Aki Ito has always looked up to her older sister, Rose. Rose was beautiful. She was popular. She was fearless. She was the one to strike out to Chicago to make a new life after the Ito family was incarcerated in Manzanar along with thousands of Japanese Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor. So […]
Late in Kevin Barry’s amazing novel, The Heart in Winter, rumors start to race around Montana and Idaho as people recount what they heard about Tom Rourke and Polly Gillespie’s doomed love. It sounds like a tall tale or sordid scandal or a blues song the way folks tell it. They’re not far wrong. There […]
The way we grow up sets our definitions of what “normal” is. Childhood prepares us for the way we interpret and react to the world around us: with fear, with enthusiasm, with curiosity, with anger, etc. In Love is a Burning Thing, Nina St. Pierre takes us into a childhood where constant motion was normal, […]
There’s a floating aphorism about everyone fighting a battle we know nothing about. This has never been more true in the case of Vesper Wright, the protagonist of Rachel Harrison’s hair-raising novel, Black Sheep. Four years before we meet her, Vesper left her family, friends, and community to scrape together an independent life as a […]
Charlie Parker returns in The Instruments of Darkness, by John Connolly, the twenty-first book in the series. Parker has been bruised and battered by his work as a private investigator, but he can’t stop when there’s a chance that he can take a measure of evil out of the world. Evil is absolutely real for […]
Trigger warning to references to sexual assault. Before the studio system was broken up by the Supreme Court, film studios would sign actors up to multi-year contracts. Actors under contract would not only be told which films they would appear in but also told which parties to go to, when to go to rehab, and […]
Trigger warnings for alcoholism and discussions of suicide. Louie arrives at the (fictional) Takoda reservation in Louisiana, unwittingly just in time to help his niece Noemi after she suffers a personal tragedy. He’s been gone for years, only coming back for the annual powwow. It’s been ten years since his last visit as Indian Burial […]
Vivvy Bouchet would much rather spend her time gazing at the stars, in the remote Texas desert, with the most powerful telescope she can get her hands on. Unfortunately for Vivvy, an old cop friend believes that she has a psychic ability to find the dead and missing. He keeps calling her in to “consult” […]
Trigger warning for brief depictions of interpersonal violence. The Night Flowers, by Sara Herchenroether, tells several stories at the same time. There’s the story of Jean Martinez, a detective who is one of the few who isn’t getting too old for this shit in spite of her husband’s hope that they can retire together. There’s […]
Trigger warnings for references to child sexual abuse, murder, and suicidal ideation. In Wolf at the Table, Adam Rapp spins a violent family saga based on elements of his mother’s life. Although this book contains more than its share of murders—including appearances from John Wayne Gacy—I found this book to be a fascinating exploration of […]