The Unraveling of Julia by Lisa Scottoline

 Author Lisa Scottoline ventures into new territory with The Unraveling of Julia, trading her familiar thrillers for a work part psychological fiction, part historical fiction with a twist of a ghost story. Hitting bookstore shelves July 15, the novel follows Julia Pritzker, a recently widowed woman grappling with the traumatic murder of her husband, when out of nowhere she inherits a Tuscan villa.

Emilia Rossi, old enough to be Julia’s grandmother if she had one, has bequeathed to Julia, a total stranger, the villa, a depleted vineyard, and a large monetary sum. Julia is adopted so she wonders how a recluse in Italy could even know her name or her contact information in Pennsylvania.

Julia journeys to Italy to unravel the mystery and is stunned by her resemblance when the caretaker shares a photograph of Emilia. Evidence that a young girl once lived in the villa stimulates Julia into imagining that she could be on the trail of her birth mother. The crumbling villa is not enough to persuade her to sell it as a local realtor keeps trying to tempt her with the offers he has been collecting.

With the introduction of paranormal elements, the novel takes a turn with Julia discovering she has a “gift,” she suffers a shock when touching a photograph of Emilia on the Rossi crypt in the cemetery, and she experiences strange occurrences at the villa, including visions of a long dead historical figure, Caterina Sforza (1463-1509),  an Italian noblewoman who lived during the Renaissance. Julia learns that Emilia had long believed that she was related to Sforza, so sure that she had a ceiling fresco created in the villa that featured the Sforza family tree.

The action picks up when Julia meets a librarian who helps her get away from people who have been following her ever since she inherited a fortune. Gianluca Moretti befriends her and becomes her companion as she tries to find answers about her inheritance and the possibility that Emilia is somehow related to her. Julia and Gianluca become attracted to each other but she pushes away her feelings as she buried her husband just a few months ago. When Gianluca has a terrible accident, Julia believes her pursuers were also chasing him. The local police are not much help, and Julia grows suspicious of them as well. With Gianluca out of the picture, Julia is on her own to unravel the Tuscan mystery.

Lisa Scottoline’s visits to Italy empower her descriptions of the Italian landscape and the various museums and architecture of the area. She has written more than two dozen novels as well as a couple of nonfiction books with her daughter. She has been drawn to writing historical fiction in recent years. She lives in Philadelphia with a menagerie of horses, dogs, and cats.

My review will be posted on Goodreads starting June 30, 2025.

I would like to thank Grand Central Publishing and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in return for an objective review.

 

Fast Boys and Pretty Girls by Lo Patrick,

 A Haunting Return to the Heart of Georgia

“One year lasts a lifetime when it’s the year that changes everything” shares former teen model Danielle “Dani” Greer in Fast Boys and Pretty Girls by Lo Patrick, available July 8. As Dani, she saw New York City, Miami, and Paris, but after a short modeling career, Danielle moves back to Pressville, a small town modeled after Ellijay, Georgia, in a story that burns slowly and leaves deep scars.

Now married with four daughters all living in her childhood home, Danielle wakes from a nap to the excitement of the girls’ discovery of a body in the wooded ravine behind their house. While the majority of the book flashes back to Dani’s modeling years when she found herself enamored with a Georgia underage misfit, the current timeline revolves around the mystery surrounding the bones found on Danielle’s property.

As Danielle reveals that her boyfriend died in a motorcycle wreck on the curve of the road in front of her house more than a dozen years ago, she suspects that she knows the identity of the body in the woods although she has no idea how it could have ended up there. The past refuses to stay buried.

The investigation of the found remains by Cady Benson, a woman whose trajectory has been similar to Danielle’s with a brief career in New York and now settled as a police officer in Pressville, has triggered Danielle’s mental visit back to the confusing time in her life when she was a 17-year-old on her own in the Big Apple trying to carve out a modeling career.

Once again Danielle enters a puzzling phase in her life causing her to ask, could it be who I think it is buried in the woods? How much if anything do I know about the quickly identified body?

A satisfying exploration of love, loss, and the weight of secrets in small-town America, a surprising twist will devastate Danielle’s family.

Georgia native Lo Patrick is proving to be a compelling voice in Southern mystery fiction. A lawyer-turned-writer, she lives in the Atlanta suburbs with her family. Her debut novel, The Floating Girls, earned a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly in 2022, and she followed it with The Night the River Wept, another gripping Southern-crime tale.

My review will be posted on Goodreads starting June 25, 2025.

I would like to thank Sourcebooks Landmark, an imprint of Sourcebooks, and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in return for an objective review.

 

 

 

 

Our Last Resort by Clémence Michallon

Clémence Michallon’s sophomore novel, Our Last Resort, is a powerful psychological crime thriller, written using several timelines to tell the story of self-made siblings Frida and Gabriel. The pair grew up cloistered in a cult in upstate New York led by a charismatic and fanatical leader from birth to adulthood, when they made a daring escape from the compound.

Hitting shelves July 8, the book is set in the desert beauty of Escalante, Utah, at a luxury hotel where Frida and Gabriel agree to meet to repair the fracture in their bond that has developed over the last few years since Gabriel moved to the West Coast to get far away from the past. They enjoy swimming in the pool and taking desert trail hikes until a young woman who was also vacationing there turns up dead.

The situation quickly unravels as the police sort things out. When the first suspect, the dead woman’s husband, has his lawyer clear his name, suspicion falls upon Gabriel who has a well-publicized skeleton in his closet. Haunted by his past both during his cult years as well as during a troubled marriage, Gabriel is devastated at this latest turn of events.

United by the trauma of their upbringing, Frida refuses to believe Gabriel even knew the dead woman. As she doubles down to develop an alternate scenario regarding the murder, looking for evidence the police missed, how much will be enough to clear Gabriel of the crime?

As the back story develops alongside the present-day timeline, the climax explodes with a big reveal readers will not see coming.

Clémence Michallon burst into the writing world with The Quiet Tenant in 2023. Her background includes being a journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Time Magazine, The Independent, and more. Born and raised near Paris, she moved to the United States in 2014 where she lives in  New York.

Fox by Joyce Carol Oates (I gave it one star)

 Few authors plunge into the darker recesses of human nature with as much skill and intensity as Joyce Carol Oates, in her  forthcoming novel, Fox, scheduled for release on June 17. Billed as her first murder mystery, Fox is about Francis Fox, a charismatic middle school English teacher at a private, elite school in Wieland, New Jersey, who ends up dead in an apparent single-car wreck.

Readers should be prepared to be shocked by the dirty deeds of Fox who lures young girls into his den, er, his office in the basement of the school. His shocking manipulations of the select seventh and eighth graders in his four classes are not for the faint. Little is spared in the descriptions of what he does to the girls who he first drugs.

Detective Howard Zenger is charged with solving the circumstances surrounding the death of Fox. Methodically he pieces together the clues that lead up to what happened not only to Fox but to his students. The girls seem not to fear Fox but rather seek his adoration. None tell their parents they are being abused because Fox has brainwashed them into thinking he loves them.

Oates seems to be creating her own Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov) story rather than a murder mystery. Overall, in a blurb comparing Fox to Tom Ripley, a fascinating character who lives long in the mind of readers, Fox is found to be lacking. This is a story you must choose to push through or you throw up your hands and mark it DNF.

Joyce Carol Oates published her first book in 1963 and has since published 60 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. She also writes under the pseudonyms Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly. She lives in New Jersey.

Don't Open Your Eyes by Liv Constantine

In a nightmarish journey into psychological terror, Don't Open Your Eyes by Liv Constantine plunges Annabelle Reynolds into a terrifying world of vivid, prophetic dreams that start coming true in increasingly disturbing ways.

Hitting bookstore shelves on June 17, Annabelle’s already anxious nature ramps up when her nearly perfect life with a husband, two daughters, a great career, and a wonderful home are threatened by bad dreams that turn into reality: an almost head-on collision with her husband and older daughter in the car, a serious fall from a balance beam that could have happened to her younger daughter.

Both scenarios are altered by Annabelle when she changes the timing for James and Scarlett to be on the road and picks up Olivia from school before she can go to gymnastics practice. In reality, a collision did occur causing James and Scarlett to be tied up in lengthy traffic and a gymnastic team member did fall from the beam, breaking her arm.

Relieved beyond words, Annabelle explains why she changed elements in both scenarios to her husband James, a medical doctor, who scoffs at Annabelle for believing her dreams could predict the future. He explains she is overly anxious and needs to return to her former therapist.

As the visions in her dreams become increasingly detailed and terrifying, both Annabelle’s and readers’ dread escalate as the most horrific predictions come true placing one of her daughters in a deadly situation. Beneath all the terror of Annabelle’s dreams and their realizations is a scaffold of past memories and secrets that are coming back into her life.

Liv Constantine has crafted yet another twisted thriller that will not let readers down. She lives in Milford, Connecticut.