Pg. 69: Katie Tietjen's "Death in the Details"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Death in the Details: A Novel by Katie Tietjen.

About the book, from the publisher:

Inspired by the real-life mother of forensic science, Frances Glessner Lee, and featuring a whip-smart, intrepid sleuth in post-WWII Vermont, this debut historical mystery will appeal to fans of Victoria Thompson and Rhys Bowen.

Maple Bishop is ready to put WWII and the grief of losing her husband, Bill, behind her. But when she discovers that Bill left her penniless, Maple realizes she could lose her Vermont home next and sets out to make money the only way she knows how: by selling her intricately crafted dollhouses. Business is off to a good start—until Maple discovers her first customer dead, his body hanging precariously in his own barn.

Something about the supposed suicide rubs Maple the wrong way, but local authorities brush off her concerns. Determined to help them see “what’s big in what’s small,” Maple turns to what she knows best, painstakingly recreating the gruesome scene in miniature: death in a nutshell.

With the help of a rookie officer named Kenny, Maple uses her macabre miniature to dig into the dark undercurrents of her sleepy town, where everyone seems to have a secret—and a grudge. But when her nosy neighbor goes missing and she herself becomes a suspect, it’ll be up to Maple to find the devil in the details—and put him behind bars.

Drawing inspiration from true crime and offering readers a smartly plotted puzzle of a mystery, Death in the Details is a stunning series debut.

Visit Katie Tietjen's website.

The Page 69 Test: Death in the Details.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Anna S. Mueller & Seth Abrutyn's "Life under Pressure"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Life under Pressure: The Social Roots of Youth Suicide and What to Do About Them by Anna S. Mueller & Seth Abrutyn.

About the book, from the publisher:

A rare study that transforms our understanding of why youth die by suicide, why youth suicide clusters happen, and how to stop them

Youth suicide clusters have deeply unsettled communities in recent years. While clusters have been widely documented in the media, too little is known about why youth die by suicide, why youth suicide clusters happen, and how to stop them both.

In Life under Pressure, Anna S. Mueller and Seth Abrutyn investigate the social roots of youth suicide and why certain places weather disproportionate incidents of adolescent suicides and suicide clusters. Through close examination of kids' lives in a community repeatedly rocked by youth suicide clusters, Mueller and Abrutyn reveal how the social worlds that youth inhabit and the various messages they learn in those spaces--about who they are supposed to be, mental illness, and help-seeking--shape their feelings about themselves and in turn their risk of suicide. With great empathy, Mueller and Abrutyn also identify the moments when adults unintentionally fail kids by not talking to them about suicide, teaching them how to seek help, or helping them grieve.

Through stories of survival, resilience, and even rebellion, Mueller and Abrutyn show how social environments can cause suicide and how they can be changed to help kids discover a life worth living. By revealing what it is like to live and die in one community, Life under Pressure offers tangible solutions to one of the twenty-first century's most tragic public health problems.

Visit Anna S. Mueller's website and Seth Abrutyn's website.

The Page 99 Test: Life under Pressure.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five of the best books about queer relationships

At the Guardian Safi Bugel tagged five "rich, nuanced LGBTQ+ tales," including:

Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval

Rotting fruit, flies and urine may not be the typical markers of a sexual awakening tale, but somehow Jenny Hval’s strange, feverish world perfectly captures the dizzying feelings associated with unspoken, and unfamiliar, sexual chemistry. After responding to a newspaper ad from another girl at her college, Jo finds herself sharing a dank warehouse flat with no walls and little privacy; tension between the two roommates swells as boundaries break down. Like in her music, which is both uncanny and intimate, Hval’s debut novel is hypersensual and completely immersive.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Cara Hunter

From my Q&A with Cara Hunter, author of The Whole Truth: A Novel:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

Titles play such an important part in establishing the reader's route into a book. Like the jacket design, it's like a signpost for the sort of experience to expect. You only have to look at the original titles for classic novels to see how vital they can be - would The Great Gatsby have been such a hit if it had been issued as Trimalchio in West Egg? And what about All's Well That Ends Well - doesn't have quite the gravitas of War and Peace, does it.

As for my own books, all the novels in the Fawley series thus far have had three-word titles, all of which have a double meaning. Thus Close to Home (literally, figuratively), In the Dark (likewise), All the Rage (fashion, but also anger - the theme of the book). The Whole Truth is number five, and here the title is - of course - a deliberate reference to the oath taken by witnesses in court, but it's also, as the reader quickly discovers, the name of a podcast, included in full in the book, which analyses a possible miscarriage of justice. The rub there is that the case in question is one where my lead character, Adam Fawley, was instrumental in securing the conviction. And as he well knows, he wasn't the only one back then who didn't tell...[read on]

Learn more about The Whole Truth and visit Cara Hunter's website.

Q&A with Cara Hunter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Peter Carruthers's "Human Motives"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Human Motives: Hedonism, Altruism, and the Science of Affect by Peter Carruthers.

About the book, from the publisher:

Motivational hedonism (often called “psychological hedonism”) claims that everything we do is done in pursuit of pleasure (in the widest sense) and to avoid pain and displeasure (again, in the widest sense). Although perennially attractive, many philosophers and experimental psychologists have claimed to refute it. Human Motives shows how decision-science and the recent science of affect can be used to construct a form of motivational hedonism that evades all previous critiques. On this view, we take decisions by anticipating and responding affectively to the alternatives, with the pleasure / displeasure component of affect constituting the common currency of decision-making. But we do not have to believe that the alternatives will bring us pleasure or displeasure in the future. Rather, those feelings get bound into and become parts of the future-directed representation of the options, rendering the latter attractive or repulsive. Much then depends on what pleasure and displeasure really are. If they are intrinsically good or bad properties of experience, for example, then motivational hedonism results. Carruthers argues, in contrast, that the best account is a representational one: pleasure represents its object (nonconceptually, in a perception-like manner) as good, and displeasure represents it (nonconceptually) as bad. The result is pluralism about human motivation, making room for both genuine altruism and intrinsic motives of duty.

Clearly written and deeply scientifically informed, Human Motives has implications for many areas of philosophy and cognitive science, and will be of interest to anyone wanting to understand the foundations of human motivation.

Learn more about Human Motives at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Human Motives.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top gothic novels about distressed women

Chin-Sun Lee is the author of the debut novel Upcountry (2023) and a contributor to the New York Times bestselling anthology Women in Clothes (2014).

Her work has also appeared in Electric Literature, Literary Hub, The Georgia Review, and Joyland, among other publications. She lives in New Orleans.

At Shepherd Lee tagged five favorite gothic novels about distressed women. One title on the list:

The Need by Helen Phillips

One of my favorite hair-raising tropes is the hostile doppelgänger, and this one really delivers! After sensing an intruder in the house, Molly, a young mother, encounters a menacing double who calls herself “Moll” and claims to be her from an alternate reality, one where she has no children—which prompts her to claim Molly’s.

What makes this book so tense and creepy is Molly’s unreliable POV as she wrestles with her anxiety, exhaustion, and protectiveness over her two young children. Is Moll the manifestation of a psychotic breakdown? Does Molly want to vanquish her or trade places? The prose is potent and spare, with short chapters alternating between past and present action, twisting the suspense all the way to its ambiguous—but for me, satisfying—conclusion.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Need is among Ainslie Hogarth's eight novels about monstrous mothers, Amanda Mactas's five top horror novels driven by maternal instinct, Michael J. Seidlinger's top ten terrifying home invasions in fiction.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Samantha M. Bailey reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Samantha M. Bailey, author of A Friend in the Dark.

