Monday, June 30, 2025

Four horror books for the Fourth of July

At Book Riot Emily Martin tagged "four horror novels to get you in the mood for the 4th of July this year (…or not)." One title on the list:
Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark

This alternative history horror novel imagines the KKK as literal demons. The release of the film Birth of a Nation in 1915 spread hatred across America and spawned hellish members of the Klan who planned to proliferate violence wherever they went. The only ones who can stop them are Maryse Boudreaux and her fellow resistance fighters. But the Klan has plans for Macon, Georgia, and Maryse and her demon-hunters will have to resist them with everything they’ve got.
Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sunday, June 29, 2025

Eight mysteries and thrillers starring older sleuths and criminals

Sue Hincenbergs is a former television producer who has worked on multiple award-winning programs. She lives in Toronto with her (very much alive) husband, her scruffy, middle-aged rescue dog, Kramer, and the rooms full of the stuff her three sons left behind when they moved out. The porch light is always on in case one comes by for a visit.

The Retirement Plan is her first novel.

At People magazine Hincenbergs tagged eight mysteries and thrillers "that prove that age really can be just a number — for both those seeking to solve the crime and the ones committing it." One title on the list:
Too Old for This by Samantha Downing

Seventy-five-year-old retired serial killer Lottie Jones is forced back into action when an investigative reporter comes for a visit and asks too many questions. Technological advances since she was last disposing of bodies require some navigation in a story that has a bit of bingo and a bit of blood with a dash of church drama and family dysfunction.
Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Saturday, June 28, 2025

Nine London-set historical mysteries

Julia Seales is a novelist and screenwriter. She earned an MFA in screenwriting from UCLA, and a BA in English from Vanderbilt University. She is a lifelong Anglophile with a passion for both murder mysteries and Jane Austen. Seales is originally from Kentucky, where she learned about manners (and bourbon).

Her new novel is A Terribly Nasty Business.

At CrimeReads Seales tagged nine "fantastic London-set historical mysteries ... which wonderfully showcase the fictional detectives who populate the City of Mystery." One title on the list:
Silent in the Grave by Deanna Raybourn

Lady Julia Grey’s husband Sir Edward drops dead in their London home, murdered – and thus begins the Lady Julia Grey mystery series. Set in the Victorian era against the backdrop of London society, this is a lush showcase of the city. And once you’ve read all of Julia Grey, you can move to Veronica Speedwell, the detective in Raybourn’s other fantastic, London-set mystery series.
Read about the other titles on the list.

My Book, The Movie: Silent in the Grave and Silent in the Sanctuary.

--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, June 27, 2025

Twenty authors' summer reading

The Guardian asked twenty authors (including Anne Enright, Rutger Bregman, David Nicholls, Zadie Smith, and Colm Tóibín) about their summer reading.

Bernardine Evaristo's contribution to the survey:
No Small Thing by Orlaine McDonald is one of the best debut novels I’ve read in recent years. A family of women, mother, daughter and granddaughter, carry unresolved and unspoken trauma that’s passed down through the generations. This poisons their relationships and ability to fully function in society. Intense, visceral and beautifully written, McDonald’s novel captures their damaged souls. Stag Dance by Torrey Peters is the follow-up to her bestselling novel Detransition, Baby. Consisting of three short stories and a novella, this is adventurous, mind-expanding and provocative fiction that skilfully serves up different possibilities of gender and sexuality.
Read about the other recommended books at The Guardian.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thursday, June 26, 2025

Nine stories and folktales featuring sisters

Fran Littlewood is the author of Amazing Grace Adams, which was an instant New York Times bestseller and a #ReadWithJenna book club pick. She has an MA in creative writing from Royal Holloway, University of London. Before her MA, she worked as a journalist, including a stint at the Times. She lives in London with her husband and their three daughters.

Littlewood's new novel is The Accidental Favorite.

At Lit Hub the author tagged nine favorite stories and folktales featuring sisters. One title on the list:
Hannah Pittard, We Are Too Many: A Memoir (Kind of)

Described as “A Memoir (kind of),” this genius, genre-defying book blurs fact with fiction to brilliantly explosive and quietly devastating effect. A reconstruction of the breakdown of the author’s marriage, following her husband’s affair with her best friend, Pittard fills in the blanks creatively—detailing calls and meetings between the two, as she imagines they might have happened.

But it’s the Fleabag-esque relationship between the author and her sister, that’s a breakout star of the book for me. In caustic exchanges, which pulse with unconditional love, the sisters riff on everything from a lacklustre suicide attempt to their grandpa’s porn stash, usually both validating and invalidating one another in a single pitch-perfect encounter. Raw, irreverent and funny as hell, this is a slim volume that punches powerfully.
Read about the other entries on the list at Lit Hub.

--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, June 25, 2025

Five top literary mysteries set in coastal Massachusetts

Dwyer Murphy is the author of An Honest Living and The Stolen Coast, both of which were New York Times Editors’ Choice selections. He is the editor in chief of Literary Hub‘s CrimeReads vertical.

Murphy's new book is The House on Buzzards Bay.

At CrimeReads he tagged five favorite literary mysteries set in coastal Massachusetts, including:
Stephen L. Carter, The Emperor of Ocean Park

Carter’s 1993 novel tells the story of the Garland family through the eyes of Talcott Garland, a Yale Law professor reckoning with scandal and regret in the wake of his father’s death. The paterfamilias was Judge Oliver Garland, a DC power player once snubbed on the cusp of an appointment to the Supreme Court. Upon the Judge’s death, his son finds himself caught up in a sprawling conspiracy of former spies and politicos, and the action soon shifts to the family’s summer haunts on Martha’s Vineyard. Carter paints a lively scene on the island and off, moving through rarefied circles of African-American power and community. And Carter is a dedicated stylist, too, with a voice that presumes a level of sophistication in its readers you rarely find in thrillers today. It makes for a highly enjoyable and deeply satisfying novel that resonates all the more on a second reading.
Read about the other entries on the list at CrimeReads.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, June 24, 2025

Eight novels that capture the drama and intrigue of filmmaking

Joanna Howard is the author of the novel Porthole (2025) and the memoir Rerun Era (2019). Other works include Foreign Correspondent (2013), On the Winding Stair (2009), and In the Colorless Round, a prose collaboration with artist Rikki Ducornet (2006). She co-wrote Field Glass, a speculative novel, with Joanna Ruocco (2017). Her work has appeared in Conjunctions, The Paris Review, Verse, Bomb, and parts elsewhere. She lives in Denver and Providence and teaches at University of Denver.

At Electric Lit Howard tagged eight novels that "offer some compelling explorations of the drama and intrigue of filmmaking." One title on the list:
Innocents and Others by Dana Spiotta

Dana Spiotta’s Innocents and Others centers a pair of female filmmakers, Meadow and Carrie, whose long-standing friendship must endure the pressure-cooker of corporatized filmmaking as they grow into their very different film careers. Peppered with film history and the anxiety of influence—Orson Welles looms large—the book uses formal experimentation in the flavor of cinematic montage to mimic the technological immersion of modern filmmaking, and the fragmented modes of composition and communication it demands. Spiotta challenges any simple, singular category of woman-as-artist and maker, highlighting nuanced differences in aesthetic, ideology, and methodology for the two friends, and a difference in their feminisms, and strategies for navigating the male-dominated industry.
Read about the other entries on the list at Electric Lit.

Innocents and Others is among Rachel Kushner’s ten favorite books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Monday, June 23, 2025

Seven books about our passion & need for reading

Donna Seaman is the adult books editor at Booklist, a member of the Content Leadership Team for the American Writers Museum, and a recipient of the Louis Shore Award for excellence in book reviewing, the James Friend Memorial Award for Literary Criticism, and the Studs Terkel Humanities Service Award. Seaman has written for the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and other publications. She has been a writer-in-residence for Columbia College Chicago and has taught at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago. Seaman created the anthology In Our Nature: Stories of Wildness, her author interviews are collected in Writers on the Air: Conversations about Books, and she is the author of Identity Unknown: Rediscovering Seven American Women Artists.

Seaman's latest book is River of Books: A Life in Reading.

At Lit Hub she tagged seven books in which "writers ardently and incisively attest to how books save and sustain them, elucidating our profound need for books and affirming the need for us to defend our right to read and write freely." One title on the list:
Glory Edim, Gather Me: A Memoir in Praise of the Books That Saved Me

Many of us say that books have saved us by providing perspective, companionship, and sanctuary, but the predicaments Edim needed help navigating were exceptionally difficult. The firstborn child of immigrants from Nigeria, Edim was five when her brother, Maurice, was born; she was eight when their parents divorced and her mother, a former teacher who taught a very young Edim to read, began working long shifts as a nurse, leaving Edim to care for her brother. The siblings reveled in the weekends spent with their father until he abruptly disappeared. Worse yet was her mother’s doomed second marriage which left Edim responsible for Maurice and a new baby brother. Not even college brought relief when her long-traumatized mother needed care.

From the start, Edim read hungrily, searchingly, steeping herself in “survival stories.” She found comfort in Little Women, as have so many book-loving girls and future writers, and inspiration in Mildred D. Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, a novel about a ten-year-old Black girl in Mississippi during the Great Depression. Edim loved both books because, like her, their young female characters “were struggling, they had burdens and responsibilities beyond their years, and they still found a way to be emotionally fulfilled. They found a way out of the danger that surrounded them.” The more demanding her life became, the more urgently and astutely Edim read, finding her way to the wisdom and artistry of Zora Neale Hurston, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, bell hooks, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Audre Lorde, Jamaica Kincaid, and Toni Morrison. Ultimately her ardor for and abiding faith in literature, especially writing by Black women poets and writers, inspired her to found Well-Read Black Girl, an innovative, impactful, and award-winning nonprofit literary organization.
Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sunday, June 22, 2025

Nine great mystery and thriller novels set at sea

Sian Gilbert was born in Bristol, UK. She studied history at the University of Warwick, before teaching at a comprehensive school in Birmingham for almost five years. She now lives in Cambridge with her partner.

Gilbert's new novel is I Did Warn Her.

At CrimeReads she tagged nine novels that
explore the different ways setting a book at sea can impact characters and plot, from the inherent dangers of sailing, to being stranded, to what happens when the boat sinks and relationships are tested. The protagonists often have an offer they can’t refuse, a desire to taste a life so different from their own, and this leads to fatal consequences.
One title on the list:
The Last Passenger by Will Dean

Dean describes stepping onto a boat as “an act of faith”. This sentiment feels more common when considering something like flying—plenty of people are afraid of that, even those that fly often. There’s an implicit fear difficult to shake, and you truly feel dependent on the pilots and crew. Really, there should be a similar sentiment just as the main character describes when on a ship. If something goes wrong, you cannot outswim the ocean. The captain is everything. Which is why, when Caroline wakes up aboard the Atlantica and finds herself entirely alone, it is a worst nightmare come true. Her boyfriend is gone, her phone has no reception, and the crew have vanished. There are only a small number of other passengers who seem equally as confused about what’s going on. This book strips back life on board a vessel and shows the amount of work that goes into simply staying alive, which becomes ever more important in the game of survival that develops.
Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Saturday, June 21, 2025

Six exciting thrillers set on planes and trains

At Book Riot Liberty Hardy tagged six exciting thrillers set on planes and trains, including:
Falling by T. J. Newman

This is also a story of a member of the airline being put in an impossible situation. After a passenger plane to New York takes off, the pilot gets (secret) word that his family has been kidnapped. The kidnappers have one demand: either crash the plane or his family will die. Unsure who he can trust, Captain Bill Hoffman must make an unimaginable decision. Newman’s thrillers are terrifying, bolstered by the fact that she once worked as a flight attendant, so she knows the ins and outs of air travel.
Read about the other entries on the list.

Falling is among Ward Larsen's five novels that get the pressures of flying right and Louise Candlish's six top mysteries set on moving vehicles.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten books about history’s infinite, unsung legacies

Diana Arterian is the author of the recent poetry collection Agrippina the Younger and has twice been a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Her first collection, Playing Monster :: Seiche, received a starred review in Publishers Weekly. Arterian's writing has appeared in BOMB, The Harvard Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere. A poetry editor for Noemi Press, Arterian writes "The Annotated Nightstand" column at Lit Hub. She lives in Los Angeles.

At Electric Lit the author tagged ten books that "attend to the lacunae in the archive, reorienting the way we perceive the historical, and ultimately reconstructing the way we understand ourselves today." One title on the list:
A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa

This memoir is an extended meditation on Ní Ghríofa’s relationship with a keen poem from the late 1700s written in Irish alongside her modern experiences of love and motherhood. The keen is by Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill in response to the heinous murder of her beloved husband, whom she realizes is dead when his horse walks to their home with his “heart’s blood smeared from cheek to saddle.” The horse carries her to her husband’s corpse. “In anguish and in grief,” writes Ní Ghríofa, “she fell upon him, keening and drinking mouthfuls of his blood.” Ní Chonaill’s husband was shot at the order of a magistrate, illustrative of the oppression of the Catholic majority in Ireland. Though Ní Chonaill’s voice burns through the centuries, we know little else of her life beyond her entrancing descriptions of love and abject grief. In A Ghost in the Throat, Ní Ghríofa’s life whizzes around us as she raises four small children, her ratty copy of Ní Chonaill’s keen in her hands during late-night breastfeeds. Through the book, Ní Ghríofa never stops probing—the archive, the poem’s lines.
Read about the other entries on Arterian's list at Electric Lit.

--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, June 20, 2025

Five essential titles about Florida

Grace Flahive was born and raised in Toronto, Canada. She studied English literature at McGill University in Montreal before moving to London, UK, in 2014, where she’s lived ever since.

Palm Meridian is her debut novel.

At Lit Hub she tagged five essential books about Florida (if you’re a Canadian writing a novel about Orlando). One title on the list:
Emily St. John Mandel, The Lola Quartet

I’m grateful to be following in the tradition of Canadian authors writing about Florida (though this book packs more crime story punch than my own!) Published in 2012, two years before Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel’s The Lola Quartet is the type of book you devour in one sitting. Following a group of four friends one decade after high school, it’s both at crime thriller with literary flair and a masterful character study, exploring four very different but intertwined lives and the ways that small decisions can create ripple effects across decades. In this book, Florida’s nature is a haunting, hunting thing—heat that suffocates, greenery that hides danger, and snakes that lie in wait in the water.
Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thursday, June 19, 2025

Five titles that dive into the drug-fueled darkness of the club scene

Ivy Pochoda is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Wonder Valley, Visitation Street, These Women, and Sing Her Down which won the LA Times Book Prize. Her new novel is Ecstasy.

[The Page 69 Test: The Art of Disappearing; The Page 69 Test: Wonder Valley; The Page 69 Test: These Women]

Pochoda won the 2018 Strand Critics Award for Best Novel and the Prix Page America in France, and has been a finalist for the the Edgar Award, among other awards. For many years, she has led a creative writing workshop in Skid Row, Los Angeles where she helped found Skid Row Zine. She is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of California Riverside-Palm Desert low-residency MFA program. She lives in Los Angeles.

At CrimeReads Pochoda tagged "five books that mix nightlife with noir, where the dance floor becomes a crime scene and the come-up always ends in a comedown." One title on the list:
Ecstasy: Three Tales of Chemical Romance by Irvine Welsh (1996)
Rave culture, revenge, and pharmaceutical love stories

Welsh’s triptych of stories isn’t just about popping pills in neon-drenched clubs—it’s about what happens to your soul when the high fades. In classic Welsh fashion, the stories are raw, aggressive, and shot through with political venom. From a twisted revenge plot to a love story between damaged outsiders, Ecstasy captures the late-90s dance scene as both a cultural revolution and a minefield. The writing is visceral, the dialogue cracked with street poetry, and the characters burn bright before inevitably burning out.
Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, June 18, 2025

Eight titles about the quiet power of libraries & museums

Marian Womack is a bilingual Hispano-British writer of Weird fiction, speculative and hybrid fiction, and fiction of the Anthropocene. Her novels include The Swimmers (one of the best ten SF books of 2021, The Sunday Times) and in the Walton & Waltraud uncanny mystery series The Golden Key (2020) and On the Nature of Magic (2023). Her short fiction has been collected in Lost Objects and Out of the Window, Into the Dark, nominated to two British Fantasy Awards and one British Science Fiction Association Award, and selected for Year’s Bests. She lives in Cambridge (UK).

At Electric Lit Womack tagged eight books about the quiet power of libraries and museums, including:
To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis

One of the reasons jokes work is said to be that they offer us sidelong ways into things that, if contemplated seriously, would drive us mad…or to tears. I put Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog very firmly into this category—it’s one of the funniest novels one could ever read, yet the air of melancholy, of climate grief, that stands behind its best scenes gets me every time. We begin in the ashes of Coventry Cathedral, destroyed in a bombing raid in November 1940, with a group of time-travellers sent back to find various McGuffins that their patron, the impossible Lady Schrapnell, needs to fulfil her unnecessary plan to rebuild the cathedral as it was before the Blitz. But what sets the novel’s plot in motion is a sharp dig at the perpetual state of academia—the projects that can only get underway because of external support (for Schrapnell read Sackler), and the way in which use-value is prioritized above everything else when money is concerned. The main body of the novel, a reworking of Jerome K. Jerome’s perfect comedy, Three Men in a Boat, takes place with this disastrous future always lapping at its edges: a bittersweet reading experience.
Read about the other entries on the list at Electric Lit.

To Say Nothing of the Dog is among Sarah Gailey's ten sci-fi & fantasy books that will remind you what joy feels like.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, June 17, 2025

Top ten fantasy novels

Kate Elliott has been publishing science fiction and fantasy for over thirty years with a particular focus in immersive world building and epic stories of adventure & transformative cultural change. She’s written fantasy, science fiction, space opera based on the life of Alexander the Great (Unconquerable Sun), Young Adult fantasy, the seven volume (complete!) Crown of Stars epic fantasy series set in a landscape reminiscent of early medieval Europe, and the Afro-Celtic post-Roman alternate-history fantasy with lawyer dinosaurs, Cold Magic, as well as two novellas set in the Magic: The Gathering multiverse. Her work has been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, Norton, and Locus Awards.

Elliott's new novel is The Witch Roads.

At The Strand Magazine she tagged her top ten fantasy novels, including:
The Green Bone Saga by Fonda Lee

What if a crime family in an East Asian inspired fantasy island city had access to magical martial arts powers and were engaged in a long-standing turf war with a rival crime syndicate? Lee’s Jade City and its two sequels ask and answer this question. Lee brilliantly sets her story in an equivalent of the second half of our 20th century (although it is not our world). This allows her to follow the characters across decades of societal, cultural, diaspora, political, and technological change both in terms of their personal lives and in terms of how subsequent generations adapt to and make decisions about the family business they’ve been born into. Great stuff.
Read about the other entries on Elliott's list.

Jade City is among Roseanne A. Brown's five SFF books where magic has a steep cost, Chloe Gong's five top SFF books about warring families, Mike Chen's five recent titles featuring superpowered characters, David R. Slayton's ten favorite urban fantasies that break new ground, Emily Temple's top six epic fantasy series for fans of Game of Thrones and R.F. Kuang's five top East Asian SFF novels by East Asian authors.

The Page 69 Test: Jade City.

--Marshal Zeringue

Monday, June 16, 2025

Six books exploring romantic obsession

Olivia Worley is an author born and raised in New Orleans. A graduate of Northwestern University, she now lives in New York City, where she spends her time writing thrillers, over-analyzing episodes of The Bachelor, and hoping someone will romanticize her for reading on the subway. She is the author of the young adult novels People to Follow and The Debutantes. Her newly released adult debut is So Happy Together.

At CrimeReads Worley tagged six "books about romantic obsession that either inspired So Happy Together or that I’d be honored to see it shelved beside. ... [T]hese books all have one thing in common: they’re sure to get your heart pounding." One title on the list:
You by Caroline Kepnes

One of my all-time favorite series, You is like the mother of modern-day stalker stories. The first book, like the first season of the Netflix show it inspired, follows the infamously relatable Joe Goldberg as he falls in love with aspiring writer Guinevere Beck…and will stop at nothing, including murder, to keep her by his side.
Read about the other entries on the list.

You is among Sara Flannery Murphy's top ten stories of obsession and Peter Swanson's ten top books about voyeurs.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sunday, June 15, 2025

Eight epic BIPOC crime novels

Elisa Shoenberger is a freelance writer and journalist. At Book Riot she tagged eight of "the best BIPOC crime novels you can read right now." One title on the list:
House of Bone and Rain by Gabino Iglesias

This book really takes the idea that violence begets violence to heart. Taking place in Puerto Rico, five teenage boys have been friends since childhood and have literally weathered the constant threat of death. But this time, death has come too close: the mother of one of five friends, Maria, has been gunned down, just as a hurricane is about to hit the island. Bimbo, the dead woman’s son, demands revenge, and his four friends are all going to help him. But the murderer may be connected to a powerful cartel on the island. Can Bimbo finish his quest, or will he and his friends die trying? Or will the hurricane sweep them away first?
Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six high school novels for adult readers

Miriam Gershow is the author of Closer, Survival Tips: Stories and The Local News. Her writing is featured in The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, and Black Warrior Review, among other journals. She is the recipient of a Fiction Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, an Oregon Literary Fellowship, and is a two-time finalist for the Oregon Book Award. She is the organizer of “100 Notable Small Press Books,” a curated list of the year’s recommended books from independent publishers.

[The Page 69 Test: The Local News]

At Lit Hub Gershow tagged "a half dozen books worth the trip back into the classrooms and corridors of high school." One title on the list:
Sara Nović, True Biz

I came to True Biz because it has everything I love in a high school novel: a cloistered school environment, in this case the residential River Valley School for the Deaf; aching students straining to grow up, with fitful rebellions and first loves; and a nearby adult, the personally and professionally beleaguered headmistress, whose story is braided through the students’ and the school’s. I stayed for the intimately drawn world of Deaf culture. Nović takes us inside the unique strains and joys of deaf characters, one coming to ASL for the first time as a teen, another contending with a hearing sibling. The plot is a page-turner, to be sure. But one of the unexpected beauties of this novel is how Nović renders oral speaking, signing, and sign language itself, including chapter headings. Nović makes a home for Deafness on the page that is as powerful as the story itself.
Read about the other books on the list at Lit Hub.

True Biz is among Olivia Wolfgang-Smith's ten novels about the drama of working for the family business and Alexandra Robbins's seven books with positive portrayals of educators.

--Marshal Zeringue

Saturday, June 14, 2025

Seven books about marital murder

Peter Swanson's novels include The Kind Worth Killing, winner of the New England Society Book Award, and finalist for the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger; Her Every Fear, an NPR book of the year; Before She Knew Him, and Eight Perfect Murders.

[My Book, The Movie: The Kind Worth Killing; The Page 69 Test: The Kind Worth Killing; Writers Read: Peter Swanson (February 2015)]

His new novel is Kill Your Darlings.

At CrimeReads Swanson tagged "seven books and one play on the theme of marital homicide," including:
A Suspension of Mercy (1965) by Patricia Highsmith

Speaking of Highsmith, there’s no shortage of ugly marriages in her body of work, some of which culminate in murder. In this rather odd and clever story, the main protagonist Sydney Bartleby is an aspiring crime writer, who acts out scenes from his books and screenplays, including one in which he pretends to carry his wife’s body out of his English country cottage in a rolled carpet. When his wife actually does go missing, he naturally becomes the prime suspect.
Read about the other books on the list at CrimeReads.

--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, June 13, 2025

Five of the best modern vampire novels

V. E. Schwab was born in California, raised in Tennessee, and currently splits her time between Denver, Colorado and Edinburgh, Scotland. She got her undergraduate degree in book design at Washington University in St. Louis, and her masters in depictions of monstrosity in medieval art at the University of Edinburgh.

Schwab's new novel is Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil.

At the Waterstones blog the author tagged "five modern vampire novels with real bite." One title on the list:
Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda

Genre collides with the literary landscape in Kohda’s Woman, Eating, a cerebral and surreal work following Lydia, a young, struggling artist and gallery intern who longs to consume the food from her youth, while only being able to digest blood. What follows is at once eccentric and compelling, an examination of race, misogyny, body image and one not-entirely-human woman’s relationship with her own hunger—what she craves, compared with what she needs.
Read about the other novels on the list.

Woman, Eating is among Brittany K. Allen's ten books for fans of Sinners and Isabelle McConville's eleven greatest recent bloodsucking books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thursday, June 12, 2025

Five titles featuring disastrous party scenes

Jonathan Parks-Ramage is a Los Angeles based novelist, playwright, screenwriter and journalist. His critically acclaimed debut novel Yes, Daddy was named one of the best queer books of 2021 by Entertainment Weekly, NBC News, The Advocate, Lambda Literary, Bustle, Goodreads and more. Yes, Daddy was also optioned for television by Amazon Studios.

Parks-Ramage's new novel is It's Not the End of the World.

At Lit Hub the author tagged five "novels which feature some of the worst (but most entertaining) parties-gone-wrong." One title on the list:
Raven Leilani, Luster

There are few things sadder than a sparsely attended birthday party. And when that birthday party happens to be for a child, it is particularly heartbreaking. Raven Leilani’s brilliant debut novel Luster features one such scene—a roller rink celebration with a mere two guests and a disco ball disaster which I will not spoil here, other than to say it perfectly encapsulates the feeling of a very bad birthday.

Adding to the particularly impactful nature of this scene, is the fact that it perfectly encapsulates the complicated dynamic between the four main characters of the book. Luster follows the thorny misadventures of Edie, a disaffected publishing employee who enters a somewhat kinky affair with Eric, a digital archivist living in New Jersey.

Surprisingly, Eric’s wife doesn’t banish Edie from their home upon finding out about her husband’s dalliances. In fact, she invites Edie deeper into their family’s life. Soon, Edie becomes a significant role model to Akila, Eric’s adopted daughter, and it becomes clear that Edie may be the only Black person in Akila’s life, adding an intense complication to an already complex dynamic.

Luster brims with dark humor, poignant human insight, and sentences that shine with stylistic verve.
Read about the other books on the list at Lit Hub.

Luster is among Emily Everett's five top novels about coming of age later in life, C. Michelle Lindley’s five best novels about art, Alana B. Lytle's eight top novels about destructive women, and Forsyth Harmon's five top obsessive female relationships in literature.

--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, June 11, 2025

Five great robot sci-fi books

At Book Riot Liberty Hardy tagged five great sci-fi books about robots, AI, and cyborgs, including:
Annie Bot by Sierra Greer

Annie Bot is a companion robot, designed to be the perfect girlfriend for her owner, Doug. Annie’s days are filled with chores, like cleaning and cooking, and she also fulfills Doug’s physical requests. But as Annie goes about her responsibilities, she is learning, too, becoming more sentient and responsive to Doug’s reactions to her. As their relationship moves forward, it turns more human, with complications and misunderstandings. Will Annie always stay with Doug, or will her growing free thought lead her away?
Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, June 10, 2025

Five novels about the end of democracy

Otho Eskin burst onto the thriller scene in 2020 with The Reflecting Pool, to great reviews and much book club interest. The novel introduces readers to Marko Zorn, a Washington, DC homicide detective with a strong moral compass who isn’t afraid to bend the rules to get results. The second thriller, Head Shot, was released in 2021 and the third book, Firetrap, was released in 2024. The Reflecting Pool, Head Shot, and Firetrap were all named Amazon Editors Picks for Best Mystery, Thriller or Suspense. The fourth book in the Marko Zorn series, Black Sun Rising, is now available, and has received enthusiastic advance praise: “Another Otho Eskin thriller that delivers double the trouble, twice the action, and quadruple the enjoyment.” —Steve Berry, New York Times and #1 internationally bestselling author.

At CrimeReads Eskin tagged five "novels that depict the end (or near-end) of democracy." One title on the list:
Stacey Abrams’ While Justice Sleeps (2021)

Abrams does not only fight authoritarianism in her work as a community organizer and voting rights activist, she takes the cause of democracy to the page. Her latest legal thriller, While Justice Sleeps, follows Avery Keene, an up-and-coming law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Howard Wynn. When the enigmatic justice falls into a coma, leaving Keene as his legal guardian and power of attorney, she must continue his investigation of a biotech firm and genetics company whose merger will empower the government to use a biological weapon against specific ethnic groups. This book is a vivid reminder of the longstanding alliance between medico-scientific research and fascist government—something that I explore in Black Sun Rising.
Read about the other novels on the list at CrimeReads.

While Justice Sleeps is among Brittany Bunzey's eight best legal thrillers.

--Marshal Zeringue

Monday, June 9, 2025

Seven books to scratch that "Pride and Prejudice" itch

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

At Lit Hub she tagged seven novels "if you’re craving an Austen-y fix." One title on the list:
Mariam Rahmani, Liquid: A Love Story

With its emphasis on the ruthless economic factors that affect one’s choice of mate, this debut novel scales the rom-com to late capitalist proportions. Here’s a truth universally experienced: a young scholar sets out to marry the richest man she can find. But sensibility gets in the way of good sense.
Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sunday, June 8, 2025

Five notable unusual detectives

Jo Callaghan works full-time as a senior strategist, carrying out research into the future impact of AI and genomics on the workforce.

Her series featuring DCS Kat Frank and AIDE, the world's first AI detective, includes In the Blink of an Eye, Leave No Trace, and (not yet in the US) Human Remains.

A lot of reviewers have focussed on the fact that AIDE Lock is unusual because he is an AI detective," Callaghan writes at the Waterstones blog, "but Lock just provides a different way into exploring the age-old debate of logic vs instinct."

One of the author's five favorite unusual detectives:
Precious Ramotswe in The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith

But perhaps the most unusual detective is Precious Ramotswe. This wonderful character is not scarred by tragedies or tormented by demons. ‘Detective agencies rely on human intuition and intelligence,’ explains the author in the first novel. ‘Both of which Mme Ramotswe had in abundance…she was a good detective and a good woman.’ Precious loves all the people that God made and is not driven by the pursuit of criminals or justice, but a belief that it is her duty to help ordinary people solve the mysteries in their lives. She doesn’t rely upon science or forensic evidence, ‘because everything you wanted to know about a person was written in their face.’ Perhaps because Precious is helping people with their everyday problems rather than catching those who disrupt the social order, she doesn’t need to be an outsider. And maybe this too is why these lovely books are so hugely popular and life affirming.
Read about the other detectives on Callaghan's list at the Waterstones blog.

Precious Ramotswe appears among Esther Inglis-Arkell's twelve greatest fictional detectives (who aren't Sherlock Holmes), Ellen Wehle's top eight fresh fictional female detectives, Ian Holding's top ten books that teach us something about southern Africa, and Adrian McKinty's ten best lady detectives.

--Marshal Zeringue

Saturday, June 7, 2025

Four crime novels featuring characters' struggles

The son of two librarians, Mark Stevens was raised in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and has worked as a reporter, as a national television news producer, and in public relations. The Fireballer (2023) was named Best Baseball Novel by Twin Bill literary magazine and named a Best Baseball Book of the Year by Spitball Magazine. His novel Antler Dust was a Denver Post bestseller in 2007 and 2009. Buried by the Roan, Trapline, and Lake of Fire were all finalists for the Colorado Book Award (2012, 2015, and 2016, respectively), which Trapline won. Trapline also won the Colorado Authors League Award for Best Genre Fiction.

Stevens’s short stories have been published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Mystery Tribune, and Denver Noir. In both 2016 and 2023, Stevens was named Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers’ Writer of the Year. He hosts a regular podcast for Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers and has served as president of the Rocky Mountain chapter for Mystery Writers of America.

His new novel is No Lie Lasts Forever.

[The Page 69 Test: The Fireballer; Q&A with Mark Stevens; My Book, The Movie: The Fireballer; Writers Read: Mark Stevens (June 2025)]

At CrimeReads Stevens tagged four top crime novels featuring characters' struggles. One title on the list:
Blood on the Tracks by Barbara Nickless

Blood on the Tracks starts out as a thriller, morphs into a mystery, and turns back again into a movie-ready action-packed finish. But “movie” sounds like this story follows the normal arcs. It doesn’t – because it’s a film. It’s no redemption story. It’s more complicated than that. It’s untidy and chaotic–in a good way. It’s ambitious and sprawling. The story swoops from big picture (hey, stop that train!) to intimate. It’s both violent and raw. Blood on the Tracks is about the ghosts of war, racism, class, rank, a harrowing search for identity and, of course, truth and justice. It rolls all those topics, and more, into a multi-faceted manhunt, at first, and clue-finding mystery. Railroad Police Special Agent Sydney Rose Parnell is a complex and interesting character. She’s haunted for many reasons, including the fact that she worked in corpse retrieval during the war in Iraq and she was also involved in a situation covering up certain atrocities over there. Sydney Rose is so relatable because her demons feel real. (This was Nickless’ debut, the first of many outstanding books.)
Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, June 6, 2025

Four sports books that aren’t really about sports

S.L. Price, a Senior Writer at Sports Illustrated from 1994-2019, has written five books—including the newly released The American Game: History and Hope in the Country of Lacrosse, a wide-ranging examination of the continent’s oldest and most representative sport.

At Lit Hub the author tagged four top "sports books that aren’t really about sports." One title on the list:
A Fan’s Notes by Frederick Exley

Diner may be my favorite film, not least because the sports-centric screenplay—Barry Levinson originally had it culminating at the 1959 NFL championship with its Baltimore Colts-obsessed protagonists hanging victoriously from the goal posts—got completely hijacked by the subtext of desperate male friendship. Exley’s 1968 novel was one of the first to blow up the sports book, make the faceless mass in the stands the story; his main character’s stalking of his own white whale, Giants running back Frank Gifford, is actually a picaresque and merciless meditation on ambition, booze, fading youth, male ego, and the gut-dropping moment when fandom becomes fate. It’s painful how beautiful it is, and vice-versa.

(See also: Among the Thugs by Bill Buford and Jimmy Connors Saved My Life by Joel Drucker)
Read about the other entries on the list.

A Fan's Notes is among Bruce DeSilva's six favorite books about sports, Laura Kipnis's six favorite books about wounded masculinity, and Dan Barden's six top stories of addiction.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thursday, June 5, 2025

Seven thrillers about murder in paradise

Katy Hays is the New York Times bestselling author of The Cloisters. She is an art history adjunct professor and holds an MA in art history from Williams College and pursued her PhD at UC Berkeley. Having previously worked at major art institutions, including the Clark Art Institute and SFMOMA, she now lives with her husband and their dog in Olympic Valley, California.

Hays's new novel is Saltwater.

At Electric Lit the author tagged seven thrillers about murder in holiday settings. One title on the list:
Morocco:
Who is Maud Dixon? by Alexandra Andrews

If you haven’t read Who is Maud Dixon? stop everything, grab a copy, and thank me later. The story of a young woman who takes a job as an assistant to a critically acclaimed and commercially successful writer—Maud Dixon—and discovers the pseudonymous author is not who she seems, Who is Maud Dixon? takes a dark turn when the two women travel to a Moroccan riad so that Maud can finish her next (overdue) novel. But Maud has bigger plans than writing and research. Luckily, so, too, does her assistant. Come for the publishing inside baseball, stay for the coasts of Morocco.
Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue