12 Authors to Read During Black History Month and Beyond
Darren gets his hooks into the investigation, along the way discovering things about Sera’s family and her hometown that are odd at best, vaguely sinister at worst. Hamstrung by local law enforcement and the Texas Rangers who likewise doubt the account of a missing girl, if Darren wants answers, he’ll need help from the person whom he swore to never trust again—his mother.
It was supposed to be a romantic getaway weekend in New York City. Breanna’s new boyfriend, Ty, took care of everything—the train tickets, the dinner reservations, the rented four-story luxury rowhouse in Jersey City with a beautiful view of the Manhattan skyline. But when Bree comes downstairs their final morning, she’s shocked. There’s a stranger laying dead in the foyer, and Ty is nowhere to be found.
A Black woman alone in a new city, Bree is stranded and out of her depth—especially when it becomes clear the dead woman is none other than Janelle Beckett, the missing woman the entire Internet has become obsessed with. There’s only one person Bree can turn to: her ex-best friend, a lawyer with whom she shares a very complicated past. As the police and a social media mob close in, all looking for #JusticeForJanelle, Bree realizes that the only way she can help Ty—or herself—is to figure out what really happened that last night.
But when people only see what they want to see, can she uncover the truth hiding in plain sight?
After a grisly, bizarre incident at the Brooklyn Museum, Gwendolyn begins to realize that something nefarious is happening tied directly to her past, right as Fonsi Harewood comes back into her world. Fonsi is a queer Latinx psychic from the South Bronx who’s caught up in a love triangle with a ghost and his mortal ex. He’s able to communicate with the dead, and he comes with a dire warning for Gwendolyn, that the barrier between humans and spirits is weakening.
Gwendolyn would prefer not to have anything to do with ghostly drama. Yet in order to get to the bottom of the spookiness derailing her life and threatening the world, she must face the demons she’d long left behind. The Ghosts of Gwendolyn Montgomery is a sensuous, funny, mystical adventure that will leave you spellbound as you keep the pages turning.
Simultaneously, King finds himself in a moral bind. Marigold Hart, the wife of a powerful Californian billionaire, has gone missing, along with their seven-year-old daughter. Orr is brutish and dangerous, and King realizes after locating her that it’s in her best interest to stay hidden. But are his motives pure? There is something magnetic about Marigold; he can’t help but want her near.
In the latest installment in the Joe King Oliver series, no good deed goes unpunished. Emotionally stirring, pulse-pounding, and undeniably sexy, Been Wrong So Long It Feels Like Right shows Walter Mosley at his best.
When a bombshell revelation threatens to sink the President’s Supreme Court pick, the Gang of Six fractures, pitting senator against senator in a confirmation battle for the ages. Alliances shift with the wind. Everyone is lying to everyone.
Cam and his friends are caught up in the midst of everything…and on Election Night, one senator will end up dead.
After several years of seclusion in the Black quarter of Beetlecreek, West Virginia, in the precarious 1930s, a retired carnival worker named Bill Trapp strikes up a chance friendship with Johnny Johnson, a Pittsburgh teenager transplanted into his uncle’s home. Bill is white. Johnny is Black. Both are searching for something that will give meaning to their lives. While Bill tries to court favor in the community, Johnny joins a local gang; meanwhile, their new friendship kindles hope that there is something for each of them beyond the bounds of Beetlecreek. But as the church society’s Fall Festival approaches, the battle between the repressive town and the aspirations of its trapped inhabitants comes to a nail-biting head.
First published in 1950, Beetlecreek stands as a moving condemnation of provincialism and fundamentalism, and a classic of Black American literature. Both a critique of racial hypocrisy and a new direction for the African American novel, it occupied fresh territory for its time: neither the gritty realism of Richard Wright nor the ironic modernism of Ralph Ellison.
After ten years on the force, LAPD cop Sonny Rush relocates with her elderly mother to peaceful Haven, California, to join her godfather’s burgeoning PI business. What crimes could possibly happen in a town nicknamed “Mayberry by the Sea”? Sonny’s first case: find Figgy, a missing goldendoodle last seen sporting a Versace collar. At least scouting out a dognapper gives Sonny a chance to get to know her new neighbors.Forty-eight hours in town and Figgy’s disappearance entangles Sonny in an unwelcome reunion with her ex, one of Haven’s wealthiest citizens. And when the body of a teenage boy is found along a popular hiking trail, Sonny is drawn into a web of strange beyond anything she ever saw in LA.
Then comes a local’s warning: question everything. Haven hides secrets that could destroy its idyllic facade. Or destroy Sonny first.
The year is 1915, and Adelaide is in trouble. Her secret sin killed her parents, forcing her to flee California in a hellfire rush and make her way to Montana as a homesteader. Dragging the trunk with her at every stop, she will become one of the “lone women” taking advantage of the government’s offer of free land for those who can tame it–except that Adelaide isn’t alone. And the secret she’s tried so desperately to lock away might be the only thing that will help her survive the harsh territory.
Crafted by a modern master of magical suspense, Lone Women blends shimmering prose, an unforgettable cast of adventurers who find horror and sisterhood in a brutal landscape, and a portrait of early-twentieth-century America like you’ve never seen. And at its heart is the gripping story of a woman desperate to bury her past–or redeem it.
Jude embraces the eccentricities of the dilapidated house, soothing its ghosts and haints, honoring its blood-soaked land. And over the next thirteen years, Jude blossoms from her bitter beginnings into a wisewoman, a healer.
But her hard-won peace is threatened when an enigmatic woman shows up on her doorstep. The woman is beautiful but unsettling, captivating but uncanny. Ensnared by her desire for this stranger, Jude is caught off guard by brutal urges suddenly simmering beneath her skin. As the woman stirs up memories of her escape years ago, Jude must confront the calls of violence rooted in her bloodline.
The three Maxwell siblings keep their distance from the lily-white gated enclave outside Dallas where they grew up. When their family moved there, they were the only Black family in the neighborhood. The neighbors acted nice enough, but right away bad things, scary things–the strange and the unexplainable–began to happen in their house. Maybe it was some cosmic trial, a demonic rite of passage into the upper-middle class. Whatever it was, the Maxwells, steered by their formidable mother, stayed put, unwilling to abandon their home, terrors and trauma be damned.
As adults, the siblings could finally get away from the horrors of home, leaving their parents all alone in the house. But when news of their parents’ death arrives, Ezri is forced to return to Texas with their sisters, Eve and Emanuelle, to reckon with their family’s past and present, and to find out what happened while they were away. It was not a “natural” death for their parents . . . but was it supernatural?
Unfortunately, this is familiar territory for Sydney- Years earlier, while she worked the crime beat as a journalist, her obsession with the case of another missing girl led to a psychotic break. And now, in the suffocating grip of fertility treatments and a marriage that’s beginning to crumble, Sydney’s relentless pursuit for answers might just lead her down the same path of self-destruction. As she delves deeper into Carol’s fate, her own troubled past reemerges, clawing its way to the surface with a vengeance. The web of secrets and lies entangling her family leaves Sydney questioning everything-her fixation on the missing girls, her future as a mom, and her trust in those she knows and loves.
June 1950
Twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens, Jr., is sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, a reformatory, for kicking the son of the largest landowner in town in defense of his older sister, Gloria. So begins Robbie’s journey further into the terrors of the Jim Crow South and the very real horror of the school they call The Reformatory.
Robbie has a talent for seeing ghosts, or haints. But what was once a comfort to him after the loss of his mother has become a window to the truth of what happens at the reformatory. Boys forced to work to remediate their so-called crimes have gone missing, but the haints Robbie sees hint at worse things. Through his friends Redbone and Blue, Robbie is learning not just the rules but how to survive. Meanwhile, Gloria is rallying every family member and connection in Florida to find a way to get Robbie out before it’s too late.
