Angelo (Hunting the Witness) kicks off the King Legacy series with a propulsive if crowded thriller about a former CIA agent grappling with her past. Luna Rosati has just returned to her hardscrabble hometown of Millie Beach, S.C., in search of the daughter she gave up as a troubled 18-year-old. She’s hoping to ask her former mentor, a detective named Stryker, for help, but before she can, he’s abducted from a local diner in broad daylight. Luna reluctantly teams up with her ex, police officer Corbin King, to search for Stryker and the police commissioner’s daughter, who disappeared six weeks earlier. Soon, Luna learns that a local girl from a rehabilitation program for troubled teens has also gone missing. Believing that this girl might be her long-lost daughter, Luna begins to suspect that all three disappearances are linked. As Luna and Corbin’s investigation brings them to the center of an organ trafficking ring, they struggle to summon the faith it will take to get to the bottom of the case and decide whether they can start over again as a couple. While the many plot threads sometimes become tangled, Angelo’s tenacious leads and zippy prose keep the pages turning. Fans of Lynette Eason and Melissa Koslin should take note. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 11/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

In the deeply intelligent and endlessly supple latest from McEwan (Lessons), a pair of scholars look back on the present day from a future Britain radically transformed by climate change. By 2119, England has become an archipelago. At the Bodlein Library, which has been moved to higher ground, Thomas Metcalfe fixates on the lore behind an unpublished but legendary poem by the renowned Francis Blundy, a series of sonnets said to have been written for his wife, Vivien, but which was only ever seen and heard by those who attended a dinner party with the couple in 2014. In the years since, the mystery of the poem sparked public fascination with its purported depiction of enduring love. Thomas, self-appointed “biographer of the reputation of an unread poem,” pores over vast electronic archives and bonds with Rose Church, a historian and colleague of his at the University of the South Downs, over their shared interest in the period and their anguish that the climate disaster was allowed to happen (both attract ire from students for their “anger and nostalgia”). The pair marry, but they hit a rough patch caused by Thomas’s all-consuming devotion to his work. Meanwhile, an archivist leads Thomas to a revelation from Vivian’s diary that overhauls everything he thought he knew about the poem and the dinner. The novel keenly brings to life a post–climate change world and conveys the struggle of humanities scholars to prove the value of their work. McEwan is in top form. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 11/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

“Data is the most powerful force in society today,” designer Lupi (Dear Data) and brand strategist Cox (What a Building Does) observe in this wide-ranging collection of interviews exploring the increasing dominance of numerical data as a communicative tool. Pinpointing the Covid pandemic as the “rude awakening” that first plunged the world into its ongoing fixation with data tracking and data visualization, the authors speak to experts ranging from a TV meteorologist to a MoMA curator. The q&a-style conversations touch on myriad hot button issues, including the use of data to fight climate change and how data collecting has been a “leading factor in making the case for... legal protections for trans people.” Alongside the interviews, Lupi and Cox reflect on their own data visualization projects, such as a “poetic meditation” on the U.S. census that brainstorms ways to make its staid questions into a “richer encapsulation of human identity,” and Lupi’s data-focused attempts to “try to figure out what was happening to me” by tracking her symptoms, medications, and treatments when struggling with long Covid. Ingeniously, some of the most fascinating responses come from the simplest questions, like a prompt to define data: an artist calls it “a form of memory”; a “tech pioneer” asserts, “Data is life”; a writer labels it “a magical thing.” It’s an illuminating look at data’s growing ubiquity. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 11/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this captivating volume, folklorist Mayor (The First Fossil Hunters) guides readers through the emerging field of geomythology, which revisits ancient myths for what they reveal of natural history. She examines 53 tales from around the world, showing how they evolved from premodern peoples’ need to make sense of natural occurrences, usually ones that were unprecedented and inexplicable, like meteor strikes, disappearing lakes, and frogs and fish falling from the skies. These myths, she writes, provide insight into the ways people have been trying to make rational, proto-scientific sense of the natural world for thousands of years, but also preserve memories of violent catastrophes. These include the volcanic eruption of Budj Bim in Southern Australia a little over 36,000 years ago —Aboriginal tales of the event “convey perceptive observations and understanding of natural evidence” that have “help[ed] scientists to understand... geological events in Australia’s remote past.” In between tales of flaming bodies of water and singing sand dunes, Mayor also includes contemporary geomyths like the Chicago Rat Hole, an impression shaped like a rat’s body in a city sidewalk that drew Chicagoans bearing tokens (pennies, flowers, candles, cheese) in early 2024, which help to illustrate that “the human impulse to find meaning... in an extraordinary event... is a strong, timeless, and evolutionarily valuable tendency.” Written with wit and erudition, this delights. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 11/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

With this frenetic homage to cult classic horror films, first serialized via Substack, Peterson (Strong Bones) delivers a relentless and over-the-top supernatural thriller. When an elite FBI task force slays the supernatural slasher who’d been stalking a summer camp for decades, they unknowingly tip the balance of the cosmos, setting off an apocalyptic series of natural disasters. To restore the status quo, the enigmatic being overseeing Hell’s minions on Earth recruits Letta Starchild, daughter of an infamous cult leader, to replace him as Guildmaster. Her initiation test: break her mother’s soul out of Hell. Letta assembles a team for the heist, including two former friends from her mother’s Starchild Ranch: FBI agent Frith, who triggered the cataclysm, and hyperactive conspiracy theorist Nicky Nicodemus. Along with a supernatural Dream Master and a killer-possessed teddy bear, the gang enters supernatural realms to obtain a key, open a vault, and extract Letta’s mother. But with the universe at stake and time running out, they’re up against impossible odds. Peterson packs the text with tongue-in-cheek pop culture references, often to the point of distraction. Still, plot twists, side quests, unfolding backstories, and wild cosmology keep the pages turning on the way to a brutal climax. Fans of self-aware meta-horror will want to check this out. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 11/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

This kaleidoscopic account from historian Davis (From Head Shops to Whole Foods) looks at how local “police provocateurs” and federal intelligence agencies manipulated and harassed the civil rights movements of the 1960s and ’70s from both within and without. Drawing on testimonies uncovered during the 1975 congressional Church Committee hearings, at which many covert ops against the “Black freedom and antiwar movements” were “unmasked” to the American public, Davis considers how local acts of sabotage (like the NYPD’s use of undercover spies) and open violence (like Birmingham’s “red squads”) worked in lockstep with more cohesive federal efforts to discredit groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and hasten the end of the civil rights movement. The result is a convincing, shrewdly structured case that there isn’t as much sunlight between the undercover FBI agent and the brutalizing riot cop as many Americans would like to think. Particularly deft is how Davis traces the ethos of “political policing” that motivated J. Edgar Hoover’s infamous COINTELPRO program back to anti-anarchist efforts in the 1900s. Davis also pays keen attention to how activists fought back, astutely arguing that civil rights groups’ responses to political policing laid a foundation for today’s Black Lives Matter movement. It’s a vital corrective to the idea that anti-racist activists, then or now, are fighting in a vacuum. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 11/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

This thorough and damning account from journalist Di Cintio (Driven) profiles migrant workers who traveled to Canada from Costa Rica, India, and the Philippines under the Temporary Foreign Worker program and found themselves subjected to inhumane and dangerous working conditions. Delving into the history of the program, which was founded in 1973, and its inner workings, he argues that it is inherently flawed, as it allows the workers to be drastically taken advantage of due to restrictions that keep them from moving jobs and, in some instances, from receiving medical care. While some business owners and other stakeholders Di Cintio speaks with concede that “our migrant labour system allows bad actors to act badly,” Di Cintio goes further, arguing that “the problem isn’t a few bad apples,” and that the system is in fact working as designed, in a punitive and harmful manner. He does so via tangential explorations of the exploitative situations faced by other migrants ranging from foreign students studying in Canada to human-trafficking victims. While offering precise and useful insights into the Canadian system, Di Cintio also provides rich food for thought about the role migration plays in the global order. It’s worth a look for anyone concerned about the harsh treatment of migrants. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 11/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this stirring tribute, Clyburn, South Carolina’s ninth Black congressman, profiles his eight predecessors, Black Republicans who served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1868 to 1897. They include Robert Smalls, who won his freedom during the Civil War by hijacking a Confederate ship; George Washington Murray, an ex-slave who became a prosperous landowner; and Richard Cain, a prominent freeborn Methodist minister. Their saga starts with extraordinary hopes in the 1860s, when the 14th Amendment and federal civil rights laws enforced by federal occupation troops gave Black South Carolinians the right to vote, resulting in a state legislature and Congressional delegation dominated by Black Republicans who pursued measures to give freedmen land, education, and equality. Later chapters recount the backlash: hundreds of Republicans were murdered by the KKK and the Red Shirt militia, Democratic election officials stuffed ballot boxes and intimidated Black voters, and unfairly implemented voting regulations caused Black voter registration to plummet. Clyburn chronicles the dogged struggle of his eight predecessors to preserve Black rights—Smalls was almost killed when Red Shirts invaded a campaign rally—as they navigated Democratic violence, an increasingly indifferent Congress, and intra-Party rivalries. The narrative is full of drama, and Clyburn adds insights from his own experience breaking racial barriers as a civil-rights-era politician. It adds up to a gripping account of political courage under the most fraught circumstances. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 11/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

Set in 1925 Paris, the latest from two-time World Fantasy Award winner Powers (My Brother’s Keeper) is a colorful dark fantasy spun from the exploits of the Lost Generation. Among them is American expatriate Harry Nolan, who is confronted one afternoon by Genevieve “Vivi” Chastain, a 19-year-old orphan who holds him at gunpoint and demands to read an article he has been hired to illustrate by a local newspaper. The piece—which was written by Ernest Hemingway—is an interview with an aged bullfighter that references both the legend of the Phoenician god Moloch and a means of destroying him, and it has aroused the ire of the sauteurs, a secret society devoted to Moloch, who achieve immortality by repeatedly commandeering the bodies of young children. Vivi, it turns out, is a victim of one such sauteur, with whom she shares a body. Her efforts to shake this usurper’s soul pitch her and Harry headlong into wild escapades involving Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso, a ghoulish traipse through the catacombs, and a fiery finale in Spain. Powers dextrously weaves invented myth with real historical detail to create a gripping adventure. Readers are sure to be hooked. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 11/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

Journalist Latta debuts with a disquieting look at abuses of power in America’s evangelical megachurches, which he paints as currently undergoing consolidation under an insular tier of power brokers. He first delves into the troubling issue of sexual misconduct perpetrated by church leaders, and the machinations that allow them to repeatedly return to positions of authority in new churches. From there, he explores the physical, psychological, and economic ways that megachurches and affiliated institutions can take advantage of devout believers, including one evangelical program so violent that an outsider mistook it for a kidnapping, prompting police involvement. Finally, the book explores the way that megachurches can draw parishioners away from smaller churches, often leading to their closure, even as, in a fascinating turn, he shows that in the 2020s, many megachurches have begun franchising, meaning physical congregations are technically growing smaller again, though remaining tightly linked to a hub church. Along the way, Latta spotlights people who are working to address a flawed system, among them Boz Tchividjian, a grandson of Billy Graham who has made it his mission to fight sexual assault within religious communities. Latta also troublingly notes the ways in which some megachurches have aligned themselves with Trumpian politics. The result is a harrowing look at a growing and in many ways unaccountable force in American political life. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 11/14/2025 | Details & Permalink