Q&A with Nina McConigley

From my Q&A with Nina McConigley, author of How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder: A Novel:

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

The book had another title while I was working on it. It was originally called The Call of Migratory Things. Which is a line from Angels in America. That play had a huge influence on me, and since my book was set in the 80’s, I loved it as a title. When I first started working on the book with my editor, she asked me about the title. And mentioned she felt it was very lyrical, and made people think of more typical immigrant narratives – a more familiar story. I agreed with her. We agreed my book wasn’t that. It was weird – so why not have a little cheekier title? We went through a list and quickly settled on How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder. It summed up the book – race, murder, a kind of how-to. And then I saw the cover image of anti-freeze and knew it was all perfect. The book is serious, but also really playful, and...[read on]

Visit Nina McConigley's website.

The Page 69 Test: How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder.

Writers Read: Nina McConigley.

Q&A with Nina McConigley.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Linda Wilgus's "The Sea Child"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Sea Child: A Novel by Linda Wilgus.

About the book, from the publisher:

In this enchanting, adventurous debut novel, a band of seafaring smugglers lands on the Cornish coast, where a young widow with a mysterious past becomes entangled in their schemes—and with their charismatic captain.

England, early 1800s: Destitute and forced to leave her home in London, Isabel, a young widow of the Napoleonic Wars, returns to the village on the rugged Cornish coast where she was found as a small child, dripping wet and alone. Hoping to learn more about her enigmatic origins, she’s shocked to find herself at the center of a local legend claiming that she is the daughter of a sea spirit.

As Isabel adjusts to life in her rented cottage, the coast is rife with smugglers and the Revenue Officers who hunt them. One evening, a group of dangerous raiders arrives at her door, carrying their wounded captain, Jack. Remembering her late husband’s fatal injuries, Isabel decides to care for Jack and soon feels a powerful connection to him. Even after Jack recovers, Isabel finds herself unable to forget him. Meanwhile, the sea calls to her, and a Revenue Officer who likes to hang smugglers poses a threat in more ways than one. Before long, Isabel finds herself caught on the wrong side of the law, with violence and heartbreak looming.

From the coves of Cornwall to the wild coast of Brittany, during perilous raids at sea and society dinner parties, Isabel fights to understand her kinship with the ocean while seeking answers about her past. But when the threat catches up with them and Jack’s life hangs in the balance, she must draw on all her courage and delve deep into the mythical heart of the Cornish coast. For only a sea child can turn the tide...

Visit Linda Wilgus's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Sea Child.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Susannah Wilson's "A Most Quiet Murder"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: A Most Quiet Murder: Maternity, Affliction, and Violence in Late Nineteenth-Century France by Susannah Wilson.

About the book, from the publisher:

A Most Quiet Murder examines the death of a five-year-old girl in late nineteenth-century France, unfolding the mystery through judicial investigations, psychiatric medical evaluations, and ultimately, a trial for murder.

The investigators quickly learned that the child, Henriette, had been abducted by Marie-Françoise Fiquet, an employee at the city tobacco factory and known troublemaker. Fiquet had taken the child back to her home and kept her there all day. But what actually happened between the abduction at midday and the discovery of the child's body at five o'clock in the morning remained a mystery.

Susannah Wilson uses archival records, press coverage, and psychiatric reports to reveal how the troubled history and reputation of Marie-Françoise Fiquet, marked by suspicions of sexual debauchery, infanticide, abortions, poisoning, theft, and extortion, was a case study in an emerging medical paradigm. Her signs of trauma, psychological disturbance, and medical morphine abuse provide insight into factitious disorders―or simulated illnesses―that would be more commonly observed in the following century.

A Most Quiet Murder provides a new view of nineteenth-century France, where the law and public authorities intervened in the lives of the working classes and their children during moments of crisis to exercise the law of the land. The murder of a child reveals the connections between the psychology of female violence, the emergent understanding of factitious disorders, and the psychologically complex motives that extend beyond simple altruism.

Learn more about A Most Quiet Murder at the Cornell University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: A Most Quiet Murder.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven novels about women who lose the plot

Sara Levine is the author of the novels The Hitch and Treasure Island!!! and the short story collection Short Dark Oracles. She earned a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from Brown University and was awarded a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities.

Levine teaches creative writing at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and on Substack at Delusions of Grammar.

At Electric Lit she tagged seven novels that "celebrate reckless speed, dizzying intensity, audacious rudeness, and the abandonment of social norms." One title on the list:

The Vegetarian by Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith

The Vegetarian (ch’aesikchuŭija, translated into English by Deborah Smith) centers on a Korean housewife who abruptly stops eating meat. Told in three sections, the novel is full of surprises, partly because it’s told from three points of view, none of which belongs to the vegetarian herself. Yeong-hye’s husband, a loveless man who views his wife as “completely unremarkable in every way,” begins the story of his recalcitrant wife, but his contribution can’t explain her motives, only document his growing fury that she resembles a “hospital patient” and no longer wears a bra or willingly provides sex. The second part documents her brother-in-law’s erotic obsession with her, even as Yeong-hye descends into psychosis and physically wastes away. The third part turns to her sister, In-hye, a hard-working, well-organized mother who is appalled, for her own reasons, at her sister’s transformation. We’ve all read books about women suffering under patriarchy, but has any protagonist ever responded to the violence by willing herself to become a tree?

Read about another title on the list.

The Vegetarian is among Kate Hamilton's eight books about complicated desire, Monika Kim's five best body horror novels, Adam Biles's top ten allegories, M. S. Coe's eleven titles about women on the brink, and Amy Sackville's ten top novels about painters.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andromeda Romano-Lax's "What Boys Learn," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Andromeda Romano-Lax's What Boys Learn.

The entry begins:

To play Abby, my single mother character worried about whether her teenage son was involved in the deaths of two schoolmates, I nominate Elizabeth Olsen (Eternity, WandaVision, Avengers, Love & Death). Abby is struggling, stressed-out, and hopefully sympathetic. She also has a brother in prison and secrets in her past. Ideally, the reader will understand most of her choices yet still wonder if they know the whole story. Olsen manages to pack emotional nuances into every performance. She can be charming, sly, sincere, solemn, or murderous. If she won’t play Abby, I am willing to keep writing characters until we hit upon one that excites her. (Kidding, but I really do love Olsen.)

To play Benjamin, I need a young actor who...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Andromeda Romano-Lax's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Spanish Bow.

The Page 69 Test: The Detour.

Writers Read: Andromeda Romano-Lax (February 2012).

The Page 69 Test: What Boys Learn.

Writers Read: Andromeda Romano-Lax.

My Book, The Movie: What Boys Learn.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Nina McConigley reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Nina McConigley, author of How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder: A Novel.

Her entry begins:

I am reading two books right now at once. One is the background for a new writing project I am just starting, Black Convicts: How Slavery Shaped Australia by Santilla Chingaipe. I haven’t written a lot of historical fiction, but this is connected to family ancestry, and so I am doing a deep dive to understand the slave trade and convicts in Australia. Especially women convicts. It makes me realize how narrow my view of history and place is. And how we are so taught the history of where we are from, and not...[read on]

About How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder, from the publisher:

A bold, inventive, and fiercely original debut novel that begins with an uncle dead and his tween niece’s private confession to the reader—she and her sister killed him, and they blame the British.

Summer, 1986. The Creel sisters, Georgie Ayyar and Agatha Krishna, welcome their aunt, uncle and young cousin—newly arrived from India—into their house in rural Wyoming where they’ll all live together. Because this is what families do. That is, until the sisters decide that it’s time for their uncle to die.

According to Georgie, the British are to blame. And to understand why, you need to hear her story. She details the violence hiding in their house and history, her once-unshakeable bond with Agatha Krishna, and her understanding of herself as an Indian-American in the heart of the West. Her account is, at every turn, cheeky, unflinching, and infectiously inflected with the trappings of teendom, including the magazine quizzes that help her make sense of her life. At its heart, the tale she weaves is:

a) a vivid portrait of an extended family
b) a moving story of sisterhood
c) a playful ode to the 80s
d) a murder mystery (of sorts)
e) an unexpected and unwaveringly powerful meditation on history and language, trauma and healing, and the meaning of independence

Or maybe it’s really:

f) all of the above.

Visit Nina McConigley's website.

The Page 69 Test: How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder.

Writers Read: Nina McConigley.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Alex Diamond's "Governing the Excluded"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Governing the Excluded: Rural Livelihoods Beyond Coca in Colombia's Peace Laboratory by Alex Diamond.

About the book, from the publisher:

An on-the-ground description of Colombia’s peace process as lived by the rural populations most affected by it.

The Colombian village of Briceño might, at first glimpse, look like many communities in the rural Global South. Many of the people living there rely on small-scale farming, even as a newly constructed hydroelectric dam threatens traditional livelihoods. Yet after decades where Briceño suffered from a bloody conflict, the village has more recently become central to the nation’s hopes for peace. In Governing the Excluded, sociologist Alex Diamond shares a closer look at Briceño and offers unique insight not only into the contemporary Colombian state but to how people across the Global South are struggling to maintain rural livelihoods amid economic dispossession.

Governing the Excluded describes a landmark peace process between the Colombian government and the radical FARC guerrillas from the perspective of Colombian farmers, drawing links between economic transformation, drug economies, and armed conflict. Exclusion from global markets for traditional crops like coffee first pushed farmers to grow coca, the raw material for cocaine. This ushered in an era of violent conflict for control of the illicit economy, while farmers continued to be priced out of legal markets. In exchange for peace and state protection, farmers ultimately agreed to sacrifice profitable coca. But with its disappearance, they now find themselves dependent on the state: for machinery to maintain the roads they need to get legal harvests to market, municipal jobs that are the only decent work available, and for public resources to subsidize food crops with razor-thin profit margins. Ongoing economic struggles in the legal sector make the state’s newfound authority tenuous, as some villagers replant coca, abandon the village for uncertain urban futures, or join a rearmed guerrilla group.

Informed by deep ethnographic research and firsthand stories from Briceño residents, Governing the Excluded shows that when it comes to the forces driving dispossession—be they international corporate megaprojects, global food prices, or national initiatives to replace coca cultivation—state authority goes only so far as its ability to sustain local livelihoods.

Visit Alex Diamond's website.

The Page 99 Test: Governing the Excluded.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven of the best Southern Gothic novels

Mark Murphy is a native of Savannah, Georgia. He's worked as a fast-food worker, marine biologist, orderly, ordained minister, and gastroenterologist, his current "day job." When he's not healing the sick, he writes anything he can-newspaper columns, short stories, magazine articles, and textbook chapters.

Rose Dhu is his third novel.

At The Nerd Daily Murphy tagged seven novels in the Southern Gothic tradition that inspired hi. One entry on the list:

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)

This Pulitzer Prize winner, loosely based upon Lee’s observation of her own family and an event that occurred in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama in 1936, involves elements of racial injustice in the postwar South. Told through the eyes of Jean Louise “Scout” Finch, who is six years old at the beginning of the book, it relates Scout’s relationship with both her brother Jem and a neighbor child named “Dill” Harris, who visits his aunt’s home every summer. The three children are both fascinated by and terrified of a reclusive neighbor, Arthur “Boo” Radley, who has not been seen for years. All of which is placed in the foreground of Jem and Scout’s father, Atticus, representing Tom Robinson, a black man accused of raping a young white woman. While innocent, Robinson is remanded to prison and dies while trying to escape and the Finch family is left to deal with the brutal aftershocks of the trial.

This book is one of the most widely read novels of the 20th Century. Interestingly, the character of Dill Harris was based on the author Truman Capote, a childhood friend of Lee’s.

Read about another entry on the list.

To Kill a Mockingbird made Vaseem Khan's top five list of small town America thrillers, Mimi Herman's list of five titles with strong, spirited Southern ladies, Debbie Babitt's list of eight coming-of-age thrillers, Allison Pataki's top ten list of father figures in literature, Bonnie Kistler's list of four classic fictional trials that subverted the truth, Kathy Bates's ten desert island books list, Lavie Tidhar's list of five fantastical heroines in great children’s books, Sarah Ward's ten top list of brothers and sisters in fiction, Katy Guest's list of six top books for shy readers, Jeff Somers's top ten list of fictional characters based on actual people, Carol Wall's list of five books that changed her, John Bardinelli's list of five authors who became famous after publishing a single novel and never published another one, Ellie Irving's top ten list of quiet heroes and heroines, a list of five books that changed Richelle Mead, Robert Williams's top ten list of loners in fiction, Alyssa Bereznak's top ten list of literary heroes with weird names, Louise Doughty's top ten list of courtroom dramas, Hanna McGrath's top fifteen list of epic epigraphs, the Telegraph's list of ten great meals in literature, Nicole Hill's list of fourteen characters their creators should have spared, Isla Blair's six best books list, Lauren Passell's list of ten pairs of books made better when read together, Charlie Fletcher's top ten list of adventure classics, Sheila Bair's 6 favorite books list, Kathryn Erskine's top ten list of first person narratives, Julia Donaldson's six best books list, TIME magazine's top 10 list of books you were forced to read in school, John Mullan's list of ten of the best lawyers in literature, John Cusack's list of books that made a difference to him, Lisa Scottoline's top ten list of books about justice, and Luke Leitch's list of ten literary one-hit wonders. It is one of Sanjeev Bhaskar's six best books and one of Alexandra Styron's five best stories of fathers and daughters.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Nina McConigley's "How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder: A Novel by Nina McConigley.

