Hello Brittle Paperians. Here is another weekly reminder to check in on your TBR list and see what might be missing. This week, we’re spotlighting Behind These Four Walls by the award-winning Ghanaian American author, Yasmin Angoe.

Behind These Four Walls is Angoe’s fifth book and thriller novel (with two others forthcoming later this year). Put simply, the novel is about the demands the past makes on us to unearth what it holds at whatever cost. Isla Thorne grew up in a group home and learned early how to survive by being street smart and knowing how to find secrets. When we meet her, she’s living in Los Angeles, but she has returned to Virginia to investigate the disappearance of her childhood friend, Eden, who vanished ten years earlier. She and Eden were on the run and stopped at a motel in Virginia when Eden told her that she had some unfinished business with the Corrigans, a wealthy family living in a 13-acre sprawl of mansion and forest. That was the last time she saw Eden. Ten years on, the Corrigans resurfaces in Isla’s and she is determined to find her friend. Convinced that the only way to find answers is to get close, Isla poses as a journalist and plants herself inside Corrigans’ world. This is a mystery meets psychological thriller meets Southern tale. The closer she gets to the members of the family, the more complicated Eden’s story is. And Isla realizes that while the Corrigans are far from being saints, her friend’s story is also not adding up.

I’m glad to see Angoe return to the American South in this work. She has a long relationship with the region: she hails from Virginia and currently lives in South Carolina, where she worked as a school teacher. That familiarity shapes her fiction. Her first standalone novel, Not What She Seems, a breakout hit that earned a Goodreads Choice Award nomination, is set in a small South Carolina town where everyone knows everyone else’s story, or believes they do. Behind the warmth of civility are dark secrets. Angoe has described this dynamic as “southern charm laced with venom.” Behind These Four Walls returns to this Southern mode, but we are dealing with elite Southern power. Families like the Corrigans have built social fortresses that determine who belongs and who can be exposed to exploitation and harm. Wealth creates a literal and a social walls that characters have to undermine in order to get at the truth. Southern spaces are veiled worlds that characters have to pierce. The effect is a kind of low-key creepiness that suits psychological thrillers especially well.

If you like thrillers about infiltration, buried secrets, and the uneasy work of going back to confront unfinished business, Behind These Four Walls is one to add to your TBR list!