Top Ten Tuesday is a feature that is currently run by That Artsy Reader Girl.

This is a topic that’s super close to my heart! I’ve been in a reading slump for literal years. In 2015 I read 75 books, in 2016 that number dropped to 30 and then climbed all the way up to 35 last year. This year I’m already at 33, so I’m going to list the books that have helped me get out of the slump. Series will be lumped together, though, so it’ll actually be a fairly short list.

Cover for This Fallen Prey by Kelley Armstrong

1-3. City of the Lost, A Darkness Absolute, and This Fallen Prey by Kelley Armstrong
We moved earlier this year and I had to go back to the old apartment to clean and pack the last bits that were left. I devoured these books switching between audiobooks and ebooks. The main character moves to a town where everyone is running from something and then ALL THE CRIME happens. Also, there’s a romance that is believable except when it’s not. I’m really excited for the next 2 in the series – though book 4 isn’t coming out until 2019 at the soonest, so there’s that.

Cover for Deeper Than The Dead

4. A Drop of Night by Stefan Bachman
I literally don’t even know how to describe this book. It’s bananas. Here’s the Goodreads blurb (which really doesn’t do the insanity justice):

Seventeen-year-old Anouk has finally caught the break she’s been looking for—she’s been selected out of hundreds of other candidates to fly to France and help with the excavation of a vast, underground palace buried a hundred feet below the suburbs of Paris. Built in the 1780’s to hide an aristocratic family and a mad duke during the French Revolution, the palace has lain hidden and forgotten ever since. Anouk, along with several other gifted teenagers, will be the first to set foot in it in over two centuries.

Or so she thought.

But nothing is as it seems, and the teens soon find themselves embroiled in a game far more sinister, and dangerous, than they could possibly have imagined. An evil spanning centuries is waiting for them in the depths. . .

5. Deeper Than The Dead by Tami Hoag
I’ve read a lot of Tami Hoag books this year, but this one stands out for me. I really liked Anne Navarre and her romance, the 80s setting was great, the complex bad guys were interesting, and it’s just a great suspenseful book.

6. The Broken Girls by Simone St. James
Simone St. James is an auto-read author for me and I always turn to her other books when I’m in a true rut. She usually writes historical (early 1900s) paranormal romance/suspense novels, and this is more of a gothic thriller with only a wee bit of paranormal. Though parts of it are in 1950. To be honest, I’m not a big paranormal reader, but there’s something about this author that makes me want to read more.

7. The Dry by Jane Harper
This is the book that kicked off my intense suspense/mystery kick of this year. It’s a much more serious and complicated book than others on my list and also reassured me that small towns are the same all over. I haven’t read Force of Nature yet, but it’s pretty high on the TBR list.

Cover for The Thief’s Daughter

Cover for The King’s Traitor

8-10. The Queen’s Poisoner, The Thief’s Daughter, and The King’s Traitor by Jeff Wheeler
These comprise the first trilogy of the Kingfountain Series by Jeff Wheeler. I’ve always loved fantasy, but have dropped off lately. On Prime Day I got 3 months of Kindle Unlimited for 99 cents, and these were the first books I borrowed. They all came with an audiobook version, so I mostly read these via long drives back and forth from the old place to the new place and to a conference 6 hours away. I don’t usually go in for strategy-type plots, but Owen Kiskaddon’s story caught my interest. One thing that bugged me was that the author uses common pronunciations but ‘fantasy’ spellings, so starting with the audiobook was a bit crazy, I had preconceptions about the spellings of things that were super wrong.

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