Seven top dark academia thrillers

Ande Pliego began writing stories when she discovered she could actually wield her overactive imagination for good. A lover of stories with teeth, she writes books involving mind games, dark humor, general murder and mayhem, and most importantly, finding the hope in the dark.

When not reading or writing, she can usually be found dabbling in art, scheming up her next trip, or making constant expeditions to the library. Born in Florida, raised in France, and having left footprints all over the globe, Pliego is settled in the Pacific Northwest, USA, with her craftsman husband and little son.

She is the bestselling author of You Are Fatally Invited and The Library After Dark.

At Oprah Daily the author tagged seven top dark academia thrillers. One title on the list:

Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl

The award for one of the most brilliantly plotted and uniquely executed novels has to go to Marisha Pessl’s debut. Incredibly layered, peppered with references to classical literature, history, and the humanities, this is a character-driven story for academia lovers, pure and simple.

After an unusual childhood bouncing from place to place for her eccentric father’s academic career, Blue van Meer and her father finally settle in one spot for her entire senior year. Under the keen eye of a magnetic teacher, the precocious teenager becomes enmeshed in a group of friends as eccentric as she is. The coming-of-age story shifts into a murder mystery when Blue stumbles upon the body of their beloved teacher, and she discovers the darker ways friendship, family, and academia can collide. With sumptuous prose and poignant descriptions you can make a meal of, this is the kind of book you can read again and again, unraveling new pieces of the mystery each time.

Read about another thriller on the list.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics is among Tom Ryan's top six adult novels featuring young sleuths, Caroline Wolff's seven mysterious & unsettling novels set on campuses, Erin Mayer's eleven disturbing cliques in literature, Kiley Reid’s five top novels with incredible child caregivers and Brian Boone's fifty essential high school stories.

The Page 69 Test: Special Topics in Calamity Physics.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Shana Galen

From my Q&A with Shana Galen, author of A Shop Girl's Guide to Wooing a Lord:

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

A Shop Girl’s Guide to Wooing a Lord tells readers exactly what they are getting in this book. It’s a class divide romance featuring a lower-class woman and an upper-class man. Of course, there is so much more to the book than this trope, but my publishing team and I saw the title as a window into one of the central conflicts in the novel. When you’re titling a book set in the past, additional points to consider are what words were in use in that time and whether those words are still in use today and how much the connotation of those words has changed. For example, as the book opens the female main character sells flowers for a living; she’s a flower girl. But today a flower girl is a little girl who scatters flowers before the bride walks down the aisle, so that description wouldn’t work. There’s a lot of brainstorming and discussion and trial and error before...[read on]

Visit Shana Galen's website.

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

Q&A with Shana Galen.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six historical fiction novels set in the Middle East

Katie Moench is a librarian, runner, and lover of baked goods. A school librarian in the Upper Midwest, Moench lives with her husband and dog and spends her free time drinking coffee, trying new recipes, and adding to her TBR list.

At Book Riot she tagged six historical fiction titles set in the Middle East, including:

The Septembers of Shiraz by Dalia Sofer

Set during and after the Iranian Revolution, this book begins when rare gem dealer Isaac Amin is arrested on suspicion of being a spy. As Isaac navigates the terror of prison, his family must try and keep their life together while desperately trying to find him and navigate a society where they are no longer able to trust those around them. Through one family’s story, readers see the history of the Iranian revolution and its long-term impacts within Iran and within the Iranian diaspora.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Sarah M. S. Pearsall's "Freedom Round the Globe"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Freedom Round the Globe: A World History of the American Revolution by Sarah M. S. Pearsall.

About the book, from the publisher:

In a groundbreaking global exploration of the ideas that drove the American Revolution, a prize-winning historian shines a light on the defiance of marginalized peoples all over the world.

In her powerful new history of the American Revolution, Sarah M. S. Pearsall argues that the American Founding Fathers did not have a unique claim on the revolutionary spirit. The thirteen colonies that became the United States, she reminds us, were not even half of the British colonies that existed in the eighteenth century. In her sparkling and original Freedom Round the Globe, Pearsall uncovers the insurgents, freedom lovers, and dreamers in India, West Africa, North America, Europe, China, and West Indian islands who shaped the nature of American rebellion and nationhood.

In each fresh and compelling chapter of Freedom Round the Globe, Pearsall plucks a keyword from the Declaration of Independence—security, happiness, respect– finding its spark in a far-flung place. In an Edinburgh club where women were first invited into philosophical conversations, she explores what the pursuit of happiness meant to women and men of all sorts. She traces how novel forms of slavery provoked a new use of the word liberty in Connecticut petitions as well as in cries of “liberty or death.” On a Kolkata street where Indians protested relentless taxes, Pearsall finds a critique of oppressive imperial government that galvanized Americans in their protests and parties against the tea of the English East India Company. In rural Germany, boy soldiers sent abroad to die for Britain complicate who can lay claim to being civilized in a brutal war.

In telling the extraordinary tales of Friends of Liberty protesting tyranny around the world, Pearsall restores these individuals and movements to their rightful place in the vital story of the American Revolution and the nation it created. The result is a stirring and surprising revisioning of our history.

Learn more about the book at the publisher's website.

The Page 99 Test: Polygamy: An Early American History.

The Page 99 Test: Freedom Round the Globe.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top crime fiction books set in Florida

Erica Wright's novel Hollow Bones, a contemporary retelling of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, came out in 2024. Daniela Petrova called it a "twisty and engrossing thriller." Snake was released as part of Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series. Her mystery Famous in Cedarville received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and was called "a clever little whodunnit" in The New York Times Book Review. She is the author of five other books, including the poetry collections Instructions for Killing the Jackal and All the Bayou Stories End with Drowned. Her poems have appeared in Blackbird, Denver Quarterly, New Orleans Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Wright was the senior poetry editor at Guernica Magazine for more than a decade and currently teaches at Bellevue University. Her latest novel is The Museum of Unusual Occurrence.

[My Book, The Movie: Famous in Cedarville; The Page 99 Test: Snake; Q&A with Erica Wright]

At Novel Suspects Wright tagged some her favorite crime fiction books set in Florida, including:

Lightwood by Steph Post

Lightwood is the first of Steph Post’s Judah Cannon trilogy, a masterclass in Southern noir. After being released from prison, Judah is determined to straighten up and fly right. His crime-happy family has other ideas and soon ropes him into a robbery. As if angering a local biker gang isn’t bad enough, that gang is also in cahoots with an unhinged Pentecostal preacher named Sister Tulah. When she’s not handling snakes or drinking poison, she’s building a crime empire. Post uses her Central Florida backdrop to great affect, the heat radiating off her carefully plotted pages.

Read about another entry on the list.

My Book, The Movie: Lightwood.

The Page 69 Test: Lightwood.

--Marshal Zeringue

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