Corinne Demas's "The Road Towards Home," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Road Towards Home: A Novel by Corinne Demas.

The entry begins:

The Road Towards Home is a love story (of sorts) between a most unlikely pair of retirees. Noah and Cassandra rediscover each other at Clarion Court, a senior living community (they knew each other fifty years before in college) and end up sharing a rough cottage on Cape Cod and trying to figure out if they have a future together. There are really three main characters here—the third is the setting, and I would hope any director who turns my novel into a movie is someone who’d love the Outer Cape and understand how important sea, sand, and sky (not to mention oysters and American Woodcocks) are to the story.

My novel was published June 1, and since then I’ve been hearing from many readers who say they’re eagerly awaiting the film version and send on their suggestions for actors. Several have pointed out that because the novel relies heavily on dialogue writing a screenplay would be a piece of cake.

When Brilliance Publishing was selecting two actors for the audiobook of The Road Towards Home they asked if I wanted to have input in the casting. Of course I did! The actors in the audition tapes they first sent me didn’t quite capture my characters, so I listened to samples of audio books in search of two voices who sounded like my Noah and my Cassandra, and whose voices worked well together. I realized how hard it is to have an entire character created by voice alone. Cassandra is seventy two, but she’s youthful and lively, as well as sharp and funny. Noah is a bit pedantic, but he’s witty and wry, and actually much kinder than he would like you to think he is. Voice actors David De Vries for Noah and Erin Bennett for Cassandra proved to be the perfect pairing!

Casting an actor when it’s not their voice alone is a different matter. Noah and Cassandra are...[read on]

Visit Corinne Demas's website.

Q&A with Corinne Demas.

The Page 69 Test: The Road Towards Home.

My Book, The Movie: The Road Towards Home.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Richard Halpern's "Leibnizing"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Leibnizing: A Philosopher in Motion by Richard Halpern.

About the book, from the publisher:

Why read Leibniz today? Can we still learn from him and not just about him? This book argues that Leibniz offers a powerful, productive model for transdisciplinary thinking that can push back against the narrowness of the humanities today.

Richard Halpern recasts Leibniz as a great writer as well as a great philosopher, demonstrating that his philosophical project cannot be fully understood without taking its literary elements into account. He shows Leibniz to be a prescient thinker about art and beauty whose insights into the relationship between aesthetic experience and thought remain invaluable. Leibnizing asks readers to follow the dynamic movement of Leibniz’s writing instead of attempting to grasp a static philosophical system and to pay careful attention to the rhetorical and stylistic registers of Leibniz’s work as well as its conceptual and logical dimensions.

For philosophers, this book offers a novel approach to reading and interpreting Leibniz. For literary and other theorists, it showcases the relevance of Leibniz’s thought to areas from aesthetics to politics and from metaphysics to computer science. Written in a lucid and even witty style, Leibnizing provides readers with an accessible entryway into Leibniz’s sometimes forbidding but ultimately rewarding philosophical vision.

Learn more about Leibnizing at the Columbia University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Norman Rockwell: The Underside of Innocence.

The Page 99 Test: Leibnizing.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight top books about intelligent sea creatures

James Sturz grew up in New York City, snorkeling in his bathtub and pretending the living room shag carpet was finger coral. Now based in Hawaii, he has covered the underwater world for The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The New York Times Magazine, Outside, and Men’s Journal, among many publications. His fiction and journalism have been published in 18 countries and translated into nine languages. He graduated Magna Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Cornell University and is a PADI Divemaster, free diver, and Explorers Club Fellow. His first novel, Sasso, was set in the caves of Basilicata, Italy, very far from the water.

Sturz's new novel is Underjungle.

