August 10, 2025 – Summer’s Best!

Summer's Best!

August 10, 2025 at 7pm ET

Bianca Marais
Chris Pavone
Hank Phillippi Ryan
Brendan Slocumb

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Bianca Marais

Bianca Marais cohosts the popular podcast The Shit No One Tells You About Writing, which is aimed at helping emerging writers get published.

She’s the author of the bestselling The Witches of Moonshyne Manor, A Most Puzzling Murder, Hum If You Don’t Know the Words, and If You Want to Make God Laugh. She teaches creative writing through the podcast and was named a winner of the Excellence in Teaching Award for Creative Writing at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies.

She lives in Toronto, where she loves playing escape-room games and writing about strong female protagonists.

A Most Puzzling Murder

Destiny Whip is a former child prodigy, world-renowned enigmatologist and very, very alone. A life filled with loss has made her a recluse, an existence she’s content to endure until a letter arrives inviting her to interview for the position of Scruffmore family historian. Not only does an internet search for the name yield almost nothing, it’s a role she never applied to in the first place!

She decodes the invitation’s hidden message with ease, and its promise to reveal her family secrets proves too powerful a draw for the orphaned Destiny, who soon finds herself on Eerie Island. It’s a place whose inhabitants are almost as inhospitable as the tempestuous weather. The Scruffmores themselves turn out to be not much better, a snarled mess of secrets and motives connected by their mistrust for one another.

Their newly arrived guest proves to be just as much an enigma to them as they are to her. While Destiny slowly works to unravel the mysteries hidden throughout the ominous castle, she struggles to interpret disturbing nightly visions of what is to come. In the midst of cryptic ciphers, hidden passages, and the family’s magical line of succession, Destiny is certain of two things: one of the Scruffmores is going to die and she’s running out of time to stop it.

Chris Pavone

Chris Pavone is the New York Times-bestselling author of six thrillers, including The Expats, winner of both the Edgar and Anthony Awards, and Two Nights in Lisbon.

His latest, The Doorman, has gotten rave reviews from Stephen King, Maria Semple, John Grisham, Jenny Jackson, Ron Chernow, and Karin Slaughter, among others, as well as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

The Doorman

Chicky Diaz is everyone’s favorite doorman at the Bohemia, the most famous apartment house in the world, home of celebrities, financiers, and New York’s cultural elite.

Up in the penthouse, Emily Longworth has the perfect-looking everything, all except her husband, whom she’d quietly loathed even before the recent revelations about where all the money comes from. But his wealth is immense, their prenup is iron-clad, and Emily can’t bring herself to leave him. Yet.

And downstairs in 2a, Julian Sonnenberg—who has carved himself a successful niche in the art world, and led a good half-century of a full and satisfying, cosmopolitan life—has just received a devastating phone call that does nothing at all to alleviate his sense that, probably for better and worse, he has aged out and he’s just not that useful to anyone any more.

Meanwhile, gathered in the Bohemia’s bowels, the building’s almost entirely Black and Hispanic, working-class staff is taking in the news that that just a few miles uptown, a Black man has been killed by the police, leading to a demonstration, a counterdemonstration, and a long night of violence across the tinderbox city.

As Chicky changes into his uniform for tonight’s shift, he finds himself breaking a cardinal rule of the job: tonight, he’ll be carrying a gun, bought only hours earlier, but before he knew of the pandemonium taking over the city. Chicky knows that there’s more going on in his patch of sidewalk in front of the Bohemia than anyone’s aware of. Tonight in the city, enemies will clash, loyalties will be tested, secrets will be revealed—and lives will be lost.

Hank Phillippi Ryan

USA Today bestselling author Hank Phillippi Ryan is the author of 16 psychological thrillers. She’s won five Agatha Awards, five Anthonys, the Daphne, the Macavity, and the coveted Mary Higgins Clark Award. As on-air investigative reporter for Boston’s WHDH-TV, she’s won an unprecedented thirty-seven Emmy Awards. A board member of International Thriller Writers, and past president of National Sisters in Crime, Ryan lives in Boston with her criminal defense attorney husband.

Her newest novel is the cat-and-mouse All This Could Be Yours (Minotaur/September.) People Magazine calls it “a nail-biting thriller.”

All This Could Be Yours

Is a debut author’s blockbuster bestseller about to ruin her life? A glamorous book tour becomes a deadly cat-and-mouse chase in this new and captivating thriller.

Debut sensation Tessa Calloway is on a whirlwind book tour for her instant bestseller, All This Could Be Yours. In a different city every night, Tessa receives standing ovations from adoring fans while her husband Henry and their two children cheer her on from their brand-new dream house.

But there’s a chilling problem with Tessa’s triumphant book tour—she soon discovers she is being stalked by someone who’s obsessed not only with sabotaging her career, but also with destroying her perfect family back home.

Tessa fears the fallout from an impossible decision she once made—what felt like a genuine deal with the devil—appears to be coming due. And she’s realizing that every high-stakes bargain comes with a high-stakes price. If Tessa can’t untangle who’s threatening to expose her darkest secrets, she’ll lose her career, her family—and possibly her life.

Brendan Slocumb

Brendan Slocumb is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro with a degree in music education, with concentrations on Violin and Viola.

For over twenty-five years, he’s been a public and private school music educator for grades K-12, and has performed with orchestras throughout Northern Virginia, Maryland, Washington DC, and North Carolina. Brendan was named Teacher of the Year for Robert E. Lee High School in 2005 and has been named to Who’s Who of American teachers and is a Nobel Teacher of distinction. He also serves as an educational consultant for the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.
In 2022, Brendan published his first novel, The Violin Conspiracy (Anchor Books), a GMA Book Club Pick. In 2023, Brendan published his second novel, Symphony of Secrets (Anchor Books). His third novel, The Dark Maestro was published May 2025. He lives in Washington, D.C.

The Dark Maestro

Curtis Wilson is a cello prodigy, growing up in the Southeast D.C. projects with a drug dealer for a father. But through determination and talent, and the loving support of his father’s girlfriend, Larissa, Curtis claws his way out of his challenging circumstances and rises to unimagined heights in the classical music world—even soloing with the New York Philharmonic.

And then, suddenly, his life disintegrates. His father, Zippy, turns state’s evidence, implicating his old bosses. Now the family—Curtis included—must enter the witness protection program if they want to survive. This means Curtis must give up the very thing he loves the most: sharing his extraordinary music with the world. When Zippy’s bosses prove too elusive for law enforcement, Curtis, Zippy, and Larissa realize that their only chance of survival is to take on the criminals themselves. They must create new identities and draw on their unique talents, including Curtis’s musical ability, to go after the people who want them dead. But will it be enough to save Curtis and his family?