Six exciting thrillers set on planes & trains

At Book Riot Liberty Hardy tagged six exciting thrillers set on planes and trains, including:

Confessions on the 7:45 by Lisa Unger

While commuting from work, Selena Murphy starts to chat with a stranger on the train. As they pass the time talking, the stranger reveals that her husband is having an affair with the nanny. It’s a shocking secret to share with a stranger (say that three times fast), but they’ll probably never meet again, right? But then Selena learns that a nanny has gone missing, and maybe that stranger on the train wasn’t there by accident. As she looks into the disappearance, Selena finds connections, drawing her deeper into the mystery and unraveling her quiet life.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Ryan Cull's "Unlimited Eligibility"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Unlimited Eligibility?: Inclusive Democracy and the American Lyric by Ryan Cull.

About the book, from the publisher:

Rewrites the dominant narrative of the political work of lyric poetry in the United States since the nineteenth century.

What if increased visibility of marginalized identities-a goal of much socially committed lyric poetry in the United States-does not necessarily lead to increased social recognition? For many contemporary scholars, this is the central question of lyric politics. Unlimited Eligibility? revisits and deeply historicizes this question. Ryan Cull explores the relationship of a diverse set of poets, including Walt Whitman, Jean Toomer, Hart Crane, James Merrill, Thylias Moss, and Claudia Rankine, to a series of movements intended to build inclusion: the St. Louis Hegelians, cultural pluralism, identity politics, and multiculturalism. In tracing the tensions in lyric poetry's merger with the pursuit of recognition, Cull offers a new history of the political work of lyric poetry while exposing the discursive roots of the nation's faltering progress toward becoming a more inclusive democracy.

Learn more about Unlimited Eligibility? at the State University of New York Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Unlimited Eligibility?.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten books about history’s unsung legacies

Diana Arterian is the author of the recent poetry collection Agrippina the Younger and has twice been a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Her first collection, Playing Monster :: Seiche, received a starred review in Publishers Weekly. Arterian's writing has appeared in BOMB, The Harvard Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere. A poetry editor for Noemi Press, Arterian writes "The Annotated Nightstand" column at Lit Hub. She lives in Los Angeles.

At Electric Lit the author tagged ten books that "attend to the lacunae in the archive, reorienting the way we perceive the historical, and ultimately reconstructing the way we understand ourselves today." One title on the list:

The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left-Handed Poems by Michael Ondaatje

This “novel in verse” is about the titular Billy the Kid—a man who, despite seeming like someone out of a dime novel, was real. As a 19th century gunslinging outlaw, Billy is forever braided with ideas and American history. Ondaatje, inspired to push back against the glorification of the Wild West he encountered as a child reading comic books in Sri Lanka, wrote The Collected Works. He includes photographs, newspaper clippings, and interviews, as well as pages from those dime novels of his youth. Ondaatje’s poems are compressed, even restrained, against the expansiveness of his archival material. It is a stunning attempt to suss out who, exactly, was this living legend and how, as Ondaatje writes in his afterword, he was “turned into a cartoon.” Obdaatje explains, “I had to invent Billy from the ground up.” So Ondaatje gives us a man who catches a fly and holds the terrified buzz to his ear. “These are the killed,” Ondaatje’s Billy says before he lists those he murdered. “Blood a necklace on me all my life.”

Read about another book on Arterian's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Third reading: D.W. Buffa on Edmund Burke

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

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

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

Buffa's latest take in his "Third Reading" series is on The Remarkable Edmund Burke. It begins:

It is a mark of how much has changed, how words have changed their meaning, that Edmund Burke who, more than anyone else in the 18th century, defined what conservatism meant, has next to nothing in common with those who call themselves conservatives today. Today’s conservatives think government the enemy of liberty, and public spending at best a necessary evil; Burke thought liberty impossible without government, and public spending better than the expenditures of private wealth. When government spends on public projects, “The poorest man feels his own importance and dignity in it.” When the rich spend on themselves, it “makes the man of humbler rank and fortune sensible of his inferiority and degrades and vilifies his condition.”

This may seem to suggest that Burke wanted to narrow, if not eliminate, the difference between rich and poor. That was the last thing he wanted. Give everyone an equal share in the wealth of the country, you might end up with a reasonably prosperous middle-class, but you would not have the landed aristocracy of 18th century England, the kind of “gentlemen” able to run a country. If this sounds decidedly undemocratic, it is; and Burke makes no apologies. Liberty requires more than individual rights and majority rule. Liberty without wisdom and without virtue “is the greatest of all possible evils, for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.” Liberty requires order, and order depends upon the existence of what both Burke and Thomas Jefferson called the “natural aristocracy.” Without this aristocracy, “there is no nation.” But what, exactly, beyond the wealth of the the landed aristocracy of England, makes one a member of this “natural aristocracy?” Burke tells us, tells us in a single sentence, a single sentence that would shock to the limits, which I confess are not very great, of every law school teacher teaching legal writing who fails to understand....[read on]

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

KD Adlyn's "Sister, Butcher, Sister," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Sister, Butcher, Sister: A Novel by KD Aldyn.

The entry begins:

I can easily imagine the opening scene of my psychological crime thriller movie.

There will be blood. There will be carnage.

Follow along with me:

The opening scene starts monochrome. The viewer is at the shoulder of someone running through a forest path. It is dusk. There are cliffs on one side of the path, a roiling ocean beyond. We hear: the waves crashing, the wind in the trees, labored breathing.

The screen goes blank. Blood red droplets begin to fall.

The title comes in bursts:

SISTER…boom…BUTCHER...boom…SISTER

Now, in full color, as the opening credits roll:

Kate (played by English actor Carey Mulligan) runs along the beach. She shucks down to her bathing suit and dives through the surface.

A flash shot of hands sharpening a knife.

Aurora (Dakota Johnson) walks swiftly through the pine forest paths and...[read on]

Visit KD Adlyn's website.

Q&A with KD Aldyn.

The Page 69 Test: Sister, Butcher, Sister.

My Book, The Movie: Sister, Butcher, Sister.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Alexandre F. Caillot's "Late to the Fight"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Late to the Fight: Union Soldier Combat Performance from the Wilderness to the Fall of Petersburg by Alexandre F. Caillot.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Late to the Fight, Alexandre F. Caillot explores the combat performance of the Union soldiers who filled newly raised regiments that fought through the Civil War’s final year. Historians have typically regarded these late enlistees as substandard to those who signed on at the war’s start. Using the experiences of the 17th Vermont and 31st Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiments to assess the record of late-arriving soldiers under fire, Caillot shows that these forgotten boys in blue left behind a record of valor and sacrifice essential to achieving the destruction of the Confederacy.

Learn more about Late to the Fight at the LSU Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Late to the Fight.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five essential books about Florida

Grace Flahive was born and raised in Toronto, Canada. She studied English literature at McGill University in Montreal before moving to London, UK, in 2014, where she’s lived ever since.

Palm Meridian is her debut novel.

At Lit Hub she tagged five essential books about Florida (if you’re a Canadian writing a novel about Orlando). One title on the list:

Lauren Groff, Florida

Some books are books. Other books are places. More than any story collection I’ve read in my life, Lauren Groff’s Florida feels like tearing through the page and stepping into a fully realized portrait of the state, living and breathing and dangled with Spanish moss, as panthers pass through the shadows. In “The Midnight Zone,” a mother staying in a remote cabin with her two young boys falls from a stool and hits her head and finds herself traveling outside of her body, amongst the thick of the trees. In “Eyewall,” a woman hunkers down as a hurricane slams her home, and when the storm passes, a miracle is revealed: a single, intact chicken egg sits, gleaming, where the front steps had been.

These stories are rich, at times hallucinogenic, and unforgettable.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Shana Youngdahl's "A Catalog of Burnt Objects"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: A Catalog of Burnt Objects by Shana Youngdahl.

About the book, from the publisher:

The powerful story of a girl struggling to figure out her estranged brother, a new love, and her own life just as wildfires beset her small California town—perfect for fans of Nina LaCour and Kathleen Glasgow

Seventeen-year-old Caprice wants to piece her family back together now that her older brother has returned home, even as she resents that he ever broke them apart. Just as she starts to get a new footing—falling in love for the first time, uncertainly mending her traumatized relationship with her brother, completing the app that will win her a college scholarship and a job in tech—wildfires strike Sierra, her small California town, forcing her to reckon with a future that is impossible to predict.

A love story of many kinds, and a reflection of the terrifying, heartbreaking Camp Fire that destroyed Paradise, California, where the author grew up, this is a tale that looks at what is lost and discovers what remains, and how a family can be nearly destroyed again and again, and still survive.

Visit Shana Youngdahl's website.

Q&A with Shana Youngdahl.

The Page 69 Test: A Catalog of Burnt Objects.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Erin Beeghly's "What's Wrong with Stereotyping?"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: What's Wrong with Stereotyping? by Erin Beeghly.

About the book, from the publisher:

What's Wrong with Stereotyping? offers a refreshing and accessibly written philosophical take on the ethics of stereotyping. Stereotyping is woven into every aspect of human experience: conversation, psychology, algorithmic systems, and culture. It relates to generalization and induction, core aspects of rationality. But when and why it is morally wrong to stereotype? This book tackles this deep and enduring puzzle. To solve it, Erin Beeghly delves into the relationship between stereotyping and another phenomenon, discrimination. Not only does stereotyping cause discriminatory treatment, she argues, stereotyping can itself be discriminatory. This insight-that to stereotype is to discriminate-enables a novel philosophical methodology, which builds towards a theory of wrongful stereotyping by analyzing the lived experiences of marginalized groups and existing theories of wrongful discrimination.

Core chapters evaluate important ethical wrongs: the failure to treat persons as individuals, disrespect, harm, prejudice, threats to freedoms, and the failure to treat persons as equals. One finds that there is no "essence" of wrongful stereotyping, a single property or set of properties that all problematic cases share in common. Nor are the wrongs of stereotyping reducible to an elegant number, two or three. Instead, wrongful stereotyping is a messy normative kind characterized by clusters of wrong-making properties, including all the ones noted here (and perhaps more). Readers will come away with a radically pluralistic, open-ended theory of wrongful stereotyping that they can use to identify wrongful stereotyping in their own lives and our contemporary world. Filled with thought-provoking examples and models for social change, this book emphasizes the messiness of moral reality and the importance of looking to the past in order to understand the ethical perils of stereotyping.

Visit Erin Beeghly's website.

The Page 99 Test: What's Wrong with Stereotyping?.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five books that dive into the drug-fueled darkness of the club scene

Ivy Pochoda is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Wonder Valley, Visitation Street, These Women, and Sing Her Down which won the LA Times Book Prize. Her new novel is Ecstasy.

[The Page 69 Test: The Art of Disappearing; The Page 69 Test: Wonder Valley; The Page 69 Test: These Women]

Pochoda won the 2018 Strand Critics Award for Best Novel and the Prix Page America in France, and has been a finalist for the the Edgar Award, among other awards. For many years, she has led a creative writing workshop in Skid Row, Los Angeles where she helped found Skid Row Zine. She is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of California Riverside-Palm Desert low-residency MFA program. She lives in Los Angeles.

At CrimeReads Pochoda tagged "five books that mix nightlife with noir, where the dance floor becomes a crime scene and the come-up always ends in a comedown." One title on the list:

The Beach by Alex Garland (1996)
Backpacker utopia meets jungle paranoia—with MDMA-fueled mania

Before Garland was scripting dystopias, he wrote The Beach—an existential thriller of Gen X disillusionment set on a secret Thai island. Though not a “club” novel in setting, the spirit of the rave scene is all over this book: the search for pure experience, the retreat from consumer society, and the chemical highs used to fuel both. MDMA plays a key role in the group’s descent, from communal harmony to tribalism and violence. Garland’s prose pulses with the heat and sweat of the tropics—and the slow rot of paradise lost.

Read about another book on the list.

The Beach also appears on Andrea Bartz's list of seven psychological thrillers for White Lotus fans, Lucy Clarke's top ten list of books about castaways, Hephzibah Anderson's list of eleven previously hip books that have not aged well, S J watson's list of six novels that could only take place at the seashore, Cat Barton's top five list of books on Southeast Asian travel literature, Kate Kellaway's ten best list of fictional holidays, Eleanor Muffitt top 12 list of books that make you want to pack your bags and trot the globe, Anna Wilson's top ten list of books set on the seaside, the Guardian editors' list of the 50 best summer reads ever, John Mullan's list of ten of the best swimming scenes in literature, and Sloane Crosley's list of five depressing beach reads.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Katia Lief's "Women Like Us"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Women Like Us by Katia Lief.

About the book, from the publisher:

Katia Lief’s Women Like Us is a sharply-rendered literary thriller that examines the complexities and responsibilities of female friendship—what brings women together, and what drives them apart.

Joni Ackerman was tired of being invisible.

It’s been five years since Joni Ackerman tipped the antifreeze into her husband’s cocktail. Five years since he was found dead on the stairs. Five years since she got away with murder. At first, Joni feared the consequences of her transgression, but she’s learned to embrace the power of recklessness in a way she would have hated to see in anyone else. It was that recklessness, after all, that took her to this rewarding new life.

Joni now runs Sunny Day Productions alongside her daughter, Chris, and her best friend, Val. All is well in life and work until, one day, their balance is rocked when an unexpected, and unwelcome, visitor appears.

When Joni’s brother, Marc, resurfaces after a twenty-year estrangement, Joni braces for the sibling she knew—a cruel, vindictive conman who deftly switched between personas. But this Marc on her doorstep is different. He’s older, softer. And he seems to have overcome the self-inflicted traumas of his past.

But Val isn’t fooled. She knows exactly what sort of man Marc is, and she warns Joni to keep her guard up. When Mark inevitably betrays Joni’s trust, Joni is forced to look inward. As dark thoughts, and darker compulsions, take form, Joni can’t help but wonder: ‘Is psychopathy a family trait?’

Visit Katia Lief's website.

The Page 69 Test: Next Time You See Me.

My Book, The Movie: Next Time You See Me.

The Page 69 Test: Vanishing Girls.

My Book, The Movie: The Money Kill.

The Page 69 Test: Last Night.

Q&A with Katia Lief.

The Page 69 Test: Invisible Woman.

The Page 69 Test: Women Like Us.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Joseph Kellner's "The Spirit of Socialism"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Spirit of Socialism: Culture and Belief at the Soviet Collapse by Joseph Kellner.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Spirit of Socialism is a cultural history of the Soviet collapse. It examines the millions of Soviet people who, during the cascading crises of the collapse and the post-Soviet transition, embarked on a spirited and highly visible search for new meaning. Amid profound disorientation, these seekers found direction in their horoscopes, or behind gurus in saffron robes or apocalyptic preachers, or by turning from the most basic premises of official science and history to orient themselves anew. The beliefs they seized on and, even more, the questions that guided their search reveal the essence of late-Soviet culture and its legacy in post-Soviet Russia.

To skeptical outsiders, the seekers appeared eccentric, deviant, and above all un-Soviet. Yet they came to their ideas by Soviet sources and Soviet premises. As Joseph Kellner demonstrates, their motley beliefs reflect modern values that formed the spiritual core of Soviet ideology, among them a high regard for science, an informed and generous internationalism, and a confidence in humanity to chart its own course. Soviet ideology failed, however, to unite these values in an overarching vision that could withstand historical change.

And so, as The Spirit of Socialism shows, the seekers asked questions raised but not resolved by the Russian Revolution and subsequent Soviet order―questions of epistemic authority, of cultural identity, and of history's ultimate meaning. Although the Soviet collapse was not the end of history, it was a rupture of epochal significance, whose fissures extend into our own uncertain era.

Learn more about The Spirit of Socialism at the Cornell University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Spirit of Socialism.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight books about the quiet power of libraries & museums

Marian Womack is a bilingual Hispano-British writer of Weird fiction, speculative and hybrid fiction, and fiction of the Anthropocene. Her novels include The Swimmers (one of the best ten SF books of 2021, The Sunday Times) and in the Walton & Waltraud uncanny mystery series The Golden Key (2020) and On the Nature of Magic (2023). Her short fiction has been collected in Lost Objects and Out of the Window, Into the Dark, nominated to two British Fantasy Awards and one British Science Fiction Association Award, and selected for Year’s Bests. She lives in Cambridge (UK).

At Electric Lit Womack tagged eight titles about the quiet power of libraries and museums, including:

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, translated by Lucia Graves

Twenty years after its publication in English in Lucia Graves’s delectable translation, The Shadow of the Wind hasn’t lost any of its charm, and remains a classic of the “secret library” sub-genre of books (such as Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s El Club Dumas and Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith) which imagine the library as the physical shape of occult or mystical desires. Its young protagonist, a bookseller’s son, becomes obsessed with Julian Carax, an obscure, cursed author, and starts investigating what could have happened to him along with his vanished bibliography. When the young bookseller’s life becomes intertwined with the truths he starts to discover about Carax, reality and fiction are shown to be different sides of the same coin. At its heart, this engrossing novel is an ode to the transformative power of books and storytelling, masterfully articulating that wondrous moment of discovery we’ve all experienced when finding the book that turned us into readers. But The Shadow of the Wind is not simply about books—the library at its centre, the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, serves as a heart-wrenching metaphor for all that was lost under the long shadow of Franco’s dictatorship in Spain, and in particular for the shameful “pact of forgetting” that the democratic transition imposed on Spanish citizens, removing the possibility of restorative justice around the horrors of Franco’s regime. This is a novel that became a modern classic for all the right reasons.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Shadow of the Wind is among Stuart Kells's top ten libraries in fiction and Bartholomew Bennett's top ten fictional booksellers.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Shana Youngdahl

From my Q&A with Shana Youngdahl, author of A Catalog of Burnt Objects:

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

The title, A Catalog of Burnt Objects, comes from “objects,” scattered throughout the book. These short chapters tell the story of objects different community members lost in the catastrophic wildfire that hits Sierra in the middle of the book. The opening chapter is the protagonist, Caprice Alexander’s, object. It tells of the Talking Heads LP her grandfather gave her, and in doing so introduces us to the geography and culture of the town, as well as her gramps' important role in her life.

I had this title picked very early before the book was written because I knew the project would be about fire and what is lost and community. I know that the title doesn’t tell you that this is also a sibling story and a love story, but I hope that...[read on]

Visit Shana Youngdahl's website.

Q&A with Shana Youngdahl.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Eve Darian-Smith's "Policing Higher Education"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Policing Higher Education: The Antidemocratic Attack on Scholars and Why It Matters by Eve Darian-Smith.

About the book, from the publisher:

On the essential role of higher education and academic freedom in thriving democracies.

Higher education is facing an existential crisis. Students and staff are surveilled with cameras and facial recognition software. Police zip-tie and arrest students during protests. As universities across the United States become epicenters of ideological warfare, Policing Higher Education contextualizes these skirmishes within a broader global framework. From the contentious debates surrounding free speech and curriculum control to the denial of tenure for outspoken faculty, Eve Darian-Smith examines the myriad ways higher education has become a battleground.

Darian-Smith highlights the intersecting global trends of rising authoritarianism and declining academic freedom, revealing how the United States is part of a larger pattern seen in democracies worldwide, including in Brazil, Hungary, Germany, India, and the Philippines. This book challenges readers to view educational conflicts not merely as culture wars but as intense and connected struggles over economic, political, and social power. Drawing from extensive scholarship, Darian-Smith humanizes the impacts of these attacks on scholars and students, offering poignant stories of persecution and resilience.

With a critical eye on the historical and structural drivers of antidemocracy, this book pushes for new, meaningful conversations about academic freedom that transcend national borders. It emphasizes the vital role of universities in fostering social responsibility and combating the global drift toward authoritarianism.

Learn more about Policing Higher Education at the Johns Hopkins University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Global Burning.

The Page 99 Test: Policing Higher Education.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top fantasy novels

Kate Elliott has been publishing science fiction and fantasy for over thirty years with a particular focus in immersive world building and epic stories of adventure & transformative cultural change. She’s written fantasy, science fiction, space opera based on the life of Alexander the Great (Unconquerable Sun), Young Adult fantasy, the seven volume (complete!) Crown of Stars epic fantasy series set in a landscape reminiscent of early medieval Europe, and the Afro-Celtic post-Roman alternate-history fantasy with lawyer dinosaurs, Cold Magic, as well as two novellas set in the Magic: The Gathering multiverse. Her work has been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, Norton, and Locus Awards.

Elliott's new novel is The Witch Roads.

At The Strand Magazine she tagged her top ten fantasy novels, including:

The Books of the Raksura by Martha Wells

Martha Wells is having a big moment with her Murderbot books (and Apple TV+ series, out now—it’s great!). She’s also written a number of fantasy novels, all of them good. I want to highlight The Cloud Roads and its sequels (five novels and two collections) which feature some of the most staggeringly original world building I have ever read: a world of many sapient species who live in various ecological niches. Come for the wonderful “who am I?” journey of our hero, Moon, and stay for the splendid ingenuity of Wells’ endlessly inventive imagination.

Read about another novel on Elliott's list.

The Cloud Roads is among Kameron Hurley's five novels to inspire you to imagine a better future.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top books exploring romantic obsession

Olivia Worley is an author born and raised in New Orleans. A graduate of Northwestern University, she now lives in New York City, where she spends her time writing thrillers, over-analyzing episodes of The Bachelor, and hoping someone will romanticize her for reading on the subway. She is the author of the young adult novels People to Follow and The Debutantes. Her newly released adult debut is So Happy Together.

At CrimeReads Worley tagged six "books about romantic obsession that either inspired So Happy Together or that I’d be honored to see it shelved beside. ... [T]hese books all have one thing in common: they’re sure to get your heart pounding." One title on the list:

A Novel Obsession by Caitlin Barasch

Another literary novel that feels like a thriller, this one follows aspiring writer Naomi as she becomes obsessed with her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend, Rosemary—who quickly becomes the inspiration for Naomi’s new novel. While A Novel Obsession doesn’t delve into murder territory, Naomi’s quickly-snowballing secrets are just as impossible to look away from.

Read about another entry on the list.

A Novel Obsession is among Hanna Halperin's nine novels about infatuations that are all consuming.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: David C. Hoffman's "American Freethought"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: American Freethought: The History of a Social Movement, 1794–1948 by David C. Hoffman.

About the book, from the publisher:

A history of how the freethought movement fought to maintain a secular United States.

Although today it has largely faded from public memory, the American freethought movement played an important role in shaping the religious landscape of the United States. Without its influence, state and local governments might still demand that public officeholders subscribe to specific religious doctrines and prosecute those who question the existence of God or the authority of the Bible for blasphemy.

In American Freethought, David C. Hoffman traces the history of the freethought movement to discover the strategies that allowed it to endure and succeed in a fervently religious nation. Hoffman argues that American freethought has proceeded through four waves: a period of deism inspired by Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason and allied with Jeffersonian republicanism in the 1790s; a revival in 1825 that centered on the celebration of Paine's birthday and drew in the followers of utopian socialist Robert Owen; a "golden age of freethought" in the late 1870s that saw an unprecedented explosion of freethought publications and organizations together with a demand for the separation of church and state; and a final resurgence in the 1920s that helped realize the remarkable series of twentieth-century Supreme Court decisions that created America's present conditions of secularism.

Hoffman argues that the freethought movement was successful because it united people with a wide variety of religious outlooks―including deists, pantheists, Unitarians, Universalists, spiritualists, transcendentalists, Humanists, agnostics, and atheists―behind the idea that religion is freer and the state is more just when the government refrains from religious involvement.

Learn more about American Freethought at the Johns Hopkins University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: American Freethought.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Laura Lippman's "Murder Takes a Vacation"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Murder Takes a Vacation: A Novel by Laura Lippman.

About the book, from the publisher:

Highly acclaimed New York Times bestselling author Laura Lippman returns with an irresistible mystery featuring Muriel Blossom, a former private investigator and middle-aged widow whose vacation on a Parisian river cruise turns into a deadly international mystery…that only she can solve.

Mrs. Blossom has a knack for blending into the background, which was an asset during her days assisting private investigator Tess Monaghan. But when she finds a winning lottery ticket in a parking lot, everything changes. She is determined to see the world that she sometimes feels is passing her by.

When Mrs. Blossom booked her cruise through France on the MS Solitaire, she did not expect to meet Allan on her transatlantic flight. He is the first man who’s sparked something inside her since her beloved husband passed.

She also didn’t expect Allan to be found, dead, twenty-four hours later in Paris, a city he wasn’t supposed to be in.

Now Mrs. Blossom doesn’t know who to trust on board the ship, especially when a mystifying man, Danny, keeps popping up around every corner, always present when things go awry. He is convinced that Allan was transporting a stolen piece of art, and Mrs. Blossom knows more than she lets on, regarding both the artifact and Allan’s death.

Mrs. Blossom’s questions only increase as the cruise sails down the Seine. Why does it feel like she is being followed? Who was Allan, and why was he killed? Most alarmingly, why do these mysterious men keep flirting with her?

Visit Laura Lippman's website.

The Page 69 Test: Another Thing to Fall.

The Page 69 Test: What the Dead Know.

The Page 69 Test/Page 99 Test: Life Sentences.

The Page 69 Test: I'd Know You Anywhere.

The Page 69 Test: The Most Dangerous Thing.

The Page 69 Test: Hush Hush.

The Page 69 Test: Wilde Lake.

My Book, the Movie: Wilde Lake.

The Page 69 Test: Sunburn.

The Page 69 Test: Lady in the Lake.

The Page 69 Test: Dream Girl.

The Page 69 Test: Prom Mom.

The Page 69 Test: Murder Takes a Vacation.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight top epic BIPOC crime novels

Elisa Shoenberger is a freelance writer and journalist. At Book Riot she tagged eight of "the best BIPOC crime novels you can read right now." One title on the list:

The Missing American by Kwei Quartey

The first in the four-book “Emma Djan Investigation” series, Emma Djan has resigned herself to a life as a private investigator. She’s lucky for it, since she was kicked off the police force, and she got the PI role from a former cop. Her first case involves a middle-aged widower from the US who has gone missing. He had been corresponding with a Ghanaian widow who asked for monetary help after an accident. Not only does he give her the money, but he also travels to Ghana to find his new love, and then goes missing. Can Emma find the lost American and potentially bring the scammers to justice?

Read about another entry on the list.

The Missing American is among Femi Kayode's four top crime novels set in Africa.

--Marshal Zeringue