Political thrillers where the good guys don’t always win

Untouchable is the latest thriller from Edgar and Barry Award finalist Mike Lawson. It features Washington DC “troubleshooter” Joe DeMarco, and is the eighteenth title in the series.

At CrimeReads Lawson tagged some favorite books that share the "theme of Untouchable—that corrupt politicians, abetted by their underlings, escape conventional justice." One entry on the list:

The topic of corrupt politicians and corrupt bureaucrats isn’t limited to U.S. fiction. In Mick Herron’s Slow Horses series, Herron’s protagonist, burnt-out spy Jackson Lamb, is being constantly undermined by his boss, Diane Taverner, who’s the head of his own intelligence service. And to make matters worse, Taverner’s bosses—the British prime minister or the minister’s lackies—also have their own self-serving agendas and they’re often at odds with both Taverner and Lamb. So Lamb is usually fighting two battles simultaneously: one against the actual bad guys and one against the guys who are supposed to be the good guys—his bosses. The Slow Horses books make me think of what’s happening in the FBI today, where FBI agents not only have to fight crime but survive in an environment where the people they work for care more about loyalty to those in power than loyalty to the law.

Read about the other titles on the list.

Slow Horses is among Bernard Cornwell's six best books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven stories that use the supernatural to focus on reality

Erin Crosby Eckstine is an author of speculative historical fiction, personal essays, and anything else she’s in the mood for. Born in Montgomery, Alabama, she grew up between the South and Los Angeles before moving to New York City to attend Barnard College. She earned a master’s in secondary English education from Stanford University and taught high school English for six years. Eckstine lives in Brooklyn with her partner and their cats. Junie is her debut novel.

At Electric Lit "seven works of speculative fiction [that] are a few of my favorite examples of the genre’s limitless possibilities to examine power, race, and oppression." One title on the list:

Sing Unburied Sing by Jesmyn Ward

Part road trip, part intergenerational family story, Sing Unburied Sing follows mother-and-son Leonie and Jojo as they travel to pick up Jojo’s father from Parchman Prison in Mississippi. Like most great ghost stories, the haunting has little to do with the undead spirits. Instead of focusing on supernatural ghosts, the novel explores how the lasting effects of systemic racial and class violence haunt people’s lives.

Read about the other entries on Eckstine's list.

Sing, Unburied, Sing is among Joel H. Morris's seven novels involving literal and metaphorical ghost children, Sarah Bernstein's top ten grudge holders in fiction, James Yorkston's top ten road novels, Stacey Swann's seven novels about very dysfunctional families, Una Mannion’s top ten books about children fending for themselves, Sahar Mustafah's seven novels about grieving a family member and LitHub's ten books we'll be reading in ten years.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven books that take you places

Originally from Ballarat, Australia, Tobias Madden now resides in New York City with his husband, Daniel, and their Cavoodle, Ollie. Madden worked for ten years as a performer, touring Australia and New Zealand with musicals such as Mary Poppins, CATS, and Guys and Dolls. In 2019, he edited and published the Underdog anthology and co-wrote the cabaret show Siblingship. Madden’s debut novel, Anything But Fine, was published in 2021, and was awarded the Australian Association of Family Therapy’s Book Award for Older Readers, was shortlisted for the Australian Book Industry Awards Book of the Year for Older Readers, was named one of Better Reading’s Top 50 Kids Books (2022), and was included on Bank Street College of Education’s list of Best Children’s Books of the Year (US, 2023). His second novel, Take a Bow, Noah Mitchell, was published in 2022 in Australia and 2023 in the US.

Madden's third YA novel, Wrong Answers Only, is out now in Australia and the US!

At The Nerd Daily the author tagged "seven books that will take you to extraordinary places," including:

Midnight Library by Matt Haig

If you’re not afraid of a good cry, you might also want to pick up this global bestseller. You’ll travel with Nora to the Midnight Library and, from there, to alternate lives all over the world as our protagonist tries to right her wrongs and find her perfect life. But is there such a thing? And does the Library have the answers?

