Shelved: Books Read and Reviewed in June 2026

 

Gods of Jade and Shadow.  Silvia Moreno-Garcia.   Del Rey, 2019.  352 pages.

Imagine Cinderella set in Jazz Age Mexico, and you've imagined the kernel at the heart of this story, with one big difference:  the Fairy Godmother in this story is actually the Mayan God of Death, Hun-Kame.  Casiopea Tun and her mother live in her wealthy grandfather's house in the Yucatan, near the state capital of Merida.  Because her mother had married and been widowed by a Mayan commoner beneath her social status, thereby disgracing the family, they were treated like servants by her grandfather and the rest of the family, forced to serve and clean, but Casiopea has dreams of escaping the mundane drudgery.  Left alone one day while the rest of the family was on an outing, she opens a locked chest in her grandfather's room, accidentally releasing Hun-Kame from imprisonment and initiating a link between herself and the god that would transform her life.  Hun-Kame had been overthrown by his twin brother, with the help of Casiopea's grandfather, and imprisoned for eternity in the chest, minus a few particular possessions and body parts which were required for him to retake his rightful place as Lord of the Underworld.  Hum-Kame and Casiopea were now joined, and together they set out on a quest that will take them across Mexico to recover those objects and to eventually defeat the evil usurper and resume his reign.  Along the way, they meet and contend with various Mayan spirits and mythical figures seeking to thwart their quest.  They are also in a race against time since both are weakening as time passes- Hun-Kame is literally draining life from Casiopea, not only gaining the strength required to remain active in the human world, but also becoming more and more mortal in the process.  Finally, Casiopea must defeat her arrogant cousin Martin in a life and death race that will determine the true ruler of the Underworld.  This was a fun blend of mythology, magical realism, and historical fiction.

Author interview

Gates of Fire.  Steven Pressfield.  Doubleday, 1998.  400 pages.

In 480 BC, the Persian Emperor Xerxes led a huge invasion force determined to conquer the Greek city-states.  While ancient chroniclers estimated an army of up to 2 million, it was likely no more than 300,000 in reality.  Opposing them was an allied force of some 7,000 Greeks.  The two forces met at a narrow pass called Thermopylae.  After two days of pitched battle, which left 20,000 Persian troops dead with their bodies piled high and the ground soaked in blood, a Greek traitor revealed a secret route around the pass.  Spartan King Leonidas and 300 of the city's most fierce warriors volunteered to fight to the death in order to delay the Persian army and to allow the other Greeks to retreat and regroup for a future fight.  In Pressfield's novel, there is a lone Greek survivor captured by the Persians and presented to Xerxes.  He was not a warrior, not even a Spartan by birth, but he was a a helot, a slave and the squire of one of the officers.  Xerxes, desiring to learn as much as possible about his enemies, prods the Greek  to tell his version of Spartan history and culture leading up to the battle, revealing the mindset of the Spartan, shaped by a lifetime of unbelievable brutality, beginning in childhood, with the intent of building a culture of hardened warriors, and perhaps even more hardened wives and mothers, who give their lives, without thinking, for their state and for their fellow warriors.  Apparently, this novel is or has been required required reading at the US military academies because of its explorations of courage, fear, leadership, duty, and brotherhood.  It's an epic story.  

podcast appearance

The Wreck of the Mentor:  A True Story of Death, Despair, and Deliverance in the Age of Sail.  Eric Jay Dolin.  Liveright, 2026.  272 pages.  

Outstanding maritime historian Eric Jay Dolin is back with another interesting true tale of the sea.  In 1832, the American whaling ship Mentor wrecked on a remote reef in the Palau archipelago in the western Pacific.  The eleven survivors of the wreck not only had to survive being stranded on a barren island, but they also found themselves in the middle of tribal wars.  European and American contact with the natives of the archipelago had been haphazard since the 1700s.  Some ships' crews were attacked, and some were warmly welcomed.  Some captains and crews treated islanders respectfully and honorably, and some deceived, cheated, and harmed the islanders. It was hard to know how strangers would be received. Indeed, the Mentor's survivors experienced both welcomes and were ultimately captured and enslaved by one of the tribes.  Dolin's written a great account of their ordeal and their survival efforts, and he also informs the reader about the whaling industry and how sailing ships operated in the 19th century.  It's also an interesting look at first contact and culture clashes.

Stories and music of Holocaust Resistance

Partisan Song:  A Holocaust Story of Resilience, Resistance, and Revenge.  James A. Grymes.  Citadel, 2026.  352 pages.  Thanks to Citadel and Kensington Publishing for the free review copy.

In 1941, Moshe Gildenman was an engineer and owner of a concrete company in Korets Ukraine.  In his free time, he was a musician, composer, and the conductor of various school and community orchestras and choruses.  Korets was occupied by German troops on July 8, and they established a Jewish ghetto.  That ghetto was liquidated in May, 1942, and an estimated 2,300 Jews were killed, including Gildenman's wife and daughter.  Gildenman, his son, his nephew and a handful of others escaped into the forest, armed with a couple of pistols and a few bullets, determined to fight back.  Eventually, Gildenman, nicknamed "Uncle Misha," formed a small but highly effective partisan brigade that carried out more than 150 missions including blowing up bridges and other strategic targets.  Although the brigade linked up with other Ukrainian and then Soviet  partisan groups, they still acted independently, under "Uncle Misha's" leadership throughout the war.  On May 2, 1945, he was among the first Soviet troops to walk the streets of Berlin.  Not only is this book a much welcome addition to the library of books about partisan resistance to the Nazis, and a little remembered part at that, but there's also a really interesting hook into the story.  Grymes, the author, is himself a musicologist, a music historian, who discovered the story through his study of Jewish music, and music becomes an important part of the story.  

Editor interview

The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Women:  Stories of Landscape and Community in the Mountain South.  Edited by Kami Ahrens.  The University of North Carolina Press, 2023.  288 pages.  

In 1966, an English teacher in a small rural school in the extreme northeast corner of Georgia published a magazine and created a program that still thrives today, a program designed to collect, to preserve, and to celebrate Appalachian stories, memories, and cultural ways.  The journal, numerous books published over the years, and audio and video interviews and demonstrations have created an invaluable treasury of Appalachian history.  This volume is a collection of 21 oral histories from a variety of women, white, black, and Cherokee who share their lives, memories, and experiences.  The reader feels like he or she is sitting on the porch with the women, maybe shelling peas, shucking corn, or quilting while they tell their stories.  Each story is unique in its own way, but they all reinforce the importance of the land and how it shaped the Appalachian culture.  Their stories are all very familiar to me in various ways, and as I read them, I realize that even though both sides of my family have deep south Georgia roots, they were very Appalachian.  Things like planting "by signs," hog killings, picking cotton and tobacco, quilting, not doing laundry on New Year's Day,  oranges and nuts in Christmas stockings --- these are all stories passed down in my family.  This - and the other Foxfire books - are must reads for anyone interested in southern history and oral history.

Documentary 

The Everlasting Life of Charlie Wall.  Paul Wilborn.  St. Petersburg Press, 2026. 304 pages.

People outside of Tampa Florida have probably never heard of Charlie Wall.  I hadn't until moving to the area six years ago.  From the 1920s into the 1940s however, Charlie Wall owned Tampa Bay and was a big player in state politics and crime.  He controlled organized crime and shaped election results, gaining a large fortune through bootlegging, strip clubs, and especially bolita.  Bolita was a hugely popular game of chance imported into Tampa Bay from Cuba.  Basically,  people bet spare coins daily on which numbered ball would be drawn from a sack.  Everybody played, often daily, sometimes for pennies a draw, sometimes more.  While bolita draws could be easily fixed and usually were, Wall always steadfastly claimed that he ran honest games.  Wall's empires started to crumble when Sicilians, with ties to larger crime families up north, moved and took over Tampa.  Wall eventually retired, after testifying in federal hearings  on organized crime.  In 1955, he was murdered in his home; it's still unsolved today.  In this book, Paul Wilborn creates a historical fiction fantasy based on the premise that Wall actually survived the fatal attack and, now in 1985, is an old man sharing his life story, and life lessons, with Trip, a young aspiring writer, who takes a job as Wall's driver and bodyguard as a step on his path toward sobriety, leaving his drug-selling past, and gathering fodder for a book.  The fantasy part comes in because not only does Wall survive his murder, but also Wilborn adjusts the real timeline a bit, making his Charlie Wall born 20 years later than the actual Wall.  Wall is the only real-life character in the book, but I think Wilborn captures the real essence of the man and his world and tells a really satisfying story in the end.  

Author talk

American Nations:  A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America.  Colin Woodard.  Viking, 2011.  384 pages.  (10 year anniversary updated edition 2021)

This is one of those books that make you think about American history in a different way than what you're used to.  It's not a new idea, but relatively new to me.  Colin Woodard's approach is to tell the story of America as a loose federation of eleven separate and distinct nations, each with its own very distinct roots, attitudes, and beliefs.  Those distinctions continue to shape us, our society, and all political discourse and outcomes today.  Basically,  according to this view, America has only been a unified country during World War II, and even then each nation came to its support of the war effort with different motivations.  The rest of the time, the nations have been making and breaking alliances with each other and in conflict with each other.  In fact, our country's founding and the principles on which it was founded were not universally supported. The six nations were at odds with each other throughout.  It all makes for an extremely interesting theory that makes sense in a lot of ways, and, in fact, some of the author's impressions in the original 2011 publication have proven to be somewhat prescient.  It's not necessarily an optimistic picture, but it makes you think.  

Reading The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man in the 21st Century

The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.  James Weldon Johnson.  Sherman, French, & Co., 1912.  236 pages. Reprinted in 1927 by Alfred A. Knopf.

My latest classic read or re-read, one of the first books ever published in the US that presented a frank and honest portrayal of black life in the country, without offensive over-the-top stereotypes and broad comic characterizations.  It is a fictional memoir that Johnson first published anonymously, but many readers  assumed it was more factual than fiction.  It's a frame story, with the unnamed narrator revealing his life story and the secret that overshadowed his life. Born in Georgia just after the Civil War, he is the child of a formerly enslaved woman and a wealthy white man.  Knowing that they couldn't be together in Georgia, the father sent mother and child to Connecticut so that the boy could get an education and have a better life.  Because he had a very light complexion, race and color, and all that those constructs entailed, were of no concern to the boy for his first few years in school, but then realizations hit him head-on, and he begins his life-long struggle with racial identity.  He develops an extraordinary musical talent which opens up many opportunities for him, and he also realizes that he can operate within both worlds, black and white.  He decides to dedicate his life to spotlighting black music and to introduce it to the world, elevating it to the attention it deserves - "glorifying" his race and their achievement.  In the process, he has many experiences that remind him constantly of the overemphasis on race in America.  Finally, on a return visit to Georgia, he witnesses a lynching, and that leads him to make a final decision.  He gives up his race, his talent, and his "birthright" in exchange for security and safety, choosing to "pass" as white for the rest of his life, thereby becoming an "ex-colored man." The book is a brilliant depiction of race relations in America, colorism within a race, and the idea of "passing," forsaking one's true identity for expediency.   

Author Talk

The Beast in the Clouds:  The Roosevelt Brothers Deadly Quest Find the Mythical Giant Panda.  Nathalia Holt.  Atria/One Signal Publishers, 2025.  288 pages.

I have never understand the fascination with/admiration for the Kennedy family that many Americans have.  I've never found much to admire in any of them. Maybe it's all the tragedy that seems to surround the family over generations?  I've always thought that Theodore Roosevelt and his family were much more interesting and admirable, and perhaps even more tragic.  I mean, Roosevelt's first wife and mother both died on the same day, Valentine's Day, in the same house, just a few hours apart.  He had a bit of an estranged relationship with his first child, Alice, one of the most interesting of all the presidential children in history. His youngest son Quentin became a WWI pilot and was killed in action over France.  Ted, or Theodore Jr., had a long and distinguished political career and was the oldest soldier, and only general, to land on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day.  Kermit accompanied his father on numerous expeditions, including an Amazon trek that nearly killed them both, and he led a troubled personal life that ended in suicide.  This book documents the 1928-1929 expedition led by Kermit and Ted Roosevelt in the Himalayan region of Tibet and China.  The expedition was sponsored by Chicago's famous Field Museum of Natural History, and its objective was to collect specimens of the region's wildlife, specifically the almost mythical giant panda, thought to be - if it existed - a ferocious bear.  As incredible as it seems now, the animal most connected with China was almost totally unknown outside of legend well into the 20th century.  The first evidence of their existence didn't reach the West until the 19th century.  Even few Chinese claimed to have ever seen one, representations are almost nonexistent in Chinese art over the centuries although artists portrayed many other animals, and, in a country in which one can find furs, skins, and body parts of almost every animal that ever existed in the country, its furs were never offered for sale in markets.  It was the Roosevelts' job to prove its existence, to kill specimens, and to bring the hides and skeletons back for mounting and scientific study.  Here's another hard-to-reconcile bit for many of us:  I've never understood or appreciated the concept of trophy hunting and find it repugnant.  However, well into the 20th century, it was standard scientific practice to hunt down and kill thousands of animals, make orphans of baby animals, and kidnap said babies, dooming them to miserable lives in captivity, or more likely, miserable deaths.  It was even considered acceptable to go after and kill the last known specimens of a species.  The expedition was a harrowing one, and both brothers nearly died.  The expedition also changed them and their attitudes forever.  It's a great read, and a great companion read to Candice Millard's River of Doubt, about the aforementioned Amazon expedition.  

 

Author interview

The Land and Its People.  David Sedaris.  Little, Brown and Company, 2026.  272 pages.

Sardonic. Outrageous. Acerbic. Curmudgeonly. Quick-witted. Arrogant. Egocentric. Obsessive. Neurotic. Iconoclastic. Irreverent.  Finicky.  Judgemental. Fussy. Curious. Weird.  Critical.  Candid. Blunt. Attention-seeking. Funny.  Hilarious.  Honest.  Cantankerous. Contrary. Ornery. Not afraid to say what everybody is thinking.  All words used to describe David Sedaris.  Absolutely one of my favorite celebrities ever and my favorite essayist/social commentator, but you have to wonder sometimes how he has any friends or a 35-year relationship.  Nevertheless, I will read anything that he writes (OK, to be honest, I didn't love his unedited diaries and his book of animal fables, but I do love everything else.)  This is one of his best collections of essays.  

Street scenes Vienna, 1911

Anima Rising.  Christopher Moore.  William Morrow, 2025.  400 pages.

More Christopher Moore! Why haven't I read him before?  I love this book.  It's a historical fiction fantasy comedy set in 1911 Vienna.  Artist Gustav Klimt spots the body of a beautiful, young, nude woman in the canal.  Thinking she's dead, something compels him to draw the scene.  While  he's sketching, the woman sputters. She's alive.  Instead of alerting police, he takes her to the house he uses as a studio. At first, she appears mentally ill, even feral, but eventually her fantastic, incredible, totally unbelievable story emerges, with assistance from Klimt, his model Wally Neuzill, artist Egon Schiele, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Jung.  Since she initially remembers nothing about her past life, Klimt names her Judith, and she assumes a place in his world while her new friends and acquaintances help her rebuild her memory.  And what a memory! Turns out, Judith is literally the Bride of Frankenstein's Monster, resurrected by Dr. Frankenstein to be his creation's companion.  Following a harrowing existence as the monster's- Adam's - wife/prisoner/hostage in the Arctic, she makes multiple journeys into the Underworld,  alternately interacting with gods and spirits and reappearing on the Earth, both among the Inuit and in Europe.  Once her story is revealed, it becomes obvious that she is being hunted by various unknown people, putting herself and the people around her in danger.  Besides being a fantastically fun and fast-moving story, this book is full of great historical bits.  Most of the characters are real people, and many of the events are real.  I love books that lead me down multiple rabbit holes of research as I read.  There's art, philosophy, psychology and more, overlaid with very creative fantasy and totally irreverent humor.  Note:  there are elements that are not for the prudish or those easily triggered by open and frank sexuality. And I highly recommend the audio version; narrator Mary Jane Wells is a genius at voices and characters, adding tremendously to the enjoyment. Picture a cross between Mel Brooks and Lenny Bruce, maybe even raunchier.  I will definitely be reading more Moore, especially the historically themed titles.  

Movie Trailer 2018

Ready Player One.  Ernest Cline.  Ballantine Books, 2011.  384 pages.

I consciously avoided Ready Player One when it was the biggest novel on the planet and later when the movie was released, for two reasons:  1) my natural aversion to anything that is universally popular and 2) I am not and have never been a gamer - Tetris is as game-y as I get.  I know next to nothing about video games, and I'm totally happy with that.  It's been 15 years now (impossible!) since the book came out, so I decided to try, and I'm glad I did.  You probably already know, but this is the plot summary:  "In the year 2045, reality is an ugly place. The only time Wade Watts really feels alive is when he’s jacked into the OASIS, a vast virtual world where most of humanity spends their days. When the eccentric creator of the OASIS dies, he leaves behind a series of fiendish puzzles, based on his obsession with the pop culture of decades past. Whoever is first to solve them will inherit his vast fortune—and control of the OASIS itself."  The result is a hugely fun adventure filled with 80s nostalgia perfect for a Gen X 80s teen like myself.  The fact that I'm not a gamer did not affect my enjoyment at all.  It was a lot of fun.  (And the audiobook narrator is Wil Wheaton who has become one of my favorite narrators.)

1996 Movie Trailer

Mother Night.  Kurt Vonnegut.  Fawcett Publications, 1962.  192 pages.  

Latest classic read/re-read.  First published in 1962 and inspired by the war crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann and Lord Haw-Haw, a British traitor who did pro-Nazi radio propaganda broadcasts, it's in the form of the fictional memoir of Howard W. Campbell Jr, and American citizen who moved to Germany in 1923, remained as the Nazi regime took over, and became a well known, author, playwright, and propagandist.  However, he was also secretly an American spy,  transmitting coded information - so coded that he had no idea what he was passing on -  in his broadcasts.  The trouble is that only three people beside himself knew that he was an American spy.  At the war's end, Campbell became a war criminal.  Initially captured by soldier Bernard O'Hare (Campbell and O-Hare both appear in Vonnegut's later Slaughterhouse Five.), Campbell's handler strikes a deal for his release, and Campbell lives the next 15 years in relative obscurity and anonymity in New York City.  That life comes crashing down when his identity is revealed and publicized, and Israel, the USSR, and West Germany all start demanding his extradition for trial.  Campbell writes this memoir while awaiting trial in an Israeli prison.  The resulting novel is a dark-humored parody of white supremacy and extreme fanaticism, but the larger theme is really that the world is almost never black and white; everything is gray.  It's a powerful short read that affirms Vonnegut's stature as one of the greatest American novelists.  

Shelved: Books Read and Reviewed in May 2026

 

History Nation:  A Citizen's Guide to the History of the United States.  David Hanna.  Morris & Essex Books, 2024.  357 pages.  

David Hanna has written an excellent and concise overview/review of American history, just in time for America's semiquincentennial, and I'm extremely jealous.  Hanna is a high school history teacher and author, and he's basically written up his class curriculum.  It feels like his curriculum and mine were very similar.  Here, he's told America's story, albeit in broad strokes, the good, the bad, and the ugly, using the "city on a hill" theme as bookends, from John Winthrop's use of the phrase in 1630's "A Model of Christian Charity" to Ronald Reagan's invocation of the phrase throughout his political career.  He connects events and ideas across time and makes them incredibly accessible.  It is a progressive and inclusive historical summary, but it's much more balanced and objective than Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, a book that some reviewers have compared it to.  If you're interested in celebrating "America250" with a solid review that will encourage thinking about America's story and how it should be studied and taught, this is a great book for you.

Author Talk

Democracy:  A Case Study.  David A. Moss.  Belknap Press, 2019.  784 pages.

David A. Moss is a business administration professor at Harvard, and a proponent of the Harvard Business School Case Study Method of classroom discussion.  He designed a course in which he applied those principles to the study of history and began training secondary and college history teachers to use it in their classrooms.  The idea is to begin with an objective summary of a case and break it down in an open student-led discussion of 5 questions:  1.  Define the problem, 2. What is the context?, 3. What key facts must be considered?, 4.  What alternatives are available to decision makers?, 5.  Finally, as the decision makers at the time of the case, what action should we take?  In this book, Moss has selected 19 cases that represent challenges to democracy in American history, some you're familiar with and some you're not.  The case is left open-ended to allow contemplation or discussion, but the outcome of each event is discussed in an appendix.  The whole point of this book is to encourage discussion.  As we are becoming more and more anxious about the state of our country and the rising divisions and tensions that threaten us and our ideals and discourage constructive debate, discussion of these cases in classrooms, book clubs, friends groups, etc. is a powerful antidote.  I'm engaged with it as part of a lifelong learning class, and I thoroughly enjoy the thoughtful and respectful discussion of history and politics that I haven't been able to enjoy for twenty years or more. The structure of the book allows a facilitator to pick a few of the cases to study as a group (My group is only doing 4 cases together.   The facilitator does the classes at other times with other groups and picks other cases.), but be sure to include Moss' introduction and conclusion as well, because they contain great insights.  This is another fantastic book for America's semiquincentennial, and I highly suggest it as a group read.

A Podcast episode reviewing the case and book

Bringing Down the Colonel:  A Sex Scandal of the Gilded Age, and the "Powerless" Woman Who Took on Washington.  Patricia Miller.  Sarah Crichton Books, 2018.  384 pages.  

I can summarize this book in three words:  Men are pigs.  And those three words are a major slander against pigs everywhere.  It's 1894, and Madeline Pollard does the unthinkable, she files a breach of promise lawsuit against the popular and powerful Kentucky Congressman William Breckinridge, alleging that the pair had begun a decade-long affair when she was a teen, despite the thirty year age gap and the fact that he was married.  That affair, she charged, had led to multiple pregnancies, and, when Breckinridge's wife died, he promised to marry Pollard before abruptly marrying another woman, leaving her abandoned and broken.  Shockingly, she won, and the case captured America's attention and mobilized Kentucky's women to enter the political world for the first time, ending Breckinridge's political career.  However, much of the book is a history of the cultural and legal abuse suffered by women in the 19th century.  The double standard applied to the genders was staggering.  A woman who had premarital sex was considered to be irredeemably "ruined" for the rest of her life while there were no negative consequences for men.  A woman who had the temerity to work in any mixed-gender environment or exercised any sort of social independence was widely considered to be automatically sexually available.  In the South, society conformed to the old English aristocratic patriarchal idea that every woman in a man's household was his to do with as he pleased, whether she was an indentured servant, slave, wife, or relative.  Rape was impossible to prosecute because prevailing legal opinion held that a woman could only be penetrated if she was willing.  "Doctors" wrote medical textbooks arguing that education caused women's internal organs to dry up and to fail, creating chronic invalids and early deaths.  Thousands of babies conceived out of wedlock were murdered, dumped, and abandoned.  The author creates a quite vivid, disturbing, and enraging context for the society that was shaken when Madeline Pollard defied the status quo and took her stand, becoming an unlikely women's rights crusader and icon.

2012 movie trailer

The Great Gatsby.  F. Scott Fitzgerald.  Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925.  208 pages.  

For years, I believed that I didn't like The Great Gatsby.  Maybe because in ninth grade I couldn't relate to the fast, alcohol and jazz drenched, social world, but then again, more than forty years later, I still can't relate. I mean, invited to parties?  What's that like?  However, in the past couple of weeks, I've come across multiple references to it and figured that the universe was telling me that it was time for a re-read.  Now I see why it's remained a touchstone in American culture for a century.  This time, I enjoyed it.  It's such a classic, quintessentially American story and so incredibly modern for a novel published over a hundred years ago.  Just to refresh your memory: The Great Gatsby follows narrator Nick Carraway as he becomes entangled with the mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby, who throws lavish parties in hopes of rekindling his past romance with Daisy Buchanan. As Gatsby pursues this dream, tensions with Daisy’s husband Tom Buchanan lead to betrayal, tragedy, and ultimately Gatsby’s downfall.  My enjoyment may have been heightened by the fact that I listened to the audiobook version read superbly by actor Tim Robbins.

Author Talk

Circe.  Madeline Miller.  Little, Brown and Company, 2018.  400 pages.  

I'm a big fan of modern retellings of myths, if they are well done, Stephen Fry's latest books for example.  This book got all the buzz and lots of acclaim when it was published, and, although it took me a minute to get into it, and the language is sometimes a little overwrought, I found it to be successful and entertaining.  Circe, a daughter of the Titan and sun god Helios, feels weak and powerless by comparison and just doesn't fit in too well amongst the gods, constantly struggling to find her niche.  She discovers that niche in pharmakeia, the art of using herbs, potions, poisons, and drugs to perform transportations and other magic.  Soon, that ability and the great skill which she develops are seen as a threat to Zeus and the other Olympians, and Zeus forces Helios to banish Circe to a deserted island for the rest of eternity.  Despite being banished, Circe manages to cross paths with many of the famous characters in Greek mythology like the Minotaur, Scylla, Daedalus, Icarus, Ariadne, Hermes, Athena, Jason, Medea, and, of course, Odysseus.  The result is a great story told from a fresh, new feminist perspective.

Author Talk

Paradox.  Douglas Preston and Aletheia Preston.  Forge Books, 2026.  352 pages.  Book 2 of 2, Cash and Colcord series.

I took a little action thriller detour for the newest book by one of my favorite thriller authors, Douglas Preston.  For this one, he teamed with his daughter, "a reformed lawyer and prosecutor turned thriller author," to continue a series he began with Extinction, starring Colorado Bureau of Investigation Agent Frankie Cash and local Sheriff Jim Colcord.  That book set up a "Jurassic Park"-type resort in the Colorado mountains where scientists had brought extinct megafauna mammals back to life with, of course, dangerous unintended consequences.  Specifically, in this case, the scientists went the extra mile and re-created murderous Neanderthals.  Now, sometime later, with the "Neanders" still hiding in the mountains, Cash and Colcord are called in for a strange murder.  A reclusive, schizophrenic hermit is found ritualistically tortured and murdered in his cabin.  Meanwhile, a holy relic in Rome is inexplicably defaced.  As Cash and Colcord investigate,  they discover not only a connection between the two, but also have to deal with more murders, intrusive press, violent protesters for and against the "Neanders," UFO/UAP researchers, and a fanatical secret society.  It's another fast-moving and thought-provoking page-turner, consistently Preston.  

A Persistent Echo.  Brian Kaufman.  Black Rose Writing, 2023.  225 pages.

This was one of those books that I discovered through a Facebook ad, and it seemed interesting.  It's 1897, and August Simms, an old man who has lived an adventurous life of exploration, returns to Rhome, Texas to die.  Fifteen years earlier in Rhome, Simms had experienced two great personal tragedies, events that have haunted Simms ever since.  He's also drawn back to Rhome by newspaper reports of mysterious flying machine sightings in the area, and he's always up for a mystery.  As he collects eyewitness accounts of the UFOs, he discovers that tensions are still roiling just under the surface, both tensions going back to that 1882 lynching and more current tensions arising from the rapidly evolving economic, social, and technological climate of the turn of the 20th century.  The book has lots of very strong reviews, but it didn't quite live up to that mark for me.  I would give it 3 or 3.5 stars out of 5, but maybe my rating is marred by the fact that I listened to the audiobook version and found the narration to be extremely poor.  It was so poor that I thought that it was maybe the author reading, and I was shocked to find that it is done by a professional narrator and actor.   He was so numbingly monotone that it made me think that even I could have a career in narration.

Author Talk

Ten Caesars:  Roman Emperors From Augustus to Constantine.  Barry Strauss.  Simon & Schuster, 2019.  432 pages.  Thanks to Simon & Schuster for the review copy.  

Barry Strauss has written a history of the Roman Empire, nearly four centuries, told through the lives of ten emperors:  Augustus, Tiberius, Nero, Vespasian, Trajan, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius, Septimius Severus, Diocletian and Constantine.  A while back, social media informed us that men think of ancient Rome constantly, and it must be true because social media said so.  I am not one of those men.  Nevertheless, this book is an easily accessible general history of the Roman Empire and an examination of its legacy still felt today. 

1945.  Robert Conroy.  Random House, 2007.  432 pages.  

Hours before Japanese Emperor Hirohito made the announcement of Japan's surrender to end World War II, a group of military officers staged a failed coup, intending to kidnap the Emperor and to prevent the surrender.  They wanted to follow the way of the bushido, fighting until either victory or death; surrender for them was never an option.  Fortunately, the coup collapsed rather quickly, but what if it had succeeded?  That's the premise of Robert Conroy's alternate history, 1945, and it allows him to explore a lot of very interesting questions.  Would the US have used more atomic bombs?  How many more American and Japanese casualties would have occurred and how long would it have taken to conquer Japan?  How would the American public respond to the continued death and devastation and what would be the effects on the home front?  What would happen to the relationship among the Big Three Allies?  What would the new post-war world look like?  Here, Conroy creates a comprehensive novel addressing all of these questions, using a number of characters, both fictional and historical. The real life characters and events are portrayed in a manner that reveal thorough research, and the speculation is sound.  It all makes a great story.  This was my first discovery of Robert Conroy's work which seems to be mostly alternate history.  It reminds me of Herman Wouk and Ken Follett, two of my all-time favorite historical fiction authors, and I will definitely explore more of his work.

2002 Movie Trailer

The Quiet American.  Graham Greene.  William Heinemann, 1955. 208 pages.

Another classic read, and there are many parallels between this book and another classic, The Great Gatsby.  Both are popular and critically acclaimed short novels that masterfully capture the zeitgeist of their decades, the 1920s and the 1950s - the decadence and the turmoil.  Both stories are told by jaded and cynical narrators and revolve around idealistic men who are secretly leading double lives, and there's a love triangle in each book.  Both books offer commentaries on the American psyche, particularly the "American Dream" and the idea of American exceptionalism.  Both books remain incredibly fresh and modern decades after their publication.  In The Quiet American, the narrator is British reporter Thomas Fowler, in Vietnam to cover the futile French effort to restore colonial control, and the idealistic young American leading the double life is Alden Pyle, a US Aid representative/CIA agent who is secretly coordinating with unsavory characters to carry out his own agenda, resulting in even more death and destruction.  Their personal conflict arises because they both love - or is it desire to own? - the same young Vietnamese woman named Phuong.  When Pyle is murdered, French colonial police lackadaisically investigate, and Fowler relates the story of their relationship against the violent backdrop of the Vietnamese war for independence, with daily explosions in Saigon and other cities and pitched battles in the countryside.  Beyond the human story, this is most definitely an anti-war and anti-imperialism novel, and its message is incredibly relevant today.  Published in 1955, it's amazing how insightful and prescient a British novelist was about America's upcoming war in Vietnam.  And yes, both books reflect the sexism and racism of their time, perhaps making them problematic for some sensitive readers.  

The Kaiser's Web.  Steve Berry.  Minotaur Books, 2021.  432 pages.  Book 16 of 20 in Cotton Malone series.

This is another entry in the Cotton Malone history thriller series by Steve Berry.  Retired Justice Department Special Agent Malone and his lover Cassiopeia Vitt are back in action, solving a historical mystery and preventing a world shattering tragedy, this time at the behest of former US President Danny Daniels who enlists them to assist his friend, the German Chancellor, as she attempts to thwart a takeover by a right-wing extremist.  The twist: is the said extremist possibly the son of escaped Nazi war criminal Martin Bormann or even the son of Hitler himself?  Everything is typical Berry, lots of action, twists, turns, and betrayals.  With only one or two exceptions, each Malone adventure is pretty consistently entertaining.  

Podcast interview

American Rambler:  Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed.  Isaac Fitzgerald.  Knopf, 2026.  352 pages.  

I'm only just realizing that "white trash memoir" is a literary subgenre.  I'm aware of many of the titles and authors associated with it, but I haven't really read any of the big ones.  When I chose this book, I wasn't really aware that it is an example.  I was intrigued by the subject matter, the search for the man behind the Johnny Appleseed myth, and the "tracing his footsteps across contemporary America" format.  I might not have picked it up had I known more about Fitzgerald.  He had a rough childhood, including long homeless stretches and emotional, if not physical, violence.  His parents had psychological issues.  He is/was a heavy drinker and drug user.  At almost 40 years old, he had never owned a car or signed a lease, spending his life sleeping out in the open or on somebody's couch or floor.  He freely admits that he has no compunction whatsoever about accepting handouts.  And he's not the brightest bulb.  For example, he actually planned to float down the Allegheny River on a cheap inflatable raft from Walmart, and, in one episode, he spent half of a baseball game rooting for the wrong team.  I wouldn't necessarily want to hang out with him, but that's just me.  I'm not typically drawn to Jack Kerouac types. All that being said, I actually enjoyed the book.  The meat of the story, of course the myth of Johnny Appleseed, real name John Chapman.  In the minds of many, Appleseed is an American legend like Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill, the subject of many fantastic tall tales, but he was very much a real man with an incredible real life.  Unfortunately, the myth has become greater than the man, clouding his place in American history.  Fitzgerald dispels those myths and does a good job of developing a picture of the real man.  Along the way he has great interactions with average Americans and offers great insights into the American psyche. Of the three genres attempted here - history, memoir, and travelogue - history is maybe the least successful, but I did learn a bit more about Appleseed and discovered a few people connected to his story that I want to learn more about, and Fitzgerald's thoughts and ruminations on the subject of history and legend and the often very fine differences between the two are interesting. 

Author interview

The Hooligans of Kandahar:  Not All War Stories Are Heroic.  Joseph Kassabian.  TCK Publishing, 2022.  257 pages.

There's a long list of books that document the insanity of war, too long to list here.  And yet humans have always done it and, it seems, will always continue to do it.  We've all heard the famous quote "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results."  (Incorrectly attributed to Albert Einstein, the quote is actually much more recent.)  This book documents an Afghanistan deployment of a squad of soldiers who took their nickname "The Hooligans" to heart and forged the bonds that only soldiers experiencing combat together can forge, forever sharing the life and death moments of their deployment and the lifelong damages that they will carry after deployment.  Joseph Kassabian was a 21 year old team leader in that squad; he had joined the army at 17.  He and his squad are deployed to Kandahar, the birthplace and stronghold of the Taliban, tasked with training and supporting the corrupt and often Taliban-sympathetic Afghan police who are just as likely to torture and execute their neighbors as Taliban fighters are.  Think "Animal House" meets "MASH," but hard "R' or even "NC-17" rated, the book is funny, sad, and infuriating all at once, an honest and unflinching look at the horrors of war that is a great addition to the shelves of war stories.  It made for a very fitting Memorial Day weekend read.  

Author Interview

The Lost Empire of Emanuel Nobel:  Romanovs, Revolutionaries, and the Forgotten Titan Who Fueled the World.  Douglas Brunt.  Atria Books, 2026.  368 pages.

Most people know of the Nobel prizes  awarded each autumn in various fields of human achievement.  Some know a little about Alfred Nobel, the inventor and industrialist who funded the awards in his will at least partly to assuage his guilt over profiting from manufacturing explosives.  However, very few people are aware that the Nobels were a dominant, perhaps the most dominant, industrialist family in Europe, on par with, and often going head to head against the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds.  The real driving force behind the Nobel wealth and power was actually Alfred's nephew Emanuel.  He also is most responsible for the ensuring that the Nobel prizes exist.  As the executor of his uncle's will, he was pressured by Alfred's heirs, and even the King of Sweden, to disregard the prizes, but Emanuel stood firm and created and served as the chief steward of the Nobel Prize and his uncle's legacy for the rest of his life.  Emanuel was a visionary who built the largest oil industry in Russia and in Europe and amassed a huge fortune, while making powerful connections within the Russian bureaucracy and royal family, but he was not a "robber baron" in the American mold.  Workers in Nobel industries were among the happiest, most loyal,  and best taken care of in the world. Of course, all of that changed with World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the ensuing civil war.  When it was all over, Emanuel was no longer an industrial titan, and he was relegated to being even less than a footnote in history.  This excellent biography is extremely interesting and informative, and it offers at least some of the illumination that Nobel deserves.  

Shelved: Books Read and Reviewed in April 2026

 

Author interview

Heart of American Darkness:  Bewilderment and Horror on the Early Frontier.  Robert G. Parkinson.  W.W. Norton & Company, 2024.  480 pages.  

Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is the gold standard when it comes to searing critiques of European imperialism and colonialism in Africa around the turn of the 20th century.  Charles Marlow travels up the Congo River in search of the enigmatic ivory trader Mr. Kurtz, revealing large scale brutality, repression, and racism in the process.  Here, Parkinson deftly uses Conrad's novella as a starting point for an exploration of the colonial American frontier in the 18th century, viewed through the lives and actions of members of two families who were at the center of the efforts to colonize the Ohio River Valley.  The family of Shickellamy, one of the most renowned Indigenous leaders of the eighteenth century, were Iroquois diplomats laboring to create a world where settlers and Native people could coexist. The Cresaps were frontiersmen - the very word "frontiersman" may have been coined to refer to Thomas Cresap, the patriarch, also nicknamed "the Maryland Monster" - who became famous throughout the colonies for their bravado, scheming, and land greed. From the 1730s, when Pennsylvania and Virginia colonies literally fought each other for control of the Ohio Valley, through the Seven Years War and the American Revolution, these two families were involved in, and linked to, horrific acts of carnage and destruction that were discussed throughout the colonies and in Britain.  Parkinson not only demonstrates how the frontier shaped the American nation, but also shaped new interpretations of race and citizenship, and he also reveals how reputations, legacies, and heroic status are constantly changing.

Death of the Mantis.  Michael Stanley.  Harper, 2011.  448 pages.  Detective Kubu series, # 3 of 8.  

This find was a dollar well spent at a local public library book sale.  (Hillsborough County public libraries have permanent sale sections in their branches. Other libraries have temporary sales from time to time.  Always worth checking out.)  This is a natural for fans of The Number 1 Ladies Detective Agency series or Hillerman's Leaphorn and Chee series, detective series set in exotic locales.  This series, like the Ladies Detective Agency, is set in Botswana, where Detective David "Kubu" Bengu is drawn into murder mysteries that often involve indigenous Bushmen, or the San people.  This story opens with the discovery of a dying park ranger named Monzo, with three Bushmen on the scene.  Were they trying to assist him or were they his murderers?  The investigation brings long-standing prejudices against Bushmen to the surface, making things more complicated for Kubu.  The mystery deepens when more murders occur, and stories of undiscovered diamond fields are thrown into the mix.  It's a good murder mystery, the setting and cultural landscapes are intriguing, and Kubu is a really interesting character.  I'll be on the lookout for more of the books.

Author conversation

The History of Sound:  Stories.  Ben Shattuck.  Viking, 2024.  320 pages.

The History of Sound is a collection of 12 short stories set in New England (except for two set in Newfoundland) over three centuries.  The stories revolve around memories, artifacts, artworks, or journal entries which are used to reveal secrets, misunderstandings, and the ups and downs of love set in various landscapes across the region.  History is woven through each and every story, reinforcing the idea that we are shaped by history.  The really unique thing about this collection is that the stories are paired, connected through time somehow, and the second story often contains a revelation that adds to or illuminates some aspect of the first story. The stories are both thoughtful and thought-provoking, entertaining, inventive and original, sometimes sad, and sometimes humorous.  One word of caution, though:  I know some people have problems with stories that don't seem to have a neat ending.  Shattuck's stories have loose ends.  I'm not a big short story reader, but I enjoyed this collection. (Note:  The title story was adapted into a 2025 film of the same name.  The audiobook version features great narration by the like of Paul Mescal, Ed helms, and Nick Offerman.)

Sick Puppy.  Carl Hiaasen.  Alfred A. Knopf, 2000.  341 pages.  Book 4 of 7 in the Skink series.

Tim Dorsey is my all-time favorite "Florida Man" author, and his Serge Storms is one of my favorite literary characters ever.  Carl Hiaasen is a good second.  Sick Puppy is the fourth of Hiaasen's Skink series.  Skink is the former Florida governor who couldn't take being in politics, abandoned his office, and disappeared into the swamps where he survives on roadkill and fights a one-man battle against developers.  However, he's really a minor character.  The real lead character, Twilly Spree, appears to be a pale imitation of Serge Storms, a psychotic vigilante whose mission in life is to punish those who despoil Florida, from litterbugs to evil developers - and, of course, ALL Florida developers and politicians are evil and corrupt degenerates.  Sick Puppy was published a year after the first Serge Storms novel appeared.  I know Hiaasen and Dorsey were friends.  Maybe they discussed ideas?  Maybe Serge was originally inspired by Skink?  Anyway, this book is good, the plot and characters are as crazy as you would expect, but it reads like a Serge novel with all the trademark Dorsey humor removed.  It makes me really miss Dorsey and Serge.

Book Trailer

Grasshopper Jungle.  Andrew Smith.  Dutton Books for Young Readers, 2015.  416 pages.  

Austin, his best friend Robby, and his girlfriend Shann are just three sixteen-year olds in tiny, boring Ealing, Iowa.  Like all teens, they don't feel like they fit in even though they've only ever lived there.  Not only are they square pegs in a round hole world, but they are also dealing with their own family issues and confusion about life, the universe, and everything, including their own relationships with each other, adolescence, and sexuality.  BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!  Literally overnight, Ealing is besieged by a plague of six foot tall grasshopper/mantis creatures who are seemingly unstoppable, and their entire existence is driven by two violently primitive instincts: to eat and to mate, instincts often gratified simultaneously.  As the creatures hatch, eat, and mate, Ealing's population is devastated, and the whole of humanity is threatened.  It's up to Austin, Robby, and Shann to stop the plague before it's too late.  Imagine a combination of "Lost," "Stranger Things," "Fallout," and all of those 1950s apocalyptic creature movies, and you've got Grasshopper Jungle.  I grabbed it as soon as I saw the cover and the blurb "Raunchy, bizarre, smart, and compelling" and happily paid the dollar at the library book sale and found a quick and fun read.  Note:  while it is marketed as a young adult novel, it is frank and graphic, one of those books that would be put on a list these days, and readers will likely have differing opinions on whether it is truly suitable for young adults, and just how young those adults should be.

Author Interview

This Other Eden.  Paul Harding.  W.W. Norton & Company, 2023.  224 pages.

At the mouth of the New Meadows River in Casco Bay, Maine lies a 41-acre island called Malaga.  From about 1860 to 1911, it was home to an interracial settlement of no more than four dozen people of mixed white, black, and indigenous residents that traced their community's founding, perhaps apocryphally,  to a free black man named Benjamin Darling.  In the 1890s, people in neighboring communities - perhaps offended by the interracial character of the community, perhaps inspired by the potential profits of developing the island, perhaps some of both - began spreading stories that the islanders' culture was one of incest, sexual deviance, poverty, deformity, and imbecility.  It was a time when the "science" of eugenics held major sway in public opinion and in the halls of government, and state and local authorities took action, condemning the island's structures, seizing the land, forcing the islanders to relocate, and even committing several islanders involuntarily to institutions.  When novelist Paul Harding came across the story of Malaga, it inspired him to create his own version, an island called Apple Island, in this novel.  He only took inspiration from history and never intended to write a history.  He created his own island origin story and his own cast of characters within a loose historical framework.  The result is a moving story of people with great resilience, pride, strength, and will to survive as the outside world invades their peace.  It's one of those quiet, thought-provoking novels.   

Author podcast

G,I, G-Men:  The Untold Story of the FBI's Search for American Traitors, Collaborators, and Spies in World War II Europe.  Stephen Harding.  Citadel, 2026.  416 pages.  Thanks to Citadel/Kensington Publishing for the review copy.

Most of the books dealing with the history of the FBI that I've read have not painted very flattering pictures, with the Bureau, especially during J. Edgar Hoover's reign as Director, coming across as incompetent at best and corrupt, evil, and political at worst, but there was at least one seemingly successful and honorable operation.  During the first years of World War II, Hoover had convinced President Roosevelt to dispatch specially trained FBI agents to Latin American countries in order to thwart Axis efforts to develop and to operate espionage networks there.  That program worked, and it worked well, and,  in 1943, Hoover convinced FDR to authorize the next step.  A special unit of 21 highly qualified and trained agents, each fluent in multiple languages and most having had extensive experience living or traveling in Europe, was created and named the Army Liaison Unit.  The agents were given courtesy military ranks and uniforms and embedded within US Army units.   Their mission was to work with US and Allied military intelligence organizations to track down and arrest American citizens living in Europe who were suspected of collaborating with Axis powers to betray their home country and to return them to the US for trial as traitors.  Their efforts led to many arrests and convictions and uncovered a great deal of evidence that would be used in the Nuremberg and war crimes trials following the war.  Stephen Harding has researched and written an excellent history of the program that readers of military history and espionage buffs will enjoy.  

Author interview

Nonesuch.   Francis Spufford.  Scribner, 2026.  496 pages.  

I really enjoyed the three other Spufford novels that I've read, Golden Hill, Red Plenty, and Cahokia Jazz, so I was looking forward to reading his latest, Nonesuch.  The historical fantasy fiction opens in 1939, as Britain prepares for war, and ambitious young Iris Hawkins works as a secretary at a financial investment firm, struggling to break through the glass ceiling which prohibited women from actually being brokers or traders.  A night at a club leads to a chance encounter with Geoff, a brilliant young BBC engineer working in the emerging field of television.  She thinks the encounter is going to be a fun one-night stand, but, instead, she's drawn into a dangerous other-world, a world in which spirits, or angels, can be summoned, trapped, and forced to do the bidding of the summoner.  In this case, Iris and Geoff discover that a British fascist has learned the secrets of summoning the angels and plans to use their powers to go back in time and assassinate Winston Churchill before he becomes Prime Minister, with the ultimate goal of forcing Britain's surrender.  It's up to them, with a little assistance form the angel Raphael, to thwart the plot.  Like Spufford's other novels that I've read, Nonesuch is kind of smoldering, slow burn in the beginning, but once you're in, you're in..  The historical details of Britain in the early years of the war and through the Blitz are great, as I've come to expect from the author, and the magical fantasy time travel elements are inventive and intriguing.  Note:  it simultaneously sort of concludes and sort of ends with a cliffhanger; a sequel is forthcoming.

Ragtime movie trailer 1981

Ragtime.  E.L. Doctorow.  Random House, 1975. 270 pages.  

My latest classic read is Ragtime, by E.L. Doctorow, an icon in the genre of historical fiction.  Although relatively short, it is epic in terms of scope and the huge cast of characters.  In turn-of-the-century New York, three families - black, Jewish, and WASP - interweave with historical figures like Houdini, J.P. Morgan, Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, Sigmund Freud, Robert Peary, Booker T. Washington, and Emiliano Zapata, just to name a few,  during America's ragtime era, in the early 20th century. The reader is immersed in the time period through vivid descriptions of settings and of movements swirling through American society at the time.  However, Doctorow famously never claimed to be writing accurate history, famously saying, "The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like." While he paints historical figures in broad strokes of accuracy, he takes liberties with their characters, but those liberties don't feel out of place. A huge part of the book is atmosphere, but there is a plot involving an upper-class family in New Rochelle, New York, a nouveau riche family whose fortune is derived from manufacturing fireworks, bunting, flags, ribbons, and other patriotic accoutrements.  We don't even know their names; they're referred to as Mother, Father, Younger Brother, and Boy.  The family finds itself and the town dragged into violent chaos when a successful black ragtime pianist is victimized by the local fire department and exacts a horrible revenge.  It's easy to see why the book is a classic of historical fiction.

London Falling:  A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for the Truth.  Patrick Radden Keefe.  Doubleday, 2026.  384 pages.  

WOW! I love Patrick Radden Keefe's books, and this one is absolutely incredible.  In 2019, a security camera on the London headquarters building of MI6, the British foreign intelligence agency, captured a horrible moment on the balcony of a neighboring luxury apartment high-rise.  Nineteen-year old Zac Brettler paces the fifth-floor balcony for a minute and then leaps to his death in the Thames River below.  Days later, his parents are notified that his body was recovered.  From his birth, Zac had been an intelligent, charismatic, and likable kid, and his family lived a very comfortable, but modest, lifestyle.  His parents paid over 50,000 pounds a year for Zac and his brother to attend prestigious private schools, but they lived in a modest apartment in a quiet London neighborhood, and the family car was a Mazda.  Zac wasn't satisfied, however. He craved luxury and wealth, and he developed an obsessive fascination for the flashy and loud Russian oligarchs who had come to dominate much of London's business and organized crime worlds since the days of Margaret Thatcher.  Zac even admired Vladimir Putin, and many of the oligarchs in London either had close ties with Putin or were/are on Putin's enemies list.  Following his death, Zac's parents learned that he had crafted an elaborate fictitious alter ego, beginning in his early teens:  Zac Ismailov, the son of a wealthy Russian oligarch with access to a large family fortune.  As Ismailov, he gets enmeshed in a relationship with two of the slimiest and most crooked individuals in the city, and that relationship leads to his death.  His parents are forced to become investigators because, contrary to what those gritty British police dramas lead viewers to believe, Scotland Yard, London's Metropolitan Police, is an utter failure at anything related to criminal investigation --- a bastion of corruption, ignorance, stupidity, incompetence, and raging indifference.  Keefe takes the minimal police investigation, the parents' investigation, and multiple other sources to create an unbelievable story, not just of one tragic death and its impact on a family but of modern London.  This very well might end up being my favorite read of 2026.  

Narrow the Road.  James Wade.  Blackstone Publishing, 2025.  306 pages.

It's 1932 in rural east Texas, and 15-year old William Carter is struggling.  His father has been away for weeks in Washington as one of the leaders of the Bonus Army, WWI veterans occupying the capital to demand immediate payment of promised future payments, and was supposedly on his way home, weeks after the event had been violently broken up.  Meanwhile, William's mother is dying, their cotton crop is failing, and the banker is threatening imminent eviction.  When a letter from his father, mailed from a town just 40 miles away, is delivered, William decides to go find his father and bring him home.  His best friend Ollie joins him, and the two begin an odyssey that takes them through still untamed land occupied by eccentric backwoods characters, many of whom are so impoverished that they aren't even aware of the Great Depression.  They encounter moonshiners, murderers, a witch woman, and an evil medicine show peddler with a gorilla along the way.  It's another great James Wade historical fiction, full of great atmospheric and historic detail, interesting characters, and beautiful language.  One word of warning, though: If you like stories that end neatly, with everything wrapped up and tied up with a bow, James Wade may not be the author for you.