Between Two Fires. Christopher Buehlman. Ace Books, 2012. 433 pages.
I came across this book in a social media recommendation reel and decided to check it out. It's an historical fiction horror novel set in France in 1348, when the country, and much of Europe, is being mercilessly trampled by the Four Horsemen: War, Famine, Death, and Pestilence. Pestilence, in this case, is the Black Death, or bubonic plague. Lucifer and other demons have unleashed the plague on the earth as part of their latest war against God, angels, and humanity. Thomas, a disgraced and excommunicated knight who has lost his land and family, encounters and rescues an orphan girl named Delphine. Delphine latches on to Thomas, telling him that angels have told her that she has to go to Avignon to do something to save the world, but she doesn't know what, and he has to help her. What kind of knight can resist that? So, they set out on their quest, and they're soon joined by Father Matthieu, a disgraced priest. Together, the three face various dangers, human and monster, before they arrive in Avignon for a major showdown with a demon who has inhabited the body of the Pope. Armed with assistance from the angels, Thomas' strength and experience, and a holy relic picked up on the journey, the heroes do, in fact, change the world. It all makes for a fast read, a good historical fantasy. I recommend it for fantasy readers looking for a good adventure.
Blood and the Badge: The Mafia, Two Killer Cops, and a Scandal That Shocked the Nation. Michael Cannell. Minotaur Books, 2025. 368 pages.
In Brooklyn in the 1980s, two of the dirtiest cops ever to serve in the New York City Police Department operated without check. Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa were detectives in the major crimes division, specializing in organized crime. At the same time, they were also on the payroll of a boss in the Lucchese crime family. He called them his "crystal ball" because they used their position to secure sensitive information about city, state, and federal investigations and passed it on, ensuring that he always stayed at least one step ahead. A big part of that information was the identities of snitches, associates that chose to violate their sacred oath of secrecy and loyalty, called the omerta, and flip on their mob bosses, trading details of criminal activities for reduced sentences or witness protection. Whenever a canary sang, Eppolito and Caracappa knew about it and informed their boss. The boss then took action. Dozens of canaries were murdered. On some occasions, the bad cops volunteered to do the jobs themselves, for extra pay. Meanwhile, they continued receiving accolades, commendations, and promotions for their police work. Justice didn't catch up to them until almost two decades after they retired. This is an absolutely incredible story that no screenwriter could even conceive of, and it's all true, and it's an immersion into an unbelievable world, a world in which organized crime is pervasive and dominates every aspect of daily life. After reading this book, it's hard NOT to believe that every single Italian from New York and New Jersey is either mob-affiliated or at least mob-adjacent. As deadly as this world is, it's also extremely ridiculous. The story rivals anything ever written by Tim Dorsey or Carl Hiaasen, for example, in their Florida man comedic crime fiction. Mob nicknames alone make this a great read. The real life mobsters involved in this story include Bagels, Bubble Gum, Fat Pete, Fat Anthony, Big Mike, Fat Gangster, Flounder Head, Duck, Quack Quack, Gas Pipe, and The Toupee. I highly recommend this book.
Author Talk
The Incorruptibles: A True Story of Kingpins, Crime Busters, and the Birth of the American Underworld. Dan Slater. Little, Brown, and Company, 2024. 432 pages.
American organized crime, as we've come to think of it, had its origins in the slums and tenements of the Lower East Side of New York City in the early 1900s, prior to World War I. From the late 1800s, thousands of eastern and southern Europeans arrived and created the most crowded ghetto on earth. Many were Russian Jews, escaping the centuries of discrimination, pogroms, and forced military service. They often found work in the sweatshops of the garment district or performed some other manual labor. Some, however, moved into criminal activities like gambling, pimping and prostitution, and drugs. Graft, corruption, and violent turf wars ensued, and organized crime was born. Author Dan Slater dives deep into that subject and marks the 1912 murder of bookmaker Herman Rosenthal, committed by gunmen hired by a NYC cop in order to prevent him from exposing police corruption, as the defining moment. That murder led the more established German Jewish leadership in the city to launch an all-out war on vice and corruption conducted by the Russian Jews. It's an interesting perspective that I had not been exposed to before. The German Jews had arrived in the early 1800s, and, even though they faced outrageous prejudice, many had achieved levels of wealth, education, and respectability, and they took on a mission to provide charity and assistance to those less fortunate than themselves. They often looked down on the poorer, less educated, and less respectable Russian Jews. The book also does an excellent job of portraying life in Lower East Side New York at the turn of the 20th century.
Author talk
The Art Spy: The Extraordinary Untold Tale of WWII Resistance Hero Rose Valland - A True Account of Her Fight Against Art Theft and Tyranny in WWII Paris. Michelle Young. Harper One, 2025. 400 pages.
You've probably heard of the Monuments Men, the first-of-its-kind unit of curators and art historians tasked with preserving European art treasures threatened by World War II, but you may not know that the most effective "Monuments Man" was a French woman named Rose Valland. As German troops stormed across Europe, Hitler, Hermann Goring, and other assorted German officials and officers systematically stole millions of art works from museums and private collections. Valland, one of France's leading art experts - specializing in 20th century art, risked her life daily during the occupation of Paris and worked tirelessly for years after the war to protect and to locate tens of thousands of works and to return them to their rightful owners. And, yes, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the French Legion of Honor, and many other accolades, her memoir was made into a big 1964 Hollywood action movie, she has things named for her in France, and she's starting to become more well known, but I'm not sure all of that makes up for the incredibly terrible way she was treated during the war, not just by the Germans, but by her own superiors in the French national arts and museums bureaucracy. For most of her career as a curator, not only was she unpaid, but her immediate supervisor actually went out of his way at every opportunity to deny her titles, promotions, and a salary and to make unfounded accusations and negative reviews of her work. Still, she persisted, and when she found herself left solely in charge of the collection at her museum, the Jeu de Paume, she became the most important art spy in France. The Jeu de Paume became the epicenter of art looting in France, not only because of its own collection, but also because it became the central collection point for many of the other works stolen across France. Valland made exhaustive inventories of every work, its legitimate owner, and its planned destination, information that made recovery possible after the war. Her courage and dedication deserve even more illumination, This book provides that and honors her, and it also provides a very thorough history of the looting.
author interview
All Things Left Wild. James Wade. Blackstone Publishing, 2020. 304 pages.
I had never heard of James Wade or of his books before sitting in on a session at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville in October 2025. The subject was historical fiction, and Wade was one of two authors discussing their books. I immediately liked Wade and added his books to my list of books to check out. All Things Left Wild is Wade's debut novel, and it won high critical acclaim and several awards. At the turn of the 20th century on a ranch in Arizona Territory, Shelby Bentley decides to turn criminal and hatches a plan to exact revenge on wealthy rancher Randall Dawson for causing his alcoholic father to lose his sheriff's badge, leading to a tragic downward spiral. When their mother dies, leaving them untethered, Shelby convinces his sixteen year old brother Caleb to join him. The planned robbery goes wrong, of course, and Dawson's young son is killed in the process. The brothers are now murderers on the run, and Dawson sets out after them. Two parallel stories unfold, two separate journeys, As Shelby commits more and more evil, Caleb is torn between his conscience and family loyalty. They ultimately encounter a Mexican girl on the run, and then they fall in with a gang led by a madman who believes that he has been selected by God to create a new world, even if that creation requires murder, rape, kidnapping, and robbery. Meanwhile, Dawson, the reluctant bounty hunter who would have been more comfortable in his home library than on the trail of his son's murderers, crosses paths with Charlotte, a black woman well acquainted with the rugged western landscape and ways and exceedingly well equipped to survive. It took a minute for me to get into this book, but I was soon hooked and drawn in. It's an incredible story, told in beautiful language, and the characters engage in a lot of thoughtful conversations, internally and externally, about the nature of humanity. While Caleb comes of age, Randall comes to grips with his own midlife crisis. This book is just screaming to be made into a blockbuster movie or series. I will definitely be reading more of Wade's novels.
author podcast appearance
Hell Put to Shame: The 1921 Murder Farm Massacre and the Horror of America's Second Slavery. Earl Swift. Mariner Books, 2024. 432 pages.
About a hundred years ago and about twenty minutes from where we used to live, one of the most horrifying and most savage episodes in America's brutal racial history unfolded, and it is almost totally unknown and unrecognized today. In the spring of 1921, the bodies of two drowned young black men, chained together and tied to sacks of stones, were discovered. Over the next few weeks, nine other bodies were discovered, all black men who had been held in bondage and murdered by John S. Williams, one of the largest landowners and most respected men in Jasper County Georgia, a pillar of the community and stalwart member of his Baptist church. Williams was part of the peonage and sharecropping system that arose across the South during Reconstruction, basically a continuation of slavery. Southern states passed laws allowing land- and business owners to pay bails and fines of arrested individuals and employ them until their debts were repaid. Sharecroppers worked land for landowners in exchange for credit and a portion of their crops. White planters needed labor, and they resorted to violence, threats, coercion, and indebtedness due to corrupt accounting to force laborers (black and white) to stay on the farm and to work without pay for years. Williams and his sons kept their workers in check with physical violence and whippings, threatened their lives, locked them in a bunkhouse at night, and hunted down escapees with dogs for years before federal agents showed up to investigate charges of peonage. That visit sparked the 1921 killing spree, but there may have been eighteen or more victims over the years. Shockingly for Georgia in 1921, an investigation ensued, and, incredibly, a Georgia jury did the right thing. Author Earl Swift provides a riveting account of the crimes, the trial, and the national reaction to the horror as the story unfolded. It's also an excellent account of the history of peonage, which still exists today, albeit in slightly different forms. Peonage cases are still investigated and prosecuted in 2026.
Author talk
Four Against the West: The True Saga of a Frontier Family That Reshaped the Nation and Created a Legend. Joe Pappalardo. St. Martin's Press, 2024. 400 pages.
You've probably heard of Judge Roy Bean, the notorious and colorful Justice of the Peace who declared himself "The Only Law West of the Pecos," but you probably didn't know that he was just one of four Bean brothers, and that each brother set out separately from their "old Kentucky home" in the 1840s to go find his own adventure in the West, the wild, untamed frontier beckoning to many young Americans who were driven by a need for adventure. Each brother had that need for adventure in spades, along with a strong helping of wanderlust, and they all had the knack of being able to find action wherever they landed. Each was also driven by an entrepreneurial spirit, an enthusiasm for capitalism, and a desire to do public service. The combination makes for four extremely interesting and noteworthy lives. The brothers become soldiers, judges, husbands, guerillas, lawmen, entrepreneurs, refugees, fathers, politicians, and pioneers, and they experience triumphs and tragedies and condemnation and praise. This is a really great story of the American West and the Bean family's contributions to its legend and history.
Author talk
Everybody Wants to Rule the World. Ace Atkins. William Morrow, 2025. 368 pages.
Now THIS is an Ace Atkins book that I loved! It's a Cold War spy action thriller set in Atlanta in 1985, "The Year of the Spy," inspired by Atkins' own life growing up there and then and by real Cold War espionage events. Who knew that Atlanta in the 80s was crawling with secret agents? Fourteen-year old Peter is convinced that his mother's boyfriend is a dangerous Soviet spy, and he sets out to prove it. Peter's a bit of a nerd, and he enlists the aid of one of his literary heroes, Dennis Hotchner, Hotch, and Hotch's friend, a former Atlanta Falcon and current drag queen named Miss Jackie Demure. Hotch is a once well-known author of gritty pulp fiction action noir novels who's fallen on rough times and into a bit of a creative slump, supporting himself by working at the Oxford Too bookstore, one of my favorite Atlanta institutions of the past. Meanwhile, a woman who works with his mother at an Atlanta company engaged in research on Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, SDI or Star Wars, is murdered. Was Gary, Peter's mother's boyfriend, the murderer? Peter investigates, and soon he, Hotch, and Jackie are dragged in to a complicated web involving the FBI, the CIA, KGB, KGB defectors, sleeper agents, not only putting their lives in danger, but also threatening to derail the upcoming Reagan-Gorbachev summit. This book is full of great action and humor and lots of twists and turns, and it's jam-packed with 80s and Atlanta nostalgia that makes this Gen Xer very happy. (There is one error that stands out, however, when Atkins refers to a highway that didn't open until 1995.) A great read!
Author talk
Not Your Founding Father: How A Nonbinary Minister Became America's Most Radical Revolutionary. Nina Sankovitch. Simon & Schuster, 2026. 400 pages. Thanks to Simon & Schuster for the free review copy.
In Cumberland, Rhode Island in October 1776, 23-year old Jemima Wilkinson was ill, drifting in and out of consciousness. Her family held little hope. Miraculously, she made a full recovery, but she was different. According to Jemima, she had died, but God returned her to earth with a new charge and a new message for humanity. Oh, and Jemima no longer existed. The new messenger of God was genderless and went by the name of Public Universal Friend. Jemima's family had been Quakers, albeit not in good standing in their local meeting house. Two of her brothers had been expelled for violating the Quaker tenet of nonviolence by joining the colonial militia, and a sister had been expelled for having a baby out of wedlock. Friend's family and several friends and neighbors became followers of Friend's new message, and the Society of Universal Friends was born. The Society was one of several religious movements that developed in the late 18th century, including Mother Ann Lee's Shakers, but Friend's philosophy and practices were unique and stood apart. Friend's message seemed to be in keeping with the lofty aspirational goals of the new nation: liberty, self-sufficiency, personal responsibility, and equality of genders and races. Like other new sects such as the Shakers, members of the Society formed their own communities in New England and eventually New York. However, unlike the Shakers, they didn't seek to separate themselves from the rest of the world, and they rejected celibacy, strict rules on behavior, and traditional division of labor by gender. Families and children were encouraged. Women took on leadership roles in Society communities and worship. At its height, the Society had some 6,000 members. It survived Friend's death in 1819 and many tribulations including repeated attacks by critics who often spread false rumors about Friend and society practices, including accusations of corruption, abuse, and even murder, and, more than once, unscrupulous men took advantage of Friend's naivete and reluctance to get involved in business and property transactions to steal Society land and cheat believers before the Society ceased to exist in the 1860s. Although little is known for certain about Friend, who left little personal writing and few copies of sermons, this book is a very interesting biography and a history of the place and time that saw a bloom of religious fervor, expressed in various forms.
Author interview
Hollow Out the Dark. James Wade. Blackstone Publishing, Inc, 2024. 328 pages.
It's rural East Texas in 1932, and the Great Depression is under way. The Preston lumber mill and timber operation that dominates the town economy shuts down, plunging the town deeper into despair. Jesse Cole, a decorated veteran of the Great War, struggles to keep it together -"it" being his farm, his family, and both his own sanity and his own morality code. Up to that point, his life had been all about honoring the memory and spirit of his dead brother, who had taught him that service to others should always take precedence over his own needs. When his childhood friend and fellow WWI trench survivor runs afoul of Squirrel and Frog Fenley, the criminal brothers who run the region's vast moonshining operation and control the town through terror and violence, along with a network of corrupt of law enforcement officers, Jesse is forced into their criminal underworld. Unfortunately, it's at this moment that a rival criminal operation makes its move to take over the Fenley operation and territory, and Jesse is caught in the middle. Also in the middle is Texas Ranger Amon Atkins, assigned to investigate a murder allegedly committed by the Fenleys. Like Jesse, Amon discovers that he is in the middle of something so much bigger, and more deadly. This is excellent southern gothic/noir-ish action read, and I've become a big James Wade fan. His writing is uniquely his, although I think fans of Cormac McCarthy, S.A. Cosby, Walter Mosely, and James Ellroy will be fans of James Wade. His storytelling is first-rate, he excels at description, imagery, and characterization. His stories may start with a slow smolder, but they build to an explosive finale, and the reader is left with questions and lots to ponder about the human condition. And then there's the language. What other author uses phrases like "trammels of encumbrance," "raging rapacity," and, my favorite, the "sorrowed pairing of propinquity and heartache?"
Burn Down Master's House. Clay Cane. Dafina, 2026. 288 pages. Review copy from Kensington Publishing.
Inspired by actual stories, this novel is about the unfathomable brutality and inhumanity of slavery and the violent resistance that it sometimes inspired. It seems that every single sentence contains so much gratuitous soul-crushing hate, wickedness, savagery, and cruelty that readers are left rooting for a giant asteroid to hit the earth and finally end all of humanity and the blight on the universe that humanity is. This book is not for reading for pleasure, nor for education. It's not inspiring, it's not uplifting, it's not a testament to human perseverance, and it's not a "tour de force." This book makes the films "Django Unlimited" and "Mandingo" (1970s exploitation film) look like high art.
No comments:
Post a Comment