Books

In 2022, I read Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, and I, like so many, many others, fell in love with it. So much so that in 2023, I’m looking for more books like it. It’s a lot harder than you think. Tomorrow3 is a pretty unique book. It rests across a few

When you’re not in the mood to tackle a whole novel, reading a short story or two, or 12, can fill the bill. This new Crimeucopia collection from Murderous Ink Press titled We’ll Be Right Back – After This! is a good one to keep on hand for just those situations. Mostly set in the

Anita Yokota is both a licensed counselor and an interior designer, and she marries the two paths ingeniously in Home Therapy. I’ve seen a lot of “happy home” guides seeking to give readers more serenity through organization hacks and design principles, but none pulls in the teachings of therapy to the degree that Yokota’s book

If you love the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game, then you know all about character alignments. You’ve probably played characters from all different kinds of backgrounds will all kinds of motivations. Deciding alignments for your characters can be pretty easy? But figuring out what your own Dungeons & Dragons alignment is? Well, that’s a much

The British crime show Happy Valley wrapped up on Sunday night (5 Feb 2023) with over 7.5 million people tuning in – a hugely successful programme that is already being dubbed Britain’s best police drama. Over its three seasons in 2014, 2016 and 2023, crime fiction lovers have watched Sgt Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire) battle

When a whirlwind romance leads to a brutal murder and the disappearance of a young Nigerian woman, PI Emma Djan resorts to dangerous undercover work to track her down in Accra. Just as things at work are slowing down for PI Emma Djan, an old friend of her boss’s asks for help locating his missing

It’s been a month since my dog passed away. It was unexpected, and it broke my heart. We knew she was sick, but I didn’t think it was anything serious. And then suddenly, during a scheduled vet appointment, we were told she had to be put down that day. Five days before that was her

Infamous for his 1991 novel American Psycho, which pushed psychopathic depravity to new literary depths, Bret Easton Ellis is a controversial author whose work has inspired, or at least informed, a generation of crime novelists – particularly those writing about serial killers. He hasn’t touched on serial killers much since American Psycho, but revisits the

My friend writes a book. It’s a utopian work of speculative fiction, clever and imaginative and hopeful—a brilliant blend of art and activism. I bring flowers to her book launch and find a seat near the back of the cozy community garden where we’re gathered. Even before the reading starts, the space is abuzz with

Journalist Mark Whitaker’s (Smoketown) riveting Saying It Loud: 1966—The Year Black Power Challenged the Civil Rights Movement chronicles a key moment in the movement for racial justice in the United States: the shift in 1966 from the nonviolent organizational tactics associated with Martin Luther King Jr. to an emergent focus on Black Power as a

A powerful picture book about the transatlantic slave trade, Kwame Alexander and Dare Coulter’s An American Story opens with a question: “How do you tell a story that starts in Africa and ends in horror?” It might seem an impossible topic to teach children, and yet, as the book’s title suggests, it’s an essential part

Sixty-seven years after the savage murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi, his cousin still seeks some kind of justice. Haunted by the 1955 hate crime that ignited the civil rights movement, Reverend Wheeler Parker Jr. brings everything and everyone back to life in A Few Days Full of Trouble: Revelations on the Journey to Justice

Journalist and Julia Child’s grandnephew Alex Prud’homme (My Life in France; The French Chef in America) has crafted a finely balanced, scrupulously researched account of gastronomy and culture, history and politics in Dinner With the President: Food, Politics, and a History of Breaking Bread at the White House. Even for those of us who paid

This week across the book banning social media world, a new guidebook to inappropriate books across the state of Iowa has been circulating. This 111 page guidebook, put together by Moms For Liberty in Polk County, reiterates that their quest to remove inappropriate books from schools is not about book banning. Indeed, they use the

How about we get February underway with an action thriller that not only blows the cobwebs away but has the firepower to take out a medium-sized Wagner unit? The eighth Orphan X novel by Gregg Hurwitz should do the trick and if Smoak’s lightning-fast combos aren’t your thing then we’ve got four other books riding

“The Great British Baking Show” meets Knives Out in The Golden Spoon, Jessa Maxwell’s delicious, atmospheric debut. Celebrated baker Betsy Martin has hosted her popular show “Bake Week” from the grounds of Grafton, her Vermont family estate, for the past decade. This year, change is in the air: The network has foisted a new co-host

On January 30, James Gunn and Peter Safran, the new architects of the DC Universe in film and television, announced the first ten projects for the brand-new DC Studios. There had been a lot of speculation leading up to this announcement, given DC’s deep catalog of characters and their consistent failure to, um, make good

The sense of place is so strong in some crime novels that their setting – London, Paris, St Mary Mead – practically becomes one of the characters. In RJ Koreto’s new mystery, The Greenleaf Murders, a Manhattan Gilded Age mansion takes on that role. It’s a non-speaking part, of course, except that the house does

You may have learned in high school that the post-Civil War Reconstruction was an inevitable failure. In her latest book, I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction, historian Kidada E. Williams demonstrates that, far from dying a natural death, Reconstruction was destroyed in a not-so-secret war waged

The American crime author Lea O’Harra has lived in small-town America and small-town Japan, and has used these experiences in her Inspector Inoue novels as well as her latest book, Dead Reckoning. Here she joins us to talk about the parallels, the differences and the feelings such places evoke… The setting of the three novels

When you gaze at the quilted cover of A Flag for Juneteenth, you will want to reach out and touch it. The artwork depicts a girl wearing a fuchsia dress and kerchief standing proudly in front of a flag, the bright colors of her outfit vibrant against the flag’s soft yellows and greens. The girl’s

The Rainbow Round Table is part of the American Library Association. It started in 1970, and every year, it awards both the Stonewall Awards and the Rainbow Book List. The Rainbow Book list is in recognition of exceptional LGBTQ children’s and teen’s books of the previous year. It also provides an annotated list of notable

There’s a balancing act to be performed while reading the House at the End of the World. You may need to keep a dictionary at hand to fathom out some of the little-used words that this author sprinkles liberally through his prose – but on the other hand, you can leave all sense of reality

“We are all just hearts / beating in the darkness.” In All the Beating Hearts, poet Julie Fogliano and illustrator Cátia Chien take readers on an impressionistic journey through a single day, capturing the interior and exterior worlds of humans.  Fogliano’s text captures joy, wonder, tedium and sorrow. “Each day starts with the sun /

The American Library Association has announced the 2023 winners of the Youth Media Awards, including the Newbery, Caldecott, and Printz. These are some of the prestigious awards in children’s literature; the Newbery Medal has been awarded for over 100 years. Here are this year’s winners. Descriptions of each book are from the publisher. John Newbery

The highly-rated RTÉ crime show North Sea Connection is coming to BBC Four in the UK, with the first two episodes airing from 9pm on Saturday 4 February. It’s an ideal series to take in if you enjoy perilous plot lines set in moody, isolated locations on the far-flung fringes of Europe, and this is

On February 28, 2003, as President George W. Bush prepared to authorize military action, he turned to his advisers and asked if they had thought enough about “what they hoped to achieve in Iraq.” Plans were made and carried out, but in a short time, the Iraq policy went awry. Historian Melvyn P. Leffler explores

Dear Stephen King: Last week, you had a tweet take off. I’ve seen it everywhere, including on several giant Facebook pages, Instagram pages, even on TikTok. The tweet, about book banning, is nice and sexy, attempting to break down the problem in under 280 characters. And you know, it was successful! Hey, kids! It’s your

Set in Birmingham in 1933, Needless Alley explores provincial England between the wars from a working class and queer perspective. It’s a debut novel for Natalie Marlow, a Warwickshire-based author whose passion is for stories from the past, and the book is named after a historical street in Birmingham city centre. William Garrett’s stated profession

It can be fun to speculate about nature versus nurture, to consider which of our quirks might be innate and which might have been shaped by where or with whom we grew up. While we’re at it, we can also ponder that well-known question of Shakespearean origin: What’s in a name?  But Shenanigan Swift, the