What is Tracy Lynne Oliver reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Tracy Lynne Oliver, author of Magician.

Her entry begins:

Have you ever heard the name Ingo Swann? He was a man that worked with a ‘deep black’ agency that handled UFO’s, aliens on the moon and telepathic mind control. Ingo Swann was an extraordinarily talented remote viewer which means he can be given ‘targets’ which he can access with his mind. These targets can be physically located here on earth or even other planets. The book is called, Penetration: The Question of Extraterrestrial and Human Telepathy. I love shit like this. And, after reading, well, let’s just say, what he saw on other planets...[read on]

About Magician, from the publisher:

A dark magic debut novel featuring the Boy who becomes the Magician and the villainous Mother whose sadism might end it all—for fans of Our Share of Night and The Changeling

First, he is a Boy, born to a Mother who cannot abide his existence. Despite her torments, the Boy finds a way to survive and create a small space for himself in the world.

The Boy endures unspeakable cruelties, saved only by a mysterious magic that intervenes in moments of need: magic he learns is his to command. When he finally escapes the Mother, a beguiling circus troupe welcomes him into their family and the Boy begins to imagine a life beyond survival, one where circus lions roar and enchanted forests spiral far into the distance. For the first time, he discovers chosen family, community, and love. He eagerly apprentices under the circus’s conjurer—only to realize his gifts far outstrip his mentor’s. Thus the Boy becomes the Magician. But as ambition bends his power, a primal threat stalks, determined to destroy not just the Magician, but all he holds dear.

Echoing the fairytale cadence of Helen Oyeyemi and Gerardo Sámano Córdova’s disquieting excavation of grief and trauma, Tracy Lynne Oliver has created a spellbinding world of twisted patriarchal darkness and a powerful magic that threatens to consume everyone, including its wielder. A debut novel of uncommon accomplishment, Magician establishes its author as a new voice that will hold readers rapt.

Visit Tracy Lynne Oliver's website.

Q&A with Tracy Lynne Oliver.

Writers Read: Tracy Lynne Oliver.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top suspense novels about art, museums, and forgers

Called “an author to watch” by Booklist, Carol Snow has written numerous novels for teens and adults. A former contributor to Salon’s “Mothers Who Think” column, her writing has also appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books and Park City Magazine.

Snow holds a BA in psychology from Brown University and a MAT in English from Boston College. A native of New Jersey, she now splits her time between Cape Cod and Southern California.

[My Book, The Movie: Just Like Me, Only Better; My Book, The Movie: What Came First; The Page 69 Test: Bubble World]

Snow's new novel is The Girl on the Beach.

At CrimeReads the author tagged six "suspenseful reads about art and artists worth checking out." One title on the list:

Antoine Wilson, Mouth to Mouth

Come for the behind-the-scenes look at the world of elite Los Angeles art galleries; stay for Wilson’s gorgeous, taut prose and propulsive
Wilson uses a chance encounter, twenty years after the near-drowning, to frame the narrative.

Read about another title on the list.

Mouth to Mouth is among Laura Leffler's ten top literary thrillers set in the artworld and Maris Kreizman's twenty-three wonderful short books.

Q&A with Antoine Wilson.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Stig Abell's "A Twist in the River"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: A Twist in the River: A Jake Jackson Mystery by Stig Abell.

About the novel, from the publisher:

Former London detective Jake Jackson finds his new life in the country threatened when women start disappearing in this beautifully written and deeply immersive novel that will challenge even the most diehard mystery lover’s deductive skills.

A beautiful summer’s day

When young nurse Claire Davidson goes missing on the riverbank, the only clues left behind are her phone and shoes.

A mystery that sweeps the nation

People disappear all the time, but this case sparks an online frenzy. Amateur investigators descend on the rural idyll. Everyone has a theory. Is Claire Davidson just the story of a swim that went wrong, or could there be truth to the conspiracies?

A killer growing bolder

But when another woman is discovered dead in the river, signs point to murder. Jake Jackson, a former detective who came to the countryside searching for peace, must investigate before more lives are taken.

Follow Stig Abell on Instagram and Threads.

Q&A with Stig Abell.

The Page 69 Test: The Burial Place.

Writers Read: Stig Abell.

The Page 69 Test: A Twist in the River.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kerri Hakoda's "Too Deep to Cross," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Too Deep to Cross: A Thriller by Kerri Hakoda.

The entry begins:

Too Deep to Cross would be challenging to cast as a movie. In it, multi-racial Anchorage Homicide Detective DeHavilland Beans returns to his Yukon River hometown after a battered prosthetic leg from a local man washes up – and turns a long-cold missing person case into a homicide investigation. In the San Francisco Bay Area cleaning out the family home, Beans’ mother Mari makes unsettling discoveries of her own.

I envision a very specific look, a distinctive combination of ethnicities for DeHavilland Beans – he is half Japanese, a quarter Irish and a quarter Native Alaskan – a difficult casting combination. Maybe a younger Daniel Henney type, or Lewis Tan? It’s hard to find reasonably pleasant-looking Eurasian actors who aren’t martial artists, not that that’s a bad thing – I just don’t see Beans as being a blackbelt in anything. I like Henry Golding as well, but...[read on]

Visit Kerri Hakoda's website.

Writers Read: Kerri Hakoda.

Q&A with Kerri Hakoda.

The Page 69 Test: Too Deep to Cross.

My Book, The Movie: Too Deep to Cross.

--Marshal Zeringue

Fifty of the greatest summer novels of all time

The staff at Literary Hib tagged fifty of the greatest summer novels of all time, including:

Lydia Millet, A Children’s Bible

There is a narrative tidiness to the summer novel, fitting as it does so neatly between seasonal signifiers of rebirth and death. And I’d wager that a disproportionate number of summer novels feature children at their center for similar narrative simplicity: who better to inhabit the full world of a single season than characters for whom it means so much?

Which leads me to Lydia Millet’s riveting (and funny) dystopian tale of one summer in the lives of an apostle’s dozen of wayward children. Basically abandoned by their affluent, checked-out parents while on a multifamily vacation at a sprawling country mansion, the young heroes of A Children’s Bible must reckon with the failure of the older generation as they confront a devastating weather event that tips the northeast into something approaching a Hobbesian nightmare.

Millet, as ever, has the lightest of touches with the heaviest of subjects, drawing out comically imbalanced intergenerational relationships fueled almost entirely by scorn. But insofar as A Children’s Bible also serves as a clear analog of the absolute mess that older generations have bequeathed today’s youth, it reminds us that winter, eventually, is coming.

Read about another title on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Cameron Seglias's "Settling Debt"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Settling Debt: Antislavery and Colonial Crisis by Cameron Seglias.

About the book, from the publisher:

Settling Debt overturns the familiar tale of early antislavery as a pure moral triumph by revealing its uneasy ties to colonial ambition and economic anxiety. Cameron Seglias shows how, from the late seventeenth century through the American Revolution, settlers and religious writers condemned slavery as a threat to their own prosperity and salvation. Debt, understood both as money owed and moral obligation, anchored their vision of freedom and shaped how they justified seizing Indigenous lands while denouncing racial bondage.

Drawing from neglected books, pamphlets, poems, and dramatic protests, like the radical acts of Benjamin Lay, Seglias weaves literary close readings with sharp historical insights to expose how freedom and dispossession were two sides of the same coin. At once readable and provocative, Settling Debt compels us to see how the language of moral debt masked the building of a colonial order rooted in inequality. In revisiting this past, Seglias offers a timely reminder: The debts of America's founding have yet to be settled.

Learn more about Settling Debt at the Cornell University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Settling Debt.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Stig Abell reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Stig Abell, author of A Twist in the River: A Jake Jackson Mystery.

His entry begins:

I don’t know how common this is, but I always have at least five books on the go, each fitting a different part of my life. So:

The main book. Currently, I am reading The Power and the Glory, by Graham Greene, as part of an accidental Greene jag I am currently on. This one is perhaps his classic, a sweaty, sad tale of religious persecution in Mexico, full of terse descriptions of morally-strained characters.

The bath book. I like something light to read in my nightly bath. It tends to be either PG Wodehouse, for some literary froth, or a sports book. I love American sports and sportswriting, and there are so many great examples of the canon. Currently...[read on]

About A Twist in the River, from the publisher:

Former London detective Jake Jackson finds his new life in the country threatened when women start disappearing in this beautifully written and deeply immersive novel that will challenge even the most diehard mystery lover’s deductive skills.

A beautiful summer’s day

When young nurse Claire Davidson goes missing on the riverbank, the only clues left behind are her phone and shoes.

A mystery that sweeps the nation

People disappear all the time, but this case sparks an online frenzy. Amateur investigators descend on the rural idyll. Everyone has a theory. Is Claire Davidson just the story of a swim that went wrong, or could there be truth to the conspiracies?

A killer growing bolder

But when another woman is discovered dead in the river, signs point to murder. Jake Jackson, a former detective who came to the countryside searching for peace, must investigate before more lives are taken.

Follow Stig Abell on Instagram and Threads.

Q&A with Stig Abell.

The Page 69 Test: The Burial Place.

Writers Read: Stig Abell.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: DeAndra Davis's "The Lovers, the Liars, and Me"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Lovers, the Liars, and Me by DeAndra Davis.

About the book, from the publisher:

A teen travels to Jamaica hoping to answer questions about her absent mother, only to discover more about her identity than she could have ever expected—and find herself caught up in an unexpected love triangle—in this dazzling young adult coming-of-age novel by award-winning author DeAndra Davis.

Jaliya Powell has never had a real adventure, a real boyfriend, or spoken up for herself. She’s never even been kissed. Despite being valedictorian of her high school class, Jaliya is used to fading into the background.

But this summer will be different.

This summer, Jaliya is visiting her uncle and his family in Jamaica. Under the guise of one last vacation before college, she plans to find out more about her estranged mother, whose absence has remained an unspoken mystery. But things have changed in the seven years since Jaliya last visited. Her cousin has his own life and is reluctant to let Jaliya in, her childhood crush has only gotten hotter and more unavailable, and her aunt and uncle aren’t everything she remembered, either. Then she meets India, who’s vibrant, gorgeous, and free-spirited. And who makes Jaliya feel something she’s never felt before.

While searching for traces of her mother across the island, Jaliya finds herself entangled in complicated relationships, tricky secrets, and a passionate new love. As she navigates this perfectly complicated summer, Jaliya must choose between who she has always been or who she hopes to become.

Visit DeAndra Davis's website. She can be found on most socials @DeAndraWrites.

My Book, The Movie: The Lovers, the Liars, and Me.

Writers Read: DeAndra Davis.

Q&A with DeAndra Davis.

The Page 69 Test: The Lovers, the Liars, and Me.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six horror retellings of well-known stories

Lyndsie Manusos’s fiction has appeared in PANK, SmokeLong Quarterly, and other publications. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has worked in web production and content management. When she’s not nesting among her books and rough drafts, she’s chasing the baby while the dog watches in confused amusement. She lives with her family in a suburb of Indianapolis.

At Book Riot she tagged six horror retellings of well-known stories, including:

What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher
Retelling of The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe.

I have recommended this book over and over again, both here at Book Riot and at Wild Geese Bookshop, where I work. It is a perfect, eerie, unsettling, bite-sized horror story to wade into. This is great for seasoned horror fans and those who are testing the horror waters.

When retired soldier Alex Easton (my beloved horror protagonist who deserves a nap) hears that their childhood friend, Madeline Usher, is dying, they race to her home. What they discover is sporror—think spore and horror— at its most shocking. There is a wild fungus, eerie lights in the lake, and Madeline is sleepwalking at night. There is a scene in this book where Alex and other characters were freaking out over a discovery that had me legit freaking out with them. Did I throw the book? Yes, yes I did.

Read about another entry on the list.

Q&A with T. Kingfisher.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Robert K. Brigham's "This Is a True War Story"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: This Is a True War Story: My Improbable History with Vietnam by Robert K. Brigham.

About the book, from the publisher:

A personal account by a war historian and adoptee who discovers his biological father was a famous Marine combat photographer in Vietnam.

Robert K. Brigham has had a substantial career as a historian of the Vietnam War, with a hand in nine books, a documentary, public history projects, and more. While many a historian has felt compelled at some point to write about a subject close to them personally, Brigham did not think he was doing that. But, at age fifty-eight, Brigham, who had long known he was adopted, discovered that he’d improbably and unknowingly been studying and talking about his biological father for decades. That man, Bruce Atwell, was a Marine Corps photographer who took some of that war’s most indelible and widely reproduced pictures. Brigham had used those images over and over again in decades’ worth of classes and public lectures, never knowing the truth.

Both Brigham and Atwell were products of the American foster care and adoption system, and both were defined professionally by Vietnam. In a story shot through with echoes and shadows, Brigham not only reveals his own history as an adoptee but opens a startlingly fresh vantage on the fragility of American families; the power of social norms and taboos to shape lives; and the forces that inequitably disrupt families, not least of them war. The result is an accessible and moving book that is at once both a powerful personal story and an illuminating social critique.

Learn more about This Is a True War Story at the University of Chicago Press website.

The Page 99 Test: This Is a True War Story.

--Marshal Zeringue

Third reading: D.W. Buffa on "The Golden Bowl" by Henry James

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 covers The Golden Bowl by Henry James. It begins:

The novel is no longer a serious art form and has not been for a great many years. What is called a novel today is seldom more than a reader’s excuse for wasting time, a few hundred pages of mindless violence or insipid romance filled with characters who cannot speak in more than single sentences and, if they think at all, think only of themselves, what they want, what they have to have. We were warned this would happen. In 1936, when F. Scott Fitzgerald was forty, he wrote about why the novel - the serious novel - had begun to fall from favor, and why the situation would become even worse:

I saw the novel, which at my maturity was the strongest and supplest medium for conveying thought and emotion from one human being to another, was becoming subordinated to a mechanized and communal art that…was capable of reflecting only the tritest thought, the most obvious emotion. It was an art in which words were subordinate to images, where personality was worn down to the inevitable low gear of subordination. As long past as 1930, I had a hunch that the talkies would make the best-selling novelist as archaic as silent pictures.

This was not the first time someone insisted that the novel was in serious danger. Fitzgerald’s complaint that literature was losing its influence, that the motion picture was on its way to replacing the novel in the estimation of even the reading public, had been made years before the first motion picture. In 1891, Henry James was certain that the novel faced no greater danger than the magazines and newspapers, the mass publications to which the reading public had become more or less addicted. These were the publications in which the practice of literary criticism had reached a new low. It flowed “through the periodical press like a river that has burst its dikes.” It was a catastrophe; nothing less than “the failure of distinction, the failure of style, the failure of knowledge, the failure of thought.” Literature, which lives “upon example, upon perfection wrought,” he thought might not survive it. Books in great numbers were being sold, stories of all kinds, but...[read on]

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

Five great thrillers where writers are at the center of the action

Jamie Day, author of the new Beach Thriller, lives in one of those picture-perfect, coastal New England towns you see in the movies. And just like the movies, Day has two children and an adorable dog to fawn over. When not writing or reading, Day enjoys yoga, the ocean, cooking, and long walks on the beach with the dog, or the kids, or sometimes both.

At CrimeReads the author tagged "five books I’d recommend that give an inside look at the life (and grief) of a wordsmith," including:

The Plot — Jean Hanff Korelitz

I read this book the way I’d watch a car crash—one eye closed. It was quite distressing how accurate it felt—that quiet desperation, yearning to have a book that everyone wants to read. I’d venture to guess many writers who say they’re happy to toil in obscurity are lying. Everyone wants some recognition for their hard work—it’s just human nature to want to be successful. But thank goodness most of us have governors on our ambition. Otherwise, we writers might do as washed-up novelist Jacob Finch Bonner did, and steal the manuscript of a dead writing student and pass it off as his own. Naturally, the book is a hit (wouldn’t be much of a story otherwise), but all that glitters…well, the writer in me will let you finish the cliché. History would have been a good guide for Jacob, for there is no more surefire way to ensure one’s own downfall than to deceive the world.

Read about another novel on the list.

The Plot is among Peggy Townsend's four top academia-centered mysteries, Ayden LeRoux's seven top books about authorship hoaxes, Jane L. Rosen's nine books about book people, Elyse Friedman's eight novels featuring schemers & opportunists, E.G. Scott's five best books-within-books, Kimberly Belle's four thrillers with maximum escapism, and Louise Dean's top ten novels about novelists.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with DeAndra Davis

From my Q&A with DeAndra Davis, author of The Lovers, the Liars, and Me:

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

Titles are widely important to me and the first thing that I consider is not hating my title because I’ll have to say it so often once it’s chosen and out there. I like for titles to do at least half the heavy lifting as well. I don’t like for them to be so divorced from the book that you don’t know what to expect. I like for them to leave a little mystery but also be connected enough that you can understand it once you’ve read the book.

I definitely agonized over my title a bit because originally it had a title that really took you right into the story and the fleeting nature of my main character leaning into this single summer, but that title happened to already be in use by a really recent book, so I pivoted.

Ultimately, I decided to lean into the tarot and secret elements of the story, thinking to myself, what tarot card really represents the book and landed on the lovers. From there, the rest of the title came easily because of how trapped my character is with her love triangle, her tarot, and her secrets. It’s all entangled and I love that...[read on]

Visit DeAndra Davis's website. She can be found on most socials @DeAndraWrites.

My Book, The Movie: The Lovers, the Liars, and Me.

Writers Read: DeAndra Davis.

Q&A with DeAndra Davis.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christine Gunderson's "Behind White Picket Fences," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Behind White Picket Fences: A Novel by Christine Gunderson.

The entry begins:

One of the questions I am most often asked at book club meetings is this: Who would play the characters if my book were made into a movie?

I never know how to answer this question because inside my head, the people in my book are people, not characters, and I have a really hard time imagining them as anyone else, even famous actors.

But as release day approaches, I finally sat down and gave this question some serious thought.

Behind White Picket Fences is a book about three mothers who decide to take a break from modern motherhood. In the process, they try to re-create the kind of childhood they experienced as kids. Astute readers will notice subtle references to Leave It To Beaver, a TV show representing an idealized, bygone America.

Therefore, the character of Dottie in Behind White Picket Fences would be played by Barbara Billingsley, best known for her iconic role as June Cleaver, the perfect 1950’s era housewife and mother in Leave it to Beaver.

And yes, I realize this talented actress passed away in 2010 at the age of 94, but since we’re dream casting this movie, we can pretend she is still with us, lovely and gracious and in her prime.

The three modern moms in Behind White Picket Fences are easier to cast. Piper, the no-nonsense former diplomatic security agent would be played by...[read on]

Visit Christine Gunderson's website.

Q&A with Christine Gunderson.

My Book, The Movie: Behind White Picket Fences.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top soccer books

One title on Tertulia's list of ten soccer titles to read during World Cup 2026:

The Messi Effect: How the Global Legend Changed the Future of American Soccer
Paul Tenorio

When Lionel Messi arrived in Miami, a struggling MLS club became a global brand almost overnight. The Athletic's Paul Tenorio goes behind the closed doors of league offices, ownership meetings, and locker rooms to trace how a single player altered the trajectory of soccer in the United States—and exposed the growing intersection of sport, celebrity, and billion-dollar business.

Read about another title on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Daniel N. Jones's "Falling Fast"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Falling Fast: The Perils and Possibilities of Emophilia by Daniel N. Jones.

About the book, from the publisher:

A unique look at emophilia--the tendency to fall in love fast, easily, and often--and the profound impact it has on our lives and the lives of those around us.

Why do some people fall in love in an instant--again and again--while others take months or even years?

Across cultures, the concept of "love at first sight" has captivated us across recorded history. We all seem to know at least one hopeless romantic who falls quickly and easily, and while it's easy to dismiss this, only recently have we begun to study it from a psychological standpoint. In this book, social and personality psychologist Daniel N. Jones explores the fascinating science behind the tendency to fall in love fast, easily, and often. This groundbreaking book introduces emophilia--a powerful but often overlooked personality trait that influences how we connect, commit, and sometimes crash in our romantic lives. It draws upon cutting-edge research to explore topics like why some people are wired for whirlwind romances, risks behind what is known as "emotional promiscuity"--including infidelity and toxic partners--and impacts on emotional wellbeing.

With its fresh lens on love, intimacy, and the psychology of connection, this insightful, provocative, and deeply human book, offers a refined understanding of people who fall in love quickly and deeply--and sometimes out of love just as fast.

Visit Daniel N. Jones's website.

The Page 99 Test: Falling Fast.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Shana Galen's "A Shop Girl's Guide to Wooing a Lord"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: A Shop Girl's Guide to Wooing a Lord (The Heiress Hunters) by Shana Galen.

About the novel, from the publisher:

A down-on-her-luck shop girl and the son of an earl find they have more in common than they thought—including sexual chemistry they can’t resist—in this fresh Regency romance by Shana Galen.

Tamsin Archer might just be having the worst year of her life. And that’s saying something, considering her father is dead, her mother was maimed at work, and her family regularly sleeps under London’s bridges. But when her younger siblings go missing, Tamsin decides it’s time to step up and fight.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and Tamsin’s more than willing to take a few risks to reunite with her siblings. But while disguising herself to sneak into homes and steal from the rich, Tamsin is caught by Garret Kildare, the second son of an earl. Much to Tamsin’s surprise, Garret doesn’t want to turn her in. He wants to help her. Though Tamsin’s wary—she’s learned to never trust supposed “good luck”—the unlikely pair form an alliance, one that quickly muddles their class differences.

Garret knows he must be careful. Falling for a woman of a lower class could be the nail in the coffin for his family’s tenuous social standing, and there are eyes everywhere. Ignoring their attraction proves impossible, though, and soon the lines they’ve drawn around their partnership begin to blur. As more focus lands on Tamsin and Garret, they wonder if their red-hot connection means giving up everything—and everyone—they’ve ever known.

Visit Shana Galen's website.

The Page 69 Test: A Shop Girl's Guide to Wooing a Lord.

--Marshal Zeringue

Three top nonfiction books for Caribbean Heritage Month

At Book Riot Kendra Winchester tagged three top nonfiction books for Caribbean Heritage Month, including:

The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe by Marlene L. Daut

This one’s for the history lovers who adore diving into a tome of a book. In The First and Last King of Haiti, Yale scholar Marlene L. Daut explores the life of Henry Christophe, a complex figure in Haitian history. Born to an enslaved mother in Grenada, Christophe would go on to be a key leader in Haiti’s revolution for independence. Eventually, he would go on to declare himself King of Haiti, but died by suicide nine years later.

Read about another title on the list.

The Page 99 Test The First and Last King of Haiti.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Thomas Douglas's "Protecting Minds"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Protecting Minds: The Right Against Mental Interference by Thomas Douglas.

About the book, from the publisher:

It is widely accepted that we each possess a right against interference with our bodies. In this book, Thomas Douglas argues that we also possess an analogous right against interference with our minds. He defends the existence of this right―both by appealing to intuitions regarding cases and by invoking the notion of self-ownership―and he describes its content and contours.

In Douglas' view, the right against mental interference protects us against actions that significantly alter our mental states and operate via processes that are insensitive to the reasons that bear on the mental alteration. The interventions that most obviously infringe the right are 'nonconsensual neurointerventions'―interventions that alter a person's mental states by physically modulating their brain states, and are performed without the target's consent. But Douglas argues that some psychological forms of influence can infringe the right too. Examples include the use of subliminal imagery and conditioning-based interventions, such as the use of loot boxes in computer games.

This book contributes both to the increasingly vigorous debate over 'neurorights' and to the wider discussion of the ethics of mental and behavioural influence. Such discussion has traditionally treated manipulation, coercion and persuasion as the most important categories of influence; this volume introduces mental interference as a further category warranting attention.

Learn more about Protecting Minds at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Protecting Minds.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Tracy Lynne Oliver

From my Q&A with Tracy Lynne Oliver, author of Magician:

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

I really struggled with titling my book. The story started with a powerful image; an old black man, head in his hands, sitting on the edge of a bed in a decrepit hotel room or some sort of run-down apartment. I needed to write his story. After putting words down, and learning where it was going, I eventually just used Magician as a working title. I referred to my work in progress as such until the book was complete.

But when the novel was finished, the question I asked myself was what to call it. I did my best to come up with alternatives but nothing else seemed to fit. I kept Magician.

