I’ve decided to write some useful content for once. But then I’ll conclude my post with personal observations that are both foolish and pointless because that is my brand.

So here are some of the best mysteries and thrillers that helped me endure the pandemic, i.e., turn my brain off for hours at a time. I recommend taking these books to your private islands and secluded beaches this summer. There you can devour them along with the body parts of all the people you’ve dramatically murdered.

The Stack

1. Final Girls, Home Before Dark, The Last Time I Lied, and Lock Every Door by Riley Sager. These novels are twisty, terrifying (especially Home Before Dark), and driven by strong female voices. Still can’t believe Sager is a man.

2. When No One Is Watching by Alyssa Cole. This book just won a well-deserved Edgar Award. The story is darkly real and riveting and as a bonus Cole handles the sexy stuff like the romance ninja she is.

3. The Survivors by Jane Harper. The Dry is still my favorite by Harper, but this one made me start planning a vacation to Tasmania, which is saying something.

4. The Tenant and The Butterfly House by Katrine Engberg. The murders are just okay but I’m down with the detectives and the writing.

5. The Inspector Lynley series by Elizabeth George. SO GOOD. Read them in order. George will repeatedly break your heart, but the journey is worth it.

6. All of the Fjallbacka books by Camilla Lackberg. Lackberg is an OG with a uniquely deviant imagination.

7. The Last House Guest by Megan Miranda. Rich people, coastal vacation homes, unsolved homicides. Kind of predictable, but you read on.

8. The Devil and the Dark Water by Stuart Turton. Needlessly complex at times, but super interesting if you like wooden ships and the supernatural. Couldn’t get through Turton’s other elaborate mystery, The 7.5 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, because I’m too basic.

9. Theo Cray and Jessica Blackwood and Underwater Investigation novels by Andrew Mayne. I think Mayne was the first author I binged via Kindle Unlimited. Mayne is an honest-to-god magician who dives with sharks and writes all these books about serial killers just so he can give every antihero a happy ending.

10. The Dublin Trilogy (actually four novels) by Caimh McDonnell. These “darkly comic crime thrillers” are just fun. Sharp writing and lovable, over-the-top characters.

11. The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides

12. The Trap by Melanie Raabe

13. The Magpies by Mark Edwards

14. Every Last Fear by Alex Finlay

15. Proving Ground by Peter Blauner

16. The Red Lotus by Peter Bohjalian

17. The Boy in the Suitcase by Lene Kaaberbol and Agnete Friis

I’ve also read a lot of mysteries that were meh. I could put them in a listicle as well, but I’m trying to offer quality content today.

Meh Things I’ve Read and Said During the Pandemic

is a headline that would be followed by a billion boring things. Like for instance I’m between mystery books right now so I just read an entire bathing suit catalog marketed to women who have birthed children. In the catalog photos the sea breeze catches the hems of the models’ tie-dyed sarongs and maxi dresses and their bikini tops peek out flirtatiously from under their ombre macrame crossbody blouses and their strappy sandals sink into the wet sand and the ocean sparkles behind them and I’m just flipping the pages thinking, “It’s only a matter of time before your naked bodies are found creatively arranged in dumpsters and only a psychologically damaged FBI profiler with a secret past can figure out why.”

When my daughter finally returned to preschool last week, her teacher asked her to tell the class about her family. She said, “My dada works at a knife company and my mom likes to shop.” Thank you, Pandemic Year, for blessing me with the opportunity to show my impressionable young daughter all that a woman is capable of being.

I do, in fact, buy a lot of stuff. It’s mostly food and medicine, with some frequency. I don’t collect records. I don’t care for expensive electronics. Coffee is good, bought in bulk when on sale. If I get a fungus on one of my more prominent toes, I will splurge on some generic ointment from CVS. And that’s about it except for my Goodwill habit, which sees me buying used clothes and storybooks every other week for my daughter. But I didn’t set foot in a Goodwill until I was vaccinated. Then I went nuts, spending $5 on one visit, $3 on another, always rounding up to help “fund job training” even though we all have our suspicions. Our house contains a lot of old plastic toys with the price stickers still on them, which will save Goodwill employees time when I disappear the toys back to the donation center while my daughter is at preschool.

Right now I’m shopping for a job. I’ve had a few interviews and they all go the same way. 1) I put on lipstick. 2) I babble into my computer for 30 minutes with the expectation that the hiring manager or VP or whoever will find me so charming and human and real that they’ll hire me on the spot. 3) I don’t get hired. 4) I remember that I am now 40, devoid of youthful charm, and I didn’t go to personal branding college, and being a human is not actually a qualification. It’s like, the lowest bar. Lower than a machine. Lower than a fungus. But you also risk “underselling” yourself if you begin an interview confessing that you are lower than a fungus.

And yet you only have to get hired one time, by one company, and then you’re suddenly Employable and Professional again and people like your 4-year-old daughter can respect you. I imagine it’s a transformative experience. Probably really good for one’s self-esteem.

Interview Tips

1. Don’t say the first thing that pops into your head. You are not blogging.
2. Don’t lead with your greatest weakness, like that you have a Goodwill shopping addiction, or that you’re a loser.
3. You can try to be funny for precisely 28 seconds, then you need to talk about your marketing experience.
4. Stop taking nervous sips of iced coffee from your Yeti thermos because they’ll assume there’s vodka in it and come to think of it you’re acting drunk.
5. Don’t cling to your daughter when you pick her up from school as if your entire identity depends on her.
6. Don’t lose career momentum during a once-in-a-century pandemic.

