LATE SUMMER / EARLY FALL 2026 READS - posted 10.3.26

With my garden not needing much tending to, I spent the end of summer reading ARCs as well as books I learned about on bookbub.com. Some of the books I found myself drawn to turned out to be true crime fiction, a genre I haven't spent much time discovering. I found myself enjoying the genre, looking for more. A few of these recommendations are true crime and a few are books I found to be treasures to spend reading in my sunny garden. Enjoy these new suggestions.

The Jacklighter: Murder, Betrayal, and Justice in Pennsylvania's Endless Mountains   -   Carla Conti

Guaranteed this true-crime story will be hard to put down and forget after reading the last chapter. In 1976, in a small town in Pennsylvania, a well-known and respected physician attorney and his best friend, an equally regarded physician, went skeet-shooting on the attorney's wooded property, but the attorney didn't come home. He was dead. Believing the best friend's story, local police called the death a horrible accident, despite the fact that everyone in town knew that the best friend had been conducting an affair with the attorney's wife for years. The two quickly moved far away and married. The physician then raised his new wife and the best friend's children as his own. This and that his story of the accident didn't slide with the attorney's parents or many in the community, including some of the town's law enforcement. Over the next 20 years those officers conducted deep dives into evidence that led to the reopening of the case, including exhuming the deceased attorney's body. In point-by-point detail, author Carla Conti has reconstructed the case and the courtroom drama between the high-profile lawyers hired by each side, as the doctor was finally put on trial for murder, 20 years after his best friend's death. 

The Origin of Ava   -   Annie Lampman

This is a beautiful tribute to birds and the natural world in which they inhabit. Bird watcher and author Annie Lampman's second novel travels back-and-forth from the western Idaho wilderness to the magical beauty of Ecuador, where the birds of both regions are as central to the novel as the characters. After her student research assistant tragically dies in an Idaho wildfire on the same day as her father's shocking untimely death, Ava Waters, an ornithology professor researching and studying ravens in Idaho, abandons her life to study boobies in Ecuador. As Ava's life falls into place with new like-minded friends in Ecuador, Greer, an 11-year old girl who happens to live near Ava's father, escapes into the Idaho wilderness after witnessing Ava's father's murder by her mother's abusive alcoholic boyfriend who has been raping young Greer for years. Ava and Greer do not know each other but as the story unfolds, their lives intersect in this story about the wonders and complications of nature, alongside the wonders of human nature and the complications we put on ourselves and each other.

Magic Hour   -   Kristin Hannah

On an ordinary day, some people living in a small town nestled against the Pacific Northwest's old growth Olympic National Forest, witness something very strange and magical: a small person, holding onto a wolf, is seen "flying" into the branches of a tree in town. After numerous rescue attempts, the person brought out of the tree turns out to be a six-year girl, wild looking and seemingly unable to speak. She and the wolf are taken into custody, the wolf to an animal refuge, and the girl to a holding cell. The townspeople are afraid of what they witnessed, who the wild being girl is and how she got up in the tree. A local police officer is not so distrusting, and as she attempts to locate any parents in the Northwest who've reported a missing child, she takes the girl to the safety of her home. At the same time, a child psychiatrist returns to that town, her hometown, to escape a horrific scandal . . . and the media . . .that ruined her career. The psychiatrist, Julia, happens to be sister to the police officer. Though they've been estranged for years, they arrange for Julia to work with the girl as Julia attempts to get her to help her relearn how to speak so they can unravel the girl's mystery appearance, and disappearance from her family. This is a fascinating story unveiling the process Julia uses to get through to the little girl, with a twist ending that comes as a surprise.

Life, Death, & Giants   -   Ron Rindo

This tender and bittersweet novel takes place in an Amish community in Lakota, Wisconsin. The giant is Gabriel Fisher who weighs at birth 18 pounds and measures 27 inches long. The death is his mother, who dies giving birth to him. The life is his grandparents and a few of the town's small "English" community, who take him under their wing and the life he leads as he grows bigger and bigger, a life that puts him in the national and international spotlight when he grows to nearly 8 feet. The story has many sides to it: while people gawk at Gabriel and revere him as he becomes an unparalleled athlete, animals are drawn to him in the most tender and lovely way. Gabriel is a large man with the softest of hearts and touch, a truly larger-than-life character from a unique small-town life, where the mystery of who impregnated his mother never left the corner of people's minds. 

The Half Life   -   Rachel Beanland

This historical novel takes place in the 1970s in La Maddalena, Italy, a Mediterranean island where the author had lived with her parents in a U.S. Navy community during the 1950s and 60s Atomic Age. The novel's main characters are a naval officer who is heading up a radiology controls unit on a U. S. nuclear-powered submarine on the island's coast and Eileen, the young woman he married several months after they met so he could bring her to the island during his two-year stint. As she works on blending in with the other navy wives, she also decides to learn the local language so she's less of an outsider to her neighbors. Over time the local woman she hires to learn Italian becomes a friend and who connects Eileen with other townspeople, including a young journalist who helps her recognize that the Navy isn't being upfront with the townspeople about the nuclear waste that is spilling into the water. When more than one extremely deformed baby is born on the island, Eileen puts her marriage at risk as her loyalties transfer from believing the word of the Navy to that of the Italian locals and the journalist who she is now falling in love with. This is a good story about a time in U.S. history that's gone and forgotten and how that time impacted on others outside of the U.S.

The Wednesday Sisters   -  Meg Waite Clayton

What better way for new friends to bond than through books: reading them and then eventually writing them. At this story's start a small group of young mothers meet every Wednesday morning in the park by their Palo Alto homes. It's 1967 and these women's housewife lives are the polar opposite to what's going on in the Bay Area at the time. They talk about their babies and children and what's for dinner, and, some of the husband's growing careers in the new technology industry they are building in Palo Alto. The women's common thread is books, but over time they encourage each other to start writing — perhaps someday their own books will be published for the world to read. This is a lovely story about the bonds women form, the struggles of marriage and raising children, and, after 35-years of sharing their writings with each other, the ups and downs of success.