About the book, from the publisher:

A bold, inventive, and fiercely original debut novel that begins with an uncle dead and his tween niece’s private confession to the reader—she and her sister killed him, and they blame the British.

Summer, 1986. The Creel sisters, Georgie Ayyar and Agatha Krishna, welcome their aunt, uncle and young cousin—newly arrived from India—into their house in rural Wyoming where they’ll all live together. Because this is what families do. That is, until the sisters decide that it’s time for their uncle to die.

According to Georgie, the British are to blame. And to understand why, you need to hear her story. She details the violence hiding in their house and history, her once-unshakeable bond with Agatha Krishna, and her understanding of herself as an Indian-American in the heart of the West. Her account is, at every turn, cheeky, unflinching, and infectiously inflected with the trappings of teendom, including the magazine quizzes that help her make sense of her life. At its heart, the tale she weaves is:

a) a vivid portrait of an extended family
b) a moving story of sisterhood
c) a playful ode to the 80s
d) a murder mystery (of sorts)
e) an unexpected and unwaveringly powerful meditation on history and language, trauma and healing, and the meaning of independence

Or maybe it’s really:

f) all of the above.

Visit Nina McConigley's website.

The Page 69 Test: How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five books to read in the early days of parenting

Catherine Pierce served as the Poet Laureate of Mississippi from 2021-2025, and is the author of four books of poems: Danger Days (2020), The Tornado Is the World (2016), The Girls of Peculiar (2012), and Famous Last Words (2008), all from Saturnalia Books. Each of her most recent three books won the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Prize; Famous Last Words won the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. Two new books arrive in 2026: a memoir, Foxes for Everybody, from Northwestern University Press, and a poetry collection, Dear Beast, from Saturnalia.

At Lit Hub Pierce tagged "five books that I would have gratefully devoured as a new mother (and did gratefully devour as a not-quite-as-new one)." One title on the list:

Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs by Beth Ann Fennelly

While not solely about parenting, this book includes some of my favorite depictions of the fullness of a domestic life with children. Heating & Cooling was my introduction to the micro-memoir, defined by Fennelly, a skilled poet, as “[a] true hybrid [that] strives to combine the extreme abbreviation of poetry, the narrative tension of fiction, and the truth-telling of creative nonfiction.” Childbirth and parenting are here, alongside reflections on art, family, mortality, and romance. Sometimes a micro-memoir is no longer than a sentence, as in “Married Love, III,” which reads as follows, in its entirety: “There will come a day—let it be many years from now—when our kids realize no married couple ever needed to retreat at high noon behind their locked bedroom door to discuss taxes.” This moving, funny, compulsively readable book is perfect for new parents, and for anyone struggling to teach their attention how to return to written language.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Mark Hlavacik's "Willing Warriors"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Willing Warriors: A New History of the Education Culture Wars by Mark Hlavacik.

About the book, from the publisher:

How the rise of the culture wars afflicts the politics of education.

On August 9, 2022, the Denton Independent School District held a meeting to address complaints about its libraries. Like so many districts in Texas and across the country, Denton had been responding to accusations that children had access to inappropriate books at school. During the public comment session, a local man stood up to the podium and read a sexually explicit passage from a book that he wanted removed from Denton’s school libraries. But beguiled by the prospect of securing a political win, he had confused the title of the lurid psychological thriller he read aloud with a young adult fiction series about mermaids. While his attempt to ban a book that was never in Denton’s school libraries in the first place received a few laughs, it also reflects a deeply serious and troubling culture of conflict that has taken over the politics of education and now divides people so completely as to make public education as a shared endeavor seem impossible.

In Willing Warriors, Mark Hlavacik shows how the culture wars have redefined the politics of US schooling from the 1970s to the present through vivid accounts of public controversies featuring Allan Bloom, Oprah Winfrey, Lynne Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, Betsy DeVos, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and others. Beginning in the 1970s, Hlavacik shows, efforts at innovation in schooling have increasingly been met by attempts to discredit them through exposé. As the culture wars have accelerated and exploded, this cycle of innovation and exposé has embroiled public schools in increasingly heated debates. He explains the dynamics that make curriculum controversies so intractable and confronts the delicate question of whether raucous public arguments are bad for education.

With clarity and insight, Hlavacik reveals why bitter contests between educational ideologies not only add another burden for the schools, but also for the people—the willing warriors—who devote their lives to fighting for their betterment.

Visit Mark Hlavacik's website.

The Page 99 Test: Willing Warriors.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Lynn Cullen

From my Q&A with Lynn Cullen, author of When We Were Brilliant:

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

I wrote my novel When We Were Brilliant in response to the deep curiosity I’ve had about Marilyn Monroe since I was a kid watching her in The Seven Year Itch. I’d wanted to write about her for decades but couldn’t find a way in that was unique. It then occurred to me that one of the many woman who photographed Marilyn might have some interesting insights. I was shocked to find that she’d only sat for one woman, Eve Arnold. In fact, Marilyn sought her out.

Eve was wary of Marilyn at first. Marilyn claimed that she could help Eve’s career, a big boast, Eve thought, coming from a starlet. But she soon found out that their collaboration was like nothing she’d ever experienced (nor would ever again in her highly acclaimed, 70-year career.) Marilyn...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Lynn Cullen's website.

12 Yoga Questions: Lynn Cullen.

My Book, The Movie: Mrs. Poe.

The Page 69 Test: Mrs. Poe.

The Page 69 Test: Twain's End.

The Page 69 Test: The Sisters of Summit Avenue.

My Book, the Movie: The Sisters of Summit Avenue.

Q&A with Lynn Cullen.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Andromeda Romano-Lax reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Andromeda Romano-Lax, author of What Boys Learn.

Her entry begins:

On my nightstand are two novels that defy easy genre categorization, as many of my favorites do. New Zealander Catherine Chidgey’s The Book of Guilt is a slow burn alternate history that takes us into a world where no one won World War II and where sickly orphans are being kept in group homes and isolated from the public for reasons we don’t understand at first. I love Chidgey’s ethically nuanced fiction, empathetic characterization, and unique angles on historical events. She pulls me back toward...[read on]

About What Boys Learn, from the publisher:

A twisty, jaw-dropping psychological thriller that unravels a mother's worst nightmare—that her child is capable of terrible violence—when her teenage son becomes a suspect in the murder of two classmates, from the author of The Deepest Lake.

Over one terrible weekend, two teenage girls are found dead in a wealthy Chicago suburb. As the community mourns, Abby Rosso, the girls’ high school counselor, begins to suspect that her son was secretly involved in their lives—and possibly, their deaths.

Abby doesn’t want to believe Benjamin hurt anyone. But she’s seen the warning signs before. Two decades ago, her brother was imprisoned for a disturbing crime—he was only a little older than Benjamin is now. And Abby has more troubling memories from her own adolescence that confirm what boys and men are capable of. As Abby searches for the truth about what happened to her students, she’s forced to face the question: Has she been making excuses for Benjamin for years?

Swirling with sharp questions about family and masculinity, What Boys Learn unravels a mother’s worst fears.

Learn more about the book and author at Andromeda Romano-Lax's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Spanish Bow.

The Page 69 Test: The Detour.

Writers Read: Andromeda Romano-Lax (February 2012).

The Page 69 Test: What Boys Learn.

Writers Read: Andromeda Romano-Lax.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Ronald Angelo Johnson's "Entangled Alliances"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Entangled Alliances: Racialized Freedom and Atlantic Diplomacy During the American Revolution by Ronald Angelo Johnson.

About the book, from the publisher:

Entangled Alliances is a reinterpretation of the American Revolution through analysis of diplomacy in the emerging United States during decades of hemispheric transformation. Ronald Angelo Johnson brings to light the fascinating story of American patriots and rebels from Saint-Domingue (later Haiti) allying against European tyranny.

The American Revolution occurred between two of the greatest achievements in diplomacy of the eighteenth century: the peace treaties at Paris in 1763 and 1783. In Entangled Alliances, Johnson draws on original multilingual sources to offer readers fresh, lively stories in a timely study. While modern understandings of freedom are often linked to the US Declaration of Independence, Johnson argues that the desire of Black Atlantic inhabitants for liberty and their will to resist slavery predated the fateful standoff between minutemen and redcoats at Lexington and Concord.

Entangled Alliances is a US history of the American Revolution, fusing the search for freedom by Black and white founders in the United States and Saint-Domingue into a coherent story of collective resistance during the most explosive twenty-year period of the eighteenth century.

Learn more about Entangled Alliances at the Cornell University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Entangled Alliances.

--Marshal Zeringue

The best mysteries & thrillers of 2025 -- "Elle"

One title on Elle magazine's 2025 list of the best mysteries and thrillers:

The Doorman by Chris Pavone

Pavone’s books tend to involve globe-spanning espionage, and though The Doorman stays much closer to home, that home is an exciting one. In Pavone’s latest, the Bohemia (a pretty clear stand-in for the Dakota) is one of the most prestigious buildings in Manhattan. The book centers three main characters at the Bohemia: Chicky, the building’s longtime doorman; Emily, the beautiful wife to one of the country’s richest and cruelest men; and Julian, a successful art dealer. Each are experiencing personal crises that could ruin their lives when, mere miles away, a young Black man is killed by the police. The ensuing protests add a weighty cultural backdrop to The Doorman, even as the thrills ramp up within and around the Bohemia itself. The Doorman ultimately makes a greater point—that the lifeblood of a luxury building is not its wealthy residents but the under-appreciated workers who keep it running.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Page 69 Test: The Doorman.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Madeleine Dunnigan's "Jean"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Jean: A Novel by Madeleine Dunnigan.

About the book, from the publisher:

Set over one hot summer, a startlingly assured debut about the kinds of love that break us and make us whole.

Seventeen-year-old Jean, a troubled Jewish boy caught in the countercultural swirl of 1970s London, arrives at Compton Manor, a rural alternative boarding school for boys with “problems.” Dyslexic, antisocial, and prone to violent outbursts, Jean has never made friends easily and school has never been a place of safety or enjoyment.

Compton Manor is his last chance, but even here, despite the unconventional teaching methods, Jean is marked by difference. The other boys are fee-paying, while Jean is on a grant; they have good, English families, while Jean’s mother, Rosa, is a German-Jewish refugee and his father is an absent memory. Having broken the rules several times, Jean is on thin ice. But there is only one summer to get through and then Jean will pass his exams and get out.

All of a sudden, he is befriended by Tom―confident, charming, buoyed by years of good breeding and privilege―and it seems as if Jean’s world might change. When things turn romantic, Jean is tipped into a heady, overwhelming infatuation. Now Jean skips class to venture into the woods, or sneaks across moonlit fields to see Tom, wondering whether the relationship might offer a way out of a life marked by alienation. But what if the only true path to freedom is to disappear altogether

Spellbinding and evocative, Jean is a meditative narrative of loss and escape distilled into the heartrending story of an intense and dangerous adolescent love.

Visit Madeleine Dunnigan's website.

My Book, The Movie: Jean.

The Page 69 Test: Jean.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Van Jensen

From my Q&A with Van Jensen, author of Godfall:

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

Godfall is about a god-like being falling out of the sky, so I'd say it hits the nail on the head.

Funny enough, this was a book that I took forever to generate the title. When the answer finally came, I about kicked myself that such an obvious one had been there all along.

What's in a name?

There's a thing that a lot of writers do where they use the meaning/etymology of a name to reinforce a character's personality traits. To me, that's a bit on the nose.

I think more about how a name sounds. How it feels. There's a military head in Godfall named Conover, and I chose that because it has the hard initial C, but also is unassuming. This is a guy who is tougher than he appears.

All this said, I did name my protagonist in this giant-alien story "David," so...[read on]

Visit Van Jensen's website.

Writers Read: Van Jensen.

Q&A with Van Jensen.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Lauren Derby's "Bêtes Noires"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Bêtes Noires: Sorcery as History in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands by Lauren Derby.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Bêtes Noires, Lauren Derby explores storytelling traditions among the people of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, focusing on shape-shifting spirit demons called baka/bacá. Drawing on interviews with and life stories of residents in a central Haitian-Dominican frontier town, Derby contends that bacás—hot spirits from the sorcery side of vodou/vodú that present as animals and generate wealth for their owners—are a manifestation of what Dominicans call fukú de Colón, the curse of Columbus. The dogs, pigs, cattle, and horses that Columbus brought with him are the only types of animals that bacás become. As instruments of Indigenous dispossession, these animals and their spirit demons convey a history of trauma and racialization in Dominican popular culture. In the context of slavery and beyond, bacás keep alive the promise of freedom, since shape-shifting has long enabled fugitivity. As Derby demonstrates, bacás represent a complex history of race, religion, repression, and resistance.

Learn more about Bêtes Noires at the Duke University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Bêtes Noires.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven novels that delve into the great mysteries of Oxford

A. D. Bell lives in Oxford, haunting the city’s bookshops of a weekend, writing in their cafes and walking the winding paths of her characters.

Their debut, The Bookbinder’s Secret, features Lilian ("Lily") Delaney, apprentice to a master bookbinder in Oxford in 1901, who chafes at the confines of her life.

At CrimeReads Bell tagged seven novels that delve into the great mysteries of Oxford. One title on the list:

Charles Finch, The September Society

Published in 2008, this Victorian-set crime novel is a brilliant mystery set in and around the colleges. A student goes missing and his mother asks detective Charles Lenox to investigate the mystery. Things take a dark turn with the discovery of a body and a trail leads Lenox to a mysterious secret society.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kelli Stanley's "The Reckoning," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Kelli Stanley's The Reckoning (A Renata Drake Thriller, 1).

The entry begins:

With the exception of Miranda Corbie, I generally don’t think about actors while I’m writing—I dream-cast after the book is through! Miranda was an exception because she looked like Rita Hayworth, so obviously only the woman who played Gilda could play Miranda—at least in my head.

So now that The Reckoning is out in the world, I’ve been ruminating on an imaginary movie. There are a lot of talented young actors out there, right now, and of course I’d love to see this book—a very suspenseful, slow-burning thriller about a young woman with severe PTSD who is on the run from the FBI and stumbles into a crime scene and a hunt for a serial killer—actually adapted (I envision something like Shetland except it’s Humboldt County, CA, not the northernmost islands of Great Britain). But for this dream cast, I’m going to dream all the way—and think about who would have played Renata Drake and the main characters in The Reckoning in 1985, the year the story is set!

The story is centered around Renata: a seriously traumatized, 25-year-old young defense attorney who lost her sister to a murderer who couldn’t be prosecuted. Renata wrestles with the anguish and the anger, and, under treatment for her PTSD, writes a fantasy-revenge journal on how, exactly, she would execute her sister’s murderer.

And then she wakes up on a concrete floor staring at his corpse.

She assumes, after an interview, that the FBI are going to figure out that she’s responsible, so she runs to the opposite end of the country and lands in Garberville, California … a tiny town in the heart of the redwoods that is facing its own harrowing crime: a serial killer of young girls. To make matters even more tense, a federal and state paramilitary taskforce surrounds the area, focusing on uprooting every cannabis plant in the Emerald Triangle.

Renata is both vulnerable and resilient, strong and sensitive, unsure, self-doubting and resolute. She’s a complex character in a highly complex situation … so, who in 1985 had the acting chops and was the right age to play her?

Linda Hamilton can certainly portray “tough.” But the heartbreak and survivor’s guilt of trauma and loss? I’m not so sure. On the flip side, Sean Young excelled at unbalanced, off-kilter characters, but could she emote the kind of grit and determination that Renata does? Debra Winger, certainly a brilliant actress, registers as a little too country, a little too Midwest. Renata is from Chicago and grew up in a very urban environment.

So, who’s my pick? One of the two greatest actresses of their generation: Michelle Pfeiffer or...[read on]

Visit Kelli Stanley's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Kelli Stanley & Bertie.

The Page 69 Test: City of Dragons.

The Page 69 Test: City of Secrets.

The Page 69 Test: City of Ghosts.

My Book, The Movie: City of Ghosts.

The Page 69 Test: City of Sharks.

My Book, The Movie: City of Sharks.

Writers Read: Kelli Stanley (March 2018).

The Page 69 Test: The Reckoning.

Writers Read: Kelli Stanley.

My Book, The Movie: Kelli Stanley's The Reckoning.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Derek J. Thiess's "American Fantastic"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: American Fantastic: Myths of Violence and Redemption by Derek J. Thiess.

About the book, from the publisher:

American Fantastic challenges readers to recognize an organizing myth in America’s perception of its imperialist past, “the myth of redemptive violence.” Derek J. Thiess persuasively argues that this myth serves to obscure the deep thread of Christian supremacy that underwrites America’s colonial and imperial impulses, from the early colonial period to westward expansion to the contemporary global order. This American imaginary, which enmeshes religion with violence, is constructed in multiple contentious and productive contact zones: between genres, between cultures, and between past and present.

Thiess’s interdisciplinary study examines America’s past and present imperial projects, from the Hawaiian Islands to the Eastern Seaboard, as they proliferate in popular story forms. By interrogating American myths, legends, and fantastic narratives across an impressive array of genres, including folk narratives, science fiction, movies, and more, Thiess exposes how the “myth of redemptive violence” manifests in contemporary constructions of America’s fantastic imaginaries.

Visit Derek J. Thiess's website.

