Review: Gone But Not Forgotten - Sabrina Jeffries - January 2008  You know how it is when you're scrolling through your Kindle at midnight, not really looking for anything, and then a title just reaches out and grabs you? That was me with Gone But Not Forgotten by Sabrina Jeffries. Something about it gave me immediate vibes of Nicholas Sparks' Remain wrapped in a M. Night Shyamalan twist - emotional, atmospheric, and quietly unsettling in the best possible way. Reader, I downloaded it immediately. Sunny is dead. Not in a tragic, drawn-out way  she and her husband are simply gone, the victims of an accident, and now she finds herself in that strange limbo between worlds, tethered to the living by one ferocious, unfinished piece of business: her twin babies. A mother's work, it turns out, is never done  not even from beyond the veil. Not while Sunny has a ghost of a chance. Her sister Honey and brother-in-law Bert step up as guardians, good-...

Review: Little Ghost's Summerween - Maggie Edkins Willis - April 2026  Little Ghost has attended his very first birthday party and decides he wants one of his own. His friend Anya gives him the most beautifully simple advice: the party should celebrate what Little Ghost loves most. And of course, what Little Ghost loves most is Halloween - bats, black cats, candy corn, pumpkins, the whole gloriously spooky lot. The small snag? It's the middle of summer. What unfolds is a genuinely delightful little story about identity, creativity, and the joy of refusing to be boxed in by expectations. Maggie Edkins Willis has a wonderful instinct for the interior logic of childhood like of course you can have Halloween in summer. Why wouldn't you? The solution Little Ghost lands on (a "Summerween" party) is exactly the kind of lateral thinking that picture books do best: it validates kids who feel like they don't quite fit the calendar of normal celebrations. The illustr...

Review: Murder at the Royal Ruby - #Obsession Collection - Nita Prose - July 2023 Work has been an absolute whirlwind this past week ,the kind of busy that has me staying later than I'd like and trudging through the door with barely enough energy to string a sentence together. As much as I hate to admit it, my reading had been waning a few evenings in a row, and for a bookworm, there really is no worse feeling. So, in true book lover fashion, I did what any of us would do, I scratched that reading itch with a short, satisfying quick read that had been quietly waiting for me on my Kindle. Sometimes a book just knows when it's time to be picked up! Now, most of you will know Nita Prose from her beloved series featuring Molly the Maid, but this little gem takes us somewhere entirely different behind the velvet curtains and into the dazzling, cutthroat world of theatre. We are introduced to a young, passionate wannabe actress who has been paying her dues, grinding away and waitin...

Review: America's Most Gothic - Haunted History Stranger Than Fiction - Leanna Renee Hieber and Andrea Janes - September 2025 I'm absolutely delighted to share my thoughts on America's Most Gothic: Haunted History Stranger than Fiction by Leanne Renee Hieber and Andrea Janes. This atmospheric gem arrived as a physical ARC from Kensington Publishing, and honestly, it couldn't have found a better home on my nightstand. One of my reading goals for 2026 is tackling at least twelve non-fiction books ,one per month and I'm thrilled to report I'm right on track. This beauty marks my second non-fiction read of the year, and what a wonderfully eerie way to continue this journey. As a writer for Gothic Bite Magazine US, I've spent countless hours researching historical crimes, peculiar criminals, poison rings, and architecturally strange buildings. The weird, the wacky, the downright spine-tingling , demons, hauntings, unexplained phenomena , all of it fascinates me...

Review: Forget You Saw Her - Book #0 Ask For Andrea Series - Noelle W. Ihli - November 2025 Lately, I’ve found myself completely captivated by the works of Noelle W. Ihli . If you are a fan of fast-paced, "unputdownable" thrillers like those by Freida McFadden or Faith Gardner , then Ihli needs to be at the absolute top of your TBR pile. Her latest release , Forget You Saw Her , has been sitting on my desk for a while, and before I even opened the first page, I had a massive cover crush . It is stunning, moody, and perfectly sets the tone for the story withi n. For those who have read Noelle W. Ihli’s previous hit, Ask For Andrea , you’ll remember the haunting premise of ghostly women banding together in the afterlife to take down the man who ended their lives. It was a unique, chilling concept. Forget You Saw Her serves as the prequel , diving deep into Andrea’s personal story. What I found most fascinating was finally learning the "origin story" of the famous ba...

Review: Remain - Nicholas Sparks and M. Night Shyamalan - October 2025 I'll admit it when I heard Nicholas Sparks and M. Night Shyamalan were collaborating on a book, my inner teenage self did a little happy dance. I grew up devouring Sparks' tearjerkers (yes, I ugly-cried through A Walk to Remember), and I'm absolutely obsessed with Shyamalan's deliciously twisted films. The idea of combining Sparks' emotional gut-punches with Shyamalan's mind-bending reveals? Sounds great right,  Or so I thought. Remain had so much potential, but ultimately landed somewhere in the middle for me a solid, average read that never quite reached the heights I'd hoped for. The story opens with Tate watching his sister Sylvia die, but not before she does something completely bizarre: she breathes into his mouth. Gross? Yes. Weird? Absolutely. But this is how Tate inherits the ability to see ghosts, which naturally sends him spiraling into a mental breakdown. After some time in ...

Review: The Butcher and Liar - SL Woeppel - September 2025 Playing catch-up with my reviews as usual! This was my final read for October, which turned out to be a surprisingly quiet month with only 14 books crossing my path. But what a book to end on. The Butcher and the Liar grabbed me from the first page because I'm absolutely fascinated by stories exploring how families cope when they discover a parent or loved one is a killer. That moment when everything you thought you knew shatters. Then fast-forward to the present day, where those children are grown and desperately trying to build new lives, only to have their carefully constructed identities exposed to the world. It's the kind of premise that keeps me turning pages late into the night. When Daisy was just a young girl, her father a butcher by trade graduated from slaughtering animals to murdering women. He struck me as a bit of a Dexter-type killer, methodical and clean in his horrifying work. Now, decades later at t...

VBT # The Motel - Nancy Savage - September 2025 There’s something about late-night reads that hit different—especially when the story itself is set in the dead of night, in a run-down motel with secrets stitched into every creaky floorboard. I picked up this eerie tale on a whim, and let me tell you, I wasn’t ready for the emotional rollercoaster it took me on. Pearl Fuller is one of those characters who feels like someone you might know—or maybe even a version of yourself during a rough patch. She’s heartbroken, broke, and bunking on her ex’s couch (we’ve all had our couch-surfing moments, right?). Her only escape is her night shift at The Driftwood Motel, a place that’s seen better days and harbors a chilling past—the infamous Berkman murder in room 52. Now, I’m not usually one to get spooked easily, but the way this story builds tension had me glancing at my own hallway more than once. Pearl starts seeing movement in the supposedly empty room 52 and hears voices no one else seems ...

Review: You're Dead to Me - Amy Christine Parker - December 2024 Amy Christine Parker’s You’re Dead to Me is a chilling YA thriller that blends the glam of Gossip Girl with the sinister vibes of Carrie , delivering a high school horror story that’s impossible to put down. Packed with ghostly visions, a masked serial killer, and a fierce heroine on the clock to save her own life, this novel keeps you guessing right until its blood-soaked finale. Meet Ruby, a snarky, sharp-tongued scholarship student at the elite Oleander High School. Straddling the tense divide between the town’s privileged elites and its struggling locals, Ruby’s anonymous gossip blog, ReputationKiller, has earned her both loyal followers and enemies. But when her secret identity is exposed, the tables turn. Publicly shunned and targeted by the town’s collective ire, Ruby’s situation spirals into outright terror after she encounters her ghostly doppelgänger—a blood-drenched vision of herself in a prom dress. Ru...