Club Calvi has books involving secrets, obsession, and murder for your summer reading
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If you are looking for a summer book that will keep you guessing from beginning to end, we have three novels for you to consider. They are filled with secrets, obsessions, and murder mysteries.
"Men Like Ours" is the debut novel by Bindu Bansinath. It's a satire set in a South Asian neighborhood of New Jersey.
"The Insomniacs" by Allison Winn Scotch is about four strangers who bond over sleep deprivation and get caught up in a mystery after one of them goes missing.
"Boring Asian Female" is the debut book by Canwen Xu. It's the story of Columbia University senior who spirals after her application to Harvard Law School is rejected, while a classmate is accepted.
You can read excerpts and get the books below.
Club Calvi books may contain adult themes.
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"Men Like Ours" by Bindu Bansinath
From the publisher: When Matthew Pillai is found dead, slumped over the wheel of his BMW, the women of Willow Road are roped into the investigation of their friend's death.
At the center of the case are the Sharmas--Anita, a widow whose late husband introduced Matthew to the neighborhood, and her boundary-pushing daughter, Leila, who called him Uncle. To Anita, who has been in freefall since her arrival in the United States as a young woman, Matthew's presence offered hope, including a promise of betterment for Leila. The truth, however, is far stranger.
Bindu Bansinath lives in Jersey City, NJ.
"Men Like Ours" by Bindu Bansinath (ThriftBooks) $22
"The Insomniacs" by Allison Winn Scotch
From the publisher: In the city that never sleeps, it's not always easy to share what's on your mind with the people who know you best. Huddled in an all-night diner over coffee and pancakes, a lonely middle-aged mom, an injured baseball pro, an elusive retiree, and a young waitress examine the thoughts that plague them in the middle of the night.
Empty-nester Sybil does what she does best: rolls up her sleeves and spearheads the efforts to turn this group of strangers into friends. Aimless after an injury threatens to ruin his career, Zeke finds genuine connection among the unlikely group. Tight-lipped Julian, who's seemingly adrift in retirement and attempting to rebuild a relationship with his daughter, expands their circle when he takes their cagey diner waitress, Betty, under his wing. Betty, cautious about strangers and uncertain about strokes of good luck, entertains the trio in an attempt to resolve her own problems, which she keeps close to the vest.
Within a few restless months, the group of strangers have become a fragile family. And when one of them goes missing in the dead of night, they're thrust into a propulsive mystery pulled straight from the true-crime podcasts Sybil obsesses over. Though ill-prepared and unequipped for the job, they begin to piece together the clues left behind. In chasing down answers, they uncover a reason for their friend's disappearance, and are forced to wrestle with the question of how well you can really know anyone—and once you do, how much are you willing to risk to save them? And in doing so, save yourself?
Allison Winn Scotch lives in Los Angeles.
"The Insomniacs" by Allison Winn Scotch (ThriftBooks) $23
"Boring Asian Female" by Canwen Xu
From the publisher: Elizabeth Zhang is well aware of her place in the world. She's in the tenth percentile for likability, the seventieth percentile for attractiveness, and the ninety-ninth percentile for academics. While she's never been the most beautiful or the most liked, she knows she has the intelligence and ambition to achieve her greatest dream: Harvard Law School. But when Harvard rejects Elizabeth for not standing out enough—which she knows means she's just another boring Asian female—her carefully constructed life falls apart. What shocks her even more is that Laura Kim, a classmate at Columbia, got in. Elizabeth can't figure out how this could have happened. Why was Laura accepted? What makes her so interesting?
At first, she follows her because she's just curious. What Laura orders for lunch. Where Laura shops. What Laura's hobbies are. All of these things must contribute to her overall package, what makes her an acceptable person to Harvard. But still, Elizabeth just can't see it. The only thing she sees is that Laura has taken her spot.
A spot that she knows she deserves after working so hard. A spot that she'll simply have to take back.
Canwen Xu is a graduate of Columbia University.
"Boring Asian Female" by Canwen Xu (ThriftBooks) $23
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Excerpt: "Men Like Ours" by Bindu Bansinath
NONE OF THE women down Willow Road remembered if they'd seen Mr. Matthew Pillai that Sunday in question. Only how hot it had been—hard-pressed by the two township officers who came knocking on their doors, that was the lone detail they offered. Certain women lamented over how they'd had to open all the windows in their identical vermilion-shuttered colonial homes, a blanket invitation to common pests and neighborhood filth. Others complained their ears still rang from how hard their children wailed for AC, a plea the women denied them in the interest of saving on utility bills.
"I told my son, Manu, have I not just opened all these windows for you, boy?" said Devika Gill, forty-six, as she counted out the pink Hostess cakes at Mr. Gill's gas station convenience store. "But no one appreciates. And they won't, until I'm dead."
The women hummed in assent. They'd all nursed kindred thoughts Sunday morning, peering out their open doorways at front lawns flush with dandelions and crabgrass. Meanwhile their husbands set out folding chairs near the back porch windows. There they sat, happily alone, foreheads pressed against the gridded wire of insect mesh, feeling for a breeze.
The women were unmoved by the discomfort of their husbands. Tempered by minor and major discomforts, they took pride in enduring what their husbands could not. They knew what their husbands did not: about heat and how to keep things alive. Do not leave small children locked inside hot sedans for longer than an hour, this was one kind of knowledge. When preparing tea for houseguests ("aka freeloaders," Devika Gill said) don't use milk that's been sitting on the countertop for more than two hours maximum. Here was another kind.
These were self-evident rules, and the women followed them piously. Behind the swing of their big hips lay paper trails of obeisance. But even the most self-evident rules grew inconvenient, and in these cases the women knew how to make exemptions for themselves. Like using the bad milk anyway ("Why should I give one f***about your bad gut?" said Jyoti Kaushal, forty-two, local tailor and Dateline enthusiast). Like cracking a car window open for a too-hot child, for an extra hour of child-free shopping at Marshall's.
And like a child overheating, the body of Mr. Matthew Pillai had been discovered at eight o'clock that broiling Sunday evening, slumped over the steering wheel of his black BMW. The car had idled off a backroad in north Jersey. Or so said those two officers called to the scene, one average-looking and one ugly, who documented the finer details with an iPhone camera, as one might document the position of plants for a still life.
IT UNNERVED THE WOMEN to recount the mundanity of their Sundays before such an official audience. (More unnerving was having no audience: No one bloody banged on my door, an anonymous woman complained to Jyoti, via WhatsApp.) How embarrassing to cop to your own inconsequence. Dying was such a momentous thing to do, and while Matthew, their dear friend, their cousin-brother, had been off doing it, the women had occupied themselves with such frivolities as cleaning and heat.
"If only I had known what dark was to come," said Jyoti, who had spent the day engaged in an on-and-off squabble with her husband, Tejas, the township podiatrist and an International Krishna Consciousness enthusiast. Tejas had asked Jyoti to accompany him to a local bhajan. Alone he couldn't hold a note, but the sound of his voice in the harmony of a group moved him to tears. Jyoti declined the invitation. She had five blouses to alter and five-part murder-suicide series to binge. You're wasting daylight on depravity, Tejas accused. I am depraved, so is anyone who wants to hear you sing, Jyoti replied. The argument grew feverish; Tejas picked up his folding chair and flung it, legs first, across the driveway, onto Hema Rao's lawn.
Hema Rao, fifty, owned the Dunkin' Donuts franchise on Route 1. She'd taken Sunday off to fight a minor viral lung infection and was lounging outside with her twin Dobermans, Hattie and Baloo, when the chair struck. Hema scratched their heads as they stretched, sphinxlike, on either side of her lawn chair, black-and-tan rumps glittering in the sunlight.
AROUND FIVE, a handful of Hindu women drove to the township mandir for aarti. ("We're not all Hindus, thanks very much," one woman clarified.) For a place of worship the temple was plain, with a long hallway of overlapping purple carpet and idols carved crudely from blush-colored marble. Karina Dixit, a housewife of fifty-six, wept before Durga perched on her marble tiger. Have a little mercy on a mother, she prayed. Mercy on a good mother like me.
An iron bell hung above the hallway entrance. Worshippers were to ring it when entering or exiting the space to announce their presence before god. It wasn't a heavy bell, but the women were very short, and even when they jumped, they could not reach it.