The Page 99 Test: American Fantastic.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine true crime memoirs that explore our obsession with darkness

Rebecca Hannigan has an MA in Creative Writing Crime Fiction from UEA, graduating in 2023. She won the UEA/Little Brown Crime Prize for her dissertation. She has also been shortlisted for Virago/The Pool’s Best New Crime Writer.

Her first novel, Darkrooms, is a fictional work in which she explores the "feeling of betrayal and injustice" stemming from "a murder in [her] mother’s small Irish hometown" for which "no one was ever sentenced."

For People magazine Hannigan tagged nine "gripping true crime memoirs that explore why we're all so obsessed with darkness." One title on the list:

Hell In The Heartland by Jax Miller

When fiction author Miller set out to investigate an unsolved cold case set in the Oklahoma prairies, she had no idea what she was getting herself into. In 1999, an arson attack on a trailer home concealed the corpses of a couple, Danny and Kathy Freeman, but the bodies of their daughter Ashley and her best friend Lauria Bible were never found.

Miller spends a significant amount of time getting to know the local people and towns, but every discovery leads only to more pain; more disappearances, more tragic unsolved crimes, and more horrifyingly abusive characters terrorizing whole communities into silence. A desperately sad and bleak read about a class of society underserved by the justice system.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Jacquelyn Stolos

From my Q&A with Jacquelyn Stolos, author of Asterwood:

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

Asterwood is a clean, simple title and I love that. It signals the novel's setting to readers, and I'm a setting-oriented writer--it's usually the detail that comes first in the pre-draft, dreamstorm stage of my work and the detail that speaks loudest in my finished books--so it feels right. I can't take credit though! There were many placeholder titles before my brilliant editor, Wendy Loggia, suggested Asterwood.

What's in a name?

So much. The novel's protagonist, Madelyn, is named...[read on]

Visit Jacquelyn Stolos's website.

Writers Read: Jacquelyn Stolos.

The Page 69 Test: Asterwood.

My Book, The Movie: Asterwood.

Q&A with Jacquelyn Stolos.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Fabricio Tocco's "Precarious Secrets"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Fabricio Tocco's Precarious Secrets: A History of the Latin American Political Thriller.

About the book, from the publisher:

An exploration of the political thriller genre and its context in Latin American politics and entertainment.

For the past five decades, a distinctive type of political thriller has been steadily developing in Latin America. Precarious Secrets is a panoramic overview of the genre in the hands of renowned writers and filmmakers from Argentina, Mexico, Chile, and Brazil, as well as lesser-known Peruvian, Uruguayan and Paraguayan artists for whom the style has been a vehicle for pungent narratives shot through with menace and conspiracy.

Fabricio Tocco explores the genre’s unique role in Latin American entertainment and activism. Precarious Secrets traces the evolutions of the Latin American political thriller from its emergence in the 1970s, through the silence imposed by dictatorships and the genre’s resurgence after the Cold War. The political thriller has dramatized the region’s turbulent past, through assassinations, coups, mass killings, revolutions and the search of desaparecidos by human rights organizations. In the process, Tocco isolates the Latin American political thriller’s particular grammar of secrecy. In the Hollywood thriller, revealing secrets involves high stakes and transformative consequences. In Latin American political thrillers, by contrast, secrets produce only more precarity—moral ambiguity as unsettling as it is unshakeable.

Learn more about Precarious Secrets at the University of Texas Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Precarious Secrets.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top sad books by funny women

Sydney Rende is a writer and editor. You can read her work in The New York Times Style Magazine, Carve Magazine, Joyland, and elsewhere. She has an MFA in fiction from Syracuse University.

Rende's debut short story collection is I Could Be Famous.

At Lit Hub she tagged six sad books by funny women "who give grief and humor the equal respect they deserve." One title on the list:

Weike Wang, Chemistry

Weike Wang’s debut novel is quick, wry, and fraught with self-deprecating humor. Wang’s unnamed narrator, whose boyfriend Eric has just proposed, is pursuing her PhD in chemistry without much success. Through often fragmented narration, we see her unravel as she fails to meet the expectations she’s set for herself. But even in her darkest moments of identity crisis, her insights are self-aware, profound, and, yes, funny, including a bit where she impulsively chops off her hair because her mother told her that “too much hair will suck nutrients away from the head and leave it empty.”

Read about another entry on the list.

Chemistry is among K.D. Walker's eight top campus novels set in grad school and Anne Heltzel's seven novels about women who refuse to fit in.

--Marshal Zeringue