Pg. 99: Wendy E. Parmet's "Constitutional Contagion"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Constitutional Contagion: COVID, the Courts, and Public Health by Wendy E. Parmet.

About the book, from the publisher:

Constitutional law has helped make Americans unhealthy. Drawing from law, history, political theory, and public health research, Constitutional Contagion explores the history of public health laws, the nature of liberty and individual rights, and the forces that make a nation more or less vulnerable to contagion. In this groundbreaking work, Wendy Parmet documents how the Supreme Court departed from past practice to stymie efforts to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic and demonstrates how pre-pandemic court decisions helped to shatter social contracts, weaken democracy, and perpetuate the inequities that made the United States especially vulnerable when COVID-19 struck. Looking at judicial decisions from an earlier era, Parmet argues that the Constitution does not compel the stark individualism and disregard of public health that is evident in contemporary constitutional law decisions. Parmet shows us why, if we are to be a healthy nation, constitutional law must change.

Learn more about Constitutional Contagion at the Cambridge University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Health of Newcomers by Patricia Illingworth and Wendy E. Parmet.

The Page 99 Test: Constitutional Contagion.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Gail-Agnes Musikavanhu's "Ride or Die"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Ride or Die by Gail-Agnes Musikavanhu.

About the book, from the publisher:

Gail-Agnes Musikavanhu’s adrenaline-packed joyride of a debut is an ode to Gen Z and chaotic teens—perfect for fans of Grace D. Li, Ebony Ladelle, and Baby Driver.

Best friends Loli Crawford and Ryan Pope have earned their nickname, the “Bonnie and Clyde of Woolridge High.” From illegal snack swapping in kindergarten to reckless car surfing in high school, they have been causing trouble in their uptight California town forever. But everyone knows that the mischief starts with Loli; when it comes to chasing thrills, drama, and adventure, no one is on her level.

At least until Loli throws the wildest party Woolridge High has ever seen and meets X, a strange, unidentified boy in the coat closet, who challenges her to a game she can’t refuse—one that promises to put her love of danger to the ultimate test.

Loli and X begin an anonymous correspondence, exchanging increasingly risky missions. Loli’s fun has always been free and easy, but things spin out of control as she attempts to one-up X’s every move. As Loli risks losing everything—including her oldest friend—she’ll face the most dangerous thing of all: falling for someone she shouldn’t.

Visit Gail-Agnes Musikavanhu's website.

Q&A with Gail-Agnes Musikavanhu.

The Page 69 Test: Ride or Die.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven novels featuring musicians & the lure of rock stardom

Matthew Norman was born in Omaha, Nebraska. His debut novel, Domestic Violets, was nominated in the Best Humor category at the 2011 Goodreads Choice Awards. Since then, he’s written four other novels. We’re All Damaged was an Amazon bestseller, Last Couple Standing was named one of the best books of 2020 so far by Esquire, All Together Now was one of the New York Post’s best books of the summer in 2021, and Charm City Rocks.

At LitHub Norman tagged seven of his "favorite novels that feature musicians and the seductive lure of rock stardom." One title on the list:

Jessica Anya Blau, Mary Jane

Set in Baltimore in the ’70s, this 300-page joy machine is the story of a 14-year-old girl, Mary Jane, who’s working as a summer nanny for a psychiatrist who lives in her neighborhood. Shortly after being hired, Mary Jane learns that her boss, Dr. Cone, has cleared his summer schedule to focus exclusively on one very important patient, a handsome rock star/heroin addict named Jimmy Bendinger.

What makes this book so wonderful is the magic trick that Jessica Anya Blau pulls off as she gives us a coming-of-age novel full of sex, drugs, and rock and roll that somehow manages to feel sweet, heartwarming, and even downright wholesome.

Read about another entry on the list.

Mary Jane is among Jessica Gentile's eight titles with all the band drama of Daisy Jones & the Six.

The Page 69 Test: Mary Jane; Q&A with Jessica Anya Blau.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Samuel Dolbee's "Locusts of Power"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East by Samuel Dolbee.

About the book, from the publisher:

In this highly original environmental history, Samuel Dolbee sheds new light on borders and state formation by following locusts and revealing how they shaped both the environment and people's imaginations from the late Ottoman Empire to the Second World War. Drawing on a wide range of archival research in multiple languages, Dolbee details environmental, political, and spatial transformations in the region's history by tracing the movements of locusts and their intimate relationship to people in motion, including Arab and Kurdish nomads, Armenian deportees, and Assyrian refugees, as well as states of the region. With locusts and moving people at center stage, surprising continuities and ruptures appear in the Jazira, the borderlands of today's Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Transcending approaches focused on the collapse of the Ottoman Empire or the creation of nation states, Dolbee provides a new perspective on the modern Middle East grounded in environmental change, state violence, and popular resistance.

Learn more about Locusts of Power at the Cambridge University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Locusts of Power.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Eva Gates reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Eva Gates, author of Death Knells and Wedding Bells.

Her entry begins:

I rarely have two books on the go at one time. I’m more of a straight-forward, linear reader. One book, beginning to end, and then pick up the next.

But right now I am reading two. One of my daughters invited me to her book club recently when I was visiting. The book the club was reading is When Women Ruled the World by Kara Cooney. I hadn’t read the book but I enjoyed the discussion and found the topic interesting enough to want to find out more. It’s an account of six queens of ancient Egypt, who ruled their countries and empires and with full power, despite living in an otherwise patriarchal society. In my opinion, the book should be more accurately titled When A Woman Ruled the World, as these women might have had absolute power but...[read on]

About Death Knells and Wedding Bells, from the publisher:

Librarian Lucy’s wedding is nearly perfect—aside from a missing guest and the strangled body she finds. Now, she must vow to find the killer in this 10th Lighthouse Library mystery.

Lucy and Connor planned for the perfect Outer Banks wedding—and that’s exactly what they got. Aside from typical rumblings of familial tensions, the late spring weather allowed for a beautiful day, the food was delicious, and everyone had a good time, until one of the guests goes missing.

Before Lucy can look forward to the rest of her life in Nags Head and the work she does at the Bodie Island Lighthouse Library, she gets a phone call from her boss, Bertie James. Eddie, Bertie’s friend, never made it back home after the reception. Initially, Lucy doesn’t think anything of it—sometimes wedding guests simply have a little too much fun. But this quickly turns to something darker when she discovers the body of a wedding guest strangled in a locked closet, and the police immediately start asking questions about Eddie. Lucy must figure out if the two are connected before it’s too late—both for Bertie’s friend and the rest of her wedding guests.

With the Classic Novel Reading Club reading the Selected Works of Edgar Allan Poe—Lucy wonders if the master of the macabre can assist her investigation or if the hunt for the killer’s identity will remain as nothing more than an unsolved mystery.

Follow Eva Gates on Twitter and visit Vicki Delany's website.

The Page 69 Test: Death By Beach Read.

Writers Read: Eva Gates (June 2022).

The Page 69 Test: Death Knells and Wedding Bells.

Writers Read: Eva Gates.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Gail-Agnes Musikavanhu

From my Q&A with Gail-Agnes Musikavanhu, author of Ride or Die.

About the book, from the publisher:

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

Ride or Die does all the work of taking the reader into the story. It immediately denotes action, flare, and a dash of mystery, while also relaying that this is a story about deep friendship. I’ve always been proud of the multilayered nature of the title’s meaning. The protagonist, Loli, and the mystery figure at the center of the novel embark on a game of dares with high psychological stakes, and they really do believe it is either “ride” or “die”. They feel an urgency to take dramatic, competitive action or it’s the end of...[read on]

Visit Gail-Agnes Musikavanhu's website.

Q&A with Gail-Agnes Musikavanhu.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven new classics in Southern crime fiction

Polly Stewart grew up in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, where she still lives. She graduated from Hollins University and has an MFA in fiction and a PhD in British literature from Washington University in St. Louis. Her short fiction has appeared in literary collections and journals, including Best New American Voices, The Best American Mystery Stories, Epoch, and the Alaska Quarterly Review. Her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, CrimeReads, and Poets & Writers, among other publications.

Stewart's new novel is The Good Ones.

At CrimeReads she tagged "seven great novels that celebrate the beauty and the magic of [the South], while also acknowledging it’s not always an easy place to call home." One title on the list:

Amy Greene, Long Man

I don’t think anybody writes Appalachia better than Amy Greene. When I was thinking about this list, it was a toss-up for me whether to include Long Man or her debut, Bloodroot, but I had to go with Long Man because the story at its center—the disappearance of a three-year-old girl from a town about to be flooded by a government-built dam—is so compelling and so terrifying. I’ve always been fascinated by the real-life stories of the towns flooded by the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 1930’s, and Greene makes powerful use of that history of betrayal and longing. This is one of those novels that I remember with such clarity that I feel like I lived through them, and I can’t wait for Greene’s next book.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Sharon Ann Murphy's "Banking on Slavery"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Banking on Slavery: Financing Southern Expansion in the Antebellum United States by Sharon Ann Murphy.

About the book, from the publisher:

A sobering excavation of how deeply nineteenth-century American banks were entwined with the institution of slavery.

It’s now widely understood that the fullest expression of nineteenth-century American capitalism was found in the structures of chattel slavery. It’s also understood that almost every other institution and aspect of life then was at least entangled with—and often profited from—slavery’s perpetuation. Yet as Sharon Ann Murphy shows in her powerful and unprecedented book, the centrality of enslaved labor to banking in the antebellum United States is far greater than previously thought.

Banking on Slavery sheds light on precisely how the financial relationships between banks and slaveholders worked across the nineteenth-century South. Murphy argues that the rapid spread of slavery in the South during the 1820s and ’30s depended significantly upon southern banks’ willingness to financialize enslaved lives, with the use of enslaved individuals as loan collateral proving central to these financial relationships. She makes clear how southern banks were ready—and, in some cases, even eager—to alter time-honored banking practices to meet the needs of slaveholders. In the end, many of these banks sacrificed themselves in their efforts to stabilize the slave economy. Murphy also details how banks and slaveholders transformed enslaved lives from physical bodies into abstract capital assets. Her book provides an essential examination of how our nation’s financial history is more intimately intertwined with the dehumanizing institution of slavery than scholars have previously thought.

Follow Sharon Ann Murphy on Twitter.

The Page 99 Test: Other People's Money.

The Page 99 Test: Banking on Slavery.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Daniel Weizmann's "The Last Songbird"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Last Songbird by Daniel Weizmann.

About the book, from the publisher:

A gritty, fast-paced neo-noir that explores the consumptive nature of fame, celebrity, and motherhood through the lens of a driver lost in the gig economy.

A struggling songwriter and Lyft driver, Adam Zantz’s life changes when he accepts a ride request in Malibu and 1970s music icon Annie Linden enters his dented VW Jetta. Bonding during that initial ride, the two quickly go off app— over the next three years, Adam becomes her exclusive driver and Annie listens to his music, encouraging Adam even as he finds himself driving more often than songwriting.

Then, Annie disappears, and her body washes up under a pier. Left with a final, cryptic text— ‘come to my arms’— a grieving Adam plays amateur detective, only to be charged as accomplice-after-the-fact. Desperate to clear his name and discover who killed the one person who believed in his music when no one else in his life did, Adam digs deep into Annie’s past, turning up an old guitar teacher, sworn enemies and lovers, and a long-held secret that spills into the dark world of a shocking underground Men’s Rights movement. As he drives the outskirts of Los Angeles in California, Adam comes to question how well he, or anyone else, knew Annie— if at all.

The Last Songbird is a poignant novel about love, obsession, the price of fame and the burden of broken dreams, with a shifting, twisting plot that's full of unexpected turns.

Visit Daniel Weizmann's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Last Songbird.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mary Anna Evans's "The Traitor Beside Her," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Traitor Beside Her: A WWII Mystery by Mary Anna Evans.

The entry begins:

Three of the four primary characters in The Traitor Beside Her are fairly straightforward to cast. The protagonist, Justine Byrne, is very young, only twenty-one, and the key characteristic that would drive a casting agent looking for the perfect Justine is her fierce intelligence. I describe her as small and thin with bright red hair, but the plot depends on none of these things. In fact, early in the book, she is directed by her boss to bleach her hair to a platinum blond. Justine is an undercover agent, so the most important thing about her appearance is that she be able to change it. I think that Hailee Steinfeld would do an excellent job with both Justine’s intelligence and the rather charming social awkwardness that can come from being blindingly intelligent.

Justine’s best friend Georgette Broussard, also twenty-one, comes from a rural background where education was hard to get, and she is only beginning to learn to let her natural intellect shine. She has a brash boldness that...[read on]

Learn more about the author and her work at Mary Anna Evans's website.

The Page 69 Test: Floodgates.

Writers Read: Mary Anna Evans (October 2010).

The Page 69 Test: Strangers.

My Book, The Movie: Strangers.

The Page 69 Test: Plunder.

Writers Read: Mary Anna Evans (November 2013).

The Page 69 Test: Rituals.

Q&A with Mary Anna Evans.

My Book, The Movie: The Physicists' Daughter.

The Page 69 Test: The Physicists' Daughter.

Writers Read: Mary Anna Evans.

The Page 69 Test: The Traitor Beside Her.

My Book, The Movie: The Traitor Beside Her.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine novels honoring women’s unseen contributions to science

C. E. McGill was born in Scotland and raised in North Carolina. Their short fiction has appeared in Fantasy Magazine and Strange Constellations, and they are a two-time finalist for the Dell Award for Undergraduate Excellence in SF/F Writing. They now live in Scotland with their family, two cats, and a growing number of fake succulents (the real ones keep dying).

Our Hideous Progeny is their first novel and they have begun writing their second.

At Electric Lit McGill tagged nine titles honoring women’s unseen contributions to science, including:

The Tenth Muse by Catherine Chung

In this compact but powerful novel, set in the decades after World War II, we meet Katherine, a young Asian American woman determined to make her place in the world of mathematics. From an early age, Katherine’s parents foster in her a love of nature and science—but after her mother abruptly abandons the family one day, Katherine buries her hurt and confusion in her studies, eventually becoming fixated on proving the notorious Riemann Hypothesis. As it turns out, however, the Riemann hypothesis and her own family history are far more entangled than she knows, and Katherine finds herself journeying across Europe in search of the truth. I adored the way that Chung depicted the struggles that women (especially women of color) face in STEM—not just outright prejudice, but also loneliness, insecurity, and a complicated mix of inspiration and envy that comes from seeing someone else like you succeeding in your field. Plus, as a fan of mathematics myself, I thoroughly enjoyed seeing a character as driven and interesting as Katherine so passionate about the beauty and grace of a good equation.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Tenth Muse is among Ruth Minah Buchwald's seven novels about Americans of color living abroad and Erica Wright's nine crime novels featuring glamorous women.

My Book, The Movie: The Tenth Muse.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: William Chapman Sharpe's "The Art of Walking"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Art of Walking: A History in 100 Images by William Chapman Sharpe.

About the book, from the publisher:

A lively and thought-provoking tour of the intertwined histories of art and walking

What does a walk look like? In the first book to trace the history of walking images from cave art to contemporary performance, William Chapman Sharpe reveals that a depicted walk is always more than a matter of simple steps. Whether sculpted in stone, painted on a wall, or captured on film, each detail of gait and dress, each stride and gesture has a story to tell, for every aspect of walking is shaped by social practices and environmental conditions. From classical statues to the origins of cinema, from medieval pilgrimages to public parks and the first footsteps on the moon, walking has engendered a vast visual legacy tightly intertwined with the path of Western art. The path includes Romantic nature-walkers and urban flâneurs, as well as protest marchers and cell-phone zombies. It features works by artists such as Botticelli, Raphael, Claude Monet, Norman Rockwell, Agnès Varda, Maya Lin, and Pope.L. In 100 chronologically arranged images, this book shows how new ways of walking have spurred new means of representation, and how walking has permeated our visual culture ever since humans began to depict themselves in art.

Learn more about The Art of Walking at the Yale University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: New York Nocturne.

The Page 99 Test: Grasping Shadows.

The Page 99 Test: The Art of Walking.

--Marshal Zeringue

Third reading: D.W. Buffa on Sciascia's "To Each His Own"

D.W. Buffa's new novel is Lunatic Carnival, the tenth legal thriller 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, most recently, America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Buffa writes a monthly review for the Campaign for the American Reader that we're calling "Third Reading." Buffa explains. "I was reading something and realized that it was probably the third time that I knew it well enough to write something about it. The first is when I read it when I was in college or in my twenties, the second, however many years later, when I wanted to see if it was as good as I remembered, and the third when I knew I was going to have to write about it."

Buffa's "Third Reading" of Leonardo Sciascia's To Each His Own begins:

In 1891, when my grandfather was a young boy living in New Orleans, a mob broke into the jail, beat to death some of the eleven Italians held there, most of them Sicilians, and then hung the rest. It was the largest lynching in the history of the United States. Both the New York Times and Teddy Roosevelt thought that, on the whole, it was a rather good thing. Someone had to teach Sicilians the consequences of criminality. That several of those killed had just been acquitted by a jury of the murder of the New Orleans chief of police proved only that, if justice were to be done, the mob had to do it.

A dozen or so years later, my grandfather, by then a young man with a young wife and child, warned that he was about to be arrested for a crime which he may, or may not, have committed, left New Orleans and made his way to San Francisco. Thanks to Prohibition and his own ingenuity he cornered the market on illegal liquor and became one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the city. The local police, for reasons of their own, never gave him any trouble; the federal agents who arrested him had similar motives. He was given a choice: prison or his money, and with a Sicilian’s sense of honor, he gave them his money and in that way protected the family name. It was a decision that some of his grandchildren have sometimes regretted.

Some years ago, on my first visit to Sicily, a distant cousin, a prominent physician in Palermo, suggested I...[read on]

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

Third reading: The Great Gatsby. 

Third reading: Brave New World.

Third reading: Lord Jim.

Third reading: Death in the Afternoon.

Third Reading: Parade's End.

Third Reading: The Idiot.

Third Reading: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Third Reading: The Scarlet Letter.

Third Reading: Justine.

Third Reading: Patriotic Gore.

Third reading: Anna Karenina.

Third reading: The Charterhouse of Parma.

Third Reading: Emile.

Third Reading: War and Peace.

Third Reading: The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Third Reading: Bread and Wine.

Third Reading: “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities.

Third reading: Eugene Onegin.

Third Reading: The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay.

Third Reading: The Europeans.

Third Reading: The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction.

Third Reading: Doctor Faustus.

Third Reading: the reading list of John F. Kennedy.

Third Reading: Jorge Luis Borges.

Third Reading: History of the Peloponnesian War.

Third Reading: Mansfield Park.

Third Reading: To Each His Own.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top mysteries about motherhood and crime

Nicole Hackett is a reader, writer, and below-average toddler negotiator. She lives with her husband and two kids in a small town just outside Baltimore, Maryland, where she works as a biochemical patent agent.

Her debut novel is The Perfect Ones.

At CrimeReads Hackett tagged her six favorite mysteries about motherhood and crime. One title on the list:

I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai

I Have Some Questions for You is an ode to the incredible versatility of mothers—including the parts of a mother that have nothing to do with her child. Rebecca Makkai tells the story of a popular podcaster, Bodie, who returns to her elite boarding school as a teacher and instead finds herself embroiled in the reinvestigation of the decades-old murder of her former roommate. It’s a gripping mystery with the lightest touch of social commentary as Bodie navigates the question every working mother inevitably hears: who’s watching your kids?

Read about another entry on the list.

I Have Some Questions For You is among Brittany Bunzey's ten books that take you inside their characters’ heads, Anne Burt's four top recent titles with social justice themes, and Heather Darwent's nine best campus thrillers.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Robert Mann's "Kingfish U: Huey Long and LSU"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Kingfish U: Huey Long and LSU by Robert Mann.

About the book, from the publisher:

No political leader is more closely identified with Louisiana State University than the flamboyant governor and U.S. senator Huey P. Long, who devoted his last years to turning a small, undistinguished state school into an academic and football powerhouse. From 1931, when Long declared himself the “official thief” for LSU, to his death in 1935, the school’s budget mushroomed, its physical plant burgeoned, its faculty flourished, and its enrollment tripled.

Along with improving LSU’s academic reputation, Long believed the school’s football program and band were crucial to its success. Taking an intense interest in the team, Long delivered pregame and halftime pep talks, devised plays, stalked the sidelines during games, and fired two coaches. He poured money into a larger, flashier band, supervised the hiring of two directors, and, with the second one, wrote a new fight song, “Touchdown for LSU.”

While he rarely meddled in academic affairs, Long insisted that no faculty member criticize him publicly. When students or faculty from “his school” opposed him, retribution was swift. Long’s support for LSU did not come without consequences. His unrelenting involvement almost cost the university its accreditation. And after his death, several of his allies—including his handpicked university president—went to prison in a scandal that almost destroyed LSU.

Rollicking and revealing, Robert Mann’s Kingfish U is the definitive story of Long’s embrace of LSU.

Visit Robert Mann's website.

The Page 99 Test: Kingfish U: Huey Long and LSU.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Mary Anna Evans's "The Traitor Beside Her"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Traitor Beside Her: A WWII Mystery by Mary Anna Evans.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Traitor Beside Her is an intricately plotted WWII espionage novel weaving together mystery, action, friendship, and a hint of romance perfect for fans of The Rose Code and Code Name Helene.

Justine Byrne can't trust the people working beside her. Arlington Hall, a former women's college in Virginia has been taken over by the United States Army where hundreds of men and women work to decode countless pieces of communication coming from the Axis powers.

Justine works among them, handling the most sensitive secrets of World War II—but she isn't there to decipher German codes—she's there to find a traitor.

Justine keeps her guard up and her ears open, confiding only in her best friend, Georgette, a fluent speaker of Choctaw who is training to work as a code talker. Justine tries to befriend each suspect, believing that the key to finding the spy lies not in cryptography but in understanding how code breakers tick. When young women begin to go missing at Arlington Hall, her deadline for unraveling the web of secrets becomes urgent and one thing remains clear: a single secret in enemy hands could end thousands of lives.

Learn more about the author and her work at Mary Anna Evans's website.

The Page 69 Test: Floodgates.

Writers Read: Mary Anna Evans (October 2010).

The Page 69 Test: Strangers.

My Book, The Movie: Strangers.

The Page 69 Test: Plunder.

Writers Read: Mary Anna Evans (November 2013).

The Page 69 Test: Rituals.

Q&A with Mary Anna Evans.

My Book, The Movie: The Physicists' Daughter.

The Page 69 Test: The Physicists' Daughter.

Writers Read: Mary Anna Evans.

The Page 69 Test: The Traitor Beside Her.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top sinister small town thrillers

At B&N Reads Brittany Bunzey tagged ten sinister small town thrillers, including:

Still Life (Chief Inspector Gamache Series #1) by Louise Penny

The start of the series that inspired the show Three Pines, Still Life introduces us to the quietly courageous Chief Inspector Armand Gamache. As he investigates the death of a local woman, he’s sure it’s more sinister than it appears. Beautifully written, this is the debut that kicked off the storied career of beloved author Louise Penny.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Page 69 Test: Still Life.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Mark Harrison's "Secret Leviathan"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Secret Leviathan: Secrecy and State Capacity under Soviet Communism by Mark Harrison.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Soviet Union was one of the most secretive states that ever existed. Defended by a complex apparatus of rules and checks administered by the secret police, the Soviet state had seemingly unprecedented capabilities based on its near monopoly of productive capital, monolithic authority, and secretive decision making. But behind the scenes, Soviet secrecy was double-edged: it raised transaction costs, incentivized indecision, compromised the effectiveness of government officials, eroded citizens' trust in institutions and in each other, and led to a secretive society and an uninformed elite. The result is what this book calls the secrecy/capacity tradeoff: a bargain in which the Soviet state accepted the reduction of state capacity as the cost of ensuring its own survival. This book is the first comprehensive, analytical, multi-faceted history of Soviet secrecy in the English language. Harrison combines quantitative and qualitative evidence to evaluate the impact of secrecy on Soviet state capacity from the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Based on multiple years of research in once-secret Soviet-era archives, this book addresses two gaps in history and social science: one the core role of secrecy in building and stabilizing the communist states of the twentieth century; the other the corrosive effects of secrecy on the capabilities of authoritarian states.

Visit Mark Harrison's Twitter perch.

The Page 99 Test: Secret Leviathan.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten essential works of Northern Irish literature

Alexander Poots was born in London in 1985. After studying at the University of Manchester and Magdalen College, Oxford, he worked as a bookseller.

The Strangers’ House: Writing Northern Ireland is his first book.

He lives in Belfast.

At Publishers Weekly Poots tagged ten works with the "tact, nuance, and deep historical understanding" essential to capturing the "predicament" (Seamus Heaney's term) that is Northern Ireland. One title on the list:

Milkman by Anna Burns

No one—well, almost no one—has a name in Burns’s glorious black comedy. The narrator is middle sister. There's also first sister, and Somebody McSomebody, and tablets girl. The place is unnamed, too, though it is Belfast, or a kind of Belfast. Middle sister—bookish, wry, blunt—describes her claustrophobic world, a place in which people are ruled by gossip and violence. It’s a compelling premise, but it could have become too abstract in the wrong hands. Burns makes the reader care, but crucially, she also makes the reader laugh. Despite the subject matter, this book is a scream—and a worthy winner of the 2018 Man Booker Prize.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five noir novels at the corner of Hollywood and music

Daniel Weizmann is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Billboard, the Guardian, AP Newswire, and more. Under the nom de plume, Shredder, Weizmann also wrote for the long running Flipside fanzine, as well as LA Weekly, which once called him “an incomparable punk stylist.”

His new novel is The Last Songbird.

At CrimeReads Weizmann tagged five noir titles that "feature mysteries, musicians, and mayhem against a Tinseltown backdrop." One entry on the list:

Cut to the 1990s: both the Strip and the record biz had inflated into revolting, bloated monsters, doling out million-dollar contracts to every slime-o with a shaggy haircut, leather pants, and a coke-laced snarl. Elmore Leonard’s Be Cool captures the atmosphere of glam excess and multi-platinum daydreams at a dozen wisecracks per page. Get Shorty’s loan shark Chili Palmer has returned, fresh from the movie biz, and he’s ready to cancel hip-hop debts with bare fists and take over rock star contracts faster than you can say “Walter Yetnikoff.” But Be Cool is more than hilarious, more than a caper. In its knuckle-cracking ferocity, it exposes, once and for all, the gangster heart that has always beat in the chest of the music biz.

Read about another title on Weizmann's list.

Be Cool is among Andrew Martin’s top ten examples of dialogue in crime fiction.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Huaping Lu-Adler's "Kant, Race, and Racism"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Kant, Race, and Racism: Views from Somewhere by Huaping Lu-Adler.

About the book, from the publisher:

Kant scholars have paid relatively little attention to his raciology. They assume that his racism, as personal prejudice, can be disentangled from his core philosophy. They also assume that racism contradicts his moral theory. In this book, philosopher Huaping Lu-Adler challenges both assumptions. She shows how Kant's raciology--divided into racialism and racism--is integral to his philosophical system. She also rejects the individualistic approach to Kant and racism. Instead, she uses the notion of racism as ideological formation to demonstrate how Kant, from his social location both as a prominent scholar and as a lifelong educator, participated in the formation of modern racist ideology.

As a scholar, Kant developed a ground-breaking scientific theory of race from the standpoint of a philosophical investigator of nature or Naturforscher. As an educator, he transmitted denigrating depictions of the racialized others and imbued those descriptions with normative relevance. In both roles, he left behind, as one of his legacies, a worldview that excluded non-whites from such goods as recognitional respect and candidacy for cultural and moral achievements. Scholars who research and teach Kant's philosophy therefore have an unshakable burden to take part in the ongoing antiracist struggles, through their teaching practices as well as their scholarship. And they must do so with a pragmatic attention to nonideal social realities and a deliberate orientation toward substantial racial justice, equality, and inclusion.

Lu-Adler pushes the discourse about Kant and racism well beyond the old debates about whether he was racist or whether his racism contaminates his philosophy. By foregrounding the lasting legacies of Kant's raciology, her work calls for a profound reorientation of Kant scholarship.

Learn more about Kant, Race, and Racism at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Kant, Race, and Racism: Views from Somewhere.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Eva Gates's "Death Knells and Wedding Bells"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Death Knells and Wedding Bells by Eva Gates.

About the book, from the publisher:

Librarian Lucy’s wedding is nearly perfect—aside from a missing guest and the strangled body she finds. Now, she must vow to find the killer in this 10th Lighthouse Library mystery.

Lucy and Connor planned for the perfect Outer Banks wedding—and that’s exactly what they got. Aside from typical rumblings of familial tensions, the late spring weather allowed for a beautiful day, the food was delicious, and everyone had a good time, until one of the guests goes missing.

Before Lucy can look forward to the rest of her life in Nags Head and the work she does at the Bodie Island Lighthouse Library, she gets a phone call from her boss, Bertie James. Eddie, Bertie’s friend, never made it back home after the reception. Initially, Lucy doesn’t think anything of it—sometimes wedding guests simply have a little too much fun. But this quickly turns to something darker when she discovers the body of a wedding guest strangled in a locked closet, and the police immediately start asking questions about Eddie. Lucy must figure out if the two are connected before it’s too late—both for Bertie’s friend and the rest of her wedding guests.

With the Classic Novel Reading Club reading the Selected Works of Edgar Allan Poe—Lucy wonders if the master of the macabre can assist her investigation or if the hunt for the killer’s identity will remain as nothing more than an unsolved mystery.

Follow Eva Gates on Twitter and visit Vicki Delany's website.

The Page 69 Test: Death By Beach Read.

Writers Read: Eva Gates (June 2022).

The Page 69 Test: Death Knells and Wedding Bells.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine top books about book people

Jane L. Rosen is an author and screenwriter whose critically acclaimed first novel, Nine Women, One Dress, has been translated into ten languages. Katie Couric called her novel Eliza Starts a Rumor “A smart, engaging treat for Big Little Lies fans. The perfect summer read!” Rosen lives in New York City and on Fire Island with her husband and three daughters.

[The Page 69 Test: Eliza Starts a Rumor; My Book, The Movie: Eliza Starts a Rumor]

Rosen's new novel is On Fire Island.

At Lit Hub she tagged nine books about book people, including:

The Swans of Fifth Avenue by Melanie Benjamin

What’s more bookish than a novel about the great American novelist, screenwriter and play write, Truman Capote. Capote forms an infamous friendship (second only to that with his BFF, Harper Lee) with high society girl Babe Paley and other society “Swans” of the 1950s, but the friendships are questioned with the ultimate betrayal of the publication of his scandalous book, “La Cote Basque, 1965”.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Page 69 Test: The Swans of Fifth Avenue.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Jerry Emory's "George Meléndez Wright"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: George Meléndez Wright: The Fight for Wildlife and Wilderness in the National Parks by Jerry Emory.

About the book, from the publisher:

The first biography of a visionary biologist whose groundbreaking ideas regarding wildlife and science revolutionized national parks.

When twenty-three-year-old George Meléndez Wright arrived in Yosemite National Park in 1927 to work as a ranger naturalist—the first Hispanic person to occupy any professional position in the National Park Service (NPS)—he had already visited every national park in the western United States, including McKinley (now Denali) in Alaska. Two years later, he would organize the first science-based wildlife survey of the western parks, forever changing how the NPS would manage wildlife and natural resources. At a time when national parks routinely fed bears garbage as part of “shows” and killed “bad” predators like wolves, mountain lions, and coyotes, Wright’s new ideas for conservation set the stage for the modern scientific management of parks and other public lands.

Tragically, Wright died in a 1936 car accident while working to establish parks and wildlife refuges on the US-Mexico border. To this day, he remains a celebrated figure among conservationists, wildlife experts, and park managers. In this book, Jerry Emory, a conservationist and writer connected to Wright’s family, draws on hundreds of letters, field notes, archival research, interviews, and more to offer both a biography of Wright and a historical account of a crucial period in the evolution of US parks and the wilderness movement. With a foreword by former NPS director Jonathan B. Jarvis, George Meléndez Wright is a celebration of Wright’s unique upbringing, dynamism, and enduring vision that places him at last in the pantheon of the great American conservationists.

Visit Jerry Emory's website.

The Page 99 Test: George Meléndez Wright.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Corinne Demas

From my Q&A with Corinne Demas, author of The Road Towards Home: A Novel:

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

My working title for my novel was The Lady with the Dog, the title of a favorite short story by Anton Chekhov, which is quoted in my epilogue. The novel does more, though, than focus on one female dog-owner, so my editor, my agent, and I explored dozens of other titles. I kept mining the text of the manuscript, looking for a phrase that would speak to the core of the novel, and I ended up discovering it in the last line of the book.

I hope The Road Towards Home will suggest to readers not just a physical road, but a psychological journey as well. There are a number of “homes” in the novel: the houses each of the characters once owned, the retirement community where they find themselves, and the rough Cape Cod cottage where most of the story takes place. Home, of course is not just a physical place, but a state of mind.

I chose “towards” rather than “toward” for the title because...[read on]

Visit Corinne Demas's website.

Q&A with Corinne Demas.

--Marshal Zeringue

Adam Mitzner's "Love Betrayal Murder," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Love Betrayal Murder by Adam Mitzner.

The entry begins:

Love Betrayal Murder is the second of my books in which a very close friend generously allowed me to use his name (The Best Friend being the other). I’m sure that my Matt Brooks would have his own thoughts about the Hollywood A-lister to play his fictional alter ego, but in my mind it’s someone with tremendous charisma, but not traditional leading man looks. I’m thinking Seth Rogan or Paul Dano.

For Vanessa Lyons, I go the other way. Someone truly beautiful, but who uses her intelligence, and not her looks, as her calling card. I’ve been hoping Nina Dobrev would take an interest in my work for a while now, and she would indeed be an excellent Vanessa. But I just saw Riley Keough in Daisy Jones and she’d be great too.

Bradley Lyons is older and as handsome as his wife is beautiful, but...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Adam Mitzner's website.

The Page 69 Test: A Conflict of Interest.

My Book, The Movie: A Conflict of Interest.

The Page 69 Test: A Case of Redemption.

My Book, The Movie: A Case of Redemption.

The Page 69 Test: Losing Faith.

My Book, The Movie: Losing Faith.

The Page 69 Test: A Matter of Will.

