July’s Best New Fiction

Watch Me Disappear, by Janelle Brown
In some ways a darker version of Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette, Disappear centers on the sudden absence of a notoriously unreliable woman, Billie Flanagan, during a hiking trip on the Pacific Crest Trail. With no body left behind, and very few clues to go on, her whereabouts are a chilling mystery. Billie’s teenage daughter, Olive, begins hallucinating that her mother is alive and needs her help, while Billie’s husband, Jonathan, has a different response to the disappearance, having recently discovered she may have been unfaithful. A perfect book for fans of Liane Moriarty, A.J. Banner, Gillian Flynn, and A.S.A. Harrison, this marital suspense story also stands on its own feet.

Where the Light Falls, by Allison Pataki and Owen Pataki
Do you hear the people sing? Singing the songs of angry men? If so, journey to post-revolution France, where citizens from different walks of life struggle to make sense of their new reality. Jean-Luc, a young family man and lawyer, is determined to join the perilous cause despite his previously safe life in Marseille; Andre, a captain whose father was executed, fears he will suffer the same fate and rushes to join the French Army; the object of his affection, Sophie, is a widow embarking on a more personal bid for freedom: an escape from her stultifying, vengeful uncle. A sprawling, compellingly detailed historical novel about the consequences of the fight for liberty, equality, and fraternity.

Domina, by L.S. Hilton
The second book in the New York Times bestselling Maestra trilogy finds our seductive, jet-setting, hella murderous heroine, Judith Rashleigh—who has been compared to a female Tom Ripley—working at her own Venice art gallery and possessed of a new identity. But trading Paris for Venice won’t save her from her past misdeeds, and the calm before the storm doesn’t last long. Soon, she’s hit hard and fast with a deadly new scandal involving a stolen and possibly counterfeit piece of art, some dead bodies, and a Russian oligarch. Buckle up for more sex, violence, and European art world decadence.

The Wildling Sisters, by Eve Chase
Rebecca meets I Capture the Castle in this gothic tale of four teenage sisters-slash-rivals sent to live in an isolated manor in the English countryside with their housebound Aunt Sybil in the summer of 1959. Sybil’s own daughter, Audrey, vanished some years earlier, and the reverberations of the 12-year-old’s disappearance are shocking. The novel travels back and forth in time, contrasting the four sisters’ complex romantic entanglements with two local boys against the present-day struggle of a newlywed second wife desperate to step out of her predecessor’s shadow. Read it with the lights on.

The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen, by Hendrik Groen, translated by Hester Velmans
At 83 and 1/4 years old, living in an Amsterdam home for seniors, Hendrik is no spring chicken, but that doesn’t mean he’s going quietly into that good night. In fact, he’s writing a diary documenting his trials and tribulations at the group home, including a late-in-life romance with a woman he’s long had his eye on. When the object of his affection becomes the latest “tenant” of the care facility, he decides to throw himself into love with her, no matter how fraught or hopeless it may be. You’ll laugh and cry at this wildly successful and beloved international bestseller, translated from its original Dutch.

The Almost Sisters, by Joshilyn Jackson
A drunken one-night stand at a comic book convention leaves “nerd-famous” graphic novelist Leia pregnant with a handsome cosplay Batman’s baby. How will her conventional, proper, southern family react to her pending single motherhood, and the fact that her baby to be is biracial? (Leia is white, and the Batman is black.) When she returns to the family homestead in Alabama, Leia learns her family members are dealing with dramas of their own.  Seemingly perfect stepsis Rachel has been abandoned by her husband, and grandmother Birch is suffering from dementia. The third bombshell concerns a dark family secret that dates to the Civil War and will have dire implications for the family’s future. Jackson, born and bred in the south, provides an authentic, revealing, and moving depiction of the racial, political, and historical contradictions that continue to define life in the region.

 Gork, the Teenage Dragon, by Gabe Hudson
A wondrously insane mashup of teen rom-com, coming of age fable, and dragons—at military school. Raised through toddlerhood by a sentient spaceship after his parents die in a crash, sweet young Gork the Terrible—a tenderhearted poet of a dragon who’s scared of heights and stricken with embarrassingly diminutive horns—is taken in by his eccentric, techno-savvy “mad scientist” grandfather, Dr. Terrible. Back home on the planet Blegwethia, Gork eventually matriculates to WarWings Academy, where he must successfully woo a female dragon on the last night of high school or be excommunicated and enslaved. Not to be missed! 

Meddling Kids, by Edgar Cantero
In 1977, five adventure-seeking kids living in Oregon—Andy, Kerri, Nate, and Peter, plus Nate’s dog Tim—formed a detective club whose final case has tormented them ever since. Now it’s 1990, and those who survived the horror of Sleepy Lake have returned home to confront their considerable demons. In fact, even those who didn’t survive are back. (Peter has become a ghost with whom Nate communicates.) This looks to be a screamingly entertaining, darkish summer read that should appeal to fans of The Goonies, Scooby Doo (as well as Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Scooby Gang), It, and It’s spiritual twin, Stranger Things.

Tornado Weather, by Deborah E. Kennedy
This relevant, inclusive, emotional debut novel, set in rural Indiana, introduces a wide cast of characters who harbor seemingly incompatible viewpoints: Mexican migrant workers and those who feel displaced by them; families living in trailer parks and families living in McMansions; wives struggling with prescription painkiller dependence; an emerging local militia whose two-person membership won’t prevent them from acting; and a missing 5-year-old girl, last seen in her wheelchair headed home after school. The events spin together as violently as a tornado, providing a sense of the chaos felt by people who suspect their Midwest town—and perhaps America itself—is in decline.

The Necklace, by Claire McMillan
McMillan’s debut, Gilded Age, was a modern take on Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth, set in high society Cleveland, and her followup also depicts present-day, old-money Ohioans whose determination to maintain social standing eclipses their blood ties. When Nell Quincy’s great-aunt Loulou passes away, Nell, a lawyer long ostracized from the Quincys, is as surprised as anyone to learn she’s the beneficiary of an extraordinary family heirloom: a necklace rumored to have been stolen a century earlier from a maharaja in India. The mystery behind the necklace is brought to light when the narrative travels to the Jazz Era, where Nell’s grandmother, May, is wooed by two brothers. Nell’s own love life is jumpstarted when she teams up with Loulou’s attractive estate lawyer to outsmart the nest of vipers that is her extended family.