Pg. 69: Mia Tsai's "The Memory Hunters"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Memory Hunters by Mia Tsai.

About the book, from the publisher:

Inception meets Indiana Jones in this cinematic, slow burn, romantic fantasy following a headstrong academic and her equally stubborn bodyguard as they unearth an ancient secret that rocks the foundations of their society…and challenges their unspoken love for one another. A sapphic, dark academia-adjacent, climate dystopia — with mushrooms — for readers of Blood Over Bright Haven, A Memory Called Empire, and Ink Blood Sister Scribe.

Kiana Strade can dive deeper into blood memories than anyone alive. But instead of devoting her talents to the temple she’s meant to lead, Key wants to do research for the Museum of Human Memory. . . and to avoid the public eye.

Valerian IV's twin swords protect Key from murderous rivals and her own enthusiasm alike. Vale cares about Key as a friend—and maybe more—but most of all, she needs to keep her job so she can support her parents and siblings in the storm-torn south.

But when Key collects a memory that diverges from official history, only Vale sees the fallout. Key’s mentor suspiciously dismisses the finding; her powerful mother demands she stop research altogether. And Key, unusually affected by the memory, begins to lose moments, then minutes, then days.

As Vale becomes increasingly entangled in Key’s obsessive drive for answers, the women uncover a shattering discovery—and a devastating betrayal. Key and Vale can remain complicit, or they can jeopardize everything for the truth.

Either way, Key is becoming consumed by the past in more ways than one, and time is running out.

Visit Mia Tsai's website.

Q&A with Mia Tsai.

Writers Read: Mia Tsai.

The Page 69 Test: The Memory Hunters.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Susan Hylen's "Gender Mobility"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Gender Mobility: 7 Ideas about Gender in the New Testament Period by Susan Hylen.

About the book, from the publisher:

What if our long-held understandings of gender have less historical basis than we imagine?

The gender norms and sexual distinctions of the first century world that produced the New Testament were not strictly binary, as we might think. Although some ancient writers did indeed contrast male and female attributes, other social norms created considerable overlap between men and women.

In Gender Mobility, Susan E. Hylen argues that the Roman gender order was definitively non-binary. She makes a compelling case that freeborn men, freeborn women, freed men, freed women, enslaved men, and enslaved women all constituted different genders. Further, specifically non-binary genders like eunuchs held a place within Roman gender norms and systems. And the possibility that some people could change gender -- what Hylen calls "gender mobility" -- was a standard feature of the period.

Hylen also shows that, for the most part, gender options were not freely chosen, and moreover that gender norms were dominated by familiar forms of oppression -- a social domination that favored freeborn men and women over other groups. In this way, Hylen redirects our contemporary thinking about gender roles to the ancient past, while simultaneously opening our imaginations to other ways that societies have constructed gender. This thought-provoking book serves our own current moment as we continue to debate gender norms and the institutions that maintain them.

Learn more about Gender Mobility at the Oxford University Press.

The Page 99 Test: Gender Mobility.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven wedding-themed cozies

Valerie (V. M.) Burns is a mystery writer whose novels and short stories have been finalists for the Agatha, Anthony, Edgar, and Next Generation Indie Book Awards. She is the author of the Mystery Bookshop, Dog Club, RJ Franklin, and Baker Street Mystery series, as well as the Bailey the Bloodhound Mysteries under the name Kallie E. Benjamin. Burns is a member of Sisters in Crime, Crime Writers of Color, Mystery Writers of America, and the Crime Writers' Association. She is also an adjunct professor in the Writing Popular Fiction Program at Seton Hill University in Greensburg, PA. Born and raised in northwestern Indiana, Burns now lives in the southeastern United States with her two poodles.

Burns's new cozy mystery Icing on the Murder.

At CrimeReads the author tagged seven favorite wedding-themed cozies, including:

Krista Davis, The Diva Takes the Cake (A Domestic Diva Mystery)

In the second book in the Domestic Diva Mystery series, Sophie Winston’s sister, Hannah, is getting married—again! Sophie doesn’t love her soon-to-be-brother-in-law, but does that mean he’s a killer. Does it? When his ex-wife is murdered, that’s the question that Sophie needs to find out.

With a list of suspects that is as long as the guest list, Sophie must solve the murder in time to stop her sister from making the biggest—and possibly the last—mistake of her life.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Mia Tsai reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Mia Tsai, author of The Memory Hunters.

Her entry begins:

Aside from books by my colleagues and friends in the industry, which I am always happy to read (Gabriella Buba's Daughters of Flood and Fury; JR Dawson's The Lighthouse at the Edge of the World; LD Lewis's The Dead Withheld; Yume Kitasei's Saltcrop; AD Sui's The Iron Garden Sutra; Jared Poon's City of Others; EM Anderson's The Keeper of Lonely Spirits), I try to keep a mix of personal interest nonfiction and fiction on the desk. Since I work in genre and am basically always reading something speculative or romantic, nonfiction has truly become my escape. I've been collecting books about horses for the next project's research (Susanna Forrest's The Age of the Horse) as well as some architectural books...[read on]

About The Memory Hunters, from the publisher:

Inception meets Indiana Jones in this cinematic, slow burn, romantic fantasy following a headstrong academic and her equally stubborn bodyguard as they unearth an ancient secret that rocks the foundations of their society…and challenges their unspoken love for one another. A sapphic, dark academia-adjacent, climate dystopia — with mushrooms — for readers of Blood Over Bright Haven, A Memory Called Empire, and Ink Blood Sister Scribe.

Kiana Strade can dive deeper into blood memories than anyone alive. But instead of devoting her talents to the temple she’s meant to lead, Key wants to do research for the Museum of Human Memory. . . and to avoid the public eye.

Valerian IV's twin swords protect Key from murderous rivals and her own enthusiasm alike. Vale cares about Key as a friend—and maybe more—but most of all, she needs to keep her job so she can support her parents and siblings in the storm-torn south.

But when Key collects a memory that diverges from official history, only Vale sees the fallout. Key’s mentor suspiciously dismisses the finding; her powerful mother demands she stop research altogether. And Key, unusually affected by the memory, begins to lose moments, then minutes, then days.

As Vale becomes increasingly entangled in Key’s obsessive drive for answers, the women uncover a shattering discovery—and a devastating betrayal. Key and Vale can remain complicit, or they can jeopardize everything for the truth.

Either way, Key is becoming consumed by the past in more ways than one, and time is running out.

Visit Mia Tsai's website.

Q&A with Mia Tsai.

Writers Read: Mia Tsai.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Kenneth L. Feder's "Native America"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Native America: The Story of the First Peoples by Kenneth L. Feder.

About the book, from the publisher:

An epic deep history of the Indigenous peoples of North America, covering more than 20,000 years of astonishing diversity, adaptation, resilience, and continuity

Native America presents an infinitely surprising and fascinating deep history of the continent’s Indigenous peoples. Kenneth Feder, a leading expert on Native American history and archaeology, draws on archaeological, historical, and cultural evidence to tell the ongoing story, more than 20,000 years in the making, of an incredibly resilient and diverse mixture of peoples, revealing how they have ingeniously adapted to the many changing environments of the continent, from the Arctic to the desert Southwest.

Richly illustrated, Native America introduces close to a hundred different peoples, each with their own language, economic and social system, and religious beliefs. Here, we meet the Pequot, Tunxis, Iroquois, and Huron of the Northeast; the Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, and Apache of the Southwest; the Hidatsa, Mandan, and Lakota of the Northern Plains; the Haida, Kwakiutl, Nootka, and Salish of the Northwest Coast; the Tule River and Mohave of Southern California; the Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole of the Southeast; and the Inuit and Kalaallit of the Arctic. We learn about hunters of enormous Ice Age beasts; people who raised stone toolmaking to the level of art; a Native American empire ruled by a king and queen, with a huge city at its center and colonies hundreds of miles away; a society that made the desert bloom by designing complex irrigation networks; brilliant architects who built fairy castles in sandstone cliffs; and artists who produced beautiful and moving petroglyphs and pictographs that reflect their deep thinking about history, the sacred, the land, and the sky.

Native America is not about peoples of the past, but vibrant, living ones with an epic history of genius and tenacity—a history that everyone should know.

Learn more about Native America at the Princeton University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Native America.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top dieselpunk novels

K. W. Colyard is the author of the BNW-nominated “Those Who Forget and Those Who Perish,” which appeared in Seize the Press in 2022. Their fiction has also appeared in Clarkesworld and Diabolical Plots. They are currently working on a horror novel.

At Book Riot Colyard tagged five top works of dieselpunk, steampunk’s darker and dirtier cousin. One title on the list:

Amberlough by Lara Elena Donnelly

The Amberlough Dossier trilogy hearkens back to Weimar Germany — a world of bright lights, big cities, and queerness under looming threat. Here, readers meet Cyril, a spy whose last mission just went sideways. Forced to work for the socially conservative One State Party, Cyril must protect his criminal lover and cabaret emcee, Aristide, from harm. Together with Cordelia, Aristide’s partner in crime, the two men must navigate a deadly web of intrigue in Amberlough.

Read about another entry on Colyard's list.

My Book, The Movie: Amberlough.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Vicki Delany's "Tea with Jam & Dread"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Tea with Jam & Dread (Tea by the Sea Mysteries) by Vicki Delany.

About the book, from the publisher:

Cape Cod tearoom owner Lily Roberts leaves New England for old England to attend a party for an aristocratic centenarian—but what goes on there is anything but noble...

Long ago, Lily’s grandmother Rose worked as a kitchen maid at Thornecroft Castle, and now Elizabeth, dowager countess of Frockmorton, is celebrating her one hundredth birthday. Rose still has fond feelings for her onetime employer, so a group trip to Yorkshire is planned. It’s also an opportunity for Lily to visit her boyfriend, who’s currently working in England—and to indulge in some British tea.

Much has changed, however, and the ancestral home is now a luxury hotel, which will be closed for a week to accommodate the big bash, much to the chagrin of Elizabeth’s grandson, Julien—leading Lily to overhear an argument among the younger generation about the fate of the family fortune. Little do they know that Elizabeth plans to sell the famous Frockmorton Sapphires out of the family for the first time in centuries...

The icing on the cake comes when the jewels suddenly vanish—and things really go nuts when a party guest dies from an allergic reaction to almonds that someone smuggled into Lily’s coronation chicken sandwiches. Now she’ll have to scour the property to find out who would commit murder in such a manor...

Visit Vicki Delany's website, and follow her on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.

The Page 69 Test: Rest Ye Murdered Gentlemen.

The Page 69 Test: A Scandal in Scarlet.

The Page 69 Test: Murder in a Teacup.

Writers Read: Vicki Delany (September 2021).

The Page 69 Test: Deadly Summer Nights.

The Page 69 Test: The Game is a Footnote.

Writers Read: Vicki Delany (January 2023).

Writers Read: Vicki Delany (January 2024).

The Page 69 Test: The Sign of Four Spirits.

The Page 69 Test: A Slay Ride Together With You.

Writers Read: Vicki Delany (December 2024).

The Page 69 Test: The Incident of the Book in the Nighttime.

Writers Read: Vicki Delany.

The Page 69 Test: Tea with Jam & Dread.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Erin Michaels's "Test, Measure, Punish"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Test, Measure, Punish: How the Threat of Closure Harms Students, Destroys Teachers, and Fails Schools by Erin Michaels.

About the book, from the publisher:

The risk of closure and repression in schools

In the last two decades, education officials have closed a rising number of public schools nationwide related to low performance. These schools are mainly located in neglected neighborhoods with high concentrations of poverty. Despite this credible threat of closure, relatively few individual schools threatened with closure for low performance in the United States are actually shut down. Yet, as Erin Michaels argues, the looming threat is ever present. Test, Measure, Punish critically shifts the focus from school shutdowns to the more typical situation within these strained public schools: operating under persistent risk of closure.

Many K-12 schools today face escalating sanctions if they do not improve according to repressive state mandates, which, in turn, incentivize schools to put into place nonstop test drills and strict student conduct rules. Test, Measure, Punish traces how threats of school closure have distorted education to become more punitive which disproportionately impacts―even targets―Black and Latinx communities and substantially hurts student social development. This book addresses how these new punitive schooling conditions for troubled schools reproduce racial inequalities.

Michaels centers her research in a suburban upstate New York high school serving mainly working-class Black and Latinx students. She reveals a new model of schooling based on testing and security regimes that expands the carceral state, making the students feel dejected, criminalized, and suspicious of the system, their peers, and themselves. Test, Measure, Punish offers a new theory of schooling inequality and shows in vivid detail why state-led school reforms represent a new level of racialized citizenship in an already fragmented public education system.

Learn more about Test, Measure, Punish at the NYU Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Test, Measure, Punish.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven top books that explore the myths of sirens

Kalie Cassidy was born and raised in Southern California and spent over a decade working in LA as a professional theater actor, coach, and acting teacher. She now lives in Cleveland, Ohio with her two children and husband. She spends most of her time dreaming up new stories in her library, gardening, walking the nearby woods, and learning about “real” weather.

Cassidy's new novel is In the Veins of the Drowning.

At Lit Hub she tagged seven titles that explore the myths of sirens. One novel on the list:

Rose Sutherland, A Sweet Sting of Salt

Beautifully windswept, with a touch of the gothic, this sapphic retelling of the selkie wife folktale is rife with yearning and features a slow-burn and tender romance. The setting—Nova Scotia in the 1800s—makes for a stunningly atmospheric backdrop, but the unabashed pining in A Sweet Sting of Salt is the real star of the show.

It follows a young midwife as she endeavors to uncover a dark secret about her neighbor and his mysterious new, pregnant wife. Now she’ll have to fight to keep herself—and the woman she’s come to love—safe. If you love historical fiction with a hint of magic, this one’s for you.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Carolyn Dasher reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Carolyn Dasher, author of American Sky: A Novel.

Her entry begins:

I lean toward fiction that tells a great story while also digging into the essential truths of what it means to be human. But no soapboxing, please!

I recently finished Martyr, a moving, gorgeous book by Kaveh Akbar that explores the immigrant experience, addiction, death and loss, finding true love, the power of dreams and art—I could go on. And the ending! Absolute apocalyptic brilliance.

Periodically, I try to fill the gaps in my “classics” education....[read on]

About American Sky, from the publisher:

Three generations of indomitable women navigate life on their terms in an epic and inspiring historical novel about love and war, family secrets, and mothers and daughters finding the freedom to fly.

It’s 1943. The war rages. The newly launched WASP program is recruiting. And barnstormer fan Georgeanne “George” Ector’s dream is to take to the skies. Grit is what she inherited from her mother, an Oklahoma farm girl at the turn of the century who preferred taking apart an engine to stitching linens for a hope chest. She taught her daughter well. George isn’t the only woman about to follow her calling.

Vivian Shaw, so similar to George they’re like sisters, also longs for a career flying the fastest planes in the American arsenal. For a time, George and Vivian triumph. But at war’s end, the adventurous women are grounded by the expectations of others: to get married, have children, and raise a family. Vivian has other plans. So, eventually, do George’s daughters, Ruth and Ivy, who embark on very different paths of their own.

Three generations of women staring down a vast horizon of possibilities are determined to navigate whatever comes their way―from the hardships of war and home to love and loss, and to the fallout of a long-held secret that could change their lives forever.

Visit Carolyn Dasher's website.

Q&A with Carolyn Dasher.

The Page 69 Test: American Sky.

Writers Read: Carolyn Dasher.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Alan Kramer's "Concentration Camps"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Concentration Camps: A Global History by Alan Kramer.

About the book, from the publisher:

A global and comprehensive history of a modern institution of inhumanity.

In popular perception concentration camps are synonymous with genocide and Nazi racial extermination. Yet concentration camps were and are a global phenomenon, not restricted to Nazi Germany, used at times even by democracies, with an astonishing range of functions.

Drawing together a wide range of multi-lingual archival research and synthesising a broad secondary literature, Alan Kramer provides here a comprehensive history of concentration camps, charting their first establishment at the beginning of the twentieth century on the colonial periphery, through their most extreme and inhuman instances in the mid-twentieth century, to their continued use today. Concentration camps are shown to be a truly transnational phenomenon that emerged both simultaneously (within and between imperial spheres―Britain, Spain, the USA, and Germany around 1900), and diachronically (from then to the First World War, the Gulag, and Nazi camps). Such camps existed (and exist) under a variety of regimes, often concomitant with empire-building by revolutionary dictatorships, as sites of genocide, mass murder, and performative violence, but also as central elements of utopian schemes of social and racial transformation. Integrating the perspective of perpetrators and the victims and contextualising them within the historiography of other carceral institutions, the book will reshape the way we think about concentration camps as part of modern civilization, past and present.

Learn more about Concentration Camps at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Concentration Camps.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven books that show Pittsburgh is the best place to come of age

Anna Bruno is the author of Fine Young People and Ordinary Hazards. She teaches at the University of Iowa’s Tippie College of Business and the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. Previously, Bruno managed public relations and marketing for technology and financial services companies in Silicon Valley. She holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, an MBA from Cornell University, and a BA from Stanford University. She lives in Iowa City with her husband, two sons, and blue heeler.

At Electric Lit Bruno tagged "seven books that show Pittsburgh is the best place to come of age—at any age." One title on the list:

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon

Chabon’s debut is the tragicomic coming-of-age of Art Bechstein, during the summer after he graduates from college. Art makes friends and lovers, exploring his sexual identity as he reckons with his mobster father’s sins. After meeting his buddy, Cleveland, at the boiler plant, which Art affectionately calls the Cloud Factory, they head out to collect illegal interest for Uncle Lenny, a local loan shark. It is on this journey that Art gets his first street lesson in economics, “the precise measurement of shit eating, it’s the science of misery.” Nothing captures the feeling of growing up quite like Art’s Museum of Real Life. He is a tourist in his own city, a spectator amused by the wretched circumstances of other people’s lives, until finally, he sees the world for what it is.

Read about another book on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: J.T. Ellison's "Last Seen"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Last Seen by J.T. Ellison.

About the book, from the publisher:

From New York Times bestselling author J.T. Ellison comes a twisted psychological thriller about the bonds of family and the disconnect between memory and the truth.

Come here. Come closer.

Halley James knows her marriage is over. But she’s not prepared for the rest of her life to fall apart too.

No one can hear you. No one can help you.

She just lost her job at the forensics lab. Her dad needs emergency surgery. But the biggest blow comes back home in Marchburg, Virginia, where she discovers her mother didn’t actually die in a car crash. Her mom was murdered―and her father lied about it all these years.

I have nothing to hide from you. Are you hiding something from me?

Since she was six years old, it’s been Halley and her dad. Now, she doesn’t know what to believe. Desperate for the truth, Halley chases down a lead in Brockville, Tennessee. But all there is not as it seems. Brockville’s utopian charm hides a chilling darkness. And Halley’s search for answers threatens to expose an unspeakable reality.

Follow J.T. Ellison @thrillerchick and read about the process of writing Last Seen at The Creative Edge Substack.

The Page 69 Test: Edge of Black.

The Page 69 Test: When Shadows Fall.

My Book, The Movie: When Shadows Fall.

My Book, The Movie: What Lies Behind.

The Page 69 Test: What Lies Behind.

The Page 69 Test: No One Knows.

My Book, The Movie: No One Knows.

The Page 69 Test: Lie to Me.

My Book, The Movie: Good Girls Lie.

The Page 69 Test: Good Girls Lie.

Writers Read: J. T. Ellison (January 2020).

Q&A with J.T. Ellison.

The Page 69 Test: A Very Bad Thing.

The Page 69 Test: Last Seen.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Julia Brock's "Closed Seasons"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Closed Seasons: The Transformation of Hunting in the Modern South by Julia Brock.

About the book, from the publisher:

In a unique and personal exploration of the game and fish laws in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi from the Progressive Era to the 1930s, Julia Brock offers an innovative history of hunting in the New South. The implementation of conservation laws made significant strides in protecting endangered wildlife species, but it also disrupted traditional hunting practices and livelihoods, particularly among African Americans and poor whites.

Closed Seasons highlights how hunting and fishing regulations were relatively rare in the nineteenth century, but the emerging conservation movement and the rise of a regional “sportsman” identity at the turn of the twentieth century eventually led to the adoption of state-level laws. Once passed, however, these laws, were plagued by obstacles, including insufficient funding and enforcement. Brock traces the dizzying array of factors—propaganda, racial tensions, organizational activism, and federal involvement—that led to effective game and fish laws in the South.

Learn more about Closed Seasons at the University of North Carolina Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Closed Seasons.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five thrillers that grab you from page one

Ryan Pote is a twelve-year veteran Navy helicopter pilot who was part of a joint interagency special operations task force, deployed throughout Central and South America conducting counter narcotics. Before the Navy, he was a scuba diving instructor in Hawaii and a lab tech conducting algae-biofuels research. He holds a Masters degree in History from Ashland University. He lives with his wife and children in New England.

Pote's new novel is Blood and Treasure.

At CrimeReads the author tagged five thriller novels that grab you from page one. One title on the list:

The Gray Man by Mark Greaney

Hook: Court Gentry, a CIA-trained assassin, is on the run from his own agency, dodging bullets and betrayal in a globe-trotting game of cat-and-mouse that starts with a bang—literally.

From the first page, Greaney’s The Gray Man is a shot of adrenaline straight to the heart. Court’s a lone wolf with a moral streak, and when his employers turn on him, you’re instantly rooting for this deadly underdog. It’s a lean, mean thriller machine that inspired a Netflix blockbuster, and it’s perfect for readers who love their heroes gritty and their action relentless. Speaking of Greaney, he’s already raving about my Blood and Treasure, calling it “The must-read debut thriller of 2025.” If the king of thrillers is hyped, you know it’s gonna be a wild ride!

Read about another entry on the list.

The Gray Man is among Isabelle McConville's eight assassin stories you don’t want to miss.

The Page 69 Test: The Gray Man.

My Book, The Movie: The Gray Man.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Christina Dotson

From my Q&A with Christina Dotson, author of Love You To Death: A Novel:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

I always envy writers who can create the perfect title. Unfortunately, that is not a gift I possess. I initially titled this book A Good Place To Stop, which my agent vetoed right away because it’s obviously terrible. We wanted the book’s title to have a wedding theme, but we knew that choosing one could potentially lead readers to think this was a romance novel. In the end, after several rounds of brainstorming, it was someone from my editor’s team who came up with the title, Love You To Death. And while we know this isn’t necessarily a unique title, it does give readers a deeper understanding of Kayla and Zorie’s bond. It’s a perfect reminder of the book’s themes surrounding loyalty, manipulation and...[read on]

Follow Christina Dotson on Instagram and Threads.

Q&A with Christina Dotson.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Chris Sweeney's "The Feather Detective"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Feather Detective: Mystery, Mayhem, and the Magnificent Life of Roxie Laybourne by Chris Sweeney.

About the book, from the publisher:

The fascinating and remarkable true story of the world’s first forensic ornithologist—Roxie Laybourne, who broke down barriers for women, solved murders, and investigated deadly airplane crashes with nothing more than a microscope and a few fragments of feathers.

In 1960, an Eastern Airlines flight had no sooner lifted from the runway at Boston Logan Airport when it struck a flock of birds and took a nosedive into the shallow waters of the Boston Harbor, killing sixty-two people. This was the golden age of commercial airflight—luxury in the skies—and safety was essential to the precarious future of air travel. So the FAA instructed the bird remains be sent to the Smithsonian Institution for examination, where they would land on the desk of the only person in the world equipped to make sense of it all.

Her name was Roxie Laybourne, a diminutive but singular woman with thick glasses, a heavy Carolina drawl, and a passion for birds. Roxie didn’t know it at the time, but that box full of dead birds marked the start of a remarkable scientific journey. She became the world’s first forensic ornithologist, investigating a range of crimes and calamites on behalf of the FBI, the US Air Force, and even NASA.

The Feather Detective takes readers deep within the vaunted backrooms of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History to tell the story of a burgeoning science and the enigmatic woman who pioneered it. While her male colleagues in taxidermy embarked on expeditions around the world and got plum promotions, Roxie stayed with her birds. Using nothing more than her microscope and bits of feathers, she helped prosecute murderers, kidnappers, and poachers. When she wasn’t testifying in court or studying evidence from capital crimes, she was helping aerospace engineers and Air Force crews as they raced to bird-proof their airplanes before disaster struck again.

In The Feather Detective, award-winning journalist Chris Sweeney charts the astonishing life and work of this overlooked pioneer. Once divorced, once widowed, and sometimes surly, Roxie shattered stereotypes and pushed boundaries. Her story is one of persistence and grit, obsession and ingenuity. Drawing on reams of archival material, court documents, and exclusive interviews, Sweeney delivers a moving and amusing portrait of a woman who overcame cultural and scientific obstacles at every turn, forever changing our understanding of birds—and the feathers they leave behind.

Visit Chris Sweeney's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Feather Detective.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thirteen notable feminist books

Emma Specter is the Culture Writer at Vogue, where she covers film, TV, books, politics, news and (almost) anything queer. She has previously worked at GARAGE and LAist and has freelanced for outlets including The Hairpin, Bon Appetit, them, the Hollywood Reporter and more. Her first book is More Please: On Food, Fat, Bingeing, Longing and the Lust for ‘Enough’.

Specter lives in Los Angeles. In her spare time, she shops for vintage purses and bakes a lot of bagels.

For Vogue she and her colleagues tagged thirteen feminist books that deserve a place on your nightstand. One title on the list:

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo (2019)

It may be surprising to see fiction on this list, but Evaristo’s skill at portraying 12 very different protagonists in this Booker Prize–winning novel, which spans decades’ worth of race, class, gender, and sexuality-based identity, more than deserves some good old-fashioned feminist acclaim.

Read about another entry on the list.

Girl, Woman, Other is among Sarah Davis-Goff's six top books about women working together, Ore Agbaje-Williams's seven books featuring very, very complicated friendships, Cecile Pin's seven novels featuring displacement in multicultural London, and Kasim Ali's nine top books about interracial relationships.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Thomas Maltman's "Ashes to Ashes"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Ashes to Ashes by Thomas Maltman.

About the book, from the publisher:

Small-town Minnesota teenager Basil “The Brute” Thorson—a shy, reluctant wrestling star and “special” tracked into special education classes—vows to make his family whole again in the wake of multiple tragedies, during a year in which his community is roiled by strange religious and mythological events.

Another perceptive and empathetic novel from the author of Indie Next and All Iowa Reads selection Little Wolves, blending myth, history, and religion with a nuanced look at contemporary rural life, perfect for fans of Marilynne Robinson, Richard Russo, and Paul Harding.

When the ashes from an Ash Wednesday service in the prairie town of Andwhen, Minnesota, refuse to wash off, members of a small congregation are left wondering whether they’ve been blessed or cursed. For Basil—a “gentle giant” of a teen reeling from a farming accident that shattered his family and haunted by his mother’s decade-long confinement in a state mental hospital—the ashes become a sign. He embarks on a secret ritual of fasting and prayer, seeking meaning in his unraveling world.

Meanwhile, Basil and his friends, Lukas and Morgan (who self-identify as “a gay, a goth, and a giant”), stumble upon what may be the centuries-old remains of a Viking explorer in a local meadow, a find that brings its own complications, as folk history clashes with the agendas of online racists. As Basil’s relentless fasting warps his grip on reality, the danger he poses to himself and his family escalates.

Blending the fragments of a Norse saga with a finely observed portrait of rural Midwestern life at the start of the pandemic, Thomas Maltman delivers a novel of narrative daring and profound empathy—his most inventive and compassionate work yet.

Learn more about the book and author at Thomas Maltman's website.

The Page 69 Test: Little Wolves.

Writers Read: Thomas Maltman (February 2013).

The Page 69 Test: Ashes to Ashes.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Richard J. Sexton's "Food Fight"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Food Fight: Misguided Policies, Supply Challenges, and the Impending Struggle to Feed a Hungry World by Richard J. Sexton.

About the book, from the publisher:

Society's most basic challenge is arguably to produce and distribute enough food for its citizens. In 2023, 733 million people faced hunger and 2.3 billion were moderately or severely food insecure. Feeding a growing world population is becoming more difficult in the face of climate change, pest resistance to traditional treatments, and misguided government policies that limit how much food ends up on our plates. Policies to support biofuels, organic agriculture, local foods, and small farms and to oppose genetically modified foods all reduce food production on existing land. This leads to higher food prices, increased carbon emissions, and less natural habitat as cropland expands. Food Fight documents the challenges to adequately feeding the world in the twenty-first century and illustrates the ways in which contemporary food policies in the United States, Europe, and beyond imperil food security. Richard J. Sexton provides a window into the world of modern agriculture and food supply chains. He separates the wheat from the chaff to distinguish policies that will limit, or expand, the global food supply, and he explains how we can construct a food system that forestalls future hunger and environmental degradation.

Learn more about Food Fight at the University of California Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Food Fight.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten books for "Murderbot" fans

At B&N Reads Margarita Polkowska tagged ten "Murderbot read-alikes with just enough existential dread." One title on the list:

Sea of Tranquility: A novel by Emily St. John Mandel

A haunting tale of time travel, love and humanity, this book follows a host of interconnected characters that jump at the chance to make mindful choices that have the power to impact the timeline of the universe — in the best way.

Read about another entry on the list.

Sea of Tranquility is among Mark Skinner's twenty-five best time travel books.

--Marshal Zeringue