Pg. 69: Gabriella Saab's "The Star Society"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Star Society: A Historical Novel by Gabriella Saab.

About the book, from the publisher:

Inspired by the indomitable spirit of Audrey Hepburn, this gripping story follows two extraordinary sisters as they reunite after World War II, embarking on a journey of justice, survival, and secrets amid the backdrop of the Red Scare in Hollywood.

A new name, a new country, and a coveted title as Hollywood's newest rising star: by 1946, actress Ada Worthington-Fox has discarded the life she left in war-torn Arnhem, where she worked for the Dutch resistance before Gestapo imprisonment prompted her to flee after release. But that life is thrust back into the spotlight when Ingrid--the sister she believed dead--shows up on her doorstep.

Politically-minded Ingrid escaped the Nazi invasion of Arnhem and fled to Washington, DC, where she became a private investigator. Now, she has been sent to root out Communist influences in Hollywood. Her target: Ada Worthington-Fox, the sister she long thought lost to her. Ingrid must hide her true purpose as she shields Ada from sneaky reporters, damaging rumors, and increasing threats, all while fighting to uncover which side her sister is truly on before Ingrid's efforts to help her are too late.

Yet, Ada has her own mission: locating the Gestapo agent who terrorized her hometown and bringing him to justice. But delving into her past would risk alerting the press to a life too personal to expose. As the rising fear of Communism threatens everyone, she turns to her sister, believing Ingrid's ties to Washington may be her only hope for success.

But the connections between Ada's elusive Nazi and Ingrid's Communist witch hunt might be stronger than they realize. Both sisters share the darkest secret of all, one that risks their very lives if ever exposed. As they come closer to identifying Ada's target and as Ingrid's investigation intensifies, they will need to decide what is more important: justice or safety, keeping silent or taking a stand, and, above all, if their loyalty to one another is worth risking the post-war lives they've fought to build.

A thrilling historical novel that transports readers from the shadows of the Dutch resistance to the glitz and glamour of Hollywood.

Visit Gabriella Saab's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Star Society.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Amanda Shubert's "Seeing Things"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Seeing Things: Virtual Aesthetics in Victorian Culture by Amanda Shubert.

About the book, from the publisher:

A cultural history of nineteenth-century media imaginaries, Seeing Things tells the story of how Victorians experienced the virtual images created by modern optical technologies―magic lanterns, stereoscopes, phenakistoscopes, museum displays, and illusionistic stage magic. Amanda Shubert argues that interactions with these devices gave rise to a new virtual aesthetics―an understanding of visual and perceptual encounters with things that are not really there.

The popularization of Victorian optical media redefined visuality as a rational mode of spectatorship that taught audiences to distinguish illusion from reality. As an aesthetic expression of a civilizational ideal that defined the capacity to see but not believe, to be entertained without being deceived, it became a sign of western supremacy. By tracing the development of virtual aesthetics through nineteenth-century writings, from the novels of George Eliot and Charles Dickens to popular science writing and imperial travelogues, Seeing Things recovers a formative period of technological and literary innovation to explain how optical media not only anticipated cinema but became a paradigmatic media aesthetic of western modernity.

Visit Amanda Shubert's website.

The Page 99 Test: Seeing Things.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sixteen of the best books about music from the last decade

Emma Glassman-Hughes (she/her) is the associate editor at PS Balance. At PopSugar she tagged the sixteen best books about music from the last decade. One title on the list:

Bridge and Tunnel Boys: Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, and the Metropolitan Sound of the American Century by Jim Cullen

This book by cultural historian Jim Cullen draws parallels between two of the most iconic American voices of the 1970s and beyond: Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel. It also connects other fascinating sociopolitical dots about the period in which they rose to fame, and the influence of the not-quite-New York City region that they both call home.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Page 99 Test: Bridge and Tunnel Boys.

Also see Bob Stanley's top ten music histories, Holly George-Warren's ten essential music biographies, and Jarvis Cocker's top ten music books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Cara Black

From my Q&A with Cara Black, author of Huguette:

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

The title, Huguette, to me, encapsulates the book. This is Huguette's story all the way. We're with her on her journey as a young woman after Liberation in Paris, 1944 through the post war era in France to the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival in 1958.

What's in a name?

Huguette is an old fashioned French name. So many people have told me 'that's my grandmother's name' or 'my great-aunt was called Huguette'. So it's quite time specific to the post WW1 era and the 1920's, 30's when it was a popular name. We know names go in and out of fashion but so far, Huguette's name hasn't come back in style.

I discovered this name from...[read on]

Visit Cara Black's website and follow her on Instagram and Threads.

The Page 69 Test: Murder at the Lanterne Rouge.

My Book, the Movie: Murder at the Lanterne Rouge.

The Page 69 Test: Murder below Montparnasse.

The Page 69 Test: Murder in Pigalle.

My Book, The Movie: Murder in Pigalle.

My Book, The Movie: Murder on the Champ de Mars.

The Page 69 Test: Three Hours in Paris.

The Page 69 Test: Night Flight to Paris.

