10 books you should read in December

If you’d been drafted into the U.S. Navy and sent off to serve as a submarine doctor, you’d probably have some pretty creepy medical tales, too. Robin Cook has been pumping out health horror stories since the 1970s, but Bellevue might be the first time he dives explicitly into the supernatural. The novel centers on Michael “Mitt” Fuller, a first-year resident at New York’s infamous Bellevue Hospital, as he begins to have visions and uncovers a dark family history tying him to the now-defunct but still intact Bellevue Psychopathic Hospital building.

Did you know that most Christmas romance novels are published in October? Actually, you probably did, if you’re the target audience for holiday meet-cutes in book form, but the more casual genre reader might find it difficult when searching for something new this month. Bluebird Day isn’t a romance, but it’s got cozy Christmas vibes all the same. Claudine has been estranged from her daughter, Wylie, for several years after their champion skiing careers fell apart. Now, they’re forced back together, stranded at a fitness competition in the Alps after an avalanche. It’s a heartwarming pressure cooker that’s perfect for reading next to a warm fire.

Getting sloshed at a Bon Iver show in Milwaukee probably isn’t the best time to be making major life decisions, but that didn’t stop Patrick Hutchison and his friend, Bryan Schatz, from laying out a plan to quit their jobs, move to a remote area of Washington state, and start building a cabin from scratch. Hutchison and Schatz wrote about the experience for Outside magazine in 2020. Cabin is an expanded version of that tale, peppered with new details like the woeful name of the dirt road on which the cabin is situated: Wit’s End. The two were wildly unprepared and mostly ill-equipped for the project, but they did manage to finish the building and sell it for a good profit. The arduous process to get there, though, is well worth a read.

Dust is Alison Stine’s first young adult novel, and it follows Thea, an isolated and homeschooled teen who’s just moved to the remote Bloodless Valley in Colorado. At the coffee shop where she works, Thea meets Ray, a deaf patron who begins to teach Thea how to sign. Thea is partially deaf, but her parents encourage her to pass as hearing, and Ray’s friendship opens up a whole new world for Thea as she begins to question everything around her.

Rachel Howzell Hall’s background as a mystery and thriller writer adds some spice to her first romantasy outing, The Last One. The plot is pretty standard: Woman wakes up in an unknown place with no memories of who she is or how she got there, woman faces challenging new situations while dodging mysterious pursuers. But it’s Hall’s prose that makes the story shine, elevating the familiar plot elements with uncommonly descriptive writing.

The Shutouts is set in the same world as Gabrielle Korn’s first novel, 2023’s Yours For The Taking, and though the two books share some characters, it’s not a direct sequel. Instead, The Shutouts continues to explore the fallout of the environmental disaster that made it unsafe to be outside in Yours For The Taking. It’s queer dystopian climate change horror about reconnection and searching for answers—what more could you want from a single book?

Spending time with your in-laws can be rough—and spending holidays with your in-laws and your own family at the same time is a special kind of hell. It’s even worse for Keru and Nate, the protagonists of Weike Wang’s Rental House. Keru’s parents are strict Chinese immigrants, and Nate comes from a white, working-class family. Keru and Nate are secure enough in their relationship, but even several years in, they still haven’t quite figured out how to make their families get along. So, obviously, the best solution is to gather them all in a beach house for a group family vacation. That’s going to work out well, right?

Thea Guanzon released The Hurricane Wars to a rabid audience in 2023. Just over a year later, she’s back with the second book in the series, A Monsoon Rising. This time around, Talasyn and Alaric are married in a union that was supposed to end the war between their two lands. They still don’t trust each other, though, and there are even larger enemies that they need to face together using their combined powers of light and dark. Guanzon, who is from the Philippines, infuses her fictional world with Southeast Asian influences, creating a unique fantasy setting.

Addison isn’t innocent, not by a long shot—but she didn’t actually kill her husband, Dr. Richmond Dougherty. Sure, they’d only been married for 97 days when he mysteriously fell to his death, and sure, she never really loved him and was, in fact, planning to ruin his life over a long-held secret, but this specific crime isn’t her fault. In What The Wife Knew, Addison must prove her innocence while lying to everyone around her.

Sometimes, you’re just trying to make it as a surgeon in 1820s Scotland when you find yourself caught up with a pair of notorious serial killers. A. Rae Dunlap’s debut novel is a historical fiction take on Burke and Hare, real criminals who murdered people and sold the bodies to doctors for profit. The Resurrectionist follows two people in Burke and Hare’s orbit: James, a young medical student, and Nye, a dissectionist with a body-snatching side hustle. As they try to dodge the shadier elements of the various underground body-snatching gangs in Edinburgh, James and Nye quickly find themselves in over their heads.