Pg. 99: Clifford Bob's "Rights as Weapons"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Rights as Weapons: Instruments of Conflict, Tools of Power by Clifford Bob.

About the book, from the publisher:

An in-depth look at the historic and strategic deployment of rights in political conflicts throughout the world

Rights are usually viewed as defensive concepts representing mankind’s highest aspirations to protect the vulnerable and uplift the downtrodden. But since the Enlightenment, political combatants have also used rights belligerently, to batter despised communities, demolish existing institutions, and smash opposing ideas. Delving into a range of historical and contemporary conflicts from all areas of the globe, Rights as Weapons focuses on the underexamined ways in which the powerful wield rights as aggressive weapons against the weak.

Clifford Bob looks at how political forces use rights as rallying cries: naturalizing novel claims as rights inherent in humanity, absolutizing them as trumps over rival interests or community concerns, universalizing them as transcultural and transhistorical, and depoliticizing them as concepts beyond debate. He shows how powerful proponents employ rights as camouflage to cover ulterior motives, as crowbars to break rival coalitions, as blockades to suppress subordinate groups, as spears to puncture discrete policies, and as dynamite to explode whole societies. And he demonstrates how the targets of rights campaigns repulse such assaults, using their own rights-like weapons: denying the abuses they are accused of, constructing rival rights to protect themselves, portraying themselves as victims rather than violators, and repudiating authoritative decisions against them. This sophisticated framework is applied to a diverse range of examples, including nineteenth-century voting rights movements; the American civil rights movement; nationalist, populist, and religious movements in today’s Europe; and internationalized conflicts related to Palestinian self-determination, animal rights, gay rights, and transgender rights.

Comparing key episodes in the deployment of rights, Rights as Weapons opens new perspectives on an idea that is central to legal and political conflicts.

Learn more about Rights as Weapons at the Princeton University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Rights as Weapons.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Adam Mitzner's "A Matter of Will"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: A Matter of Will by Adam Mitzner.

About the book, from the publisher:

Will Matthews came to Wall Street with hopes and dreams of hitting it big. But things have not been going as expected. He’s on the verge of being fired when he meets the devilishly mysterious and fabulously wealthy Sam Abaddon.

Winning Sam’s business answers Will’s prayers, catapulting the young stockbroker into the privileged world of money and luxury. Not only that, but Will also has met his dream girl, ambitious attorney Gwen Lipton.

All at once, it seems as if Will’s life couldn’t get any better.

And it doesn’t.

When Will witnesses a shocking act of violence, his charmed new existence is revealed to be a waking nightmare as the truth about his benefactor—and his own complicity in criminal conduct—becomes devastatingly clear. As the noose draws tighter, Will faces an impossible choice: feast upon the poisonous fruit of his bloody business or defy his patron and face dire consequences.

Then again, maybe there’s a third option…

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

The Page 69 Test: A Conflict of Interest.

My Book, The Movie: A Conflict of Interest.

The Page 69 Test: A Case of Redemption.

My Book, The Movie: A Case of Redemption.

The Page 69 Test: Losing Faith.

My Book, The Movie: Losing Faith.

The Page 69 Test: A Matter of Will.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Louis Greenberg reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Louis Greenberg, author of Green Valley.

His entry begins:

My choice for this post surprises me. I usually seek out books that are set elsewhere – whether on another continent or on another planet. I love reading that transports me. But the book I’ve most enjoyed recently is The Plague Stones by James Brogden. I thought it was deftly plotted and felt effortlessly confident, and it was all about the history and present of the part of England where I currently live.

Partly, I suppose it’s because I’m newish to England and the area, so in a way this was like reading a book about another place. But on the other hand, I’ve been here long enough for the villages and towns in the area to feel familiar, and then to get the thrill of those familiar places being rendered strange through...[read on]

About Green Valley, from the publisher:

When Lucie Sterling’s niece is abducted, she knows it won’t be easy to find answers. Stanton is no ordinary city: invasive digital technology has been banned, by public vote. No surveillance state, no shadowy companies holding databases of information on private citizens, no phones tracking their every move.

Only one place stays firmly anchored in the bad old ways, in a huge bunker across town: Green Valley, where the inhabitants have retreated into the comfort of full-time virtual reality—personae non gratae to the outside world. And it’s inside Green Valley, beyond the ideal virtual world it presents, that Lucie will have to go to find her missing niece.

Visit Louis Greenberg's website.

Writers Read: Louis Greenberg.

--Marshal Zeringue

Siri Hustvedt’s ten favorite books

Siri Hustvedt is a critic, poet, and author. Her latest book is Memories of the Future.

One of the author's ten favorite books, as shared at Vulture.com:

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

This diabolical work of fiction is so complex in its structure that I remain awed by it. I have no doubt that I could read it again and again and still not get to the bottom of it.

Read about another entry on the list.

Wuthering Heights appears on Robert Masello's list of six classics with supernatural crimes at their center, André Aciman's list of five favorite books about the intensity of a once-in-a-lifetime love, Emily Temple's top ten list of literary classics we (not so) secretly hate, Cristina Merrill's list of eight of the sexiest curmudgeons in romance, Kate Hamer's list of six top novels with a strong evocation of atmosphere, Siri Hustvedt's six favorite books list, Tom Easton's top ten list of fictional "houses which themselves seem to have a personality which affects the story," Melissa Harrison's list of the ten top depictions of British rain, Meredith Borders's list of ten of the scariest gothic romances, Ed Sikov's list of eight top books that got slammed by critics, Amelia Schonbek's top five list of approachable must-read classics, Molly Schoemann-McCann's top five list of the lamest girlfriends in fiction, Becky Ferreira's list of seven of the worst wingmen in literature, Na'ima B. Robert's top ten list of Romeo and Juliet stories, Jimmy So's list of fifteen notable film adaptations of literary classics, John Mullan's lists of ten of the best thunderstorms in literature, ten of the worst nightmares in literature and ten of the best foundlings in literature, Valerie Martin's list of novels about doomed marriages, Susan Cheever's list of the five best books about obsession, and Melissa Katsoulis' top 25 list of book to film adaptations. It is one of John Inverdale's six best books and Sheila Hancock's six best books.

The Page 99 Test: Wuthering Heights.

--Marshal Zeringue

Richard Zimler's "The Warsaw Anagrams," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Warsaw Anagrams by Richard Zimler.

The entry begins:

The Warsaw Anagrams is a noir mystery set inside Warsaw’s Jewish ghetto. The narrator, Erik Cohen, is an elderly psychiatrist, except that the reader discovers right away that he is already dead. Erik is an ibbur – a ghost – who has failed to pass over to the Other Side. Why? He theorizes that it is because he still has a duty to fulfill in our world. Except that he doesn’t know what it is. He tells the story of his last year in the Warsaw ghetto in the hopes of discovering what it is.

A little context… In the autumn of 1940, the Nazis sealed 400,000 Jews inside a small area of the Polish capital, creating an urban island cut off from the outside world. Erik is forced to move into a tiny apartment there with his niece and his beloved nine-year-old nephew, Adam.

One bitterly cold winter day, Adam goes missing. The next morning, his body is discovered in the barbed wire surrounding this Jewish ghetto. For what possible...[read on]

Visit Richard Zimler's website.

The Page 99: Guardian of the Dawn.

The Page 69 Test: The Gospel According to Lazarus.

My Book, The Movie: The Warsaw Anagrams.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Michael Blumlein's "Longer"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Longer by Michael Blumlein.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Longer, Michael Blumlein explores dauntingly epic topics—love, the expanse of the human lifespan, mortality—with a beautifully sharp story that glows with grace and good humor even as it forces us to confront deep, universal fears.

Gunjita and Cav are in orbit.

R&D scientists for pharmaceutical giant Gleem Galactic, they are wealthy enough to participate in rejuvenation: rebooting themselves from old age to jump their bodies back to their twenties. You get two chances. There can never be a third.

After Gunjita has juved for the second and final time and Cav has not, questions of life, death, morality, and test their relationship. Up among the stars, the research possibilities are infinite and first contact is possible, but their marriage may not survive the challenge.

Visit Michael Blumlein's website.

Writers Read: Michael Blumlein.

The Page 69 Test: Longer.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top morality-driven thrillers

Lori Roy is the author of Bent Road, winner of the Edgar Award for Best First Novel; Until She Comes Home, finalist for the Edgar Award for Best Novel; Let Me Die in His Footsteps, winner of the Edgar Award for Best Novel; and The Disappearing.

Roy's new novel is Gone Too Long.

At CrimeReads the author tagged five "books that deliver smartly drawn plots, but that also mine the greater moral issues that make us all part of the story," including:

Devil in a Blue Dress (1990) by Walter Mosley

The author of more than 40 books, fiction and non-fiction, Walter Mosley began his writing career following a job as a computer programmer. In his debut novel, Devil in a Blue Dress, which was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best First Novel, Mosley introduces his protagonist, Easy Rawlins. After serving in WWII, Rawlins returns to Los Angeles where he takes a job in a factory, buys a house and settles into a routine. But his plan for a simple life is interrupted when, while working at the factory, a place Rawlins describes as a plantation, he stands up to his white supervisor and is fired for having done so. In order to pay the bills and retain his independence, Rawlings reluctantly accept a job investigating a woman who has gone missing in Watts. Writing against the backdrop of Watts in the post WWII era, Mosley, as he has done through the 14 books in the series and his many other works, tackles racial discrimination, violence in America and an unjust justice system.

Read about another entry on the list.

Devil in a Blue Dress is among Al Roker's six favorite crime novels.

Raymond “Mouse” Alexander, from Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins series, made The A.V. Club's list of “13 sidekicks who are cooler than their heroes.”

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Domenica Ruta reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Domenica Ruta, author of Last Day: A Novel.

Her entry begins:

Right now I'm reading In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche. It's about this Tibetan Buddhist monk living in India, a man who essentially grew up as royalty. He's from a long lineage of esteemed teachers and monks and has led a very sheltered life full of meditation and study but not much dish washing or laundry or even walking alone. One night he leaves his monastery, telling no one, to spend a few years in poverty and anonymity begging for food on the streets. Of course the narrative is interspersed with bits of spiritual wisdom and practical techniques for dealing with the noisy chaos of regular life, but these two threads - the story and the lessons - are so...[read on]

About Last Day, from the publisher:

In Domenica Ruta’s profoundly original novel, the end of the world comes once a year. Every May 28, humanity gathers to anticipate the planet’s demise—and to celebrate as if the day is truly its last.

On this holiday, three intersecting sets of characters embark on a possibly last-chance quest for redemption. In Boston, bookish wunderkind Sarah is looking for love and maybe a cosmic reversal from the much older Kurt, a tattoo artist she met at last year’s Last Day BBQ—but he’s still trying to make amends to the family he destroyed long ago. Dysfunctional Karen keeps getting into trouble, especially when the voices she’s been hearing coax her to abandon everything to search for her long-lost adoptive brother; her friend Rosette has left the Jehovah’s Witnesses to follow a new pastor at the Last Kingdom on Earth, where she brings Karen on this fateful day. Meanwhile, above them all, three astronauts on the International Space Station, Bear, an American; Russian Svec; and billionaire Japanese space tourist Yui, contemplate their lives as well as their precious Earth from afar.

With sparkling wit, verbal ingenuity, and wild imagination, Ruta has created an alternate world in which an ancient holiday brings into stark reflection our deepest dreams, desires, hopes, and fears. In this tour-de-force debut novel she has written a dazzling, haunting love letter to humanity and to our planet.

Visit Domenica Ruta's website.

The Page 69 Test: Last Day.

Writers Read: Domenica Ruta.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five SFF books set in contemporary African locales

Suyi Davies Okungbowa is a Nigerian author of stories featuring African gods, starships, monsters, detectives and everything in-between. His godpunk novel, David Mogo, Godhunter, is out from Abaddon in July 2019. His internationally published fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Lightspeed, Fireside, Podcastle, The Dark, Mothership Zeta, Omenana, Ozy, Brick Moon Fiction and other periodicals and anthologies. He is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Arizona, where he teaches writing, and has worked in editorial at Podcastle and Sonora Review.

At Tor.com he tagged five SFF books set in contemporary African locales, including:

Johannesburg, South Africa: Zoo City by Lauren Beukes

Much like [Charlie Human's] Apocalypse Now Now, Beukes’ Zoo City takes place in South Africa, features its invisible undesirables and ventures into noirish territory. Most of the comparisons end there, though. Johannesburg—and Zoo City, the slum where the “animalled” population live (those who’ve committed a crime and have been forced to “carry” an animal, as well as gain a strange magical ability)—is its own world. Zinzi December is a con artist with her own animal—a sloth—and a gift for finding missing things. She’s dragged into a missing persons case that turns out to be much more. There are strong allusions to xenophobia, class segregation and the stigma of conviction (and in a tongue-in-cheek manner, AIDS), all issues plaguing the brick-mortar-and-flesh city outside of the book.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Amy Mason Doan's "Summer Hours"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Summer Hours by Amy Mason Doan.

About the book, from the publisher:

Commencement meets The Graduate in this sparkling novel about a secret affair, the summer it all unravels, and the reunion a decade later that will be one woman’s happy ending or her biggest mistake.

Becc was the good girl. A dedicated student. Aspiring reporter. Always where she was supposed to be. Until a secret affair with the charming Cal one summer in college cost her everything she held dear: her journalism dreams; her relationship with her best friend, Eric; and her carefully imagined future.

Now, Becc’s past is back front and center as she travels up the scenic California coast to a wedding—with a man she hasn’t seen in a decade. As each mile flies by, Becc can’t help but feel the thrilling push and pull of memories, from infinite nights at beach bonfires and lavish boat parties to secret movie sessions. But the man beside her is not so eager to re-create history. And as the events of that heartbreaking summer come into view, Becc must decide if those dazzling hours they once shared are worth fighting for or if they’re lost forever.

Set in the mid ’90s and 2008, Amy Mason Doan’s Summer Hours is a warmly told novel about the idealism of youth, the seductive power of nostalgia and what happens when you realize you haven’t become the person you’d always promised to be.

Visit Amy Mason Doan's website.

The Page 69 Test: Summer Hours.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Peter Houlahan's "Norco ’80"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Norco ’80: The True Story of the Most Spectacular Bank Robbery in American History by Peter Houlahan.

About the book, from the publisher:

Norco ’80 is a gripping true crime account of one of the most violent bank heists in US history.

Norco ’80 tells the story of how five heavily armed young men—led by an apocalyptic born-again Christian—attempted a bank robbery that turned into one of the most violent criminal events in U.S. history, forever changing the face of American law enforcement. Part action thriller and part courtroom drama, Norco ’80 transports the reader back to the Southern California of the 1970s, an era of predatory evangelical gurus, doomsday predictions, megachurches, and soaring crime rates, with the threat of nuclear obliteration looming over it all.

A group of landscapers transforms into a murderous gang of bank robbers armed to the teeth with military-grade weapons. Their desperate getaway turned the surrounding towns into war zones. When it was over, three were dead and close to twenty wounded; a police helicopter was forced down from the sky, and thirty-two police vehicles were destroyed by thousands of rounds of ammo. The resulting trial shook the community to the core, raising many issues that continue to face society today: from the epidemic of post-traumatic stress disorder within law enforcement to religious extremism and the militarization of local police forces.

Visit Peter Houlahan's website.

Writers Read: Peter Houlahan.

The Page 99 Test: Norco ’80.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five novels with complex and credible child narrators

Michelle Sacks is the author of the story collection, Stone Baby, and the novels, You Were Made for This and All The Lost Things.

At LitHub she tagged five books with complex and credible child narrators, including:

Janet Fitch, White Oleander

Twelve-year-old Astrid, the daughter of struggling poet, Ingrid Magnussen, is enchanted with her free-spirited mother and the stories she weaves about herself. But Ingrid is all too consumed with ideas of her own greatness to be concerned with the mundanity of her daughter’s childhood. When Ingrid is imprisoned for the murder of Barry, an ex-boyfriend who dared to spurn her, Astrid is thrown into the chaos and uncertainty of the foster care system. As she moves through various homes and a woeful array of surrogate mothers, Ingrid continues to overshadow her life from afar. Although it’s a heartbreaking portrait of toxic motherhood and a child failed, Astrid’s lush prose and rich interior world reveal a young girl who seems destined, above all, to survive.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Domenica Ruta's "Last Day"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Last Day: A Novel by Domenica Ruta.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Domenica Ruta’s profoundly original novel, the end of the world comes once a year. Every May 28, humanity gathers to anticipate the planet’s demise—and to celebrate as if the day is truly its last.

On this holiday, three intersecting sets of characters embark on a possibly last-chance quest for redemption. In Boston, bookish wunderkind Sarah is looking for love and maybe a cosmic reversal from the much older Kurt, a tattoo artist she met at last year’s Last Day BBQ—but he’s still trying to make amends to the family he destroyed long ago. Dysfunctional Karen keeps getting into trouble, especially when the voices she’s been hearing coax her to abandon everything to search for her long-lost adoptive brother; her friend Rosette has left the Jehovah’s Witnesses to follow a new pastor at the Last Kingdom on Earth, where she brings Karen on this fateful day. Meanwhile, above them all, three astronauts on the International Space Station, Bear, an American; Russian Svec; and billionaire Japanese space tourist Yui, contemplate their lives as well as their precious Earth from afar.

With sparkling wit, verbal ingenuity, and wild imagination, Ruta has created an alternate world in which an ancient holiday brings into stark reflection our deepest dreams, desires, hopes, and fears. In this tour-de-force debut novel she has written a dazzling, haunting love letter to humanity and to our planet.

Visit Domenica Ruta's website.

The Page 69 Test: Last Day.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Season Butler reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Season Butler, author of Cygnet: A Novel.

Her entry begins:

I’ve been thinking a lot – and writing a bit – about the idea of intergenerational conflict and the climate crisis, so I revisited Rachel Carson’s classic, Silent Spring. Carson’s brilliance comes through in her command of the diversity of her reader’s imagination, weaving together science, fable and reportage to illustrate the challenges facing humanity. Rachel Carson was close to the end of her life when Silent Spring was published in 1962 – though only 54 when it came out, she died of cancer two years later. While we often think of environmentalism as a youth movement (and young activists like Greta Thunberg and Xiuhtezcatl Martinez certainly deserve credit for the eloquence and energy they bring to the movement), it’s worth remembering that...[read on]

About Cygnet, from the publisher:

An utterly original coming-of-age tale, marked by wrenching humor and staggering charisma, about a young woman resisting the savagery of adulthood in a community of the elderly rejecting the promise of youth.

“It’s too hot for most of the clothes I packed to come here, when I thought this would only be for a week or two. My mother kissed me with those purple-brown lips of hers and said, we’ll be back, hold tight.”

Seventeen-year-old Kid doesn’t know where her parents are. They left her with her grandmother Lolly, promising to return soon. That was months ago. Now, Lolly is dead and Kid is alone, stranded ten miles off the coast of New Hampshire on tiny Swan Island. Unable to reach her parents, and with no other relatives to turn to, Kid works for a neighbor, airbrushing the past—digitally retouching family photos and movies—to earn enough money to survive.

Surrounded by the vast ocean, Kid’s temporary home is no ordinary vacation retreat. The island is populated by an idiosyncratic group of elderly separatists who left behind the youth-obsessed mainland—”the Bad Place”—to create their own alternative community. These residents call themselves the Swans. Kid calls them the Wrinklies. Even as Kid tries to be good and quiet and patient, the adolescent’s presence unnerves the Swans, turning some downright hostile. They don’t care if she has nowhere to go, they just want her gone. She is a reminder of all they’ve left behind and are determined to forget.

But Kid isn’t the only problem threatening the insular community. Swan Island is eroding into the rising sea, threatening the Swans’ very existence there. To find a way forward, the Kid must come to terms with the realities of her life and an unknown future that is hers alone to embrace.

Season Butler makes her literary debut with an ambitious work of bold imagination. Tough and tender, compassionate and ferocious, intelligent and provocative, Cygnet is a meditation on death and life, past and future, aging and youth, memory and forgetting, that explores what it means to find acceptance—of things past and those to come.

Visit Season Butler's website.

My Book, The Movie: Cygnet.

The Page 69 Test: Cygnet.

Writers Read: Season Butler.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten books about the River Thames

Caroline Crampton is a writer and editor who contributes regularly to the Guardian, the Mail on Sunday and the New Humanist. She has appeared as a broadcaster on Newsnight, Sky News and BBC Radio 4.

The Way to the Sea: The Forgotten Histories of the Thames Estuary is her first book.

One of Crampton's ten top books about the River Thames, as shared at the Guardian:

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

The Hoo peninsula, a spur of land between the Thames and its final tributary the Medway, is not a place that has appeared much in classic fiction. But it’s in a graveyard near the Hoo’s highest point that young Pip meets the convict Magwitch, who has just escaped from a prison hulk and is fleeing his jailers through the Thames marshes. I first read this scene as a teenager and I still find it chilling. Pip is terrified, but little knows that this chance meeting will change the course of his life.

Read about another entry on the list.

Great Expectations appears on Jenny Kawecki's list of four of the worst holidays in fiction, Lynne Truss's 6 best books list, Charlotte Seager's list of five well-known literary obsessives who take things too far, TheReadDown's list of seventeen books to read during wedding season, Phoebe Walker's list of eight of the best feasts quotes in literature, Rachel Cooke's top ten list of single women, Robert Williams's top ten list of loners in fiction, Chrissie Gruebel's top ten list of books set in London, Melissa Albert's list of five interesting fictional characters who would make undesirable roommates, Janice Clark's list of seven top novels about the horrors of adolescence, Amy Wilkinson's list of five books Kate Middleton should have read while waiting to give birth, Kate Clanchy's top ten list of novels that reflect the real qualities of adolescence, Joseph Olshan's list of six favorite books, John Mullan's lists of ten of the best clocks in literature, ten of the best appropriate deaths in literature, ten of the best castles in literature, ten of the best Hamlets, ten of the best card games in literature, and ten best list of fights in fiction. It also made Tony Parsons' list of the top ten troubled males in fiction, David Nicholls' top ten list of literary tear jerkers, and numbers among Kurt Anderson's five most essential books. The novel is #1 on Melissa Katsoulis' list of "twenty-five films that made it from the book shelf to the box office with credibility intact."

Read an 1861 review of Great Expectations.

--Marshal Zeringue

Catherine Chung's "The Tenth Muse," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Tenth Muse: A Novel by Catherine Chung.

The entry begins:

When I was growing up, my white friends would sometimes ask each other who they'd want to play them in the movie of their lives. As a child, I was always at a loss: there were no Asian American child actresses I knew by name. I don't know when the first time I saw one was, but to be honest, it's not something I likely would have wanted to commemorate: the Asian American onscreen characters of my childhood were the foreign exchange students in the goofy clothes who spoke with accents, or the nerds everyone else made fun of and picked on, who carried calculators and protractors, whose noses were buried in giant books. It's not that these depictions didn't reflect my experience: they did, in the most painful ways. I wanted nothing to do with them.

When my first book came out, people would ask me who I wanted to play the Korean American family in my novel. "When was the last time you...[read on]

Visit Catherine Chung's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Tenth Muse.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Ashley Dyer's "The Cutting Room"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Cutting Room by Ashley Dyer.

About the book, from the publisher:

Detectives Ruth Lake and Greg Carver, introduced in the electrifying Splinter in the Blood, must stop a serial killer whose victims are the centerpiece of his macabre works of art.

While Britain is obsessed with the newest hit true-crime television show, Fact, or Fable? detectives Ruth Lake and Greg Carver are tormented by a fiendish flesh-and-blood killer on the loose.

Lured to a “crime scene” by a mysterious digital invitation, Ruth Lake is horrified by what she finds: a bizarre and gruesome tableau surrounded by a crowd of gawkers. The deadly work is the latest “art installation” designed by a diabolical criminal dubbed the Ferryman. Not only is this criminal cold-blooded; he’s a narcissistic exhibitionist desperate for an audience. He’s also clever at promoting his deadly handiwork. Exploiting England’s current true-crime craze, he uses social media to titillate and terrorize the public.

Ruth is joined in the investigation by her partner Greg Carver, who is slowly regaining his strength after a run-in with another sadistic criminal. But Greg can’t seem to shake the bewildering effects of the head wound that nearly ended him. Are the strange auras blurring his vision an annoying side effect of his injury, or could they be something more ... a tool to help him see a person’s true nature?

In this utterly engrossing and thrilling tale of suspense, a pair of seasoned detectives face off against a wickedly smart and inventive psychopath in a tense, bloody game that leads to a shocking end.

Visit Ashley Dyer's website and Facebook page.

Writers Read: Ashley Dyer.

The Page 69 Test: The Cutting Room.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Travis Rieder's "In Pain"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: In Pain: A Bioethicist's Personal Struggle with Opioids by Travis Rieder.

About the book, from the publisher:

A bioethicist’s eloquent and riveting memoir of opioid dependence and withdrawal—a harrowing personal reckoning and clarion call for change not only for government but medicine itself, revealing the lack of crucial resources and structures to handle this insidious nationwide epidemic.

Travis Rieder’s terrifying journey down the rabbit hole of opioid dependence began with a motorcycle accident in 2015. Enduring half a dozen surgeries, the drugs he received were both miraculous and essential to his recovery. But his most profound suffering came several months later when he went into acute opioid withdrawal while following his physician’s orders. Over the course of four excruciating weeks, Rieder learned what it means to be “dope sick”—the physical and mental agony caused by opioid dependence. Clueless how to manage his opioid taper, Travis’s doctors suggested he go back on the drugs and try again later. Yet returning to pills out of fear of withdrawal is one route to full-blown addiction. Instead, Rieder continued the painful process of weaning himself.

Rieder’s experience exposes a dark secret of American pain management: a healthcare system so conflicted about opioids, and so inept at managing them, that the crisis currently facing us is both unsurprising and inevitable. As he recounts his story, Rieder provides a fascinating look at the history of these drugs first invented in the 1800s, changing attitudes about pain management over the following decades, and the implementation of the pain scale at the beginning of the twenty-first century. He explores both the science of addiction and the systemic and cultural barriers we must overcome if we are to address the problem effectively in the contemporary American healthcare system.

In Pain is not only a gripping personal account of dependence, but a groundbreaking exploration of the intractable causes of America’s opioid problem and their implications for resolving the crisis. Rieder makes clear that the opioid crisis exists against a backdrop of real, debilitating pain—and that anyone can fall victim to this epidemic.

Visit Travis Rieder's website.

Writers Read: Travis Rieder.

The Page 99 Test: In Pain.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six terrifying villain-doctors in fiction

Caroline Louise Walker grew up in Rock Island, Illinois. For her fiction and nonfiction, she has received fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, The Kerouac Project, Jentel Arts and Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts & Sciences. She holds an MA from NYU.

Man of the Year is Walker's first novel.

At CrimeReads she tagged six medical men with terrible designs, including:

HANNIBAL LECTER from Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs, by Thomas Harris

Hannibal the Cannibal is skilled at many things—for example, infiltrating our nightmares. He is a legend on the page and in pop culture, thanks to Harris’s brilliant choice to balance depravity against refined taste and class. Lecter speaks beautifully, lives beautifully, and yes, eats his victims’ remains. But his threat to his victims’ minds is the first point of vulnerability—and the piece that keeps us up at night, shuddering at the thought of fava beans.

Lecter is a psychiatrist, not a surgeon, but the prospect of having one’s thoughts penetrated by this character is sufficiently disturbing. We can imagine ourselves trusting him, in his civilized life, in his office, in our naïveté. We do it all the time.

And yet, there is no rest for the weary. Even in a maximum security prison, Lecter is asked to keep his criminal mind sharp, rather than taking a break.

Read about another entry on the list.

Red Dragon appears on Peter Swanson's list of ten thrillers that explore mental health, John Verdon's list of the ten best whodunits, Laura McHugh's list of ten favorite books about serial killers, Kimberly Turner's list of the ten most disturbing sociopaths in literature, John Mullan's lists of ten of the best dragons in literature and ten of the best tattoos in literature, and the (U.K.) Telegraph 110 best books; Andre Gross says "it should be taught as [a text] in Thriller 101."

The Silence of The Lambs is among Kathy Reichs's six best books, Matt Suddain's five great meals from literature, Elizabeth Heiter's ten favorite serial killer novels, Jill Boyd's five books with the worst fictional characters to invite to Thanksgiving, Monique Alice's six great fictional evil geniuses, sixteen book-to-movie adaptations that won Academy Awards.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Catherine Chung reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Catherine Chung, author of The Tenth Muse: A Novel.

Her entry begins:

This has been a phenomenal year in reading for me so far: I've been blown away by the amazing books have come my way which I found both timely and timeless. Two of my favorite poets published new collections this year: Honeyfish by Lauren Alleyne, is a shimmering, elegiac collection of poetry laced with wonder and grief that tackles immigration, police and state violence, and the longing for the home left behind and the home not yet found; in Deaf Republic Ilya Kaminsky imagines an occupied country that goes collectively deaf after the soldiers breaking up a protest kill a deaf boy. Terrifying, tender, and filled with beauty and pain, it is a work of tremendous imagination and heart. Another poet (and novelist and translator) Idra Novey wrote one of my favorite novels of the year, the extraordinary Those Who Knew about personal and political power, violence, and the cost of...[read on]

About The Tenth Muse, from the publisher:

An exhilarating, moving novel about a trailblazing mathematician whose research unearths her own extraordinary family story and its roots in World War II

From the days of her childhood in the 1950s Midwest, Katherine knows she is different, and that her parents are not who they seem. As she matures from a girl of rare intelligence into an exceptional mathematician, traveling to Europe to further her studies, she must face the most human of problems—who is she? What is the cost of love, and what is the cost of ambition? These questions grow ever more entangled as Katherine strives to take her place in the world of higher mathematics and becomes involved with a brilliant and charismatic professor.

When she embarks on a quest to conquer the Riemann hypothesis, the greatest unsolved mathematical problem of her time, she turns to a theorem with a mysterious history that may hold both the lock and the key to her identity, and to secrets long buried during World War II. Forced to confront some of the most consequential events of the twentieth century and rethink everything she knows of herself, she finds kinship in the stories of the women who came before her, and discovers how seemingly distant stories, lives, and ideas are inextricably linked to her own.

The Tenth Muse is a gorgeous, sweeping tale about legacy, identity, and the beautiful ways the mind can make us free.

Visit Catherine Chung's website.

Writers Read: Catherine Chung.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight top books set over twenty-four hours

Alex Clark writes for the Guardian and the Observer. Two of her best books set over twenty-hours:

James Joyce’s Ulysses is one of the 20th century’s most celebrated examples of such a novel, the richness of its evocation of a day in Dublin giving rise to last week’s Bloomsday. And this week there was “Dallowday”, on which fans of Virginia Woolf mark the mid-June setting of her 1925 novel, Mrs Dalloway. At its start, Clarissa Dalloway sets out to buy flowers, accompanied by her perpetual sense “of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day”; at its close, she has returned home to host her party, and to reflect on her kinship with the young war veteran Septimus Smith as “the clock was striking”.

Read about another entry on the list.

Ulysses is on Tom McCarthy's lit of six favorite books about nothing, Alice-Azania Jarvis's reading list on grammar, George Vecsey's list of six favorite books, Nina MacLaughlin's top ten list of dirty old (literary) men, John Mullan's lists of the ten of the best parodies, ten of the best Hamlets in literature, ten of the best visits to the lavatory, and ten of the best vegetables in literature. It appears on Frank Delaney's top ten list of Irish novels and five best list of books about Ireland.

Mrs. Dalloway also appears on Mary Gordon's ten favorite books list, Andrew O'Hagan's six favorite books list, Elizabeth Strout's six favorite books list, Juan Gabriel Vásquez's six favorite books list, Becky Ferreira's list of seven of the best fictional depictions of female friendship, Rebecca Jane Stokes's list of seven favorite fictional shopaholics, Suzette Field's top 10 list of literary party hosts, Jennie Rooney's top ten list of women travelers in fiction, John Mullan's list of ten of the best prime ministers in fiction, and among Michael Cunningham's 5 most important books, Dani Shapiro's 10 favorite books, and Kate Walbert's best books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Season Butler's "Cygnet"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Cygnet: A Novel by Season Butler.

About the book, from the publisher:

An utterly original coming-of-age tale, marked by wrenching humor and staggering charisma, about a young woman resisting the savagery of adulthood in a community of the elderly rejecting the promise of youth.

“It’s too hot for most of the clothes I packed to come here, when I thought this would only be for a week or two. My mother kissed me with those purple-brown lips of hers and said, we’ll be back, hold tight.”

Seventeen-year-old Kid doesn’t know where her parents are. They left her with her grandmother Lolly, promising to return soon. That was months ago. Now, Lolly is dead and Kid is alone, stranded ten miles off the coast of New Hampshire on tiny Swan Island. Unable to reach her parents, and with no other relatives to turn to, Kid works for a neighbor, airbrushing the past—digitally retouching family photos and movies—to earn enough money to survive.

Surrounded by the vast ocean, Kid’s temporary home is no ordinary vacation retreat. The island is populated by an idiosyncratic group of elderly separatists who left behind the youth-obsessed mainland—”the Bad Place”—to create their own alternative community. These residents call themselves the Swans. Kid calls them the Wrinklies. Even as Kid tries to be good and quiet and patient, the adolescent’s presence unnerves the Swans, turning some downright hostile. They don’t care if she has nowhere to go, they just want her gone. She is a reminder of all they’ve left behind and are determined to forget.

But Kid isn’t the only problem threatening the insular community. Swan Island is eroding into the rising sea, threatening the Swans’ very existence there. To find a way forward, the Kid must come to terms with the realities of her life and an unknown future that is hers alone to embrace.

Season Butler makes her literary debut with an ambitious work of bold imagination. Tough and tender, compassionate and ferocious, intelligent and provocative, Cygnet is a meditation on death and life, past and future, aging and youth, memory and forgetting, that explores what it means to find acceptance—of things past and those to come.

Visit Season Butler's website.

My Book, The Movie: Cygnet.

The Page 69 Test: Cygnet.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Charlotte E. Blattner's "Protecting Animals Within and Across Borders"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Protecting Animals Within and Across Borders: Extraterritorial Jurisdiction and the Challenges of Globalization by Charlotte E. Blattner.

About the book, from the publisher:

Extraterritorial jurisdiction stands at the juncture of international law and animal law and promises to open a path to understanding and resolving the global problems that challenge the core of animal law. As corporations have relocated and the animal industry (agriculture, medical research, entertainment, etc.) has dispersed its production facilities across the territories of multiple states, regulatory gaps and fears of a race to the bottom have become a pressing issue of global policy. This book provides enough background to allow readers to understand why extraterritorial jurisdiction must respond to these developments, counters objections that readers might raise, and describes how to improve animal law in tandem. The heart of the work is a fully-fledged catalogue of options for extraterritorial jurisdiction, which states can employ to strengthen their animal laws. The book offers top-down perspectives drawn from general international law and trade law, and complements them by a bottom-up up view from the perspective of animal law. The approach connects the law of jurisdiction to substantive law and opens up deeper questions about moral directionality, state and corporate duties owed animals, and the comparative advantages of constitutional, criminal, and administrative animal law. To ensure that extraterritorial animal law does not become complicit in oppressing ethnic and cultural minorities, the book offers critical interdisciplinary perspectives, informed by posthumanist and postcolonialist discourse. Readers will further learn when and how extraterritorial jurisdiction violates international law, and the consequences of exercising it illegally under international law. This work answers questions about how and why extraterritorial jurisdiction can overcome the steepest hurdles for animal law and help move us toward a just global interspecies community.

Visit Charlotte E. Blattner's website.

The Page 99 Test: Protecting Animals Within and Across Borders.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six books that spotlight political incorrectness

Herman Koch is the best-selling author of The Dinner. His new novel is The Ditch.

At The Week magazine Koch tagged six books that spotlight political incorrectness, including:

Serotonin by Michel Houellebecq (2019).

In his latest novel, the absolute master of political incorrectness does not disappoint his readers. "Nobody in the West will ever be happy again," his depressed narrator tells us. It is all made very palatable by a quality that many French authors lack: a great sense of humor. The U.S. edition of the book is due out in September.

Learn about another entry on the list.

Read Ray Taras's take on Serotonin.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Peter Houlahan reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Peter Houlahan, author of Norco ’80: The True Story of the Most Spectacular Bank Robbery in American History.

His entry begins:

Mayflower: A Story of Courage Community and War. Nathanial Philbrick. It doesn’t get any better than Nathanial Philbrick when it comes to history writers, and his wheelhouse is anything maritime. His sense of story arc and trenchant prose makes fiction writers envious, but he never sensationalizes or trivializes his subjects. The Nantucket-based writer is happy to take the reader on little field trips into related subjects and somehow never make it feel tangential. History of maritime cannibalism anyone? You never...[read on]

About Norco ’80, from the publisher:

Norco ’80 is a gripping true crime account of one of the most violent bank heists in US history.

Norco ’80 tells the story of how five heavily armed young men—led by an apocalyptic born-again Christian—attempted a bank robbery that turned into one of the most violent criminal events in U.S. history, forever changing the face of American law enforcement. Part action thriller and part courtroom drama, Norco ’80 transports the reader back to the Southern California of the 1970s, an era of predatory evangelical gurus, doomsday predictions, megachurches, and soaring crime rates, with the threat of nuclear obliteration looming over it all.

A group of landscapers transforms into a murderous gang of bank robbers armed to the teeth with military-grade weapons. Their desperate getaway turned the surrounding towns into war zones. When it was over, three were dead and close to twenty wounded; a police helicopter was forced down from the sky, and thirty-two police vehicles were destroyed by thousands of rounds of ammo. The resulting trial shook the community to the core, raising many issues that continue to face society today: from the epidemic of post-traumatic stress disorder within law enforcement to religious extremism and the militarization of local police forces.

Visit Peter Houlahan's website.

Writers Read: Peter Houlahan.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight notable crime novels set in the art world

Lisa Levy is a columnist and contributing editor at LitHub and CrimeReads.

At CrimeReads she tagged eight top crime novels set in the art world, including:

Ashley Dyer, The Cutting Room (Morrow)

Cutting Room is the second outing for the writing duo known as Ashley Dyer and the second book to feature Detectives Ruth Lake and Greg Carver. Dyer is partial to writing about serial killers with ingenious methods of both murder and manipulation of the media. In Cutting the serial killer, known as the Ferryman, has staged his murders down to the last detail, and is quickly rewarded for circulating photos of them by gaining a massive Instagram following (yes, between goat memes and vacation photos you could have a chilling crime scene in your feed). As the Ferryman becomes Britain’s true crime sensation, Carver and Lake try to use his social media footprint to stop him.

Read about another entry on the list.

Writers Read: Ashley Dyer (June 2019).

--Marshal Zeringue

Season Butler's "Cygnet," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Cygnet: A Novel by Season Butler.

The entry begins:

Amandla Stenberg is The Kid. No question. I’m a great admirer of Stenberg as a thinker and activist as well as a performer, so she would be the ideal embodiment of an intersectional protagonist.

Cygnet’s flashback scenes would be irresistible with Donald Glover and Lupita Nyong'o as The Kid’s parents, and Nichelle Nichols (the original Star Trek’s Commander Uhura) as Lolly.

Oprah Winfrey would bring wise-woman realness to the role of Rose. This might be controversial, but I can see Mrs Tyburn played by Dolly Parton in conservative drag. If...[read on]

Visit Season Butler's website.

My Book, The Movie: Cygnet.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Ellen LaCorte's "The Perfect Fraud"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Perfect Fraud: A Novel by Ellen LaCorte.

About the book, from the publisher:

In this propulsive debut thriller, two women with deep secrets are thrown together by an unexpected meeting that plunges both their lives into chaos. But it’s a sick little girl whose fate hangs in the balance.

Motherhood is tough. But then, so is daughterhood. When we first meet Claire, she’s living in Sedona, Arizona with her boyfriend Cal and ducking calls from her mother. Her mom is a world class psychic on the East Coast and Claire doesn’t want her to discover the truth. Claire works in the family business and calls herself a psychic, but she doesn’t really have “the gift” and hasn’t for a long time. She’s a fraud.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, Rena, a young mother, has family issues of her own. She’s divorced and her four-year-old daughter, Stephanie, suffers from mysterious, seemingly incurable stomach problems. No matter how many specialists Rena drags her to, no matter how many mommy-blog posts she makes about her child’s health issues, trying to get help and support from her online community, Stephanie only gets sicker.

When Claire and Rena meet by chance on an airplane, their carefully constructed lives begin to explode. Can these two women help each other and can they help Stephanie before it’s too late?

Visit Ellen LaCorte's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Perfect Fraud.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Dorian Lynskey's "The Ministry of Truth"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell's 1984 by Dorian Lynskey.

About the book, from the publisher:

An authoritative, wide-ranging, and incredibly timely history of 1984–its literary sources, its composition by Orwell, its deep and lasting effect on the Cold War, and its vast influence throughout world culture at every level, from high to pop.

1984 isn’t just a novel; it’s a key to understanding the modern world. George Orwell’s final work is a treasure chest of ideas and memes–Big Brother, the Thought Police, Doublethink, Newspeak, 2+2=5–that gain potency with every year. Particularly in 2016, when the election of Donald Trump made it a bestseller (“Ministry of Alternative Facts,” anyone?). Its influence has morphed endlessly into novels (The Handmaid’s Tale), films (Brazil), television shows (V for Vendetta), rock albums (Diamond Dogs), commercials (Apple), even reality TV (Big Brother). The Ministry of Truth is the first book that fully examines the epochal and cultural event that is 1984 in all its aspects: its roots in the utopian and dystopian literature that preceded it; the personal experiences in wartime Great Britain that Orwell drew on as he struggled to finish his masterpiece in his dying days; and the political and cultural phenomena that the novel ignited at once upon publication and that far from subsiding, have only grown over the decades. It explains how fiction history informs fiction and how fiction explains history.

Follow Dorian Lynskey on Twitter.

The Page 99 Test: The Ministry of Truth.

--Marshal Zeringue