Writers Read: Cara Black (March 2023).

Writers Read: Cara Black (March 2024).

The Page 69 Test: Murder at la Villette.

My Book, The Movie: Huguette.

The Page 69 Test: Huguette.

Writers Read: Cara Black.

Q&A with Cara Black.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Matthias Egeler's "Elves and Fairies"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Elves and Fairies: A Short History of the Otherworld by Matthias Egeler.

About the book, from the publisher:

An enchanting history of the otherworld of elves and fairies, from the nature spirits of Iceland and Ireland to Avalon and Middle Earth

Originating in Norse and Celtic mythologies, elves and fairies are a firmly established part of Western popular culture. Since the days of the Vikings and Arthurian legend, these sprites have undergone huge transformations. From J. R. R. Tolkien’s warlike elves, based on medieval legend, to little flower fairies whose charms even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle succumbed to, they permeate European art and culture.

In this engaging cultural history, Matthias Egeler explores these mythical creatures of Iceland, Ireland, Scotland, and England, and their continental European cousins. Egeler goes on a journey through enchanted landscapes and literary worlds. He describes both their friendly and their dangerous, even deadly, sides. We encounter them in the legends of King Arthur’s round table and in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in the terrible era of the witch trials, in magic’s peaceful conquest of Victorian bourgeois salons, in the child-friendly form of Peter Pan, and even as helpers in the contemporary fight against environmental destruction.

Learn more about Elves and Fairies at the Yale University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Elves and Fairies.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eleven books for "Stranger Things" fans

At the Waterstones blog, Mark Skinner tagged eleven top books for Stranger Things fans, including:

The Saturday Night Ghost Club
Craig Davidson

Bathed in a nostalgic 1980s glow and perfect reading for all Stranger Things fans, Davidson's quietly powerful coming-of-age tale finds a group of children uncovering unexpected mysteries in the slightly haunted Niagara Falls.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Christina Kovac reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Christina Kovac, author of Watch Us Fall.

Her entry begins:

I am re-reading Crooks by Lou Berney. I read an advanced copy last summer before the crime novel published in September. I’m a huge Lou Berney fan since his November Road blew me away in 2018. Then I went back and read The Long and Faraway Gone, which was so beautiful to me, all his books are. I tend to reread loved books when I’m really stressed—and it’s my pub week, so I’m really, really stressed! It’s relaxing to hear the music of his prose and feel the way he eases you into his character’s psyche. It’s my therapy.

The reason I picked up this particular Lou Berney book again: it’s a really insightful look at families and crime, and...[read on]

About Watch Us Fall, from the publisher:

“A stunning work of suspense that’s impossible to put down. Christina Kovac masterfully combines a twisty missing person mystery, a heartbreaking love story, and an insightful exploration of the nature of obsession and trauma. I loved this novel.” —Angie Kim, New York Times bestselling author of Happiness Falls and Miracle Creek

Lucy and her three best friends share a glamorous but decaying house in the heart of Georgetown. They call themselves “the Sweeties” and live an idyllic post-grad lifestyle complete with exciting jobs, dramatic love lives, and, most importantly, each other.

But when Addie, the group’s queen bee, discovers that her ex-boyfriend Josh has gone missing, the Sweeties’ worlds are turned upside down. In the days leading up to his disappearance, Josh, a star investigative journalist from a prominent political family, was behaving erratically—and Lucy is determined to find out why. All four friends upend their lives to search for him, but detectives begin to suspect that the Sweeties might know more than they’re letting on.

As the investigation unfolds, Lucy’s obsession with the case reaches a boiling point, and with it, her own troubling secrets begin bubbling to the surface of her carefully curated life. A thrilling account of the lies and delusions that lurk beneath cloistered groups of female friends and the sinister realities of celebrity, Watch Us Fall is a gripping mystery and an examination of the things we tell ourselves when we can’t face the truth.

Visit Christina Kovac's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Cutaway.

The Page 69 Test: The Cutaway.

Writers Read: Christina Kovac (March 2017).

My Book, The Movie: Watch Us Fall.

The Page 69 Test: Watch Us Fall.

Writers Read: Christina Kovac.

--Marshal Zeringue

The five best legal thrillers of 2025: "CrimeReads"

One novel on the CrimeReads list of the best legal thrillers released in 2025:

The Note, Alafair Burke

Burke’s new novel is something of a legal thriller in disguise. Yes, it’s also a masterful psychological thriller, but not only is the main character a former prosecutor turned law professor, but the dilemma the characters find themselves in (leaving a threatening note on the windshield of a now missing man) plays out like a brilliantly complex law school hypothetical, probing theories of causation, culpability, and intent. The old friendships torn apart by circumstance are the stars of this novel, but the legal and ethical concerns are just as compelling, and they serve as powerful plot engines. This is the rare book that will keep readers debating exactly what they’ve read and what they believe for a long time to come.

Read about another thriller on the list.

The Page 69 Test: The Note.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Indira Ghose's "A Defence of Pretence"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: A Defence of Pretence: Civility and the Theatre in Early Modern England by Indira Ghose.