As the book’s story takes you through the life journey of one man, Magician doesn’t seem to capture what the totality of the book is. Magician is only the final version of this man. His story begins even before he is the Boy. So, it might not be the best representation of what the novel is fully about, but it does highlight the gravitas of what he becomes and...[read on]

Visit Tracy Lynne Oliver's website.

Q&A with Tracy Lynne Oliver.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top thrillers with troubled parent-child relationships

Leah Rowan is an author living in Brooklyn and the Catskills.

Marion is her new thriller.

Megan Collins, author of Cross My Heart, called Marion a "pitch-perfect thriller that feels like the primal scream every woman has been holding back her entire life."

At CrimeReads Rowan tagged "six scintillating stories where the parent-child relationship is a little (or a lot) off." One title on the list:

Zoje Stage, Baby Teeth

Baby Teeth by Zoje Stage has quickly become a classic of the parent-child relationship gone wrong trope, right alongside mainstays such as The Bad Seed. It tracks Suzette and her seven-year-old daughter Hanna, who’s been kicked out of almost every school she’s gone to, and has taken to torturing Suzette during their daily homeschooling, while always playing the perfect child when Daddy’s home.

A powerful exploration not only of mother-child dynamics but of the lengths men will go to not believe women, it’s a horror-thriller must-read that promises to keep you up long past bedtime.

Read about another thriller on the list.

Baby Teeth is among Sarah Pekkanen's five titles exploring twisted mother/daughter relationships, Leah Konen's seven thrillers that explore the darker side of motherhood, Rebecca Kelley's nine books featuring female villains who lean into their wickedness, Amber Garza's five titles featuring (possibly) murderous children, Christina Dalcher's seven crime books that challenge notions of inherent female goodness, May Cobb's five psychological thrillers featuring single-minded villains & anti-heroes, Jae-Yeon Yoo's top ten books about the promise & perils of alternative schooling, Pamela Crane's five top novels featuring parenting gone wild, Damien Angelica Walters's five titles about the horror of girlhood, and Sally Hepworth's eight messed up fictional families.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is DeAndra Davis reading?

Featured at Writers Read: DeAndra Davis, author of The Lovers, the Liars, and Me.

Her entry begins:

I always tackle a few books at a time because I’m a mood reader. Currently, I’m vacillating between books for pleasure and research (though the books for research are still pleasurable).

Immortal Dark by Tigest Girma is, for me, such a well-done work of mystery, dark academia, and fantasy. I really wanted to tap into this vampire story, especially pulling from the brevity of the chapters, the timing of reveals, and the tension between the main character and her antagonist because of how well written I believe it is. That tension especially. I...[read on]

About The Lovers, the Liars, and Me, from the publisher:

A teen travels to Jamaica hoping to answer questions about her absent mother, only to discover more about her identity than she could have ever expected—and find herself caught up in an unexpected love triangle—in this dazzling young adult coming-of-age novel by award-winning author DeAndra Davis.

Jaliya Powell has never had a real adventure, a real boyfriend, or spoken up for herself. She’s never even been kissed. Despite being valedictorian of her high school class, Jaliya is used to fading into the background.

But this summer will be different.

This summer, Jaliya is visiting her uncle and his family in Jamaica. Under the guise of one last vacation before college, she plans to find out more about her estranged mother, whose absence has remained an unspoken mystery. But things have changed in the seven years since Jaliya last visited. Her cousin has his own life and is reluctant to let Jaliya in, her childhood crush has only gotten hotter and more unavailable, and her aunt and uncle aren’t everything she remembered, either. Then she meets India, who’s vibrant, gorgeous, and free-spirited. And who makes Jaliya feel something she’s never felt before.

While searching for traces of her mother across the island, Jaliya finds herself entangled in complicated relationships, tricky secrets, and a passionate new love. As she navigates this perfectly complicated summer, Jaliya must choose between who she has always been or who she hopes to become.

Visit DeAndra Davis's website. She can be found on most socials @DeAndraWrites.

My Book, The Movie: The Lovers, the Liars, and Me.

Writers Read: DeAndra Davis.

--Marshal Zeringue