Sure, you could spend Black Friday battling other shoppers in the stores, or planning your Cyber-Monday purchases. But there’s another alternative for this long weekend: curling up in your favorite reading spot with some leftover pie, a hot beverage, and a great book. And if you need recommendations for a seasonally-appropriate read, we’ve got you…
Mysteries with elderly protagonists are all the rage lately, whether the seniors in question are solving crimes or committing them. So you’d be forgiven for assuming that Deanna Raybourn’s latest, Killers of a Certain Age, was merely chasing a trend, but you’d be wrong – and that’s the whole point. Killers of a Certain Age…
Here is the thing you should know before you read Mary Laura Philpott’s Bomb Shelter: Love, Time, and Other Explosives: Everyone is FINE. Kids, parents, pets: they all make it through. Normally, I am spoiler-averse, but the description of this book does not put one’s mind at ease, especially if, like me, one is prone…
Jaq Walker is an aspiring filmmaker whose subject is her hometown of Savannah, Georgia, a “town out of a fable.” Many of Savannah’s denizens agree – the city does resemble a fairy tale, with its lush beauty, storied history, and high society trappings. But Jaq knows that fairy tales and fables are two very different…
At first glance, The Return of Faraz Ali reads like noir fiction: A police inspector in 1960s Pakistan is sent to the Mohalla, Lahore’s red light district, to cover up the murder of a child prostitute, but his conscience urges him to investigate instead. That is the central mystery of Aamina Ahmad's novel: who killed…
It's fitting that Annie Hartnett was living in a cemetery groundskeeper's cottage when she began writing her sophomore novel, Unlikely Animals -- this quirky, big-hearted novel is narrated by the ghosts of the Maple Street Cemetery. Unable to act but chock-full of opinions, the ghosts take a particular interest in Everton, New Hampshire's prodigal daughter,…
Alma Katsu writes critically acclaimed and deeply creepy horror, so the news that she was switching to espionage for her latest title came as a surprise – until I discovered that Katsu spent thirty five years in the intelligence community. Her inside knowledge of the CIA and other “alphabet agencies” gives every page of Red…
While it is a truth universally acknowledged that I am a scaredy cat, I occasionally read books MOST people would call horror, and others (me) would call Exceedingly Creepy, just for a change of pace. It's February, after all, and if ever there was a time to mix things up, it's now, when the fresh…
Nobody ever notices the maid — until something goes wrong. That’s the premise of The Maid, Nita Prose’s fresh and vastly entertaining debut mystery featuring Molly Gray, an unconventional and often-overlooked housekeeper at a posh big-city hotel whose unique perspective makes her uniquely suited to solve a murder. Adrift and lonely after the death of…
Climate fiction -- stories dealing with the repercussions of climate change -- has been increasingly popular in recent years. From award-winning literary fiction to young adult thrillers, the fallout from global warming and changing weather patterns has given authors plenty to work with. Naturally, science fiction is a natural fit for these types of books,…