About the book, from the publisher:

How the drama of Shakespeare’s time demonstrates the tensions within civility

Is civility merely a matter of reinforcing status and excluding others? Or is it a lubricant in a polarised world, enabling us to overcome tribal loyalties and cooperate for the common good? In A Defence of Pretence, Indira Ghose argues that it is both. Ghose turns to the drama of Shakespeare’s time to explore the notion of civility. The theatre, she suggests, was a laboratory where many of the era’s conflicts played out. The plays test the precepts found in treatises on civility and show that, in the complexity and confusion of human life, moral purity is an illusion. We are always playing roles. In these plays, as in social life, pretence is inescapable. Could it be a virtue?

Civility, Ghose finds, is radically ambiguous. The plays of Shakespeare, Jonson and Middleton, grappling with dissimulation, lies and social performance, question the idea of a clear—cut boundary between sincerity and dissembling, between truth and lies. What is decisive is the use to which our play—acting is put. A pretence of mutual respect might serve an ethical end: to foster a sense of common purpose. In life, as in drama, the concept of the common good might be a fiction, but one that is crucial for human society.

Learn more about A Defence of Pretence at the Princeton University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: A Defence of Pretence.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven books to read while basking in a food coma

At The Huffington Post Maddie Crum tagged seven books "that suit the [holiday] season, either because they're about family, or because their gripping plots will keep you awake," including:

The Hundred-Year House by Rebecca Makkai

The characters in Rebecca Makkai's novel know what it's like to be entrapped in a space with family members welcome and unwelcome. The Hundred-Year House tracks the history of an estate, beginning with its prideful, mostly neurotic present-day inhabitants, and moving back in time to reveal the lives of the ancestors and artists who lived there for, well, the past one-hundred years. The storyline is more than clever; Makkai uses the cast of residents to make a broader comment on perceived versus "actual" history, and manages to be amusing along the way.

Read about another novel on the list.

The Hundred-Year House is among Ellen Wehle's four books with tough, savvy female characters.

The Page 69 Test: The Hundred-Year House.

My Book, The Movie: The Hundred-Year House.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 25 books for 2025: "Christian Science Monitor"

One title on the Christian Science Monitor's list of the top twenty-five books for 2025:

The Containment, by Michelle Adams

Legal scholar Michelle Adams traces school desegregation efforts in her native Detroit and their reverberations throughout the North. She focuses her compelling narrative on the 1974 Supreme Court decision in Milliken v. Bradley, which ruled that majority-white suburban school districts could not be forced to desegregate.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Page 99 Test: The Containment.

--Marshal Zeringue

Third reading: D.W. Buffa on Allan Bloom’s "The Closing of The American Mind"

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 Closing of The American Mind by Allan Bloom. It begins:

In the late l940s, before television made those who watched at best passive observers, radio engaged the attention, and the imagination, of those who listened. One show did this in what even then was considered an unusual way, The Whiz Kids, in which several young teenagers answered, or tried to answer, serious questions about serious things. Their age told part of the story. Instead of high school freshmen, they were already in college, and not just any college, places like the University of Chicago. One of them could easily have been Allan Bloom, who would years later write The Closing of The American Mind, a critique of American higher education that was not expected to sell more than the initial print run of 10,000 copies, but ended up selling more than a million copies in the Untied States and another million in the rest of the world. It was a book that would never have been written had Bloom not begun his undergraduate career at the University of Chicago just after the end of the Second World War, in 1946, when he was only fifteen years old.

Bloom understood the moment he stepped on campus that the University of Chicago was different. The buildings might be fake Gothic, gray stones that had the look of wind worn battlements, but they “were a bow to the contemplative life by a nation addicted more than any other to the active life.” A great university, it announced that “there are questions that…are not asked in ordinary life.” These were the kind of questions Bloom wanted to explore. Fifteen when he began his undergraduate education, he was eighteen when he graduated and began graduate school in the Committee on Social Thought which, in a way, was almost a university within the university. The only students taken were those who wanted to devote themselves, in that now quaint-sounding phrase, to the “life of the mind.” Bloom studied Greek history and thought, wrote his dissertation on the Greek statesman and orator Isocrates, was eighteen when he started and almost twenty-five when he finished.

Whatever else Bloom learned as a student in his years at Chicago, nothing was as important, or as influential, as what he learned from Leo Strauss. When Leo Strauss began talking about something Socrates had said in one of the dialogues Plato had written, it was as if you were listening to someone tell you what he had just heard in a conversation he had had with Socrates himself early that morning. Strauss knew what was worth reading and how that reading should be done. He explained it in a way that was really quite simple: The mind needs teachers, teachers are themselves pupils, but there cannot be an infinite regress, i.e. there must be teachers who are not pupils. These are the great minds, the greatest minds, and they are extremely rare. The only access to them are through the books they have written - the great books. It is what liberal education is all about.

One of the greatest minds - some would say the greatest mind - is Plato, who of course wrote in Greek. There are translations, but those who did the translations were not themselves very close students of what they were translating and were, many of them, satisfied with giving a kind of general account of what they thought Plato was trying to say. F. N. Cornford, whose translation was the most widely used, removed many of the exchanges between Socrates and other participants in the dialogues because he thought they were too formal and tended to become tedious. Bloom decided that a better translation was needed. In l968, his literal translation of Plato’s Republic was published and for the first time Plato could be understood by English speaking students as Plato understood himself. That did not mean students had to like it.

This is the thrust of Bloom’s The Closing of The American Mind. The proof, which at first does not appear to prove anything, is that “Classical music is dead among the young.” If this seems irrelevant to the question whether the American mind is open, as most would like to believe, or closed, as Bloom insists, his dismissal of the music those same young people came to embrace, will strike many as the closed-minded sentiment of a hopeless reactionary. Rock music, he writes, is nothing so much as a barbaric appeal to sexual desire. If...[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; Tocqueville’s America and Ours; American Statesmen; Ancient and Modern Writers Reconsidered; Père Goriot; The Remarkable Edmund Burke; The Novels of W.H. Hudson; America Revised; The City And Man; "The Use And Abuse Of History"; I, Claudius; The Closing of The American Mind.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Mark S. Cladis's "Radical Romanticism"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Radical Romanticism: Democracy, Religion, and the Environmental Imagination by Mark S. Cladis.

About the book, from the publisher:

Romanticism is often reduced to nostalgic pastoralism and solitary contemplation of the sublime. But a radical strand of Romantic writers and thinkers offered sweeping political, ecological, and religious critiques of capitalism, racism, settler colonialism, and environmental destruction. Interweaving canonical nineteenth-century authors with Black and Indigenous thinkers who transformed their work, this book is a bold new account of Romanticism for today’s deeply entrenched crises.

Mark S. Cladis examines the progressive democratic, religious, and environmental beliefs and practices that informed European Romantic literature and its sustained legacies in North America. His interpretation interweaves diverse voices such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, and Leslie Marmon Silko while also revealing the progressive visions of Romantic authors such as Rousseau, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge, Mary Shelley, Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller. Forging connections among literary and philosophical traditions while closely reading a wide range of texts, Radical Romanticism shows how storytelling is central to the pursuit of justice and flourishing for the human and the more-than-human worlds. Bringing together environmental humanities, literary theory, political theory, and religious studies, this book makes the case for a renewed radical Romanticism, offering urgent resources for a world beset by catastrophe, uncertainty, and despair.

Learn more about Radical Romanticism at the Columbia University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Radical Romanticism.

--Marshal Zeringue

The best noir fiction of 2025: "CrimeReads"

One novel on the CrimeReads list of the best noir fiction released in 2025:

Saint of the Narrows Street, William Boyle

Boyle continues filling out the Gravesend neighborhood of Brooklyn with powerful, emotionally complex crime stories. In Saint of the Narrows Street, two sisters arrange for a terrible secret to be hidden, reverberating across the generations. Boyle’s work is always traced with melancholy and never shies away from the tough moral predicaments his characters face.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Page 69 Test: Saint of the Narrows Street.

My Book, The Movie: Saint of the Narrows Street.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Crystal King's "The Happiness Collector"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Happiness Collector: A Novel by Crystal King.

About the novel, from the publisher:

In this stunning contemporary fantasy novel for fans of V. E. Schwab and Kaliane Bradley, a historian’s dream job in Italy takes a dark turn when she discovers her employers aren’t exactly human…

After losing her book deal and her academic position, historian Aida Reale needs a new career, and fast. After all, she and her fiancé, Graham, have a wedding to pay for. So when a friend recommends her for an extremely high—paying position at a company called MODA, it feels like the perfect stroke of luck. And with a move to Italy and a breathtaking palazzo included, how could she say no?

Aside from a snooty assistant, a daunting NDA and some very stringent rules about the use of personal technology, working for MODA is a dream come true—at least at first. But the more research Aida conducts for this elusive company, the more things feel off. Not only does her relationship with Graham suffer, but it seems like every site she visits either vanishes or is struck by tragedy soon after she’s been there.

It’s only after a mysterious woman approaches Aida and Luciano, her devastatingly handsome and equally concerned MODA colleague, that they learn the truth—they are just mortal pawns in a game between gods. Now Aida must find answers to the question she's been avoiding: What's really happening to all the happiness she's been collecting…and can she stop the gods’ plans before it’s too late?

Visit Crystal King's website.

The Page 69 Test: Feast of Sorrow.

Writers Read: Crystal King (March 2019).

The Page 69 Test: The Chef's Secret.

My Book, The Movie: The Happiness Collector.

The Page 99 Test: The Happiness Collector.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Joshua R. Shiver's "War Fought and Felt"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: War Fought and Felt: The Emotional Motivations of Confederate Soldiers by Joshua R. Shiver.

