Pg. 69: Charlene Wang's "I'll Follow You"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: I'll Follow You: A Novel by Charlene Wang.

About the book, from the publisher:

For two best friends desperate to escape their dead-end town, a viral online persona becomes a dangerous game of control in a twisting psychological thriller about class, power, and identity.

Faith and her charismatic best friend, Kayla, always vowed to escape their trailer park together. After their social media persona, Hannah Primrose, goes viral, their fates seem more entwined than ever. But when Faith is accepted into prestigious Harkness College, she must decide whether to keep her promise to Kayla or learn to tell her own story.

By the time Faith arrives on campus, Kayla is no longer speaking with her. Struggling to fit in with her wealthy classmates, Faith reinvents herself, drawing the attention of her enigmatic art history professor. Then Kayla shows up outside her dormitory one night. I need to stay with you.

Having Kayla on campus is thrilling―and dangerous. Posing as a student, Kayla charms everyone she encounters, and soon enough they’re posting together again. Hannah Primrose, after all, is perfect for a place like Harkness. But as Faith risks her future for the persona she helped create, she begins to realize that Kayla is playing a deadly game…and it may be too late to regain control of the narrative.

Visit Charlene Wang's website.

The Page 69 Test: I'll Follow You.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: G. Edward White's "Robert H. Jackson"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Robert H. Jackson: A Life in Judgment by G. Edward White.

About the book, from the publisher:

Discover the meteoric rise of one of the most extraordinary and singular figures in American jurisprudence, Robert H. Jackson, from self-trained lawyer to influential Supreme Court Justice and chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, in this compelling new biography.

Until he joined the U.S. government in 1934, Robert H. Jackson had been a lawyer in private practice in Upstate New York who was admitted to the bar without going to college and after completing only one year of law school. Once part of FDR's administration, Jackson became, in rapid succession, United States Solicitor General and United States Attorney General, where he successfully defended New Deal programs before the Supreme Court, including the legality of Lend Lease, which helped the U.S. give war supplies to England in exchange for grants of territory and harbors. Jackson played a central role in formulating the arguments justifying a number of initiatives on constitutional grounds and in drafting the policy statements that accompanied them. In 1941, FDR nominated him to be Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, on which he served until his death in 1954, only months after his adding his vote to the unanimous decision in Brown V. Board of Education.

It was a meteoric rise for someone from outside the elite, and essentially self-trained. That didn't stop Jackson from becoming one of the most influential and independent-minded judges of his day, unafraid to question the status quo and leave his mark on a number of landmark cases, including West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnett, which guaranteed First Amendment rights by holding that students in public schools did not have to salute the flag or recite the Pledge of Allegiance. He dissented from the notorious decision in Korematsu v. U.S., which condoned the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War Two. To many, however, Jackson's most significant contribution was as chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg war trials following the war.

Drawing on Jackson's extensive personal papers in the Library of Congress and the Jackson Center, as well as a substantial oral history, G. Edward White's biography offers the first full-length portrait in decades of this fascinating and seminal figure.

Learn more about Robert H. Jackson at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Robert H. Jackson.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sixteen cozy novels that feature travel & international intrigue

Lucy Connelly travels around the world, usually with her bossy dog in tow. Her favorite pastime is sipping tea in a quaint cafe as she turns each passerby into a murder victim, witness, or suspect. If she stares at you strangely, don’t worry. She only murdered you in her book.

[The Page 69 Test: Death at a Scottish Wedding; Q&A with Lucy Connelly]

Connelly's new novel is Death on a Scottish Train.

At CrimeReads the author tagged sixteen favorite cozy novels that feature travel and international intrigue. One title on the list:

Ann Cleeves, Raven Black

To cool off, dive into Ann Cleeve’s Shetland Series. The first book, Raven Black, is set in Shetland during January. Jimmy Perez and his crew must break through frozen ground to find the killer. These are intense mysteries within a wonderful community of odd fellows.

Read about another entry on the list.

Raven Black is among William Shaw’s top ten mysteries set in the British countryside.

The Page 99 Test: Raven Black.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Ian Chorão

From my Q&A with Ian Chorão, author of When We Talk to the Dead: A Novel:

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

My book’s title, When We Talk to the Dead, was a last-minute decision. For the longest time it was called, She’s Not There. Both titles work, but are wildly different, vibe wise. She’s not there is a refrain said several times in the book; it has multiple meanings (no spoilers but trust me).

But alluding to what the book’s about isn’t enough. A title needs to capture more: tone, genre. My book is a gothic, psychological horror. I needed a title to speak to that. When We Talk to the Dead instantly tells you the type of story you’re about to read. This is a scary book, a story of darkness. This is the tale of 19-year-old Sally da Gama, so haunted by tragic loss that she will follow a path that might offer release or might plunge her deeper into madness.

The title also has an energy and action I really liked. It sets up a dynamic. When we talk to the dead, what then happens? Get ready. Once you enter the book, you will...[read on]

Follow Ian Chorão on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.

