Another light book  Unbecoming by  Rebecca Scherm,  along the lines of the Tom Piccarilli books; a girl from a poor family and a boy from a local-gentry family fall in love; far from being the cliche'd monster the boy's mother is amazingly nice to her, almost regards her as her own child. But, life happens. Read it to find out the rest.

  The Wilds by Julia Elliott.   This collection of short stories had me with the first line;

                          "Brunell Hair lived in a lopsided mill house with her mama and her uncle and her little withered-up critter of a   grandmaw."

        I went to a public school in a small town in Missouri and I knew several girls who lived in lopsided mill-type houses, and a couple of them had what could fairly be described as a little withered-up critter of a grandmaw. Aside from that these are imaginative and broad-ranging, very well written stories with a dash of Southern Gothic in all.

     Wow, quite a hiatus. Well, anyway, two new recommends that are debut novels:
      First, A Man Called Ove  by Fredrik Backman, from Sweden. NOT a crime or mystery although Swedish crime/mys are very very good. This is a book about a curmudgeon who is pulled back into humanity by interaction with a new neighbor and her children and various others. A feelgood novel but still quality.
      Second, My Sunshine Away, by M. O. Walsh which IS a book about a horrible crime inserted into a modern, suburban-America setting. The narrator is a boy through the book, beginning in grade school (the timeline is established with his class watching the Challenger disaster on TV). "We were all middle-to-upper-class white kids, all the products of our parents' success, and when we played with one another at school we played in the mirror." (quoted by Seira Wilson in the Amazon review). A literary book that is also a page-turner.