Her entry begins:

One of the best things about being an author is when I’m asked to blurb upcoming books from writers I love and admire. One of these exceptional authors is Laurie Elizabeth Flynn, whose latest suspense, Till Death Do Us Part, releases on August 13th . I just finished devouring it, and it’s outstanding. Set in the wine-soaked Napa Valley, this masterful novel ignites in the first paragraph, catching fire until the explosive conclusion. It’s...[read on]

About A Friend in the Dark, from the publisher:

A digital romance turns deadly in this sensual domestic thriller from USA Today bestselling author Samantha M. Bailey.

Eden Miller’s world is crumbling. Her husband blindsided her with divorce, and her daughter barely speaks to her. In an impulsive decision to escape her present and revisit the past, she sends a friend request to her college crush, Justin Ward.

One night twenty-three years ago changed the course of her life. It closed the door on Justin and opened the door to her husband, Dave. But what if Eden could have a do-over?

Eden begins an online relationship with Justin that awakens her in ways she never thought possible, and his voice and words make her take bold risks. But something’s off. He knows too much about her and her family…he’s been following her.

Eden is forced to awaken from her fantasy and look for answers―who really is the man on the other line? The truth about Justin―and about what happened that fateful night two decades ago―puts her and her family in a fight for their lives.

Visit Samantha M. Bailey's website.

Q&A with Samantha M. Bailey.

Writers Read: Samantha M. Bailey.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seraphina Nova Glass's "The Vacancy in Room 10," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Vacancy in Room 10 by Seraphina Nova Glass.

The entry begins:

Anna receives a call one evening to hear her husband in a panic admitting that he killed someone which is followed by a bang and the call dropping. Later, his body is found on the banks of the Rio Grande and is considered a suicide. It doesn't make sense, so Anna moves into the Sycamore apartments where he kept his art studio and decides to investigate herself.

Cass has found herself left with nothing after a messy breakup. She is living in this same rundown apartment complex. Desperate for money, she starts a little scheme, blackmailing men for bits of money to get by. One day, however, she blackmails the wrong person and all hell breaks loose as Anna and Cass’s stories crash into one another.

So, for this book, I have been already tasked to think about who would play the lead characters in a movie because one of my previous books, On A Quiet Street, was offered a movie deal and this book is being shopped around for one as well. My husband jokes that he sees Kristen Wiig playing the...[read on]

Visit Seraphina Nova Glass's website.

Q&A with Seraphina Nova Glass.

My Book, The Movie: The Vacancy in Room 10.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Colleen Taylor's "Irish Materialisms"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Irish Materialisms: The Nonhuman and the Making of Colonial Ireland, 1690–1830 by Colleen Taylor.

About the book, from the publisher:

Irish Materialisms: The Nonhuman and the Making of Colonial Ireland, 1690-1830, is the first book to apply recent trends in new materialist criticism to Ireland. It radically shifts familiar colonial stereotypes of the feminized, racialized cottier according to the Irish peasantry's subversive entanglement with nonhuman materiality. Each of the chapters engages a focused case study of an everyday object in colonial Ireland (coins, flax, spinning wheels, mud, and pigs) to examine how each object's unique materiality contributed to the colonial ideology of British paternalism and afforded creative Irish expression.

The main argument of Irish Materialisms is its methodology: of reading literature through the agency of materiality and nonhuman narrative in order to gain a more egalitarian and varied understanding of colonial experience. Irish Materialisms proves that new materialism holds powerful postcolonial potential. Through an intimate understanding of the materiality Irish peasants handled on a daily basis, this book presents a new portrait of Irish character that reflects greater empowerment, resistance, and expression in the oppressed Irish than has been previously recognized.

Learn more about Irish Materialisms at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Irish Materialisms.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top crime stories set in small towns

Samantha Jayne Allen is the author of the Annie McIntyre Mysteries. She has an MFA in fiction from Texas State University. Her writing has been published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, The Common, and Electric Literature. Raised in small towns in Texas and California, she now lives with her husband in Atlanta.

Allen's new novel is Next of Kin.

[Q&A with Samantha Jayne Allen]

At CrimeReads she tagged six "titles that use crime as the vehicle and small towns as the fuel, all in service of a well-told story." One entry on the list:

Tornado Weather by Deborah E. Kennedy

A beautifully written, sharply observed novel told in alternating viewpoints of the residents of Colliersville, Indiana, Tornado Weather’s plot centers around the disappearance of a five-year-old girl who is last seen at the bus stop near her home during a tornado watch. But the real small-town mystery here is actually how the people in a community—in much of America, really—are both disparate and interlocked. Using the kaleidoscopic framework of many different voices, Kennedy examines the forces that both connect and divide the town’s residents: race, class, the feeling of being trapped (by poverty or sheer inertia), gossip, and perhaps even more powerfully, what’s left unsaid and unknown.

Read about another entry on the list.

My Book, The Movie: Tornado Weather; The Page 69 Test: Tornado Weather; Writers Read: Deborah E. Kennedy (July 2017).

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Caroline Leavitt’s "Days of Wonder"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Days of Wonder: A Novel by Caroline Leavitt.

About the book, from the publisher:

New York Times bestselling author Caroline Leavitt returns with a tantalizing, courageous story about mothers and daughters, guilt and innocence, and the lengths we go for love.

As a teenager, for a moment, Ella Fitchburg found love—yearning, breathless love—that consumed both her and her boyfriend, Jude, as they wandered the streets of New York City together. But her glorious life was pulled out from beneath her after she was accused of trying to murder Jude’s father, an imperious superior court judge. When she learns she’s pregnant shortly after receiving a long prison sentence, she reluctantly decides to give up the child.

Ella is released from prison after serving only six years and is desperate to turn the page on a new life, but she can’t seem to let go of her past. With only an address as a possible lead, she moves to Ann Arbor, Michigan, determined to get her daughter back. Hiding her identity and living in a constant state of deception, she finds that what she’s been searching for all along is a way to uncover—and live with—the truth. Yet a central mystery endures: neither Jude nor Ella can remember the events leading up to the attempted murder—that fateful night which led to Ella’s conviction.

For fans of Miranda Cowley Heller’s The Paper Palace and Allegra Goodman’s Sam, Caroline Leavitt’s Days of Wonder is a gripping high-drama page-turner about the elusive nature of redemption and the profound reach of love.

Learn more about the book and author at Caroline Leavitt's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: Pictures of You.

My Book, the Movie: Pictures of You.

The Page 69 Test: Is This Tomorrow.

My Book, The Movie: Is This Tomorrow.

My Book, The Movie: Cruel Beautiful World.

The Page 69 Test: Cruel Beautiful World.

Writers Read: Caroline Leavitt (October 2016).

My Book, The Movie: Days of Wonder.

Q&A with Caroline Leavitt.

The Page 69 Test: Days of Wonder.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Kristalyn Marie Shefveland "Selling Vero Beach"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Selling Vero Beach: Settler Myths in the Land of the Aís and Seminole by Kristalyn Marie Shefveland.

About the book, from the publisher:

Separating “Old Florida” myths from realities in a tourist haven with a deep Indigenous past

Themes of unspoiled paradise tamed by progress can be seen in stories about pioneer history across the United States, especially in Florida. Selling Vero Beach explores how settlers from northern states created myths about the Indian River area on Florida’s Atlantic Coast, importing ideas about the region’s Indigenous peoples and marketing the land as an idyllic, fertile place of possibilities.

In this book, Kristalyn Shefveland describes how in the Gilded Age, Indian River Farms Company and other boosters painted the region as a wild frontier, conveniently accessible by train via Henry Flagler’s East Coast Railway. Shefveland provides an overview of local Aís and Seminole histories that were rewritten by salespeople, illustrates how agricultural companies used Native peoples as motifs on their fruit products, and includes never-before-published letters between Vero Beach entrepreneur Waldo Sexton and writer Zora Neale Hurston that highlight Sexton’s interest in story-spinning and sales.

Selling Vero Beach unpacks real and fabricated pasts, showing how the settler memory of Florida distorted or erased the fascinating actual history of the region. With a wide variety of stories invented to lure investors and tourists, many of which circulate to this day in a place that remains a top vacation destination, Vero Beach is an intriguing example of why and how certain pasts were concocted to sell Florida land and products.

Learn more about Selling Vero Beach at the University Press of Florida website.

The Page 99 Test: Selling Vero Beach.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven books about unconventional situationships

Christine Ma-Kellams is a Harvard-trained cultural psychologist, Pushcart-nominated fiction writer, and first-generation American.

Her work and writing have appeared in HuffPost, Chicago Tribune, Catapult, Salon, The Wall Street Journal, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.

The Band is her first novel.

At Electric Lit Ma-Kellams tagged seven books that feature situationships "replete with the kind of sexual tension that makes you wonder: will they or won’t they?" One title on the list:

The Idiot by Elif Batuman

Some readers went crazy over the fact that at the end of 432 pages, Selin and Ivan (the protagonist and her love interest) seems to have never consummated their relationship. I found it the most relatable thing I read all year because I, too, spent all my college years in the same kind of sexual repression driven by a cocktail of being the good daughter of immigrants meets excessive intellect meets nerd school. Like the elusive Hungarian mathematician that is the (potentially underserved) target of Selin’s desires, the book can come off like a giant tease—the literary equivalent of blue balls—but then again, that might be part of its appeal.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Idiot is among Lauren Hutton's ten books about young women in (and out) of love and Katherine Heiny's eight of the best books about modern dating.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Caroline Leavitt

From my Q&A with Caroline Leavitt, author of Days of Wonder: A Novel:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

Days of Wonder is a little deceptive as a name of a book because it’s a title of hope. The book is about two 15-year-olds from different classes in NYC who fall madly in love and are about to be separated by the boy’s abusive father, and so they start fantasizing about killing him. And then the fantasy veers into something realer, and both kids are accused of attempted murder. Both kids were sleep-deprived and drugged-up the night of crime, and neither can really remember just what happened. Jude, with a wealthy dad and a good lawyer, goes free, but Ella gets 25 years. When she’s early released after six years, she’s desperate to find Jude, to find her child, and to find out what really happened that night, and why?

Doesn’t seem like the stuff of wonder, does it? But I wanted to focus on the bright glints of life or hope that appear in a lot of the novel’s darkness. Yes, this great gorgeous young love is destroyed, but like that great old movie, Splendor in the Grass, there is always the memory of it. Things don’t work out the way any of the characters imagine they will, and there is a tremendous cost to everyone, but out of that darkness, there is growth, understanding, and yeah, a sense of wonder about how the world works. I wanted that wonder to be revealed at the end when...[read on]

Visit Caroline Leavitt's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: Pictures of You.

My Book, the Movie: Pictures of You.

The Page 69 Test: Is This Tomorrow.

My Book, The Movie: Is This Tomorrow.

My Book, The Movie: Cruel Beautiful World.

The Page 69 Test: Cruel Beautiful World.

Writers Read: Caroline Leavitt (October 2016).

My Book, The Movie: Days of Wonder.

Q&A with Caroline Leavitt.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Regina Kunzel's "In the Shadow of Diagnosis"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: In the Shadow of Diagnosis: Psychiatric Power and Queer Life by Regina Kunzel.

About the book, from the publisher:

A look at the history of psychiatry’s foundational impact on the lives of queer and gender-variant people.

In the mid-twentieth century, American psychiatrists proclaimed homosexuality a mental disorder, one that was treatable and amenable to cure. Drawing on a collection of previously unexamined case files from St. Elizabeths Hospital, In the Shadow of Diagnosis explores the encounter between psychiatry and queer and gender-variant people in the mid- to late-twentieth-century United States. It examines psychiatrists’ investments in understanding homosexuality as a dire psychiatric condition, a judgment that garnered them tremendous power and authority at a time that historians have characterized as psychiatry’s “golden age.” That stigmatizing diagnosis made a deep and lasting impact, too, on queer people, shaping gay life and politics in indelible ways. In the Shadow of Diagnosis helps us understand the adhesive and ongoing connection between queerness and sickness.

Learn more about In the Shadow of Diagnosis at the University of Chicago Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Criminal Intimacy.

The Page 99 Test: In the Shadow of Diagnosis.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine books for fans of David Nicholls's "One Day"

British author David Nicholls is best-known for the globally bestselling love story One Day, adapted first as a feature film and more recently as a major Netflix production. It charts the lives of two people over 20 years on the same day. People magazine called it an "instant classic.... One of the most ...emotionally riveting love stories you’ll ever encounter."

Nicholls's new novel is You Are Here.

At the Waterstones blog Mark Skinner tagged nine literary love stories for fans of One Day. One title on the list:

Maybe in Another Life by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Rootless Hannah finds her future split two ways as she decides whether or not to spend the night with her high school boyfriend in this escapist romance from the bestselling author of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo.

Read about another entry on the list.

Maybe in Another Life is among David M. Barnett's top ten summer love stories and Phoebe Fox's seven books to help you cope with heartbreak.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Helen Benedict's "The Good Deed"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Good Deed by Helen Benedict.

About the book, from the publisher:

Set in 2018 against the ironic backdrop of an overcrowded, fetid refugee camp on the beautiful, Homeric island of Samos in Greece, The Good Deed follows the stories of five women: Amina, who is nineteen and has just been released from one of Bashar al-Assad's secret and torture-ridden prisons in Syria; Leila, a Syrian widow with two little sons, who has lost her daughter and granddaughter to smugglers on a Turkish beach; Nafisa, who survived civil war and gang rape in Sudan only to see her entire family murdered, save for one daughter; Farah, Leila's lost daughter; and finally, an American named Hilma, who came from New York to Samos to escape her own dark secret, only to become entangled in conflict with the very people she wishes to help.

Drawing from four years of interviews with refugees on Samos, along with twelve previous years of work on the Iraq War, Benedict has written The Good Deed as a series of lyrical, intensely felt alternating voices, following these women’s everyday lives in the camp, as well each of their backstories—stories of families, love, secrets, violence, war, and flight. When Hilma, the American, unwittingly does a “good deed,” she triggers a crisis that brings her and the refugee women into a conflict that escalates dramatically as each character struggles for what she needs.

In essence, The Good Deed is about the struggle never to lose hope, even in the face of war and the world’s hostility to refugees; the complexities that arise out of trying to help others; the healing power of friendship; and the everlasting bonds between mothers and children.

Learn more about Helen Benedict and her work.

My Book, The Movie: Sand Queen.

The Page 69 Test: Sand Queen.

The Page 69 Test: Wolf Season.

Q&A with Helen Benedict.

The Page 69 Test: The Good Deed.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Charles Trueheart's "Diplomats at War"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Diplomats at War: Friendship and Betrayal on the Brink of the Vietnam Conflict by Charles Trueheart.

About the book, from the publisher:

For two Americans in Saigon in 1963, the personal and the political combine to spark the drama of a lifetime

Before it spread into a tragic war that defined a generation, the conflict in Vietnam smoldered as a guerrilla insurgency and a diplomatic nightmare. Into this volatile country stepped Frederick “Fritz” Nolting, the US ambassador, and his second-in-command, William “Bill” Trueheart, immortalized in David Halberstam’s landmark work The Best and the Brightest and accidental players in a pivotal juncture in modern US history.

Diplomats at War is a personal memoir by former Washington Post reporter Charles Trueheart—Bill’s son and Nolting’s godson—who grew up amid the events that traumatized two families and an entire nation. The book embeds the reader at the US embassy and dissects the fateful rift between Nolting and Trueheart over their divergent assessments of the South Vietnamese regime under Ngo Dinh Diem, who would ultimately be assassinated in a coup backed by the United States. Charles Trueheart retells the story of the United States’ headlong plunge into war from an entirely new vantage point—that of a son piecing together how his father and godfather participated in, and were deeply damaged by, this historic flashpoint. Their critical rupture, which also destroyed their close friendship, served as a dramatic preface to the United States’ disastrous involvement in the Vietnam conflict.

Visit Charles Trueheart's website.

The Page 99 Test: Diplomats at War.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five great murder mysteries set in college towns

Harry Dolan is the author of the mystery/suspense novels Bad Things Happen, Very Bad Men, The Last Dead Girl, The Man In The Crooked Hat, and The Good Killer. He graduated from Colgate University, where he majored in philosophy and studied fiction-writing with the novelist Frederick Busch. A native of Rome, New York, he now lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Dolan's new novel is Don't Turn Around.

At CrimeReads he tagged "five crime novels that have entertained and influenced me—all of them set in college towns." One title on the list:

They Never Learn by Layne Fargo

Scarlett Clark is a professor of English literature at Pennsylvania’s Gorman University—and a killer who targets men who abuse Gorman’s female students. She’s been getting away with it for sixteen years, but her most recent kill prompts the university to set up a task force to look into the suspicious deaths that keep happening on campus. Now she’ll need to take special care as she plans her next murder and strikes up a relationship with the head of the task force, Mina Pierce. In a parallel storyline, Gorman student Carly Schiller witnesses an assault on her roommate Allison at a party and begins to think about taking revenge on the fellow student who’s responsible. Fargo writes in short, propulsive chapters that ratchet up the tension on the way to a conclusion that’s both disturbing and satisfying.

Read about another entry on the list.

They Never Learn is among Katherine A. Olson's five top books with righteous female rage, Laura Picklesimer's seven dark and thrilling novels about women who kill, Julia Bartz's five thrillers featuring female psychopaths, Misha Popp's eight recent novels featuring truly fatal femmes fatales, Lesley Kara's six top crime novels about settling old scores, Heather Levy's top eight books on those darkest guilty pleasures we love to devour, Melissa Colasanti's six deliciously duplicitous female characters in thrillers, Amy Gentry's novels of the new Dark Academia canon, and Molly Odintz's six best vigilante thrillers.

My Book, The Movie: They Never Learn.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Jo Perry reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Jo Perry, author of The World Entire.

One title she tagged:

Matt Phillips’s latest, A Good Rush of Blood (Run Amok Crime) delineates delicate, complicated and sharp-edged persons and places in a stark, sexy thriller about family estrangement and liberation, trust and betrayal, and the search for the mirage we call freedom in a world as unnourishing and beautiful as the desert Phillips conjures to life. It’s no surprise that AGROB is a 2024 Thriller Award finalist. Phillips also...[read on]

About The World Entire, from the publisher:

Ascher Lieb (PURE) returns in a fast-moving, intense, and layered mystery about a dog accused of murder and a violent group that targets the man Ascher loves.

But love is complicated. And to save the dog, Ascher must find the murderer on her own and risk everything to fulfill an impossible and dangerous promise.

Visit Jo Perry's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Jo Perry & Lola and Lucy.

My Book, The Movie: Dead is Better.

The Page 69 Test: Dead is Better.

My Book, The Movie: Dead is Best.

The Page 69 Test: Dead is Best.

My Book, The Movie: Dead Is Good.

The Page 69 Test: Dead Is Good.

The Page 69 Test: Dead is Beautiful.

My Book, The Movie: Dead is Beautiful.

Writers Read: Jo Perry (February 2019).

My Book, The Movie: Pure.

Q&A with Jo Perry.

The Page 69 Test: Pure.

The Page 69 Test: The World Entire.

Writers Read: Jo Perry.

--Marshal Zeringue

Caroline Leavitt's "Days of Wonder," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Days of Wonder: A Novel by Caroline Leavitt.

The entry begins:

Days of Wonder is about two fifteen-year-old kids, Jude and Ella, who fall passionately in love, and when the boy’s father threatens to separate them, they fantasize about killing him. Until it’s no longer fantasy. But both are exhausted and sleep deprived, and using drugs to stay awake, and on the night of an attempted murder of the dad, neither one can remember what really happened. Ella goes to jail, gives up a baby, and is let out early, but Jude vanishes. As Ella struggles to create a new identity, she is desperate to learn what happened that night? What is the truth?

One of my favorite movies is Rust and Bone, a French film about a woman who used to train Orcas, who loses her legs in an accident with them and falls for a very tough, very wounded guy. Directed by Jacques Audiard, it...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Caroline Leavitt's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: Pictures of You.

My Book, the Movie: Pictures of You.

The Page 69 Test: Is This Tomorrow.

My Book, The Movie: Is This Tomorrow.

My Book, The Movie: Cruel Beautiful World.

The Page 69 Test: Cruel Beautiful World.

Writers Read: Caroline Leavitt (October 2016).

My Book, The Movie: Days of Wonder.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Douglas Dowland's "We, Us, and Them"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: We, Us, and Them: Affect and American Nonfiction from Vietnam to Trump by Douglas Dowland.

About the book, from the publisher:

When Americans describe their compatriots, who exactly are they talking about? This is the urgent question that Douglas Dowland asks in We, Us, and Them. In search of answers, he turns to narratives of American nationhood written since the Vietnam War—stories in which the ostensibly strong state of the Union has been turned increasingly into an America of us versus them. Dowland explores how a range of writers across the political spectrum, including Hunter S. Thompson, James Baldwin, and J. D. Vance, articulate a particular vision of America with such strong conviction that they undermine the unity of the country they claim to extol. We, Us, and Them pinpoints instances in which criticism leads to cynicism, rage leads to apathy, and a broad vision narrows in our present moment.

Learn more about We, Us, and Them at the University of Virginia Press website.

The Page 99 Test: We, Us, and Them.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight top thrillers about dysfunctional mother-daughter relationships

K.T. Nguyen's features have appeared in Glamour, Shape, and Fitness. After graduating from Brown University, she spent her 20s and 30s bouncing from New York City to San Francisco, Shanghai, Beijing and Taipei, and has now settled just outside Washington, D.C. with her family. Nguyen enjoys native plant gardening, playing with her rescue terrier Alice and rooting for the Mets.

You Know What You Did is her debut novel.

At Electric Lit Nguyen tagged eight thrillers that "explore the darker side of mother daughter relationships ...[and] deliver raw emotion, tension, and complexity." One title on the list:

Darling Rose Gold by Stephanie Wrobel

Loosely inspired by the Gypsy Rose Blanchard case, Darling Rose Gold quickly departs from its real-life source material to create an even more twisted mother-daughter relationship, predicated on coercive control, simmering rage, and the blinding need for validation. The novel opens as Patty Watts is released from prison after serving five years for poisoning and abusing her daughter Rose Gold in a case of Munchausen by proxy syndrome. Patty makes the chilling declaration, “My daughter didn’t have to testify against me. She chose to.” So why is Rose Gold now welcoming her mother back into her life? Wrobel expertly wields dual timelines and head-to-head POVs to craft a taut cat-and-mouse story, only the roles of predator and prey shift constantly between mother and daughter in a delightfully destabilizing turn.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Page 69 Test: Darling Rose Gold.

My Book, The Movie: Darling Rose Gold.

Q&A with Stephanie Wrobel.

--Marshal Zeringue