10 New Beach Reads for Your Summer Vacation (or Staycation)

… supernatural suspense

Whistle by Linwood Barclay 

Courtesy Harper Collins

Barclay (No Time for Goodbye, Trust Your Eyes) dives into the supernatural-horror genre in this story that has serious Stephen King vibes. (King even offered a brief blurb for the book cover: “Terrific.”) Its focus is a widow — a children’s book writer and illustrator — with a young son who moves to an isolated little town in upstate New York to begin a new, quiet life following a tragic scandal involving one of her books. Then her son stumbles upon a forgotten train set in a shed on her new property, and strange things begin happening, including her sudden compulsion to draw a frightening character that’s certainly not fit for a children’s story. 

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… a novel that will make you feel good about humanity

The Passengers on the Hanku Line by Hiro Arikawa  

Courtesy Penguin Random House

This is a wonderful example of feel-good fiction (see our story on the trend here) that has flourished in Japan and South Korea and is growing more popular in the U.S. In the latest from the author of The Travelling Cat Chronicles and The Goodbye Cat, we meet a motley group of passengers journeying through the mountains of Japan, including a grandmother with her granddaughter, a lovesick student and a couple in a troubled relationship. We revisit them on a future trip and see how they’ve evolved through the human connections they made. 

... a twisty thriller

The Ghostwriter by Julie Clark

Courtesy Source Books

Best-selling author Clark (The Last Flight and The Lies I Tell) turns the trope of a deathbed confession into a literary thriller as twisty as the canyon roads that lead to Ojai, California, the setting for this noir. The titular ghostwriter, Olivia Dumont, is called home to Ojai by her estranged and ailing father, Vincent Taylor, a mega-best-selling horror novelist with developing dementia. Dad wants to hire Olivia to help him write his memoirs; desperate for money, she agrees — and ends up revisiting a horrible incident from long ago: the unsolved murders of Vincent’s two teenage siblings, Poppy and Danny, in 1975. What will her father tell her that he never told the police?

… something romantic  

Sounds Like Love by Ashley Poston

Courtesy Penguin Random House

Joni Lark is a songwriter who has not written a song or had a successful date in ages. At a concert in Los Angeles, she is seated alone in a dark theater balcony with Sebastian, a has-been boy band member and nepo baby with a rock star father and all the attendant baggage. Then an inexplicable thing happens: Joni swears she can hear Sebastian think — although he’s much more appealing in her head than in real life. Hoping they can collaborate on music-making and get to the bottom of their inexplicable telepathic connection, he visits her when she’s back in her North Carolina hometown on the Outer Banks (where her parents own a divey music venue), and their in-key relationship unfolds. It’s an enemies-to-lovers story with a touch of magical realism. Poston is the best-selling author of 2023’s The Seven Year Slip, among other romantic tales.

… historical fiction with royal drama

The Cardinal by Alison Weir

Courtesy Penguin Random House

This is the 16th novel about the Tudors from the prolific British writer and popular historian known for her Six Tudor Queens series. Here, Weir focuses on the real-life Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, a commoner from Ipswich who rose to become Henry VIII’s most powerful adviser. Then came his downfall: He was banished from the court after failing to secure from the Pope the annulment of Henry’s marriage to his first wife, Katherine of Aragon. Weir reimagines such political machinations and Wolsey’s baroque personal life, including his long-term love affair with a married woman who bore him two children. Publisher’s Weekly calls it “an immersive tale of Tudor intrigue.”

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… a ‘Broadchurch’-style mystery

Death at the White Hart by Chris Chibnall

Courtesy Penguin Random House

Fans of the British police procedural Broadchurch, which ran for three seasons on PBS, will want to check out the debut novel by the series’ creator (and former Dr. Who showrunner). Like Broadchurch, this murder mystery is set in a foggy coastal English village confronted by a terrible crime. The drama begins when Jim Tiernan, the owner of the village pub, The White Hart, is found dead on the road one early morning, naked, with stag antlers tied to his head. As the story unspools, Chibnall switches rapidly through multiple characters’ perspectives, including that of detective Nicola Bridge, who has plenty of suspects to consider and secrets to uncover.

… a beachy book about a book club for your book club

The Martha’s Vineyard Beach and Book Club by Martha Hall Kelly 

Courtesy Penguin Random House

Kelly (author of the best-selling The Lilac Girls) toggles between past and present in this story, which is set on the Massachusetts island of Martha’s Vineyard and centered on real-life events from the 1940s, when German U-boats patrolled the state’s coast and the Army trained soldiers for the Normandy invasion on local beaches. The wartime tale focuses on the teenage Smith sisters, Cadence and Briar, working with their grandmother to maintain their family farm on World War II-era Martha’s Vineyard. They aren’t sure what to believe when a stranger arrives, warning that a spy is lurking within their small community. We also meet Mari Starwood in 2016 Los Angeles, whose mother has passed away and left a scrap of paper bearing a woman’s name. Mari visits the island to find her and learns the sisters’ story, as well as information about her own past.