Five books that are also love-letters to American cities

At The Amazon Book Review editor Erin Kodicek tagged five "great reads that also serve as love letters to the US cities in which they take place," including:

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

New Orleans

One of the greatest comic novels of all time, A Confederacy of Dunces finds its delightful antihero, Ignatius J. Reilly, the “Don Quixote of the French Quarter,” wandering the streets of New Orleans and pontificating on the profound, but mostly the inane. And looking for a job. A fittingly offbeat, and occasionally melancholy, love letter to the Big Easy.

Read about another entry on the list.

Ignatius Reilly is on Jeff Somers's list of five of the greatest, dumbest characters in literary history, Ginni Chen's top six list of fictional mustaches, Melissa Albert's list of six of the worst fictional characters to sit next to on a plane and Jill Boyd's list of five of the worst fictional characters to invite to Thanksgiving. A Confederacy of Dunces is among Peter Mann's six titles with charming, workshy anti-heroes, Nicole Holofcener’s ten desert island books, Chrissie Gruebel's top eleven books that will make you glad you're single, Christian Rudder's six favorite books, the Telegraph's critics' fifty best cult books, Melissa Albert's eight favorite fictional misfits, Ken Jennings's eight notable books about parents and kids, Sarah Stodol's top ten lost-then-found novels, Hallie Ephron's top ten books for a good laugh, Stephen Kelman's top 10 outsiders' stories, John Mullan's ten best moustaches in literature, Michael Lewis's five favorite books, and Cracked magazine's classic funny novels.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Ishi Robinson

From my Q&A with Ishi Robinson, author of Sweetness in the Skin: A Novel:

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

There’s a lot of meaning behind the title: I’m telling the story of a young girl who is searching for family, identity and belonging; one who’s using her talent for baking to reach what seems to be an unreachable goal. As she tries to figure out who she is, she’s bucking up against the expectations her family have set for her, which are a direct result of the colorism and legacy of colonialism that exist in Jamaica still. So we’re talking about being comfortable in your own skin, about sweet foods, about which skin color is beautiful and more deserving than another – for me, that all culminates in Sweetness in the Skin.  

What's in a name?  

My two characters with the most unusual names are Pumkin and Boots...[read on]

Visit Ishi Robinson's website.

Q&A with Ishi Robinson.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: David Alff's "The Northeast Corridor"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the People, the History, the Region by David Alff.

About the book, from the publisher:

All aboard for the first comprehensive history of the hard-working and wildly influential Northeast Corridor.

Traversed by thousands of trains and millions of riders, the Northeast Corridor might be America’s most famous railway, but its influence goes far beyond the right-of-way. David Alff welcomes readers aboard to see how nineteenth-century train tracks did more than connect Boston to Washington, DC. They transformed hundreds of miles of Atlantic shoreline into a political capital, a global financial hub, and home to fifty million people. The Northeast Corridor reveals how freight trains, commuter rail, and Amtrak influenced—and in turn were shaped by—centuries of American industrial expansion, metropolitan growth, downtown decline, and revitalization.

Paying as much attention to Aberdeen, Trenton, New Rochelle, and Providence as to New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, Alff provides narrative thrills for history buffs, train enthusiasts, and adventurers alike. What’s more, he offers a glimpse into the future of the corridor. New infrastructural plans—supported by President Joe Biden, famously Amtrak’s biggest fan—envision ever-faster trains zipping along technologically advanced rails. Yet those tracks will literally sit atop a history that links the life of Frederick Douglass, who fled to freedom by boarding a train in Baltimore, to the Frederick Douglass Tunnel, which is expected to be the newest link in the corridor by 2032.

Trains have long made the places that make America, and they still do.

Learn more about The Northeast Corridor at the University of Chicago Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Northeast Corridor.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five of the best books about eating

Sophie Ratcliffe is professor of literature and creative criticism at the University of Oxford and a fellow and tutor at Lady Margaret Hall. In addition to her scholarly books, including On Sympathy, she has published commentary pieces and book reviews for the Guardian, the New Statesman, and the Times Literary Supplement, among other outlets, and has served a judge for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction and the Wellcome Book Prize.

Ratcliffe's forthcoming book is Loss, A Love Story: Imagined Histories and Brief Encounters.

At the Guardian she tagged five of the best books about eating, including:

The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester

“This is not a conventional cookbook,” writes Lanchester’s hero Tarquin Winot in this thriller-masquerading-as-foodie memoir. Over a variety of “seasonal” chapters, Winot weighs in about his various relatives and friends, “the many extant batter, waffle and pancake dishes” from “Swedish krumkaker” to “Polish naleśniki” and his convictions in relation to fish (“lemon sole is a very underrated fish, much closer in quality to its more highly regarded Dover cousin than wisdom normally permits”). Lanchester crafts Winot-as-author to be infuriating – he’s pompous, tricksy and pedantic – but a fancy prose style soon turns out to be the most innocent of his vices. A dark, funny and exquisitely crafted book.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jeff Zentner's "Colton Gentry's Third Act," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Colton Gentry's Third Act: A Novel by Jeff Zentner.

The entry begins:

Colton Gentry’s Third Act is the story of Colton Gentry, a country musician approaching middle age and for whom some things are going very well. He has a hit song climbing the country music charts and he’s married to Maisy Martin, one of country’s hottest acts who’s preparing to make the jump to pop music. But other things are not so good in his life. He recently lost his best friend in a mass shooting at a country music festival. His wife has been in the tabloids with rumors of infidelity. And he’s always sought comfort from heartache in the bottle. So one night, he takes the stage, drunk, before an arena ground, and offers up his opinion on guns. And it goes over...poorly. His career and marriage implode and he moves back home to his small town in Kentucky, where he begins his third act in life, part of which involves taking on a new vocation and reconnecting with a high school flame.

I love book to movie adaptations and the Hulu adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People was one of the inspirations for Colton Gentry’s Third Act. So, if I were able to pick a director to adapt it, I’d want Lennie Abrahamson and Hettie MacDonald, who did that adaptation. I’d also be a big fan of Ray McKinnon, who did Rectify, which was another one of the inspirations for Colton.

As for who to play the leads? I’d love to see Rachel Brosnahan playing older Luann (the story has two timelines⏤high school and present day). I think she’d bring steel, wit, and intelligence to the part. I could see her giving orders in the kitchen (she runs a restaurant). As for older Colton? I’d love to see...[read on]

Visit Jeff Zentner's website.

Writers Read: Jeff Zentner (March 2016).

My Book, The Movie: The Serpent King.

The Page 69 Test: The Serpent King.

The Page 69 Test: Goodbye Days.

My Book, The Movie: Colton Gentry's Third Act.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Clea Simon's "Bad Boy Beat"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Bad Boy Beat by Clea Simon.

About the book, from the publisher:

When a rookie reporter for the Boston Standard is convinced a series of street crimes are connected, she is willing to go the extra mile to chase down the big story. The newest mystery by Clea Simon is a page-turning story featuring a female protagonist and set in Boston's underground.

Boston Standard journalist Emily - Em - Kelton is desperate for a big story. As a new reporter Em covers the police beat, which has her responding to every crime that comes across the newsroom scanner. Despite the drudgery and the largely nocturnal hours, it's a beat that suits her - especially with her affinity for the low-level criminals she regularly interacts with and what she considers a healthy scepticism for the rules.

But she's sick of filing short news briefs about random street murders that barely merit a byline, and when she sets out to cover yet another shooting of a low-level dealer, she begins to wonder if these crimes are somehow connected.

With not much to go on but her instincts, Em sets out to uncover the truth behind these sordid crimes. But the more she investigates and uncovers a pattern, the more she digs herself into a hole from which she might not come out of alive . . .

Clea Simon draws on her career as a journalist and delivers a fast-paced and intricate plot and intriguing characters with the city of Boston coming to life. This mystery will appeal to fans who love a strong female protagonist, unexpected twists and turns and a mind-blowing ending!

Visit Clea Simon's website.

The Page 69 Test: To Conjure a Killer.

The Page 69 Test: Bad Boy Beat.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Jane Webster's "Materializing the Middle Passage"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Materializing the Middle Passage: A Historical Archaeology of British Slave Shipping, 1680-1807 by Jane Webster.

About the book, from the publisher:

An estimated 2.7 million Africans made an enforced crossing of the Atlantic on British slave ships between c.1680 and 1807--a journey that has become known as the 'Middle Passage'. This book focuses on the slave ship itself. The slave ship is the largest artefact of the Transatlantic slave trade, but because so few examples of wrecked slaving vessels have been located at sea, it is rarely studied by archaeologists. Materializing the Middle Passage: A Historical Archaeology of British Slave Shipping,1680-1807 argues that there are other ways for archaeologists to materialize the slave ship. It employs a pioneering interdisciplinary methodology combining primary documentary sources, maritime and terrestrial archaeology, paintings, maritime and ethnographic museum collections, and many other sources to 'rebuild' British slaving vessels and to identify changes to them over time.

The book then goes on to consider the reception of the slave ship and its trade goods in coastal West Africa, and details the range, and uses, of the many African resources (including ivory, gold, and live animals) entering Britain on returning slave ships. The third section of the book focuses on the Middle Passage experiences of both captives and crews and argues that greater attention needs to be paid to the coping mechanisms through which Africans survived, yet also challenged, their captive passage.

Finally, Jane Webster asks why the African Middle Passage experience remains so elusive, even after decades of scholarship dedicated to uncovering it. She considers when, how, and why the crossing was remembered by 'saltwater' captives in the Caribbean and North America. The marriage of words and things attempted in this richly illustrated book is underpinned throughout by a theoretical perspective combining creolization and postcolonial theory, and by a central focus on the materiality of the slave ship and its regimes.

Learn more about Materializing the Middle Passage at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Materializing the Middle Passage.

--Marshal Zeringue

The five best novels about hauntings

Jen Williams lives in London with her partner and their small ridiculous cat. A fan of pirates and dark folklore from an early age, these days she writes horror-tinged crime thrillers with strong female leads as well as character-driven fantasy novels with plenty of banter and magic. In 2015 she was nominated for Best Newcomer in the British Fantasy Awards.

[My Book, The Movie: Games for Dead Girls]

Williams's new novel is The Hungry Dark.

At CrimeReads she tagged her "five favourite books about Hauntings (which are really books about Bad Places, and Terrible People)." One title on the list:

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

It is probably illegal to have a list about hauntings without including the grandmother of the modern horror novel. Shirley Jackson was the undisputed queen of the unsettling undercurrent, and by the time Eleanor arrives at Hill House with all her mental baggage, we already know that something is terribly wrong, and that the house is going to draw it out of her like a poison. Except it won’t be a healing experience. The Haunting of Hill House also contains probably the greatest opening lines in a novel ever:

‘No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more.’

Please read that and tell me you are not terrified of Hill House. I still wake up in a sweat sometimes with the words ‘Hill House, not sane’ bouncing around my head.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Haunting of Hill House also appears on Sara Flannery Murphy's five top thriller and horror books with “House” in the title, Lisa Unger's list of five great horror novels that explore the darkest corners of our minds, Dell Villa's list of seven of the best haunted houses in literature, Kat Rosenfield's list of seven scary October reads, Michael Marshall Smith's top ten list of horror books, Carlos Ruiz Zafón's top ten list of 20th-century gothic novels,  and Brad Leithauser's five best list of ghost tales.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Katie Tietjen

From my Q&A with Katie Tietjen, author of Death in the Details:

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

“Death” and “Details” are both very central concepts in my book! My protagonist, Maple, begins selling her intricately crafted dollhouses and finds her first customer dead.

Because she thinks the sheriff is overlooking suspicious details at the scene, she turns her crafting skills towards a new purpose: re-creating the death scene in miniature so she can walk him through all the ways his investigation went wrong…which he is, ahem, less than thrilled about.

Ultimately, Maple’s impressive attention to detail is what enables her to crack the case.

What's in a name?

I wanted to set the story in New England, and the name “Maple Bishop”...[read on]

Visit Katie Tietjen's website.

The Page 69 Test: Death in the Details.

Q&A with Katie Tietjen.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Robin Bernstein's "Freeman’s Challenge"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit by Robin Bernstein.

About the book, from the publisher:

An award-winning historian tells a gripping, morally complicated story of murder, greed, race, and the true origins of prison for profit.

In the early nineteenth century, as slavery gradually ended in the North, a village in New York State invented a new form of unfreedom: the profit-driven prison. Uniting incarceration and capitalism, the village of Auburn built a prison that enclosed industrial factories. There, “slaves of the state” were leased to private companies. The prisoners earned no wages, yet they manufactured furniture, animal harnesses, carpets, and combs, which consumers bought throughout the North. Then one young man challenged the system.

In Freeman’s Challenge, Robin Bernstein tells the story of an Afro-Native teenager named William Freeman who was convicted of a horse theft he insisted he did not commit and sentenced to five years of hard labor in Auburn’s prison. Incensed at being forced to work without pay, Freeman demanded wages. His challenge triggered violence: first against him, then by him. Freeman committed a murder that terrified and bewildered white America. And white America struck back—with aftereffects that reverberate into our lives today in the persistent myth of inherent Black criminality. William Freeman’s unforgettable story reveals how the North invented prison for profit half a century before the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery “except as a punishment for crime”—and how Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and other African Americans invented strategies of resilience and resistance in a city dominated by a citadel of unfreedom.

Through one Black man, his family, and his city, Bernstein tells an explosive, moving story about the entangled origins of prison for profit and anti-Black racism.

Learn more about Freeman’s Challenge at the University of Chicago Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Freeman’s Challenge.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight top novels about absent mothers

Heidi Reimer is a novelist and writing coach. Her debut novel, The Mother Act, is now out from Penguin Random House. Her writing interrogates the lives of women, usually those bent on breaking free of what they’re given to create what they yearn for. Her front row seat to The Mother Act’s theatrical world began two decades ago when she met and married an actor, and her immersion in motherhood began when she adopted a toddler and discovered she was pregnant on the same day.

At Electric Lit Reimer tagged eight "nuanced stories that explore the complicated reasons behind mothers leaving their children." One title on the list:

Leave Me by Gayle Forman

Maribeth Klein is an exhausted working mother. She’s keeping too many balls in the air for her job, her husband, and their four-year-old twins when she has a heart attack at 44. She survives, but her recovery is hampered by the mental and physical labor no one else seems able to shoulder long enough for her to properly recuperate. When she withdraws $25,000 of inheritance money, pays cash for a train ticket, and disappears, her act feels like a matter of life and death. Alone in her new furnished apartment, she grapples both with what she’s done to her family and with her own experience as an adoptee. One night she watches a movie about a mother who abandons her kids, and she knows the character will be redeemed because she’s given screen time and a voice. Despite her own justifications, Maribeth fears that in the made-for-TV movie of her life, she is the villain.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Page 69 Test: Leave Me.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Amy Shearn's "Dear Edna Sloane"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Dear Edna Sloane by Amy Shearn.

About the book, from the publisher:

Dear Edna Sloane is a funny, fast-paced epistolary novel about fame, writers, ambition, and the ups and downs of a creative life.

Edna Sloane was a promising author at the top of her game. Her debut novel was an instant classic and commercial success, vaulting her into the heady echelons of the 1980s New York City lit scene. Then she disappeared and was largely forgotten. Decades later, Seth Edwards is an aspiring writer and editor who feels he’s done all the right things to achieve literary success, but despairs that his dream will be forever out of reach. He becomes obsessed with the idea that if he can rediscover Sloane, it will make his career. His search for her leads to unexpected places and connections, and the epistolary correspondence that ensues makes up this book, a novel infused with insights and meditations about what our cultural obsession with the "next big thing" does to literature, and what it means to be a creative person in the world.

Visit Amy Shearn's website.

The Page 99 Test: How Far Is the Ocean from Here.

Writers Read: Amy Shearn (March 2013).

Q&A with Amy Shearn.

My Book, The Movie: Dear Edna Sloane.

The Page 69 Test: Dear Edna Sloane.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Brian M. Ingrassia's "Speed Capital"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Speed Capital: Indianapolis Auto Racing and the Making of Modern America by Brian M. Ingrassia.

About the book, from the publisher:

How a speedway became a legendary sports site and sparked America’s car culture

The 1909 opening of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway marked a foundational moment in the history of automotive racing. Events at the famed track and others like it also helped launch America’s love affair with cars and an embrace of road systems that transformed cities and shrank perceptions of space.

Brian M. Ingrassia tells the story of the legendary oval’s early decades. This story revolves around Speedway cofounder and visionary businessman Carl Graham Fisher, whose leadership in the building of the transcontinental Lincoln Highway and the iconic Dixie Highway had an enormous impact on American mobility. Ingrassia looks at the Speedway’s history as a testing ground for cars and airplanes, its multiple close brushes with demolition, and the process by which racing became an essential part of the Golden Age of Sports. At the same time, he explores how the track’s past reveals the potent links between sports capitalism and the selling of nostalgia, tradition, and racing legends.

Learn more about Speed Capital at the University of Illinois Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Speed Capital.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven top too-good-to-be-true tech stories

James Folta is a writer and the managing editor of Points in Case. He co-writes the weekly Newsletter of Humorous Writing.

At Lit Hub he tagged seven titles that "feature technology that’s not ready for primetime." One entry on the list:

Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park

Like so much tech these days, Crichton’s next big vacation destination turns out to be an utter disaster. When I first read this as a kid, it was boggling to me that no one imagined how it might be difficult to contain creatures that are famous for being huge. But having lived through a number of highly lauded tech innovations that have blazed ahead only to bump up against obvious pitfalls, Jurassic Park makes more sense now.

Hard to look back on Crichton’s stuff as predictive, though, knowing that he spent much of his later public life claiming that climate change wasn’t humans’ fault.

Read about another title on the list.

Jurassic Park is among Ezekiel Boone's five top thrillers about when technology betrays us, Shawn Pryor's five top books with giant monsters, Nicole Hill's five weird science stories in which nothing could possibly go wrong, Kat Rosenfield's ten worst traitors in fiction, Chuck Wendig's five books that prove mankind shouldn’t play with technology, Jeff Somers's top seven books that explore what might happen when technology betrays us, Damian Dibben's top ten time travel books, and Becky Ferreira's eleven best books about dinosaurs.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Ava January

From my Q&A with Ava January, author of The Mayfair Dagger: A Novel:

About the book, from the publisher:

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

The title of The Mayfair Dagger was the starting point for the entire story. I loved the idea of a woman in hiding, not just physically but from herself emotionally as well. Albertine Honeycombe is sweet and soft but has decided she will reinvent herself as Countess Von Dagga, a woman who needs no one and nothing (except money, one rather needs money regardless of their feelings about it). While she might fancy herself a crack detective referred to as The Mayfair Dagger, Albertine learns that changing who you are is never as easy as a mere name change. The reader begins with an idea of who Albertine might be, but that is challenged as they get to know her further.

What's in a name?

My main character is a woman who is pretending to be a married countess who also acts as a detective. Due to laws of the time she was unable to work, hold her own bank account or arrange her own accommodation so she communicates as her ‘husband’ in writing. I wanted to give her a name that...[read on]

Visit Ava January's website.

Q&A with Ava January.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top literary novels masquerading as crime novels

Ash Clifton grew up in Gainesville, Florida, home of the University of Florida, where his father was a deputy sheriff and, later, the Chief of Police. He graduated from U.F. with a degree in English, then got an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona. He lives in Gainesville with his wife and son. He writes mystery, thriller, and science fiction novels.

Clifton's new novel is Twice The Trouble.

At Shepherd he tagged five titles that feel "like a genre novel (that is, it has a great plot) but also has the depth and vividness of a literary novel." One title on the list:

What Meets The Eye by Alex Kenna

One thing I really like about this mystery novel is the way it is told from multiple points of view, which is a very unusual technique in mystery fiction. That’s one reason that it felt, to me, so much like a literary novel.

The first character is a brilliant, tortured artist named Margot, who is already dead at the start of the novel. The second character is Kate, an ex-cop turned P.I. who is hired to find Margot’s killer.

Both women are compelling, interesting characters, but I especially liked the way Kenna renders the hero, Kate. She’s a single mom in recovery from a drug addiction. Her ex is a creep, and most of her old (male) cop colleagues are, too. Her struggle in solving the case felt completely real and human to me. And that’s the signature quality of literary fiction.

Read about another entry on the list.

Q&A with Alex Kenna.

My Book, The Movie: What Meets the Eye.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Rosamund Johnston's "Red Tape"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Red Tape: Radio and Politics in Czechoslovakia, 1945-1969 by Rosamund Johnston.

About the book, from the publisher:

In socialist Eastern Europe, radio simultaneously produced state power and created the conditions for it to be challenged. As the dominant form of media in Czechoslovakia from 1945 until 1969, radio constituted a site of negotiation between Communist officials, broadcast journalists, and audiences. Listeners' feedback, captured in thousands of pieces of fan mail, shows how a non-democratic society established, stabilized, and reproduced itself. In Red Tape, historian Rosamund Johnston explores the dynamic between radio reporters and the listeners who liked and trusted them while recognizing that they produced both propaganda and entertainment. Red Tape rethinks Stalinism in Czechoslovakia—one of the states in which it was at its staunchest for longest—by showing how, even then, meaningful, multi-directional communication occurred between audiences and state-controlled media. It finds de-Stalinization's first traces not in secret speeches never intended for the ears of "ordinary" listeners, but instead in earlier, changing forms of radio address. And it traces the origins of the Prague Spring's discursive climate to the censored and monitored environment of the newsroom, long before the seismic year of 1968. Bringing together European history, media studies, cultural history, and sound studies, Red Tape shows how Czechs and Slovaks used radio technologies and institutions to negotiate questions of citizenship and rights.

Visit Rosamund Johnston's website.

The Page 99 Test: Red Tape.

--Marshal Zeringue

Amy Shearn's "Dear Edna Sloane," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Dear Edna Sloane by Amy Shearn.

The entry begins:

I hadn’t thought about this until you asked me this question and then my brain immediately screamed Olivia Colman, duh. Olivia Colman would be great as Edna Sloane – the way she can be so funny and also have such depth of emotion, how she’s at once totally unafraid of looking or seeming any particular way, and at the same time is so sexy. A slightly unhinged Colman, playing deep smoldering rage frosted with brilliance and wit, that’s what we’re wanting here.

For Seth, we’re going to need...[read on]

Visit Amy Shearn's website.

The Page 99 Test: How Far Is the Ocean from Here.

Writers Read: Amy Shearn (March 2013).

Q&A with Amy Shearn.

My Book, The Movie: Dear Edna Sloane.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Catherine Mack's "Every Time I Go on Vacation, Someone Dies"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Every Time I Go on Vacation, Someone Dies: A Novel (The Vacation Mysteries, Volume 1) by Catherine Mack.

About the book, from the publisher:

Ten days, eight suspects, six cities, five authors, three bodies . . . one trip to die for.

All that bestselling author Eleanor Dash wants is to get through her book tour in Italy and kill off her main character, Connor Smith, in the next in her Vacation Mysteries series—is that too much to ask?

Clearly, because when an attempt is made on the real Connor’s life—the handsome but infuriating con man she got mixed up with ten years ago and now can't get out of her life—Eleanor’s enlisted to help solve the case.

Contending with literary competitors, rabid fans, a stalker—and even her ex, Oliver, who turns up unexpectedly—theories are bandied about, and rivalries, rifts, and broken hearts are revealed. But who’s really trying to get away with murder?

Every Time I Go on Vacation, Someone Dies is the irresistible and hilarious series debut from Catherine Mack, introducing bestselling fictional author Eleanor Dash on her Italian book tour that turns into a real-life murder mystery, as her life starts to imitate the world in her books.

Visit Catherine McKenzie's website.

The Page 69 Test: Every Time I Go on Vacation, Someone Dies.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten great books about books

Elly Griffiths is the author of the Ruth Galloway and Brighton mystery series, as well as the standalone novels The Stranger Diaries, winner of the Edgar Award for Best Novel, and The Postscript Murders. She is the recipient of the CWA Dagger in the Library Award and the Mary Higgins Clark Award.

[The Page 69 Test: The Crossing Places; My Book, The Movie: The House at Sea’s End; The Page 69 Test: A Room Full of Bones; The Page 69 Test: A Dying Fall]

Griffith's newest Ruth Galloway mystery is The Last Word.

At CrimeReads she tagged her ten favorite books about books, including:

The Glass Room by Ann Cleeves

Ann Cleeves is one of the most successful crime writers in Britain. She also a great champion of books, reading and libraries. This book is set at a writer’s retreat with a stunning glass observatory. It’s the perfect location for a classic locked-room mystery with Ann’s usual clever twists and hall-of-mirrors misdirection. What’s not to love? As an added bonus, you have the delight of DI Vera Stanhope mixing with the arty types.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue