This author has a gift for writing unusual, complex characters—and for shocking plot twists. Readers quickly get the sense that no one and nothing is safe in one of Aymar’s novels. In his latest, love is on the table, except—what does love even mean? Can you fall for the wrong person? If you do so once, can you then go on to find a righteous and truer love? And if so, what will you do to keep it? Aymar takes on the corruption of a criminal family as well as the corrupting factor of the patriarchy, while weaving a rousing story of suspense with stakes that affect people you’ll come to feel are real and really deserve to be cared about.

I discovered this second author through a virtual event at The Writer’s Center, a resource I highly recommend for book lovers and emerging authors.

Having made the transition from what I call relationship fiction into thriller territory, Butler pens tales that combine family drama with high stakes and crime. In this story, a nine-year-old named Luca goes missing, a young boy who’s already suffered the loss of his mother, making the stakes even higher for the couple raising him. What are terror and terrible, crushing guilt like when you have a responsibility both to a child and to the past? And then Butler ratchets things even tighter because there’s a woman out there with nothing to lose…and everything to gain from Luca.

The chasm that arises when someone new arrives in an established community can be hard under any circumstances. But when first Ruby’s troubled daughter, and then her husband, go missing, hard becomes impossible. All Ruby can do is try to figure out what has happened to what was supposed to be an early retirement for her and a new start for all of them. The past interchanges with the present in a twisty tale…and then a body washes up in the pond where Ruby likes to row. Everybody is sure it’s Ruby’s husband. Everyone except Ruby herself.

This title comes from Bookouture, a digital-first press with an interesting model that writers looking for a publisher may want to check out.

Writing under a pseudonym, this author-psychotherapist ventures into territory she is well-positioned to understand, presenting a clinical and legal dive into a situation many are familiar with: the harrowing lengths to which a couple will go to destroy each other when their relationship dissolves, especially when a child is involved. In this novel Greg and Madeline are trying to win an unwinnable situation even if lives have to be destroyed in the process. But if the life in question is that of their daughter, Lola, then the notion of victory takes on a completely different definition. As does the notion of loss.