5 must-watch murder mysteries with 85%+ Rotten Tomatoes ratings

This starts with a “theft” and really reads in part like a thriller where I was on the edge of my “is she going to get caught?!” seat. Basically, it’s like a literary thriller.

Athena Liu is a very popular author, working on the draft for a new novel when she dies unexpectedly after choking. Her literary frenemy June Hayward has not found much success and thus swipes Liu’s draft without anyone knowing. She finishes the novel — a historical fiction about WWI focused on Chinese workers in the British army — and changes her name to June Song, using her middle name. Now she starts to get the attention as an author she believes she deserves, but she’s a white author who stole an Asian author’s work, and questions are starting to come for her…

I really enjoyed Helen Laser’s narration of the audiobook — which I inhaled. It ruined me for other books for a solid week.

The mindfckry of reading this book during our current time gave me the same feeling of reading a suspense novel, or social horror, where things are just cranking up worse and worse — but with humor.

This story is told through letters about an island off the coast of South Caroline. This (fictional) island was named after Nevin Nollop, who created a famous sentence that uses every letter of the alphabet (a pangram): “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” When a letter falls off the Nevin Nollop statue, the Council bans that letter from being used by anyone. But this is just the beginning of the Council’s dive into dictator behavior as more and more letters become problematic and also banned.