I’m supposed to be writing about the books I want to read next, but the truth is I’m not ready to think about “next” yet. I just finished Pretty Girls by Karin Slaughter, and my brain is still pacing the room. Some books you close and immediately shelve; others sit beside you for a while, arms crossed, waiting for you to process what just happened. This one is the second kind.
I’m not reaching for my TBR pile. I’m not even pretending to. Right now I’m still replaying scenes, admiring the craft, and wondering why certain moments hit as hard as they did. It’s less “what do I want to read?” and more “what did this book just do to me?”
The adrenaline started early and didn’t let up. There’s a particular kind of thriller that doesn’t just entertain you — it activates you — and this one had my nervous system running a marathon I didn’t sign up for. It begins with a family wound that never healed: a sister who vanished years ago, leaving behind a crater the rest of the family built their lives around. You think you’re stepping into a story about grief and distance, and then the floor drops out from under you. From that point on, every chapter tightens the screws. Every revelation feels like it’s happening in real time. My body was convinced something was happening to me, not just to the characters.
What impressed me most wasn’t the shock factor but the control behind it. Slaughter writes like someone who knows exactly how long to hold a moment before snapping it. She understands when to zoom in, when to pull back, when to let you breathe, and when to take that breath away again. She starts with ordinary domestic scenes — a marriage, a strained sibling relationship, a father who never stopped searching — and then lets the shadows creep in. A detail that doesn’t sit right. A discovery that shifts the ground. A moment where you realize the past isn’t done with anyone in this family. The structure is so confident that everything feels inevitable in hindsight, even though you’re constantly off balance while reading.
When I finally reached the last page, I didn’t feel closure. I felt the way you do after a near-miss on the highway — that shaky, hyper-aware moment where your body is still convinced you’re in danger even though the threat has passed. It’s not a bad feeling, exactly. It’s more like a reminder that stories can still get under your skin, even when you think you’ve built up a tolerance. And part of what lingers is the emotional core: two sisters navigating the wreckage of a shared past they never fully understood. The plot is brutal, but the heart of it is human, and that combination stays with you.
So no, I’m not ready to move on to another book yet. I’m still metabolizing this one. I’m still letting my heart rate return to baseline. I’m still appreciating the fact that a novel can do this — can hijack your physiology, can make you feel something primal, can linger long after the plot details start to fade.
The TBR pile will wait. It always does. Right now I’m sitting with the echoes of the book I just finished, letting them settle, letting them teach me something about pacing, tension, and the strange intimacy of fear on the page. Sometimes the most honest answer to “what do you want to read next” is simply that I’m not done with the last one.
Scored by Copilot. Conducted by Leslie Lanagan.
Stories That Are All True 