Our new neighborhood has a micro-kinder-culture that celebrates decorative crocs, hoverboards, and worms. Small posses of children migrate from house to house, rolling as if weightless on their electric craft, stomping across lawns in their spangled rubber shoes, overturning every brick and paving stone in their neighbors’ backyards, yelling “Jackpot!” when they find a particularly long and/or swollen earthworm, then triumphantly absconding with the squirming creatures in their soiled hands.

Where do the children go when they leave us? I couldn’t say. I have not been to their homes. I have not stolen worms from their yards. It’s just not a thing where I’m from. As a progressive woman of middle age, I try to tolerate the foreign neighborhood kinder-culture, but I also find myself feeling threatened in the midst of this constant earthworm transport. Especially because we are still fighting a pandemic that was probably started at a wet market. I don’t know what these kids are doing with these live worms, if they’re selling them to restaurants or what, but I feel that it’s only a matter of time before a disease jumps from worm to kid, or god forbid from kid to worm. Then what?

That is a rhetorical question. We all know what will happen. Little worm hospitals. Tanks of oxygen the length of their slimy, unfurled bodies.

By the way, my mom told me recently that when she was little she ate a roly-poly on a dare and she is like a different person to me now.

Many years ago I applied for a job as a clickbait writer and when asked to pitch an irresistible headline, I enthusiastically offered:

The 5 Most Batshit Things Ever Found Inside a Vagina 

and the man didn’t hire me, but that is because he was sexist against vaginas and didn’t grasp the mass appeal of my horror stories about gynecologists digging plastic baby dolls out of schizophrenic women’s birth canals.

One of my roles as a health and wellness content provider avidly pursued by the Industry is to feed the sales funnel with quality stories about perverse foreign objects wrenched out of vaginas so key marketing personas can’t help but share the copy throughout their social media channels and then click upon the CTA. What’s the craziest thing YOU’VE ever found in YOUR vagina? these personas ask their ten million followers on Twitter. And suddenly I have sold a ream of Victoria’s Secret MedTech underwear and the world is my oyster.

Hey hiring managers! My kid is finally back in school. I am looking for jobs with short hours and long pay. Thank you in advance for your etc., etc.

String, mozzarella. Parmesan. Marshmallow, plural. Hotdog. Vodka. Bacon egg bagel. Spaghetti. Fudgesicle. Coffee, innumerable. Banana bread. Pickle. Vodka, plural. Cuticle. Fingernail. Toenail. Plant-based meat. Candy, plural. Carrot. Celery. Pizza, fresh. Pizza, frozen. Ice cream sandwich. Champagne. Brownie. Wine. Birthday cake. Granola. French fry, plural. Salad. Salt. Avocado. Quesadilla. Fruit snack. Peanut butter, jelly. Potato variation. Milkshake. Apple. Organic pear. Watermelon margarita. Chocolate éclair. Raspberry, plural. Sausage link. Burrito. Grapefruit vodka complement. Cranberry vodka complement. Lemon vodka complement. Day, plural. Week, plural, Month, plural.

The flowers should all be dead. Their bright orange petals are out of season, kind of spooky in their flourishing. The parents recognize this, but the children don’t, so they toddle about the garden picking at blossoms that shouldn’t exist.

My friend and I sit on our picnic blanket, watching uncomfortably as small hands dismantle the flowers. Our own children seem more sensitive to the miracle—or the plight—of the garden. They stay close to us, little sprouts on good behavior. Eating, fussing, having their faces wiped.

A tight-lipped lady marches toward us. She’d emerged through the back doors of the museum as if she’d been watching malevolently from a castle’s high tower. She goes straight for the children.

“Don’t pick the flowers,” she says to the young gardeners. “Why on earth would you do that?” She grabs for the petals in their hands. The startled children look around for their parents.

“They’re living things,” scolds the museum lady as she drops to her knees and begins scouring the grass for more petals. My friend and I draw our children close, not wanting to implicate them and further pollinate the lady’s anger. 

The food truckers, the bluegrass musicians, the other museum personnel at the party, they do not seem to notice the drama unfolding here at the edge of the petunias. They’re all baking in the sun, even though it’s October, even though it should be sweater weather, even though this flower garden should be trimmed back and barren.

Someone needs to tell this lady that it’s our own fault these flowers grew in the first place. The grownups are responsible for confusing Mother Nature. We fucked up. The moms and dads. If petunias are going to make themselves an attractive nuisance at fall parties, we’ve only got ourselves to blame. If the world were as it should be, our sons and daughters would wear infinite crowns of bee-stung flowers.

“I mean…we all want to save the planet,” says my friend. “Is yelling at children the best way to go about it?”

My daughter scoots into my lap and opens her chubby fist. “Here, Mommy,” she says, and offers me an orange petal that she’s squished and heated into pulp. “This is for you.” I’m touched, I’m ashamed, I’m complicit. I mash her into my chest and inhale her like a bouquet. She was once part of the earth, but now she’s all mine.

Where have you been?

Nowhere.

What do you have to show for yourself?

Nothing.

What have you been reading?

Murders.

What have you been writing?

Executive shopping lists.

How has that been going?

Okay.

What’s your baby up to?

Not a baby, not a baby blog.

Who are you kidding?

Nobody.

What’s next for you?

Springtime. Renewal. Age-reversing serums. Excellence.

Alternatively?

More winter. More irrelevance.

How will we tell?

You won’t be able to! It will all look and feel the same!