Writers Read: Ian Chorão.

Q&A with Ian Chorão.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Gillen D’Arcy Wood's "The Wake of HMS Challenger"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Wake of HMS Challenger: How a Legendary Victorian Voyage Tells the Story of Our Oceans' Decline by Gillen D’Arcy Wood.

About the book, from the publisher:

A scientific adventure story that dramatizes how profoundly our oceans have changed over the past 150 years

In December 1872, HMS Challenger embarked on the first round-the-world oceanographic expedition. Its goal: to shine a light for the first time on the mysteries of the deep sea. For the next four years, Challenger’s naturalists explored the oceans, encountering never-before-seen marvels of marine life. The expedition’s achievements are the stuff of legend. It identified major ocean currents and defining features of the seafloor, including the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and Mariana Trench. It measured worldwide sea temperatures and chemistry, creating baseline data for all ocean research since. And, most spectacularly of all, it collected nearly five thousand sea creatures and plants new to science. In The Wake of HMS Challenger, Gillen D’Arcy Wood looks afresh at this legendary scientific odyssey and shows why, 150 years later, its legacy looms larger than ever.

The Challenger’s scientists had no way of knowing that the incredible undersea aquarium they were documenting was on the verge of catastrophic change. Off Portugal, they encountered a brilliant starfish now threatened with extinction by microplastics; in St. Thomas, teeming coral habitats that today have been decimated by ocean warming; and at remote Ascension Island, the breeding grounds of the now-endangered green turtle. Lyrical and elegiac, The Wake of HMS Challenger offers a stunning before-and-after picture of our global oceans. It is both a reminder of what we have lost since the Victorian age and an urgent call to preserve what remains of the diverse life and wild beauty of our planet’s final frontier.

Learn more about The Wake of HMS Challenger at the Princeton University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Tambora.

The Page 99 Test: The Wake of HMS Challenger.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top classic basketball books

Yaron Weitzman is an award-winning NBA writer and the author of Tanking to the Top: The Philadelphia 76ers and the Most Audacious Process in the History of Professional Sports and A Hollywood Ending: The Dreams and Drama of the LeBron Lakers. His work has appeared in outlets such as The Ringer, Bleacher Report, Yahoo Sports, FOX Sports, The New Yorker, and GQ, and was recognized in 2020's "The Best American Sports Writing." None of this, however, matches his career highlight of being the ESPN Radio college intern tasked with delivering Stephen A. Smith his daily bag of Cheez Doodles.

At Lit Hub Weitzman tagged five classic basketball "books that moved me the first time I read them and have stayed with me ever since." One title on the list:

Jack McCallum, :07 Seconds or Less

This is one of those books that I still can’t believe happened. McCallum, a longtime NBA writer for Sports Illustrated, and not only just one of the best to ever do it but one of those writers beloved and revered by his peers, somehow convinced Phoenix Suns head coach Mike D’Antoni to let him embed with the team’s coaching staff for the 2005-06 season. This may sound simple, and may sound common; it’s far from both. The more sports have grown over the years, the more access has been limited, to the point where, around the turn of the century, reporters had to start fighting to hold on to the ability to talk to a team’s star player after games. And yet here was McCallum spending a season in coaches meetings, team bus rides and player huddles.

McCallum was the perfect writer for this, too. No one is better at mixing sharp analysis with simple, joyful and lighthearted prose. You can feel McCallum saying, Can you believe I’m in this room right now?! and his eagerness to bring readers along for the ride. So many basketball books—my own included—pitch themselves as true windows into how that world operates. But none of us get anything close to the access that McCallum received, and no one was better equipped to take advantage of it all. Given how big the sports industry has become, and how guarded and corporate that world has become, I think :07 Seconds or Less will likely end up being the last of its kind.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Jaime Parker Stickle's "Vicious Cycle"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Vicious Cycle: A Thriller by Jaime Parker Stickle.

About the book, from the publisher:

A former reporter gets a new spin on life in this gripping debut from author Jaime Parker Stickle, whose psychological roller-coaster ride set in sunny Los Angeles tackles motherhood and murder.

New mother Corey Tracey-Lieberman wakes up to nightmarish news: two teenage girls found hanged in a nearby park. Even more unsettling is how the news casually casts the tragedy as the result of increasing street crime, as if the victims’ lives didn’t really matter.

Corey knows better. In the six years she’s lived in Highland Park, she’s seen gentrification but no uptick in criminal activity. A former broadcast journalist, she knows all about spin―and not just the media kind. She now teaches spin classes in the neighborhood, between caring for her nine-month-old son and battling postpartum anxiety.

When police efforts fall short, Corey launches her own investigation into the hangings, flexing her idle sleuthing skills with baby in tow. And after a third murder strikes too close to home, she knows she’s onto something big.

An emotional gut punch tempered by belly laughs, Vicious Cycle is a tour de force certain to thrill all readers.

Visit Jaime Parker Stickle's website.

My Book, The Movie: Vicious Cycle.

The Page 69 Test: Vicious Cycle.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Wendell Marsh's "Textual Life"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Textual Life: Islam, Africa, and the Fate of the Humanities by Wendell Marsh.

About the book, from the publisher:

Textual Life is a groundbreaking book that recasts the role of knowledge in the making of a colonial and postcolonial nation. It makes a case for a new literary and intellectual-historical approach to Islam in Africa.

The Senegalese Muslim scholar Shaykh Musa Kamara (1864–1945) wrote History of the Blacks, a monumental history of West Africa, in a time when colonial discourses asserted that Africans lacked both writing and history. He sought to publish a bilingual Arabic and French edition of the book by working with humanists in colonial institutions, but the project was ultimately undermined by the disregard of the French state.

Textual Life considers Kamara’s story as a parable about the fate of the humanities amid epistemic and technological change. Wendell H. Marsh argues that Kamara’s scholarship reflected what he calls the textual attitude, an orientation to the world mediated by reading. Colonial humanists shared this attitude even while upholding racial and religious hierarchies, and they took an interest in African texts and traditions. The bureaucrats and technocrats who succeeded them, however, disdained such dialogue―for reasons that bear a striking resemblance to the algorithmic antihumanism that is ascendant today.

Drawing on Kamara’s body of work, colonial archival documents, and postcolonial knowledge production within Senegal, Textual Life offers a decolonial vision of the humanities. By engaging with African and Muslim intellectual resources, Marsh shows how thinkers like Kamara who were subjected to colonialism can help us find a future after empire.

Visit Wendell H. Marsh's website and learn more about Textual Life at the Columbia University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Textual Life.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven books about the power of political imagination

Mai Serhan is the author of CAIRO: the undelivered letters, winner of the 2022 Center for Book Arts Poetry Chapbook Award and I Can Imagine It For Us, a finalist for the 2022 Narratively Memoir Prize. Her writing has appeared in The London Magazine, The Adroit Journal, Magma Poetry, The Oxford Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine and elsewhere.

At Electric Lit Serhan tagged seven titles about the power of political imagination. One book on the list:

House of Stone by Anthony Shadid

This memoir caught me off guard. I began reading it at Beirut airport and was in tears within the first few pages. Leaving Beirut is always emotionally charged for me. It’s my family’s adopted home following their exile from Palestine, the city of my father’s youth, and where my aunt, the last surviving member of our Nakba generation, still lives, though she now has dementia. In this elegantly written memoir, Shadid returns to his ancestral home in Southern Lebanon, once a splendid Ottoman structure, now destroyed by Israeli bombardment, to rebuild it. The act of rebuilding becomes a meditation on memory, ancestry, migration to America, and the destruction wrought by occupation and war. In my memoir, I too rebuild my ancestral home, word by word, as a way to meditate on loss and return. Like Matar, Shadid showed me how a sentence can carry grief, and still land in grace.

Read about another entry on the list.

House of Stone is among Naji Bakhti's top ten books about Lebanon and Tatjana Soli's six favorite books that conjure exotic locales.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Ian Chorão reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Ian Chorão, author of When We Talk to the Dead: A Novel.

One novel he mentions:

The Shining by Stephen King. I know, strange that I've never read it. Usually my experience is seeing a movie of a book I love, but this is the reverse--I know the movie by heart, so I have to actively push it out of my head, so I can read the actual book. What is really great about it is how down to earth the characters and tone of the story are. Planting the supernatural in a very naturalistic setting makes the impact of the horror so much more intense. And I love how much he enjoys giving space to the...[read on]

About When We Talk to the Dead, from the publisher:

The island was abandoned years ago–but something dark was left behind, and it’s waiting for those bold enough to return.

Perfect for fans of Iain Reid, this slow-burning horror novel will sweep you out, and like a churning ocean, before you realize, it will pull you under its turbulent spell.

A remote deserted island off the coast of Maine holds dark memories and disturbing secrets for the family who once lived on its rocky shores. Though nineteen-year-old Sally de Gama remembers nothing about the accident that took place on Captain’s Island and destroyed her family when she was a little girl, she suffers from intense anxiety, pervasive bouts of dissociation, and gruesome nightmares.

All Sally knows is that her mother hasn’t spoken since the accident that took the life of Sally’s twin sister. Following the tragedy, her family fled and never looked back.

When her mother suddenly dies, Sally and three college friends travel to the island–for her friends it’s an adventure to a strange, abandoned place. For Sally, it’s a desperate bid to recover some of her memories and understand what really happened to her family. But when memories begin to return, Sally is overcome by grief and rage that threaten to plunge her into madness–a madness that is fed by a malevolent presence stalking them on the island.

Follow Ian Chorão on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.

Writers Read: Ian Chorão.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jaime Parker Stickle's "Vicious Cycle," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Vicious Cycle: A Thriller by Jaime Parker Stickle.

The entry begins:

I love to think about casting once I am deeply into the characters. I hold back in the beginning, mostly because the characters must form themselves. Once they have become a second language to me, I begin to hear them in my dreams, in music (lyrics become conversations between all my characters) then I can start to think about the dream cast. As a screenwriter and actor myself who has done a bit of casting for projects, I wouldn’t for a second dismiss the possibility of a series or film. I think it would be an incredible feat.

For my protagonist, Corey, who is a new mom in her late thirties, I really thought about someone who had the confidence, life experience, and vulnerability it would take to play a character that suffers from severe postpartum anxiety and panic attacks while caring for her newborn and solving a murder and immediately thought Christina Hendricks based on her role in Good Girls. It was a slam dunk for me and I often picture her delivering the lines while I write. Today, I think a lot about Brianne Howey from Ginny and Georgia. She definitely has the hutzpah and attitude to embrace a character as complex as Corey.

Corey’s husband, Evan, is already based on...[read on]

Visit Jaime Parker Stickle's website.

My Book, The Movie: Vicious Cycle.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven historical horror novels inspired by true events

C. J. Cooke is an award-winning poet and novelist published in twenty-three languages. She teaches creative writing at the University of Glasgow, where she also researches the impact of motherhood on women’s writing and creative writing interventions for mental health.

Cooke's newest novel is The Last Witch.

At CrimeReads she tagged seven novels "that not only chill but also takes a long hard look at the histories that have haunted us for centuries," including:

Karen Maitland, Company of Liars

When the Black Death arrives in England, nine strangers band together on the road, each hiding secrets as they flee north to outrun the pestilence. But the further they travel, the more it becomes clear that the danger lies not only in the plague, but in the lies, betrayals, and sins carried within the group.

Maitland blends folklore, medieval superstition, and historical detail into a dark fable about human frailty and fear, where survival comes at a terrible price.

Read about another novel on Cooke's list.

Company of Liars is among Laura Purcell's ten top historical crime novels.

The Page 69 Test: Company of Liars.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Celene Reynolds's "Unlawful Advances"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Unlawful Advances: How Feminists Transformed Title IX by Celene Reynolds.

About the book, from the publisher:

The remarkable story of the women who defined sexual harassment as unlawful sex discrimination under Title IX

When the US Congress enacted Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, no one expected it to become a prominent tool for confronting sexual harassment in schools. Title IX is the civil rights law that prohibits education programs from discriminating “on the basis of sex.” At the time, however, the term “sexual harassment” was not yet in use; this kind of misconduct was simply accepted as part of life for girls and women at schools and universities. In Unlawful Advances, Celene Reynolds shows how the women claiming protection under Title IX made sexual harassment into a form of sex discrimination barred by the law. Working together, feminist students and lawyers fundamentally changed the right to equal opportunity in education and schools’ obligations to ensure it.

Drawing on meticulously documented case studies, Reynolds explains how Title IX was applied to sexual harassment, linking the actions of feminists at Cornell, Yale, and Berkeley. Through analyses of key lawsuits and an original dataset of federal Title IX complaints, she traces the evolution of sexual harassment policy in education—from the early applications at elite universities to the growing sexual harassment bureaucracies on campuses today—and how the work of these feminists has forever shaped the law, university governance, and gender relations on campus. Reynolds argues that our political and interpretive struggle over this application of Title IX is far from finished. Her account illuminates this ongoing effort, as well as the more general process by which citizens can transform not only the laws that govern us, but also the very meaning of equality under American law.

Learn more about Unlawful Advances at the Princeton University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Unlawful Advances.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight fictional books that read like reality TV

Natalie Zutter is a playwright and pop culture critic whose work has appeared on Reactor, NPR Books, Lit Hub, and elsewhere.

At Paste magazine she tagged eight fictional works that read like reality television. One title on the list:

All This and More by Peng Shepherd
For Fans of: Trading Spaces crossed with MTV’s Made

While the premise of this thriller utilizes quantum technology to let one woman explore parallel universes, the rules are all reality TV: unhappy fortysomething Marsh is allowed to jump from one “Bubble” to the next, trying on careers and men like outfits she will discard, but there must be continuity. In comes the Show Bible, which collects her every branching path and the consequences that ripple out from each choice. Add a peanut gallery of viewers watching and commenting on her every move in real-time, and it’s enough to make even the most vast and promising Bubble feel downright claustrophobic.

A setup this trippy feels like a throwback to early-2000s reality TV, in which normal people got to switch places, transform each others’ spaces, and beg TV networks to help them achieve their dreams… then decide if the dream is better than their previous reality.

Read about another book on the list.

The Page 69 Test: All This and More.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Vicki Delany's "O, Deadly Night"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: O, Deadly Night: A Year-Round Christmas Mystery by Vicki Delany.

About the book, from the publisher:

’Tis the season for mischief and murder in the eighth Year-Round Christmas mystery from national bestselling author Vicki Delany.

It’s Christmastime in Rudolph, New York, which means it’s time for the December Santa Claus parade. This year, shop owner Merry Wilkinson has decided to decorate her float as Santa’s elves' workshop and invites her landlady, Mabel D’Angelo, to help supervise the excited children playing the elves. But when Mrs. D’Angelo doesn’t show up, Merry begins to worry.

Worry quickly turns into frustration when Mrs. D’Angelo reveals she was delayed by new neighbors moving in. As the center for all things gossip, Mrs. D’Angelo is determined to introduce the new arrivals to the neighborhood. As the days pass, Mrs. D’Angelo notices strange things about the newcomers, but Merry, busier than an elf in Santa’s workshop, has little time for matters that really don’t concern her. But things turn from jolly to downright concerning when Mrs. D’Angelo disappears, and Merry is forced to admit that something might be terribly wrong.

With family and friends counting on her during this stressful holiday season, it is up to Merry to make sure this Christmas doesn’t end up wrapped in blood red.

Visit Vicki Delany's website, and follow her on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.

The Page 69 Test: Rest Ye Murdered Gentlemen.

The Page 69 Test: A Scandal in Scarlet.

The Page 69 Test: Murder in a Teacup.

Writers Read: Vicki Delany (September 2021).

The Page 69 Test: Deadly Summer Nights.

The Page 69 Test: The Game is a Footnote.

Writers Read: Vicki Delany (January 2023).

Writers Read: Vicki Delany (January 2024).

The Page 69 Test: The Sign of Four Spirits.

The Page 69 Test: A Slay Ride Together With You.

Writers Read: Vicki Delany (December 2024).

The Page 69 Test: The Incident of the Book in the Nighttime.

Writers Read: Vicki Delany (July 2025).

The Page 69 Test: Tea with Jam & Dread.

Writers Read: Vicki Delany.

The Page 69 Test: O, Deadly Night.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Addie E. Citchens

From my Q&A with Addie E. Citchens, author of Dominion: A Novel:

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

The title Dominion shoves readers into the book, and ultimately, for me, the moral of the story is that the concept of dominion itself is both relative to the forces at hand and dependent upon the willingness of other entities to be subjected. I don’t know if I’m supposed to say this, but I have a love/hate relationship with my title. It feels powerful, yet literal. The first title, or rather the working title was In the Image of the Beast, which also felt literal, though, so I don’t know. I’ve never been good at titles. Dominion was a joint effort, which I could dig, but I sometimes wish I would have held out until we could come up with something even harder and more poignant.

What's in a name?

Emanuel’s name is the most deliberately chosen in Dominion, but...[read on]

Visit Addie E. Citchens's website.

Q&A with Addie E. Citchens.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten titles featuring devils, doppelgängers, ghosts, and creepy dolls

Laura Venita Green is a writer and translator with an MFA from Columbia University, where she was an undergraduate teaching fellow. Her fiction won the Story Foundation Prize, received a Pushcart Prize Special Mention, and appears in The Missouri Review, Story, Joyland, Fatal Flaw, and translated to Italian in Spazinclusi. Her translations appear in World Literature Today and The Apple Valley Review. Born in San Angelo, TX, she's lived in New Orleans and now lives with her husband in New York City. Sister Creatures is her debut novel.

At Electric Lit Green tagged "ten books, all published within the last decade, feature some sort of entity or presence that looms over the lives of their characters, and they’re all incredibly enjoyable reads." One title on the list:

The Need by Helen Phillips

I have a theory that every one of us contains a doppelgänger story, and Phillips’s is one of the best. Molly, a paleobotanist and mother of two small children, works

in a fossil quarry called the Pit, where, in addition to ancient plant life, they discover objects that are just slightly…off: a Coca-Cola bottle with the wrong font, a plastic toy soldier manufactured with a monkey’s tail, a wrongly-shaped Altoids tin, a Bible with one conspicuous alteration. The Bible in particular brings more visitors and more funding to the Pit, but it also brings a fair share of hostility. These work stresses bleed into Molly’s home life, where an unwelcome presence enters and threatens the wellbeing of her children. With one of the tensest openings I’ve ever read, The Need explores the bewilderment and dread of motherhood, of caretaking, of being responsible for such tiny, vulnerable bodies.

Read about another book on the list.

The Need is among Clare Beams's nine titles about haunted motherhood, Chin-Sun Lee's five top gothic novels about distressed women, Ainslie Hogarth's eight novels about monstrous mothers, Amanda Mactas's five top horror novels driven by maternal instinct, Michael J. Seidlinger's top ten terrifying home invasions in fiction.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Lars Cornelissen's "Neoliberalism and Race"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Neoliberalism and Race by Lars Cornelissen.

