My Library | LynseyFreeman

This collection of titles represents some of the books I've recently read and enjoyed. You're invited to browse my brief comments below each one. You'll learn a bit about me, and then you can read the official publisher's blurb. If a book is on this list, it's an A. There are so many more books to add; I hope to have time to do so, soon. Check back for updated titles from other favorites like Ruth Ware, Stacy Willingham, Tana French, and Alice Feeney as well as non-fiction titles.

The Girls In The Garden

Then She Was Gone

The Night She Disappeared

Invisible Girl

This is the book that began a minor addiction for me to Lisa Jewell books. My husband and I were on holiday in the Caribbean, and I found it abandoned on a bookshelf in the breezeway on the way to the pool. On a midsummer night, as a festive neighborhood party is taking place, preteen Pip discovers her thirteen-year-old sister Grace lying unconscious and bloody in a hidden corner of a lush rose garden. What really happened to her? And who is responsible?

There is a scene in this book about captivity that is unsettling in a subtle way—not gore or torture. Just supremely odd. And it's probably something that gave the editor pause. But it made the book so memorable. Laurel Mack is a mother trying to put her life back together ten years after her golden-child daughter, Ellie, vanished without a trace. When Laurel meets a charming new man, she is deeply unnerved to discover his nine-year-old daughter bears an uncanny resemblance to the daughter she lost.

I wonder if—maybe—Lisa Jewell was inspired by her own days of partying or university. This one is easy to identify with if you've ever tried to keep up with the in-crowd—and what can happen when you've partied too much. On a beautiful summer night in a charming English suburb, a young woman and her boyfriend disappear after partying at the massive country estate of a new college friend.

The premise of this book is part of what makes it so intriguing. Everybody has that one weird neighbor. Right? Owen Pick’s life is falling apart. In his thirties and living in his aunt’s spare bedroom, he has just been suspended from his job as a teacher after accusations of sexual misconduct—accusations he strongly denies. Searching for professional advice online, he is inadvertently sucked into the dark world of incel forums, where he meets a charismatic and mysterious figure. When a troubled young woman goes missing could Owen be responsible?

My first and still probably my most favorite Shari Lapena book. A frozen setting and a chilling story—absolutely gripping. A weekend retreat at a cozy mountain lodge is supposed to be the perfect getaway . . . but when the storm hits, no one is getting away.

An Unwanted Guest

I live in a quiet suburban neighborhood. Sometimes, I've wondered about one or two of the households. This one will make you question who lives around you. In a quiet, leafy suburb in upstate New York, a teenager has been sneaking into houses–and into the owners’ computers as well–learning their secrets, and maybe sharing some of them, too. Who is he, and what might he have uncovered? After two anonymous letters are received, whispers start to circulate, and suspicion mounts. And when a woman down the street is found murdered, the tension reaches the breaking point. Who killed her?

Someone We Know

This title is the one that makes me shiver. The threat isn't outside; it's inside. It's family. Brecken Hill in upstate New York is an expensive place to live. You have to be rich to have a house there, and Fred and Sheila Merton certainly are rich. But even all their money can’t protect them when a killer comes to call. The Mertons are brutally murdered after a fraught Easter dinner with their three adult kids. Who, of course, are devastated. Or are they?

Not A Happy Family

We frequently send our kids out to play, assume they'll get home from school okay, or simply leave them in the house on their own. This one made me a helicopter parent for a few weeks after reading it. William Wooler is a family man, on the surface. But he's been having an affair, an affair that ended horribly this afternoon at a motel up the road. So when he returns to his house, devastated and angry, to find his difficult nine-year-old daughter Avery unexpectedly home from school, William loses his temper. Hours later, Avery's family declares her missing. Who took Avery Wooler?

Everyone Here Is Lying

This is my favorite Megan Miranda title so far. Her description of the setting puts you in Maine on vacation, and you feel like you're there at the parties with all the summer people. As tension builds, the relationship between Sadie and Avery feels risky. You wonder all along if Avery is obsessed with Sadie—to the point of murder. Really captivating: I didn't want the book to end! This story is ripe for a continuation that follows how things have changed. Readers would also be interested to see the Loman family held accountable or a new twist in the storyline. Typically, fierce friendships never develop between a local and a summer girl—but that’s just what happens with visitor Sadie Loman and Littleport resident Avery Greer. Each summer for almost a decade, the girls are inseparable—until Sadie is found dead. While the police rule the death a suicide, Avery can’t help but feel there are those in the community, including a local detective and Sadie’s brother, Parker, who blame her. Someone knows more than they’re saying, and Avery is intent on clearing her name, before the facts get twisted against her.

The Last House Guest

There are so many twists and turns in this novel. Every time I turned the page I was sure the suspect was someone else. Finally, I landed on the neighbor, but I was wrong. Of particular poignance for me is the dynamic of the absent mother. Did Libby abandon her daughter to live her own life? Is she a criminal in hiding? Or is she a victim? When Hazel Sharp, daughter of Mirror Lake’s longtime local detective, unexpectedly inherits her childhood home, she’s warily drawn back to the town—and people—she left behind almost a decade earlier. But Hazel’s not the only relic of the past to return: a drought has descended on the region, and as the water level in the lake drops, long-hidden secrets begin to emerge…including evidence that may help finally explain the mystery of her mother’s disappearance.

Daughter of Mine

The foreshadowing in this narrative is excellent. I knew something was up with the parents. The atmosphere inside their house creates the kind of tension that makes you feel certain someone is coming around the corner at any minute—the surprise is who and when. And the cover art is brilliant! Beckett Bowery never thought she’d return to Wyatt Valley, a picturesque college town in the Virginia mountains steeped in tradition. Her roots there were strong: Beckett’s parents taught at the college, and she never even imagined studying anywhere else—until a tragedy her senior year ended with two local men dead, and her roommate on the run, never to be seen again… For the last two decades, Beckett has done her best to keep her distance. Then her daughter, Delilah, secretly applies to Wyatt College and earns a full scholarship, and Beckett can only hope that her lingering fears are unfounded. But deep down she knows that Wyatt Valley has a long memory, and that the past isn’t the only dangerous thing in town…

You Belong Here

I am excited to read this book! I'm anticipating the same kind of tension in the relationships that exists in the characters of The Last House Guest, and I'm interested to see how Miranda portrays Tennessee. A decade ago, two vans filled with high school seniors on a school service trip crashed into a Tennessee ravine—a tragedy that claimed the lives of multiple classmates and teachers. The nine students who managed to escape the river that night were irrevocably changed. A year later, after one of the survivors dies by suicide on the anniversary of the crash, the rest of them make a pact: to come together each year to commemorate that terrible night. To keep one another safe. To hold one another accountable. Or both.

The Only Survivors

TH1RT3EN

I read this when it first came out, but when the UHC CEO was brutally murdered outside a midtown Manhattan hotel, it immediately called to mind for me the serial killer lurking outside studying the court system—it seemed to be a parallel for that level of surveillance. It’s the murder trial of the century—and Joshua Kane has killed to get the best seat in the house. He has done everything in his power to make sure the wrong man goes down for the crime. Because this time, the killer isn’t on trial. He’s on the jury.

The Zero Night

If you ever want to feel like the cool cop chick, this book embodies that. While Serena is troubled, she is tough as heck! After nearly dying of a gunshot wound, Jonathan Stride has been on leave from the Duluth Police for more than a year. When his partner, Maggie Bei, gets called about a suspicious abduction involving a local lawyer, she tells Stride it's time for him to come back. Even as Stride digs for the truth about Gavin Webster and his wife, he must also deal with a crisis in his own marriage. His wife, Serena, is struggling after the death of her mother, the abusive woman she hadnn't seen in twenty-five years. hat death haunts Serena like an echo of her own childhood--but her obsession with it takes a terrible toll. And it's not over yet.

Middle Of The Night

This book kept me company in the Palm Springs airport last October when all flights were delayed, and I sat in the lounge for nearly ten hours. Thanks, Sager! The worst thing to ever happen on Hemlock Circle occurred in Ethan Marsh’s backyard. One July night, ten-year-old Ethan and his best friend and neighbor, Billy, fell asleep in a tent set up on a manicured lawn in a quiet, quaint New Jersey cul-de-sac. In the morning, Ethan woke up alone. During the night, someone had sliced the tent open with a knife and taken Billy. He was never seen again. What happened?

Amazing! There is no preamble necessary for writer Anthony Horowitz. I've read all in the Hawthorne & Horowitz series except the latest, A Deadly Episode, which I will get to soon! On a bright spring morning, Diana Cowper walks into a London funeral parlor to plan her own service. Six hours later, she is found strangled to death. Disgraced ex-detective Daniel Hawthorne recruits author Anthony Horowitz to shadow the investigation. Soon, the writer finds himself the reluctant sidekick in a twisting murder mystery.

The Word Is Murder

Harlem Shuffle

My introduction to Colson Whitehead was Sag Harbor. As a native—although displaced—New Yorker and a reader who cut my teeth on titles like Bright Lights, Big City, American Psycho; Bonfire of the Vanities; and others, I love a book that puts me in the New York area. Like Sag Harbor and the other titles above, Harlem Shuffle has a great sense of place. And I relate to being "somewhere" on the continuum of New York society where you're neither in nor out but somewhere in between. Harlem Shuffle is the first title in a series of three. It's a a great read: you get a little Harlem history and a lot of heists. The novel follows Ray Carney, a seemingly upstanding 125th Street furniture salesman who masks his connection to a lineage of criminals, as his life of "slightly bent" crookedness begins to fracture. When his cousin Freddie involves him in a high-stakes heist at the Hotel Theresa, Ray is dragged into a dangerous underworld of corrupt cops, gangsters, and other lowlifes. Crook Manifesto, the second title, keeps things rolling with Carney, and Cool Machine, the third installment, is set to come out July 2026.

