Since her best friend, Hope, died, Liv Porter has struggled with grief, anxiety, and debilitating panic attacks. The cops ruled Hope’s death a suicide, but Liv suspects that their other best friend, Brendan, was involved. On Halloween evening, she lures him to an isolated house and, with the help of her friends Kizzy and Sherie, sets up a plot to blackmail him into telling the truth. But their plan is derailed when two friends of Brendan’s show up and a storm knocks out the power. And then someone starts killing people, one by one. To get out alive, Liv must face her guilt and confront what really happened the night Hope died. This fast-paced page-turner jumps between past and present, delivering satisfying twists that will keep readers guessing until the end. The story explores heavy themes, including grief, mental illness (depression, bipolar disorder, and anxiety), domestic abuse, and online bullying, though the presentation of mental health feels lacking in depth. However, the characters’ authentic voices make the work accessible and will encourage ongoing discussion. Harris serves up complex, unreliable characters who help create that delightful sense of unease and distrust that makes thrillers so fun. Most characters are Black, and Kizzy, who’s a lesbian, is Black and Chinese American.

Cartoonist Pond (Over Easy, The Customer Is Always Wrong) weaves glimpses of her own life into an entertaining group biography of the notorious, eccentric Mitford sisters—Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica, and Deborah. Growing up in suburban Southern California in the 1960s, Pond envied girls who had sisters rather than her boorish brothers; she envied, too, the Mitford girls’ rebelliousness, glamour, and sophistication. Born between 1904 and 1920, the sisters spent their childhood isolated on their family’s vast estate, each inhabiting “an island unto themselves.” Politically, they emerged with diametrically different views: Diana and Unity became unabashed fascists. At the age of 22, Diana divorced her husband to carry on an affair with Oswald Moseley, head of the British Union of Fascists, whom she eventually married. Unity, an ardent admirer of Hitler, went to Germany to meet him and soon, to her family’s horror, published a scandalous letter denouncing Jews. Jessica, on the other hand, touted communism and socialism. With Esmond Romilly (a nephew of Winston Churchill), she left home to aid in the Spanish Civil War. Defying her furious parents, they married and moved to the U.S.; she became a widow when Esmond was killed during World War II, and she later married a lawyer who shared in her labor and civil rights activism. Jessica made her name writing exposés, the first being The American Way of Death, skewering the funeral home industry. Nancy was the first to make her mark as an author, writing satirical novels that offended several members of her family. Pond recounts the sisters’ marriages, divorces, affairs, pregnancies, miscarriages, occupations, and preoccupations, all set in the context of the turbulent times in which they lived: “Across the scope of the entire 20th century,” Pond writes, “was the Mitford Circus.”

“The world’s biggest terrorist has a Pikachu bedspread.” So a reporter learned from former National Security Agency analyst Winner’s mother. In this matter-of-fact narrative, Winner, who “helped the United States government kill people,” opens on May 9, 2017, when she downloaded and printed a five-page document of Russian cyberattacks on U.S. election officials and a company that makes software for voter registration. Why she did so, she allows, was a subject she pondered often as she served out a five-year prison term, part of a sentence that was the longest incarceration for any single-incident leaker. (By contrast, Edward Snowden leaked 1.5 million pages.) Winner’s crime was to send those printed pages to an online site that specialized in national security matters. As she writes, astonishingly, a staffer described the pages to a source who in turn notified the FBI; meanwhile, the staffer also called the NSA and sent photographs of the printed pages, violating “standard Reporting 101 protocols for journalists who need to confirm the authenticity of leaked documents.” Traced to her by virtue of a printer code, the document occasioned her arrest and conviction under the terms of the Espionage Act of 1917, meant as a legal tool against German secret agents during World War I. After 15 months in jail, a plea bargain earned her a spot in federal prison, “a vacation, filled with activities and amenities,” compared to where she’d been. Winner writes candidly about the hellish nature of incarceration in America, from constant violence to boredom and the challenge of contending with conflicting and arbitrary rules, with her fellow prisoners more often than not less dangerous than the staff: “These weirdos, outcasts, and criminals loved me, and I loved them back.”

“The dark is for growing,” Alary writes, making a lovely comparison between a human baby developing in a dark womb and birds and turtles growing inside eggs. Throughout, the refrain “And you are not the only one” makes clear that both humans and animals enjoy aspects of the darkness. Humans dream and work through ideas in the dark, while a slumbering cat might be dreaming about how to catch a mouse. And sleep is useful for bees, huddled in their dark hive—it “clears [their] minds so they remember where to find food.” A spread about darkness healing the brain and body during sleep is festively illustrated with bright colors that pop against a black backdrop, filled with one- and two-celled creatures, stars, and a child slumbering beside a teddy bear. On another page, Hugo draws a connection between children sharing secrets at night, while trees communicate messages to other plants and fungi in the dark soil. One particularly moving scene shows a young child dealing with sensory overload tucked into a closet “to curl up in the comforting dark.” In a tribute to those humans and creatures that thrive in the dark and “want to stand out and be noticed,” Hugo illustrates children in glowing pajamas dancing, while a bioluminescent plant with “ruffles of bitter oyster mushroom” makes its own light at night. Human characters are diverse.

The book opens in 1942, as Helen Anderson prepares breakfast for herself and her sister, Effie, before leaving for her day as a mail carrier in Glen Clova, Scotland. The post office job is one of many given to women while the area’s able-bodied men are away at war. Neither Helen nor Effie ever married, and they live in the family home, which also functions as the town’s schoolhouse. After Helen—or Nell, as she’s called—delivers mail, news of a plane crash nearby spreads through town. As Nell hurries to help the lone survivor, he hands her a photo of a woman before he’s taken away. It’s not long before Nell discovers the woman in the picture, Mathilde, has arrived in Glen Clova to mourn the passing of her sweetheart, one of the crew members who died in the crash. As Nell begins to learn Mathilde’s story, the book flashes periodically back to the years between 1908 and 1917, showing how events during the first World War, including Nell’s work as an ambulance driver and Effie’s secret teen pregnancy, led inevitably to the complex family dynamics through which they are both trying to muddle in the 1940s. Gradually, the sisters discover many secrets and coincidences that help them understand who they are and what sort of lives they want to lead. Told in close third person throughout, the book alternates perspectives between Nell and Effie, also shifting briefly to their mother, Manon, and Mathilde. Full of interesting details about female ambulance drivers at Royaumont Abbey and life in rural Scotland during both world wars, the book offers an unhurried examination of the way secrets can burden their carriers over time. While this emotionally evocative novel would have benefitted from additional setting details to bring the village of Glen Clova more to life, the characters are drawn with depth and nuance. Similarly, although there are too many coincidences to feel entirely credible, the outcome is both satisfying and uplifting.