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Midnight Library is among Mark Skinner's twenty-five best time travel books and twelve great novels set in a bookshop or library and Clare Mackintosh's top ten books with “What if?” moments.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven memoirs that show the many sides of Cuba

Rebe Huntman is a memoirist, essayist, dancer, teacher and poet. For over a decade she was head of the award-winning Danza Viva Center for World Dance, Art & Music and its dance company, One World Dance Theater. Rebe collaborates with native artists in Cuba and South America, has been featured in Latina Magazine, Chicago Magazine, and the Chicago Tribune and on Fox and ABC News. The recipient of an Ohio Individual Excellence award, Huntman has received support for this book from the Ohio State University, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Ragdale Foundation, Playa, Hambidge Center, and Brush Creek Foundation. She lives in Delaware, Ohio and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

Huntman's new book is My Mother in Havana: A Memoir of Magic & Miracle.

At Lit Hub the author tagged "seven richly-rendered memoirs, ... each offers up its own distinct lens on the people and stories that make up the dynamic and ever-changing landscape that is Cuba." One title on the list:

Daisy Hernández, A Cup of Water Under My Bed

“The first man I love and the first woman I adore, my father and my mother with their Spanish words, are not in these cards,” Hernández writes about the flash cards her teachers use to render a language that sounds—to a child growing up among her half-Cuban, half-Colombian family in 1980s and 90s New Jersey—”like marbles in the mouth.”

Through lyrical prose that dances between the English of the country she inhabits and the Spanish of those who raise her, Hernández invites us into a world where “cuarticos” hold African gods and women read cups of water that “ferry messages between us and the santos and the dead.” As someone who writes in My Mother in Havana about discovering Santería as an adult, I was delighted to read how Hernández stumbles upon its rituals through the eyes of a child.

Read about the other entries on Huntman's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine top art world mysteries

Patrice McDonough is a former educator who taught history for more than three decades. A member of the Historical Writers of America, the Mystery Writers of America, and the Historical Novel Society, she splits her time between New Jersey and the Florida Gulf Coast.

McDonough's new novel, A Slash of Emerald, is her second Dr. Julia Lewis mystery.

At CrimeReads the author tagged nine titles featuring "dastardly deeds in rarified settings." One title on the list:

Paula Hawkins, The Blue Hour

Does anyone do dread better than Paula Hawkins? The Blue Hour (2024), her fourth psychological thriller, is a quieter story than Hawkins’ sensational debut, The Girl on the Train. This novel’s macabre menace creeps insidiously, opening with a polite but unsettling letter from a forensic anthropologist to the Tate Modern. The exhibit label for a mixed-media sculpture by the late Vanessa Chapman is wrong: the bone in the piece is human, not animal. Ten years before her death, the artist’s philandering, parasitic husband disappeared without a trace. Could the fragment be his?

The story unfolds along two timelines and in three points of view. Art historian James Becker is searching for Chapman’s missing pieces and papers. Dr. Grace Haswell, the artist’s companion, stands in his way. Vanessa Chapman speaks to the reader in diary excerpts and letters curated by Grace. The Blue Hour is about obsession: Becker with the artist’s work, Grace with Vanessa, Vanessa with her art and secrets. Where it’s all heading seems clear enough: a confrontation on Eris, the isolated island battered by the “terrible chaos” of wind and waves where Chapman spent her final years. Still, what happens in the novel’s final moments—at the blue hour, before the stars appear, and color vanishes from sea and sky—jolts.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine titles that take you inside the entertainment industry

Daniel D’Addario is chief correspondent at Variety. He has won awards from the Los Angeles Press Club for profile writing and for political commentary and is among the moderators of Variety’s Actors on Actors video series. He was previously the television critic for Variety and for Time. A graduate of Columbia University, he lives with his husband and two daughters in Brooklyn.

D’Addario's new novel is The Talent.

At Electric Lit he tagged nine books that shed "light on what kind of temperament it takes to make art, and what pressures artists face as they try to express something genuine." One title on the list:

Mike Nichols: A Life by Mark Harris

The greatest Hollywood biography of recent years tracks one prolific director through a long and varied career. Mike Nichols rose to prominence as a filmmaker with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate and went on to make Working Girl, Closer, and Charlie Wilson’s War. Intriguingly, he lacked a fundamental signature or style. He was competent and engaged enough to allow his career to go on, and he spent his life wearing a wig and false eyebrows (a side effect from a childhood medical treatment), which left him fundamentally relating to outsider characters, whether they were a young college alum driftless in Southern California or a Staten Island secretary looking for more. Harris marshals a fantastic set of interviewees to make Nichols’s life and work into a narrative that, itself, might make a great film.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top SFF books set in winter climates

At Book Riot Liberty Hardy tagged five stellar sci-fi and fantasy books set in winter climates, including:

Hogfather by Terry Pratchett

I am not one to recommend series out of order, but the Discworld books can be read in any order. Or you can read all the books in the series to get to this one, possibly the funniest of the bunch. It’s about the Hogfather, who goes out on Hogswatchnight in his sleigh pulled by eight hogs, to spread presents around Discworld. But when Hogfather goes missing, someone needs to take his place while they search for him. Who is a natural replacement for Hogfather? Death, of course! Death must take on the criminal elements of the world with the help of his granddaughter, Susan, if they want to keep Hogswatchnight from going to the hogs. Er, dogs.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thirteen top books about breakups

At Marie Claire Liz Doupnik tagged "some of the best books about breakups ... for whatever stage of relationship recovery you’re in." One title on the list:

Animal Instinct by Amy Shearn

In this upcoming sexy novel, Rachel is about a week into her life as a newly divorced mom when COVID-19 storms N.Y.C. where she lives, raises her children, and works as a UX designer. Now stuck at home and incredibly horny, Rachel immerses herself in the world of online dating, pushing her vibrator to its limits. After careful safety screenings, Rachel takes the sexting to the sheets, hooking up with random men for the first time in her life.

Though the wild nights are delicious, Rachel can’t shake a convo she had with her best friend about her ideal person. What attributes would she program into them? She has the chops to design those very characteristics into a chatbot—but will she?

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven titles about a prophecy that changes everything

Olufunke Grace Bankole is a Nigerian American writer and novelist. A graduate of Harvard Law School, and a recipient of a Soros Justice Advocacy Fellowship, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Glimmer Train Stories, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, New Letters, The Antioch Review, Stand Magazine (UK), Writer's Digest, Portland Monthly Magazine, and elsewhere.

She won the first-place prize in the Glimmer Train Short-Story Award for New Writers, and was the Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Scholar in Fiction at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She has been awarded an Oregon Literary Fellowship in Fiction, a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant, a residency-fellowship from the Anderson Center at Tower View, and has received a Pushcart Special Mention for her writing.

Bankole's debut novel, The Edge of Water, set between Nigeria and New Orleans, is the story of Amina, a young woman, who dreams of life in America, as the collision of traditional prophecy and individual longing tests the bonds of a family during a devastating storm.

At Electric Lit the author tagged seven "works of fiction in which a life-altering prophecy is featured." One title on the list:

Efuru by Flora Nwapa

Another classic of African literature, this piercing novel tells the story of newly-married Efuru who is struggling with fertility. With her father, she visits the dibia, the Igbo healer and diviner who mediates between the human and spiritual worlds. In sharp detail, the dibia outlines the sacrificial steps Efuru must take in order to ensure that by the following year’s Owu festival, she would be pregnant. Efuru heeds the dibia’s guidance, and when the Owu festival arrives, her in-laws are delighted, as they detect the scent of pregnancy on her being. Indeed, Efuru soon gives birth. But the joy of the prophecy’s manifestation is short-lived when the dibia–after predicting, without providing details, that there will be an issue with Efuru’s child–dies suddenly, along with his unspoken pronouncements over Efuru’s future and the reassurance his foreknowing had once provided.

Read about the other entries on Bankole's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five likable fictional scoundrels

Wes Browne lives within the Kentucky River Basin in Madison County, Kentucky. He has practiced law as a criminal defense attorney, prosecutor, and public defender in Appalachia for over 24 years. He also helps run his family's pizza shops.

His novel They All Fall the Same was a Goodreads Biggest Thriller or Mystery of 2025 and one of Book Riot Read or Dead's Most Anticipated Books of 2025.

At CrimeReads Browne tagged five "books featuring not-so-good folks in prominent roles that may tickle your fancy." One title on the list:

Frank Guidry in November Road

Lou Berney lets you know right out of the chute that Guidry is a ruthless man. Guidry is a foot soldier for a New Orleans organized crime boss so powerful, he upends the United States government and the history books all over a personal grudge.

This is a spoiler for sure, but it happens in the first chapter, so I’m going to spill it. When we look in on Guidry, he is immediately forced to choose between getting sideways with his boss or giving up the life of his mentor. He barely hesitates to sell his mentor out, rationalizing that if he doesn’t do it, someone else will. If he feels any guilt about it, he shakes it off quickly enough to bed a redhead he just met.

Trouble is, his mentor was a loose end, and it’s not long before Guidry realizes he is one too. And he faces the same fate. He goes on the run with a particularly lethal killer close on his tail and soon concludes his single-man-on-the-road profile is a giveaway. Dual storylines come together when Guidry encounters a wayward housewife from Oklahoma and her young daughters. He hatches a plan to join them as a cover and proceeds to derail their trip long enough to charm his way into their party, knowing all the while that linking up risks the family’s lives. Before long Berney deftly pits Guidry’s survival instincts against his late-developing affection for his traveling companions and his urge to preserve his soul.

Read about the other entries on the list.

November Road is among Frank Sennett's five crime novels that deepen our appreciation of collective trauma and Dwyer Murphy's eleven top modern classics of conspiracy noir.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six essential literary love stories

Jessica Soffer is the author of This Is a Love Story and Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots. She grew up in New York City, attended Connecticut College, and earned her MFA at Hunter College. Her work has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, Real Simple, Saveur, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue, and on NPR’s Selected Shorts. She teaches creative writing to small groups and in the corporate space and lives in Sag Harbor, New York with her family.

[Writers Read: Jessica Soffer (April 2013); My Book, The Movie: Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots]

Soffer's new novel is This Is a Love Story.

At Lit Hub she tagged six essential literary love stories that "do not sugarcoat the inescapable fact that love is a heavy lift." One title on the list:

Emma Straub, Modern Lovers

Emma Straub is the most delightful writer and this novel is perhaps my favorite of hers. It follows a group of former punk rock bandmates who met at Oberlin College in 1980s to Brooklyn, present day where they have families and careers and the shared sadness of a friend’s death.

Though there is particular focus on time passing, secrets, trauma that hasn’t been worked through and parental love, what strikes me most is Straub’s masterful handling of shifting the love dynamics in a close-knit long-term friend group.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven stories about women coming of age in their 30s and 40s

Emily J. Smith is a writer based in Brooklyn.

Her debut novel is Nothing Serious.

Smith discovered writing in her thirties, after a career in tech and nonprofits. She holds a B.S in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Cornell, and an M.B.A. from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. She also founded Chorus, the matchmaking app where friends swipe for friends.

At Electric Lit the author tagged seven stories that celebrate "women in their thirties and forties who, rather than conforming to the traditional paths of marriage and motherhood, embark on transformative journeys of self-discovery while choosing a life without children." One title on the list:

Grown Ups by Emma Jane Unsworth

Jenny McLaine is an anxious 35-year-old, eager to please and always over-analyzing. The first page starts with her agonizing over captioning the photo of her morning croissant (settling on “CROISSANT, WOO! #CROISSANT”). But Emma Jane Unsworth’s unwavering humor does not distract from the poignancy in this laugh-out-loud novel. Jenny’s journalism career is floundering, and her personal relationships begin to unravel after a breakup with her longtime boyfriend, Art. Prone to extreme self-criticism as a result of her mother’s judgmental eye, Jenny feels like a failure at the very point in her life when she imagined it would all be coming together. She takes solace in a parasocial relationship with an online influencer that only serves to heighten her insecurities and self-doubt. The book follow Jenny as she learns to face her issues-head on, build her sense of self, and define, then trust, her own version of success.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue