Q&A with Lori Banov Kaufmann

From my Q&A with Lori Banov Kaufmann, author of Rebel Daughter:

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

The title Rebel Daughter refers to Esther, a real-life character who lived through events which changed the course of human history. She was captured during the Roman siege of Jerusalem in the first-century and ended her life as a freed slave in Rome. The book is my attempt to bring her remarkable story to life.

Of course, women in ancient times didn’t have the freedom we’re used to today so the word ‘rebel’ must be viewed in the context of that time. Sexism was not only alive and well, it was considered necessary for the proper functioning of society. And I was absolutely committed to writing a book that was historically accurate. I felt an obligation not only to Esther, but to...[read on]

Visit Lori Banov Kaufmann's website.

Q&A with Lori Banov Kaufmann.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top winter mysteries & thrillers

Sarah Pearse lives by the sea in South Devon with her husband and two daughters. She studied English and Creative Writing at the University of Warwick and worked in Brand PR for a variety of household brands. After moving to Switzerland in her twenties, she spent every spare moment exploring the mountains in the Swiss Alpine town of Crans Montana, the dramatic setting that inspired her novel. Pearse has always been drawn to the dark and creepy – remote spaces and abandoned places – so when she read an article in a local Swiss magazine about the history of sanatoriums in the area, she knew she’d found the spark of the idea for her debut novel, The Sanatorium.

At CrimeReads she tagged five favorite frozen mysteries and thrillers, including:

The Quality of Silence, by Rosamund Lupton

The Quality of Silence follows a mother and daughter, Yasmin and Ruby, on a journey to find Matt, their missing husband and father as they venture into the snowy wilderness of the Alaskan tundra. Yasmin and Ruby start driving the isolated, icy roads of Alaska desperately searching for answers about Matt’s disappearance, but when a violent storm strikes, they start to fear that someone else might be out there…

Lupton conjures the icy setting so beautifully using wonderfully descriptive prose that really evokes the bleakness of an Alaskan winter. Page by page, you feel a chill setting in as the tension ramps in this haunting, suspenseful read.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Allison Epstein's "A Tip for the Hangman"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: A Tip for the Hangman: A Novel by Allison Epstein.

About the book, from the publisher:

Christopher Marlowe, a brilliant aspiring playwright, is pulled into the duplicitous world of international espionage on behalf of Queen Elizabeth I. A many-layered historical thriller combining state secrets, intrigue, and romance.

England, 1585. In Kit Marlowe’s last year at Cambridge, he receives an unexpected visitor: Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster, who has come with an unorthodox career opportunity. Her Majesty’s spies are in need of new recruits, and Kit’s flexible moral compass has drawn their attention. Kit, a scholarship student without money or prospects, accepts the offer, and after his training the game is on. Kit is dispatched to the chilly manor where Mary, Queen of Scots is under house arrest, to act as a servant in her household and keep his ear to the ground for a Catholic plot to put Mary on the throne.

While observing Mary, Kit learns more than he bargained for. The ripple effects of his service to the Crown are far-reaching and leave Kit a changed man. But there are benefits as well. The salary he earns through his spywork allows him to mount his first play, and over the following years, he becomes the toast of London’s raucous theater scene. But when Kit finds himself reluctantly drawn back into the uncertain world of espionage, conspiracy, and high treason, he realizes everything he’s worked so hard to attain–including the trust of the man he loves–could vanish before his very eyes.

Pairing modern language with period detail, Allison Epstein brings Elizabeth’s privy council, Marlowe’s lovable theater troupe, and the squalor of sixteenth-century London to vivid, teeming life as Kit wends his way behind the scenes of some of Tudor history’s most memorable moments. At the center of the action is Kit himself–an irrepressible, irreverent force of nature. Thrillingly written, full of poetry and danger, A Tip for the Hangman brings an unforgettable protagonist to new life, and makes a centuries-old story feel utterly contemporary.

Visit Allison Epstein's website.

My Book, The Movie: A Tip for the Hangman.

The Page 69 Test: A Tip for the Hangman.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Leslie Margolin's "The Etherized Wife"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Etherized Wife: Privilege and Power in Sex Therapy Discourse by Leslie Margolin.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Etherized Wife seeks to provide a comprehensive examination of the evolution of sex therapy through the prism of gender. It focuses, in particular, on how sex therapists "treat" women's sexual problems, arguing that these practices have actually enshrined male sexuality and supremacy by advocating for heterosexual intercourse as the pinnacle of a healthy sex life. It holds that in sex, like other domains of life in which men set the standard of normality, women have been judged normal to the degree they match men's expectations.

To support these claims, Margolin maps a series of case studies drawn from the sex therapy literature--the articles and books that have been, and continue to be treated as exemplar's of the discipline's collective consciousness. Through examination of case studies which focus on discrepancies in sexual desire, where the male partner wants more sex and the female wants less, the book shows how therapists have favored the male's side. The Etherized Wife shows how the sex therapy discipline has upheld male sexuality as the model of normal, natural, healthy sexuality.

Learn more about The Etherized Wife at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Etherized Wife.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five YA fantasy books where enemies become lovers

Hafsah Faizal is the New York Times bestselling author of We Hunt the Flame and the newly released We Free the Stars, and the founder of IceyDesigns, where she creates websites for authors and beauteous goodies for everyone else. When she’s not writing, she can be found designing, deciding between Assassin’s Creed and Skyrim, or traversing the world. Born in Florida and raised in California, she now resides in Texas with her family and a library of books waiting to be devoured.

At Tor.com Faizal tagged five YA fantasy titles where enemies become lovers, including:

You might have already read this one, and if you haven’t, where have you been? Six of Crows from Leigh Bardugo features a few

romantic narratives, and there’s no better way to establish an enemies-to-lovers trope than having our couple on two opposing sides. Nina Zenik is a Grisha, deemed a witch by the Drüskelle, a cult of witch hunters that Matthias Helvar is a part of. When a shipwreck leaves the two of them to fend for themselves in the icy wilderness, well, that’s when things get exciting. Much of their story is told through flashbacks, and I found that refreshing, given their… current circumstances when the story begins.

Read about another title on the list.

Six of Crows is among Django Wexler's favorite YA sci-fi & fantasy novels.

--Marshal Zeringue

Allison Epstein's "A Tip for the Hangman," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: A Tip for the Hangman: A Novel by Allison Epstein.

The entry begins:

A Tip for the Hangman is a historical fiction spy thriller set in 1500s England, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. The main character, Kit Marlowe, is a grad-student-turned-spy who finds himself undercover in the household of Mary Queen of Scots, trying to uncover a Catholic-led plot to assassinate Elizabeth.

Even though most of my characters are real historical figures, they’re mostly behind-the-scenes players who didn’t get their portraits painted often. There’s only one existing portrait of Marlowe, and scholars aren’t even really sure it’s him! So I had some freedom to play with my actor lookalikes.

In my dream cast, Kit himself is played by Timothée Chalamet. They’re both small, scrappy, poetic types who look like they’ve just wandered in from the local tavern without brushing their hair. And since Chalamet has already played Henry V, I can imagine him wandering back into old-time England for the role.

Sir Francis Walsingham, the intimidating spymaster who oversees Kit’s missions, is definitely...[read on]

Visit Allison Epstein's website.

My Book, The Movie: A Tip for the Hangman.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Carol Wyer

From my Q&A with Carol Wyer, author of An Eye for an Eye:

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

I was very pleased to have been consulted about the titles in this series and chose them all. The relevance will be obvious from the off, but given I love playing with language, there is a more subtle meaning behind An Eye For An Eye as well as the obvious connection which will come to light towards the end of the novel. The book's working title was The Death Whisperer which was spooky, yet didn't convey the contents accurately. I spent weeks coming up with new titles and had a list of four by the time it was ready to go to my agent who decided immediately that An Eye For An Eye was perfect.

What's in a name?

Ah, every character's name and very book title is chosen with huge care. As an ex-English graduate who studied linguistics and etymology, I am...[read on]

Visit Carol Wyer's website.

Q&A with Carol Wyer.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eleven top thrillers set in toxic workplaces

Amy Gentry is the author of the feminist thrillers Good as Gone, Last Woman Standing, and Bad Habits, as well as Boys for Pele, a book of music criticism in the 33 1/3 series.

At Electric Lit she tagged eleven favorite thrillers set in toxic workplaces, including:

Wall Street Bank: The Escape Room by Megan Goldin

Is an all-day meeting your personal version of hell? Try a team-building exercise where you get trapped in an elevator with backstabbing colleagues, and your only goal is to make it out alive. Goldin’s full-throttle locked-room thriller has a grabby premise, but it’s the depictions of the cult of rampant, amoral greed at a top Wall Street firm that make this book compulsively readable.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Page 69 Test: The Escape Room.

Also see: Molly Schoemann-McCann's five fictional workplaces more dysfunctional than yours.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Alisha Rankin's "The Poison Trials"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Poison Trials: Wonder Drugs, Experiment, and the Battle for Authority in Renaissance Science by Alisha Rankin.

About the book, from the publisher:

In 1524, Pope Clement VII gave two condemned criminals to his physician to test a promising new antidote. After each convict ate a marzipan cake poisoned with deadly aconite, one of them received the antidote, and lived—the other died in agony. In sixteenth-century Europe, this and more than a dozen other accounts of poison trials were committed to writing. Alisha Rankin tells their little-known story.

At a time when poison was widely feared, the urgent need for effective cures provoked intense excitement about new drugs. As doctors created, performed, and evaluated poison trials, they devoted careful attention to method, wrote detailed experimental reports, and engaged with the problem of using human subjects for fatal tests. In reconstructing this history, Rankin reveals how the antidote trials generated extensive engagement with “experimental thinking” long before the great experimental boom of the seventeenth century and investigates how competition with lower-class healers spurred on this trend.

The Poison Trials sheds welcome and timely light on the intertwined nature of medical innovations, professional rivalries, and political power.

Learn more about The Poison Trials at the University of Chicago Press website.

Follow Alisha Rankin on Twitter.

The Page 99 Test: The Poison Trials.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Keisha Bush's "No Heaven for Good Boys"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: No Heaven for Good Boys: A Novel by Keisha Bush.

About the book, from the publisher:

Set in Senegal, this modern-day Oliver Twist is a meditation on the power of love, and the strength that can emerge when we have no other choice but to survive.

Six-year-old Ibrahimah loves snatching pastries from his mother’s kitchen, harvesting string beans with his father, and searching for sea glass with his sisters. But when he is approached in his rural village one day by Marabout Ahmed, a seemingly kind stranger and highly regarded teacher, the tides of his life turn forever. Ibrahimah is sent to the capital city of Dakar to join his cousin Étienne in studying the Koran under Marabout Ahmed for a year, but instead of the days of learning that Ibrahimah’s parents imagine, the young boys, called Talibé, are forced to beg in the streets in order to line their teacher’s pockets.

To make it back home, Étienne and Ibrahimah must help each other survive both the dangers posed by their Marabout, and the darker sides of Dakar: threats of black-market organ traders, rival packs of Talibé, and mounting student protest on the streets.

Drawn from real incidents and transporting readers between rural and urban Senegal, No Heaven for Good Boys is a tale of hope, resilience, and the affirming power of love.

Visit Keisha Bush's website.

My Book, The Movie: No Heaven for Good Boys.

The Page 69 Test: No Heaven for Good Boys.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six of the best novels about sisters

Leslie Archer is the nom de plume of a New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty-five novels, including The Girl at the Border.

[The Page 69 Test: The Girl at the Border; Writers Read: Leslie Archer (December 2018); My Book, The Movie: The Girl at the Border]

His new novel is Until We are Lost.

At CrimeReads, Archer tagged six novels he's "read and loved, that deal with what life is like for two sisters, in different countries, with different values, and even in different time periods. But one thing connects them all: they are presented to us in three thrilling dimensions with all their frailties, their unresolved desires, and their bitter-sweet experiences intact." One title on the list:

Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino

Deservedly famous in her native Japan, Natsuo Kirino remains mostly undiscovered here in America. Ostensibly a crime novel, this is more the psychological pain inflicted on one sister, the unnamed narrator by her gorgeous sister, Yuriko. The two girls are in Q High School and the pressures on teenagers in this setting is starkly laid out, as is every other aspect of Japanese culture on which the book touches. The narrator comes to hate her sister, her family, and everyone around her, isolating herself. On the other hand, Yuriko discovers the effect she has on young men and decides to make her living as a prostitute. The depiction of that life on the nighttime streets of Tokyo is harrowing. When Yuriko and her streetwalker friend are both murdered in the same gruesome fashion, the narrator puts aside her hatred for her sister. In the process, she discovers Yuriko’s journal. The rigidness of Japanese society, limiting the ability of women to navigate it successfully is just as trenchant as the revelations of the bond between the two sisters and how that changes the narrator’s life for good.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Jeri Westerson

From my Q&A with Jeri Westerson, author of Spiteful Bones:

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

I hope it intrigues enough to get them to pick it up and read the back matter. I work pretty hard on my titles. I want them to intrigue and then to describe what the book will be about in a, hopefully, subtle way. When I work on my medieval mystery titles, I gather a list of words that one might expect of such a book. For instance, “shadow”, “blood”, “sword”, “bone”, etc. with other word prompts like “season of…”, “conspiracy of… “house of…”. The title should evoke the time period as well as suggest a mystery. I wouldn’t have called a humorous book Spiteful Bones…unless, of course, I was describing the humerus. All in all, I’ve liked my titles, if I do say so myself.

What's in a name?

Crispin Guest, my protagonist in the series—a disgraced knight and lord banished from court and the only life he had ever known—was...[read on]

Follow Jeri Westerson on Twitter and Facebook.

The Page 69 Test: Veil of Lies.

The Page 69 Test: Serpent in the Thorns.

The Page 69 Test: The Demon's Parchment.

My Book, The Movie: The Demon's Parchment.

The Page 69 Test: Troubled Bones.

The Page 69 Test: Blood Lance.

The Page 69 Test: Shadow of the Alchemist.

The Page 69 Test: Cup of Blood.

The Page 69 Test: The Silence of Stones.

The Page 69 Test: A Maiden Weeping.

Q&A with Jeri Westerson.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Molly Merryman's "Clipped Wings"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Clipped Wings: The Rise and Fall of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) of World War II by Molly Merryman.

About the book, from the publisher:

During World War II, all branches of the military had women's auxiliaries. Only the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) program, however, was made up entirely of women who undertook dangerous missions more commonly associated with and desired by men.

Within military hierarchies, the World War II pilot was perceived as the most dashing and desirable of servicemen. "Flyboys" were the daring elite of the United States military. More than the WACs (Army), WAVES (Navy), SPARS (Coast Guard), or Women Marines, the WASPs directly challenged these assumptions of male supremacy in wartime culture. WASPs flew the fastest fighter planes and heaviest bombers; they test-piloted experimental models and worked in the development of weapons systems. Yet the WASPs were the only women's auxiliary within the armed services of World War II that was not militarized.

