Latest Reviews
Every day, millions watch Mia Wright, the “trad wife” queen, on her idyllic 300-acre farm. But behind every perfect image is a secret. And in this case, the secret is a horror. Desperate to save her tarnished career, journalist Jenny Kaplan arrives at Black Swan Farm to profile Mia. Jenny is ready to write a scathing exposé, determined to expose the deception behind Mia’s curated life. But soon, Jenny has more to contend with than staged videos and camera-ready poses. There’s something wrong at the farmhouse. Something slithers through Jenny’s dreams, and at night, the children sing strange nursery rhymes. She’s losing time. She’s losing her hair. She starts to worry that she’s losing her mind.
Drawing on newly discovered archival materials and previously overlooked documents, Thomas Meyer tells the story of an intellectual icon whose character and ideas continue to captivate and challenge us to this day. Tracing anew Hannah Arendt’s journey from Königsberg to Paris, where she fled after being imprisoned in 1933, and finally to New York in 1941, Meyer illuminates her formative years and the development of her radical and brilliant books, as well as her lifelong philosophical debate with Martin Heidegger, whose Nazism was a permanent challenge for her. Meyer’s account centers on two pivotal phases: Arendt’s years in Paris after fleeing Nazi Germany and her time in the United States leading up to the landmark publication of THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM in 1951.
Willa Sullivan is excited to celebrate her best friends finally having the big wedding they’ve always wanted. But this is the first time she’s seen her ex-fiancé in months, and he brought a date. Everything feels off. Things start to look up, though, when Willa meets Danny, the groom’s charming and single childhood best friend. When they sneak off together, their rendezvous is interrupted by a masked killer terrorizing the reception. Willa and Danny fight to save the ones they love and survive the night, but the killer is unrelenting. Willa wakes up, and it’s the morning of the wedding. She just had the most intense nightmare of her life. But as the day unfolds, there are some uncanny coincidences that make her question whether it was really a dream, déjà vu or something more sinister.
Learned Edmund, a disillusioned scholar, is transporting yet another precious relic from one stuffy temple to a different stuffy temple. But when Edmund is set upon by bandits, he breaks the cardinal rule and grabs for the relic, an ancient sword. To his surprise, an alarmingly handsome man appears, wielding daggers of blue steel and cutting the thieves down. This man is the Dervish, an immortal warrior who has been trapped for centuries in a sword of enchanted steel. He hates the curse that put him there, and he wants to hate Edmund. But the damned scholar is just so sweet and clever and kind. And while the Dervish may be able to protect Edmund from bandits, cultists, dragons and strange inhuman diplomats, he may find it much harder to protect his own heart.
Owein arrives in England to marry Lady Cora of Leiningen, his dearest friend and confidante he’s known mostly through letters. However, Queen Victoria has other plans in store for the centuries-old wizard. The queen is obsessed with preserving magic, and she believes Owein is the key to pursuing her lofty ambitions. Torn from his family, his home and his betrothed, Owein is pushed into the Queen’s League of Magicians, where he learns that the Crown’s upheaval of his life is only the beginning of his problems. Meanwhile, Cora must push aside her broken heart and use her own spells and resources to uncover truths that the queen wants hidden. As new threats, former loves, untapped spells and even older souls than Owein collide, his next choice could be his last.
For more than half a century, Paul Theroux has traveled the globe and chronicled its far corners with curiosity, wit and an unflinching eye. With TRUE NORTH, he turns that eye to a country that has long been his quiet neighbor: Canada. What begins as the completion of a North American road trip trilogy becomes something more personal. Theroux meets his Quebcois friends and relations, then travels more widely through remote villages, multicultural cities and sweeping landscapes that have defined modern Canada. Along the way, he speaks with farmers, refugees, writers like John Irving and Michael Ondaatje, and Indigenous leaders such as Tanya Talaga, listening as Canadians reckon with identity, belonging and patriotism.
In 1981, KGB Major Vladimir Kuzichkin, codenamed “Redwood,” was the best Soviet officer in Iran, running spies in the wake of the Islamic revolution and working with a hidden network of Iranian communists to undermine the new regime. But Kuzichkin had a problem, a sexual secret that, if revealed, would humiliate him with his colleagues, cost him his job, and send him into exile. Desperate for a solution, he reached out to the only place he believed could help: Britain’s MI6. So begins one of the most astounding true spy stories of the Cold War, set against the terrifying prospect of nuclear armageddon. In REDWOOD, Ben Macintyre unfolds a world in turmoil, where no one’s motive is what it seems, and exposure means death.
Before he was known as the Four Monkey Killer, he was just a boy trying to survive. Charleston, 1999. Fifteen-year-old Anson Bishop didn't mean to kill --- not the first time, anyway. Raised by parents who taught him that murder was simply survival, Anson thought he'd escaped his dark past when his home burned and his mother vanished with stolen mob money. He was wrong. Someone is hunting Charleston's forgotten children --- runaways, the addicts, the ones no one will miss. When the few people Anson has come to care about vanish into the night, he discovers a truth more horrifying than anything his parents taught him: there are monsters in the world far worse than the one he sees in the mirror.
Dorothy Wagner has spent her whole life wanting nothing more than to be seen. But after failing to make her mark as an influencer, she takes a job working for a brilliant coder whose company is focused on cutting-edge deepfake technology. And there, in secret, is where she creates her salvation. Isabella. An impossibly gorgeous girl who takes social media by storm. Dorothy's artistry is brilliant, and Isabella seems so real that she garners millions of followers. But everybody knows that overnight success doesn’t just happen. And when someone gets a little too close to the truth, a violent confrontation sends Dorothy on the run, forcing her to confront what she’s willing to sacrifice to keep her secrets.
Peter Gammons is the preeminent baseball writer of his generation. Nearly every significant figure in the game has shared stories with him. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PLAYERS reveals what Gammons has learned from those greats about baseball and life. He details the emergence of Latin and Asian players in Major League Baseball and the symbiotic relationships between manager and general managers, catchers and pitchers, and second basemen and shortstops. He recalls his chance childhood meeting with Roger Maris as he was falling in love with baseball. He speaks to the marriage between rock n' roll and baseball, and tells the story of how Ted Williams claimed he could smell the wood burning on his bat after smoking line drives to the outfield.
