Four titles featuring cultural institutions & crime

Molly Odintz is the managing editor for CrimeReads and the editor of Austin Noir. She grew up in Austin and worked as a bookseller before becoming a Very Professional Internet Person. She lives in central Texas with her cat, Fritz Lang.

At CrimeReads Odintz tagged "four excellent recent and upcoming novels featuring cultural institutions and plenty of crimes." One title on the list:

Poupeh Missaghi, Sound Museum

Why should male torturers get all the credit? In Poupeh Missaghi’s parody of corporate feminism and the misplaced morality of professionalism, the women holding up a brutal regime would like their contributions acknowledged, too, thank you very much. And one has created a strange new archive dedicated to analyzing the sounds of torture, which she would love to tell you all about. Humorous enough to avoid feeling heavy-handed, Sound Museum may challenge the squeamish, but even if it takes several sessions to get through Poupeh Missaghi’s Kafka-esque tone poem, it’s well worth the effort.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top legal thrillers

Sally Smith is a barrister and KC who has spent all her working life in the Inner Temple. After writing a biography of Sir Edward Marshall Hall KC, a renowned Edwardian barrister she retired from the bar to write fulltime. A Case of Mice and Murder, her first novel, was inspired by the historic surroundings in which she lives and works and by the centuries of rich history in Inner Temple Archives and Library. This is the first in a series introducing the amateur and unwilling sleuth Sir Gabriel Ward KC.

At the Waterstones blog Smith tagged five favotite legal thrillers ("sticking to what have become classics"). One title on the list:

The Firm by John Grisham

The story of an idealistic young lawyer offered what is apparently the dream job in a law firm, who uncovers corruption and learns about the attraction of power and the importance of moral integrity and the pull of both. A terrific read and thought provoking as well.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Firm is among Michelle Frances's eight top workplace thrillers, Jamie Kornegay's five top novels with criminals covering their tracks, and Alafair Burke's seven top books that show the real lives of lawyers.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine titles that center asexuality

Debbie Urbanski is the author of the novel After World (2023)—which was named a best book of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle, Engadget, the Los Angeles Times tech, Booklist, and Strange Horizons—and Portalmania (2025). Her writing focuses on the intersections of horror, fantasy, science fiction, asexuality, memoir, and/or the planet. Over the past two decades, she's published widely in such places as The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, The Best American Experimental Writing, The Sun, Granta, Orion, and Junior Great Books.

At Electric Lit Urbanski tagged nine "narratives [that] push against the traditional definitions of love that confine all of us." One title on the list:

Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe

This graphic memoir relates Maia’s experience growing up as e (Maia uses e/em/eir pronouns) tries to figure out eir identity: what gender e is, who e’s attracted to, what attraction means to e, how e feels about sex, and what sorts of relationships e wants to have in eir life. One of my favorite passages is when Maia describes the relief of realizing that eir life can reflect who e actually is. “I remember when I first realized I never had to have children. It was like walking out of a narrow alley into a wide open field. ‘I never have to get married.’ ’I never have to date anyone.’ ‘I don’t even have to care about sex.’ These realizations were like gifts that I gave myself.” The book, to me, is often about language—specifically the words we use to describe ourselves—and how language can either constrict or expand the possibilities of identity. Since its publication in 2019, Gender Queer has gone on to become one of the most challenged and most frequently banned books in U.S. public schools.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten books for fans of "Sinners"

Brittany K. Allen is a writer and actor living in Brooklyn.

At Lit Hub she tagged ten books for fans of Sinners, the 2025 American musical horror film produced, written, and directed by Ryan Coogler. One title on the list:

Claire Kohda’s Woman, Eating

This contemporary vampire novel also finds echos of colonialism in Dracula’s fangs. Lydia is a “frustrated foodie” who yearns to eat the Japanese cuisine of her father’s homeland. But she can’t stomach anything but blood, due to being undead.

This literary fiction is concerned with thwarted desires, and finely depicts a person straddling several identities while feeling at home in none. Like Coogler, Kohda also does a lot of mixing around the usual lore.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Woman, Eating is among Isabelle McConville's eleven greatest recent bloodsucking books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top puzzle novels

K. A. Merson is a vaguely reclusive writer who lives in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, along with a patient spouse, a malevolent boxer dog, and an Airstream trailer.

The author's new novel is The Language of the Birds.

At CrimeReads Merson tagged six favorite puzzle novels, including:

The Twyford Code by Janice Hallett

A brilliantly clever, mind-bending mystery, The Twyford Code is a page-turning scavenger hunt chock full of puzzles, red herrings, and an endearing protagonist you will not soon forget. I must confess to holding The Twyford Code in a special place as it was one of the three comps (comparable titles) that I used when querying agents for The Language of the Birds manuscript (you won’t find my other two comps on this list). While discussing The Twyford Code, I should also mention The Appeal, Hallett’s debut novel. The Twyford Code might be considered more puzzle-oriented, whereas The Appeal is more of a puzzling twist on a classic whodunnit. But both stories are presented to the reader in strikingly original ways.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight novels exploring complicated feelings about ambition

Emma Pattee is a climate journalist and fiction writer.

Her work has been published in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and elsewhere.

Her debut novel, Tilt, is available now.

At Electric Lit Pattee tagged eight "contemporary novels that explore ambition in complicated, nuanced, and exciting ways." One title on the list:

So Big by Edna Ferber

Inspired by a true story, So Big is about a woman who is determined to make something of her life no matter what it takes. When she has a son, she names him So Big, and puts her own dreams to the side in order to help foster his. As every child gymnast tells us, that never goes great! This book is an examination of the American Dream, and asks us that eternal question: is it better to chase money or to be true to yourself?

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight top revenge thrillers

At Book Riot Addison Rizer tagged eight "satisfying revenge thrillers where the bad guys finally get their due." One title on the list:

Your House Will Pay by Steph Cha

In the aftermath of the shooting of a Black teenager in 2019, tensions in Los Angeles rise. Especially for Shawn, the brother of a Black girl who was shot and killed in the 1990s. His story intersects with Grace, the daughter of Korean immigrant parents who run a local pharmacy full of family tension of their own. As Shawn and Grace’s stories overlap, revenge, injustice, and loss amass into a tragedy.

Read about the other thrillers on the list.

Your House Will Pay is among the thirteen most essential Los Angeles books of mystery or crime, Jordan Harper's three top novels in the new L.A. crime canon, Erin E. Adams's seven titles that use mystery to examine race, María Amparo Escandón's eight books about living in Los Angeles, Alyssa Cole's five top crime novels that explore social issues, Sara Sligar's seven California crime novels with a nuanced take on race, class, gender & community, and Karen Dietrich's eight top red herrings in contemporary crime fiction.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine books about women without children

Nicole Louie is a writer and translator based in Ireland. Her essays have appeared in Oh Reader Magazine, The Walrus, and The Guardian and her curated collections of books, movies and podcasts about women who are not mothers by choice, circumstance or ambivalence can be found on Instagram: @bynicolelouie.

Others Like Me: The Lives of Women Without Children is her first book.

At Electric Lit Louie tagged nine favorite books "by women who placed writing, not babies, at the center of their lives and flourished outside of motherhood." One title on the list:

Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir by Amy Tan

By uncovering seven plastic boxes of family memorabilia in the corner of her office, Amy Tan goes deep into her traumatic childhood, reflects on her Chinese heritage, and offers insights into the nature of creativity and her writing methods. Where the Past Begins is a poignant and humorous memoir that recounts Tan’s complex relationship with her mentally ill mother, the loss of both her 16-year-old brother and her father within months of each other, and examines her love for art, music, and linguistics.

Old letters to and from her mother, some dating from 1969, when Tan went to college and they separated for the first time, give further insight into a relationship marked by frequent emotional fights and declarations of love. Sunk deep into the material evidence of their mother-daughter bond, Tan shares her feelings about becoming a mother herself, expressing no desire to pass along her genetic structure by stating, “What’s in me that I’d have wanted to pass on is already in the books.”

Read about the other entries on the list at Electric Lit.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight globe-spanning titles on World War II

Natasha Lester is the New York Times bestelling author of The Paris Seamstress, The Paris Orphan, and The Paris Secret, and a former marketing executive for L’Oréal. Her novels have been international bestsellers and are translated into twenty-one different languages and published all around the world. When she’s not writing, she loves collecting vintage fashion, practicing the art of fashion illustration, and traveling the world. Natasha lives with her husband and three children in Perth, Western Australia.

Lester's newest novel is The Mademoiselle Alliance.

At Lit Hub the author tagged eight books "which are set in different theaters of the Second World War, from France to Hong Kong, Britain, Japan, Australia and Germany." One title on the list:

Anne Sebba, Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died in the 1940s

If you only want to read one nonfiction book about WWII, make it this one. Anne Sebba doesn’t cover the battles and the front-line heroics of the war; instead she tells the story of the Frenchwomen who had to deal with their German occupiers every day of their lives.

It’s hard to draw a line in the sand between collaborators and résistantes after reading this book because Sebba also considers survival, not just for the women, but for the families who depended on these women for food and shelter. When you finish this book, you’ll want to find out more about the different women Sebba brings to life, some of whom were famous, but many of whom are unknown.

Read about the other entries on the list at Literary Hub.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top titles about rivers

Robert Macfarlane is Professor of Literature and the Environmental Humanities at the Faculty of English in Cambridge. He is well-known as a writer about nature, climate, landscape, people and place, and his books –– which include Underland (2019), a book-length prose-poem Ness (2018), Landmarks (2015), The Old Ways (2012) and Mountains of the Mind (2003) –– have been translated into more than thirty languages, won prizes around the world, and been widely adapted for music, film, television, radio and theatre.

Macfarlane's new book, Is a River Alive?, is his most personal and political work to date.

At the Waterstones blog the author tagged "five books that present the complexity and importance of rivers through both fiction and non-fiction." One title on the list:

A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean

I have long thought Maclean’s novella to be one of the most perfect pieces of English prose of the twentieth century, from its unforgettable first sentence (‘In our family, there was no clear line between religion and flyfishing’) to its last (‘I am haunted by waters’). It unfurls in the fast-running mountain rivers of western Montana, where two brothers, both obsessive fly-fishermen, follow very different courses in life. I have read it six times now, and each time it yields new wonders to me.

Read about the other entries on the list.

A River Runs Through It is among Jeff Somers's five novels that play with time and Eric Blehm's most influential books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven Southern Gothic titles set in small towns

Tennessee Hill holds an MFA from North Carolina State University. Her work has been featured in Poetry magazine, Best New Poets, Southern Humanities Review, Adroit Journal, Arkansas International, and elsewhere. She is a native of South Texas, where she still lives and teaches with her husband and their dog.

Hill's new novel is Girls with Long Shadows.

At Electric Lit she tagged seven "books about the small-town Southern Gothic and the creature comforts and ghosts that inhabit it." One title on the list:

Ferris Beach by Jill McCorkle

NC Literary Hall of Fame-er Jill McCorkle’s Ferris Beach catalogues the teenage years of only-child Katie Burns, who lives with her family in Ferris Beach. Katie grows close to a new girl in the neighborhood, and warily nurses a curiosity for a local misfit boy. In orbiting coming-of-independence and youthful curiosity, Ferris Beach considers the sanctity of the family unit, the family home, and the hometown. Nobody captures the small-town south like McCorkle.

I read this book for the first time last July in the middle of a hundred-degree summer and a five-day power outage after a hurricane. It buoyed me.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven top works of cross-genre Gothic fiction

Paulette Kennedy is the author of The Artist of Blackberry Grange (2025), The Devil and Mrs. Davenport (2024), The Witch of Tin Mountain (2023), and Parting the Veil (2021), which received the HNS Review Editor’s Choice Award. Her work has been featured in People Magazine, The Mary Sue, Paste Magazine, and BookBub. Originally from the Missouri Ozarks, she now lives with her family and a menagerie of rescue pets in sunny Southern California, where sometimes, on the very best days, the mountains are wreathed in gothic fog.

[The Page 69 Test: Parting the Veil; The Page 69 Test: The Devil and Mrs. Davenport; My Book, The Movie: The Artist of Blackberry Grange]

At CrimeReads Kennedy tagged "seven novels [that] combine aspects of sci-fi, romance, magic, and fantasy with the traditional conventions of the Gothic genre to create something new and fresh." One title on the list:

When The Reckoning Comes by LaTanya McQueen

In this novel of Southern Gothic horror, LaTanya McQueen tackles the problematic nature of plantation weddings, whitewashed history, and the balance between honoring the lessons of the past without erasing the violent nature of its sins. When childhood friends Mira, Jesse, and Celine reunite for Celine’s wedding at the Woodsman Plantation, old scars and grievances reemerge as the injustices and prejudices of their small, southern town coalesce. The plantation, newly renovated as an event venue, stands as a monument to its oppressive, racist history. The service staff is mostly Black, and disturbing antebellum reenactments provide guests with “entertainment.” But when Mira begins to witness horrific visions from the past on the plantation grounds, she and her friends are forced to reckon with the blood-soaked history of the Woodsman Plantation and the righteous fury of its ghosts. Important, powerful, and unforgettable, with shades of Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Octavia Butler’s Kindred, McQueen’s debut should be required reading.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue