Latest Reviews
Lottie Jones thought her crimes were behind her. Decades earlier, she changed her identity and tucked herself away in a small town. Her most exciting nights are the weekly bingo games at the local church and gossiping with her friends. When investigative journalist Plum Dixon shows up on her doorstep asking questions about Lottie’s past and specifically her involvement with numerous unsolved cases, well, Lottie just can’t have that. But getting away with murder is hard enough when you’re young. And when Lottie receives another annoying knock on the door, she realizes this crime just might be the death of her.
In the gritty East Village of 1970s New York, Ivan and his best friend, Eddie, a popular local bartender, are dabbling in drugs following a short tour of Europe. One night, as Ivan and Eddie experiment with heroin, things go horribly wrong. In a panic, Ivan rushes Eddie to a crowded local ER and, believing his friend is about to die, makes the awful choice to leave him there. This one act of abandonment haunts Ivan his entire life. He keeps this secret from his friends and later his family, forever searching for mercy from "a remorse that never dies." Ivan's decision also ripples across time through an extended community, affecting a host of other people unknowingly connected to that night.
The quarterback: the American equivalent of royalty, long glamorized, mythologized and worshipped. Still, long before the Super Bowl trophies, massive contracts, brand deals and millions of social media followers comes the dream. From the backyard to Pop Warner, from high school to college, from the NFL to the Hall of Fame, becoming the country’s ultimate idol requires single-minded focus while navigating a maze of bad breaks, insecurities, jealousy, pressure and fame. Long known as the outsider’s guide into this elite world, Seth Wickersham’s fresh reporting goes deep into the quarterback journey, measuring the distance between what the men who have traveled it expected and what they found at the end of the road.
Years after escaping New York and the center of its artistic world --- a group of self-important, depraved and unscrupulous artists, curators and hangers-on --- our narrator is back in town. She’s wandering around the Lower East Side, thinking about the recent death of her former best friend, Rebecca, when she runs into Eugene, one half of the artist-curator couple at the heart of her old social set. Despite her better judgment, she accepts his invitation to a dinner party. And though the party is held only hours after Rebecca’s funeral, it's not a memorial of Rebecca but a dinner held in honor of a young, newly famous actress. When the guest of honor finally arrives, she sets in motion a disastrous end to the evening, laying bare the depravity and decadence of the hosts’ empty little lives.
Anne Bishop seems like a typical Vassar sophomore --- one of a popular group of privileged WASP friends. None of the girls in her circle has any idea that she’s Jewish, or that her real first name is Miriam. Pretending to be a Gentile has made life easier. As Anne, she no longer suffers the snubs, snide remarks and daily restrictions Jews face. But her secret life is threatened when she becomes fascinated by a girl not in her crowd. Delia Goldhush is sophisticated, stylish, brilliant and unashamedly Jewish. Knowing that her growing closeness with Delia would be social suicide if it were discovered, Anne keeps their friendship quiet. Delia seems to understand --- until a cruelty on Anne’s part drives them apart and sends them scattering to other corners of the world, alone and together.
You don’t have to eat food to know the way to a city’s heart is through its stomach. So when a group of deactivated robots come back online in an abandoned ghost kitchen, they decide to make their own way doing what they know: making food --- the tastiest hand-pulled noodles around --- for the humans of San Francisco, who are recovering from a devastating war. But when their robot-run business starts causing a stir, a targeted wave of one-star reviews threatens to boil over into a crisis. To keep their doors open, they’ll have to call on their customers, their community and each other --- and find a way to survive and thrive in a world that wasn’t built for them.
Coral and Allan Clarendon have just moved to the seaside town of Barnwall with their young son, Dean. If an uncommon number of children have died unnaturally in Barnwall throughout history, surely Dean must be safe with his parents. Could their house be a source of peril? Allan and Coral seem to think so, since they call for an exorcism. Allan’s father, Thom, believes his wife is wrong to think the ceremony has left Dean in worse danger. But if she’s alone in seeing the terrors that are gathering around him, how desperate will her solution have to be?
Since its initial publication in 1978, THE STAND has been considered Stephen King’s seminal masterpiece of apocalyptic fiction. Generations of writers have been impacted by its dark yet ultimately hopeful vision of the end and new beginning of civilization, and its stunning array of characters. Now for the first time, King has fully authorized a return to the harrowing world of THE STAND through this original short story anthology as presented by award-winning authors and editors Christopher Golden and Brian Keene. Bringing together some of today’s greatest and most visionary writers, THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT features unforgettable, all-new stories set during and after (and some perhaps long after) the events of THE STAND.
“Why do you write?” the organizer of a literary event in Mexico City asks Miriam Toews. Each attempted answer from Toews --- all of them unsatisfactory to the organizer --- surfaces new layers of grief, guilt and futility connected to her sister's suicide. She has been keeping up, she realizes, a decades-old internal correspondence, filling a silence she barely understands. And we, her readers, come to see that the question is as impossible to answer as deciding whether to live life as a comedy or a tragedy. Marking the first time that Toews has written her own life in nonfiction, A TRUCE THAT IS NOT PEACE explores the uneasy pact a writer makes with memory.
Crime fiction author Joe Penvale has won the most brutal battle of his life. Now that he has finished his intense medical treatment, he and his twin sister, Meredith, are boarding the glorious Orient Express in Paris. Meredith hopes that the literary ghosts on the train will nudge Joe's muse awake, and he'll be inspired to write again. After their first evening spent getting to know some of their fellow travelers, Joe pulls out his laptop and opens a new document. The next morning, Joe and Meredith are shocked to witness that the cabin next door has become a crime scene. They soon find themselves caught up in an Agatha Christie-esque murder investigation. But when the steward guarding the crime scene is murdered, it marks the beginning of a killing spree that leaves five found dead --- and one still missing.