At Lit Hub he tagged eight books that "feature intelligent sea creatures who become part of our world, or else we enter theirs." One title on the list:

Claire Fuller, The Memory of Animals

This heart-thumper is a tale of isolation, loss, connectedness, memory-reproducing technology, and a whole lotta apocalypse. So why shouldn’t there also be an octopus in it? Surely, they’re the kings of connection, with all those arms and suckers. The novel is set mostly in confined spaces in England and open ones in Greece, against a backdrop of something a hundred times worse than Covid, which has wrought devastation on the planet—think Emma Donoghue’s Room, flushed with childhood recollections of life at the sea. Fuller’s novel drips with ache and desperation, but you’ll never feel either more than when its 27-year-old marine biologist narrator, Neffy, embraces an octopus and weeps.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Kelly Creagh's "Strange Unearthly Things"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Strange Unearthly Things by Kelly Creagh.

About the book, from the publisher:

A hauntingly romantic paranormal Jane Eyre reimagining, by the author of Phantom Heart!

Eighteen-year-old Jane Reye is a psychic artist. She draws what she sees, and what she sees are spirits and the supernatural. Growing up orphaned, she’s now of legal age and can no longer return to the girls’ school she’s called home for most of her life. Lost and alone after the death of her lifelong friend, she receives an invitation to partake in a study at the English manor Fairfax Hall: an investigation of the property that requires her specific area of expertise. Upon arrival, Jane understands this will be no ordinary study when she meets Elias Thornfield, the elusive proprietor of the estate, a boy her age, roguishly handsome, who dons a mysterious eye patch. During the study it becomes clear that something is amiss—something having to do with Elias and the spiritual activity taking place around the manor. Turning to her art to unravel the mystery, Jane is shocked to find that her talents—and her growing affection for Elias—could be the key to saving him from a horrible fate.

Visit Kelly Creagh's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Kelly Creagh and Annabel (September 2010).

Coffee with a Canine: Kelly Creagh & Annabel, Jack and Holly (September 2012).

The Page 69 Test: Phantom Heart.

Q&A with Kelly Creagh.

The Page 69 Test: Strange Unearthly Things.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Asia Friedman's "Mammography Wars"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Mammography Wars: Analyzing Attention in Cultural and Medical Disputes by Asia Friedman.

About the book, from the publisher:

Mammography is a routine health screening performed forty million times each year in the United States, yet it remains one of the most deeply contested topics in medicine, with national health care organizations supporting conflicting guidelines. In Mammography Wars, sociologist Asia Friedman examines cultural and medical disagreements over mammography. At issue is whether to screen women under age fifty, which is rooted in deeper questions about early detection and the assumed linear and progressive development of breast cancer. Based on interviews with doctors and scientists, interviews with women ages 40 to 50, and newspaper coverage of mammography, Friedman uses the sociology of attention to map the cognitive structure of the “mammography wars,” offering insights into the entrenched nature of debates over mammography that often get missed when applying a medical lens. Friedman’s analysis also suggests the sociology of attention’s unique potential for analyzing cultural conflicts beyond mammography, and even beyond medicine.

Learn more about Mammography Wars at the Rutgers University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Mammography Wars.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five novels in which love conquers & sometimes destroys

T.M. Dunn is the author of three novels, Her Father's Daughter (2023), Last Stop On The 6 (2021,) and Rebels By Accident (2014). She has served as Senior Director of the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College, where she holds a MFA in creative writing, and currently coaches aspiring and established writers and teaches creative writing workshops.

At CrimeReads Dunn tagged five "novels where love drives characters to dangerous extremes," including:

Meg Gardiner’s UNSUB was published in 2017, and when the Boston Globe wrote that it had hints of “Silence of the Lambs,” I immediately clicked and purchased the hardcover. Anyone who had ever taken one of my creative writing classes knows that Hannibal Lecter is one of my favorite characters of all time. How the author, Thomas Harris, manages to get you, me, to root for a serial killer is extraordinary. I shamefully admit I let life get in my way and never read the novel. It was only recently, with a very long drive ahead of me to see my sister, I downloaded the audiobook and was captivated, no serial killer pun intended. There’s no question that the protagonist’s love for her father is the inspiration for her to become a detective who solves crimes and protects people.

When the serial killer, to whom her father devoted years of his life and most of Caitlin’s childhood trying and failing to stop, surfaces again, the love for her father, the need to save him, leads her down the similar destructive path that in many ways destroyed her father.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Page 69 Test: UNSUB.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Genevieve Plunkett

From my Q&A with Genevieve Plunkett, author of In the Lobby of the Dream Hotel:

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

I wrote songs before I started writing fiction, so the cadence of the title was important to me. In the Lobby of the Dream Hotel has a catchiness that I hope draws people in, even if they don’t know what the book is about. As for how it connects to the story itself, the title comes directly from a conversation between Portia and Theo. They are bandmates, who are also in love, searching desperately for a way to be together, when it seems otherwise impossible. The lobby of a dream hotel is a central place and also a nowhere place, kind of like hope.

What's in a name?

Elizabeth Bowen was perhaps the first author that I truly loved as an adult reader. Her novel, The Death of the Heart, is centered around sixteen-year-old orphan Portia Quayne. My Portia--Portia Elby-- is not modeled after her, but...[read on]

Visit Genevieve Plunkett's website.

Q&A with Genevieve Plunkett.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Jerome Charyn's "Ravage & Son"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Ravage & Son by Jerome Charyn.

About the book, from the publisher:

A master storyteller’s novel of crime, corruption, and antisemitism in early 20th-century Manhattan

Ravage & Son reflects the lost world of Manhattan’s Lower East Side—the cradle of Jewish immigration during the first years of the twentieth century—in a dark mirror.

Abraham Cahan, editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, serves as the conscience of the Jewish ghetto teeming with rogue cops and swindlers. He rescues Ben Ravage, an orphan, from a trade school and sends him off to Harvard to earn a law degree. But upon his return, Ben rejects the chance to escape his gritty origins and instead becomes a detective for the Kehilla, a quixotic gang backed by wealthy uptown patrons to help the police rid the Lower East Side of criminals. Charged with rooting out the Jewish “Mr. Hyde,” a half-mad villain who attacks the prostitutes of Allen Street, Ben discovers that his fate is irrevocably tied to that of this violent, sinister man.

A lurid tale of revenge, this wildly evocative, suspenseful noir is vintage Jerome Charyn.

Learn more about the book and author at Jerome Charyn's website.

The Page 69 Test: Under the Eye of God.

My Book, The Movie: Big Red.

Q&A with Jerome Charyn.

The Page 69 Test: Ravage & Son.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top novels about mad scientists

Akemi C. Brodsky is the author of The Brill Pill. She graduated magna cum laude from Brown University with a bachelor of science, then moved to the UK to do a master’s in engineering at Imperial College London. She currently lives in the Bay Area and spends most of her spare time traveling, cooking, seeing family and friends, and watching TV.

At Electric Lit Brodsky tagged ten novels about mad scientists, including:

All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders

Nature and technology collide in this mashup of mad science and magic. Two outcasts in middle school (ugh, middle school) form an unexpected friendship that will be tested time and again by the harsh realities of the world (and all of the typical dramas that come between a witch and a techie). As the planet burns around them, mistakes are made on both sides, but we root for them throughout and wonder whether, if they can just stay friends, we all might be capable of something better. This story is all kinds of dark and all kinds of hopeful, terrifyingly honest and laugh out loud funny. Anders weaves together a brilliant narrative with an amusing dose of snark and pop-culture awareness.

Read about another entry on the list.

All The Birds in The Sky is among Jeff Somers's fifty science fiction essentials written by women, Nancy Kress's five best books with ambitious birds, and Laura Lam's five top books about futuristic California.

My Book, The Movie: All the Birds in the Sky.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Adrienne Russell's "The Mediated Climate"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Mediated Climate: How Journalists, Big Tech, and Activists Are Vying for Our Future by Adrienne Russell.

About the book, from the publisher:

To what extent does journalism deserve blame for the failure to address climate change over the last thirty years? Critics point out that climate coverage has often lacked necessary urgency and hewed to traditional notions of objectivity and balance that allowed powerful interests—mainly fossil fuel companies—to manufacture doubt. Climate journalism, however, developed alongside the digital media landscape, which is characterized by rampant misinformation, political polarization, unaccountable tech companies, unchecked corporate power, and vast inequalities. Under these circumstances, journalism struggled, and bad actors flourished, muddling messages while emissions mounted and societies struggled to avert catastrophe.

The Mediated Climate explores the places where the climate and information crises meet, examining how journalism, activism, corporations, and Big Tech compete to influence the public. Adrienne Russell argues that the inadequate response to climate change is intertwined with the profound challenges facing the communications environment. She demonstrates that the information crisis is driven not only by technological changes but also by concentrated power that predates the rise of digital media companies. Efforts to improve climate coverage must take into account the larger social and material contexts in which journalism operates and the broader power dynamics that shape public discourse. Drawing on interviews with journalists and activists, Russell considers the ways recent movements are battling misinformation. She offers timely recommendations to foster engagement with climate issues and calls on readers to join in efforts to reshape the media landscape to better serve the public interest.

Learn more about The Mediated Climate at the Columbia University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Mediated Climate.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sara Flannery Murphy's "The Wonder State," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Wonder State: A Novel by Sara Flannery Murphy.

The entry begins:

I’m biased, but I think The Wonder State could make a riveting movie. The story is familiar – friends drawn back to a hometown they swore they’d leave behind. And setting a movie in the Arkansas Ozarks seems like an overlooked opportunity. The natural landscape there is dramatic and gorgeous, a character in and of itself.

If I could choose my dream director and screenwriter, I’d go with Brit Marling and Zat Batmanglij, the brains behind The OA. The OA has a dreamlike quality that I absolutely love, and Batmanglij and Marling would capture the nostalgic, magical feeling of The Wonder State while also weaving in its strangeness and darkness. The second season of The OA even features a mysterious house with a complex backstory, so I know they could handle The Wonder State’s many houses.

Casting actors to play my characters is tricky since I picture them so distinctly inside my head. It almost feels like casting a movie based on people I actually know, like finding an actor who best represents my mother or my close friend … something’s always lost in translation. The Wonder State presents an additional challenge because it’s a dual timeline story, requiring both teen and adult actors. I’m a massive Yellowjackets fan, so...[read on]

Visit Sara Flannery Murphy's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Possessions.

The Page 69 Test: The Possessions.

Writers Read: Sara Flannery Murphy (March 2017).

Q&A with Sara Flannery Murphy.

The Page 69 Test: The Wonder State.

My Book, The Movie: The Wonder State.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top books about historical heroines in fiction

Elizabeth Fremantle is the critically acclaimed author of four Tudor historical novels: Queen's Gambit (soon to be the feature film, Firebrand), Sisters of Treason, Watch the Lady, and The Girl in the Glass Tower. As E.C. Fremantle she has written two gripping historical thrillers: The Poison Bed and The Honey and the Sting.

Fremantle's newest novel, Disobedient, about the artist Artemisia Gentileschi.

At Lit Hub the author tagged six books about her "favorite historical heroines in fiction," including:

Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies

What Mantel, an author of extraordinary skill and subtlety, has done in Bring Up the Bodies—in my opinion the best of her Cromwell trilogy—is give us a new portrait of Anne Boleyn. Henry VIII’s second wife has been more fictionalized than any other woman of that period, apart, perhaps from her daughter, Elizabeth I. There are so many versions of Anne – the temptress, the victim, the conniver – it is hard to gain a sense of what she might really have been like.

Mantel has excavated the historical record to find the politically canny Anne, the Reformation Anne, the Anne that made an uncomfortable ally of the coming man Cromwell, who would ultimately mastermind her downfall. This Anne is one who refused to be like other women but overplayed her hand and paid the ultimate price. Mantel’s depiction of her execution manages to balance being both heart-breaking, yet unsentimental. A truly extraordinary portrait of a remarkable and much maligned woman.

Read about another entry on the list.

Bring Up the Bodies is among Peter Stanford's top ten Protestants in fiction, Terry Stiastny’s ten top books about Westminster politics and Fiona Barton's ten favorite books centering on marriages that hold dark secrets. The position of Queen, in Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies, is among Rachel Cantor's ten worst jobs in books.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Mark Pryor reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Mark Pryor, author of The Dark Edge of Night: A Henri Lefort Mystery (Volume 2).

His entry begins:

I'm reading The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles. I like to step away from crime fiction from time to time and one of my favorite books ever was A Gentleman in Moscow, so I knew Lincoln Highway would be good. I'm about halfway through and loving the prose, plot, and characters. I'm always impressed when...[read on]

About The Dark Edge of Night, from the publisher:

“Sharp eyed and sharp mouthed police detective”* Henri Lefort, is determined to solve homicides and uncover any German conspiracies threatening France—in Mark Pryor’s newest World War II mystery, The Dark Edge of Night.

Winter 1940: With soldiers parading down the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, Nazi flags dangling from the Arc de Triomphe, and the Eiffel Tower defaced with German propaganda, Parisians have little to celebrate as Christmas approaches. Police Inspector Henri Lefort’s wishes for a quiet holiday season are dashed when the Gestapo orders him to investigate the disappearance of Dr. Viktor Brandt, a neurologist involved in a secret project at one of Paris’s hospitals.

Being forced onto a missing persons case for the enemy doesn’t deter Henri from conducting his real job. A Frenchman has been beaten to death in what appears to be a botched burglary, and catching a killer is more important than locating a wayward scientist. But when Henri learns that the victim’s brother is a doctor who worked at the same hospital as the missing German, his investigation takes a disturbing turn.

Uncovering a relationship between the two men—one that would not be tolerated by the Third Reich—Henri must tread carefully. And when he discovers that Dr. Brandt’s experimental work is connected to groups of children being taken from orphanages, Henri risks bringing the wrath of both the SS and the Gestapo upon himself and everyone he loves.

Visit Mark Pryor's website.

My Book, The Movie: Dominic.

Writers Reads: Mark Pryor (January 2018).

My Book, The Movie: Die Around Sundown.

Q&A with Mark Pryor.

My Book, The Movie: The Dark Edge of Night.

Writers Read: Mark Pryor.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Andrew Payne's "War on the Ballot"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: War on the Ballot: How the Election Cycle Shapes Presidential Decision-Making in War by Andrew Payne.

About the book, from the publisher:

The president of the United States is at once holder of the highest elected office and commander in chief of the armed forces. How do upcoming elections influence presidents’ behavior during wartime? How do presidents balance perceptions of the national interest with personal political interests?

War on the Ballot examines how electoral politics shaped presidential decisions on military and diplomatic strategy during the wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq. Drawing on a wealth of declassified documents and interviews with senior officials and military officers, Andrew Payne reveals the surprisingly large role played by political considerations during conflicts. He demonstrates how the exigencies of the electoral cycle drove leaders to miss opportunities to limit the human and financial costs of each war, gain strategic advantage, or sue for peace, sometimes making critical decisions with striking disregard for the consequences on the ground. Payne emphasizes the importance of electoral pressures throughout the full course of a conflict, not just around the initial decision to intervene. He shows how electoral constraints operate across different phases of the political calendar, going beyond the period immediately preceding a presidential election.

Offering a systematic analysis of the relationship between electoral politics and wartime decision-making, this book raises crucial questions about democratic accountability in foreign policy.

Learn more about War on the Ballot at the Columbia University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: War on the Ballot.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten books set in Cornwall

Emylia Hall lives in Bristol with her husband and son where she writes from a hut in the garden and dreams of the sea. The Shell House Detectives is the first novel in her new crime series, following the exploits of sleuthing duo Ally and Jayden and the people in and around the fictional village of Porthpella. The Harbour Lights Mystery – the second book in The Shell House Mystery series – will be published in October 2023, with the third to follow in Spring 2024. Described as Contemporary Cosy Crime, the series is inspired by her love of Cornwall’s wild landscape.

At the Guardian Hall tagged ten top books set in Cornwall, including:

"Yoruba Man Walking" by Bernardine Evaristo

Evaristo’s powerful short story appears in Closure, a collection of Black British short stories. It’s the 1880s and, after 20 years at sea, Lawani heads inland. Passing through the Cornish harbour town he draws stares, but “he had learned to become metal, inside and out”. He finds work at a tin mine and marries a local girl in a vividly drawn romance. As Lawani works underground his mind travels: he contemplates fatherhood and longs for his hometown of Lagos and the freedom of the ocean. An important story about loss of identity and the erasures of history. While it’s perfect in form, I’d have happily stayed with these compelling characters for a novel or more.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Sara Flannery Murphy's "The Wonder State"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Wonder State: A Novel by Sara Flannery Murphy.

About the book, from the publisher:

From the author of Girl One comes a spellbinding adventure about a strange power lurking in the Arkansas Ozarks, and the group of friends obsessed with finding it.

Five friends arrive back in Eternal Springs, the small town they all fled after high-school graduation. Each of them is drawn home by a cryptic, scrawled two-word letter: You promised.

It has been fifteen years since that life-changing summer, and they're anxious to find out why Brandi called them back, especially when they vowed never to return.

But Brandi is missing. She'd been acting erratically for months, in and out of rehab, railing at whoever might listen about magic all around them. About a power they can't see. And strange houses that appear only when you need them . . .

Told in two enthralling time lines, The Wonder State is a stunning, immersive follow-up to Girl One. Sara Flannery Murphy has created another dazzling, genre-blurring novel—an adventure story laced with nostalgia and magic, exploring belonging and the lasting power of community.

Visit Sara Flannery Murphy's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Possessions.

The Page 69 Test: The Possessions.

Writers Read: Sara Flannery Murphy (March 2017).

Q&A with Sara Flannery Murphy.

The Page 69 Test: The Wonder State.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Mark A. Ragan's "Kingdoms, Empires, and Domains"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Kingdoms, Empires, and Domains: The History of High-Level Biological Classification by Mark A. Ragan.

About the book, from the publisher:

A generation or two before Socrates, thinkers classified the world's organisms into three categories: plants, animals, and man. However, Aristotle recognized that some organisms, such as sponges and sea-fans, share properties of both plants and animals. These became known as zoophytes. Since then, scientists have explored the idea of a "third kingdom." In Kingdoms, Empires, and Domains, leading molecular systematist Mark A. Ragan offers a history of the idea that there is more to the living world than plants and animals.

Progressing chronologically through philosophical, religious, literary, and other pre-scientific traditions, Ragan traces how transgressive creatures such as sponges, corals, algae, fungi, and diverse microscopic beings have been described, categorized, and understood throughout history. The book considers their appearance in early Christian, Islamic, and Jewish traditions; myths, legends, and traveller's tales; occult literature; and more. Kingdoms, Empires, and Domains also details how the concept of a "third kingdom" has evolved throughout the history of scientific botany and zoology, and continues to evolve up to the present day.

Kingdoms, Empires, and Domains features original translations of passages from key historical texts, many of which have never appeared in English before. It also draws on the most recent and reliable scientific literature. A sweeping, interdisciplinary study, Kingdoms, Empires, and Domains is essential reading for students and scholars of the history of biological classification and anyone interested in the history of ideas about the natural world.

Learn more about Kingdoms, Empires, and Domains at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Kingdoms, Empires, and Domains.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five memorable mysteries for performing arts lovers

Lynn Slaughter is addicted to chocolate, the arts, and her husband’s cooking. After a long career as a professional dancer and dance educator, she earned her MFA in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University.

Her award-winning novels include Deadly Setup and Leisha’s Song. She is also the author of It Should Have Been You, a Silver Falchion finalist, and While I Danced, an EPIC finalist.

The ridiculously proud mother of two sons and grandmother of five, she lives in Louisville, Kentucky where she is at work on her next novel and is an active member and former president of Derby Rotten Scoundrels, her local Sisters in Crime chapter.

Slaughter's new novel is Missed Cue.

At CrimeReads she tagged five memorable mysteries for performing arts lovers, including:

The Turnout by Megan Abbott

If your reading tastes run to the darkly hypnotic, you’ll be entranced by Megan Abbott’s The Turnout. Siblings Dara and Marie Durant grew up dancing in their mother’s dance school, which they inherited after their parents’ tragic car accident. Along with Charlie, Dara’s husband and once their mother’s prize student, the sisters now run the school together and are busily preparing for the school’s annual Nutcracker performances.

The trio appears to operate as a smooth team managing their young students with aplomb. But when they hire a charismatic, barrel-chested contractor to repair the damage from a fire in one of the studios, their unity is disrupted. Marie begins a passionate affair with the contractor, and it soon becomes evident that he has his own agenda for the studio building, as well as the stately home the trio has inherited.

In this beautifully disturbing portrait of a troubled family, Abbott moves between the past and present to reveal a web of long held secrets and abuse that culminate in murder. Along the way, she vividly evokes the sights, sounds, and smells of a dance school filled with competitive young people eager for a future in ballet at almost any cost.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Third reading: D.W. Buffa on "Seven Pillars of Wisdom"

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 T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom begins:

In the copy of Seven Pillars of Wisdom T.E. Lawrence gave to his friend, E.M. Forster, he wrote: “Not good enough, but as good, apparently, as I can do.” Forster disagreed. Lawrence, he explained, “was so modest that he never grasped its greatness, or admitted that he had given something unique to our literature.” To say that the book describes the revolt in Arabia against the Turks, is like saying that “Moby Dick is about catching a whale.”

The book that Lawrence did not think good enough, and E.M. Forster thought one of the greatest ever written, was written more than once. The original manuscript, left in a bag at the Reading station, was stolen, and Lawrence had to write it all over again. This second manuscript, known as the Oxford edition of l922, did not do much better. Nearly 330,000 words in length, only about a half dozen copies were known to exist. Lawrence cut this version by 50,000 words, including all of the first chapter, which contained one sentence Forster always remembered: “All the subject provinces of the Empire to me were not worth one dead English boy.” It was a sentence to be weighed against the seven words stamped on the cover of the edition finally offered to the public in 1935, the year of Lawrence’s death: “The sword also means cleanness and death.”

Forster understood why Lawrence had become so famous. The war in the desert was the “last of the picturesque wars. Camels, pennants, the blowing up of little railway trains by little charges of dynamite in the desert - it is unlikely to recur. Next time the airplane will blot out everything in an indifferent death….” The Arab Revolt, Lawrence’s war, was “the last effort of the war-god before he laid down his godhead and turned chemist.” How did it happen? How did a twenty-eight year old English intelligence officer who had joined the army only at the outbreak of the war become one of the greatest generals England ever had?

Lawrence was sent out from Cairo, where he was stationed, to...[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.

Third Reading: A Passage To India.

Third Reading: Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten books portraying a search for truth

Babak Lakghomi is the author of South (2023) and Floating Notes (2018). His fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, NOON, Ninth Letter, New York Tyrant, The Adroit Journal, and Green Mountains Review, and has been translated into Italian and Farsi.

Lakghomi was born in Tehran, Iran, and currently lives and writes in Toronto.

At Electric Lit he tagged ten "stories that play with form to portray the difficulty of accessing reality." One title on the list:

Last Days by Brian Evenson

Last Days combines detective and horror genres; the story homes in on a religious mutilation cult. Kline is an amputee, ex-detective who is kidnapped by two members of the mutilation cult in order to identify the murderer of their former leader. Kline has to find his way to freedom through the members of the cult and other rival sects, and navigate their web of lies and misinformation. Narrated in Evenson’s stark and vivid prose, the novel is filled with absurd and memorable passages and dialogue.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue