A book so good I waited weeks to finish it

Just One Book: The Summer Guests

This is supposed to be Just One Book, and it is—Tess Gerritsen’s The Summer Guests, which is maybe best described as Karin Slaughter minus the gore meets The Thursday Murder Club but make it not quite so cute.

Okay, so maybe there’s a reason I’m not in charge of movie taglines.

The thing is, if you haven’t yet read Gerritsen’s first Martini Club book, The Spy Coast, I’m telling you to go start there. So this is Just Two Books for some of you.

And if you HAVE already read The Spy Coast, what are you waiting for? I personally have already pre-ordered The Shadow Friends, which is supposedly August 2026.

But you COULD start with The Summer Guests, which has more of the “rich people behaving badly” elements of your classic thriller with the word “summer” in the title, and you would not be sorry. The Spy Coast is more Le Carré, The Summer Guests more Lucy Foley. And while both are very thriller-ing thrillers, you won’t have that bleak “well, humanity deserves whatever it gets” feeling that I personally tend to end a Karin Slaughter book with.

It’s like this whole post is written in another language, isn’t it? Do you speak thriller? If you don’t, you’ll still like these, because they’re smart and suspenseful and full of heart and humanity (the better bits as well as the not-so-great), and they’re just so well done—Gerritsen, unlike another writer whose series entry I’m reading with increasing dismay at the moment, never phones it in.

So, remember last week when I claimed that I never, ever felt like I couldn’t read? The universe had a good laugh on me after that. More on that when What I Read This Week returns… probably Friday, but I’m not testing the universe again. I know! I know! I control nothing.

But I AM reading again.

Drop any smart, suspenseful, but not too gory thrillers in the comments—I’m ripe for another book!