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Headlights by C.J. Leede

I’m a huge C.J. Leede fan, so I went into Headlights with a lot of curiosity. Releasing June 9, 2026, this latest novel moves into supernatural thriller territory with a male FBI agent at the center of the story. While Maeve Fly remains my favorite of her books, I’ve enjoyed seeing her tackle different styles, and Headlights feels like another interesting step in that direction.

Headlights follows Special Agent Daniel Stansfield, an FBI agent who gets pulled back into a disturbing case connected to his past. People are being found on the side of highways with no memory of what happened to them, and the details around the victims are strange, gruesome, and impossible to ignore. Daniel is already carrying a heavy personal history, and as the case unfolds, the mystery starts digging into parts of his life he never fully understood.

I listened to this one as a NetGalley audiobook, and Andrew Eiden does a good job with the narration. It took me a little bit to settle into the voice and tone of the story, partly because this isn’t my usual lane and the male lead gave me a different entry point than I expected. Once I got into it, though, the performance worked. Daniel feels grounded, tired, complicated, and believable, and the narration fits that.

What impressed me most was Daniel’s backstory and the way Leede writes trauma. The flashbacks and memories are woven into the present in a way that felt true to PTSD, where the past can intrude without warning and blur together with the present. That aspect of the book was especially strong, and Daniel’s history and the mystery surrounding his identity ended up being my favorite part.

Leede’s writing is fantastic. She creates complex characters with real emotional wounds beneath the plot, and Headlights stands out from a standard FBI thriller thanks to its supernatural elements and haunted atmosphere.

That said, this was more restrained than I expected, and I found myself wanting it to go further. The body horror is there, but the book ultimately feels more like a supernatural thriller with horror elements than a full-on horror novel. That’s not a bad thing, but it did affect how hard it hit for me personally.

I also didn’t connect with the romantic thread as much as I wanted to. The scenes between Daniel and Hannah are well-written, and Leede handles Daniel’s perspective convincingly, including the intimacy. Still, I was far more invested in Daniel’s personal history and the central mystery than in the relationship.

The Shining influence is also pretty clear, and I had mixed feelings about it. Early on, I liked the nods. Calling him “Danny” and leaning into the idea of him being special was enough for me. I love The Shining, so I appreciated the connection. But as the book went on, some of those elements started to feel a little forced. I found myself wondering whether the story might have been stronger without leaning so heavily on that influence.

I’d recommend this especially to readers who like crime thrillers, supernatural thrillers, FBI investigations, trauma-heavy character work, and horror that doesn’t go completely off the rails. If Maeve Fly was too much for you, Headlights may actually be a better fit. It retains Leede’s sharp writing and dark imagination while being more accessible and thriller-forward.

If you’re looking for a well-written supernatural thriller with a complicated lead, disturbing imagery, and a strong emotional core, Headlights is absolutely worth picking up.

**Rating: 4/5 ⭐️ **

#horror #thriller #CrimeThriller #NetGalley #headlights #cjleede #NewBook #bookrelease #bookrecommendations #bookstagram #BookTok

E.L. Chen’s Sweetside Motel just hit shelves on March 2, 2026, and at 138 pages, it’s a fast, unsettling little novella that wastes no time pulling you in.

At its core, Sweetside Motel is about a woman trying to escape one bad situation and landing in another. Set against the backdrop of the pandemic, the book blends small-town suspicion, outsider tension, and personal trauma into a setup that feels claustrophobic from the start. There’s an immediate sense that something is off, and that tension is what really drives the story forward.

What worked for me right away was how quickly the story pulls you into that situation. The opening wastes no time establishing that Sarah is in trouble and trying to get away from something in her past. I also appreciated the way the book handles her position as an outsider. Some comments get made early on that feel loaded before you fully understand why, and I actually liked that. It created that moment of pause where you’re thinking, wait, what exactly do they mean by that? When the context becomes clearer later, it adds another layer to how the town views her.

I also liked the core mystery a lot. The small-town hostility, the fear of outsiders, the racial tension, and the sense that something is very off there all made the story feel tense and compelling. Even when I had issues with parts of the execution, I was still fully into it the whole way through, and that says a lot.

Where it lost me a little was in the worldbuilding around the pandemic. Since we’re now several years removed from that period, some of it felt harder to buy in the exact way it was framed. I could absolutely believe a closed-off small town using a virus as an excuse to distrust outsiders. That part makes sense. But some of the social dynamics around it felt a little conflicting to me, and I found myself wishing the story had maybe used a fictional virus or pushed that angle into something even more unsettling. I think that might have made the setting feel stronger and more believable on its own terms.

I also thought the novella felt rushed in some of the relationship-building. Sarah’s connections with certain people escalate very quickly, and I had a hard time fully buying the level of trust and reliance that developed in such a short amount of time. At the same time, she can be very back-and-forth in her decisions, which made her frustrating in places. She’s written as someone coming from abuse, and I do think that part of the book adds something worthwhile. There’s an interesting thread here about how abuse changes people, and how survival can twist the way someone reacts to others. That part felt real. But as a character, Sarah was still hard for me to fully like, and that made the emotional side a little shakier than I wanted.

That said, I really do think this story could have been even stronger with a little more room to breathe. This is one of those books where I found myself wishing it dug deeper into its relationships, its setting, and some of the emotional beats. There’s enough here to support more development, and I honestly would have welcomed it.

Overall, Sweetside Motel is a quick, engaging horror novella with a strong hook, a compelling mystery, and an atmosphere of isolation and suspicion that kept me interested from start to finish. I didn’t love every choice, especially when it came to some of the worldbuilding and the speed of certain character dynamics, but I still found it to be a really solid read.