Five top mystery series that explore nature and the environment

Lark O. Jensen, a former lawyer who is now a full-time writer, has published 53 books so far, including mysteries and romantic novels. She has written several cozy mystery series including the Barkery & Biscuits Mysteries and Superstition Mysteries for Midnight Ink, and the Kendra Ballantyne, Pet-Sitter Mysteries and Pet Rescue Mysteries for Berkley Prime Crime. She also writes romances for Harlequin, including Harlequin Romantic Suspense.

Jensen's latest Alaska Untamed Mystery is Cry Wolf.

At CrimeReads Jensen tagged five "of the best mystery series that explore nature and the environment," including:

Another book I enjoy that involves Alaska is Alaskan Catch, by Sue Pethick. It’s not necessarily a mystery, more of a rom-com, but it does contain suspense… and some fun descriptions of Alaska and the environment. In it, Emily Prentice is a marine biologist who leaves her boyfriend behind and goes to Ketchikan for a NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) internship—in a fish cannery! Lots of smells and goo, plus a large but loving Newfoundland dog who knocks Emily over and into that goo. Fortunately, despite all that goo it’s not totally graphic. Some of the story involves how the boats go out to catch fish. It also describes seaplanes and boats including a ferry, and there’s more about the Alaskan atmosphere, including cloudy skies, but golden sun sometimes. And there are storms, heavy swells in water, rain causing difficult flights. Plus, there are gray-winged seagulls and great gray owls. It’s another enjoyable story involving the environment and wildlife.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven books on the dark side of true crime

Kate Brody lives in Los Angeles and holds an MFA from NYU. Her work has been published (or is forthcoming) in The New York Times, Literary Hub, Crime Reads, Noema, The Literary Review, The Guardian, Write or Die, and Largehearted Boy, among others. Rabbit Hole is her debut novel.

At Electric Lit Brody tagged seven true crime titles:

all share a few elements: colorful characters, evocative settings, heroes and villains. But most importantly, they are molded. What do I mean by this? Like memoir, they are of life but they do not necessarily resemble life. They are shaped, aesthetic objects.

One entry on the list:

True Story by Kate Reed Petty

This book is one of my favorite reads of the last few years. A wildly inventive, formally playful look at the fallout from a high school sexual assault, True Story is interested in the role of memory and the way a single, monolithic story can become the dominant narrative around a crime. Alex, the victim at the center of the story, must ultimately defend herself not only against her possible assailants (and the community that rallied to protect the young athletes) but against her friend, Haley, an aspiring filmmaker keen on flattening and commodifying her story.

Read about the other titles on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight winter reads rooted in the West

At Sunset magazine Krista Simmons tagged eight "amazing books set in the American West that will make for great wintry reads," including:

No Exit by Taylor Adams

Goodreads Description: “On her way to Utah to see her dying mother, college student Darby Thorne gets caught in a fierce blizzard in the mountains of Colorado. With the roads impassable, she’s forced to wait out the storm at a remote highway rest stop. Inside are some vending machines, a coffee maker, and four complete strangers.

Desperate to find a signal to call home, Darby goes back out into the storm… and makes a horrifying discovery. In the back of the van parked next to her car, a little girl is locked in an animal crate. Who is the child? Why has she been taken? And how can Darby save her?There is no cell phone reception, no telephone, and no way out. One of her fellow travelers is a kidnapper. But which one?

Trapped in an increasingly dangerous situation, with a child’s life and her own on the line, Darby must find a way to break the girl out of the van and escape. But who can she trust?”

Read about the other entries on the list.

No Exit is among Heather Gudenkauf's five great winter storm thrillers, Rektok Ross's nine top YA survival thrillers, and Sophia LeFevre's six top isolated, snowy thrillers.

The Page 69 Test: No Exit.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten YA novels

At Vogue Boutayna Chokrane tagged ten top YA books, including:

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green (2012)

“It’s a metaphor, see: You put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don’t give it the power to do its killing.” If that quote doesn’t immediately transport you to 2012, here’s a refresher: Hazel Grace Lancaster, a 16-year-old with stage IV thyroid cancer, finds herself in a cancer patient support group where she meets 17-year-old Augustus Waters, a survivor of osteosarcoma. Their intense love story, both heartwarming and heartbreaking, grapples with the weightiness of illness and grief, which Green handles with a rare blend of sensitivity and wit.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Fault in Our Stars is among Nicole Hill's nine favorite meet cutes in YA history, Lara Williamson's ten top goodbyes in children’s literature, the Off the Shelf Staff's eight great books told by child narrators, Luke Kelly's five top YA novels, and Sophie McKenzie's five favorite Young Adult books that appeal to teenagers.

--Marshal Zeringue

The 50 best mysteries of all time

Gabino Iglesias is the author of the Shirley Jackson and Bram Stoker award-winning novel, The Devil Takes you Home, as well as author of the critically acclaimed and award-winning novels Zero Saints and Coyote Songs. He is a writer, journalist, professor, and literary critic living in Austin, TX and a member of the Horror Writers Association, the Mystery Writers of America, and the National Book Critics Circle.

For Esquire Iglesias tagged the fifty best mysteries of all time. On the list at #8:

Devil in a Blue Dress, by Walter Mosley

Few novels have been as frequently listed or celebrated as widely as Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress, the first and perhaps the most well-known novel in Mosley’s bestselling Easy Rawlins mystery series. Set in Los Angeles in the late 1940s, Devil in a Blue Dress introduces readers to Easy Rawlins, a recently unemployed Black war veteran who’s offered good money to locate Miss Daphne Monet, a beautiful blonde known to frequent Black jazz clubs. Besides being a great mystery, Devil in a Blue Dress, which was adapted into a movie starring Denzel Washington as Rawlins, is a perennially timely novel tackling issues of class and race that are as present now as they were in the 1940s.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Devil in a Blue Dress is among Zach Vasquez's nine novels that explore secrecy & deception in racial identity, Peter Colt's eight books featuring unlikely detectives, E.G. Scott's ten best pairs of frenemies in fiction, Alex Segura's nine top jazz-infused crime novels, Lori Roy's five top morality-driven thrillers, and Al Roker's six favorite crime novels.

Raymond “Mouse” Alexander, from Mosley’s Easy Rawlins series, made The A.V. Club's list of “13 sidekicks who are cooler than their heroes.”

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten books on booze

Henry Jeffreys is a journalist who writes about wine and other drinks in the Guardian, Spectator and Food & Wine. He is the author of Empire of Booze.

One of the writer's top ten books on booze, as shared at the Guardian:

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

Brideshead is neither Waugh’s best book (I favour the Sword of Honour trilogy), nor his funniest (Scoop or The Loved One), but it is the best from a booze point of view. The scenes of drunkenness between Sebastian Flyte and Charles Ryder include some of the funniest parodies of wine talk: “a little, shy wine like a gazelle”. There’s also the excellent cognac-off between Rex Mottram and Ryder, which is a masterclass in razor-sharp snobbery.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Brideshead Revisited is one of Johanna Lane's five top imaginary castles in fiction, John Mullan's ten of the most memorable hunting scenes in literature, Robert Irwin's top ten quest narratives, Val McDermid's top ten Oxford novels, and Christopher Buckley's best books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six remarkable books set on New Year's Eve & Day

The Times of India tagged six remarkable books set on New Year's eve and day, including:

Rules of Civility by Amor Towles

"On the last night of 1937, twenty-five-year-old Katey Kontent is in a second-rate Greenwich Village jazz bar when Tinker Grey, a handsome banker, happens to sit down at the neighboring table. This chance encounter and its startling consequences propel Katey on a year-long journey into the upper echelons of New York society," reads the book's blurb.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Rules of Civility is among Glamour magazine's list of the fifty-seven best books of the 2010s and Michael Hogan's ten best New Year’s Eves in culture.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight books to explain economic development

Benjamin Selwyn is Professor of International Relations and International Development at the University of Sussex. At the Guardian he tagged eight books to help explain the way we live now, including:

Amartya Sen: Development as Freedom (1999)

One of the most powerful truisms that politicians, policymakers and academics buy into is that development depends upon economic growth.

Sen – an Indian economist and Nobel prizewinner – makes a compelling argument about why that narrative is wrong.

Many countries achieved rapid growth and industrial transformation during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The most prominent – Brazil and South Korea in the 1960s and 1970s, and contemporary China – under authoritarian regimes.

Authoritarianism is justified by some as necessary for an ultra-hardworking labour force to catch up with developed countries. Sen argues that human development could and should be “a process of expanding the real freedoms” people enjoy.

Democracy, political participation and freedom of speech ensure that the poor cannot simply be ignored or exploited in the name of growth, he argues.

Core essential freedoms include a life free from the threat of starvation, undernourishment and premature mortality, alongside literacy and numeracy.

People’s freedoms are intrinsically important and enhance economic participation, generating further freedom-enhancing values.

States and public institutions have a crucial role to play. Sen’s thinking about development is evident in his understanding of poverty. He opposes metrics that count poverty based on income but focuses on ways in which poverty restricts freedom, and how it is expanded by anti-poverty measures.

Sen welcomed India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme of the early 2000s, which provided at least 100 days of unskilled wage employment a year to at least one member of every household, contributing significantly to poverty reduction.

The scheme enhanced its recipients’ “self-respect and participation in life and community” and he argues that women’s empowerment – through education, healthcare, changes to sexist laws – is key to women’s ability to advance social change.

“Nothing, arguably, is as important today in the political economy of development as an adequate recognition of political, economic and social participation and leadership of women,” he concludes.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thirty-one of the best horror books of 2023

Neil McRobert is a writer, researcher and podcaster, with a specialism in horror and other darkly speculative topics; he is the host and producer of the Talking Scared podcast.

For Esquire he tagged the thirty-one best horror books of 2023, including:

The Paleontologist, by Luke Dumas

Ghost dinosaurs! Has any pairing of words ever sounded more loaded with possibility, or more worryingly like a gimmick? Have no fear—Luke Dumas’ sophomore novel is not the literary Sharknado that the words “ghost dinosaurs” would have you believe. Quite the opposite; it’s a moving, sorrowful story of secrecy, institutional rot, and the everlasting power of love and loss that even geological eons cannot diminish. When Simon takes up the role of head paleontologist in his hometown museum, he becomes obsessed with solving the mystery of his sister’s abduction from that very institution decades before. In the process, he unearths plenty of skeletons, both literal and figurative, some of which belong to the prehistoric entity roaming the exhibit halls. The Paleontologist is a mixture of sober Gothic and B-movie flamboyance. It’s a family drama, a crime procedural, and a social critique, but did I mention the GHOST DINOSAURS?!

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top SFF books set in the American South

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 and her family live in Charlotte, North Carolina. She is the #1 New York Times and internationally bestselling author of the Wrath and the Dawn series, the Flame in the Mist series, and The Beautiful quartet.

At Tor.com Ahdieh tagged "five of my most beloved SFF books set in the American South," including:

Legendborn by Tracy Deonn

This is a recent addition to the ranks of my favorite SFF set in the American South, but I was sold the moment I heard it was set at UNC Chapel Hill and involved a historically white magical society and a Black girl attempting to infiltrate its ranks to learn about its involvement in her mother’s death. As a Carolina grad, seeing my school through this lens of the occult was fascinating, as well as eye-opening when it came to the problematic elements in our history as the first public university to open its doors. Bree is an inspired, layered main character, and the book’s nod to Arthurian legend makes it one of the best urban fantasies I’ve read in a long time.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

The best nonfiction books of 2023

One title on Publishers Weekly's list of the best nonfiction books of 2023:

Black Ball: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Spencer Haywood, and the Generation That Saved the Soul of the NBA by Theresa Runstedtler

Runstedtler’s fleet-footed chronicle examines how Black athletes transformed the NBA in the 1970s, covering Cornelius Hawkins and Spencer Haywood’s policy-changing antitrust suits against the league and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s political activism. Scrupulous research illuminates the contributions of superstars and overlooked game-changers alike, making for a history as nimble as the players profiled.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Page 99 Test: Black Ball.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best noir fiction titles of 2023

The editors at CrimeReads tagged their ten best noir fiction titles of 2023, including:

Scott Von Doviak, Lowdown Road

Von Doviak’s new book is an absolutely rollicking, roaring journey across 1970s America, as two cousins with a jackpot of weed decide to pack it into their car and move it across country to the site of a daredevil feat: a motorcycle jump across Snake River Canyon. Von Doviak has the period details just right, but even more importantly he captures the uncanny, corrupt atmosphere of the Seventies in exquisite detail, all while moving an intricate plot relentlessly forward. (The cousins happen to have a big-time trafficker and the law on their tail.) This is noir that manages to be both gritty and light on its feet. You’d be hard pressed to find a more fun road trip story.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue