Eight crime novels featuring angry women in an angry world

Katie Lowe is a writer living in Worcester, UK. Her debut novel is The Furies.

At CrimeReads, Lowe tagged eight mysteries and thrillers that "feature female characters who aren’t necessarily good—but they’re sure as hell angry," including:

Darling, by Rachel Edwards

Darling puts a sharp, unique spin on the fraught stepmother-daughter relationship – infusing an already delicate situation with all-too-relevant racial and political tensions, both in the home and beyond.

It’s testament to Edwards’ skill as a writer that a novel described in the UK as “the first Brexit thriller,” is this much fun to read – but trust me, it is. Both Darling, and her stepdaughter Lola, have their own private angers and frustrations, though they express them in wholly different ways (and with wildly different results.) It’s by turns gripping, incisive, and even, occasionally, bittersweet – a timely, intelligent thriller.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five books about the lives of artificial objects

Andrew Skinner now works as an archaeologist and anthropologist, and is interested in folklore, rain-making arts, and resistance.

Steel Frame is his first novel.

At Tor.com, Skinner tagged "five stories about the lives of artificial objects, finding their own paths, making their own mistakes," including:

Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee

The artificial lives I’ve mentioned so far have had some strain of the familiar, in whole or in part. The objects we have nurtured into sentience, or brought to it by accident; things built on body-systems that could easily pass as our own. In Ninefox Gambit, we catch glimpses of lives very much unlike our own. In the background of this world, we see servitors, the social equivalent of your toaster. They are present in every part of daily life; surprisingly complex machines that spend their lives cleaning up after human beings, and doing the menial jobs that keep society running.

What we learn, as Ninefox Gambit plays out, is that servitors are a society of artificial objects; their artificial lives playing out behind bulkheads, in service tunnels, and across network frequencies. All with their own motives, and their own politics. What’s more, this society is everywhere humanity goes, and this is what makes them so potent. They are a piece of the everyday; the powerful little things that share our lives, able to change the course of history.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Yoon Ha Lee's Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire series is among Jenn Lyons's five villains who see themselves as heroes, Jeff Somers's fifty greatest debut sci-fi and fantasy novels ever written and T.W. O'Brien's five recent books that explore the secret lives of robots.

My Book, The Movie: Ninefox Gambit.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top novels that reference pop music

Robert Haller holds an MFA in fiction from the New School in New York City. He lives in upstate New York. Another Life is his first novel.

At LitHub he tagged "six novels that reference pop music in interesting, effective ways," including:

Zadie Smith, Swing Time

In Swing Time Zadie Smith employs an unnamed narrator who grew up in public housing in North London in the 1970s and 80s. During her childhood she falls in love with tap dancing and meets her best friend Tracey at a dance class; the two girls spend their time together watching old musicals on VHS—Fred and Ginger, Judy Garland. Numbers from these musicals make up the soundtrack to their childhood friendship. An early pivotal scene in the novel comes when the two girls see Michael Jackson’s Thriller video on TV for the first time, and are introduced to a new way to dance. As they grow up, the two girls’ friendship is severed, and in college, the narrator substitutes dancing to show tunes to the then contemporary music of Gang Starr, Nas, and NWA. As an adult, Smith’s narrator gets a job as a personal assistant to a pop superstar named Aimee who bears some resemblance to Madonna. During the interview, Aimee asks the narrator who her favorite singers are, and the narrator lists Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan. “Real singers,” she says, before stopping herself.

A novel that deals with memory, loss and the way people change, the narrator’s vast and divergent music taste can be seen as one way Smith illuminates her character’s conflicted feelings towards her past.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten notable titles in gothic fiction

Kate Racculia is a novelist living in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She is the author of the novels This Must Be the Place and Bellweather Rhapsody, winner of the American Library Association’s Alex Award.

Her new novel is Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts.

At CrimeReads, Kate Racculia tagged ten gothic fiction titles that meant something to her, including:

A Good Man is Hard to Find, Flannery O’Connor

This collection is dark af all the way through, but the eponymous story, with its roadside family murder, is a master class in voice, character, suspense, what you can get away with—and desperately morbid comic timing. The Addams Family first crystallized my appreciation for black humor, but O’Connor taught me how to level up.

Read about the other entries on the list.

A Good Man Is Hard to Find is among Melissa Albert's sixteen most indispensable books of the 1950s and Tina Jordan's top ten books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top books about Europe

Laurent Gaudé is a French novelist and playwright. After being nominated for the 2002 Prix Concourt with The Death of King Tsongor, he won the award in 2004 for his novel The House of Scorta.

His new book is Our Europe: Banquet of Nations.

At the Guardian, Gaudé tagged his top ten books about Europe, including:

The Truce [US title: The Reawakening by Primo Levi

I could have chosen If This Is a Man, a sober and clinical telling of our great black hole. But The Truce sheds light on an a lesser-known, less debated aspect of the Holocaust: the return. Levi invites us to imagine what Europe was like a few months after the Allied victory: a field of ruins, full of shadows trying to return home.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

The five most badass vampires of all time

Renée Ahdieh is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In her spare time, she likes to dance salsa and collect shoes. She is passionate about all kinds of curry, rescue dogs, and college basketball. The first few years of her life were spent in a high-rise in South Korea; consequently, Ahdieh enjoys having her head in the clouds. She lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, with her husband and their tiny overlord of a dog.

Ahdieh's new novel is The Beautiful.

At Tor.com she shared her list of "the five most badass vampires in literature and pop culture." One bloodsucker on the list:

Maharet

I know, I know. B-b-but what about Lestat? Look, I have been a die-hard fangirl of Lestat de Lioncourt since I was a teenager. The thing is, there are so many famous dude vampires. I think it’s high time we give the ladies a moment to shine. Anyway I’m not worried Lestat will ever be forgotten. And if you ask me, Maharet is the quintessential badass vampire of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles. She is the only vampire in Rice’s world who never succumbed to the madness prevalent in the “ancient ones”: the vampires that were there from the very beginning. Maharet has tracked her human family for over six millennia. She has been a pillar for them throughout the centuries, and she is one of the main reasons the vampires are able to overcome Akasha, the Queen of the Damned, when Akasha tries to take over the world midway through the series. Sorry, I should have done a spoiler alert.

But if you haven’t read Queen of the Damned, then you should get on that right away. It’s one of my absolute favorite vampire books in the world, mostly because it gets to the origin behind how vampires came to be, and the unglamorous side of living forever. Truly this book gave me first existential crisis at twelve years old, and I’m still jealous of people who get to read it for the first time.

Read about the other vampires on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten great opening paragraphs from Graham Greene

Dwyer Murphy is the managing editor of CrimeReads.

He assembled ten great opening paragraphs from the works of Graham Greene, including:

After dinner I sat and waited for Pyle in my room over the rue Catinat: he had said, ‘I’ll be with you at latest by ten,’ and when midnight had struck I couldn’t stay quiet any longer and went down into the street. A lot of old women in black trousers squatted on the landing: it was February and I suppose too hot for them in bed. One trishaw driver pedalled slowly by towards the river front and I could see lamps burning where they had disembarked the new American planes. There was no sign of Pyle anywhere in the long street.

—The Quiet American (1955)

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Quiet American is among Pete Buttigieg’s ten favorite books, Cat Barton's five top titles on Southeast Asian travel literature, Richard Haass's six top books for understanding global politics, Sara Jonsson's seven best literary treatments of envy, Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones's top ten classic spy novels, Tom Rachman's top ten journalist's tales, John Mullan's ten best journalists in literature, Charles Glass's five best books on Americans abroad, Robert McCrum's books to inspire busy public figures, Malcolm Pryce's top ten expatriate tales, Catherine Sampson's top ten Asian crime fiction, and Pauline Melville's top 10 revolutionary tales.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five sci-fi stories featuring futuristic technology

Veronica Roth is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Divergent Series and the Carve the Mark series. Her short stories and essays have appeared in the anthologies Summer Days and Summer Nights, Shards and Ashes, and Three Sides of a Heart. The Divergent Series was developed into three major motion pictures.

Roth grew up outside of Chicago and graduated from Northwestern University. She now lives in Chicago proper with her husband and dog and writes full-time.

Her new book is The End and Other Beginnings: Stories from the Future.

At Tor.com Roth tagged "five stories that explore a piece of futuristic technology—for better, worse, or a mix of both," including:

Warcross by Marie Lu

Warcross is a worldwide sensation, an alternate reality capture-the-flag game with famous players, specialized positions, and international championships—a little like an exaggerated version of pro Overwatch. I pitch this book to friends and family as being FUN AS HELL and I stand by that assessment. It’s an immensely satisfying Cinderella-ish story of Emika Chen, a bounty hunter just barely scraping by, who pulls a stunt that gets her recruited to play for one of the world’s best Warcross teams. And along the way, she discovers a much darker side of the game (and, of course, society itself). As someone who has played Beat Saber on an Oculus more than once, this technology felt close enough to grasp, but dreamlike enough to long for—we’re a ways off from a completely immersive, worldwide augmented reality system that could bring us a game like this. And this isn’t a story that preaches at you to stop playing games and go outside—it’s written with an obvious love of gaming as a given, by someone who clearly understands the appeal and has no judgment for those of us who have spent days on end lost in Hyrule. (I’m on my fourth playthrough of Breath of the Wild, so I take this very personally.) I want to play Warcross the same way I want to play Quidditch. My love is pure.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six of Tim O'Brien's favorite works of fiction

Tim O'Brien received the 1979 National Book Award for Going After Cacciato. Among his other books are The Things They Carried, Pulitzer Finalist and a New York Times Book of the Century, and In the Lake of the Woods, winner of the James Fenimore Cooper Prize. He was awarded the Pritzker Literature Award for lifetime achievement in military writing in 2013.

O'Brien's new book is Dad's Maybe Book, a work of nonfiction which "shares wisdom from a life in letters, lessons learned in wartime, and the challenges, humor, and rewards of raising two sons."

At The Week magazine, O'Brien recommended six of his favorite books. One title on the list:

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates (1961).

Among the best novels of the past 75 years, Revolutionary Road is a story of a marriage gone sour. A suburban couple dreams about heading for Paris; it never happens. This is a heartbreaking and really human story, beautifully written.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Revolutionary Road also appears on Diana Evans's list of five books for helping with loss, Jenny Eclair's six best books list, the Barnes & Noble Review's list of five top books for Mad Men fans, Hanna McGrath's list of five fictional characters who tell it like it is, John Mullan's list of ten of the best Aprils in literature, Selma Dabbagh's top ten list of stories of reluctant revolutionaries, Laura Dave's list of books that improve on re-reading, Tad Friend's seven best fiction books about WASPs, and James P. Othmer's list of six great novels on work.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight books about a planet in peril

Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta and grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. He studied in Delhi, Oxford and Alexandria. His most recent novel is Gun Island.

Ghosh is also the author of The Great Derangement; Climate Change and the Unthinkable, a work of non-fiction.

At the Guardian, he tagged eight notable books about a planet in peril, including:

How do we make sense of the Earth when it seems to be turning against us in revenge for its despoliation? The very act of writing about the devastation can sometimes create a kind of coherence. Elizabeth Kolbert shows us how with The Sixth Extinction, where she focuses on a few of the million or so species that are dying out in what is now known to be one of the greatest extinction events in the history of the Earth. The closeness of the focus creates a powerful sense of empathy, not just with the vanishing creatures but also with the writer as she struggles to account for the horrors to which she is bearing witness.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top mysteries set in the greater Boston area

Peter Colt is currently a police officer in a small New England city where he has worked since 2007. He spent over twenty years in the Army reserve and was deployed to Kosovo in 2000, where he was attached to the Russian Army. He was deployed to Iraq in 2003 and again in 2008. He was fortunate to get to know many Vietnam vets and U.S. Army Special forces soldiers. He lived on Nantucket Island from 1973-1986.

Colt's new novel is The Off-Islander: An Andy Roark Mystery #1.

At CrimeReads Colt tagged five top mysteries set in the Boston area, including:

Dennis Lehane, Gone Baby Gone

It is an undisputed fact that Dennis Lehane owns South Boston, Southie. He owns it the way that Robert B. Parker owned Cambridge and the Boston itself and the way that Raymond Chandler owned LA. Lehane’s books are page turners but Gone Baby Gone is the one that is the most Boston to me. It is filled with heartbreak, violence and mystery all delivered against crisp dialogue, that reads as authentic. While Parker was our guide to many of the nicest Boston restaurants, Gone Baby Gone takes us to the places in Boston that aren’t on the Duck boat tour, we go to Southie, the Projects and the Quincy Quarry. The mystery grabs us, the story shocks us and the locations hold us. This is another one that I read and will reread.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Gone Baby Gone is among Haylen Beck's eight crime novels that focus on the bonds of parent and child.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten haunting ghost stories

Jac Jemc is the author of the story collection False Bingo (2019) and the forthcoming novel Total Work of Art, both from Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Her previous books include A Different Bed Every Time, My Only Wife, and the bone-chilling haunted house novel The Grip of It.

At Publishers Weekly, Jemc tagged ten essential books featuring hauntings, including:

In the House in the Dark of the Woods by Laird Hunt

As a longtime lover of Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown, I find in this book the permission to enter into the complex female perspective denied us in that classic. This book is half fairy tale, half nightmare quest through colonial New England. If you’re a fan of the Robert Eggers film The Witch or deep diving on the Salem witch trials, this will do it for you.

Read about the other entries on the list.

My Book, The Movie: In the House in the Dark of the Woods.

The Page 69 Test: In the House in the Dark of the Woods.

--Marshal Zeringue