Typewriter BeachMeg Waite Clayton. Harper, $30 (320p) ISBN 978-0-06-342214-8
Clayton (The Postmistress of Paris) delivers an irresistible story of 1950s Hollywood featuring a restless ingénue who befriends a blacklisted screenwriter. It’s 1957 and Isabella Giori has just debuted in a supporting role opposite Janet Leigh. She’s hoping Hitchcock will pick her as his n... Continue reading »
Marble Hall MurdersAnthony Horowitz. Harper, $31 (592p) ISBN 978-0-06-330570-0
Horowitz dazzles with the brilliant third entry in his Susan Ryeland series (after Moonflower Murders). At the outset, Susan has just broken up with her Greek boyfriend, Andreas, leaving him and their bustling Crete hotel behind for her dreary London flat and a new freelance project with Ca... Continue reading »
UnWorldJayson Greene. Knopf, $28 (224p) ISBN 978-0-59380-218-2
Memoirist Greene (Once More We Saw Stars) makes his fiction debut with this haunting and deeply introspective speculative exploration of grief, memory, and the nature of consciousness. In a near-future world shaped by AI technology with which people can upload their consciousnesses to the c... Continue reading »
Look Before You LeapVirginia Heath. Griffin, $18 trade paper (320p) ISBN 978-1-250-89609-4
A reticent lord falls for a spirited lady below his station in Heath’s sparkling second Miss Prentice’s Protégées romance (after All’s Fair in Love and War). In 1820 London, Lord Guy Harrowby, the Viscount Wennington, is both irked by and attracted to the woman who berates him for nearly co... Continue reading »
Gilt FrameMatt Kindt and Margie Kraft Kindt. Dark Horse, $29.99 (216p) ISBN 978-1-5067-4594-7
Harvey award winner Kindt (the Mind MGMT series) collaborates with his mother, Margie Kraft Kindt, on this charming cozy whodunit that builds an intricate case around the murder of a Parisian antiques dealer. Amateur sleuths Meredith “Merry” Pearson and her nephew Sam have a knack for stumbling onto... Continue reading »
Viscera: Eight Voices from PolandEdited by Mark Tardi, trans. from the Polish by Malgorzata Myk et al. Litmus, $22 trade paper (288p) ISBN 978-1-933959-83-2
This luminous bilingual anthology features eight contemporary women poets from Poland: Anna Adamowicz, Maria Cyranowicz, Hanna Janczak, Natalia Malek, Joanna Oparek, Zofia Skrzypulec, Katarzyna Szaulińska, and Ilona Witkowska. The opening “Cantata” section presents selections from each, displaying t... Continue reading »
The Long March HomeMarcus Brotherton and Tosca Lee. Revell, $26.99 (400p) ISBN 978-0-8007-4275-1
In this tour de force from Brotherton (A Bright and Blinding Sun) and Lee (A Single Light), four friends’ lives change irrevocably when America becomes embroiled in WWII. In 1930s Mobile, Ala., preacher’s son Jimmy Propfield shares an idyllic upbringing with childhood sweetheart Cl... Continue reading »
Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial KillersCarolin Fraser. Penguin Press, $32 (480) ISBN 978-0-593-65722-5
What makes a murderer? Pulitzer winner Fraser (Prairie Fires) makes a convincing case for arsenic and lead poisoning as contributing factors in this eyebrow-raising account. Fraser, who was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, where smelters belted out poison for decades and a prolifer... Continue reading »
How to Be Well: Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic, One Dubious Cure at a TimeAmy Larocca. Knopf, $28 (304p) ISBN 978-0-525-65553-4
The present-day vogue for wellness is merely the latest attempt to convince women to buy products to correct for imagined deficiencies, according to this trenchant debut critique. Fashion reporter Larocca suggests that beauty product manufacturers responded to the rise of body positivity in the 2000... Continue reading »
Islam: A New History from Muhammad to the PresentJohn Tolan. Princeton Univ, $29.95 (296p) ISBN 978-0-69126-353-3
Historian Tolan (Faces of Muhammad) traces in this vibrant and sweeping survey the 1,400-year evolution of Islam. Stressing Islam’s conceptual unity (“we are one umma”) and diverse reality, he tells its history by stitching together the stories of key figures. Among them are Um Waraqa, a wo... Continue reading »
Sunrise on the Reaping (A Hunger Games Novel)Suzanne Collins. Scholastic Press, $27.99 (400p) ISBN 978-1-5461-7146-1
Set 40 years after the events of The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, this heart-wrenching novel from Collins centers a 16-year-old Haymitch Abernathy and his role in the climactic 50th Hunger Games. Though readers will know him as Katniss and Peeta’s ill-tempered, alcohol-dependent mentor d... Continue reading »
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