Lisa Unger is the New York Times and internationally bestselling author of twenty-two novels. With books published in thirty-three languages and millions of copies sold worldwide, she is regarded as a master of suspense. Unger’s critically acclaimed novels have been featured on “Best Book” lists and been nominated for, or won, numerous awards. Lisa is the current co-President of the International Thriller Writers organization. She lives on the west coast of Florida with her family.

Close Your Eyes and Count To Ten, February 25, 2025

Charismatic daredevil and extreme adventurer Maverick Dillan invites you to the ultimate game of hide-and-seek. But as the players gather on Falcao Island, the event quickly spirals into a chilling test of survival instead of the social media stunt it was intended to be.

Enter Adele, a single mother with a fierce determination to protect her children at all costs. Can she maneuver through the treacherous storm and the relentless competition and get home to her family? In a ruthless battle for survival where the stakes are higher than ever, the blurry line between the virtual and the real proves that the only person we can trust is ourselves.

Lisa’s fave snack is salt and vinegar pistachios—preferably paired with a drink called The Killer! See recipe below.

Cory Doctorow  is an author, activist and journalist. Recent books include The Bezzle and The Lost Cause, a solarpunk science fiction novel of hope amidst the climate emergency. Other recent books include Red Team Blues, a science fiction crime thriller; Chokepoint Capitalism, nonfiction about monopoly and creative labor markets; the Little Brother series for young adults; In Real Life, a graphic novel; and the picture book Poesy the Monster Slayer. In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.

Picks and Shovels, February 18, 2025

The year is 1986. The city is San Francisco. Here, Martin Hench will invent the forensic accountant—what a bounty hunter is to people, he is to money—but for now he’s hired by Silicon Valley PC startup Fidelity Computing to investigate a group of disgruntled ex-employees who’ve founded a competitor startup. He quickly ditches the greasy old guys running Fidelity, utterly infatuated with the electric atmosphere of Computing Freedom. This group of brilliant young women found themselves exhausted by predatory business practices and set out to beat Fidelity at their own game. But this optimistic startup, fueled by young love and California-style burritos, has no idea the depth of the evil they’re seeking to unroot or the risks they run.

In this company-eat-company city, Martin and his friends will be lucky to escape with their lives.

Marty Hench, the protagonist of this series, does a lot of cooking. When we meet him in 2023’s Red Team Blues, he’s grilling a lot of meat. But in Picks and Shovels, we learn about his origins as a young man seeking his fortune in 1980s San Francisco, where he has just discovered the Moosewood Cookbook, a vegetarian classic. He cooks many of Molly Katzen’s excellent recipes, but does especially well with her Gado-Gado, a kind of Indonesian peanut curry served over a variety of crudites.

Marty starts out the book as a beer drinker, whose pretensions to sophistication lead him to drink Anchor Steam, a Bay Area favorite back in those days. But by the end of the book, he’s a committed bourbon drinker, as am I, and his daily drinkers are excellent mid-shelf bourbons like Four Roses and Maker’s Mark.

Kelley Armstrong believes experience is the best teacher, though she’s been told this shouldn’t apply to writing her murder scenes. To craft her books, she has studied aikido, archery and fencing. She sucks at all of them. She has also crawled through very shallow cave systems and climbed half a mountain before chickening out. She is however an expert coffee drinker and a true connoisseur of chocolate-chip cookies.

Cold As Hell, February 18, 2025

Haven’s Rock is a sanctuary town hidden deep in the Yukon for those who need to disappear from the regular world. As Detective Casey Duncan nears the end of her pregnancy, she lets nothing, including her worried husband Sheriff Eric Dalton, stop her from investigating what happens in the forbidden forest outside the town of Haven’s Rock.

When one of the town’s residents is dragged into the woods kicking and screaming, she’s saved in the nick of time, but the women of the town are alarmed. Casey and Eric investigate the assault just as a snowstorm hits Haven’s Rock and find a frozen body in the forest, naked in the snow. With mixed accounts of the woman’s last movements, the two begin to question who they can trust—and who they can’t—in their seemingly safe haven.

Casey’s favorites are cookies for the snack and normally a shot of tequila, but to keep it family friendly, she’s also fond of hot chocolate. She’s in a town where everything is flown in, meaning her hot chocolate would made with powdered milk. See below for an excellent hot chocolate mix recipe.

Joshua Moehling is the bestselling author of the Ben Packard series. The first book, And There He Kept Her, was a Barnes & Noble monthly Mystery/Thriller pick and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBTQ+ Mystery. His second novel, Where the Dead Sleep, was described as “a well-paced whodunit” and “devastating” by The New York Times. Joshua lives in Minneapolis and works in the medical device industry.

A Long Time Gone, February 4, 2025

Ben Packard was just a boy when he watched his older brother walk out the back door of their grandparents’ house and into the cold night—never to be seen again. Decades later, Deputy Packard finds himself with too much time on his hands and for the first time in years, new information about his brother has surfaced that may lead them to the location of a body in the frozen midwinter ground. Though cut off from department resources, Packard strikes out to finally uncover the truth and stumbles on a separate, suspicious death. A tenuous connection exists between the two cases, and as Packard starts to dig, he meets fierce resistance from friends and foes alike who want him to stand down.

Joshua loves Everything Cookies and a Duluth Manhattan and has shared the recipes for both with us. See below!