Kira Jane Buxton's "Tartufo," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Tartufo by Kira Jane Buxton.

The entry begins:

Tartufo is a funny Italian caper about a dying village, its cast of delightfully eccentric characters and what happens when truffle hunter Giovanni (along with his truffle hunting dogs) unearth the biggest truffle the world has ever seen. There are a lot of characters, so it is a tremendously fun novel to imagine casting. I will focus on the three main characters to avoid this becoming a novella!

For the role of Delizia Micucci, I have only ever envisioned Sabrina Impacciatore. She is a phenomenal comedic actress whom you might have seen steal the show in season two of The White Lotus. I imagine she would be phenomenal at playing the stressed out Delizia Micucci as she tries to save her village from extinction.

Giovanni Scarpazza is the kind, sensitive truffle hunter of the village. He is grieving his partner, and being in the woods with his dogs is where he feels most at home. I can picture...[read on]

Visit Kira Jane Buxton's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Kira Jane Buxton & Ewok.

My Book, The Movie: Hollow Kingdom.

The Page 69 Test: Hollow Kingdom.

My Book, The Movie: Feral Creatures.

Q&A with Kira Jane Buxton.

The Page 69 Test: Feral Creatures.

My Book, The Movie: Tartufo.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Kieran Connell's "Multicultural Britain"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Multicultural Britain: A People's History by Kieran Connell.

About the book, from the publisher:

Between the end of the Second World War and the early twenty-first century, Britain became multicultural. This vivid book tells that remarkable story. Kieran Connell, an historian of Irish and German heritage who grew up in Balsall Heath, inner-city Bir-mingham, takes readers into multicultural communities across Britain at key moments in their development.

Journeying far beyond London, Multicultural Britain ex-plores the messy contradictions of the country's transition into today's diverse society. It reveals the ordinary people who have forged Britain's multiculturalism; skewers public leaders, from Enoch Powell to Harold Wilson to Margaret Thatcher, who have too often weaponized race for their own political ends; and shines a light on the shifting nature of British racism, revealing its enduring day-to-day impact on ethnic-minority groups.

Between postcolonial reckonings and immigration anxieties, how people live together in Brexit Britain remains an urgent question for our time. Connell's fresh, thought-provoking book unveils British multiculturalism not as a problematic idea, but as a rich and complex lived reality.

Visit Kieran Connell's website.

The Page 99 Test: Black Handsworth.

The Page 99 Test: Multicultural Britain.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eleven thrillers featuring the mega-rich

Trisha Sakhlecha grew up in New Delhi and now splits her time between Berlin and London. She is a diplomat, currently working as Director of The Tagore Centre at the Embassy of India. In the past, Sakhlecha has worked in the fashion industry as a business consultant, designer, and trend forecaster.

The Inheritance is her U.S. debut.

At Electric Lit Sakhlecha tagged thrillers featuring the mega-rich in which "the themes of betrayal, secrecy, and ambition [are] explored with razor-sharp intensity." One title on the list:

Pretty Things by Janelle Brown

Two women, from vastly different backgrounds, find their lives entwined in this novel that delves into the world of luxury, deceit, and revenge. One is a grifter, and the other, a wealthy socialite. Throw in a plot abounding with secrets and you have a twisty thriller that explores the disparity between rich and poor, while building suspense around what happens when the two worlds collide.

Read about another entry on the list.

Pretty Things is among Julie Clark's four top books featuring female con artists and Lindsay Cameron's five thrillers to warn you away from social media.

The Page 69 Test: Pretty Things.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is James Byrne reading?

Featured at Writers Read: James Byrne, author of Chain Reaction (A Dez Limerick Thriller, 3).

His entry begins:

I shouldn’t read mysteries and thrillers when I’m in a first-draft mode — as I am now — so I’m re-reading Wind, Sand and Stars by aviator, novelist, journalist Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. It’s a collection of the most amazing stories about the earliest days of aviation. He writes about flying over hostile tribes in North Africa and the treacherous Andes Mountains in South America, delivering the mail in the 1930s. His prose style is beautiful and lyrical, and his descriptions are elegant.

Although he’s most famous for The Little Prince, it’s his aviation writing that mesmerizes me.

Adding to his mystique...[read on]

About Chain Reaction, from the publisher:

Dez Limerick, a man of many skills and a murky past, faces the impossible-a skilled, deadly opponent who anticipates his every move in James Byrne's Chain Reaction.

Desmond Aloysius Limerick ("Dez" to his friends and close personal enemies) is a man with a shadowy past, certain useful hard-won skills, and, if one digs deep enough, a reputation as a good man to have at your back. He was trained as a "gatekeeper"―he can open any door, keep it open as long as necessary, and control who does―and does not―go through. Now retired from his previous life, Dez still tries to keep his skills up to date.

Knocking around the country, picking up the occasional gig as a guitarist, Dez is contacted by a friend in urgent need of his musical skills. At his behest, Dez flies to the East Coast to a gig at the brand new massive complex, the Liberty Center. But he's barely landed before he finds himself in the midst of a terrorist attack, a group has taken over the whole center and thousands of hostage lives are in danger. With the semi-willing help of a talented thief, Dez takes on the impossible task of outfighting and outwitting a literal army. But that's just the beginning, as Dez learns he was actually lured there under false pretenses, by someone who knows more about Dez, his past and his skills than any living person should.

Visit James Byrne's website.

Q&A with James Byrne.

The Page 69 Test: Deadlock.

My Book, The Movie: Deadlock.

Writers Read: James Byrne.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Keidrick Roy's "American Dark Age"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism by Keidrick Roy.

About the book, from the publisher:

How medieval-inspired racial feudalism reigned in early America and was challenged by Black liberal thinkers

Though the United States has been heralded as a beacon of democracy, many nineteenth-century Americans viewed their nation through the prism of the Old World. What they saw was a racially stratified country that reflected not the ideals of a modern republic but rather the remnants of feudalism. American Dark Age reveals how defenders of racial hierarchy embraced America’s resemblance to medieval Europe and tells the stories of the abolitionists who exposed it as a glaring blemish on the national conscience.

Against those seeking to maintain what Frederick Douglass called an “aristocracy of the skin,” Keidrick Roy shows how a group of Black thinkers, including Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Hosea Easton, and Harriet Jacobs, challenged the medievalism in their midst—and transformed the nation’s founding liberal tradition. He demonstrates how they drew on spiritual insight, Enlightenment thought, and a homegrown political philosophy that gave expression to their experiences at the bottom of the American social order. Roy sheds new light on how Black abolitionist writers and activists worked to eradicate the pernicious ideology of racial feudalism from American liberalism and renew the country’s commitment to values such as individual liberty, social progress, and egalitarianism.

American Dark Age reveals how the antebellum Black liberal tradition holds vital lessons for us today as hate groups continue to align themselves with fantasies of a medieval past and openly call for a return of all-powerful monarchs, aristocrats, and nobles who rule by virtue of their race.

Visit Keidrick Roy's website.

The Page 99 Test: American Dark Age.

--Marshal Zeringue

Four tech thrillers rooted in the tensions between technology & human nature

Sara Sligar is an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California. Her first novel, Take Me Apart, was a Kirkus Best Book of the Year and a finalist for the Ned Kelly Award for Best International Crime Fiction. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.Phil. in Modern European History from the University of Cambridge. Her new novel is Vantage Point.

At CrimeReads Sligar tagged four books that "are living on the blade edge of progress, using fiction’s vast possibilities to imagine what comes next, for tech and for the people who use it." One title on the list:

Samanta Schweblin, Little Eyes

Have you ever had a conversation with a friend about an ocean-themed costume party and then gotten an Instagram ad for shark onesies a few hours later? Have you ever wondered how much our devices truly see into our lives? If so, you might empathize with the characters in Samanta Schweblin’s Little Eyes, translated into English by Megan McDowell. In the universe Schweblin imagines, the world has become enchanted with kentukis, an electronic pet equipped with a camera that allows people thousands of miles away to observe your every move. Through short chapters spanning the globe, Schweblin tracks the allure and danger of these Tamagotchis-on-steroids, exploring how far people will go in search of connection. The novel’s structure is more fragmented and experimental than your typical thriller, but the foreboding tone and pervasive violence can go head-to-head with the darkest crime fiction.

Read about another entry on the list.

Little Eyes is among Rabeea Saleem's six technothrillers featuring digital surveillance and voyeurism.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Nicholas George's "A Lethal Walk in Lakeland"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: A Lethal Walk in Lakeland (A Walk Through England Mystery) by Nicholas George.

About the book, from the publisher:

Former San Diego detective Rick “Chase” Chasen has found a welcome change of pace on walking tours in the British countryside. But England’s green and pleasant land can hide all kinds of surprises—including murder . . .

Chase has two compelling reasons for returning to England—a group walk along the famed Coast to Coast trail in the picturesque Lake District, and a chance to further his relationship with Mike, the handsome Devonshire coroner he met on his last trip. The walkers, including Chase’s dear friend and fellow Anglophile Billie Mondreau, assemble at a Cumbrian hotel and begin their adventure with the traditional “baptism of the boots” in St. Bee’s Bay. But they’ve barely begun traveling eastward with their genial guide than the group dynamic turns unexpectedly rocky.

The problem is the Uptons—a wealthy family who have arrived from Texas, and whose squabbling antics continually overshadow the bucolic surroundings. Brock Upton, tall and commanding, is traveling with his pint-sized wife and his three siblings, along with a family friend. Every member of the party cites a different reason for joining the tour, and Chase’s instincts tell him they’re all lying.

Brock’s heart condition hinders their progress through the Lake District’s hills and dales. But that proves the least of their problems when one of the Uptons is fatally poisoned. Years of secrets and grudges emerge, along with a decades-old family mystery. And only Chase’s investigative expertise can find the answers—and uncover a killer in their midst before tragedy befalls the tour again . . .

Visit Nicholas George's website.

My Book, The Movie: A Lethal Walk in Lakeland.

The Page 69 Test: A Lethal Walk in Lakeland.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Michelle Adams's "The Containment"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North by Michelle Adams.

About the book, from the publisher:

The epic story of Detroit's struggle to integrate schools in its suburbs—and the defeat of desegregation in the North.

In 1974, the Supreme Court issued a momentous decision: In the case of Milliken v. Bradley, the justices brought a halt to school desegregation across the North, and to the civil rights movement’s struggle for a truly equal education for all. How did this come about, and why?

In The Containment, the esteemed legal scholar Michelle Adams tells the epic story of the struggle to integrate Detroit schools—and what happened when it collided with Nixon-appointed justices committed to a judicial counterrevolution. Adams chronicles the devoted activists who tried to uplift Detroit's students amid the upheavals of riots, Black power, and white flight—and how their efforts led to federal judge Stephen Roth’s landmark order to achieve racial balance by tearing down the walls separating the city and its suburbs. The “metropolitan remedy” could have remade the landscape of racial justice. Instead, the Supreme Court ruled that the suburbs could not be a part of the effort to integrate—and thus upheld the inequalities that remain in place today.

Adams tells this story via compelling portraits of a city under stress and of key figures—including Detroit’s first Black mayor, Coleman Young, and Justices Marshall, Rehnquist, and Powell. The result is a legal and historical drama that exposes the roots of today’s backlash against affirmative action and other efforts to fulfill the country's promise.

Learn more about The Containment at the publisher's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Containment.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top wild girls of literature

Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum's most recent collection of fiction, What We Do with the Wreckage, won the 2017 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her two previous collections are Swimming with Strangers and This Life She’s Chosen, which was a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick of the Month.

Elita is her first novel. She lives near Seattle.

At Lit Hub Lunstrum tagged five works of literature featuring wild children, including:

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë

How can I end this list without Jane, for who is wilder than Jane? I found Jane Eyre on a library shelf when I was in middle school—the same age my students are now. I was in my own period of dark stillness then, and Jane presented a wholly new (to me) alternative to the girl-protagonists I had loved before her. Prickly and plain, blunt-spoken and too moody, Jane felt to me like a kind of soulmate, a literary mirror. She refuses capture again and again, unyielding in her need to understand herself above all else. My book takes its epigraph from Brontë, Atalanta’s and Bernadette’s story beginning with Jane’s call to freedom: “I am no bird, and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you.” When she eventually returns to Rochester at the close of the novel, it is not as a submission, but as a partner. She tells her reader that it is she who leads him, taking his hand to walk the first steps into their new life. “We entered the wood,” she tells her reader, “and wended homeward.” Home, Jane Eyre reminds the reader, is always and only where the self can be free—on the other side of the dark wood.

Read about another novel on Lunstrum's list.

Jane Eyre also made Christina Henry's list of five top novels featuring brave women in mysterious circumstances, Hannah Sloane's list of seven titles about men breaking hearts & acting despicably, Aidan Cottrell-Boyce's top ten list of novels and stories about prophets, Jane Shemilt's list of five books that trace the portrayal of mental disorders in literature, Lucy Ellmann's top ten list of gripes in literature, Elizabeth Brooks’s list of ten of the creepiest gothic novels, Kate Kellaway's list of the best romantic novels that aren’t riddled with cliches, Julia Spiro's list of seven titles told from the perspective of domestic workers, Jane Healey's list of five favorite gothic romances, Annaleese Jochems's list of the great third wheels of literature, Sara Collins's list of six of fiction's best bad women, Sophie Hannah's list of fifteen top books with a twist, E. Lockhart's list of five favorite stories about women labeled “difficult,” Sophie Hannah's top ten list of twists in fiction, Gail Honeyman's list of five of her favorite idiosyncratic characters, Kate Hamer's top ten list of books about adopted children, a list of four books that changed Vivian Gornick, Meredith Borders's list of ten of the scariest gothic romances, Esther Inglis-Arkell's top ten list of the most horribly mistreated first wives in Gothic fiction, Martine Bailey’s top six list of the best marriage plots in novels, Radhika Sanghani's top ten list of books to make sure you've read before graduating college, Lauren Passell's top five list of Gothic novels, Molly Schoemann-McCann's lists of ten fictional men who have ruined real live romance and five of the best--and more familiar--tropes in fiction, Becky Ferreira's lists of seven of the best fictional depictions of female friendship and the top six most momentous weddings in fiction, Julia Sawalha's six best books list, Honeysuckle Weeks's six best books list, Kathryn Harrison's list of six favorite books with parentless protagonists, Megan Abbott's top ten list of novels of teenage friendship, a list of Bettany Hughes's six best books, the Guardian's top 10 lists of "outsider books" and "romantic fiction;" it appears on Lorraine Kelly's six best books list, Esther Freud's top ten list of love stories, and Jessica Duchen's top ten list of literary Gypsies, and on John Mullan's lists of ten of the best governesses in literature, ten of the best men dressed as women, ten of the best weddings in literature, ten of the best locked rooms in literature, ten of the best pianos in literature, ten of the best breakfasts in literature, ten of the best smokes in fiction, and ten of the best cases of blindness in literature. It is one of Kate Kellaway's ten best love stories in fiction.

The Page 99 Test: Jane Eyre.

--Marshal Zeringue

Third reading: D.W. Buffa on "The Sheltering Sky"

The Dark Backward is among D.W. Buffa's more recent novels to be released. The story revolves around not just the strangest case William Darnell had ever tried;

it was the strangest case ever tried by any lawyer anywhere. It was impossible to explain; or rather, impossible to believe. The defendant, who did not speak English or any other language anyone could identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed, and charged with murder, rape and incest. He was given the name Adam, and Adam, as Darnell comes to learn, is more intelligent, quicker to learn, than anyone he has ever met. Adam, he learns to his astonishment, is a member of an ancient civilization that has remained undiscovered for more than three thousand years.

Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Buffa's latest take in his "Third Reading" series is on The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles. It begins:

When Paul Bowles was ten years old his family bought a piano and he did what any ten year old would have done: studied music theory, sight-singing and piano technique, and then wrote “LeCarre: An Opera in Nine Chapters.” It was a story that any ten year old would think to compose: the tangled affair of two men who exchange wives. The private New York school he attended decided that the young Paul Bowles was perhaps not quite normal for his age and moved him from the fourth to the sixth grade. It might have been better had they simply sent him off to graduate school, though, if they had, it would have been difficult to know exactly what university he should be sent and what he should study. Music was not his only interest, or his only accomplishment. When he was fifteen, he wrote his first crime story, saw Stravinsky’s The Firebird at Carnegie Hall, and displayed considerable, not to say prodigious, talent as a painter.

It would take a dozen pages to list the musical compositions of Paul Bowles and more pages than that to describe the sometimes discordant events of his personal life. His marriage, in which he and his wife often lived separately, and sometimes with other people, could only be described in a novel, one something like the one he wrote himself, a novel that, it is fair to say, could only have been written by a great musician. The Sheltering Sky is music set to English prose.

The story, on the surface, is simple enough, and even, again on the surface, a little absurd. A young couple travel with a friend across North Africa, moving from one remote village to another across the arid, blindingly hot Sahara. An epidemic is raging across North Africa. The husband, named Port, gets typhoid and dies. His wife, Kit, wandering off into the desert, is picked up by a caravan, sleeps with the Arab leader, is made part of his harem, and then escapes. That is all there is, an adventure story without much adventure. There are no battles, no rescues, and no happy endings. There is not much, really, in the way of an ending at all; nothing but a vast feeling of sadness and regret. It is, if you will, like the ending of Richard Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, a few dying notes in the distance that somehow seem to hint, and perhaps more than hint, at a new beginning, a beginning that gives a different, and a deeper, meaning to what you have just heard, or, in this case, what you have just read.

Begin at the beginning, begin with the title: The Sheltering Sky. There is a difference between Moslems and Christians, a difference in the way Moslems and Christians live, the culture, or more adequately, the horizon within which people take their bearings, what they look to when they try to define who and what they are. But, Bowles reminds us, there is another horizon, a horizon that everyone, Moslem, Christian, Hindu, Jew, or any other religion or nationality, share, the horizon that...[read on]

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

Buffa's previous third reading essays: The Great Gatsby; Brave New World; Lord Jim; Death in the Afternoon; Parade's End; The Idiot; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; The Scarlet Letter; Justine; Patriotic Gore; Anna Karenina; The Charterhouse of Parma; Emile; War and Peace; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Bread and Wine; “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities; Eugene Onegin; The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay; The Europeans; The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction; Doctor Faustus; the reading list of John F. Kennedy; Jorge Luis Borges; History of the Peloponnesian War; Mansfield Park; To Each His Own; A Passage To India; Seven Pillars of Wisdom; The Letters of T.E. Lawrence; All The King’s Men; The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus; Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt; Main Street; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Fiction's Failure; Hermann Hesse's Demian; Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July; Caesar’s Ghost; The American Constitution; A Tale of Two Cities; The Leopard; Madame Bovary; The Sheltering Sky.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Vaughn Scribner's "Under Alien Skies"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Under Alien Skies: Environment, Suffering, and the Defeat of the British Military in Revolutionary America by Vaughn Scribner.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Revolutionary War is often celebrated as marking the birth of American republicanism, liberty, and representative democracy. Yet for the tens of thousands of British and Hessian troops sent 3,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean to wage war under alien skies, such a progressive picture, as Vaughn Scribner reveals, could not have been further from the truth. In Under Alien Skies, Scribner illustrates how foreign soldiers' negative perceptions of the American environment merged with harsh wartime realities to elicit considerable physical, mental, and emotional anguish.

Whether trudging through alligator-infested swamps, nursing a comrade back to health in a rain-sodden tent, or digging trenches in a burned-out port city, most who fought in America under the British army’s flag ultimately deemed themselves strangers fighting in a strange land. For them, Revolutionary America looked nothing like the “happy land . . . blessed with every climate” that Revolutionary republicans so successfully promoted. Instead, the War of Independence descended into a quagmire of anxiety, destruction, and distress at the hands of the American environment―a “Diabolical Country,” as one British soldier opined, “which no Earthly Compensation can put me in Charity with.”

Visit Vaughn Scribner's website.

The Page 99 Test: Inn Civility.

The Page 99 Test: Under Alien Skies.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine top chilling thrillers about marriage

At BookRiot Courtney Rodgers tagged nine chilling thrillers about marriage. One title on the list:

My Lovely Wife by Samantha Downing

After 15 years of marriage, Millicent and Tobias are bored and uncommunicative. To save their marriage, they plan out a ridiculous series of murders. Hiding secrets from each other and shifting blame, Millicent and Tobias find themselves caught in a complicated web with no way out. The contrast between murders and mundane details of everyday suburban life makes this novel all the more chilling.

Read about another thriller on the list.

My Lovely Wife is among Darby Kane's seven top thrillers with couples who don’t get (or deserve) a happy ending, Misha Popp's eight titles featuring truly fatal femmes fatales, Sarah Bonner's thirteen psychological thrillers with gobsmacking twists, Kaira Rouda's thirteen books highlighting the wives in domestic suspense, Alice Feeney's eight top novels featuring odd couples & unexpected partnerships, Pip Drysdale's seven top revenge thrillers featuring women who have had enough, Christina McDonald's seven top thrillers with flawed characters, C.J. Tudor's seven crime novels where murder is a group activity, Lisa Levy's top seven psychological thrillers with manipulative male narrators, Kaira Rouda's top seven literary couples whose relationships are deeply disturbing in the most fascinating ways possible, and Margot Hunt's top five villains who have had about enough of domestic life.

The Page 69 Test: My Lovely Wife.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Susan Furlong's "Lethal Wilderness Trap"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Lethal Wilderness Trap by Susan Furlong.

About the book, from the publisher:

Trust means everything…

when danger hits too close to home.

Hunting a never-caught killer, Special Agent Nolan Shea learns of a new victim. But the body on Ava Burke’s land puts her and her young daughter, Rose, in someone’s lethal sights. With a trail of shocking clues pointing to her family’s involvement, Ava starts to question everything she holds dear and is soon desperate to uncover the truth with Nolan. Step after step, they confront their fears. But will finally cornering a murderer out in the wilderness become a trap they can’t escape?

Visit Susan Furlong's website.

My Book, The Movie: Splintered Silence.

The Page 69 Test: Splintered Silence.

Writers Read: Susan Furlong (December 2018).

Q&A with Susan Furlong.

Writers Read: Susan Furlong (July 2023).

The Page 69 Test: Lethal Wilderness Trap.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Michael Albertus's "Land Power"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn't, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies by Michael Albertus.

About the book, from the publisher:

An award-winning political scientist shows that a society’s path to prosperity, sustainability, and equality depends on who owns the land

For millennia, land has been a symbol of wealth and privilege. But the true power of land ownership is even greater than we might think. In Land Power, political scientist Michael Albertus shows that who owns the land determines whether a society will be equal or unequal, whether it will develop or decline, and whether it will safeguard or sacrifice its environment.

Modern history has been defined by land reallocation on a massive scale. From the 1500s on, European colonial powers and new nation-states shifted indigenous lands into the hands of settlers. The 1900s brought new waves of land appropriation, from Soviet and Maoist collectivization to initiatives turning large estates over to family farmers. The shuffle continues today as governments vie for power and prosperity by choosing who should get land. Drawing on a career’s worth of original research and on-the-ground fieldwork, Albertus shows that choices about who owns the land have locked in poverty, sexism, racism, and climate crisis—and that what we do with the land today can change our collective fate.

Global in scope, Land Power argues that saving civilization must begin with the earth under our feet.

Visit Michael Albertus's website.

The Page 99 Test: Land Power.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five novels that exploit our fear of being known

Melissa Larsen is the author of Shutter and The Lost House.

She received her M.F.A. from Columbia University and her B.A. from New York University.

When she isn’t traveling somewhere to research her next novel—and somehow hurting herself in the process—she lives in New York City and teaches creative writing.

At CrimeReads Larsen tagged five novels that embody "the fear of even letting someone get close to us, because once we submit to that ordeal, they have the potential to hurt us." One title on the list:

The Sea of Lost Girls by Carol Goodman

There are so many of Goodman’s novels to choose from that explore this particular topic, but this is the one that I return to again and again. A teacher at a remote private school, Tess, wakes in the middle of the night to a text from her troubled teenaged son, asking her for help. She finds him by the shore, alone, drenched, covered in what looks like blood, and unwilling to explain. Hours later, she receives a call from the school administration informing her that her son’s girlfriend has been found dead on that same shore. A mother’s fierce love is put to the test in this absolutely stunning, atmospheric novel.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nicholas George's "A Lethal Walk in Lakeland," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: A Lethal Walk in Lakeland by Nicholas George.

The entry begins:

Of course, as an author, I dream of my Walk Through England mystery series becoming a movie or TV series. The series is set mostly outdoors, so it is very visual.

My main character, Rick "Chase" Chasen, is an older (70+) man, heavy-set, with a full beard. The celebrity I envision when I think of him is James Galway, the flutist, but not an actor. Perhaps John Goodman might be a good actor choice, but he'd need to grow a beard!

Chase's close friend is Billie, also in that age range. While writing, I envisioned...[read on]

Visit Nicholas George's website.

My Book, The Movie: A Lethal Walk in Lakeland.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Bethany Hughes's "Redface"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity by Bethany Hughes.

About the book, from the publisher:

Considers the character of the “Stage Indian” in American theater and its racial and political impact

Redface unearths the history of the theatrical phenomenon of redface in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. Like blackface, redface was used to racialize Indigenous peoples and nations, and even more crucially, exclude them from full citizenship in the United States. Arguing that redface is more than just the costumes or makeup an actor wears, Bethany Hughes contends that it is a collaborative, curatorial process through which artists and audiences make certain bodies legible as “Indian.” By chronicling how performances and definitions of redface rely upon legibility and delineations of race that are culturally constructed and routinely shifting, this book offers an understanding of how redface works to naturalize a very particular version of history and, in doing so, mask its own performativity.

Tracing the “Stage Indian” from its early nineteenth-century roots to its proliferation across theatrical entertainment forms and turn of the twenty-first century attempts to address its racist legacy, Redface uses case studies in law and civic life to understand its offstage impact. Hughes connects extensive scholarship on the “Indian” in American culture to the theatrical history of racial impersonation and critiques of settler colonialism, demonstrating redface’s high stakes for Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike. Revealing the persistence of redface and the challenges of fixing it, Redface closes by offering readers an embodied rehearsal of what it would mean to read not for the “Indian” but for Indigenous theater and performance as it has always existed in the US.

Learn more about Redface at the NYU Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Redface.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top wintery horror novels

Claudia Guthrie is a writer covering culture, entertainment, and lifestyle content. Her work has appeared in ELLE, The Muse, Food52, and more. Originally from Kansas City, she now resides in Denver, where you can find her reading the newest thriller or knitting sweaters for her cats.

At Electric Lit Guthrie tagged ten wintery horror novels that will chill you to the bone, including:

The Winter People by Jennifer McMahon

The Winter People is told in two entwined stories. The first of Sara, a grieving mother in 1908 who would do anything to see her dead daughter again. The second of Ruthie, a present-day teenager whose mom mysteriously vanishes one January night.

As Ruthie searches for her mother, she unearths long-buried secrets and begins wondering if there’s any truth to the rumors that the dead haunt the woods around their small town.

Read about another entry on the list.

Winter People is among Melissa Albert's five dark thrillers to soothe your Valentine’s Day hangover.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Thomas Perry's "Pro Bono"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Pro Bono: A Novel by Thomas Perry.

About the book, from the publisher:

A tenacious attorney grapples with a dangerous group of thieves in this new thriller from the author of The Old Man.

Charles Warren, Los Angeles attorney, has dedicated his career to aiding people in financial straits. He is particularly skilled at the art of recovering assets that have been embezzled or hidden. In his newest case, helping a beautiful young widow find the money missing from her late husband’s investment accounts, Charlie recognizes a familiar scheme―one that echoes the con job that targeted his own widowed mother many years before, and that led him, as a teenager, to commit a crime of retribution that still weighs on his conscience.

Charlie can’t get the present case out of his mind, but within hours of starting his investigation, he is followed, shot at, and has his briefcase stolen. It’s clear that someone doesn’t want him following the trail of the missing money but, as Charlie continues to pursue answers, he quickly becomes too entangled in the web of fraud, betrayal, and career criminals surrounding the theft to escape its deadly snare.

A nail-biting tale of conspiracy and pursuit from Thomas Perry, “a dominating force in the world of contemporary suspense thrillers” (Publishers Weekly), Pro Bono will have readers looking over their shoulders as constantly as they keep turning pages.

Visit Thomas Perry's website and Facebook page.

The Page 69 Test: Silence.

The Page 99 Test: Nightlife.

The Page 69/99 Test: Fidelity.

The Page 69/99 Test: Runner.

The Page 69 Test: Strip.

The Page 69 Test: The Informant.

The Page 69 Test: The Boyfriend.

The Page 69 Test: A String of Beads.

The Page 69 Test: Forty Thieves.

The Page 69 Test: The Old Man.

The Page 69 Test: The Bomb Maker.

The Page 69 Test: The Burglar.

The Page 69 Test: A Small Town.

Writers Read: Thomas Perry (December 2019).

Q&A with Thomas Perry.

The Page 69 Test: Eddie's Boy.

The Page 69 Test: The Left-Handed Twin.

The Page 69 Test: Murder Book.

The Page 69 Test: Hero.

The Page 69 Test: Pro Bono.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Thomas M. Jamison's "The Pacific's New Navies"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Pacific's New Navies: An Ocean, its Wars, and the Making of US Sea Power by Thomas M. Jamison.

About the book, from the publisher:

The initial creation of the United States' ocean-going battlefleet – otherwise known as the 'New Navy' – was a result of the naval wars and arms races around the Pacific during the late-nineteenth century. Using a transnational methodology, Thomas Jamison spotlights how US Civil War-era innovations catalyzed naval development in the Pacific World, creating a sense that the US Navy was falling behind regional competitors. As the industrializing 'newly-made navies' of Chile, Peru, Japan, and China raced against each other, Pacific dynamism motivated investments in the US 'New Navy as a matter of security and civilizational prestige. In this provocative exploration into the making of modern US navalism, Jamison provides an analysis of competitive naval build-ups in the Pacific, of the interactions between peoples, ideas, and practices within it, and ultimately the emergence of the US as a major power.

Learn more about The Pacific's New Navies at the Cambridge University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Pacific's New Navies.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five books where bad things happen in beautiful places

Sandra Chwialkowska is a television writer and producer who splits her time between Los Angeles and Toronto. Most recently, she served as writer and co–executive producer on the Golden Globe–nominated ABC series Alaska Daily, created by Oscar-winning writer Tom McCarthy and starring two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank. Chwialkowska holds a BA in literature from Yale.

The Ends of Things is her first novel.

At The Nerd Daily Chwialkowska tagged "five delicious mysteries and thrillers to feed our obsession with bad things happening in beautiful places." One title on the list:

Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty

When someone is found dead at an elementary school fundraiser in the scenic Northern Beaches of Sydney, Australia, suspects and motives abound. A thrilling mystery told in multiple perspectives that centers on three mothers – Celeste, Jane, and Madeline – and their families and friends, in the leadup to the night of the murder.

Read about another entry on the list.

Big Little Lies is among Jamie Day's seven crime books featuring special events going off the rails, Ashley Audrain’s six great thrillers featuring manipulative mom-friends, Nicole Hackett's six top mysteries about motherhood & crime, Janice Hallett's five notable gripping mysteries set in small towns, Tracy Dobmeier and Wendy Katzman's six riveting titles of ultra-competitive parents, Pamela Crane's five novels featuring parenting gone wild, Michelle Frances's eight top workplace thrillers, and Jeff Somers's ten novels that teach you something about marriage.

--Marshal Zeringue