My Top Books of 2019

Wow. The reading year started off with a bang, and it never stopped. I’ve read 85 books this year, and I kept track of the books that really stood out to me as I finished them. You can find more of the books I loved this year here. This list represents the best of the best for me — and before you say “hey, J.T.” these are not necessarily published in 2019, but books I read in 2019. (Hey, I make the rules here…)

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DAISY JONES AND THE SIX by Taylor Jenkins Reid

If you like music, you will LOVE this book about a tempestuous young singer and the band who launched her to stardom. The structure and multiple POVs give it the feel of a Rolling Stone interview. Very unique, very well written, and so good I immediately went to the store and grabbed THE SEVEN HUSBANDS OF EVELYN HUGO. Taylor Jenkins Reid is that good.

EDUCATED by Tara Westover

This book spoke to me on a number of levels. I grew up in the mountains, well away from the nearest town, and understand the joy and pain of isolation. But… that’s where our similarities end. This is a fascinating look at the lengths some people have to go to in order to become educated. Beautifully written, Tara Westover has a lovely command of language. Heartbreaking, inspiring, and frighteningly real. 

THE SILENT PATIENT by Alex Michaelides 

THE SILENT PATIENT is absolutely superb. And honestly, to say much more will ruin it completely. I expect great things from Alex going forward... Also, this one won the Goodreads Best Mystery/Thriller Book of the Year award, and it’s incredibly well deserved. I loved this book and I appreciate the effort that went into it.

THE STRANGER INSIDE by Laura Benedict

What if you came home to find a stranger living inside your house? An outstanding, ever-twisting, surprise-filled psychological drama (Publishers Weekly, starred review), in the tradition of Shari Lapena and Liane Moriarty, from an Edgar- and Thriller Award-nominated author. 

Can you imagine the nightmare of a stranger taking over your house? The terror you would feel? Benedict turns her unique voice in suspense to this elegant scary mystery, where nothing is as it seems and one woman's truth is shattered by the hidden secrets of her past. It is so good!

THE STRANGER INSIDE by Lisa Unger

No, you aren’t seeing things — there were two books called THE STRANGER INSIDE this year, and they were both excellent! I'm a fan of Lisa Unger's work, and especially of how she builds her characters. From the most innocent to the most evil, every one of them has depth that makes them come alive on the page. THE STRANGER INSIDE is no different — a brilliant character study of victims who've survived a terrible event in their childhood and how they've found ways to cope with the aftermath. As always, this is more than a page turner, it is a complex psychological study and thrilling to boot. Her best yet.

OUT EAST by John Glynn

I’ve always been obsessed with the northeastern beach scene, being a Florida beach girl myself. I went in expecting a light read about the Hamptons and WHOA. Glynn’s style is amazingly evocative. This is a wonderful coming-of-age memoir, beautiful, lovely, heartbreaking, and inspiring. I gobbled it up in two days. While John’s day job is editing for Graydon House, I really hope he writes a lot more. He’s a true talent. This was a perfect first read of the summer.

IF SHE WAKES by Michael Koryta

I listened to this amazing title from Michael Koryta on audio. The conceit of IF SHE WAKES—the main character in a coma—scared me off at first, but several people told me Koryta pulled it off, so I dove in. And holy cow. The story rocks along and has one of the scariest villains I’ve read in a long time. Think of a rattlesnake sheathed in the skin of an assassin. His female leads are fantastic, heroic, leap off the page larger than life, and the intricate storyline is A+. There are also multiple points of view, all handled wonderfully. Just a superb book all the way around. 

SAVE ME THE PLUMS by Ruth Reichl 

What a lovely, fascinating book. I'm lately come to memoir, but each one I read builds on the last like layers in a cake. This slice of Reichl's life chronicles being named editor in chief of Gourmet Magazine to the magazine's eventual close a decade later made me laugh, and made me think. "Brand Ruth" is an excellent cautionary tale to us all, I think. 

GIDEON THE NINTH by Tamsyn Muir

Every review you will see about this book starts the same way—I’ve never read anything quite so unique. This is the truth. I mean, you put together space, necromancy, wars and petty grievances, a kick ass heroine (Gideon) with a smart mouth and a longing to prove herself, pair her with a nemesis named Harrow who is the daughter of the Ninth House Leaders and as such in total control of her, and watch the bones fly. I’ve never read anything quite so original in my life. The cover itself gives you a clue about the journey—all those skeletons! Absolutely wonderful, and more to come in this series next year! I can’t wait.

