Chris McKinney's "Sunset, Water City," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Sunset, Water City by Chris McKinney.

The entry begins:

Cartoons! Well, more specifically anime. I’d love for this post-apocalyptic world and its characters, who all have special abilities, to be animated in the style of Monster or Ghost in the Shell, the “seinsen” genre of anime. There are numerous action scenes in this book, from gunfights, to the hunting of genetically engineered mythical creatures, to death defying nosedives from the mesosphere. Anime would match the energy of the book perfectly.

For voice actors, my list of impossible to get talent would include Denzel Washington as the world-weary father, Florence Pugh as the cynical yet idealistic daughter, and...[read on]

Visit Chris McKinney's website.

The Page 69 Test: Sunset, Water City.

Q&A with Chris McKinney.

My Book, The Movie: Sunset, Water City.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five of the best holiday crime novels

Born and raised in West Lothian, Catriona McPherson left Edinburgh University with a PhD in Linguistics and worked in academia, as well as banking and public libraries, before taking up full-time writing in 2001. For the last ten years she has lived in Northern California with frequent visits home. Among numerous prizes, she has won two of Left Coast Crime’s coveted Humorous Lefty Awards, as well as the inaugural Anthony Award for Best Humorous Novel, for the Last Ditch comedies. Her latest novel is Hop Scot.

[The Page 69 Test: Go to My Grave; Writers Read: Catriona McPherson (November 2018); My Book, The Movie: The Turning Tide; The Page 69 Test: The Turning Tide; My Book, The Movie: A Gingerbread House]

At CrimeReads she tagged five favorite holiday crime novels, including:

The Christmas Thief, by Mary Higgins Clark and Carol Higgins Clark

It was just out, set in New York, featuring Willy and Alvirah Meehan, who lived on Central Park South, just like me (except I “lived” there for ten days and they had won the lottery and bought a flat). It was one of the most perfect Christmas crime experiences of my life. Last year, doing an Agatha Christie jigsaw while listening to Christie at Christmas on Radio 4 came close, but I wasn’t in Manhattan.

Since then, I’ve read and re-read all of the Higgins Clarks’ stories about the lottery-winning plumber and house cleaner, Christmas after Christmas. They’re perfect little seasonal bon-bons.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Whitney Barlow Robles's "Curious Species"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Curious Species: How Animals Made Natural History by Whitney Barlow Robles.

About the book, from the publisher:

A compelling and innovative exploration of how animals shaped the field of natural history and its ecological afterlives

Can corals build worlds? Do rattlesnakes enchant? What is a raccoon, and what might it know? Animals and the questions they raised thwarted human efforts to master nature during the so-called Enlightenment—a historical moment when rigid classification pervaded the study of natural history, people traded in people, and imperial avarice wrapped its tentacles around the globe. Whitney Barlow Robles makes animals the unruly protagonists of eighteenth-century science through journeys to four spaces and ecological zones: the ocean, the underground, the curiosity cabinet, and the field. Her forays reveal a forgotten lineage of empirical inquiry, one that forced researchers to embrace uncertainty. This tumultuous era in the history of human-animal encounters still haunts modern biologists and ecologists as they struggle to fathom animals today.

In an eclectic fusion of history and nature writing, Robles alternates between careful historical investigations and probing personal narratives. These excavations of the past and present of distinct nonhuman creatures reveal the animal foundations of human knowledge and show why tackling our current environmental crisis first requires looking back in time.

Visit Whitney Barlow Robles's website.

The Page 99 Test: Curious Species.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: M. M. DeLuca's "The Night Side"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Night Side by M.M. DeLuca.

About the book, from the publisher:

Twenty years of secrets. One deadly truth.

When Ruby Carlson was eighteen, she ran away from her home in Stoneybrook, Montana, and vowed she'd never return. Never return to life under the control of her manipulative mother, Ida, a self-styled medium and psychic scammer who made a career out of ruining people's lives. Never return to the small town where enemies lurk at every turn.

