Chloe Barnes wants nothing more than to build up a healthy clientele for the weed-themed bakery she started in Azalea Bay, California, when her Grandma Rose needed help with the side effects of chemotherapy. So, she reluctantly agrees to be interviewed by podcaster Calista Bryant on the Azalea Bay episode of Starch Nemesis. Calista, who’s normally a tough critic, raves about Baked by Chloe, saving her harshest words for Starr Bright’s health-and-wellness cafe, Sprout. When Calista turns up dead and the police suspect Starr, Chloe springs into action to save her fellow entrepreneur. The puzzle is standard shopkeeper cozy fare, with lots of suspects, a romantic side plot, warnings from the police to leave detection to the experts, and a tense confrontation with the killer when those warnings go unheeded. Adding cannabis to the heroine’s signature confections provides a quirky twist, although readers should be cautious when it comes to the two recipes George appends. She obviously knows a lot about the chemistry of cannabis, and those recipes carry a warning that their potency can vary with both the strain of the plant and the consumers’ personal tolerance. Like solving murders, however, creating edibles whose ingredients include psychoactive drugs is probably best left to professionals.

Billy Diamond has always been too occupied with his band, Chimera, to spare much attention for his daughter, Devon. But when she and her boyfriend, Carlos, take time off from their studies at Yale to enroll in Today’s Enlightenment, a retreat in rural Nevada, Billy’s concerned. The usually conscientious Devon drops off Billy’s radar, not calling her dad or answering his texts. His concern deepens when he learns that Carlos’ body has been found in the Truckee River, and he summons Rachael Davies of the Locard Institute—“a center for forensic research, training, and investigation”—to his mansion outside D.C., hoping she can make contact with Devon and assure him that his daughter’s all right. Too busy raising her late sister’s toddler son to travel to Reno herself, Rachael asks her younger colleague, Ellie Carr, to take a look. Once she arrives at Today’s Enlightenment, Ellie sees that Devon is far from all right. Galen, who like many charismatic leaders has no last name, seems determined to isolate his followers from their friends and families, leaving them dependent on him alone. Black paces her story carefully, revealing the true menace Devon faces gradually as she keeps readers wondering how far Galen will go. There are many surprises on the way to the big reveal. The backstory of Rachael and her late sister, Isis, packs plenty of punch, as does Ellie’s brave fight to survive the peril her investigation puts her in.

Daniel’s father is the headmaster of a choir school, a plum position in a small English town and one that will soon evaporate. An illness and financial mismanagement force him into an early retirement and a half-life of ill-advised farming. Daniel’s mother, meanwhile, slumps into a depression that eventually becomes suicidal. In the midst remains the boy (as Amherst calls him), trying to matter-of-factly interpret the adult world. He’s impressed by psychotherapy, which he learns about on TV (“People are just like books—full of hidden meanings that need to be unearthed by an attentive reader”) and becomes indignant that the Anglican Church says he’ll have to become confirmed before receiving communion, so he refuses to do it (“Is this not exactly what Jesus would have done, he asks his parents? His mother does not welcome the comparison”). Daniel’s joys are drawn from Philip, a boy as smart as him but with more charisma and a stable family, and from Mr. Miller, a “young and exciting” art teacher who tutors the two boys in painting while their classmates play. Mr. Miller’s hipness is thrilling—he prefers Fauvism to John Constable—but it becomes sinister when he discusses “sex appeal” with a class of preadolescents. The novel’s plain style is contemporary, though Amherst is comfortable with figurative language: A vicar has a “face like a spoon,” the gap between two posh houses is “like a held breath before one makes a choice.” But when Amherst embraces ambiguity, in the moments where Daniel must admit no answer is to be found, the novel contains the same eerie spark that makes the bildungsromans of Hermann Hesse crackle.

Six years after the death of her brother, Eddie, Mina Ellis is still haunted by memories that have been mercifully ameliorated by her attendance at a bereavement support group. There she meets empathetic journalist Sam Hunter, who hires her to do background research on a story he’s covering for the Western Herald. Though she’s professionally inexperienced, Mina has recently gotten her degree in psychology. Since she’s also feeling secretly uncertain about her upcoming marriage to the brusque Oscar, the assignment, which sends her to the bucolic parish of Banathel, provides a welcome getaway. The subject is Alice Webber, a bedridden teenager who believes she’s possessed by a witch. Parents Lisa and Paul are warmly supportive, but siblings Tamsin and Billy are frustrated and skeptical. The womblike aura of the household makes Mina homesick. Her arrival disturbs the parish, which has a long history of sorcery-related tragedy (think The Wicker Man), and a clutch of citizens visits the Webbers to demand that she leave. Shortly after Mina becomes convinced that Alice’s malady is psychological, the arrival of Alice’s nemesis, Vicky Matherson, triggers a horrific incident that shocks everyone. Pearce’s first-person narrative compellingly captures Mina’s mental fragility, the swirling anxiety simmering beneath even her most mundane human interactions and intensified by the heatwave that’s gripping Britain, marked by brown grass that’s a metaphor for her dark psyche. Can Mina trust her own analyses?

In the sweet—and sometimes challenging—blur of her first nine months of motherhood, bookworm Cam has found domestic joy with her daughter, Polly, and her husband, Luke, as well as enough downtime to do some pleasure reading, so she’s nervous about returning to her job at a London literary agency. Her first day back certainly doesn’t turn out as she imagines: Unable to find Luke, she drops Polly off at day care and goes to work. When Luke doesn’t answer her texts for hours, she starts to worry. Then, on a television in her office, she sees live footage of an ongoing siege at a nearby warehouse—and realizes her husband seems to have taken three people hostage. Several hours later, despite the intervention of Niall Thompson, a trained police hostage negotiator, two of those three people will be dead, and Luke will be in the wind. Seven years pass, and while both Cam and Niall seem to have moved on in various ways, they’re both tethered to the memories and pain of that June afternoon. Niall’s wife left him that same day, and ever since he’s been troubled with dreams of the gunshots that destroyed not only the lives of the hostages, but also his career. Cam finds joy in Polly’s growth, but she can’t let go of her love for her husband—and her deep-rooted belief that he must still be out there, and may have an explanation for everything. Cam’s fierce love for Luke is admirable, but it also feels somewhat naïve, even as she and Niall begin to uncover discrepancies and coincidences about that day and the weeks leading up to it, many of which seem like quite a narrative stretch. The sweet mundanity of Cam and Luke’s “before” relationship is the true treasure of the book, as is the tension of the early chapters. McAllister asks us to consider whether blind faith in those we love is always justified—and worth the cost.