This week, Gare is back! And we share some of our favorite reads of the first half of 2024.

Books We Talk About

Listen for the Lie

Kill for Me, Kill for You

An Inconvenient Woman

The Man on the Train

This Family Lies

The Hollywood Assistant

The Hunter’s Daughter

Love Letters to a Serial Killer

Bodies to Die For

How We Name the Stars

Rabbit Hole

Missing White Woman

Things Don’t Break on Their Own

No Road Home

This week, I got to chat with Sarah Easter Collins about her exceptionally emotional debut novel Things Don't Break on Their Own. She shares how the shifting nature of memory, sibling differences and the first dog in space inspired her book.

Things Don't Break on Their Own Synopsis

A heart-wrenching mystery about sisters, lovers, and a dinner party gone wrong.

Twenty-five years ago, a young girl left home to walk to school. Her younger sister soon followed. But one of them arrived, and one of them didn’t.

Her sister’s disappearance has defined Willa’s life. Everyone thinks her sister is dead, but Willa knows she isn’t. Because there are some things that only sisters know about each other—and some bonds only sisters can break.

Willa sees fragments of her sister everywhere — the way that woman on the train turns her head, the gait of that woman in Paris. If there’s the slightest resemblance, Willa drops everything, and everyone, and tries to see if it is her.

When Willa is invited to a dinner party thrown by her first love, she has no reason to expect it will be anything other than an ordinary evening. Both of them have moved on, ancient history. But nothing about Willa’s life has been ordinary since the day her sister disappeared, and that’s not about to change tonight.

Sarah Easter Collins has written an extraordinary novel about memory, lost love, and long-buried secrets that sometimes see the light of day.

This week, I got to chat with Eliza Jane Brazier about her new erotic assassin thriller It Had to Be You. We dive into her inspiration for the book, and how she never intended for it to be taken as anything other than fantasy.

It Had to Be You Synopsis

Two contract killers, each with a hit out on the other, must fight their growing attraction as they face off in an epic game of lust and murder across Western Europe.

When Eva and Jonathan hook up on the sleeper train from Florence to Paris, they think they’ll never see each other again. Which is too bad, because neither has ever felt a spark like this for another person. But love isn’t on the agenda in their line of work.

Six months later, they run into each other in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. This encounter is not by chance, because Eva has been hired to kill Jonathan. She’s a contract killer, but what she doesn’t know is that he is too.

Their meeting kicks off a high-stakes adventure across Western Europe. There will be tourism. There will be bodies. Eva and Jonathan might even fall for each other.

As the two get closer to completing their assignments, it becomes clear that they are also being hunted—by something even more dangerous than love. . . .