Idaho Books: The Best Books Set in the Gem State

Book Summary

This contemporary drama is blended with a mystery as readers experience a mass shooting, with the story narrated by those impacted in different ways.

Tessa, the 23-year-old bartender who hid in a storage closet, doesn’t understand why she survived when others did not. Angie is awakened by a call that her husband is critically injured, but she’s confused as she thought he was sleeping next to her. Joyce receives a knock at the door informing her that her son is dead after a bar shooting, except he wasn’t a victim in the same way she expected. He was the shooter.

These three women are now tied together in an unexpected way as they are thrust into a new reality. This powerful book is a hard read, but it doesn’t focus on the shooting itself. Instead, it delves into the aftermath.

Book Summary

Gad is a father of four who channels the disappointment of his personal failures into his extreme control of others, especially his children. Aran, an aspiring artist, and his sister Tamsin are ready to challenge their father in hopes of improving their own futures and protecting their younger brothers.

Linda is a newcomer to Rexburg from Seattle and hopes to heal from her own hard childhood. When she falls for Aran, she learns that his family is even more toxic than her own. Linda’s introduction to the family upsets the precarious balance that existed and triggers new upheaval. Can they all break free from the past and find a way forward?

Book Summary

After growing up in Emerald Creek, Idaho, Ava moved away, married the love of her life, and went on to publish a bestselling memoir. But now, she’s back home in Idaho because her marriage fell apart after her husband learned the truth about something from her past.

Her sister, Madison, is finally happy after years of healing. She opened a no-kill shelter and is secretly in love with the town veterinarian. But how could he love Madi when his own father died to protect her all those years ago?  To reconcile their futures, the sisters must confront the demons of their past together.

Book Summary

Natalie projects the picture-perfect life and tradwife values to her 8 million followers online from her Idaho farmhouse. Her husband is a handsome cowboy born into a conservative political dynasty, and her six children are a delight…or so she tells her audience. Behind the scenes, she’s building an empire based on her Christian pioneer lifestyle, so no one needs to know that her house is really full of nannies, producers, and industrial-grade fridges and ovens to make her content possible. She’s also a common target of online critics who label her as anti-feminist.

One morning, instead of waking up in the fake life she represents, she wakes up in 1855, and everything is so much harder. Her home is heated by fire instead of electricity, her children are dirty, and her husband seems to be an actual farmer now. Suddenly, life depends on hauling firewood and handwashing clothes. She has no idea how she ended up in this alternate life, but after she is injured in the woods, she knows she has to escape.

Book Summary

In this thriller inspired by the 1976 Chowchilla school-bus kidnapping, ten children and their bus driver are abducted in broad daylight from Bus 315. Jessa, the bus driver, blames herself but will do anything to protect the kids, especially because she couldn’t protect her own daughter three years ago.

They are now trapped in a shipping container twenty feet underground, where the kidnappers insist that they’ll all be fine if the ransom is paid. But with every passing minute, the air seems to be getting thinner and harder to breathe.

Book Summary

As a baby, Cassandra was adopted by the best parents she could have hoped for. Now a senior in high school, she’s longing for more information about her birth mother as her adoptive mom awaits a heart transplant.

Eighteen years ago, someone wrote her a series of letters that may hold all the answers. This quiet story alternates between Cassandra’s present-day life and letters written by a pregnant teenager years earlier.

Book Summary

Daiyu was named after a tragic heroine in Chinese folklore and hoped to avoid being cursed like her namesake. However, she’s kidnapped in China at the young age of 13 to be sent to an American brothel.

While she’s able to escape the brothel, ahe cannot escape the growing violence directed at Chinese immigrants as the Chinese Exclusion Act fuels anti-Chinese sentiment across the country. Daiyu is lucky to find a safe home with Chinese shopkeepers in Idaho, but life is anything but easy in a country that hates you.

Book Summary

In this memoir, Tara Westover shares the story of her upbringing in rural Idaho. Born to survivalist parents, she grew up learning to stew herbs for her midwife-healer mother and also worked in her father’s junkyard. Her father forbade doctors and hospitals, even when she and her brothers suffered serious injuries.

As part of her father’s beliefs, she was kept from any formal education. While she didn’t set foot in a classroom for the first time until the age of 17, Tara worked hard to educate herself in mathematics and grammar. She was ultimately able to gain admission to BYU, where she studied history and learned about major world events, like the Holocaust and the civil rights movement, for the first time. From there, she went on to opportunities at Harvard and Cambridge.

This coming-of-age memoir recounts how she struggled to lift herself up and grappled with the tension between family loyalty and the grief that comes with severing those ties in search of something more.

Book Summary

In the first book of this cozy mystery series, Angie is opening a new farm-to-table restaurant in Idaho with her best friend, Felicia. With only three weeks until the opening, she’s spending a lot of time working with local vendors, including a goat dairy farm.

When the dairy farmer is murdered, Angie jumps in to help care for the herd…and to find the killer. The first book sets up some of the future relationships, and the subsequent installments are even higher rated.

Book Summary

Kelsey just graduated from college and has one summer left before marrying her wealthy fiancé and starting her adult life. She heads to her family’s ranch in Idaho, hoping for a quiet summer with plenty of time to plan her wedding.

Unfortunately, she discovers that her dad has hired Cade, the guy with whom she was constantly engaged in a prank war throughout their youth. Now, her childhood enemy lives on her ranch, and all bets are off.

Book Summary

In the 15th century, a young orphan named Anna lived in Constantinople (what is now Istanbul, Turkey). Growing up in an ancient city famous for its libraries, Anna discovers what could be the last copy of a centuries-old book chronicling the story of Aethon. Soon her path crosses with a village boy named Omeir, who has been drafted into the army.

In a library in present-day Idaho, 80-something Zeno is directing a children’s play adaptation of Aethon. But tucked among the books on the library’s shelves is a bomb planted by a troubled teen.

In the not-too-distant future, Konstance is on an interstellar ship copying down the story of Aethon told to her by her father.

Throughout the novel, the lives of these dreamers are intertwined in such an immersive way that you’ll forget your own world and feel as if you’ve been transported into theirs.

Book Summary

In the first book of the Wayward Pines series, Secret Service agent Ethan Burke arrives in the Idaho town in search of two missing federal agents. After an accident, Ethan wakes up in the hospital with no ID or phone. Something feels off, and it becomes even more confusing when his investigation keeps turning up more questions than answers.

As days pass, he’s increasingly concerned that he can’t reach anyone outside of Wayward Pines and that no one believes that he is who he says he is. And why is there an electric fence circling the town?

Book Summary

Opposites attract in this fun Idaho renovation romance! Maggie is a house flipper and YouTube star who needs to restore a crumbling Victorian mansion in four months or less. She arrives in the small town of Kinship, Idaho, with her to-do lists, her blueprints, and her team.

Her local landscaper, Silas, is laid back but also an outrageously sexy flirt. While she doesn’t have time in her busy production schedule for a long-term romance, she could handle a short-term fling. However, steamy nights with Silas begin to break down her long-standing emotional walls. When the end of her renovation looms, she has some big decisions to make.

Book Summary

This novel highlights Idaho’s famous export: potatoes. Yumi left Liberty Falls, Idaho, and its famous potato farms when she was only 15. Now 40, Yumi is returning to confront her dying parents, her best friend, and her conflicted past. The post-millennial farming community is not the same as the one she left behind. It’s been invaded by both Agribusiness and activists.

Book Summary

Jack’s father went to prison, and his younger brother, Matty, is headed to foster care unless Jack can come up with the money needed to save him. And the only way he can do that quickly is by finding the drug money that sent his father to prison.

Ava has spent her entire life isolated and under her father’s orders to trust no one. Now, he Ava’s father is chasing the same money as Jack. When he discovers that Jack is also hunting for the cash, will Ava remain silently loyal to her dad or help the brothers survive?

Book Summary

Sloane is a small-town librarian in Idaho who enjoys her daily visits from the town curmudgeon, Arthur. She loves verbal sparring with him so much that she instantly notices when he doesn’t show up one morning. When another day passes without a visit, her worry intensifies.

When Sloane tracks Arthur down at home and finds him almost bedridden, she needs a way to cheer him up. An impromptu book club with other lonely library patrons soon begins, and unlikely friendships form through their shared love of books.

Book Summary

In this award-winning modern classic, Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, grow up haphazardly on a glacial lake in Idaho. It’s the same place where their grandfather died in a train wreck, and their mother deliberately drove off a cliff and into the lake.

After their mom was gone, they were first raised by their competent grandmother. They then pass into the care of two comically bumbling great-aunts before eventually living with Sylvie, their eccentric aunt.

The lake is like its own character as the girls, who are very different from one another, come of age.

Book Summary

Sienna’s family has lived on and cared for the same wild Idaho land for generations, but with her parents gone and her marriage over, it suddenly feels very lonely. Trying to make her feel better, Sienna’s best friend jokingly places a husband-for-hire ad in the paper. The man who responds, however, is taking it very seriously.

Guy is a handsome Montana construction worker with a young daughter battling stage-five chronic kidney disease. Money is tight, and he can’t afford the lifelong anti-rejection medication Emma would need after a transplant.. He’s willing to do anything to help his daughter, even if it means marrying a stranger.

Sienna knows that this marriage of convenience is only about helping Emma, but she can’t help but notice how easily Guy fits into life at the ranch and how much more light and laughter result from his and Emma’s presence. The more time they spend as a fake family, the more she fears the very real loss she’ll feel when it ends.

Book Summary

Amanda isn’t a fan of Christmas, but as the owner of a soap shop in a small town, a certain level of holiday cheer is good for business, so she’s participating in the town’s holiday giving market.

When Amanda’s 80-year-old grandmother starts dating a new resident at the Shelter Inn retirement community, Amanda smells trouble. Fortunately, the man’s grandson, Rafe, is equally dubious of the match. He and Amanda share a common goal of keeping their grandparents apart.

Rafe is a handsome firefighter and single father who has experienced heartache of his own. Despite the connection Amanda feels to him as their paths continue crossing at the holiday market, she is afraid of getting burned.