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It’s time to decide what we’ll add to our TBR (To-Be-Read) book stack for June 2024!
This month is also our first…
“You Like it Darker” by Stephen King
You don’t need to ‘sign up’ or have ‘special elite access’ to join the Fishbird Central Book Club. Just read along with our chosen book for the month, and let us know how you like it!
We’ll talk a little more in depth about the Book Club and our thoughts on the book in our Fishbird Central Newsletter.
Join us as we read some great new titles and tick off some reading prompts! We’ll be sure to circle back around and post reviews of the books we read at the end of June.
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We encourage you to always source books from your local independent bookshop. However, we understand this is sometimes not practical based on location or budget.
Therefore, this post contains Amazon affiliate links. This means, if you click on the link and purchase the book from that link, I get a few dollars at no extra cost to you! This way we can both stock up our June TBR stack! 😀
Happy Reading, Friends!
TBR Prompt:
Read a book of short stories!
Back Blurb:
A collection of 12 stories – ‘Two Talented Bastids‘ explores the long-hidden secret of how the eponymous gentlemen got their skills. In ‘Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream‘, a brief and unprecedented psychic flash upends dozens of lives, Danny’s most catastrophically. In ‘Rattlesnakes‘, a sequel to Cujo, a grieving widower travels to Florida for respite and instead receives an unexpected inheritance – with major strings attached. In ‘The Dreamers‘, a taciturn Vietnam vet answers a job ad and learns that there are some corners of the universe best left unexplored. ‘The Answer Man’ asks if prescience is good luck or bad and reminds us that a life marked by unbearable tragedy can still be meaningful. This is a stand-alone novel.
What made me pick it up?:
Stephen King is an ‘auto buy’ author for me. I’m not a huge fan of the short story / novella format, but I’ll take a gander at whatever Sai King puts out. I’ll try not to barrel through this one like I would a novel, to sit awhile with each story and muddle on it before jumping to the next. I’ll also be keeping an eye out for any Easter Eggs that King sometimes sprinkles through his novels and stories – harking back to prior works in his backlog. I’m excited about the Cujo sequel! Any references or allusions to Pennywise are always a hoot too .. or should I say a ‘Beep Beep’ 🙂
This book will be our Fishbird Central Book Club pick for June 2024! As King is a well-established author and icon, you should be able to source a copy fairly easily. We look forward to hearing your thoughts!
Grab yourself a copy:
TBR Prompt:
Read a book with a spooky house!
Back Blurb:
Ford and Neuland are paranormal mercenaries – one living, one undead; one of them kills the undead, the other kills the living. When a job goes bad in New York, they head west to wait for the heat to cool down. There, a young woman named Tilda Rosenbloom hires them on behalf of wealthy landowner, Shepherd Mansfield, to track and kill a demon haunting a mansion in remote northern California. As Ford and Neuland investigate the creature they uncover a legacy of blood, sacrifice and slavery in the house. Forced to confront a powerful creature unlike anything they’ve faced before, they come to learn that the most frightening monster might not be the one they’re hunting. This is a stand-alone novel.
What made me pick it up?:
I’ve loved Richard Kadrey since first picking up the ‘Sandman Slim‘ series. If you haven’t checked those books out before, you’re in for a treat 🙂 I’m also a lover of the supernatural and especially a haunted house trope. Not sure if this specifically counts as a haunted house book, but the cover drew me in and I’m keen to find out more. This is also a super short read at just over 100 pages. Bring on the demons!
Grab yourself a copy:
TBR Prompt:
Read a book by an author you’ve loved before.
Back Blurb:
Outside the island there is nothing: the world destroyed by a fog that swept the planet, killing anyone it touched. On the island: it is idyllic. 122 villagers and 3 scientists, living in peaceful harmony. The villagers are content to fish, farm and feast, to obey their nightly curfew, to do what they’re told by the scientists. Until, to the horror of the islanders, one of their beloved scientists is found brutally stabbed to death. And they learn the murder has triggered a lowering of the security system around the island, the only thing that was keeping the fog at bay. If the murder isn’t solved within 107 hours, the fog will smother the island – and everyone on it. But the security system has also wiped everyone’s memories of exactly what happened the night before, which means that someone on the island is a murderer – and they don’t even know it. This is a stand-alone novel.
What made me pick it up?:
While I could have picked King or Kadrey to fill this prompt, I’ve been itching to pick up this latest book by Stuart Turton. I’ve loved both ‘The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle‘ and ‘The Devil and the Dark Water‘, and hoping this will make a great-read hat trick! This book sounds like a really interesting twist on a crime novel, and I’m here for the island vibes and puzzle solving. Grab a notebook and a dingy and let’s get started!
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TBR Prompt:
Read a book with a feisty female lead.
Back Blurb:
By day, Maeve Fly works at the happiest place in the world as every child’s favourite ice princess. By the neon night glow of the Sunset Strip, Maeve haunts the dive bars with a drink in one hand and a book in the other, imitating her misanthropic literary heroes. But when Gideon Green – her best friend’s brother – moves to town, he awakens something dangerous within her, and the world she knows suddenly shifts beneath her feet. Untethered, Maeve ditches her discontented act and tries on a new persona. A bolder, bloodier one, inspired by the pages of American Psycho. Step aside Patrick Bateman, it’s Maeve’s turn with the knife. This is a stand-alone novel.
What made me pick it up?:
Nominated for ‘Superior Achievement in a First Novel’ as part of the 2023 Bram Stoker Awards – this book sparked my interest as the character arc from Frozen Disney princess (or similar spin-off) to rampaging psychopath sounds like a ride! Promising to be gory and terrifying, I’ll be reading this one in the daylight and far away from a theme park.
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TBR Prompt:
Read a book that may drive you mad.
Back Blurb:
After being dragged into the Salpetriere women’s asylum screaming, covered in blood, and suffering from amnesia, Josephine is diagnosed with what the 19th-century Parisian press has dubbed “the epidemic of the age”: hysteria. It’s a disease so uniquely baffling that Jean-Martin Charcot, the Salpetriere’s acclaimed director, devotes popular lectures to it, using hypnosis to elicit fits and fantastical symptoms in front of rapt audiences. Young, charismatic, and highly susceptible to this entrancement, Josephine quickly becomes a favourite of the powerful doctor and the Parisian public alike. But her true ally at the Salpetriere is Laure, a lonely ward attendant. As their friendship blossoms into something more, the two women find comfort and even joy together despite their bleak surroundings. Soon, Josephine’s memory returns, and with it images of a gruesome crime she’s convinced she’s committed. Ensnared in Charcot’s hypnotic web, she starts spiralling into seeming insanity, prompting a terrified Laure to plot their escape together. First, though, Laure must solve a grim mystery: Who, really, is the girl she’s grown to love? Is Josephine a madwoman – or a murderer. This is a stand-alone novel.
What made me pick it up?:
Nominated for ‘Best Novel’ in the 2024 Edgar Awards, this book promises to be infuriating and intriguing – and potentially too much for my delicate lady brain. I’ll keep some smelling salts on hand, and make sure my husband tells me if I’m getting hysterical at any point – but otherwise anticipating a great read. I like a good historical tale, and stories set in asylums are usually very atmospheric.
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TBR Prompt:
Read a book with gold on the cover.
Back Blurb:
Berkeley, California 1944: A former presidential candidate is assassinated in one of the rooms at the opulent Claremont Hotel. A rich industrialist, Walter Wilkinson could have been targeted by any number of adversaries. But Detective Al Sullivan’s investigation brings up the spectre of another tragedy at the Claremont ten years earlier: the death of seven-year-old Iris Stafford, a member of the wealthy and influential Bainbridge family. Some say she haunts the Claremont still. The many threads of the case keep leading Sullivan back to the three remaining Bainbridge heiresses, now adults: Iris’s sister, Isabella, and her cousins Cassie and Nicole. Determined not to let anything distract him from the truth – not the powerful influence of Bainbridges’ grandmother, or the political aspirations of Berkeley’s district attorney, or the interest of Chinese first lady Madame Chiang Kai-Shek – Sullivan follows his investigation to its devastating conclusion. This is a stand-alone novel.
What made me pick it up?:
What could be more golden, than Amy Chua’s ‘The Golden Gate’?! Nominated for a multitude of awards – ‘2024 ITW Thriller Awards‘, ‘2024 Edgar Awards‘, ‘2024 CWA Dagger Awards‘ – I’ve got high hopes for this one. A fashionable hotel, a complex crime, and the hint at unsolved hauntings – sign me up!
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TBR Prompt:
Read a book with a title starting with the letter ‘L’.
Back Blurb:
It’s the summer of ’74. Richard Nixon has resigned from office, CB radios are the hot new thing, and in the great state of Texas two cousins hatch a plan to drive $1 million worth of stolen weed to Idaho, where some lunatic is gearing up to jump Snake River Canyon on a rocket-powered motorcycle. But with a vengeful sheriff on their tail and the revered and feared marijuana kingpin of Central Texas out to get his stash back, Chuck and Dean are in for the ride of their lives ― if they can make it out alive. This is a stand-alone novel.
What made me pick it up?:
Nominated for ‘Best Paperback Original’ in the 2024 Edgar Awards, this one is giving pot-boiler vibes like you wouldn’t believe! Love the cover, and a road-trip high-action chase through Texas sounds like it will be entertaining at the least! I’ve read a few books from the Hard Case Crime imprint before, and keen to check out a few more.
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TBR Prompt:
Read a book with ‘Road’ in the title.
Back Blurb:
Annie McIntyre has a love/hate relationship with Garnett, Texas. Recently graduated from college and home waitressing, lacking not in ambition but certainly in direction, Annie is lured into the family business―a private investigation firm―by her supposed-to-be-retired grandfather, Leroy, despite the rest of the clan’s misgivings. When a waitress at the café goes missing, Annie and Leroy begin an investigation that leads them down rural routes and haunted byways, to noxious-smelling oil fields and to the glowing neon of local honky-tonks. As Annie works to uncover the truth she finds herself identifying with the victim in increasing, unsettling ways, and realises she must confront her own past―failed romances, a disturbing experience she’d rather forget, and the trick mirror of nostalgia itself―if she wants to survive this homecoming. This is Book One in the ‘Annie McIntyre‘ series.
What made me pick it up?:
The second book in this series ‘Hard Rain‘ was nominated for a memorial award in the 2024 Edgar Awards lineup. As I’m a completist, I can’t just jump into a series at Book 2 – so needed to source this one. Hoping that I’ll get to love the main character, Annie McIntyre and want to follow her through a dedicated series. I’m a sucker for rural based crime novels, so fingers crossed we don’t part ways at the crossroads. Check out our post ‘Road in the Title‘ for some more ideas for this prompt.
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TBR Prompt:
Read a book with trees on the cover.
Back Blurb:
Summer 1980: Despite the local superstition that the Bendy Man haunts the woods, three girls go into a Minnesota forest. Only one comes out, dead silent, her memory gone. The mystery of the Taken Ones captures the nation. Summer 2022: Cold case detective Van Reed and forensic scientist Harry Steinbeck are assigned a disturbing homicide—a woman buried alive, clutching a heart charm necklace belonging to one of the vanished girls. Van follows her gut. Harry trusts in facts. They’re both desperate to catch a killer before he kills again. They have something else in common: each has ties to the original case in ways they’re reluctant to share. As Van and Harry connect the crimes of the past and the present, Van struggles with memories of her own nightmarish childhood—and the fear that uncovering the truth of the Taken Ones will lead her down a path from which she, too, may never return. This is Book One in the ‘Steinbeck and Reed’ series.
What made me pick it up?:
The Bendy Man?? Creepy! This book was nominated for ‘Best Paperback Original’ in the 2024 Edgar Awards and looks suitably spooky! Book One in the ‘Steinbeck and Reed‘ series, I’m curious to see if this will be a story I want to continue. The supernatural aspects peak my interest, and the foresty cover gives ominous vibes. Excited to start this one!
Grab yourself a copy:
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