This week, Halley, Gare and I catch up and also share 2025 book releases we are super excited about!

Books We Talked About

This Book Will Bury Me

Beautiful Ugly

Cross My Heart

Don’t Let Him In

A Serial Killer’s Guide to Marriage

Victorian Psycho

High Season

A Gorgeous Excitement

Vantage Point

This week, Gare, Steph and each chose a hyped book and share three books like it that deserve more hype!

Kate's Books Like The Guest List (And White Lotus)

The Astrology House

You Can Trust Me

It Could Be Anyone

Steph's Books Like The Push

The First Day of Spring

Blood Sugar

Monday’s Not Coming

Gare's Books Like The Luckiest Girl Alive

Everything You Want Me to Be

Nice Girls

White Ivy

This week, Gare, Steph and I chose our own genres to pick books from, and tried to guess what each other picked based on our choices! Listen and you can play along with us!

Kate’s Picks

The Prediction

Fatal Intrusion

Dead Money

Steph's Picks

A Step Past Darkness

Jane Doe

The Mindfuck Series

Gare's Picks

The Girls Are All So Nice Here

Tell Me Everything

Only If You’re Lucky

This week, I talk with Sagit Schwartz about her new short story thriller Broken Threads! We dive into the inspiration for the story, the fun of writing short stories, and the Easter egg for her next novel.

Broken Threads Synopsis

When Clare loses her job as a technical writer at a pharmaceutical company due to AI, she has one month’s rent saved and a historical fiction novel she’s been unable to get published. Desperate, she turns to Amber, a young influencer in her apartment building, for help promoting the book.

Amber offers Clare a shocking deal: fifty percent of the profits—if Clare allows her to claim the novel as her own. Running out of money and options, Claire hesitantly agrees.

Then, the unimaginable happens. The book is an instant runaway hit—a viral phenomenon, skyrocketing to the top of multiple bestseller lists. Literary agents reach out to Amber, eager to sign her, and Clare begins to suspect Amber is cheating her out of money. Until Amber is found dead…

This week, Gare and Steph and I share SOME of our favorite books we read in 2024! I have to add that we all had plenty of others we loved, and it was hard to just pick a few for this episode.

Books We Talked About

We Used to Live Here

Return to Midnight

Margo’s Got Money Troubles

An Academy for Liars

The Lake of Lost Girls

Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books

The Last Party

Rabbit Hole

Listen for the Lie

Madwoman

Only If You’re Lucky

Don’t Forget the Girl

No Road Home

How We Named the Stars

The Golden Cage

This week, I talk with Karen E. Osborne about how she published her first book at 69, and continued publishing more! We dive into the grit and grace that permeate all of her stories, and her desire to see survivors of trauma as thrivers and not just the "bad guys" of a story.

Follow Karen's podcast on YouTube here

And check out her website here

Halley Sutton is back this week, and per usual, we cover ALL the things! We dive into the visuals of Gladiator II vs the plot, Michael Schur's A Man on the Inside, and give a writing challenge update. Then, we get to our main topic: the difference between twists and reveals.

This week, I talk with Pip Drysdale about her new Hollywood thriller The Close Up! We dive into her inspiration for the book, how she made LA come to life, and writing a book within a book.

The Close Up Synopsis

When Zoe Ann Weiss moves to Los Angeles to pursue her dream of becoming a writer, her whole future is wide open. But then Zach, the bartender and aspiring actor she’s falling for, ghosts her. Her debut novel, a thriller, fails. And she has writer’s block worse than ever before. Now, three years later, Zach is famous and Zoe is... not.

She’s facing her thirtieth birthday, a dead-end job at a flower shop, and a demanding agent, terrified she’ll never get her life back on track. But when she goes to make a flower delivery and Zach is at the address, it’s like no time has passed at all. They start casually dating in secret, her writer’s block disappears, and Zoe begins to feel Zach inspired her first novel, so why can’t he inspire her second? But then the inevitable happens and photos are leaked, landing Zoe in the press. Her first novel goes viral, and now everyone seems to know her name. Except the problem with everyone knowing your name is that everyone knows your name—including the mysterious stalker obsessed with Zach. A stalker who begins reenacting violent events from Zoe’s book, step by step, against her...