October's Best Books Are A Mix Of Old And New Favorite Authors

On a rain-soaked forest road, a car swerves and crashes, followed by four more cars. The five drivers seek shelter in a run-down bar where time seems to work differently, and no one can agree on what to do next. They don't know exactly what is happening and how they got there, but they all seem to understand one fact: danger is all around them.

A murder mystery set against the backdrop of American history, this story starts with Richard Milford, infamous moonshiner, who is dead at last. It’s the time in Tulsa between the Race Massacre and the Great Depression and his four wives each might have done the deed. But where is the truth in this wry novel about the clash between old and new?

A mom and her son are stranded in a cabin in the woods in this unsettling novel. As a quick trip to prepare the cabin for sale becomes an eternity when Nell and Oscar are blocked from leaving by a local Tribe. As bad memories surface from the past and Nell starts to change, Oscar must deal with things worse than any horror movie could have taught him.

Martha is the star of this comedy-body horror book where a trans woman finds herself inexplicably pregnant. Martha seems to have the perfect life and the ideal family, but they don’t know she trans. When her body starts changing rapidly, she struggles to hold on to the life she built from the ground up.

Morello is a homeless orphan struggling to get by when magnificent Florence arrives with a plan: they must kill a predatory man of the art world each year and Morello will inherit riches. It all goes to dramatic plan when Jude enters the story, upending everything Morello has been working toward.

The author of the best-selling “The Art of Fielding” is back with a coming of age stories of Pella and Irma. When Pella’s wedding weekend implodes, a unplanned future in New York appears before her. Irma’s life is going similarly off the rails and the two are about to brave these new lives together.

Author of "The Housemaid" Freida McFadden brings us this spooky house thriller set in rural Massachusetts. In it, after Julia loses her job, she goes to her family’s seventeenth century estate to check on her grandmother. But at night, the clock stops at 3:41 a.m., the lights flicker, and there’s a scream. Julia digs into the family history for answers and finds connections to the Salem Witch trials and a group of women dying to be heard.

Part cozy holiday romance, part bloody murder mystery, this genre-spanning book features two detectives that need to solve the case of a tourist stabbed with an icicle ornament (at the town nativity scene no less) to save their jobs. They have twelve days find the murderer, if they can put that drunken holiday party hookup behind them.

Funny, fizzy and impossibly romantic, this illustrated holiday-themed book from the hilarious Abby Jimenez has a fake dating scheme that leads to a fast-tracked holiday wedding. There’s also matching sweater silliness, spirited shenanigans and bonus recipes.

A sequel to the wildly popular "The Time Traveler’s Wife," this book follows Alba, daughter of the time-jumping Henry, who is also afflicted with the same disorder as her dad. As she slips back and forth through decades, including a dystopian future, she meets Isadora, a curator in a digital museum of lost memories and also her stepsister, leading to a dangerous crash of fates.