The Conjuring of America

Someday I'll have to read The Serpent and the Rainbow by Wade Davis because I loved the movie. Voodoo is frighteningly interesting, which is why this title caught my eye. Written by Lindsey Stewart a scholar of philosophy at the University of Memphis, I knew I had to read it to support a local writer and the local bookstore Novel. You'll be surprised to learn where our vapor rub originates from—Negro Mammies. Emerging first on plantations in the American South, enslaved conjure women used their magic to treat illnesses. These women combined their ancestral spiritual beliefs from West Africa with local herbal rituals and therapeutic remedies to create conjure, forging a secret well of health and power hidden to their oppressors and many of the modern-day staples we still enjoy.

Memphis

We're often more similar than we are different—at least generally. Readers and writers look for that connection. I, too, had to relocate to the south as a result of family—and it ain't always easy. But that's where the comparison ends, and this epic story begins. Summer 1995: Ten-year-old Joan, her mother, and her younger sister flee her father’s explosive temper and seek refuge at her mother’s ancestral home in Memphis. This is not the first time violence has altered the course of the family’s trajectory. Half a century earlier, Joan’s grandfather built this majestic house in the historic Black neighborhood of Douglass—only to be lynched days after becoming the first Black detective in the city. Joan tries to settle into her new life, but family secrets cast a longer shadow than any of them expected.

Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

My mother used to say there was a time when it was absolutely taboo to ask your neighbor if they were a Republican or a Democrat, to ask where they worshipped or what their ethic background happened to be. You took good people at face value, and you dismissed the ignorant and narrow-minded. Today, we could all learn from this ideal. McBride's book traces the ugliness when people are marginalized and the triumph when community prevails. When a skeleton is discovered in a 1972 Pottstown well, the long-buried secrets of Chicken Hill are unearthed. In this impoverished, vibrant neighborhood, immigrant Jews and African Americans forge a deep bond. Together, they risk everything to protect a deaf Black child from the state, revealing the ultimate triumph of love and community.

As a student I never really liked history; I found it boring. Much to the disappointment of my mother, a historian, academic editor, and library scientist, I just didn't learn my history. Well, this book changed that. And the most important take-away is comforting. In many respects politics is the same today as throughout most of American history: messy at best—even when great strides in democracy are being made—and nightmarish at worst when corruption and cronyism rule the day. However, it is never too dark or too late in the fight that we should give in to fear. We must maintain hope! Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jon Meacham helps us understand the present moment in American politics and life by looking back at critical times in our history when hope overcame division and fear. With compelling narratives of past eras of strife, from the Jim Crow South to the anti-Communist witch-hunts, Meacham offers wisdom for our own time. He reassures us that we have come through such darkness before, calling on readers to resist tribalism, respect facts, and find our 'better angels. The follow up book American Struggle Democracy, Dissent, and the Pursuit of a More Perfect Union: An Anthology was published in February 2026.

The Soul of America

My undergraduate major was organizational and strategic communication, and over the years I've read a ton on org comm and leadership. My bookshelves are deep with scholarly and pop titles, so I know a thing or two when I say Brene Brown is the real deal. She blends sports metaphors, liberal Episcopal values—very loosely mind you—and all the data from her decades of scholarly research at the University of Houston to chart a course to brave and kind leadership. She is funny and serious and definitely someone I'd have a drink with, but since she's sober it'll have to be a coffee. Brown returns with an urgent call to reimagine the essentials of courageous leadership. In a time when uncertainty runs deep and bluster, hubris, and even cruelty are increasingly framed as acceptable leadership, Brown delivers practical, actionable insights that illuminate the mindsets and skill sets essential to reclaiming focus and driving growth through connection, discipline, and accountability.

Strong Ground

Guns, Germs, and Steel

Continuing to catch up on my failed history education, I selected this title to provide me with one of the broadest portraits of civilization. It looks like an intimidating read at first glance, but I encourage you to dig in and finish it as I did. It's not possible to generalize the text, but with one quip I'd say: there is no such thing as the pejorative "cultural appropriation" as used today in cancel culture. If there'd been no cultural appropriation throughout history, none of us would be here. Period. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a national bestseller: the global account of the rise of civilization that is also a stunning refutation of ideas of human development based on race. In this "artful, informative, and delightful" (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, Jared Diamond convincingly argues that geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world. Societies that had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed writing, technology, government, and organized religion—as well as nasty germs and potent weapons of war—and adventured on sea and land to conquer and decimate preliterate cultures. A major advance in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way that the modern world came to be and stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history.

On Writing

I have to give credit to my friend and mentor Stan Norton for pointing me to this book—Stephen King lives down the beach from him in Florida in their respective summer homes. I've watched—and enjoyed—a lot of movies based on Stephen King novels but have been too scared to read one, which would probably happen alone at night. But this book has been my companion between my first draft and my final polished draft. It's common sense in some ways, and I like what King says about paying no heed to rules for the sake of rules and just writing. But there are also some gems to gather about mechanics and doing things right. It also highlights what a brilliant writer King is because he probably had 10,000 hours of practice before he was 20 years old. No wonder he can zip off a draft straight away. I recommend it for anyone interested in bringing their book into the world. And, I'll probably read something else of his now—starting with The Shining, which I used to watch annually like Jaws for decades. Immensely helpful and illuminating to any aspiring writer, this special edition of Stephen King’s critically lauded, million-copy bestseller shares the experiences, habits, and convictions that have shaped him and his work. King's advice is grounded in his vivid memories from childhood through his emergence as a writer, from his struggling early career to his widely reported near-fatal accident in 1999 -- and how the inextricable link between writing and living spurred his recovery. Brilliantly structured, friendly and inspiring, On Writing will empower and entertain everyone who reads it -- fans, writers, and anyone who loves a great story well told.

Perhaps everyone has read this book, but I think not. Clear gets credit for making my weekly workouts easier through habit stacking. I lay the workout clothes in the bathroom before bed, and in the morning I get up and put them on. There is no negoiation: I will workout. I appreciate that. So there's likely to be a gem in there for someone who has not yet read it or might reread it. Clear is known for his ability to distill complex topics into simple behaviors that can be easily applied to daily life and work. Here, he draws on the most proven ideas from biology, psychology, and neuroscience to create an easy-to-understand guide for making good habits inevitable and bad habits impossible. Along the way, readers will be inspired and entertained with true stories from Olympic gold medalists, award-winning artists, business leaders, life-saving physicians, and star comedians who have used the science of small habits to master their craft and vault to the top of their field.

Atomic Habits

I am honored to call John Daniel a friend. Former CHRO with First Horizon Bank, he is an institution in the local area—and an excellent thinker on leadership and org comm. For me, the most important takeaway from his book is the point he makes about distal thinking. We all do it to a certain degree, but it can be dangerous in some cases. Distal thinking is comprised of concepts and ideas that many individuals have no immediate experience with, so there is no firsthand engagement with the subject: outer space, brain surgery, even the inner workings of politics. "In this zone, beliefs are distal, there is no way, through personal experience, to find out if the beliefs are true of false." What an eye-opener as to how many people form their opinions. In Ancestral Mindset, John Daniel traces the development of the human brain from the birth of our species and applies his insights to teach leadership and teamwork from an evolutionary-neurological perspective. Why is your fight-or-flight instinct on a hair trigger when the boss calls you in? Why does receiving advice from a colleague induce a threat state? Why does it feel so disproportionately risky to disagree with the team? The answers to those questions lie in our collective past.

Ancestral Mindset

It's been within the last two years that I read The Worst Hard Time. I was amazed by how engaging the writing is—the picture of people living in dirt holes in the ground with scorpions and spiders is unthinkable in the country that we consider the land of plenty. There are always lessons to be learned from history—we take heed to our reliance on nature, or we ignore it at our peril. Following a dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, Egan tells of their desperate attempts to carry on through blinding black dust blizzards, crop failure, and the death of loved ones. Brilliantly capturing the terrifying drama of catastrophe, Egan does equal justice to the human characters who become his heroes, "the stoic, long-suffering men and women whose lives he opens up with urgency and respect" (New York Times).

The Worst Hard Time

This book was written by my mother, Patricia LaPointe McFarland, and her co-author Mary Ellen Pitts. I am immensely proud of it and of her. This book is the culmination of years of scholarly research in one of Patricia's several areas of interest: the history of Memphis as a regional medical center, from the Civil War to the Yellow Fever Epidemic, through the modern era of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, among other important medical facilities and infrastructure in the Mid-South today. My father, Dr. L. Gordon LaPointe, was a surgeon at St. Vincent's Hospital in Manhattan for decades and an Honorary Police Surgeon to the NYPD. Following his premature death, Patricia carried on an interest in medicine within her specialty field—history. Memphis Medicine is expertly researched and beautifully written and illustrated. A wonderful coffee table book, it is also a complete primer on some of the most important regional medical history in the country.

LYNSEY FREEMAN

ALL SHE HAD

Building Dread
One Secret At A Time