About the book, from the publisher:

Joshua R. Shiver’s War Fought and Felt advances our grasp of the links between masculinity, emotion, and relationships during the American Civil War. It is the first broadly researched, multidisciplinary, and statistically supported approach to understanding the pivotal role of emotions in the everyday lives of Confederate soldiers. Using a source base of more than 1,790 letters and diaries from two hundred Confederate soldiers from North Carolina and Alabama, it builds upon traditional sociocultural and ideological arguments for why Confederate soldiers fought. Drawing on history, psychology, sociology, philosophy, and neuroscience, it underscores the necessity of examining primal emotions when looking to understand soldiers’ motivations. It argues that the heightened emotions felt by these soldiers drove them to suffer, fight, desert, and willingly die.

Shiver examines the vital role of emotions within the context of soldiers’ relationships with their parents, children, wives, sweethearts, and comrades. These relationships and the emotions they engendered defined Confederate soldiers’ firsthand experiences of war and ultimately redefined the Confederate cause itself. A war that began steeped in ideology ended, for the soldiers, as one fought for the protection and future of one’s loved ones. Shiver demonstrates that the emotionally overwhelming nature of the war forced a tectonic shift in American masculinity in which the prewar emphasis on stoic individualism gave way to an outpouring of emotional expression and mutual interdependence. As a result, Confederate soldiers pragmatically embraced emotional and relational norms that were previously considered taboo.

By placing emotion alongside traditional ideological and sociocultural explanations for motivation, Shiver sheds light on a new area of research that promises to promote a deeper understanding of why the American Civil War was one of the bloodiest, most emotionally influential, and world-changing events of the last two centuries.

Learn more about War Fought and Felt at the LSU Press website.

The Page 99 Test: War Fought and Felt.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten thrillers with characters you’ll love to hate

Tanya Grant writes twisty thrillers full of secrets, murder, and gossipy group dynamics. When not conducting highly suspicious web searches (for research!), she also writes romances. Her essays have appeared on HelloGiggles.com and Bust.com, and she's spoken about creativity on various podcasts. When she's not writing, you can find the author listening to the coyotes howl outside her Seattle-area home, drinking cinnamon tea, and chasing her two children.

Grant's new novel is Made You Look.

At CrimeReads she tagged "ten thrillers with characters you’ll love to hate," including:

May Cobb, The Hollywood Assistant

When a personal assistant to a famous Hollywood couple gets caught in their secrets and lies, she lands in the middle of a murder investigation. May Cobb is the queen of writing unlikeable women, and in this thriller she delivers plenty to enjoy, from the assistant who continues to make questionable choices to the angsty drama-magnet wife she works for.

Read about another thriller on Grant's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Crystal King's "The Happiness Collector," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Happiness Collector: A Novel by Crystal King.

The entry begins:

I don't cast actors while I'm writing. For me, that comes after, when the manuscript is finished, and I can look back at who my characters became on the page. In The Happiness Collector, my protagonist, Aida Reale, emerges as a historian who loses everything: her book deal, her academic position, and her sense of purpose. When she accepts a too-good-to-be-true job at a mysterious Italian company called MODA, she thinks she's salvaging her career. Instead, she discovers she's been hired by gods using mortals as pawns in their nefarious machinations.

Looking back at Aida now, I'd cast Emma Stone without hesitation.

Stone has that rare ability to play intelligence without making it feel performative. In The Favourite, she navigated court intrigue with a combination of calculation and vulnerability that would serve Aida perfectly. My protagonist isn't a warrior or a chosen one. She's a researcher who solves problems by digging through archives and asking uncomfortable questions. She needs to be smart enough to piece together what's happening, stubborn enough to keep pushing when things turn dangerous, and human enough that we feel her fear when she realizes the people she works for aren't people at all.

Stone also excels at playing women whose relationships are messy and complicated. The romance in this book is woven into Aida's transformation from someone who thinks she knows what she wants to someone forced to reckon with who she actually is. Stone can play that kind of internal conflict without spelling it out in dialogue.

What I appreciate most is Stone's gift for balancing drama with moments of levity. The Happiness Collector has humor woven through the tension. There's absurdity in discovering your boss is a god, in signing an NDA that binds you to divine employers, in trying to have normal conversations about happiness disappearing as part of your job. Stone can...[read on]

Visit Crystal King's website.

The Page 69 Test: Feast of Sorrow.

Writers Read: Crystal King (March 2019).

The Page 69 Test: The Chef's Secret.

My Book, The Movie: The Happiness Collector.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Steve Tibble's "Assassins and Templars"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Assassins and Templars: A Battle in Myth and Blood by Steve Tibble.

About the book, from the publisher:

The story of the medieval world’s most extraordinary organisations, the Assassins and the Templars

The Assassins and the Templars are two of history’s most legendary groups. One was a Shi’ite religious sect, the other a Christian military order created to defend the Holy Land. Violently opposed, they had vastly different reputations, followings, and ambitions. Yet they developed strikingly similar strategies—and their intertwined stories have, oddly enough, uncanny parallels.