In Clipped Wings, Molly Merryman draws upon military documents—many of which weren’t declassified until the 1990s—congressional records, and interviews with the women who served as WASPs during World War II to trace the history of the over one thousand pilots who served their country as the first women to fly military planes. She examines the social pressures that culminated in their disbandment in 1944—even though a wartime need for their services still existed—and documents their struggles and eventual success, in 1977, to gain military status and receive veterans’ benefits.

In the preface to this reissued edition, Merryman reflects on the changes in women’s aviation in the past twenty years, as NASA’s new Artemis program promises to land the first female astronaut on the moon and African American and lesbian women are among the newest pilot recruits. Updating the story of the WASPs, Merryman reveals that even in the past few years there have been more battles for them to fight and more national recognition for them to receive. At its heart, the story of the Women Airforce Service Pilots is not about war or planes; it is a story about persistence and extraordinary achievement. These accomplished women pilots did more than break the barriers of flight; they established a model for equality.

Learn more about Clipped Wings at the NYU Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Clipped Wings.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five of the best intrusive fantasy books

Gita Trelease is the author of All That Glitters (UK Enchantée,) a YA fantasy set on the eve of the French Revolution, and the sequel Everything That Burns. Born in Sweden to Indian and Swedish parents, Trelease has lived in New York, Paris, and a tiny town in Italy. She attended Yale College and New York University, where she earned a Ph.D. in British literature. Before writing novels, she taught classes on monsters and fairy tales. With her family, Trelease divides her time between a village in Massachusetts and the coast of Maine, where she searches for a secret portal to take her back to Versailles.

At Tor.com Trelease tagged five favorite books featuring intrusive fantasy (the opposite of portal fantasy), including:

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which reads like a perfect mashup of Dickens and Austen, hinges on fantasy’s creep into the Regency England’s everyday world. In it, a “magician” is a historian of magic, magic itself having not been practiced in England in a very long time. Yet that is about to change as magic intrudes upon the story. It happens through the surprising revelation that there are at least two “practical” magicians in England who can work magic. It happens through one of those magician’s ill-advised workings, which summons sinister fairies into British society. Magic also seeps into the story through the book’s footnotes. In them, an alternate history of a magical England invades the page’s margins, stealing attention from the main plot, and insisting, I think, that dividing worlds into “real” and “magical” is a most dangerous illusion.

Read about another entry on the list.

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is among Emily Temple's top ten contemporary Dickensian novels, April Genevieve Tucholke's top five books with elements that echo Norse myth , and D.D. Everest's top ten secret libraries.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gwen Florio's "Best Laid Plans," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Best Laid Plans by Gwen Florio.

The entry begins:

She’s a little younger than Nora Best, but Reese Witherspoon repeatedly came to mind when I was writing Best Laid Plans.

Maybe it’s because of her role in Wild, struggling to adapt to life on the trail in much the same way Nora has to fend for herself in Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains. Witherspoon has a way of personifying determination, and Nora is nothing if not determined, even when faced with the most challenging circumstances.

Witherspoon also has a knack for...[read on]

Visit Gwen Florio's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Gwen Florio & Nell.

My Book, the Movie: Silent Hearts.

Writers Read: Gwen Florio (August 2018).

The Page 69 Test: Silent Hearts.

My Book, The Movie: Best Laid Plans.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Anna North's "Outlawed"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Outlawed by Anna North.

About the book, from the publisher:

In the year of our Lord 1894, I became an outlaw.

The day of her wedding, 17 year old Ada's life looks good; she loves her husband, and she loves working as an apprentice to her mother, a respected midwife. But after a year of marriage and no pregnancy, in a town where barren women are routinely hanged as witches, her survival depends on leaving behind everything she knows.

She joins up with the notorious Hole in the Wall Gang, a band of outlaws led by a preacher-turned-robber known to all as the Kid. Charismatic, grandiose, and mercurial, the Kid is determined to create a safe haven for outcast women. But to make this dream a reality, the Gang hatches a treacherous plan that may get them all killed. And Ada must decide whether she's willing to risk her life for the possibility of a new kind of future for them all.

Featuring an irresistibly no-nonsense, courageous, and determined heroine, Outlawed dusts off the myth of the old West and reignites the glimmering promise of the frontier with an entirely new set of feminist stakes. Anna North has crafted a pulse-racing, page-turning saga about the search for hope in the wake of death, and for truth in a climate of small-mindedness and fear.

Learn more about the book and author at Anna North's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Life and Death of Sophie Stark.

The Page 69 Test: Outlawed.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven great thrillers featuring communal living

Alison Wisdom's new novel We Can Only Save Ourselves "follows the disappearance and radicalization of one 'perfect' teenage girl, told from the perspective of the town she left behind."

At CrimeReads, Wisdom tagged seven great reads about communal living, including:

The Likeness by Tana French

Here is another big old house with lots of secrets, but here, French allows us to see its inhabitants from both an insider and outsider’s point of view, managing to both invite us in and keep us wary of everyone we meet, as Detective Cassie Maddox goes undercover to solve the murder of a girl who lived in the house—a girl who looked just like her and went by the name Cassie herself once used as an alias, Lexie Madison. Cassie, who has long searched for a place to belong, finds herself both on guard amidst her new roommates but also drawn into the insular, intimate world they’ve created for themselves. But soon the closeness, both emotionally and physically, takes a toll on them all as Cassie gets closer to uncovering who killed Lexie and why—and as her housemates begin to suspect something isn’t quite right with “Lexie.”

Read about another entry on the list.

The Likeness is among Christopher Louis Romaguera's nine books about mistaken identity and Simon Lelic's top ten false identities in fiction.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Jeanne E. Abrams's "A View from Abroad"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: A View from Abroad: The Story of John and Abigail Adams in Europe by Jeanne E. Abrams.

About the book, from the publisher:

Reveals how the European travels of John and Abigail Adams helped define what it meant to be an American

From 1778 to 1788, the Founding Father and later President John Adams lived in Europe as a diplomat. Joined by his wife, Abigail, in 1784, the two shared rich encounters with famous heads of the European royal courts, including the ill-fated King Louis XVI and Queen Marie-Antoinette, and the staid British Monarchs King George III and Queen Charlotte.

In this engaging narrative, A View from Abroad takes us on the first full exploration of the Adams’s lives abroad. Jeanne E. Abrams reveals how the journeys of John and Abigail Adams not only changed the course of their intellectual, political, and cultural development—transforming the couple from provincials to sophisticated world travelers—but most importantly served to strengthen their loyalty to America.

Abrams shines a new light on how the Adamses and their American contemporaries set about supplanting their British origins with a new American identity. They and their fellow Americans grappled with how to reorder their society as the new nation took its place in the international transatlantic world. After just a short time abroad, Abigail maintained that, “My Heart and Soul is more American than ever. We are a family by ourselves.” The Adamses’ quest to define what it means to be an American, and the answers they discovered in their time abroad, still resonate with us to this day.

Learn more about A View from Abroad at the New York University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: A View from Abroad.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Doug Engstrom

From my Q&A with Doug Engstrom, author of Corporate Gunslinger:

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

Corporate Gunslinger is, among other things, a satire. The title takes a term for a predatory business person and applies it to a character who uses real bullets on behalf of her employer. For a story that’s all about highlighting the indirect violence of our economic system by making it direct and visceral in the story, I think it works well.

What's in a name?

A key attribute of the main character is that she’s a “white person behaving badly.” To be clear about that...[read on]

Visit Doug Engstrom's website.

The Page 69 Test: Corporate Gunslinger.

My Book, The Movie: Corporate Gunslinger.

Q&A with Doug Engstrom.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Paul Vidich's "The Mercenary"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Mercenary: A Novel by Paul Vidich.

About the book, from the publisher:

From acclaimed spy novelist Paul Vidich comes a taut new thriller following the attempted exfiltration of a KGB officer from the ever-changing—and always dangerous—USSR in the mid-1980s.

Moscow, 1985. The Soviet Union and its communist regime are in the last stages of decline, but remain opaque to the rest of the world—and still very dangerous. In this ever-shifting landscape, a senior KGB officer—code name GAMBIT—has approached the CIA Moscow Station chief with top secret military weapons intelligence and asked to be exfiltrated. GAMBIT demands that his handler be a former CIA officer, Alex Garin, a former KGB officer who defected to the American side.

The CIA had never successfully exfiltrated a KGB officer from Moscow, and the top brass do not trust Garin. But they have no other options: GAMBIT's secrets could be the deciding factor in the Cold War.

Garin is able to gain the trust of GAMBIT, but remains an enigma. Is he a mercenary acting in self-interest or are there deeper secrets from his past that would explain where his loyalties truly lie? As the date nears for GAMBIT’s exfiltration, and with the walls closing in on both of them, Garin begins a relationship with a Russian agent and sets into motion a plan that could compromise everything.

Visit Paul Vidich's website.

Q&A with Paul Vidich.

My Book, The Movie: The Mercenary.

The Page 69 Test: The Mercenary.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten books about soccer

David F. Ross was born in Glasgow in 1964 and has lived in Kilmarnock for over 30 years. He is a graduate of the Mackintosh School of Architecture at Glasgow School of Art, an architect by day, and a hilarious social media commentator, author and enabler by night. His debut novel The Last Days of Disco was shortlisted for the Authors Club Best First Novel Award, and received exceptional critical acclaim, as did the other two books in the Disco Days Trilogy: The Rise & Fall of the Miraculous Vespas and The Man Who Loved Islands.

Ross's new novel is There’s Only One Danny Garvey.

At the Guardian he tagged ten of the best books about football, including:

Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby

Hornby’s memoir details his obsessional relationship with a football club that wouldn’t have been his obvious geographical choice. The club begins to fill an emotional hole in his young life as his parents’ relationship fractures. Hornby doesn’t hold back from elucidating how irrational the life of a football fan can become as the fixtures begin to govern his own relationships with those close to him. It’s the best book ever written about what it means to dedicate your life to one team, through thick and thin. Just a pity it had to be Arsenal!

Read about another entry on the list.

Fever Pitch is among Nicholas Wroe's top six sporting landmarks in literature, John Gustad's top ten sports books, and Mihir Bose's top ten soccer books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Tim Harford's "The Data Detective"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics by Tim Harford.

About the book, from the publisher:

From “one of the great (greatest?) contemporary popular writers on economics” (Tyler Cowen) comes a smart, lively, and encouraging rethinking of how to use statistics.

Today we think statistics are the enemy, numbers used to mislead and confuse us. That’s a mistake, Tim Harford says in The Data Detective. We shouldn’t be suspicious of statistics—we need to understand what they mean and how they can improve our lives: they are, at heart, human behavior seen through the prism of numbers and are often “the only way of grasping much of what is going on around us.” If we can toss aside our fears and learn to approach them clearly—understanding how our own preconceptions lead us astray—statistics can point to ways we can live better and work smarter.

As “perhaps the best popular economics writer in the world” (New Statesman), Tim Harford is an expert at taking complicated ideas and untangling them for millions of readers. In The Data Detective, he uses new research in science and psychology to set out ten strategies for using statistics to erase our biases and replace them with new ideas that use virtues like patience, curiosity, and good sense to better understand ourselves and the world. As a result, The Data Detective is a big-idea book about statistics and human behavior that is fresh, unexpected, and insightful.

Learn more about the book and author at Tim Harford's website, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

Tim Harford: top 10 undercover economics books.

The Page 69 Test: The Undercover Economist.

The Page 69 Test:The Logic of Life.

The Page 99 Test: Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure.

The Page 99 Test: The Undercover Economist Strikes Back.

Writers Read: Tim Harford (February 2014).

The Page 99 Test: The Data Detective.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paul Vidich's "The Mercenary," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Mercenary: A Novel by Paul Vidich.

The entry begins:

The Mercenary was written with great attention to setting, place, and atmosphere. Of course those are appropriate for a spy novel set in Moscow in 1985 at the end of the Cold War. An American, Alex Garin, formerly of the CIA, is brought back to Moscow Station to help exfiltrate a senior KGB officer who wants to defect. It’s a dreary city, Americans are under constant surveillance, and danger is everywhere. When I wrote the novel, I saw my characters in visual settings and dialogue drives most scenes. In this sense, The Mercenary, feel cinematic. I have chosen to cast the movie with actors from the past or from earlier in their careers.

The Mercenary, the movie, ideally would be directed by Carol Reed, the English film director best known for Odd Man Out (1947), The Fallen Idol (1948), and The Third Man (1949). I am a huge fan of The Third Man and the dark, atmospheric world of Post-War Vienna that Reed created in his classic film. Vienna in 1948 was controlled for the four major powers and it was a city where everyone had a racket, food was rationed, and many people were desperate for a new life. The movie captures the city’s numbing grimness, and my novel tries to capture the same pervasive grimness of Moscow thirty-five years later.

Natalya, the book’s female protagonist, is both a spy and the novel’s romantic interest. I see her...[read on]

Visit Paul Vidich's website.

Q&A with Paul Vidich.

My Book, The Movie: The Mercenary.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Joseph Bruchac

From my Q&A with Joseph Bruchac, author of Peacemaker:

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

The title Peacemaker was chosen for several reasons. It introduces the central theme of the book —bringing peace at a time of conflict. It also directly relates to the story of the founding centuries ago of the League of the Five Nations (or Iroquois) by a messenger from the Creator who was known as the Peacemaker. Further, the main character of the book is a young man who is himself in need of peace and seeks a way to help bring it.

What’s in a name?

I chose the name Okwaho for my main character not just because it is...[read on]

Visit Joseph Bruchac's website.

Q&A with Joseph Bruchac.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five of the most enduring imposters in crime fiction & espionage

Paul Vidich’s fourth novel, The Mercenary, is now out from Pegasus Books. His debut novel, An Honorable Man, was selected by Publishers Weekly as a Top 10 Mystery and Thriller in 2016. It was followed the next year by The Good Assassin. His third novel, The Coldest Warrior, was widely praised in England and America, earning strong reviews from The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times.

[Q&A with Paul Vidich]

At CrimeReads, Vidich tagged five "classic works whose memorable imposters still entertain and appall us," including:

The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith (1955)

Tom Ripley is the quintessential sympathetic scoundrel. To avoid police detectives in New York, Ripley eagerly accepts a wealthy businessman’s invitation to visit Italy to check in on his son, Dickie Greenleaf. The two young men are opposites and from the start don’t get along. Ripley is clever and intelligent, yet lacks a college degree, and he feels superior to most of the people around him. Dickie is educated, wealthy, and self-absorbed, having gone to Italy to paint, but he has negligible talent. During an outing on San Remo bay, Ripley impulsively strikes Dickie with an oar, killing him. The novel’s course suddenly shifts.

Ripley vaguely regrets the murder, suffers bouts of paranoia and some bad dreams, but he is able to convince himself that it was not his fault. He re-imagines the incident, draws alternate conclusions, and makes up different versions of what happened. And slowly, he begins to inhabit Dickie’s life, signing Dickie’s name on checks, selling Dickie’s boat, and soon Ripley begins to enjoy being Dickie. He takes on Dickie’s mannerisms, his tastes, and soon he is no longer impersonating Dickie—he is Dickie. He leaves behind his own shabby existence and steps into the life of the man he killed.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Talented Mr Ripley is on Lisa Levy's list of eight of the most toxic friendships in crime fiction, Elizabeth Macneal's list of five sympathetic fictional psychopaths, Laurence Scott's list of seven top books about doppelgangers, J.S. Monroe's list of seven suspenseful literary thrillers, Simon Lelic's top ten list of false identities in fiction, Jeff Somers's list of fifty novels that changed novels, Olivia Sudjic's list of eight favorite books about love and obsession, Roz Chast's six favorite books list, Nicholas Searle's top five list of favorite deceivers in fiction, Chris Ewan's list of the ten top chases in literature, Meave Gallagher's top twenty list of gripping page-turners every twentysomething woman should read, Sophia Bennett's top ten list of books set in the Mediterranean, Emma Straub's top ten list of holidays in fiction, E. Lockhart's list of favorite suspense novels, Sally O'Reilly's top ten list of novels inspired by Shakespeare, Walter Kirn's top six list of books on deception, Stephen May's top ten list of impostors in fiction, Simon Mason's top ten list of chilling fictional crimes, Melissa Albert's list of eight books to change a villain, Koren Zailckas's list of eleven of literature's more evil characters, Alex Berenson's five best list of books about Americans abroad John Mullan's list of ten of the best examples of rowing in literature, Tana French's top ten maverick mysteries list, the Guardian's list of the 50 best summer reads ever, the Telegraph's ultimate reading list, and Francesca Simon's top ten list of antiheroes.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Suzanne Redfearn's "Hadley & Grace"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Hadley & Grace by Suzanne Redfearn.

About the book, from the publisher:

The author of In an Instant delivers a heart-pounding and emotional roller-coaster ride of self-discovery in the tradition of Thelma and Louise.

Needing to escape her abusive marriage, Hadley flees with her two kids, knowing it might be her only chance. A woman who can’t even kill a spider, Hadley soon finds herself pushed to the limits as she fights to protect her family.

Grace, new mother of baby Miles, desperately wants to put her rough past behind her for good, but she finds it impossible when her path crosses with Hadley’s, and her quest for a new start quickly spirals out of control and turns into a terrifying flight for survival.

Stronger together than apart, the two find their fates inextricably entwined, and as the danger closes in, each must decide how much she is willing to risk for the other.

A powerful story of self-discovery, Hadley and Grace is the heart-racing tale of two women facing insurmountable odds, racing to stay one step ahead of the trouble that is chasing them, and discovering new kinds of love and family along the way.

Visit Suzanne Redfearn's website, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

Coffee with a Canine: Suzanne Redfearn and Cooper.

My Book, The Movie: Hush Little Baby.

The Page 69 Test: Hush Little Baby.

The Page 69 Test: No Ordinary Life.

Writers Read: Suzanne Redfearn (February 2016).

My Book, The Movie: No Ordinary Life.

My Book, The Movie: In an Instant.

The Page 69 Test: In an Instant.

Q&A with Suzanne Redfearn.

My Book, The Movie: Hadley and Grace.

The Page 69 Test: Hadley & Grace.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Jennifer M. Rampling's "The Experimental Fire"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Experimental Fire: Inventing English Alchemy, 1300-1700 by Jennifer M. Rampling.

About the book, from the publisher:

In medieval and early modern Europe, the practice of alchemy promised extraordinary physical transformations. Who would not be amazed to see base metals turned into silver and gold, hard iron into soft water, and deadly poison into elixirs that could heal the human body? To defend such claims, alchemists turned to the past, scouring ancient books for evidence of a lost alchemical heritage and seeking to translate their secret language and obscure imagery into replicable, practical effects.

Tracing the development of alchemy in England over four hundred years, from the beginning of the fourteenth century to the end of the seventeenth, Jennifer M. Rampling illuminates the role of alchemical reading and experimental practice in the broader context of national and scientific history. Using new manuscript sources, she shows how practitioners like George Ripley, John Dee, and Edward Kelley, as well as many previously unknown alchemists, devised new practical approaches to alchemy while seeking the support of English monarchs. By reconstructing their alchemical ideas, practices, and disputes, Rampling reveals how English alchemy was continually reinvented over the space of four centuries, resulting in changes to the science itself. In so doing, The Experimental Fire bridges the intellectual history of chemistry and the wider worlds of early modern patronage, medicine, and science.

Learn more about The Experimental Fire at the University of Chicago Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Experimental Fire.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight top mean girls in literature

Ellie Eaton is a freelance writer, whose work has appeared in The Guardian, The Observer, and Time Out. Former Writer-in-Residence at a men’s prison in the UK, she holds an MA in creative writing from Royal Holloway, University of London and was awarded a Kerouac Project residency. Born and raised in England, she now lives in Los Angeles with her family. The Divines is her first novel.

At Lit Hub, Eaton tagged eight of literature's notable mean girls, including:

Bunny Lampert
Rufi Thorpe, The Knockout Queen

Nobody writes about the messy lives of adolescents better than Rufi Thorpe and, let’s face it, there are few things more terrifying than a teenage girl. At six foot three, Bunny Lampert looms large in this story about a rich Californian volleyball player and her gay best friend Michael. A self-described monster, Bunny bites a one boy’s ear so hard she makes him bleed, before going on to pound a female team mate’s head into a locker room door so hard it sounded “like celery wrapped in meat, like, just crunching.” Despite torching a building and bedding her coach, there’s something uniquely forgivable about Bunny’s capacity for destruction and violence. Her unwieldy body, her loyalty to her friend, her twisted insecurities, all serve to remind us of the horrors of being a teenage girl.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Paul Vidich

From my Q&A with Paul Vidich, author of The Mercenary: A Novel:

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

My latest novel is The Mercenary. A mercenary is a soldier who works for profit – not honor, glory, or in service of his country. I chose this title because it suggests a world in which ethics are set aside and money is all that matters. It suggests a tear in the moral fabric of patriotism and service. My goal with the title is to pique potential readers’ interest so they pick the book up to see what it’s about. The title operates like lighting in a room – it provides atmosphere and shading and invites the visitor in.

What's in a name?

I put great weight on a character’s name. I usually try several before I settle on one that feels right for the story. Names suggest...[read on]

Visit Paul Vidich's website.

Q&A with Paul Vidich.

--Marshal Zeringue

Suzanne Redfearn's "Hadley & Grace," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Hadley and Grace by Suzanne Redfearn.

The entry begins:

Since Hadley & Grace was inspired by Thelma & Louise, the entire time I was writing it I was seeing it as a movie. Yet, in my head, the characters were very different than Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon.

Hadley is well bred and sexy. I see someone like Salma Hayek playing her.

And the moment I started watching...[read on]

Visit Suzanne Redfearn's website, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

Coffee with a Canine: Suzanne Redfearn and Cooper.

My Book, The Movie: Hush Little Baby.

The Page 69 Test: Hush Little Baby.

The Page 69 Test: No Ordinary Life.

Writers Read: Suzanne Redfearn (February 2016).

My Book, The Movie: No Ordinary Life.

My Book, The Movie: In an Instant.

The Page 69 Test: In an Instant.

Q&A with Suzanne Redfearn.

My Book, The Movie: Hadley and Grace.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five great alternative histories of WWII & the space race

Sylvain Neuvel dropped out of high school at age 15. Along the way, he has been a journalist, worked in soil decontamination, sold ice cream in California, and taught linguistics in India. He’s also a certified translator, though he wishes he were an astronaut. He writes about aliens and giant robots as a blatant excuse to build action figures (for his son, of course).

Neuvel's new novel is A History of What Comes Next.

At Tor.com he tagged five favorite alternative histories of WWII and the space race. including:

The Oppenheimer Alternative by Robert J. Sawyer

All life on Earth is a few decades away from being scorched into oblivion (of course it is) and the world’s greatest minds band together to stop it. You know many of them. There’s the titular J. Robert Oppenheimer, obviously, but also Albert Enstein, Leo Szilard, Niels Bohr, Edward Teller, Wernher von Braun, Richard Feynman, Arthur Compton, Enrico Fermi, etc., etc. Every single character in this book is a real person. That’s right, all of them. Even some of the dialogue is real. This is one of the most ambitious books I’ve come across. I can’t imagine the amount of research that went into giving each character a believable voice and personality (actually, I can, the bibliography runs 30 pages on my phone), but this is Robert J. Sawyer so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. In some ways, it reminded me of the play Copenhagen by Michael Frayn, with more thrills, cool rockets and a doomsday scenario to boot.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Elliott Young's "Forever Prisoners"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Forever Prisoners: How the United States Made the World's Largest Immigrant Detention System by Elliott Young.

About the book, from the publisher:

Stories of non-US citizens caught in the jaws of the immigration bureaucracy and subject to indefinite detention are in the headlines daily. These men, women, and children remain almost completely without rights, unprotected by law and the Constitution, and their status as outsiders, even though many of have lived and worked in this country for years, has left them vulnerable to the most extreme forms of state power. Although the rhetoric surrounding these individuals is extreme, the US government has been locking up immigrants since the late nineteenth century, often for indefinite periods and with limited ability to challenge their confinement.

Forever Prisoners offers the first broad history of immigrant detention in the United States. Elliott Young focuses on five stories, including Chinese detained off the coast of Washington in the late 1880s, an "insane" Russian-Brazilian Jew caught on a ship shuttling between New York and South America during World War I, Japanese Peruvians kidnapped and locked up in a Texas jail during World War II, a prison uprising by Mariel Cuban refugees in 1987, and a Salvadoran mother who grew up in the United States and has spent years incarcerated while fighting deportation. Young shows how foreigners have been caged not just for immigration violations, but also held in state and federal prisons for criminal offenses, in insane asylums for mental illness, as enemy aliens in INS facilities, and in refugee camps. Since the 1980s, the conflation of criminality with undocumented migrants has given rise to the most extensive system of immigrant incarceration in the nation's history. Today over half a million immigrants are caged each year, some serving indefinite terms in what has become the world's most extensive immigrant detention system. And yet, Young finds, the rate of all forms of incarceration for immigrants was as high in the early twentieth century as it is today, demonstrating a return to past carceral practices.

Providing critical historical context for today's news cycle, Forever Prisoners focuses on the sites of limbo where America's immigration population have been and continue to be held.

Learn more about Forever Prisoners at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Forever Prisoners.

--Marshal Zeringue