But now, twenty years later, Ruby is back. Her mother is missing, presumed dead, and Ruby reluctantly returns to a home filled with chilling memories to settle Ida's affairs. Did she really commit suicide by drowning, or is this another dark scheme? Ruby thought she knew everything about her mother, but finds herself unraveling a web of lies and secrets to reveal a story more twisted than anyone could have imagined...

Visit M.M. DeLuca's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Night Side.

The Page 69 Test: The Night Side.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven top mystery novels with the best twists

Emily Bain Murphy was born in Indiana and raised in Hong Kong and Japan. She graduated from Tufts University and has also called Massachusetts, Connecticut, and California home.

Enchanted Hill, Murphy’s debut adult novel, is a historical mystery set in 1930 over a glittering week of parties at a mansion on the California coast.

At Writer's Digest she tagged seven mystery novels with "engaging characters, an atmospheric setting, a mystery that keeps me turning pages, and at least one twist I didn’t see coming." One title on the list:

All the Devils Are Here, Louise Penny

Louise Penny is simply a master of mystery. Her books have endearing characters and red herrings galore, mouthwatering food descriptions, and brutally dark murders contrasted with thoughtful, often hopeful conclusions. Most of Penny’s renowned Armand Gamache series is set within the charming, idyllic atmosphere in Three Pines—although All the Devils Are Here trades the quiet Canadian village for the glittering city lights of Paris.

In Devils, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Quebec and his wife, Reine-Marie, travel to Paris for the birth of their newest grandchild. But danger and threats follow them there when Armand’s old friend, billionaire Stephen Horowitz, is purposefully hit by a car, leading Armand deep into a web of dark secrets hidden in the City of Light. Louise Penny is one of the best mystery writers of our time, and I’m eagerly awaiting the next installment of Gamache—the 19th book in a series that thankfully just keeps getting better.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Chris McKinney

From my Q&A with Chris McKinney, author of Sunset, Water City:

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

When my editor and I discussed title options, we both agreed that it’s better to be direct and simple as opposed to trying to be clever. “Water City” indicates to the reader that a significant portion of the novel is set in an underwater city. “Sunset” suggests that this is the last book in a trilogy.

But I’m also hinting at something thematic. Walking backwards is a motif in these books, and the sequence of titles move backwards as well, from “Midnight” (book one), to “Eventide” (book two), to “Sunset” (book three). The idea is that as we advance technologically, we devolve in significant, terrifying ways.

What's in a name?

Two major characters in this book...[read on]

About Sunset, Water City, from the publisher:

In the powerful conclusion to the sci-fi noir Water City trilogy, faith, power, and tech clash when our nameless protagonist passes the responsibility of saving the world to his teenage daughter. For fans of Phillip K. Dick and The Last of Us.

Year 2160: It’s been ten years since the cataclysmic events of Eventide, Water City, where 99.97 percent of the human population was possessed or obliterated by Akira Kimura, Water City’s renowned scientist and Earth’s former savior.

Our nameless antihero, a synesthete and former detective, and his daughter, Ascalon, navigate through a post-apocalyptic landscape populated by barbaric Zeroes—the permanent residents of the continent’s biggest landfill, The Great Leachate—who cling to the ways of the old world. They live in opposition to Akira’s godlike domination of the planet—she has taken control of the population that viewed her as a god and converted them into her Gardeners, zombie-like humans who plod along to build her vision of a new world.

What that world exactly entails, Ascalon is not entirely sure, but intends to find out. Now nineteen, she, a synesthete herself, takes over this story while her father succumbs to grief and decades of Akira’s manipulation. Tasked with the impossible, Ascalon must find a way to free what’s left of the human race.

Visit Chris McKinney's website.

The Page 69 Test: Sunset, Water City.

Q&A with Chris McKinney.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Alexandra Lindgren-Gibson's "Working-Class Raj"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Working-Class Raj: Colonialism and the Making of Class in British India by Alexandra Lindgren-Gibson.

About the book, from the publisher:

Focusing on the military men, railway workers, and wives and children of the British working-class who went to India after the Rebellion of 1857, Working-Class Raj explores the experiences of these working-class men and women in their own words. Drawing on a diverse collection of previously unused letters and diaries, it allows us to hear directly from these people for the first time. Working-class Brits in India enjoyed enormous privilege, reliant on native Indian labour and living, as one put it, “like gentlemen.” But within the hierarchies of the Army and the railyard they remained working class, a potentially disruptive population that needed to be contained. Working in India and other parts of the empire, emigrating to settler colonies, often returning to Britain, all the while attempting to maintain family ties across imperial distances-the British working class in the nineteenth century was a globalised population. This book reveals how working-class men and women were not atomised individuals, but part of communities that spanned the empire and were fundamentally shaped by it.

Learn more about Working-Class Raj at the Cambridge University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Working-Class Raj.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven top books about authorship hoaxes

Ayden LeRoux is a queer writer and critic from New England. Once upon a time she attended culinary school, worked as a cheesemaker on a goat farm, and studied to become a sommelier. Now she writes fiction and nonfiction exploring embodiment, eroticism, and illness, in order to complicate narratives about caretaking, gender, sexuality, and family structures. She writes art and literary criticism regularly, often covering work that pertains to sexuality, disability, and the culinary world.

LeRoux's work can be found in BOMB, Bookforum, Catapult, Electric Lit, Entropy, Guernica, Lit Hub, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Rumpus, and was honored as Notable in Best American Essays 2021. She is the co-author of Odyssey Works: Transformative Experiences for an Audience of One (2016).

At Electric Lit LeRoux tagged seven notable books about authorship hoaxes, including:

The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz

Jacob Finch Bonner had a respectable start to his publishing career but has been struggling to write a second book for far too long. When a student of his comes along that is painfully arrogant but has a brilliant idea for a book, Bonner is jealous. The plot is undeniably juicy, and it seems only a matter of time that he will be eclipsed by a student, washed up and forgotten about. But the book never comes out and Bonner eventually discovers his student died. He decides to use the plot for his own next book (chapters of Bonner’s book are interwoven with the story so readers slowly come to see what exactly this atomic plot is). This thrilling read gets even more propulsive when someone who knows Bonner stole the story starts hunting him down to pay penance.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Plot is among Jane L. Rosen's nine books about book people, Elyse Friedman's eight novels featuring schemers & opportunists, E.G. Scott's five best books-within-books, Kimberly Belle's four thrillers with maximum escapism, and Louise Dean's top ten novels about novelists.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: S.J. Rozan's "The Mayors of New York"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Mayors of New York: A Lydia Chin/Bill Smith Mystery by S. J. Rozan.

About the book, from the publisher:

The new crime novel from the award-winning S. J. Rozan, where private investigators Lydia Chin and Bill Smith find themselves thrust into the mystery behind the disappearance of the teenage son of the mayor of New York.

In January, New York City inaugurates its first female mayor. In April, her son disappears.

Called in by the mayor's chief aide—a former girlfriend of private investigator Bill Smith’s—to find the missing fifteen-year-old, Bill and his partner, Lydia Chin, are told the boy has run away. Neither the press nor the NYPD know that he’s missing, and the mayor wants him back before a headstrong child turns into a political catastrophe. But as Bill and Lydia investigate, they turn up more questions than answers.

Why did the boy leave? Who else is searching for him, and why? What is his twin sister hiding?

Then a teen is found dead and another is hit by gunfire. Are these tragedies related to each other, and to the mayor's missing son?

In a desperate attempt to find the answer to the boy's disappearance before it's too late, Bill and Lydia turn to the only contacts they think will be able to help: the neighborhood leaders who are the real ‘mayors’ of New York.

Visit S.J. Rozan's website.

The Page 69 Test: Paper Son.

The Page 69 Test: The Art of Violence.

Q&A with S. J. Rozan.

Writers Read: S.J. Rozan (February 2022).

The Page 69 Test: Family Business.

Writers Read: S. J. Rozan.

The Page 69 Test: The Mayors of New York.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Zachary Brodt's "From the Steel City to the White City"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: From the Steel City to the White City: Western Pennsylvania and the World's Columbian Exposition by Zachary L. Brodt.

About the book, from the publisher:

In From the Steel City to the White City, Zachary Brodt explores Western Pennsylvania’s representation at Chicago’s Columbian Exposition, the first major step in demonstrating that Pittsburgh was more than simply America’s crucible—it was also a region of developing culture and innovation. The 1893 Columbian Exposition presented a chance for the United States to prove to the world that it was an industrial giant ready to become a global superpower. At the same time, Pittsburgh, a commercial center that formerly served as a starting point for western expansion, found itself serving as a major transportation, and increasingly industrial, hub during this period of extensive growth. Natural resources like petroleum and coal allowed Western Pennsylvania to become one of the largest iron- and steel-producing regions in the world. The Chicago fairgrounds provided a lucrative opportunity for area companies not only to provide construction materials but to display the region’s many products. While Pittsburgh’s most famous contributions to the 1893 World’s Fair—alternating current electricity and the Ferris wheel—had a lasting impact on the United States and the world, other exhibits provided a snapshot of the area’s industries, natural resources, and inventions. The success of these exhibits, Brodt reveals, launched local companies into the twentieth century, ensuring a steady flow of work, money, and prestige.

Visit Zachary Brodt's website.

The Page 99 Test: From the Steel City to the White City.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten horror novels for the holidays

Erika Johansen grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. She went to Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and eventually became an attorney, but she never stopped writing. She lives in England.

Her new novel is The Kingdom of Sweets: A Novel of the Nutcracker.

At Lit Hub Johansen tagged "ten books [that] never fail to remind me that the world could use a little more love and kindness right now." One title on the list:

The Deep, by Nick Cutter

Did I mention claustrophobia? The Deep takes place in a tiny laboratory station located at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. There is no room for conflict or paranoia in such an environment, but of course all of the characters have weaknesses that can be exploited by…something. Plot is almost incidental; setting controls this story, and what a setting Cutter creates. For sheer, suffocating atmosphere, I’m not sure I’ve read anything to compare.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Page 69 Test: The Deep.

--Marshal Zeringue

M. M. DeLuca's "The Night Side," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Night Side by M.M. DeLuca.

The entry begins:

Since I’m also a keen screenwriter, I always need to visualize my main characters as if I’m compiling a cast list. Sometimes I’ll even pin pictures of them to a board in my office so I can glance up at them every now and again to remind me of how they look.

My book The Night Side, is focused on a toxic relationship between a mother and daughter, so these two characters would be the leads in a movie adaptation of the book, which is a story about Ruby Carlson, who at eighteen ran away from her home in Stoneybrook, Montana, and vowed she'd never return. Never return to life under the control of her manipulative mother, Ida, a self-styled medium and psychic scammer who made a career out of ruining people's lives. Never return to the small town where enemies lurk at every turn.

But twenty years later, Ruby, now a successful archaeologist, is back. Her mother is missing, presumed dead, and Ruby reluctantly returns to a home filled with chilling memories to settle Ida's affairs. Did she really commit suicide by drowning, or is this another dark scheme? Ruby thought she knew everything about her mother, but finds herself unraveling a web of lies and secrets to reveal a story more twisted than anyone could have imagined.

My dream actress for the character of Ruby would be Ana de Armas. Since I watched her breathtaking portrayal of...[read on]

Visit M.M. DeLuca's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Night Side.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar's "America's Black Capital"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: America's Black Capital: How African Americans Remade Atlanta in the Shadow of the Confederacy by Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar.

About the book, from the publisher:

The remarkable story of how African Americans transformed Atlanta, the former heart of the Confederacy, into today’s Black mecca  

Atlanta is home to some of America’s most prominent Black politicians, artists, businesses, and HBCUs. Yet, in 1861, Atlanta was a final contender to be the capital of the Confederacy. Sixty years later, long after the Civil War, it was the Ku Klux Klan’s sacred “Imperial City.”

America’s Black Capital chronicles how a center of Black excellence emerged amid virulent expressions of white nationalism, as African Americans pushed back against Confederate ideology to create an extraordinary locus of achievement. What drove them, historian Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar shows, was the belief that Black uplift would be best advanced by forging Black institutions. America’s Black Capital is an inspiring story of Black achievement against all odds, with effects that reached far beyond Georgia, shaping the nation’s popular culture, public policy, and politics.

Learn more about America's Black Capital at the Basic Books website.

The Page 99 Test: America's Black Capital.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five titles in which rich people (think they can) get away with murder

Charlotte Vassell studied History at the University of Liverpool and completed a Master’s in Art History at SOAS before training as an actor at Drama Studio London. Other than treading the boards she has also worked in advertising, in executive search and as a purveyor of silk top hats.

Vassell's new novel is The Other Half.

At CrimeReads she tagged five favorite books featuring "wealthy miscreants who think they can but don’t always get away with murder, although sometimes they do." One title on the list:

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age classic is a novella full of terribly large fortunes and ill begotten gains. Gatsby himself amassed his wealth through bootlegging, but it is Tom Buchanan who I am concerned with. Gatsby pays for his illegal ways and presumptive social climbing (into bed with Daisy) with his life. Tom on the other hand tells a calculated little lie to his dead mistress’ husband resulting in his rival’s death and the preservation of the old order. Gatsby is dead and Daisy hasn’t left Tom. Tom got away with it.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Great Gatsby appears among Charlotte Vassell's top ten cads in fiction, Sarah Blake's top ten tales about the rich, Lupita Nyong’o’s ten favorite books, Christian Blauvelt's five top NYC-set novels that became NYC-set films, Kate Williams's six best books, Jeff Somers's ten best book covers...ever and seven most disastrous parties in fiction, Brian Boone's six "beloved classic novels whose authors nearly cursed with a terrible title," four books that changed C.K. Stead, four books that changed Jodi Picoult, Joseph Connolly's top ten novels about style, Nick Lake’s ten favorite fictional tricksters and tellers of untruths in books, the Independent's list of the fifteen best opening lines in literature, Molly Schoemann-McCann's list of five of the lamest girlfriends in fiction, Honeysuckle Weeks's six best books, Elizabeth Wilhide's nine illustrious houses in fiction, Suzette Field's top ten literary party hosts, Robert McCrums's ten best closing lines in literature, Molly Driscoll's ten best literary lessons about love, Jim Lehrer's six favorite 20th century novels, John Mullan's lists of ten of the best clocks in literature and ten of the best misdirected messages, Tad Friend's seven best novels about WASPs, Kate Atkinson's top ten novels, Garrett Peck's best books about Prohibition, Robert McCrum's top ten books for Obama officials, Jackie Collins' six best books, and John Krasinski's six best books, and is on the American Book Review's list of the 100 best last lines from novels. Gatsby's Jordan Baker is Josh Sorokach's biggest fictional literary crush.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Chris McKinney's "Sunset, Water City"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Sunset, Water City by Chris McKinney.

About the book, from the publisher:

In the powerful conclusion to the sci-fi noir Water City trilogy, faith, power, and tech clash when our nameless protagonist passes the responsibility of saving the world to his teenage daughter. For fans of Phillip K. Dick and The Last of Us.

Year 2160: It’s been ten years since the cataclysmic events of Eventide, Water City, where 99.97 percent of the human population was possessed or obliterated by Akira Kimura, Water City’s renowned scientist and Earth’s former savior.

Our nameless antihero, a synesthete and former detective, and his daughter, Ascalon, navigate through a post-apocalyptic landscape populated by barbaric Zeroes—the permanent residents of the continent’s biggest landfill, The Great Leachate—who cling to the ways of the old world. They live in opposition to Akira’s godlike domination of the planet—she has taken control of the population that viewed her as a god and converted them into her Gardeners, zombie-like humans who plod along to build her vision of a new world.

What that world exactly entails, Ascalon is not entirely sure, but intends to find out. Now nineteen, she, a synesthete herself, takes over this story while her father succumbs to grief and decades of Akira’s manipulation. Tasked with the impossible, Ascalon must find a way to free what’s left of the human race.

Visit Chris McKinney's website.

The Page 69 Test: Sunset, Water City.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Adam Parkes's "Modernism and the Aristocracy"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Modernism and the Aristocracy: Monsters of English Privilege by Adam Parkes.

About the book, from the publisher:

During a modern age that saw the expansion of its democracy, the fading of its empire, and two world wars, Britain's hereditary aristocracy was pushed from the centre to the margins of the nation's affairs. Widely remarked on by commentators at the time, this radical redrawing of the social and political map provoked a newly intensified fascination with the aristocracy among modern writers. Undone by history, the British aristocracy and its Anglo-Irish cousins were remade by literary modernism. Modernism and the Aristocracy: Monsters of English Privilege is about the results of that remaking.

The book traces the literary consequences of the modernist preoccupation with aristocracy in the works of Elizabeth Bowen, Ford Madox Ford, Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, Rebecca West, and others writing in Britain and Ireland in the first half of the twentieth century. Combining an historical focus on the decades between the two world wars with close attention to the verbal textures and formal structures of literary texts, Adam Parkes asks: What did the decline of the British aristocracy do for modernist writers? What imaginative and creative opportunities did the historical fate of the aristocracy precipitate in writers of the new democratic age? Exploring a range of feelings, affects, and attitudes that modernist authors associated with the aristocracy in the interwar period--from stupidity, boredom, and nostalgia to sophistication, cruelty, and kindness--the book also asks what impact this subject-matter has on the form and style of modernist texts, and why the results have appealed to readers then and now. In tackling such questions, Parkes argues for a reawakening of curiosity about connections between class, status, and literature in the modernist period.

Learn more about Modernism and the Aristocracy at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Modernism and the Aristocracy.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight books that explore the power dynamics of love triangles

Sarah Blakley-Cartwright is the author of Red Riding Hood, a #1 New York Times bestseller published worldwide in thirty-eight editions and fifteen languages.

She is the editor of Hauser & Wirth’s The Artist's Library for Ursula magazine. She is publishing director of the Chicago Review of Books, and associate editor of A Public Space.

Blakley-Cartwright's debut adult novel is Alice Sadie Celine.

At Electric Lit the author tagged "eight of the most inventive literary explorations of the love triangle." One title on the list:

Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan

This alternate history, set in a 1982 in which the UK lost the Falklands War to Argentina, raises questions of human blunder and of machine consciousness. When Charlie Friend blows his inheritance on a new A.I. robot companion named Adam, the “ambulant laptop” begins to assert its own demands and withdrawals until the couple find it impossible to break free. The difficult situation results in a push and pull that threatens to topple the couple’s domestic, and romantic equilibrium. Can a machine love? Perhaps more lingering: can we love a machine? Stakes heighten when a child enters the mix.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is S. J. Rozan reading?

Featured at Writers Read: S. J. Rozan, author of The Mayors of New York: A Lydia Chin/Bill Smith Mystery.

Her entry begins:

I read a lot of non-fiction. I just started Geoff Dyer's The Last Days of Roger Federer. It's about endings, of many kinds, a good book for autumn. Dyer's prose is sharp and clear and the structure of his essays always makes sense. He writes about a range things, including sports. Finding a writer who can articulate the larger societal and, yes, spiritual implications of sports is always a thrill for me.

Two recent fiction reads also have to make this list, though, because I'm very high on them.

One is...[read on]

About The Mayors of New York, from the publisher:

The new crime novel from the award-winning S. J. Rozan, where private investigators Lydia Chin and Bill Smith find themselves thrust into the mystery behind the disappearance of the teenage son of the mayor of New York.

In January, New York City inaugurates its first female mayor. In April, her son disappears.

Called in by the mayor's chief aide—a former girlfriend of private investigator Bill Smith’s—to find the missing fifteen-year-old, Bill and his partner, Lydia Chin, are told the boy has run away. Neither the press nor the NYPD know that he’s missing, and the mayor wants him back before a headstrong child turns into a political catastrophe. But as Bill and Lydia investigate, they turn up more questions than answers.

Why did the boy leave? Who else is searching for him, and why? What is his twin sister hiding?

Then a teen is found dead and another is hit by gunfire. Are these tragedies related to each other, and to the mayor's missing son?

In a desperate attempt to find the answer to the boy's disappearance before it's too late, Bill and Lydia turn to the only contacts they think will be able to help: the neighborhood leaders who are the real ‘mayors’ of New York.

Visit S.J. Rozan's website.

The Page 69 Test: Paper Son.

The Page 69 Test: The Art of Violence.

Q&A with S. J. Rozan.

Writers Read: S.J. Rozan (February 2022).

The Page 69 Test: Family Business.

Writers Read: S. J. Rozan.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Kurt Fowler's "The Rise of Digital Sex Work"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Rise of Digital Sex Work by Kurt Fowler.

About the book, from the publisher:

How technology transformed the nature of sex work

The internet has revolutionized sex work perhaps more than any other profession. Today’s sex workers go online to attract clients, shape personas, share information, screen potential clients, and build community. The Rise of Digital Sex Work is an intimate look into the changing face of the industry, telling the stories of workers themselves and revealing how they use the internet to share information, grow their businesses, and establish global communities.

Kurt Fowler takes us inside the lives of sex workers who provide a variety of services: web-camming, dominatrix work, burlesque, and escorting. He provides insight into how race, class, and privilege affect their work and the role the internet has played in their professional journeys. Drawing on in-depth interviews with fifty workers from the United States, England, Canada, Germany, Australia, South Africa, and other industrialized countries, Fowler explores how they first entered the profession, how they manage their daily business and client relationships, their use of digital technology for safety and as a broader social resource, the role race plays in their work, and how they view their own level of risk and that of fellow sex workers. Fowler provides a look inside sex workers’ digital worlds, as well as the complex meanings they attach to their experiences in their line of work.

Learn more about The Rise of Digital Sex Work at the NYU Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Rise of Digital Sex Work.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top stories about embracing found family

At Tor.com SFF maven Cole Rush tagged "five stories [that] celebrate found families and the wonderful, unconventional love they share," including:

The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune

Let’s start with the most heartwarming story on the list (possibly of all time?). The House In The Cerulean Sea follows Linus Baker, a caseworker for the Department In Charge Of Magical Youth. He’s sent on a unique assignment to a mysterious house where a group of charming magical young ones are being raised by the enigmatic Arthur Parnassus.

As Linus learns more about the children—the Antichrist, a blob, a were-pomeranian, and a gnome, to name a few—he discovers the family he never had.

Cerulean Sea packages hundreds of lessons and wise quips into its pages; my personal favorite is the way the story teaches how to understand and appreciate the impact others can have on you. In this case, Arthur Parnassus plays a big role, but the kids are the stars. They introduce Linus to new ways of thinking, and they teach him that the ignorant bliss of childhood can give way to a personal epiphany. Linus, stuck in a corporate job he’s convinced himself is the life he wanted, blossoms into a loving person willing to embrace others for all their glorious differences.

During the holidays, that’s an important lesson. Surround yourself with people who ignite positive change within you, and who can lift you up even when you think there’s nowhere left to grow.

Read about another entry on the list.

The House in the Cerulean Sea is among S.C. Perkins's seven crime novels filled with family members.

--Marshal Zeringue