IP Picks🔎: A Sick, Stranger-Than-Fiction Horror Tale

➕ A locked-room mystery set in a college library

Far-fetched? Buffalo Bill, the other serial killer Clarice Starling matched wits with in The Silence of the Lambs, was a collector of human skin. Turns out that plot wasn’t so out-there after all. (Orion/Amazon MGM)

Welcome to The Optionist. As always, thanks for reading along.

I don't often circle back to my earlier picks when publication rolls around or they get recognized with an accolade, but a few mentions of some favorites this week made me think I should do it more often. So here goes . . .

•Grief Is for People, Sloane Crosley’s moving, honest memoir got a great review in the NYT and an excerpt in The Cut.

•Great Divide, about the construction of the Panama Canal, got a strong review in the Washington Post. And The New Couple in 5B also picked up some very positive notices.

•Since this week marks the beginning of March Madness, I'd be remiss if I didn’t mention The Real Hoosiers, about the first all-Black team to win the Indiana high school title. Because the women's tournament is poised to really break out this year as must-watch TV, I'll note that the Optionist has flagged many women's sports stories, including one last week about an Ivy League hoops player rediscovering herself on a road trip, a fun YA telling of the first Olympic women's team and a League of Their Own-esque account of a women's barnstorming basketball team in the 1930s.

•On the awards front, the recently announced Edgar nominations from the Mystery Writers of America features multiple Optionist picks, including All the Sinners Bleed (one of my favorites of the past year!), the great crypto takedown Number Go Up, the true-crime Polly Klaas kidnapping procedural, In Light of All Darkness, and William Kent Krueger's hauntingly beautiful The River We Remember. All the Sinners Bleed also picked up a nomination from the International Thriller Writers association, as did Bad Summer People by Emma Rosenblum, whose follow-up Very Bad People was a featured pick, and the spooky thriller The Paleontologist.

This is what the Optionist is all about: Keeping you ahead of the curve on great optionable material. If you're learning about a book for the first time when People taps it as a pick or the NYT reviews it, you're gonna be behind in the race to get the rights.

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Onto this week’s picks, which feature a mystery, a thriller and a true-crime drama . . . but please, do not miss the last item. It’s a bonkers story that you’ll want to read just because. The full rundown:

• A twisty thriller set in the Pacific Northwest which centers on a novelist who is framed for murder and the high school sweetheart he is trying to win back.

• A locked-room mystery about a group of college students recreating an ancient Greek ritual and discovering that one of them is a killer.

• A period mystery about a woman looking into her deceased grandmother’s secret Hollywood past.

• A true-crime drama about the 1991 murder of two young women near a Marine base in the California desert.

• A real-life horror story about the black-market trade in human body parts.