My Book, the Movie: A Matter of Will.

My Book, The Movie: The Perfect Marriage.

The Page 69 Test: The Perfect Marriage.

Q&A with Adam Mitzner.

Writers Read: Adam Mitzner.

My Book, The Movie: Love Betrayal Murder.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Mary Anna Evans reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Mary Anna Evans, author of The Traitor Beside Her: A WWII Mystery.

Her entry begins:

My career, when viewed uncharitably, could be said to sprawl a bit. I write novels. I write stories. I write essays. I teach college students to write in a multitude of fictional genres, with a focus on mysteries and thrillers, but I teach nonfiction writing, too. My academic work focuses on crime fiction and Agatha Christie, but I weigh in from time to time on writing pedagogy. There’s a joke to be made here about being a jack of all trades but a mistress of none, but there’s a common theme in all the aspects of my career. I work with words. I write them, to be sure, but all writers begin as readers, and I believe we must continue to read if we are to develop in our art.

Thus, I can say in absolute truth that I read for a living. Nothing would have made twelve-year-old me happier than to look into the future and see this.

So what am I reading now?

Well, I’m slated to teach thriller writing this fall, and I’m excited about a new-to-me author, David Heska Wanbli Weiden. I discovered him earlier this year, when reading The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2022. I was taken by his story “Turning Heart,” which prompted me to buy his acclaimed 2020 novel Winter Counts with the idea that...[read on]

About The Traitor Beside Her, from the publisher:

The Traitor Beside Her is an intricately plotted WWII espionage novel weaving together mystery, action, friendship, and a hint of romance perfect for fans of The Rose Code and Code Name Helene.

Justine Byrne can't trust the people working beside her. Arlington Hall, a former women's college in Virginia has been taken over by the United States Army where hundreds of men and women work to decode countless pieces of communication coming from the Axis powers.

Justine works among them, handling the most sensitive secrets of World War II—but she isn't there to decipher German codes—she's there to find a traitor.

Justine keeps her guard up and her ears open, confiding only in her best friend, Georgette, a fluent speaker of Choctaw who is training to work as a code talker. Justine tries to befriend each suspect, believing that the key to finding the spy lies not in cryptography but in understanding how code breakers tick. When young women begin to go missing at Arlington Hall, her deadline for unraveling the web of secrets becomes urgent and one thing remains clear: a single secret in enemy hands could end thousands of lives.

Learn more about the author and her work at Mary Anna Evans' website.

The Page 69 Test: Floodgates.

Writers Read: Mary Anna Evans (October 2010).

The Page 69 Test: Strangers.

My Book, The Movie: Strangers.

The Page 69 Test: Plunder.

Writers Read: Mary Anna Evans (November 2013).

The Page 69 Test: Rituals.

Q&A with Mary Anna Evans.

My Book, The Movie: The Physicists' Daughter.

The Page 69 Test: The Physicists' Daughter.

Writers Read: Mary Anna Evans.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Antón Barba-Kay's "A Web of Our Own Making"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation by Antón Barba-Kay.

About the book, from the publisher:

There no longer seems any point to criticizing the internet. We indulge in the latest doom-mongering about the evils of social media-on social media. We scroll through routine complaints about the deterioration of our attention spans. We resign ourselves to hating the internet even as we spend much of our waking lives with it. Yet our unthinking surrender to its effects-to the ways it recasts our aims and desires-is itself digital technology's most powerful achievement. A Web of Our Own Making examines how online practices are reshaping our lives outside our notice. Barba-Kay argues that digital technology is a 'natural technology'-a technology so intuitive as to conceal the extent to which it transforms our attention. He shows how and why this technology is reconfiguring knowledge, culture, politics, aesthetics, and theology. The digital revolution is primarily taking place not in Silicon Valley but within each of us.

Learn more about A Web of Our Own Making at the Cambridge University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: A Web of Our Own Making.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten books about connecting with nature

Hannah Stowe writes, paints, and sails. Her boat is named Larry.

I am drawn to literature that cements humans as a part of nature and stories than use the natural world to anchor our lived experiences, to explore what it means to be human, to help to understand ourselves as a part of the ecosystem [she writes at the Guardian]. In my own writing, I explore my changing relationship with the sea, how nature has both hurt and healed my body and mind, and how wild creatures have provided waypoints along a physical and emotional navigation.

Stowe's new book is Move Like Water: My Story of the Sea.

At the Guardian she tagged ten books that "explore how nature can help us understand the human experiences of addiction, illness, loss, loneliness and allow us to find solace, sanctuary, connection and subtle wisdom in the wild." One title on the list:

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

Owens’s debut novel tells the tale of a girl abandoned by her family and by society, left to be raised by and in the wild of the marsh in North Carolina. The marsh is a transitional place, where land becomes water, a place where organisms must adapt to survive. The protagonist Kya is no different as she navigates the twisting, shifting waterways and makes a life for herself. Nature becomes her family and her teacher, as she finds companionship with birds, learns how to feed herself, how to survive, how to stave off the loneliness that accompanies her and develops incredibly astute biological and ecological observations.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue