Elizabeth Gillman joins Jenna and Cait to talk about her novel, Maybe, Maybe Not. Annie has learned to live well with her OCD, but travel has always been off the table, and she has never left her little Gulf Coast community. When her boss offers to sell her the boutique she has worked in since she was a teenager, Annie finally decides to face travel with her fearless best friend Kat by her side. Then Kat dies unexpectedly, leaving behind a list of offbeat places to scatter her ashes and a surly little brother to help get it done. It is funny, it is tender, and it is full of road trip energy. We get into why OCD is not the antagonist of this story, the deeply personal reason Elizabeth wrote it, the octopus hiding on her gorgeous cover, and her ten-year road to publication.

Debut author Emily joins Jenna and Cait to talk The Care and Feeding of Dead Mothers, a psychological thriller set in the Wisconsin Northwoods. Margot Hale flees Manhattan after her career collapses, only to have her estranged sister and long-buried trauma come clawing back. Emily digs into her wild Wisconsin research, her indie publishing journey, and the unhinged meta-twist waiting in book two. Dark, twisty, and exactly our kind of story.

This episode's Lime Light shines on Marissa Malson, author of the Average Jane PI series, cozy-adjacent mysteries following a delightfully forgettable private investigator with a knack for landing in the middle of a heist. We talk about the book that arrived fully formed after a yoga class, building her own publishing company with her sister, and why author events became her secret weapon.

This bonus episode's Lime Light shines on Rebecca Gould Baeurle, author of The Secrets Trilogy — a love story with a criminal twist, following two sisters through betrayal and danger in Philadelphia. We talk about writing a full debut in two months, almost not publishing at all, and the real sisterhood behind her fiction.