Back home that night, dues paid to god, the women slathered their faces with turmeric cream and went to bed, bitter-smelling, sorry for themselves on that night as every night.
"To think, we spent the day fussing over dogs and daughters, and that whole time, dear Matthew, dying," said Anita Sharma, the thirty-eight-year-old with the thief of a daughter, as she knelt before a marble idol. Grief dripped down her cheeks. She wiped it away, along with a little peach ring dust, with her chiffon dupatta. "I cannot imagine."
Excerpted from Men Like Ours by Bindu Bansinath. Copyright Bindu Bansinath, 2026. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Bloomsbury.
Excerpt: "The Insomniacs" by Allison Winn Scotch
Julian
Julian paced from his living room into his bedroom then back into his living room again, trying to find the god**** cat. Felix liked to play this game in the middle of the night: cause some sort of alarming crash, then scurry under the furniture or on top of a bookshelf when Julian came to check on him. Often, he was skulking around the fish tank in Julian's home office, as if he were only one lucky break away from a snack. Other nights, he was as elusive as sleep was to his owner. Julian once spent forty-five minutes searching for him only to discover him in the dryer, which he had left slightly ajar earlier in the day.
Julian was not actually a fan of cats. Nor was he a fan of fish, but four years after Robin died, Simone moved out for college, and his boss suggested he get a pet. When it became obvious that Julian was going to ignore his boss's suggestion because he was both pigheaded and fastidiously devoted to his routine, the boss, always one for protocol and hierarchical command, had the tank—and sixteen different fish—delivered on a Saturday when he knew that Julian wasn't on the road. When he complained to Simone, she suggested a cat as a joke. She probably said it because she was only half listening, not because she wanted the cat to eat all the fish and resolve Julian's problem, but he remembered that Robin had a cat when they first started dating, and he figured maybe that would be nice. Maybe Robin would approve.
"Felix!" he shouted into the kitchen. Nothing.
"Felix!" He checked the bathroom and opened up the under-the-sink cabinets. Nothing.
This was how Julian was going to die. He knew it. Alone, looking for a cat, up all night loaded with regrets. He took a deep breath, felt the air rattle in his chest, which was happening more frequently these past few months, and sank onto his couch. He fought his impulse to retreat to his office and review old files; once he did that, he'd never make it back to bed. He opted instead to text Simone—she'd still be awake. He knew she didn't really want to hear from him all that much, and that he needed to do more to bridge their gap than send her late-night texts. But it was at least a start.
JULIAN: Hi Simmy, you up?
He had to retype it three times because his fingers were tingly and felt a little disconnected from his body.
He imagined her phone buzzing on her nightstand, her reaching for it, rolling her eyes.
SIMONE: Dad, not really. Can we talk another time?
Julian double-tapped her message and gave it a thumbs-up, masking the slap he felt from her dismissiveness. He knew to expect it. He thumbed over his screen and logged into the forum he'd found a few months ago when it became clear his sleeplessness had embedded itself into his life as much as breathing had.
His phone vibrated within seconds.
Mama2Twins: hey buddy, just checking on you and saw that you're online. Another night staring at the ceiling?
Initially, Julian had wondered how secure the forum was, if it was smart to use his real email, to forge connections with strangers. He ostensibly knew better. He wasn't your typical clueless elderly dude, as Simone liked to tease when she felt like they had a relationship where she could tease him. He was up on technology and online security and wasn't about to be duped by, say, an email telling him that he had been gifted ten million dollars by a Nigerian prince. But Mama2Twins had greeted him so kindly when he first logged in that his hackles softened, his edges blurred. Dad, you run a candy store, he could hear Simone say. Just relax, okay? No one is looking to, like, steal your identity.
KingofQueens: Spent the night looking for my cat (don't ask). Now, yes, staring at the ceiling long enough to draw you a diagram of the paint peeling.
He rolled his wrists, trying to limber up, loosen his joints. He was going to have to speak with his doctor about his meds.
Mama2Twins: different night, same problems. Want to join us for Sudoku?
Julian didn't know who "us" was and he honestly didn't want to join any sort of bigger group discussion at all but he didn't want Mama2Twins to hop off their chat and abandon him. Soon enough, he and Mama and Beartown were in a heated race to pair up numbers into empty boxes. An absolute ridiculous waste of time but it's not like any of them had anyplace else to be. The game dwindled after an hour, and Julian found that he didn't want to log off. He was used to being alone without Robin and postretirement but being alone in the interminable stretch of predawn hours was a different sort of emptiness. If he hopped off the forum, he knew he would indeed find his way into his office and drive himself crazy with would haves, should haves, could haves, with micromanaging all the small screw-ups that led to an avalanche. Not that he had many doubts but yes, there was one.
KingofQueens: Hey, long-shot but any chance you guys are on the east coast? Educated guess because we're up at the same time.
He had always been excellent at putting clues together.
Mama2Twins: I'm just outside New York City. First suburb on the train.
Beartown: No s***! I'm actually in the city. Right by the park.
Julian felt a pang of nostalgia for when he would take Simone to the carousel on crystal-clear spring days and let her ride as many times as she wanted. Or trek through the zoo and watch the seals. Or buy ice cream from the truck at on the 72nd Street Transverse and race to see who could eat it before it dripped down the outsides of their hands. Robin was still alive; he was still a semipresent father; the job that consumed much of his waking hours was his.
The idea tumbled out of him before he could realize what he'd proposed.
KingofQueens: I'm right near both of you actually—in Queens. Sorry, it's a stupid handle. Feel free to say no since meeting strangers from the internet is probably ill-advised and I should say, I promise I'm not a serial killer, but . . . wondering if you guys would like to meet? There's an all-night diner on the Upper West Side I used to go to, near Columbia. Maybe this would feel less lonely if we did it face to face, like our own little Insomniacs club. Any takers?
Excerpted from THE INSOMNIACS by Allison Winn Scotch, published by Berkley, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2026.
Excerpt: "Boring Asian Female" by Canwen Xu
I couldn't tell if it was just confirmation bias, or if I was seeing Laura on campus more frequently than usual. Everywhere I turned, there she was with her petty, smug smile and her perfect hair, a mundane and constant reminder of my inferiority. It wasn't like I was conjuring her presence. It was a relatively small campus; we just happened to be in the same place all the damn time. For instance, every Monday and Wednesday I'd see her at Ferris Dining Hall at 1:05 p.m. We must've both had classes in that 11:40–12:55 block. I wasn't surprised that she usually beat me there, since I was coming from my art history class on the other side of campus. I couldn't help but wonder where she was coming from. I also noticed that she never actually ate her food at the dining hall. She'd stand in the line for the pasta bar, cover her bowl with a paper plate, and walk out.
One Wednesday, I was sitting with Leah and Eunjin at one of the round tables on the first floor of Ferris Dining Hall. Leah and Eunjin were talking about a class they had taken together the prior semester. I had never taken the class and had nothing to contribute to the conversation, so I let my mind drift to other topics. For instance, it was already 1:30 and Laura was nowhere in sight. Maybe she was sick that day, or maybe she had stopped by Duane Reade to pick up a bottle of shampoo. But no, Laura probably didn't use drugstore shampoo. If she were going to Duane Reade, it'd be to pick up Plan B after having hooked up with a hot rower, one of those guys I didn't even bother trying to talk to because they were out of my league. Or she could have gone to a different dining hall, like John Jay, or even JJ's Place, the diner that served french fries, fried chicken, burgers, and made-to-order quesadillas. Actually, what was I thinking? Laura wouldn't eat at JJ's Place. She cared too much about staying skinny for that. Or maybe she was one of those people who could eat anything and still maintain a 25th percentile BMI. Maybe she was one of those people for whom things just worked out without her even having to try.
"Elizabeth, what do you think?" Leah asked, bringing my attention back to my friends. "Should I take the nonviolence seminar with the boring professor or the history of liberal thought seminar with the cool professor?"
I silently repeated the question back to myself so I could process it before answering.
"Hm," I said. "I feel like we've all been let down by a class with a cool subject but taught by a not-cool professor, but I haven't heard a lot of people complain about the opposite. Do history of liberal thought."
"See! She agrees with me," Eunjin said.
Eunjin and Leah both had to leave, but I still hadn't finished my food, so I told them I'd stay awhile longer. I was heading to the pizza section to grab a couple of garlic knots when I saw the familiar outline of Laura's leather backpack, the glossy black hair with those ashy blonde highlights. The shiny designer puffer with the beige logo'd patch on the sleeve. She was giving her order at the pasta bar. Broccoli, spinach, olives, sun-dried tomatoes, chicken, and marinara sauce. No pasta. I didn't even realize you could ask for no pasta at the pasta bar.
"Ahem, what would you like?" Startled, I realized I had accidentally joined the line, and now the worker at the pasta bar was talking to me.
"Um . . . broccoli, spinach, olives, sun-dried tomatoes, chicken, and marinara sauce. No pasta." Would she notice that I had ordered the same thing as the person in front of me? Even if she did, she didn't seem to care, and she tossed the ingredients into the pan without a second thought.
I kept going back to Robert's explanations for why Laura might've gotten into Harvard over me. The first possibility he listed was that her parents had donated a lot of money. Interesting.
Laura was of course wealthy, but I didn't know to what extent. Wealthy in South Dakota just meant one or both of your parents were doctors. Wealthy at Columbia could mean anything from a net worth of ten million dollars to a net worth of ten billion dollars, the difference between only flying first class versus only flying private. That's why even some of the trust fund kids self-identified as "upper-middle class." If Laura was on the lower end of the wealth spectrum, I doubted her parents would've been able to buy her way in. They would need at least a nine-figure net worth.
I needed to find out who her parents were and what they did for a living. I needed to find out whether that was why she had taken that last spot meant for me. I scrolled through her Instagram until I found a picture from her high school graduation standing in between her parents on a football field. I tapped once; only her mother's account was tagged. Fortunately, the account was public, so I wouldn't need to attempt to follow her using a burner account. Her mother's name was Nina, and she was relatively easy to find. An outdated LinkedIn profile showed that she worked as a mid-level marketing manager for a beauty company, but from her Instagram account, it appeared that she did quite a bit of yoga and traveling. I doubted she still held a nine-to-five.
I needed to find out what her dad did. I scrolled through her mom's posts until I found one of a middle-aged, Korean-looking guy smiling on a golf course.
The caption read, "James broke 100 today!"
Got it, so his name was James Kim. The problem was there were about a billion James Kims. But Laura had mentioned previously that her dad was an investment banker at Goldman Sachs. I looked up "James Kim Goldman Sachs" on LinkedIn but couldn't find a good match. Everyone looked too young to be her father. I pivoted strategies: I looked up "James Kim Nina Kim Greenwich CT" and found property records dating from 2001 for a two-story house with a pool. It looked like they had also purchased an apartment unit in Hell's Kitchen a couple of years ago. That would make sense; Laura frequently posted photos on Instagram from a location that looked way too nice to be a dorm room. From what I could tell from her social media, she still lived on campus, but it wasn't uncommon for the parents of rich kids to buy an apartment in the city as an investment, somewhere for them to stay during the summers and after graduation. The property records revealed her father's middle name: Haneul. I put his entire name into the LinkedIn search bar, and his profile came up right away.
James H. Kim. He wasn't an investment banker; it was possible I had misremembered, or maybe Laura had intentionally overblown his credentials. He worked in "operations," what the finance kids would call "back office" in a derogatory tone since it wasn't as prestigious as "front office"—client-facing jobs like investment banking or sales and trading. I looked up the salaries for people with the same title as her dad and found plenty of data. Laura's family was certainly rich, but they weren't extravagantly rich, not the type of rich that could mean a large donation to Harvard Law School that would secure her spot in the upcoming class. She must've gotten in on her own.
That meant there was something I was missing about Laura—something that the admissions officers had seen, but I did not. There could be no other explanation. For some reason, I was boring and she was not. If only the admissions officers could spend some time with the two of us in person. Then they would know that I was obviously the more deserving applicant. The problem was, they could only rely on how we appeared on paper, and Laura had somehow managed to appear far more interesting than she actually was.
Excerpted from Boring Asian Female by Canwen Xu Copyright © 2026 by Canwen Xu. Excerpted by permission of Berkley. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.