Biography
Born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Brianna Labuskes graduated from Penn State University with a degree in journalism.
For the past eight years, she has worked as an editor at both small-town papers and national media organizations such as Politico and Kaiser Health News, covering politics and policy.
She lives in Washington, DC, and enjoys traveling, hiking, kayaking, and exploring the city’s best brunch options.
Standalone Novels
It Ends With Her (2018)
He started the game. She’ll end it. FBI special agent Clarke Sinclair doesn’t give up easily. She’s spent years tracking serial killer Simon Cross, forced to follow his twisted clues and photographs across the country. Clarke knows that Cross selects only redheaded women and that he doesn’t target another victim until Clarke discovers the previous one.
He’s never broken pattern—until now. A girl has already gone missing in upstate New York when a second one is kidnapped—a blonde. The killer’s MO has changed, sending Clarke back to the drawing board. The closer she gets to the truth, the deeper she’s drawn into an inescapable trap made just for Clarke. Whatever Cross’s ultimate game is, it ends with her.
Standalone Novels
Girls with Glass (2019)
It takes more than a lie to hide the dark secrets of this picture-perfect family.
When the granddaughter of one of Florida’s most powerful judges disappears, it triggers a personal trauma for Detective Alice Garner: the kidnapping and murder of her own child. As a flood of painful memories comes rushing back, Alice sees herself in the guilt-ridden and emotionally fragile mother Charlotte Burke, who has become the target of a rush to judgment.
All too familiar with Charlotte’s situation, Alice is reluctant to cast any blame. Her gut instincts tell her that Charlotte’s anguish is rooted in something else—somewhere too dark for the truth to be seen. And Alice believes that it’s hiding behind the facade of the illustrious and guarded Burke mansion.
But uncovering Charlotte’s past comes with a risk. For Alice’s own life is becoming entangled in the secrets and lies of the picture-perfect family—an image that is about to be shattered in so many unexpected ways.
Standalone Novels
Black Rock Bay (2019)
A detective returns to her haunted past, with deadly consequences, in an icy novel of psychological suspense. Detective Mia Hart never planned to return home. One terrifying summer night, Mia lost two of her closest friends to suicide. Scarred and broken, she fled St. Lucy’s, a small island off the coast of Maine.
Now fifteen years later, when the body of a journalist is fished out of the bay near St. Lucy’s cliffs, Mia is forced to help with the case—and face all she’s been running from. As she approaches the island, the wintery winds of Black Rock Bay usher Mia home again.
When Mia digs into the reporter’s death, she finds he left behind a written clue: It wasn't suicide. Mia soon discovers it’s her own tragic past he was referring to. Now, as she tries to untangle a web of lies, Mia realizes that solving this case means becoming the next pawn in someone’s blood-chilling game of truth or die
Standalone Novels
Her Final Words (2020)
It seems like an open-and-shut case for FBI special agent Lucy Thorne when Eliza Cook walks into the field office. The teenage girl confesses to murdering a young boy. Disturbingly composed, she reveals chilling details only the killer could know. Beyond that Eliza doesn’t say another word, leaving a vital question met with dead silence: Why did she do it?
To find the answer, Lucy goes to the scene of the crime in the small Idaho town of Knox Hollow. But Lucy’s questions are only mounting. Especially when she’s drawn deeper into the life of the victim. Then a combing of the woods yields unsettling evidence that Eliza isn’t the only one in this close-knit rural community with secrets.
Getting to the truth is becoming Lucy’s obsession. And it’s a dangerous one. Because for the good folks of Knox Hollow, hiding that truth will take more than silence.
Standalone Novels
The Lost Book of Bonn (2024)
Germany, 1946: Emmy Clarke is a librarian not a soldier. But that doesn’t stop the Library of Congress from sending her overseas to Germany to help the Monuments Men retrieve and catalog precious literature plundered by the Nazis. The Offenbach Archival Depot and its work may get less attention than returning art to its rightful owners, but for Emmy, who sees the personalized messages on the inside of the books and the notes in margins of pages, it feels just as important.
On Emmy’s first day at work, she finds a poetry collection by Rainer Maria Rilke, and on the title page is a handwritten dedication: “To Annelise, my brave Edelweiss Pirate.” Emmy is instantly intrigued by the story behind the dedication and becomes determined to figure out what happened. The hunt for the rightful owner of the book leads Emmy to two sisters, a horrific betrayal, and an extraordinary protest against the Nazis that was held in Berlin at the height of the war. Nearly a decade earlier, hundreds of brave women gathered in the streets after their Jewish husbands were detained by the Gestapo. Through freezing rain and RAF bombings, the women faced down certain death and did what so few others dared to do under the Third Reich. They said no.
Standalone Novels
The Boxcar Librarian (March 2025)
When Works Progress Administration (WPA) editor Millie Lang finds herself on the wrong end of a potential political scandal, she’s shipped off to Montana to work on the state’s American Guide Series—travel books intended to put the nation’s destitute writers to work. Millie arrives to an eclectic staff claiming their missed deadlines are due to sabotage, possibly from the state’s powerful Copper Kings who don’t want their long and bloody history with union organizers aired for the rest of the country. But Millie begins to suspect that the answer might instead lie with the town’s mysterious librarian, Alice Monroe.
More than a decade earlier, Alice Monroe created the Boxcar Library in order to deliver books to isolated mining towns where men longed for entertainment and connection. Alice thought she found the perfect librarian to staff the train car in Colette Durand, a miner’s daughter with a shotgun and too many secret.
Now, no one in Missoula will tell Millie why both Alice and Colette went out on the inaugural journey of the Boxcar Library, but only Alice returned. The three women’s stories dramatically converge in the search to uncover what someone is so desperately trying to hide: what happened to Colette Durand.
Inspired by the fascinating, true history of Missoula’s Boxcar Library, the novel blends the story of the strong, courageous women who survived and thrived in the rough and rowdy West with that of the power of standing together to fight for workers’ lives. And through it all shines the capacity of books to provide connection and light to those who need it most
Other Publications
Raisa Susanto Series
For a brilliant forensic linguist with the FBI, crimes of the past hold clues to new series of murders.
The Lies You Wrote
The Truth You Told
By the Time You Read This
Dr. Gretchen White Series
Psychologist and criminologist Dr. Gretchen White is a specialist in antisocial personality disorders and violent crimes. She’s helped solve enough prominent cases for detective Patrick Shaughnessy that her own history is often overlooked: Gretchen is an admitted sociopath once suspected of killing her aunt.
A Familiar Sight
What Can't Be Seen
See It End
Cast of characters
Vivian Childs
The novel opens with Viv's receipt of a telegram reporting her husband Edward's death His last letter to her follows, describing how important the ASE books are to soldiers. He's gotten a copy of Oliver Twist and remembers his half-brother Hale, wishing he had been able to do more for him when they were children. With this Prologue, the stage is set.
Since that time, Vivian has been waging her own war to keep Taft from censoring the books ASE sends, for political reasons. Viv knows the only way to win this battle is to counter the senator’s propaganda with a story of her own—the conference she arranges at the end of the novel featuring both Althea and Hannah as speakers on book burning and censorship.
She lives with her mother-in-law Charlotte, a socialite who gives and attends parties, soliciting funds for war bonds, and other worthy causes, among her wealthy friends. Charlotte still meets with Hale once a month.
Vivian was raised by Uncle Horace when her parents died.
Cast of characters
Theodore Childs
Edward's father, Charlotte's husband, and a philanderer who fathered Emmett Hale with Mary Katherine Sullivan. He refused to take responsibility for the child and Mary Katherine subsequently married William Hale who did take responsibility as a father.
Theodore left his estate to Edward but did not provide for Hale or Charlotte.
Edward and Vivian married just before he was sent to war, in part to provide for Charlotte should he be killed. The couple were friends and had been since their youth. Hale was the love of her life, whom she marries when they meet again at the end of the novel.
They have 3 children—2 sons and Martha, who accompanies her mother, with Hannah and Althea, to Berlin in 1995 to see the Book Burning Memorial in the novel's Epilogue.
Emmett Hale (Childs)
Successful politician, Brooklyn's representative to Congress, whom Vivian persuades to entice Taft and other politicians to the exhibition.
Hale never replied to letters Viv sent after the two separated when she was sent to boarding school; he was not a member of her social class.
Cast of characters
Hannah Brecht
Her story begins in 1936, in Paris, where she lives after escaping from Berlin, although it is no refuge from the anti-Semitism and Nazi sympathizers she thought she left behind. She had been present at the book burning in 1933.
Heartbroken and tormented by the role she played in the betrayal that destroyed her family, Hannah throws herself into her work at the German Library of Burned Books. Through the quiet power of books, she believes she can help counter the tide of fascism she sees rising across Europe and atone for her mistakes.
Her brother Adam is interned in a detention camp, arrested for his anti-Nazi rebellion, eventually executed. He had become a radical--unpredictable, stubborn, and defiant when challenged. Initially, and for a numbers of years after, Hannah believes that Althea had betrayed his location; late in the novel, Dev takes the blame, but then admits that Otto is the one who betrayed Adam, in payment for his gambling debts. Otto doesn't say he's sorry, and Hannah leaves, never to see him again.
Althea had returned to the U.S., but wrote Hannah, letters she never read, until the final letter, a big bundle, with a visa Althea had secured for her, a visa that allowed her to leave for New York. She worked at the American Library of Nazi-Banned Books in Brooklyn, which is where Viv found her.
Cast of characters
Hannah Brecht
One source argues that Hannah is the central protagonist as the only character to appear in all three storylines. She is introduced first in her own midpoint narrative of 1936, almost four years following the start of Althea’s narrative and roughly seven years preceding the start of Viv’s narrative. Her influence is strongly felt in both characters’ stories, making her the central axis around which each storyline revolves.
At the start of her story, Hannah is bitter and jaded. Although her romance with Althea was brief, it was intense enough to leave a permanent mark. As Hannah reflects:
You only fall in love like that once, and then forever you love with a fractured heart. Healed though it may be. (p. 97)
Although Hannah has clear ideas of right and wrong, she is guarded and does not easily extend herself for others. She attends the “study group” resistance meetings yet is unwilling to participate in the more drastic and violent measures undertaken first by Adam, her brother, and later, by Otto, her lifelong friend.
Cast of characters
Otto Koch
Otto and Hannah grew up together on the wealthy outskirts of Berlin, schoolmates and lifelong friends. Although intended to marry by their parents, she saw him as a brother. He's dramatic and theatrical, even attempts to defend her at one point when she's accosted by German soldiers. But he ultimately betrays her, giving away Adam's address to the Nazis who arrest and imprison him.
Devereaux Charles—Dev
American actress, script writer, producer, director. Beautiful, and famous, she uses her fame to become a spy, passing along information and secrets she learns about Hitler and friends to the American government. She did give Adam's location to the Nazis because she had to; they suspected her, but it was Otto who traded this information for his debts.
Cast of characters
Althea James
Following the success of her debut novel, The Unfractured Light, about the Civil War, American writer Althea James receives an invitation from Joseph Goebbels to participate in a culture exchange program in Germany in 1933. She has German ancestry that Goebbels wants to use to prove the superiority of the Aryan race and to promulgate a positive message of the Nazi mission to America.
But she's just a shy, withdrawn girl from a small town in Maine who lives her life in the reality that books provide. So she finds 1933 Berlin sparklingly cosmopolitan, blossoming with the charismatic new chancellor at the helm, exactly the world Deidrich wants her to see.
Until she meets Hannah and Dev, who show her the real Berlin, with the back-alley cabarets and resisters who make her question everything she knows about her hosts, and herself.
Althea's second novel is An Inconceivable Dark, about censorship, much better received than her first, and published just before Viv's exhibition.
Cast of characters
Deidrich Muller
A literature professor at Humboldt University, movie-star handsome, and Althea's liaison to the program Goebbels has created in Berlin. Later, Dev correctly identifies him as her Nazi "handler," whom she later defies and humiliates. Her imprisons her, but lets her go, unharmed, because he has Adam, and Otto, and will use them to humiliate her among her friends.
Joe James
Althea's brother and manager who picks up Viv on her trek to meet Althea, and advises her to keep trying when Althea repeatedly slams the door in her face.
Althea Warren
The following is from When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II by Molly Guptill Manning.
The ALA was granted federal approval to launch a national book-collection drive. In a matter of months, a blueprint for the project was whipped together. With the United Service Organizations (USO) and American Red Cross each donating $50,000 to cover costs, the ALA’s National Defense Book Campaign (NDBC) made plans to collect as many as ten million volumes in 1942.
Office space in the Empire State Building was donated by the USO for the campaign’s headquarters, and the ALA hired Althea Warren, who was considered “#1 in the field of Women Librarians,” to run the campaign for a four-month term, the maximum amount of leave she could take from her position at the Los Angeles Public Library.
Warren proved the perfect candidate for the job. In fact, she devoted so much time and energy to nurturing the campaign, her closest friends referred to it as “Warren’s child.”
Althea Warren
From When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II by Molly Guptill Manning.
Warren’s personality, work ethic, and library experience suited her for the challenging work of heading the NDBC. After earning a library degree, Warren secured employment at Chicago’s Sears, Roebuck branch library. Physically connected to a Sears, Roebuck store, and created for the education and pleasure of the store’s employees, this library proved to be as hectic and demanding an environment as one could imagine.
“Before opening, at the lunch hours, and at closing time I stood in the midst of a throng and learned to hand out as fast as a ticket agent the book that best matched each person,” Warren recalled.
“‘Give me a book like The Shuttle!’
‘I want a new set of adjectives to describe colors in the spring catalog.’
‘The head chemist in the testing laboratory would like a certain government pamphlet by Dr. Wiley,’” people eagerly barked and yelled over the din of commotion.
Warren’s advice and expertise were in constant demand, and she did not disappoint.
Althea Warren
From When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II by Molly Guptill Manning.
In one memorable episode, Warren received a trusting note from a woman in the bookkeeping department via the library’s pneumatic-tube system, which ran between the library and store.
“It’s very slow here on this rainy day,” the bookkeeper complained. “Please send me one of those novels you have had to withdraw from circulation as unfit for a lady to read.”
Warren fulfilled the request and was surprised the next day to receive the book back, discreetly wrapped, with the message:
“Blessings upon you! You’re quite right. This is not fit for anybody to read. Please send another just like it.”
Warren later moved to California and worked her way up to the position of head librarian of the Los Angeles Public Library. Colleagues were impressed by the magic she brought to her work. Warren’s spirit and professionalism motivated her colleagues; it was said that her coworkers were inspired to work as hard as she did while trying to emulate her personable manner.
Althea Warren
From When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II by Molly Guptill Manning.
As Warren traveled cross-country to New York City in late November 1941 to take her seat as director of the book campaign, she already had ideas about running the drive. She had been involved in the provision of books to soldiers at Camp Kearny, outside San Diego, during World War I. Having witnessed the therapeutic and utilitarian uses of books then, Warren was determined to collect millions of volumes for the growing number of men in uniform.
Her task was simple to define and challenging to execute: to inspire a nation to give. Regardless of how people felt about the United States entering the war (with most Americans firmly opposed), Warren was confident all could agree that men in training camps deserved books for morale and entertainment.
Althea Warren
From When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II by Molly Guptill Manning.
“Most of us believe, whatever our convictions concerning the war, that . . . it will be a great satisfaction to scramble to get the books for [the men in camps] which they will genuinely enjoy,” Warren said in an editorial for Library Journal. She added: “Librarians know from their own experiences that some printed pages are medical plasters to extract pain, others are tourists’ tickets out of boredom or loneliness to exhilarating adventures, still others are diplomas for getting promotion and drilling ideas into a quick-step.”
While she described the creation of libraries for servicemen during World War I as “probably the finest accomplishment in the annals of our national growth,” she told her fellow librarians that they were now being asked “to gather more books than are contained in any existing library in the world.” She concluded simply, “Let’s do it!”
Of Taft she said:
Didn’t he make you want to haul off and slap him in the jaw? He is so full of criticism and with no suggestions to help,” she said.
Book Burning Memorial—the Empty Library
From Wikipedia
The Empty Library (1995), also known as Bibliothek or simply Library, is a public memorial by Israeli sculptor Micha Ullman dedicated to the remembrance of the Nazi book burnings that took place in the Bebelplatz in Berlin, Germany on May 10, 1933. The memorial is set into the cobblestones of the plaza and contains a collection of empty subterranean bookcases.
Located in the center of Berlin, the memorial commemorates May 10 1933 when students of the National Socialist Student Union and many professors of the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität (today Humboldt-Universität) burned over 20,000 books from many, mainly Jewish, communist, liberal and social-critical authors.
Book Burning Memorial—the Empty Library
From Wikipedia
On April 6, 1933, the Nazi German Student Association's Main Office for Press and Propaganda announced a nationwide initiative "against the un-German spirit," climaxing in a literary Säuberung, or cleansing, by fire. Local chapters of the group were charged with the distribution of literary blacklists that included Jewish, Marxist, Socialist, anti-family, and anti-German literature and planned grand ceremonies for the public to gather and dispose of the objectionable material.
In Berlin, the German Student Union organized the celebratory book burnings that took place on May 10, 1933, a dreary, rainy evening. 40,000 people crowded into the Opernplatz (as it was then known) as 5,000 German students proceeded past them, holding burning torches to ceremonially ignite the pile of books seized for the event.
Joseph Goebbels, Germany's Reich Minister of Propaganda, spoke at the event, declaring that "the era of exaggerated Jewish intellectualism is now at an end . . . and the future German man will not just be a man of books . . . this late hour [I] entrust to the flames the intellectual garbage of the past."
Thirty-four additional book burnings took place across Germany that month
Questions for discussion
This novel is based on the stories of three different women, in three different time periods, and three different cities. Do all these work well together? To what effect?
Add to his Dev, the movie star turned spy. What do you make of these women?
How well do their stories interweave?
Questions for discussion
Early in the story, Althea describes her love of books:
First they were about princesses and dragons and castles, fantasy acting as a refuge for her child’s mind. But as she grew, they matured with her. They became the prism through which she viewed the world, the cruelty of it, the beauty of it. She had started using stories as a way of understanding all the reasons those other children, and then other adults, were both cruel and beautiful, as well. What she hadn’t acknowledged was how much distance that let her put between herself and other people—she the viewer, the creator, the reader; they the characters, the subjects, the puppets. (pp. 50-51)
So, what are books to Althea? Is it significant that her favorite book is Alice in Wonderland?
Questions for discussion
Viv bases the success of her exhibition on the power of storytelling, giving her audience a more compelling story than Taft and the censors are using. She brings in veterans, publishers, journalists, and more to tell their stories. But the success of this events hinges on the stories Hannah and Althea tell.
How is her view of storytelling different from Althea's.
Questions for discussion
What role does the act of storytelling play outside of books? Consider Viv’s mission to tell a good enough story to potential voters, and Althea’s wish to see herself as the hero of her own life story. What is the significance of these various storytelling forms?
Quotes
Hannah (at the exhibition)
“I can tell you that banning books, burning books, blocking books is often used as a way to erase a people, a belief system, a culture,” Hannah said. “To say these voices don’t belong here, even when those writers represent the very best of a country. (p. 363)
Hannah to Viv:
“Books are a way we leave a mark on the world, aren’t they? They say we were here, we loved and we grieved and we laughed and we made mistakes and we existed. They can be burned halfway across the world, but the words cannot be unread, the stories cannot be untold. They do live on in this library, but more importantly they are immortalized in anyone who has read them.” (p. 44)
Hannah to Viv:
“When you sell a man a book, you don’t sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue—you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humor and ships at sea by night—there’s all heaven and earth in a book.’” (p. 134)
Quotes
Viv asks Hannah to describe the night of the book burning. She answers "wet."
Viv shook her head. “No, they wouldn’t. Goebbels would say ‘successful’ or ‘patriotic.’ A Resistance fighter might say ‘tragic.’ A German student would say ‘rousing.’ It matters who is talking, who is telling the story.” “And ‘wet’ is a more accurate story?” “No,” Viv said, frustrated. “But it is what makes it your story. And people recognize authenticity when they see it.” (pp. 288-289)
Quotes
Hannah to Althea:
Hannah inhaled then leaned forward, like she was about to tell a secret. “Right now? You’re making this all about you. It’s not about you. It’s about a dictator who wants to kill every non-Aryan in the world. And please believe me, if he somehow accomplishes that horrific feat, he will move on to killing Aryans with brown eyes, and then ones with too-long fingers or crooked teeth.” She paused, exhaled. “This is not about you.”
“But if I—”
“If you spoke up, if you disobeyed a boycott, if you slapped that handler of yours across the face, do you know what would happen?” Hannah asked, “Hitler would still be rounding up communists to put into his little jails. He would still be launching his war against the Jews, he would still be murdering his political opponents by the handful. This is not about you.”
But still Althea couldn’t help but ask, “You don’t think one person can make a difference?”
“I think one person can,” Hannah said, without blinking. “I don’t think that person is you.”
Althea was too used to thinking in terms of protagonists and main characters. They were the reason for the world they existed in—they saved the day, or saved the princess, or saved humanity. They were the reason for everything. But she wasn’t living in a book any longer. (pp. 186-187)
Quotes
Viv to Hannah:
“My fight with Taft might seem petty and political, but why I care, why I’ve always cared, is that I want to protect that idea. That stories can help us understand each other and ourselves and our world. That even our darkest days can be about more than simply survival. (p. 288)
Hannah's speech at the exhibition:
“I can tell you that banning books, burning books, blocking books is often used as a way to erase a people, a belief system, a culture,” Hannah said. “To say these voices don’t belong here, even when those writers represent the very best of a country." (p. 363)
Discussion question
This book is a testimonial to storytelling. What do you come away with?
Next week:
Julia Alvarez, The Cemetery of Untold Stories
(reading optional)