📚On Reading In April 2026 (Best of)

I have a wide range of reading flavors from my best reads in April. Plus, a bunch of added backlist recs throughout. Happy reading!

Good People by Patmeena Sabit

The structure of this novel is what makes it feel like a mystery/crime novel and also what makes it a literary novel that forces the reader to question what you really know, how you think, and how you absorb information. A tragedy has happened (you don’t know yet what) and slowly through neighbors, friends, strangers, lawyers, investigators, etc. you learn about the Sharaf family. Yet, who you never hear from is the Sharaf family. I highly recommend this for all readers, but especially anyone who enjoys a Greek chorus.

Can’t recommend the full cast narrated audiobook enough.

The Take by Kelly Yang

I’m a huge fan of Kelly Yang’s middle grade series Front Desk (super excited that it’s getting a graphic novel adaptation) so naturally I did a lot of gimme hands when I saw she’d written her first adult novel. The Take is a contemporary novel that has the pacing and tension you expect in a suspense novel—which frustratingly many crime novels as of late are actually missing.

This is how to write a character focused page-turner that follows through on the ESQUEEZE ME premise: a “desperate” to be relevant older woman pays a “desperate” for money young woman for her blood.

Maggie Wang is struggling to become a writer and just got a devastating blow of confidence from her literary hero, while also getting fired. Ingrid Parker is a Hollywood producer fighting against ageism and sexism, unable to get her current project made. After a brief health scare (and a struggling marriage) Ingrid decides to sign up for a new medical treatment to reverse aging by getting a blood transfusion from a young person. Enter Maggie, desperate for money, and to be amongst a veteran creator. What could possibly go wrong?!

A note on genre: I’ve seen this tagged as magical realism and horror and I think this is a contemporary novel with a dash of a medical age-reversal element that doesn’t actually exist but didn’t push this into magical realism for me (especially the actual historical meaning) nor was this a genre horror to me.

I really enjoyed Emily Woo Zeller’s narration on the audiobook.

Japanese Gothic by Kylie Lee Baker

This was a really good dual timeline/POV horror novel that was actually so good in each timeline/POV that my quibble with the novel was that I feel like I could have gotten two separate 5-star novels out of this. I especially wanted the modern timeline that starts with a “I killed my roommate but have no memory of it nor how I disposed of the body” trope to be a murder mystery/horror novel solely focused on that. That’s my selfish, if this was written just for me, note. The novel works really well in sewing the two timelines together and I found the young girl training to be a samurai in 1877 really interesting.

I loved Natalie Naudus’ narration of Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng so I was thrilled that she also narrated Japanese Gothic.

A Violent Masterpiece by Jordan Harper

One of my favorite crime novels is She Rides Shotgun which makes Jordan Harper an automatic read for me. While this isn’t a direct sequel to Everybody Knows (also recommend) it is set in the same universe of a gritty, dark LA (neo-noir) with the worst of humans in industries like Hollywood. This time around we follow three separate characters, all on their own missions and struggles, who end up crossing paths and having to decide what they stand for and if they’re up for a monumental fight against corruption and power.

The audiobook has a narrator for each main character: Peter Giles, Christine Lakin, and Rama Vallury.

Last Night Was Killer by Mary Pauline Lowry

Ridiculous fun. This is the trope where someone finds a murdered body and must hide it and clear their name because they didn’t do it but can’t yet prove it. I hate the term but it feels like the humor/fun of the “chick lit” books from the ‘90s yet it left out the diet culture obsession, is sex-positive, and isn’t “catty”. So wins all around.

It also weaves in grief (the MCs mom has recently died) with the seriousness it deserves without weighing down the book and there’s a romance subplot that does not take focus away from this being a murder-mystery.

The audiobook is narrated by Helen Laser who I’ve grown to really enjoy after her narrations of The Wedding People and Yellowface. (Two more books you should definitely read.)

Upward Bound by Woody Brown

This is the kind of book that is so easy to not get right and I love that Woody Brown really did the best blend of humor, voice, and seriousness for this topic in a way that makes readers not only confront biases but also see the many paths to what it looks like to listen and create a world that offers the best tools and care for people based on their individual needs.

With an adult care facility for cognitively disabled people at the center you follow a slew of characters from staff to clients in LA and get an array of voices, including nonverbal characters.

The audiobook has a multicast which was the absolute right choice.

Seek Immediate Shelter by Vincent Yu

This takes an incident and then follows a bunch of different people in the aftermath to show how it affected them and their lives.

Residents in a small Massachusetts town all received an emergency alert for an impending ballistics missile stating that they needed to seek shelter immediately. It had been an error but in the almost 20 minutes before the error is corrected they believed they were in imminent danger and their actions and thoughts all set them on new life paths — from the wife who can’t forgive her husband for almost taking off without her and their child to a mother who takes a final jab at her daughter in what she believes will be their last communication. It’s a fascinating look at how the incident wasn’t the actual problem, but rather it forced many people to face the parts of themselves and their lives they’d been avoiding, struggling with, fighting against…

I was interested in every character in the novel and got incredibly invested in many of their lives.

Gonna once again recommend the audiobook format, narrated by Katharine Chin.

Game On (Into Darkness #3) by Navessa Allen

This is a dark romance, with every book in this series having a premise that sounds unsellable as a romance plot and yet…

This time around we have a man blackmailing a woman to date him for the purposes of him getting into her family’s rich inner circle which is where he believes the father who abandoned him as a baby is. This is a true enemies-to-lovers trope, while there is attraction from the start their false opinions of each other makes them truly hate the other.

I’m a big fan of Navessa Allen’s humor, from an African parrot who calls his human “snack bitch” to the banter: “Oh, please. You probably fuck like you’re scooting a chair closer to the table.” While this one didn’t sell me to the degree of the first two books in the series, that just means that I have Lights Out and Caught Up in the 5-star category and Game On in the 4-star category. A series that remains 4-stars and higher is a hell of a feat.