About the book, from the publisher:

Lars Cornelissen argues that the category of race constitutes an organizing principle of neoliberal ideology. Using the methods of intellectual history and drawing on insights from critical race studies, Cornelissen explores the various racial constructs that structure neoliberal ideology, some of which are explicit, while others are more coded. Beginning in the interwar period and running through to recent developments, Neoliberalism and Race shows that racial themes have always pervaded neoliberal thinking. The book's key argument is that neoliberal thought is constitutively racialized―its racial motifs cannot be extracted from neoliberalism without rendering it theoretically and politically incoherent. The book aptly explores a wide variety of racial constructs through the structure of neoliberal ideology, deconstructing the conceptualizations in the works of landmark thinkers such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Peter Bauer, Thomas Sowell, Charles Murray, and others from the early twentieth century to the present. In this original―perhaps controversial―critique, Cornelissen asserts that neoliberal thinkers were not just the passive recipients of racial discourse, but also directly impacted it.

Learn more about Neoliberalism and Race at the Stanford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Neoliberalism and Race.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: John A McDermott's "The Last Spirits of Manhattan"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Last Spirits of Manhattan: A Novel by John A McDermott.

About the book, from the publisher:

Based on a true story, this sparkling and witty novel whisks you to 1956 Manhattan, where famed director Alfred Hitchcock is hosting a star-studded party in an allegedly haunted house...only for the soiree to be interrupted by a ghostly party crasher.

After fleeing her mundane life in the Midwest, Carolyn Banks finds herself in her enigmatic great-aunts’ eerie mansion on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Inside its crumbling façade, suspense director Alfred Hitchcock is throwing a party, gleefully informing his celebrity guests that the venue is supposedly haunted. It all seems like a fun gag, but Carolyn knows that the line between reality and the supernatural is dangerously blurred here.

Soon, the paranormal entities are mingling with guests like Charles Addams and Henry Fonda. As Carolyn grapples with romantic entanglements and ghostly encounters, she discovers long-buried family secrets, challenging her understanding of love, loyalty, and legacy. A striking mix of the haunting and the heartwarming, The Last Spirits of Manhattan is an unputdownable novel about a family reunion unlike any other, set against the bewitching backdrop of 1950s New York City.

Visit John A. McDermott's website.

Q&A with John A. McDermott.

The Page 69 Test: The Last Spirits of Manhattan.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Vicki Delany reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Vicki Delany, author of O, Deadly Night: A Year-Round Christmas Mystery.

Her entry begins:

I rarely read a book twice, even one I’ve enjoyed enormously. But somehow this fall I found myself returning to a couple of old favourites.

Keeping Watch by Laurie R King came out originally in 2003 and it had an enormous impact on me at the time. I decided to re-read it again and found it just as powerful as on first reading. King is best known for her Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes books, but she’s written quite a few others as well. This is now called Book 2 of a series, but it’s much more of a standalone. The protagonist is a Vietnam War vet, traumatised by an atrocity he took part in, and all these years later still trying to find redemption. It deals with the trauma of...[read on]

About O, Deadly Night, from the publisher:

’Tis the season for mischief and murder in the eighth Year-Round Christmas mystery from national bestselling author Vicki Delany.

It’s Christmastime in Rudolph, New York, which means it’s time for the December Santa Claus parade. This year, shop owner Merry Wilkinson has decided to decorate her float as Santa’s elves' workshop and invites her landlady, Mabel D’Angelo, to help supervise the excited children playing the elves. But when Mrs. D’Angelo doesn’t show up, Merry begins to worry.

Worry quickly turns into frustration when Mrs. D’Angelo reveals she was delayed by new neighbors moving in. As the center for all things gossip, Mrs. D’Angelo is determined to introduce the new arrivals to the neighborhood. As the days pass, Mrs. D’Angelo notices strange things about the newcomers, but Merry, busier than an elf in Santa’s workshop, has little time for matters that really don’t concern her. But things turn from jolly to downright concerning when Mrs. D’Angelo disappears, and Merry is forced to admit that something might be terribly wrong.

With family and friends counting on her during this stressful holiday season, it is up to Merry to make sure this Christmas doesn’t end up wrapped in blood red.

Visit Vicki Delany's website, and follow her on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.

The Page 69 Test: Rest Ye Murdered Gentlemen.

The Page 69 Test: A Scandal in Scarlet.

The Page 69 Test: Murder in a Teacup.

Writers Read: Vicki Delany (September 2021).

The Page 69 Test: Deadly Summer Nights.

The Page 69 Test: The Game is a Footnote.

Writers Read: Vicki Delany (January 2023).

Writers Read: Vicki Delany (January 2024).

The Page 69 Test: The Sign of Four Spirits.

The Page 69 Test: A Slay Ride Together With You.

Writers Read: Vicki Delany (December 2024).

The Page 69 Test: The Incident of the Book in the Nighttime.

Writers Read: Vicki Delany (July 2025).

The Page 69 Test: Tea with Jam & Dread.

Writers Read: Vicki Delany.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top adult novels featuring young sleuths

Tom Ryan is an internationally best selling, award winning author, screenwriter and producer. His adult mystery debut The Treasure Hunters Club (2024) was an instant USA Today, Globe & Mail, and Toronto Star bestseller and a 2025 Edgar Award nominee. His YA mystery Keep This to Yourself (2019) was the winner of the 2020 ITW Thriller Award for Best YA Thriller, the 2020 Arthur Ellis Award for Best YA Crime Book, and the 2021 Ann Connor Brimer Award. His follow-up YA mystery I I Hope You're Listening (2020) was the winner of the 2021 Lambda “Lammy” Award for Best LGBTQ Mystery.

Ryan’s latest novel is We Had a Hunch.

At CrimeReads the author tagged "six of my favorite adult novels featuring young sleuths." One novel on the list:

Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Part coming-of-age story, part twisty whodunnit, Special Topics follows Blue van Meer, a precocious teen who finds herself unraveling the mysterious death of a beloved teacher. It’s clever, funny, packed with literary Easter eggs, and impossible to put down, with an ending I didn’t see coming.

Read about another novel on the list.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics is among 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 Kathleen S. Allen

From my Q&A with Kathleen S. Allen, author of The Resurrectionist: A Tale of Gothic Horror:

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

The title sets up an image in the reader’s mind that this is a story about a resurrectionist, which it is. I went through many title changes before my agent suggested the current title....

The book cover goes further in that readers will guess it’s about a young woman in Victorian times trying to become a resurrectionist. Yet, there’s something sinister as evidenced by the bloody scalpel in her hand and the blood spots on her gown and handkerchief she carries. The Masquerade Venetian half mask she wears also suggests...[read on]

Visit Kathleen S. Allen's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Resurrectionist.

My Book, The Movie: The Resurrectionist.

Writers Read: Kathleen S. Allen.

Q&A with Kathleen S. Allen.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Kate Haulman's "The Mother of Washington in Nineteenth-Century America"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Mother of Washington in Nineteenth-Century America by Kate Haulman.

About the book, from the publisher:

In May 1894, President Grover Cleveland gave a speech thanking those who gathered “to worship at this national shrine.” He was not referring to the battlefields at Gettysburg or Antietam, nor to Mount Vernon, but to the gravesite of Mary Ball Washington, mother of George. While dedicating the new monument that marked it in Fredericksburg, Virginia, Cleveland honored “the woman who gave our Nation its greatest and best citizen.” There could be no clearer valorization of eighteenth-century republican motherhood and its centrality to the nation's origin story.

The Mother of Washington in Nineteenth-Century America examines the role of motherhood in the commemoration of the American Revolution by tracing the creation and evolution of the Mother of Washington figure. Kate Haulman explores the nineteenth-century memory of an eighteenth-century woman known for and through her famous son, the nation's first president. Underpinned by a canon of stories about Mary that often involved George, the monument and the figure it memorialized overlapped, sometimes in surprising and even paradoxical ways. In print, in images, and on the landscape, memorializing Mary foregrounded maternal ideals based in traditional gender roles and ancestry in the public memory of the nation's founding. As some women framed their engagement with the state in maternal terms, other men and women used the Mother of Washington to link the virtues she represented to the nation's origins. Women memorialists finally took up the cause to complete the monument, finishing what elite men had begun decades earlier.

Then as now, groups used the past to construct American motherhood, as well as using motherhood to engage with the founding past. The Mother of Washington in Nineteenth-Century America offers fresh arguments about gender, race, and the politics of Revolutionary history and memory still contested 250 years later.

Learn more about The Mother of Washington in Nineteenth-Century America at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Mother of Washington in Nineteenth-Century America.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight horror books about the power of nature & the environment

Leah Rachel von Essen is an editor, writer, and book reviewer. She is a copyeditor and fact-checker at Encyclopedia Britannica, as well as a contributing editor, Adult Books, for American Library Association’s magazine Booklist. She writes regularly for Chicago Review of Books and is a senior contributor at Book Riot.

At Book Riot she tagged eight horror reads about the power of nature and the environment. One title on the list:

Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer

Nature is absolutely trying to kill you in the Southern Reach novels (it’s a series, but you can read this one on its own as well). Four female explorers are part of the 12th expedition to attempt to explore the menacing Area X, a place that nature has fully reclaimed. Why did previous expeditions go mad? What lurks in this dark swamp of a past, in the lighthouse, in the tower? Mystery, decay, horrible insects, a green that infiltrates you, a mold that can write. It’s full of shudders and Lovecraftian horror, the kind that you feel in the pit of your stomach when confronted by the uncanny.

Read about another entry on the list.

Annihilation is among Nina Allan's top ten strangest alien invasion novels, Martin MacInnes's top ten visionary books about scientists, John Searles's five novels set in abandoned places, Rin Chupeco's five top stories where nature does its best to kill you, and Nicholas Royle's ten top lighthouses in fiction.

--Marshal Zeringue

Third reading: D.W. Buffa on "The Use And Abuse Of History" by Friedrich Nietzsche

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

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

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

Buffa's latest take in his "Third Reading" series is on "The Use And Abuse Of History" by Friedrich Nietzsche. It begins:

Everyone now understands that nothing in the past was what it should have been. No one in the past, none of those whose names are still remembered, measured up, fully measured up, to what we today understand are the standards all decent, right thinking people should meet. Washington and Jefferson, all the others who were once given credit for their commitment to the cause of freedom, either owned slaves themselves or did nothing to bring slavery to an end. History, especially American history, the history that was taught to children in schools and to everyone else in Fourth of July orations, was, if not a conscious lie, a failure to see things as they really were.

What everyone now understands, what everyone now thinks he knows, is not, surprising as it may seem, a new discovery, an original insight of the present age; it is what Friedrich Nietzsche went to war against a hundred fifty years ago. In "The Use And Abuse Of History," the second of four essays known collectively as Thoughts Out Of Season, Nietzsche complained about “unreflective people who write as historians in the naive faith that, according to all popular opinions, their age is right, and that to write in conformity with this age amounts to exactly the same thing as being just.” It is worse than that; the historians want more than to criticize, they want to condemn. “Measuring past opinions and deeds according to the widespread opinions of the present moment is what these naive historians call ‘objectivity.’ It is there that they discover the cannons of all truth; their aim is to force the past to fit the mold of their fashionable triviality.” And as to the worth of these historians, the worth, we must add, of our own over-confident historians, he remarks, “every man’s vanity is directly proportional to his lack of intelligence.” They believe, mistakenly, that, in the present, they stand higher than those in the past, when, instead, they “merely come after them.”

The belief that the present is in all important respects superior to the past would once have been thought a mark of ignorance. The Greeks, the Romans, the Bible, spoke, if in different ways, of...[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".

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Randee Dawn's "Leave No Trace"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Leave No Trace by Randee Dawn.

About Leave No Trace, from the publisher:

Seventeen-year-old Lexi has been living in a remote stretch of the Rocky Mountain woods since her father dragged her there ten years ago, after her mother and baby brother were afflicted with a magical sickness. Her paranoid father thinks they've escaped the magic, and that as long as they never leave the woods, they'll be safe.

So Lexi never tells him about her friend Gil, who turns up sometimes in a birch copse that travels with him, and who is definitely not human. She especially doesn't mention the magic he taught her, which can open a path to wherever she needs to go. After all, she's been in the woods for most of her life: she can find her way without magic.

But when pop star TJ Furey hires them to help him hunt down a bear, Lexi's secret is threatened. The bear he wants to kill is under Gil's protection, and if Lexi doesn't prevent its death, she'll never see Gil again. But she can't do so without risking her father's wrath – and when it turns out that TJ's manager is harboring a similar grudge of his own, Lexi feels trapped. If she wants her own life, she'll have to find a way to break all their expectations.

Leave No Trace plays the clash of worlds – magic and technology, future and past, rural and urban – against the backdrop of a bear hunt.

Visit Randee Dawn's website.

The Page 69 Test: Tune in Tomorrow.

Q&A with Randee Dawn.

My Book, The Movie: Tune in Tomorrow.

Writers Read: Randee Dawn.

My Book, The Movie: Leave No Trace.

The Page 69 Test: Leave No Trace.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lukas Gage's four favorite celebrity memoirs

Lukas Gage is an actor/writer/producer who is best known for his role in the first season of the Emmy Award–winning HBO limited series, The White Lotus. Gage also starred in Netflix’s You; Euphoria on HBO; Daniel Goldhaber’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline; Down Low for FilmNation, which he cowrote and stars opposite Zach Quinto and Simon Rex; and Fargo on FX/HULU. Gage can also be seen in the remake of Road House for Amazon/MGM, Smile 2 for Paramount, and the highly anticipated film, Rosebush Pruning.

Gage's new memoir, I Wrote This for Attention, "details his upbringing in the west coast—including a broken family, struggles with addiction, sex, borderline personality disorder—and his commitment to being the center of attention at all times, even as he actually becomes a star."

At Lit Hub Gage tagged four celebrity memoirs that "didn’t just entertain me; they also gave me permission to overshare, to own my most cringe qualities, and to actually embrace them." One title on the list:

Demi Moore, Inside Out

Demi doesn’t sugarcoat a thing. Addiction, breakdowns, heartbreak… and she spills it all. You expect Hollywood glam, but what you really get is someone clawing their way back to themselves. And the way she writes (and reads on Audible, in that raspy, velvety voice) is both brutal and beautiful.

Read about another entry on the list.

Inside Out is among Daniel D’Addario's nine books that take you inside the entertainment industry.

--Marshal Zeringue