NINTH HOUSE by Leigh Bardugo

Sigh. The evening after I finished Leigh Bardugo’s incredible novel, I sat down to read a new book and experienced an actual moment of grief that I was done with this one. What a brilliant world Bardugo has created. Smart, intricate, fearlessly crafted, this is an intellectual fantasy/horror novel that cements Bardugo firmly in the annals of the best storytellers of this generation. Immediately shot into my top 3 books of 2019. Just incredible. 🐍👻🖤

THE FAMILY UPSTAIRS by Lisa Jewell

I don’t often close a book and say “brilliant”, but that’s exactly what I did when I set down Lisa Jewell's latest. What a story! I read this in one gloriously long evening, captured from page one, and now I’d like to get it on audio and experience it again. A superb, insidious, compelling, compulsive read.

NEVER LET ME GO by Kazuo Ishiguro

I found this slim volume when I was looking for boarding school mysteries. I saw the description of the three friends as Hailsham School and bought it without a second though. I had no idea what I was getting into. Ishiguro was awarded the Nobel for Literature in 2017, and I’ve experienced other works of his, but nothing as deeply disturbing as this. The movie of the same name is an excellent adaptation, though it’s more up front about what’s happening than the book is. The slow reveal of Hailsham’s true purpose shocked me, troubled me, and hasn’t let me go. I suppose the title couldn’t be more perfect.

DIGITAL MIMIMALISM by Cal Newport

Cal Newport is always on my best of list when he has a book out, mostly because I admire how he stares into the digital abyss and finds a path for us mere mortals to navigate. I appreciate the thought behind this book—how can we find ways to make the internet work for us, instead of sapping our energy and creating issues? A wonderful quick read and a solid life plan for those of us who struggle with digital addictions.

STRONG IS THE NEW BEAUTIFUL by Lindsey Vonn

Lindsey Vonn is one of my heroes, and I thoroughly enjoyed this glimpse into how she keeps her body running at world champion level. If you have been dieting, or exercising, and aren’t seeing results (or are starving to death) read this. It’s a wonderful, simple, straightforward way to look at our health, and how we nourish our bodies.

What Lies Behind has a new cover!

Wrapping up our new cover scheme for the Samantha Owens novels is the 4th book in the series, WHAT LIES BEHIND. For your enjoyment, here is the origin blog post for the book, which was a complicated one indeed.

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On July 24, 2013, I read a story about a young med school student named Paul DeWolf who’d been killed in his apartment. No motive, no witnesses, no suspects. By all accounts, DeWolf was an exceptional young man. He excelled in everything from school to his military training to sports and his faith. He was perfect. Everything about him foretold a brilliant future. And here he was, his promising young life cut short. I couldn’t get him out of my mind. I read everything I could find on the case. And there was a single conclusion to be drawn. 

It was a perfect murder…

That became the first line of WHAT LIES BEHIND. I let my imagination run, wrote up a somewhat outlandish proposal. By August 12 I had a title, one that fit beautifully with the idea of a locked room mystery, and the futility of a life lost too soon. The title comes from the Thoreau (or perhaps Emerson, no one knows) quote:

What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us
are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.

Oddly enough, the day I decided on the title, I was in Ace Hardware looking for plants, and saw a plaque with beautiful birds on it. Up close, I realized it was the very quote I’d used to title the book. (I snatched it up, and it resides in my office in a spot of honor.) I knew then I had something special. Sometimes, the universe tells you when you’re on the right track.

In October, I submitted the proposal, which my agent and editor loved. I shelved the story until April 2014, when I was finished with my six months of the year I dedicate to Catherine and could think about it.

I started writing April 3. My publisher needed an excerpt for the paperback of WHEN SHADOWS FALL, so I wrote an opening. Cobbled it together, really. And in so doing, realized the story I thought I was telling wasn’t the story that wanted to be written.

It happens that way sometimes. You think a book is about one thing, but it surprises you, takes on a life of its own, and suddenly, you’re left with a completely new story. The characters dictate the story, obviously. And a lot happened between October 2013 and April 2014. Weird things, and good things.

Several wonderful people gave money to charity to have their names appear in the book. When I accept these kinds of commissions, I don’t just toss in a name. I want the donor to get their money’s worth. I create real characters, with real purpose to the story. Tommy Cattafi became my dead medical student. Robin Souleyret was his contact, also dead. (There’s another character name I can’t share, because I don’t want to spoil the story for you. You’ll see that one in the acknowledgements.)

And then the story decided it didn’t want to be about dead people. It wanted to have live people, who did amazing things. Every day, while I watched, it wove itself into a completely different entity. Tommy Cattafi wasn’t dead, but gravely injured. Robin Souleyret was very much alive, and a former CIA agent. What? She had a sister who was FBI, and her name was Amanda. She was murdered and Cataffi injured in what looked like a murder suicide. Their names became so intrinsically involved that, because of these character names, the story itself changed. It evolved. It became about Sam and Robin, the push and pull of the investigation, and the power of love.

There were other issues with the story as well. At its heart, WHAT LIES BEHIND is about a bioterror attack on the U.S. using an Ebola-esque hemorrhagic virus. Yeah. Topical much?

I was more than halfway through the writing well before the African outbreak, and as the virus, and the story, continued to spread, I kept having to change the book so it didn't look like I'd stolen the story from the headlines. Because I, apparently, am simply too prescient when it comes to writing about current events.

And then we have Sam and Xander and Fletcher. The backbone of these books. Vital, one might say, to their longevity. Samantha really comes into her own during this investigation. It was such a blast to watch her take over. She’s always been a smart cookie, but now, she’s smart and tough and isn’t about to sit back when she sees injustices. To put it mildly, she kicks ass.

It took five months to write this book, because the story was a moving target, day after day. When I finished the book, I was almost afraid to turn it in. The synopsis I’d given my editor months before was unrecognizable outside of a young man cut down in his prime. Completely different from the finished book. Happily, she loved it, and here we are.

It’s always fascinating to me to relive the writing of a book. WHAT LIES BEHIND was possibly my most challenging to date, simply because it did not behave. It didn’t do what it was told. It’s fitting WHAT LIES BEHIND was the thirteenth novel I’ve written. It seems I’ve just given birth to my first teenager. 

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The Secret is Out!

I’m finally ready to reveal the massive secret project I’ve been working on. Ready?

🎉 I have a brand new book for you! 🎉

I am thrilled to announce A THOUSAND DOORS: An Anthology of Many Lives, will release from Two Tales Press November 5, 2018!

The day Mia Jensen died, she finally got to live.

Hell of a tag line, wouldn’t you say? Here’s the rest:

WHAT IF...

We've all played the "what if" game. For Mia Jensen, "what if" is a fact of life. Dissatisfied with her choices, she often dreams about what could have been. Now she has the chance to know. But that knowledge is going to cost her dearly. Only through death can she fully realize the value of her life.

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Forty-year-old Mia Jensen is home after a terrible day, trying to figure out how she's come to this point in her life, when she hears a strange noise from the kitchen. She investigates, only to be brutally attacked and left for dead. As she dies, she experiences some of the lives that could have been hers had she only made a different choice. 

Can one woman can find peace with the path she's chosen before it slips through her fingers forever?

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Through the unique voices of New York Times bestsellers and rising stars in women's fiction, A THOUSAND DOORS examines how our smallest decisions can create lasting effects, and allows the thought—can we actually change our lives?

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For a decade, I’ve been harboring a story. A young woman, murdered. And as she dies, she lives all the lives she’d once dreamed of having. Sliding Doors meets The Lovely Bones.

But it wasn’t my usual kind of story, and a very ambitious one at that, so I shelved it until I felt the time was right. I’m so glad I did, because as the years progressed, I realized I needed help writing Mia’s many lives.

Last year, I recruited some of my favorite writers and friends to help me. And oh, boy, did they hit it out of the park.

Just look at the list of amazing authors who bring Mia to life:

Kimberly Belle

Laura Benedict

A.F. Brady

Patti Callahan Henry

Paige Crutcher

Rebecca Drake

Heather Gudenkauf

Joy Jordan-Lake

Alisha Klapheke

Ariel Lawhon

Kerry Lonsdale

Catherine McKenzie

Kate Moretti

Lisa Patton

Kaira Rouda

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This is the most unique, exciting project I’ve ever had the pleasure to work on. It’s much more than an anthology, it is a full-on novel. Over the course of the story, you are going to meet 16 different variations of Mia Jensen. You are going to journey through her lives, be shocked by her decisions, her actions, her vulnerabilities, her loves, her mistakes. You are going to get to know Mia better than she knows herself.

A THOUSAND DOORS will be on sale in all formats (hardcover, trade paper, ebook, and audio) November 5, and I hope you’ll talk to your favorite indie booksellers and librarians and ask them to stock the book, too. It’s available for preorder now 

So….

Surprise!!!!!!!!

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The Why Behind TEAR ME APART

God bless National Geographic.

I have had a subscription for decades. I used to keep all the old magazines until it became an issue (stacks and stacks and stacks - all donated, finally), so I switched to the digital version. I always knew I’d find an idea in one of them that would give me the key to a really cool book. 

Enter the July 2016 issue. I was reading it on a plane, and I read a story and felt that incredible tingle all over when I see something I want to incorporate into a book. It was about a new forensic technology called phenotyping. The uses are endless — with a DNA sample, forensic analysts can generate facial features of a suspect. Eye color. Hair color. Ancestry.

I got excited by the possibilities of this new technology. To start, think of the people accused of a crime who are wrongly convicted. Phenotyping will cut down on these cases, for sure. Nothing is infallible, but it’s a cool leap forward. And there’s also a program that can take the DNA and build a 3-D face out of it. Not admissible in court…yet. We’re about to enter the brave new world of criminology, for sure.

When I read the story, I knew immediately I wanted to have a character use these skills to solve a crime. 

But what crime? How about DNA from the crime scene of a missing, day-old baby? Cool, but… What if that baby was now 17 years old and famous? OK, now we’re getting somewhere. You see how this works. This is my process. What if? How about…? Hmmm…..?

I took this concept, married it to the idea I’d been carrying around with me for years about a woman who makes the ultimate sacrifice—her life—for her family, and boom—I had the beginnings of a story. 

In TEAR ME APART's first draft, the book was narrated by a dead woman in heaven. It was very cool, but it wasn’t right. Then I was challenged by one of those Facebook memes where you’re supposed to post the first seven lines of your work in progress (WIP). I took a look, and felt like my first seven lines weren’t shareable. I don’t like to discuss the WIP as it’s being created—you give away the magic when you do that, in my mind. So I cheated. I wrote something totally unrelated to my real opening. (Hey, don’t judge. People pay me to make things up for a living… 😉)

This is what I wrote, tossed off, really, just to satisfy the guilt of a meme:

I remember the day she arrived so clearly. What quirk of fate led her to me? I wondered about this for years. If only I had stepped right instead of left at the corner, or taken the stairs instead of the elevator at the hospital, perhaps ordered chicken instead of steak for my last meal with my father before his death, the principles of chaos—the butterfly effect—would have altered the course of my life enough that she wouldn’t have appeared. But I did step right, and I took the elevator, and I had the steak, and she did appear, and I will never recover from her. 

I posted it, and walked away. When I logged in again, there were a few comments from people who really liked it and wanted to see where the story went.

And I started to think. Who is she? Where DID this story go? Maybe this WAS the real opening of the book. It was a totally new voice, an undiscovered character. I knew one thing. It was a woman speaking. 

And suddenly, there it was. A new frame. A new setting. A new situation. A whole new story.

Magic. The sort of mental razzle-dazzle our creative brains do when we let them.

I love chaos theory; it’s the basis for a number of my stories. With my new frame in place, my new voice, the book… became. Without the meme challenge, would I have found my way into this story? I don’t know. But I am so grateful I did. (Thanks to fellow writers Bryon Quertermous, Allison Brennan, and Brian Tracey who all tagged me. Smooch!)

One last thing about TEAR ME APART: please read the Author’s Note. I was compelled to discuss some pretty dark, scary topics in this book, specifically depression, self-harm, and suicide. All have deeply affected my family, and I hope and pray we can have more open discussions about mental illness, remove the stigmas, and help ourselves, our family, and our friends live a better, happy, joyful, hopeful life. 

I leave you with the symbol of that movement, the humble semi-colon. Look it up. You won’t be sorry.

︔

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For every book, I create a soundtrack. This one is dark and evocative. I absolutely love it and hope you do too.

STORIES OF THE NIGHT and New Offerings From Two Tales Press

In a month filled with new release news, here's some more. As promised, the audio of STORIES OF THE NIGHT is on sale! It is a fantastically read collection, and it was an utter joy to collaborate with Courtney Parker and Basil Sands.

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STORIES OF THE NIGHT
(Print, Digital, Audio)

In case you missed it, in addition to audio, so many of you have asked for a print option for my short stories, I listened. This hefty collection features 2 shorts (Gray Lady, Lady Gray and Catwood) and 2 novellas (The Endarkening and The Omen Days), and a sneak peek of LIE TO ME. So however you like to read, there’s a format especially for you.

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NO ONE KNOWS - UK, Australia, Commonwealth version, German translation
(Print and Digital)

This is my first foray into publishing an actual novel, and I’ve been very excited by the response, especially in Germany. Having a book translated isn’t cheap, but if it continues to move copies, I may look at a few more translations in countries in which I sell well traditionally, especially French and Dutch. 

The book has a slightly different ending than its US counterpart, as well, so added bonus for you!

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DEAD ENDS: Stories from the Gothic South
(Print, Digital, Audio)

And it wouldn't be a post about short stories if I didn't mention the first anthology published by Two Tales! Featuring 13 southern gothic tales all centering around a single house, it’s a winner of a collection, with superb stories from a lot of my awesome writer friends. And it’s also now available in a fabulous audiobook edition, read by Courtney Parker. 

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There’s more to come from Two Tales this fall, including a major secret project I am chomping at the bit to announce. Soon, lovelies, soon….

Thank you for supporting my work, as always, and the work of these talent artists. It means the world to me!