In this engaging account, Steve Tibble traces the history of these two groups from their origins to their ultimate destruction. He shows how, outnumbered and surrounded, they survived only by perfecting “the promise of death,” either in the form of a Templar charge or an Assassin’s dagger. Death, for themselves or their enemies, was at the core of these extraordinary organisations.

Their fanaticism changed the medieval world—and, even up to the present day, in video games and countless conspiracy theories, they have become endlessly conjoined in myth and memory.

Visit Steve Tibble's website.

The Page 99 Test: Templars.

The Page 99 Test: Crusader Criminals.

The Page 99 Test: Assassins and Templars.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven top messy divorce novels & memoirs

At Vogue Daisy Jones and Emma Specter tagged seven "messy divorce novels and memoirs to read (or revisit) now," including:

Sankofa by Chibundu Onuzo (2021)

This novel gives its female protagonist, Anna, a rich storyline beyond the bounds of her recent separation from her husband: Anna, a young biracial woman living in England, returns to her Nigerian hometown to seek out the truth about her father’s death, richly complicating the divorce narrative.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Hien Nguyen reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Hien Nguyen, author of Twin Tides.

Her entry begins:

I am currently reading The Hunger We Pass Down by Jen Sookfong Lee. In it, we follow Alice Chow, a single mother struggling to juggle the delicate balance (or imbalance) of her life. A haunting intergenerational tale that is as heart wrenching as it is unnerving, it interrogates the legacies and violence the women in her family have inherited. I find myself drawn to horror by Asian women and other writers of color, in particular when...[read on]

About Twin Tides, from the publisher:

Long-lost twin sisters unravel the mystery behind their mother's disappearance and face the family betrayal that ultimately separated them in this breathtaking speculative young adult thriller.

Heiress and influencer Caliste Ha lives a glamorous life in an LA high rise, her perfectly curated social media feed hiding the cracks in her family. Across the country, Aria Nguyen is barely surviving as a freshman and academic scammer at Georgetown University. They have never met.

That changes with one unexpected and grim phone call. Their long-missing mother has been found dead in Les Eaux, Minnesota. Upon arrival in the sleepy town, Caliste and Aria discover another shocker—they are identical twins.

Ready to unearth the secrets that led to their mother’s death and their separation, they start looking for answers. But a vengeful ghost is haunting the waters, and an unknown enemy is watching their every move.

Can Aria and Caliste unravel all the sinister mysteries of Les Eaux, or will the town’s deadly secrets ultimately drag them under?

Visit Hien Nguyen's website.

Writers Read: Hien Nguyen.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Russell Fielding's "Breadfruit"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Breadfruit: Three Global Journeys of a Bountiful Tree by Russell Fielding.

About the book, from the publisher:

Breadfruit trees are staples of the tropics, bearing cantaloupe-sized green-skinned fruits whose taste and texture resemble potatoes. More than three thousand years ago, breadfruit fueled the Pacific voyages of discovery that settled islands throughout Oceania. In the late eighteenth century, the British expedition that ended with the mutiny on the Bounty aimed, but failed, to introduce breadfruit to the West Indies as food for enslaved African laborers on sugar plantations. A later voyage resulted in the fruit’s widespread distribution and complicated role within modern Caribbean food cultures. In recent years, breadfruit has been touted as a tool for sustainable development and as a “superfood” with both health benefits and culinary versatility.

Russell Fielding tells these stories and many others, exploring breadfruit’s fascinating global history and varied present-day uses. Bringing together extensive research and vivid travelogues, including learning directly from local agriculturists, chefs, scientists, and holders of traditional knowledge, he provides an immersive narrative of breadfruit’s contributions. Fielding argues that breadfruit’s history comprises two journeys: first, from its origins in Southeast Asia across the Pacific; and second, its transplantation to the Caribbean. Today, a third journey is taking place, one that is spreading breadfruit throughout the world.

Engagingly written and compellingly argued, this book draws timely lessons from breadfruit’s past to forecast its future potential.

Visit Russell Fielding's website.

The Page 99 Test: Breadfruit.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten overlooked dystopian novels

One title from TopTenz's "list of 10 dystopian novels which are often overshadowed by other champions of the genre but which are nevertheless worthy of some – and in some cases, even equal – praise:"

Mockingbird by Walter Tevis (1980)

Walter Tevis is better known for his novels like “The Hustler” and “The Colour of Money” which were adopted for the screen resulting in creation of some all-time great movies. But he also wrote a dystopian novel called “Mockingbird” in 1980, which ironically, is often overlooked by most readers in predisposition to Tevis’s own aforementioned more famous works.

Man is an endangered species in “Mockingbird”. But unlike the book from which the first sentence is borrowed, “Mockingbird” is a highly interesting novel which manages to avoid all the standard clichés of dystopian fiction. Robots do all the toiling for humans – be it cooking, cleaning, or driving. Perpetually stoned, suicidal, illiterate, and inevitably moving towards extinction, humanity’s only salvation rests with an android named Spofforth who himself has no desire to live (but was designed in such a way that he couldn’t commit suicide), and with a man named Paul Bentley and a woman named Mary Lou, who must rekindle the human desire to live through love.

Set in a dilapidating 25th century New York, the book follows a university professor Paul Bentley, who himself doesn’t know how to read. Comically enough, while watching old silent movies, he notices the subtitles at the bottom of the screen and it dawns on him that it represents what is actually being said in the movie. Eventually, he starts learning basic words of English language by watching numerous movies. A clash of motives happens between the human and the android when Bentley expresses his desire to teach other human beings to read to Spufford, because the android considers reading a crime as it deviates from the norm of the society.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Christina Kovac's "Watch Us Fall"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Watch Us Fall: A Novel by Christina Kovac.

About the book, from the publisher:

“A stunning work of suspense that’s impossible to put down. Christina Kovac masterfully combines a twisty missing person mystery, a heartbreaking love story, and an insightful exploration of the nature of obsession and trauma. I loved this novel.” —Angie Kim, New York Times bestselling author of Happiness Falls and Miracle Creek

Lucy and her three best friends share a glamorous but decaying house in the heart of Georgetown. They call themselves “the Sweeties” and live an idyllic post-grad lifestyle complete with exciting jobs, dramatic love lives, and, most importantly, each other.

But when Addie, the group’s queen bee, discovers that her ex-boyfriend Josh has gone missing, the Sweeties’ worlds are turned upside down. In the days leading up to his disappearance, Josh, a star investigative journalist from a prominent political family, was behaving erratically—and Lucy is determined to find out why. All four friends upend their lives to search for him, but detectives begin to suspect that the Sweeties might know more than they’re letting on.

As the investigation unfolds, Lucy’s obsession with the case reaches a boiling point, and with it, her own troubling secrets begin bubbling to the surface of her carefully curated life. A thrilling account of the lies and delusions that lurk beneath cloistered groups of female friends and the sinister realities of celebrity, Watch Us Fall is a gripping mystery and an examination of the things we tell ourselves when we can’t face the truth.

Visit Christina Kovac's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Cutaway.

The Page 69 Test: The Cutaway.

Writers Read: Christina Kovac (March 2017).

My Book, The Movie: Watch Us Fall.

The Page 69 Test: Watch Us Fall.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: James Riordon's "Crush"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Crush: Close Encounters with Gravity by James Riordon.

About the book, from the publisher:

The fascinating story of gravity, from its intimate role in our daily lives to its cosmic significance.

Gravity is at once familiar and mysterious. It’s the reason for the numbers on your bathroom scale, the intricate dance of the stars and planets, and the evolution and eventual fate of the universe. In Crush, James Riordon takes readers on a tour of gravity from its vanishing insignificance on the microscopic scale to its crushing extreme inside black holes.

From the moment we lift our heads as infants until the moment we lie down and ultimately surrender to its pull at the end of our lives, we labor under the burden of gravity. It has guided the shape and structure of our bodies over eons of evolution and sculpted the Earth as it cooled from a blob of molten rock. As Riordon explains, the stars couldn’t shine without gravity holding them together. Even the atoms that form you and everything around you were forged in stellar furnaces that gravity built. It took Einstein to realize that gravity is not, in fact, a force at all, but instead the curvature of space and time.

A fascinating and memorable read, Crush examines our personal relationships with gravity, explores gravity’s role in making the universe uniquely hospitable for life, and even reveals how the mundane flow of water in your kitchen sink offers a glimpse into the secrets of black holes.

Visit James Riordon's website.

The Page 99 Test: Crush: Close Encounters with Gravity.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight moving & meaningful nonfiction books about pets

Carolina Ciucci is a teacher, writer and reviewer based in the south of Argentina. She hoards books like they’re going out of style. In case of emergency, you can summon her by talking about Ireland, fictional witches, and the Brontë family. At Book Riot she tagged "eight lovely nonfiction books about pets." One title on the list:

Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs by Jennifer Finney Boylan

Jennifer Finney Boylan looks at her life in eras, and each era is marked by a particular dog. This chronicle of her life, including her transition, is full of beautiful memories of her furry friends and their love. Always, primarily, the book is about love. And who can love better than a dog?

Read about another title on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Lexi Alexander

From my Q&A with Lexi Alexander, author of Dead Set on You: A Novel:

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

A title can make or break a book – so choosing the title for Dead Set on You was many iterations in the making. In fact, my original working title was Hating You, Interrupted, because I knew from the beginning I wanted something that telegraphed rivals-to-lovers energy (“hating you”) with a twist in the relationship (“interrupted”), plus a nod to the supernatural hiccup at the heart of the story: my heroine waking up as a ghost tethered to her former friend, now rival.

Along the publishing journey, the title changed to Dead Set on You. This was also many ideas in the making – there’s a notepad with all the scribbled options shoved into a desk drawer somewhere. As for Dead Set on You – it does so much work as a title. It signals the paranormal element, keeps the romantic tension front and center, and still winks at the rivalry at the core of the book. I’m biased but I also think it’s sharp, memorable, and...[read on]

Visit Lexi Alexander's website.

Q&A with Lexi Alexander.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Marion Orr's "House of Diggs"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: House of Diggs: The Rise and Fall of America's Most Consequential Black Congressman, Charles C. Diggs Jr. by Marion Orr.

About the book, from the publisher:

At the height of the civil rights movement, Charles C. Diggs Jr. (1922–1998) was the consummate power broker. In a political career spanning 1951 to 1980, Diggs, Michigan's first Black member of Congress, was the only federal official to attend the trial of Emmett Till's killers, worked behind the scenes with Martin Luther King Jr., and founded the Congressional Black Caucus. He was also the chief architect of legislation that restored home rule to Washington, DC, and almost single-handedly ignited the American anti-apartheid movement in the 1960s. Drawing on extensive archival research, including Diggs's rarely seen personal papers, FBI documents, and original interviews with family members and political associates, political scientist Marion Orr reveals that Diggs practiced a politics of strategic moderation. Orr argues that this quiet approach was more effective than the militant race politics practiced by Adam Clayton Powell and more appealing than the conservative Chicago-style approach of William Dawson—two of Diggs's better-known Black contemporaries.

Vividly written and deeply researched, House of Diggs is the first biography of Congressman Charles C. Diggs Jr., one of the most consequential Black federal legislators in US history. Congressman Diggs was a legislative lion whose unfortunate downfall punctuated his distinguished career and pushed him and his historic accomplishments out of sight. Now, for the first time, House of Diggs restores him to his much-deserved place in the history of American politics.

Learn more about House of Diggs at the University of North Carolina Press website.

The Page 99 Test: House of Diggs.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six suspense novels & twisty thrillers set in small towns

Laura Griffin is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of more than thirty books and novellas. She is a two-time RITA Award winner, as well as the recipient of the Daphne du Maurier Award.

Her new novel is Innocence Road.

At CrimeReads Griffin tagged six favorite suspense novels and twisty thrillers set in small towns, including:

Rachel Howzell Hall, Fog and Fury

Irony is alive and well in Rachel Howzell Hall’s thriller about a private investigator who moves to Haven, California, hoping to escape the violence of L.A. but ends up getting embroiled in a murder investigation. Hall sets her story in a town nicknamed “Mayberry by the Sea,” but savvy readers will clue into the surprise she is creating for her protagonist, Sonny Rush, who soon after arrival gets called upon to help solve the mysterious death of a teenage boy.

It doesn’t take long for Sonny to figure out that nothing is as it seems in Haven, and that charming little communities can hide dangerous secrets.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christina Kovac's "Watch Us Fall," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Watch Us Fall: A Novel by Christina Kovac.

The entry begins:

Addie James, who is the pivotal love interest/best friend, should be played by Zendaya. I always imagined Zendaya. In fact, when Josh first sees her, he notices Addie’s “big eyes and sharp cheeks, her warm brown skin... the way she moved. Like a dancer, or an athlete. Someone joyful in their body.” And Zendaya moves like that.

Anya Taylor-Joy from Queen’s Gambit would be an interesting choice for Lucy. She’s got a...[read on]

Visit Christina Kovac's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Cutaway.

The Page 69 Test: The Cutaway.

Writers Read: Christina Kovac (March 2017).

My Book, The Movie: Watch Us Fall.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Min Joo Lee's "Finding Mr. Perfect"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Finding Mr. Perfect: K-Drama, Pop Culture, Romance, and Race by Min Joo Lee.

About the book, from the publisher:

Finding Mr. Perfect explores the romantic relationships between Korean men and women who were inspired by romantic Korean televisual depictions of Korean masculinity to travel to Korea as tourists. Author Min Joo Lee argues that disparate racialized erotic desires of Korean pop culture fans, foreign tourists to Korea, Korean men, and the Korean nation converge to configure the interracial and transnational relationships between these tourists and Korean men. Lee observes how racial prejudices are developed and manifested through interracial and transnational intimate desires and encounters. This book is the first to examine the interracial relationships between Hallyu tourists and Korean men. Furthermore, it is the first to analyze Korea as a popular romance tourist destination for heterosexual women. Finding Mr. Perfect illuminates South Korean popular culture’s transnational fandom and tourism as a global phenomenon where fantasies and realities converge to have a tangible impact on individual lives.

Learn more about Finding Mr. Perfect at the Rutgers University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Finding Mr. Perfect.

--Marshal Zeringue

Fifteen books on why & how to preserve democracy

One title on Tertulia's list of "books that explain how we have arrived at a precarious state of democracy and what is to be done about it:"

The Originalism Trap: How Extremists Stole the Constitution and How We the People Can Take It Back
Madiba K. Dennie

Blending scholarship with accessible analysis of Constitutional law, this book underscores the ambition of the Reconstruction Amendments, which were adopted in the wake of the Civil War and sought to build a democracy with equal membership for marginalized people. The author argues the law must serve to make that promise of democracy real in spirit, not in following the original interpretation of a bygone era.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Page 99 Test: The Originalism Trap.

--Marshal Zeringue