Ingenious and twisty, fresh and darkly comedic, A FRIEND INDEED is a meditation on social disparity, the weight of secrets, and the power of female friendships. Follow best friends Jo and Dana as they put their friendship to the ultimate test in a story that explores what it means to be a good wife, mother, and friend.

Summer wouldn’t be summer without a pile of good books to read by the pool, at the lake, or on the beach. As the temperature soars, we want sizzling reads about friends, frenemies, and foes—plus twisted family dynamics. If Christmas is the season for ghost tales and claustrophobic locked room mysteries, summer’s about steamy Domestic Suspense. Author Elka Ray suggests seven titles to stuff in your beach bag.

THE OFFING by Roz Nay

If you only read one Suspense book this summer, make it Roz Nay’s THE OFFING. New Yorkers Ivy and Regan sign up as crew on a sailboat in Far North Queensland, Australia, joining a handsome backpacker cook and the boat’s Tasmanian owner and his young daughter. It’s soon clear that everyone on board the Alone at Last has scary secrets. The travelers are trying to outrun bad choices and trauma, while the captain is either decent but desperate—or psycho. As in her past books, Roz Nay’s writing’s as smooth as a windless sea, while the setting adds heaps to this tense story, the surroundings beautiful, menacing, and claustrophobic. There’s nothing like being stuck on a small boat with people to truly get to know them. I could not turn the pages fast enough to learn whose secrets prove deadly. The solution hit like a shark attack—I didn’t see it coming.

A FRIEND IN THE DARK by Samantha M. Bailey

With her marriage in tatters, empty-nester Eden reconnects with an old flame online, only for her life to combust. The story’s told by Eden and another woman caught in a web of lies that stretches back to their time in college. Samantha Bailey does a masterful job of tying all the web’s sticky strands together in this tale of midlife angst, desire, wishful thinking, motherhood, and manipulation. As her marriage falters, Eden’s college-age daughter blames her blind-sided mom—a fascinating dynamic that adds to this midlife story. If you’re down for a truly evil villain, A FRIEND IN THE DARK is perfect pool reading. The ending is twisty, clever, and scary.

FOR WORSE by L.K. Bowen

Marital woes—and the risks of our online lives—also take center stage in FOR WORSE, which drew me in with its visually impaired main character and smooth writing. The story revolves around fifty-something Ellie, who has spent 22 years married to a manipulative man who’s using her failing eyesight to control her. After finding a tribe of over-it ex-wives in an online chat group for 50+ divorcing women, Ellie’s desire to be free reaches scary heights – while her husband’s grip tightens. The book offers fascinating insights into coercive control. Pick this up if you enjoy your Suspense with deeper character development and more psychological insights. Ellie’s domineering spouse is expertly drawn, while the women in the chat group are dryly funny.

THE WIDOW ON DWYER COURT by Lisa Kusel

While rocky marriages are the sometimes stale bread and butter of Domestic Suspense, THE WIDOW ON DWYER COURT has a truly original premise. Main character Kate hates having sex and encourages her husband Matt to sleep with other people, so long as he shares all the deets, which she plows into her bestselling erotic novels. Kate and Matt’s unconventional marriage is rattling along until an offbeat widow moves into their neighborhood, pushing everything off-kilter. At first, the newcomer is a breath of fresh air. Or is that breeze toxic? The book’s a fast, wild, and unexpected ride that explores marriage, desire, friendship, ambition, and betrayal. If you’re looking for spice, sly insights, and dark humor, slide THE WIDOW ON DWYER COURT into your beach tote. I give it top marks for uniqueness and humor.

KNIFE RIVER by Justine Champine

It’s not friends or spouses that take center stage in KNIFE RIVER but estranged sisters, reunited in their small hometown after their long-missing mother’s bones are discovered. If you want fast-paced twists, skip this one. It’s a slow burn. But burn it does—smoke will get in your eyes. Fifteen years ago, when Jess was thirteen, her mom left for a walk and vanished. Jess’s fiercely smart big sister Liz had to sacrifice her dreams of college to care for her younger sister, until Jess skipped town and drifted. Now, as they wait for the cops to finally do something, the sisters are forced to get to know each other—and face the ugliness of their small homophobic town. While the mystery of who killed their mom smolders like toxic smoke in the background, this is ultimately an examination of the ripple effects of trauma. The writing is gorgeous and the characters so real I didn’t just know them, but became them. It’s only April but I’m calling this one as one of my favorite books of 2024.

FOLLOW HER DOWN by Victoria Helen Stone

FOLLOW HER DOWN also examines the impact of trauma on siblings—in this case a brother and sister. Elise was ten and her brother thirteen when their big sister Robin was murdered. Now late-thirties, Elise is managing a rural motel and trying to cut back on her drinking, while Kyle is obsessed with conspiracy theories. Much to Elise’s fury, he questions whether the man who confessed to Robin’s slaying actually did it. When Elise’s wildly wealthy former lover is found murdered, Kyle’s convinced his death is linked to their sister’s. Not only is Elise a suspect in her ex’s killing, but she finds herself forced to ask questions she’d rather keep avoiding. Like Elise, I never knew where things were heading. If you like strong and complex female leads and tales of unsettling power dynamics, FOLLOW HER DOWN is great summer-cabin-reading.

If you had a big—as in dead body-sized problem—would your best friend help you to cover it up? Out on May 14^th, Elka Ray’s Suspense debut A FRIEND INDEED follows two childhood besties who face this desperate dilemma. Reviewed as “devilishly smart” and “totally convincing”, A FRIEND INDEED is a twisty exploration of loyalty, social disparity, and corrosive secrets. Add it to your summer TBR here.

Happy summer Suspense reading!

The post Seven Hot Domestic Suspense Books For Summer appeared first on The Nerd Daily.

About For Worse: Wait Until Dark meets Gone Girl in For Worse, a debut thriller that pulls the reader deep into a dark web of sinister plots for marital revenge.

In my debut novel, For Worse, my protagonist, Ellie, is going blind. She has no peripheral vision, and no night or low-light vision. This is because she has a degenerative retinal disease called retinitis pigmentosa.

So do I.

For Worse is a domestic thriller about a vision-impaired woman trapped in a dangerous marriage with a man who uses her disability to sabotage her. Desperate to get out, she turns to the dark web, where she finds a ladies chat room where the women have a sinister but very successful method for “navigating a bad marriage.”

When I first started writing it, years ago, I resisted giving Ellie RP. I was fond of her, and didn’t want to burden her. But at the same time, for some reason, I couldn’t make her  a non-disabled person. I felt the metaphor of her being trapped in her marriage would be bolstered if she had some issue that made her unable to drive, to literally get in her car and get away, and of course, that would ramp up the suspense factor.

But there was more to it than that. Before I knew that I was going to give her RP, I knew that I wanted her to experience the world the way I do, as a disabled person. I wanted to express what it was like to live with vision impairment, how it feels, the inconveniences, the embarrassments, the anger, the loss. I wanted to express myself.

I  had initially started thinking about other issues that might prevent her from being able to drive: something neurological, like a traumatic head injury, or epilepsy. I did some research but I soon realized I had no right to appropriate someone else’s disability, certainly not when I had a perfectly good one of my own, one that I  knew inside and out, that would require not an outreach for information but rather an inward journey to my own experience. In the same way that I had resisted acknowledging that I was vision  impaired for far too long–not unlike Ellie–it also took me a while to realize that yes, I was going to write a novel about a woman with vision loss. And I understood that, though this was fiction, all stories, to be impactful, must somehow reverberate with human truth. And so I knew that if I were to serve the narrative, serve Ellie, that I had to give  her the most challenging part of myself: my disability.

I remember thinking, I do NOT want to do this. I didn’t want to dive into that part of my personal life, the part that I held at arm’s length, that part that I preferred to think of as no big deal. I had already stopped driving, and I had been using a white cane for a few years. I was actually pretty well-adjusted about the cane. To me, it was like when you’re over 40 and have to start wearing reading glasses to see small print. (I’m over 40.) (I’m WAY over 40.) It was a tool to help me get around and I was fine with it. But as far as my emotional relationship to RP and the chunks it carved out my life, I didn’t want to go there.

Once I accepted that I was going to give Ellie RP, so to speak, things suddenly fell into place. I found this phenomenon several times while I was writing the book: frequently I didn’t want to give my characters a painful or emotional obstacle, sometimes feeling ill-equipped to do it justice with my writing, or simply not wanting to go there emotionally as the author. I soon realized this was usually a sure sign that the obstacle was exactly what needed to happen. And giving Ellie RP was exactly what needed to happen.

Blindness is a spectrum, and most people think that if you’re blind, you live in total darkness, or that if you’re vision impaired, you see things through a haze, or blurred. This is not always true. In my case, I’m very lucky. Yes, I have virtually no peripheral vision, so I can never see anything “out of the corner of my eye,” and I can’t see anything at all in no- or low-light. But my central vision, of which I have about five to ten degrees (a typically sighted person might have sixty degrees of central vision), is pretty good, about 20/35. I like to tell people that I have good vision, just not a lot of it.

I found that, through Ellie, I could explain what it was like to see the world through my imperfect eyes, something I never seemed to be able to do effectively with the people in my life. Want to know what the world looks like with this particular version of RP? Here’s what Ellie will tell you, and I agree:

“Ellie sees the world in sections, a tantalizing snippet at a time, from which she has to construct a concept of the whole. If she’s going downstairs, she can see the step she’s on and the one before and after; beyond that, she must suppose, there be dragons. She’s very careful going into an unfamiliar home or building since walls and doors and furniture lurch into her path unexpectedly, and if she’s looking into your eyes, she has no idea what your mouth is doing, though, bizarrely, she may be able to get a vague sense of the color of your shirt.

“Everything is better in bright daylight, and she can seem fully sighted, for the most part. She has all sorts of tricks for making it appear as though she’s like everyone else. She knows to look for the credit card handed back to her after paying for groceries; she can follow the line of a person’s arm when she’s first introduced, and a handshake is inevitable.

“But at night the lights go out, and she relies on her cane or the guiding arm of someone who doesn’t mind, or who minds but does it anyway. “

It was very satisfying, writing that, the nuts and bolts of everyday traveling through space with a degenerative retinal disease.

The harder part was writing about how it feels. And as I wrote, with an increasing feeling of relief, I discovered emotions I could not have verbalized even to my therapist (and I love my therapist).

I was surprised at how Ellie illuminated my own feelings about having vision loss and how I am perceived by the fully-sighted. I felt–feel–expressed by her, and hope that what I wrote in For Worse will resonate with other people who live with a disability.

Being vision-impaired means you can’t drive. Want to know what it’s like to have to rely on other people to get around? Here’s Ellie (and me, too):

“Since Ellie stopped driving several years ago, [family members] have repeatedly told her that they’re there for her to run any errand or take her anywhere she’d like to go. And then, of course, when she took them up on it, they’d either put her off, want to do it themselves, or make it clear she had fifteen minutes before their heads would blow up while waiting for her. Ellie remembers sadly the days when she could just drive over to Bed Bath & Beyond to pick out a dish towel, then hang out and look at bedding for forty-five minutes, and then maybe, if she felt like it, go get a cup of goddamn coffee. Without her own transportation, she was always accountable, to whoever drove her, dropped her off, or picked her up. It was suffocating.”

There is loss, here, and not just that of Bed Bath and Beyond (which in and of itself is tragic). There is loss of independence, freedom, the simple joy of hopping in the car to just get out.

Here’s Ellie (and me) on the decision to stop driving:

“She can’t remember the trigger that made her give up the keys to her Camry; it may have been the time she missed by inches a mother with her stroller in a crosswalk, which was bad enough without the self-righteous prick coming from the other direction, who loudly thought she (and everyone within a two-block radius) should know what she’d nearly done through her stupidity and carelessness. Shaking, she wanted to yell back, ‘I’m vision impaired, you prick!’ but that’s not a good thing to announce if you’re driving. “

(This actually happened. Putting it down on paper has somewhat eased the guilt and shame.)

“It was a Saturday when she finally [decided] she was going to stop driving….She knew she was relinquishing something that was terribly important, and yet, despite her emotion, she didn’t think the decision would be anything other than inconvenient at best, frustrating at worst. Words like humiliate, trap, infantilize, and marginalize didn’t crop up till later.”

Those are powerful words, and I never would have dared to use them in my real life. But it was empowering for me to give them to Ellie; they were the truth she had to crawl out of, and I was proud to use them as an expression of her situation and also a catapult for her impending freedom.

A friend said to me, while I was writing the book, “It must be very therapeutic for you,” and I privately bristled at this. I was writing a novel, a work of fiction for publication, and I wasn’t doing it for therapeutic purposes. I was not working through my grief/anger/loss issues about going blind through this book. And yet…I kinda was. I did find it incredibly freeing to finally be able to express my feelings about living with failing vision. As I struggled in real life to work out logistics that most people take for granted–getting a ride to work, finding a restroom, managing crowded sidewalks–I loved getting back to my laptop so I could give Ellie (jeez, poor Ellie!) the same experience and let her be as pissed off and frustrated as I was. I had a buddy.

In the book I’m writing now, there are no characters with physical disabilities. I still feel funny when one of them just gets in a car and drives, or navigates a busy museum. I envy people who can walk freely through life with all the visual information they need, so they don’t fall over or bump into stuff. But I’m finding that there’s something satisfying in writing characters who have that ability. I can walk freely with them.

Someday, I’m going to write a book about the thing that really frightens me about going blind, beyond the inconvenience and marginalization: having to live in darkness. That scares the s**t out of me. Perhaps that book will be “therapeutic” for me.

But for now, I’m content with my girl Ellie, and proud to have in print our mutual struggles and triumphs as we navigate our truncated world with as much grace as we can muster.

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