February 22, 2026 – Fireside Favorites!

Fireside Favorites!

February 22, 2026 at 7pm ET

Yosha Gunakasera
Jacquelyn Mitchard
Lori Rader-Day
Kate White

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Yosha Gunasekera

Yosha Gunasekera is a first-generation Sri Lankan-American who thinks a lot about murder. She is an attorney at the Innocence Project where she represents individuals wrongfully convicted of serious crimes. Yosha began writing in jail waiting rooms and in between court appearances as a Manhattan public defender who represented New Yorkers accused of crimes ranging from possession of a boa constrictor to attempted murder. She is currently a Visiting Lecturer at Princeton University where she is teaching a course focused on wrongful convictions and exonerations, and was previously a Blume Public Interest Leader in Residence at Georgetown Law. Yosha has written on the criminal legal system for publications like Marie Claire and Teen Vogue and has appeared as a TV commentator on networks like the BBC and Law and Crime. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the University of North Carolina. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and three (not yet murdered) plants.

The Midnight Taxi

Siriwathi Perera doesn’t quite know where she’s going in life. She never expected to be a taxicab driver in New York City, struggling to make ends meet and still living with her parents at twenty-eight. The true-crime podcasts that keep Siri company as she drives don’t do much to make up for the legal career she imagined for herself, or the brother she’s grieving.

When public defender Amaya Fernando gets into her cab, they make a quick connection through their shared Sri Lankan roots. Siri, whose social circle is limited to her grade-school best friend, Alex, thinks things might finally be looking up with this new potential friendship. But she’s suddenly dropped into her own true crime when she discovers her next passenger murdered in the backseat, and she has to call Amaya sooner than she’d expected.

Pinned as the obvious and only suspect, and desperate to clear her name, Siri chases down leads across the boroughs of New York City with Amaya’s help. But with her court date looming, they have just five days to find out who really killed the midnight passenger—or Siri’s life will be over before she can even truly live it.

Jacquelyn Mitchard

Jacquelyn Mitchard is the author of 24 books of fiction and non-fiction for adults, young adults and children, with more than 3 million copies in 34 languages worldwide. Her first novel, The Deep End of the Ocean, was the inaugural selection of the Oprah Winfrey Book Club and was adapted for a feature film starring Michelle Pfeiffer. Two other of her novels are being adapted for film.

The Bird Watcher

When she is convicted of a double murder, Felicity Wild, a brilliant grad student turned high-priced escort, declares, “I may not be innocent, but I’m innocent of this.”

Reenie Bigelow never doubted it. A jury may have given Felicity a life sentence, but Reenie knows that her childhood best friend is not capable of murder. And so Reenie, a journalist, decides to use her deep connections to Felicity’s past to unravel the truth.

The more she uncovers, the more Reenie is convinced that the story the prosecution told is wrong, despite the puzzling fact that Felicity said not one single word in her own defense. But there’s one thing Reenie knows for certain: Felicity would never lie.

Lori Rader-Day

Lori Rader-Day is the Edgar Award-nominated and Agatha, Anthony, and Mary Higgins Clark award-winning author of Wreck Your Heart, The Death of Us, Death at Greenway, The Lucky One, Under a Dark Sky, and others. Lori earned a master of arts in creative nonfiction from Ball State University and a master of fine arts in creative writing from Roosevelt University. She lives in Chicago, where she co-chairs the crime fiction readers’ event Midwest Mystery Conference and teaches creative writing at Northwestern University.

Wreck Your Heart

Dahlia “Doll” Devine had the kind of hardscrabble beginning that could launch a thousand broken-hearted country songs, but now she’s the star of her own stage at McPhee’s Tavern. As part of Chicago’s—yes, Chicago’s—country music scene, Dahlia is an up-and-coming singer in spangles and boots of classic country tunes. Up and coming, that is, until her boyfriend Joey up and went, taking the rent money with him.

So Dahlia is back to square one, relying on Alex McPhee—again. Alex helped her out of a bad situation when she was a kid living rough with her mother. Now he’s part landlord, part band booster, all-around rescuer. It’s just that Dahlia wishes she didn’t keep giving him reasons to have to do it.

Just as Dahlia suspects she’s scraped rock bottom, the mother she hasn’t spoken to in twenty years shows up with something to say. The next morning, a distraught young woman arrives at the bar, asking after her missing mother—Dahlia’s mother, too, even if the missing suburban PTA mom the girl describes sounds pretty different from the one who let Dahlia down all those years ago.

Though no one is using the word sister any time soon, Dahlia lets herself be drawn into reuniting the family that might have been hers. But when a body is discovered outside McPhee’s Tavern, the crime threatens not just the place Dahlia has made into a home, but everything she’s believed about her past, her dreams for the future, and the people she was just, maybe, beginning to let into her heart.

Kate White

Kate White is the NY Times and USA Today bestselling author of eleven standalone psychological thrillers, including I Came Back for You (March 1), and eight Bailey Weggins mysteries, including Such a Perfect Wife, which was nominated for an International Thriller Writers Award. Kate, the former editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan, has been published in over in over 30 countries.

I Came Back For You

A mother begins to challenge everything she’s been told about her daughter’s murder in a shocking novel of suspense by a New York Times bestselling author.

Ten years after her daughter, Melanie, was murdered, Bree Winter is finally moving on with a new love, a new home, and a new beginning. Then a deathbed confession from the convicted killer throws Bree’s life into a tailspin all over again. He readily confesses to murdering four girls. But not Melanie.

At first, Bree and her ex-husband don’t buy a word of it. Until inconsistencies about the crime emerge. So does the dreadful feeling that the monster who shattered Bree’s family isn’t lying. The only way she can get to the truth is to power through the trauma and return to the town in upstate New York where Melanie’s life came to a brutal end.

Bree will do anything to find justice for her daughter and finish this nightmare forever. Instead, it’s just beginning. Not only could the real killer still be in their midst, but as Bree begins to dig through Melanie’s past, what she discovers calls into question everything she has believed–about the crime and about Melanie herself.