Quick Review: THE SWISS AGENT by Anna Pitoniak (Simon & Schuster)

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Amanda Cole manages a new case and a potentially-rogue friend and colleague…

CIA officials Amanda Cole and Kath Frost must work together to untangle a global bribery scheme involving murder, wealthy oligarchs, and high-level Swiss bankers — unless Kath’s mysterious past tears them apart first…

Amanda Cole’s posting as the CIA station chief in Rome is normally too quiet for her liking. But when a chef’s body washes ashore on Capri, and Amanda learns he worked for a Russian oligarch with deep Kremlin ties, her alarm bells start ringing. Even more suspicious is the fact that the oligarch had hosted a private dinner with NATO’s deputy secretary general the night the chef died.

To get answers, Amanda calls on her former partner Kath Frost, a semi-retired CIA legend who is as brilliant as she is unpredictable. As they dig deeper, they discover a web of corruption that stretches from Moscow to Geneva to Washington, eventually uncovering a Kremlin-backed scheme to bribe NATO officials and tip the global balance of power.

But when a suave Swiss banker named Julian Schmidt emerges at the center of the scheme, it becomes clear that Kath shares an intimate history with him and that she may know more than she’s letting on. It turns out that Kath’s past is full of shadows, and the choices she made decades ago, in the gray borderlands of the Soviet collapse, are resurfacing now with devastating consequences. Amanda must uncover the truth about Kath — and whether she can really be trusted at all — before it’s too late.

This is the sequel to The Helsinki Affair, which was Pitoniak’s first spy novel. I’ve been a long-time fan of the author’s work — I started with a very early ARC of her excellent debut, The Futures — and I’ve enjoyed each of her new novels. I have been particularly enjoying this pivot to espionage. While The Swiss Agent isn’t the author’s best, it is nevertheless an engaging read, and I enjoyed it. Continue reading →

Quick Review: McKENNA’S GUY by Mike Lawson (Blackstone)

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A curious home-invasion case, and the detective determined to get to the truth

When an intruder with murderous intent breaks into Roger Smith’s modest home one night, the big brute gets more than he bargained for, ending up a bloody corpse staining Roger’s carpet.

Washington, DC, Detective Grace Lillinthal is summoned to the crime scene and marvels at the outcome. Why would anyone want to kill gray-haired Roger Smith? He’s the picture of respectability-a widower devoted to his family, an amateur painter, and a civil servant who works at the Government Publishing Office. When asked why he’d be a target, a clearly shaken Roger claims to be baffled.

But instinct tells Grace there’s more to Roger’s story, and when she learns that Roger-after killing his home invader and before calling the police-phoned John McKenna, she knows she’s onto something. John McKenna is a disreputable character of the first order. He’s the gregarious, larger-than-life owner of a local bar that’s a notorious den of thieves.

After one hired assassin fails, another’s bound to show up. The clock is ticking for Roger and McKenna to find out who wants Roger dead and why-and suspects abound. Stubborn Grace is as determined to dig up Roger’s secrets as he is to keep them hidden, and soon the investigation becomes a relentless game of cat and mouse. Even if Roger doesn’t consider himself a criminal, as chaos takes hold of his world, survival requires that he think like one.

I have been a fan of Mike Lawson’s novels for a very long time (ever since his debut, The Inside Ring), and his Joe DeMarco series is one of my favourite ongoing thriller series. With his latest novel, the author introduces a new protagonist and slight shift in genre. When I was lucky enough to get a review copy, I dove right in. And I’m happy to report that I enjoyed this very much. Continue reading →

Review: IT STARTS WITH ONE by Jason Lipshutz (Hachette)

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The definitive, must-read biography of Linkin Park

Linkin Park is one of the 21st Century’s biggest, and most important, rock bands. All it takes is one quick glance at the numbers— 11 Top 40 hits on the Hot 100 and six No. 1 albums on the Billboard 200, over a dozen massive tours, 27 major award wins, 100+ million records sold worldwide, over 30 million monthly Spotify listeners —to realize that when it comes to the metrics of music consumption and fandom, there’s no bigger group in recent memory. And yet, despite their enduring legacy within rock, there’s never been a full, comprehensive biography of Linkin Park—until now.

In IT STARTS WITH ONE: The Legend and Legacy of Linkin Park, Billboard’s executive director of music, Jason Lipshutz, chronicles the innovation and influence of this legendary band, from their early childhoods to the moment their paths crossed to the genesis of their iconic first album, Hybrid Theory, and all that followed. Not only were they able to synthesize trends in pop and hip-hop amidst the post-grunge era and nu metal boom, then constantly reinvent their sound over multiple albums, Linkin Park’s radically vulnerable lyrics also helped usher in a new era of artists (and fans) more open to discussing mental health and prioritizing inclusivity. Led by their front men, Chester Bennington and Mike Shinoda, who balanced each other out artistically, Linkin Park never shied away from songs that put their issues front and center, for the world to see and feel. Tragically, Chester succumbed to his demons and passed away in 2017, but the music endures—and in order to truly appreciate the band’s singular power to bring people together, we need to take a closer look at how exactly Linkin Park changed popular music.

Through in-depth reporting and interviews, as well as new reflections from their collaborators and contemporaries, IT STARTS WITH ONE explores how one band made such a big impact on modern music, effectively cementing Linkin Park’s long overdue place in music history.

Jason Lipshutz’s It Starts With One is the second book I’ve read about Linkin Park. The first was Jeff Blue’s One Step Closer (2020), a memoir by one of the music executives who discovered the band and helped them along their first steps towards international superstardom. Lipshutz’s book is, in my opinion, far superior, and a must-read for all fans of Linkin Park. The book should also appeal to anyone with an interest in turn-of-the-millennium rock/metal. I very much enjoyed this. Continue reading →

Upcoming: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE ARTIFICIAL STATE by Jill Lepore (Liveright/Allen Lane)

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If you’ve been reading CR for any length of time, you’re probably familiar with the fact that I am a huge fan of Jill Lepore’s work. Whether a full-length book, or one of her frequent articles in the New Yorker, Lepore is a must-read for me. So, I frequently check to see if the author has a new book in the works, and was very happy to learn that she does: The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State is due to be published later this year (August), and I can’t wait. Technology and its place in American society and culture has long been an area of interest of the author’s (and mine, but I can’t write about it nearly as well), and I have very high hopes for this new book. Here’s the synopsis:

“The Artificial State is the factory farming of humans, the sorting and segmenting, the isolation and alienation, as if humans were becoming to machines what animals had become to humans.” — Jill Lepore

“Much in history is headlong but few grand transformations have been more precipitate or more heedless than the rise of… the Artificial State,” writes Jill Lepore in this passionate account of how rule by machine has ravaged the world. Inspired by Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, which argued in 1951 that the machinery of modern life was reshaping the very fundamentals of human existence, Lepore, profoundly disturbed by the technology revolution and by the soulless inundation of artificial intelligence, unfurls a new history for our own twenty-first century.

Building on an essay in The New Yorker in 2024, Lepore’s clarion call traces our increasing dependence on and strangulation by data. Political campaigns, awash in an avalanche of fake bots, have been reduced to attention-mining algorithms, while multinational media corporations dictate public discourse, and the era of the liberal nation-state seems to be coming to a rapid end, replaced by billionaire technocrats reliant on autocracy and the tools of AI.

With Orwellian overtones, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State demonstrates how technology has corroded global democracy, leading to the destruction of both human community and capacity for self-government, creating a new form of AI government, a digital citizen’s assembly, where AI will recommend the course of action to humans in place of human-run legislatures. Especially sobering with this proliferation of “dizzying, ever-changing schemes, prophesies, and predictions” is that the Artificial State has come at the expense of the natural world, leading to catastrophic loss of wildlife habitat and biodiversity.

Deliberately alarming, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, despite its abundance of dire facts, is not a funeral dirge; rather, it’s an inspiring wake-up call, written in Lepore’s typically elegiac prose, which demonstrates that nothing about the Artificial State was inevitable, for it is a “government without consent, even government without humans.” It can, Lepore asserts, be dismantled. Other heinous systems, like feudalism, fascism, and slavery, have also been dismantled, but disassembly requires identifying the parts, tracing the sources. It requires telling a new history. This is the purpose of The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State.

As an aside, one of the author’s observations about technology has stuck with me, ever since I read it in one of the pieces included in The Deadline, a fantastic collection of the author’s articles: “Disruption is innovation without progress.”

Jill Lepore’s The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State is due to be published by Liveright in North America and Allen Lane in the UK (no cover at the time of writing), on August 25th.

Follow the Author: Goodreads

CR20: The Interviews

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For a long time, I only posted reviews on Civilian Reader. For some reason, I resisted branching out into other types of content. Partly, it was an issue of how much time I had (postgraduate degrees take up a lot of time), and how much I wanted to commit to the website. As I started to become more interesting in publishing and writing in general, though, the website took up more of my attention and energy, and I started to think about other types of content I could publish.

In December 2010, while taking a train back to university in the UK, my partner convinced me to try some interviews. I’ve always loved the long, feature-length interviews in magazines like Rolling Stone, but I didn’t feel like I had the journalistic chops to pull off anything remotely as in-depth or interesting. (I’m also not entirely sure that there are many authors who offer the chance for this type of interview; rock and movie stars just live the kind of lives that do.)

I’d just read, and very much enjoyed, Ari Marmell’s The Conqueror’s Shadow, so decided to reach out to him, and he agreed to answer some questions. I published that Q&A on December 31st, and it began a long run of interviews on CR — at the time of writing, there are 390 published interviews on the site. (I only did the math today.) The interview is recreated, below, entirely as it was published on the original, Blogspot version of CR, except for some typos. (I’ve also added the now-normal “Follow the Author” stuff, and updated some links to mentioned titles.)

After the interview, I’ve included a few general thoughts on interviewing, and why they became less-common on Civilian Reader.

Continue reading →

Civilian Reader is… 20yrs Old. WTF? Anyway, Here’s the First Review I Wrote…

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Twenty years ago today, I posted my first fiction review on Civilian Reader. That is… pretty wild.

Before creating CR, I’d been reviewing music for my own fanzine that I’d been running for about four years. I first put that together using Microsoft Publisher, and printed, stapled, and mailed it out to the handful of subscribers I had. After I discovered this thing called “blogging”, while studying journalism, I shifted everything online. (It’s just so much easier, quicker, and cheaper — no more multipacks of printer ink!)

I wanted to do something to mark the occasion, and more than just the one post marking the milestone, and have been mulling this ever since I noticed we were coming up to the 20th anniversary. I’m still not entirely sure what I want to do, so I’ll have to keep thinking about (hopefully) interesting and related things to do. I am currently toying with revisiting early books I read and reviewed for the website, and taking a look at “Before Civilian Reader” books that I love and think deserve a little more attention. (Basically, it’ll be an excuse to re-read some older favourites.) I’m hesitant to make any concrete plans, though, as I invariably don’t follow through on “reading plans” or “reading goals” for a variety of reasons.

The first book review I ever wrote was for Richard Morgan’s Market Forces, for my university paper. It was a good book, and I thought I wrote a pretty good (albeit too-long-for-print) review, which was then butchered for publication. What went to press stripped out the discussion of what actually made the novel interesting and worth reading. So, I decided to create my own space to review books. Continue reading →

Interview with JONATHAN D. BEER

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Let’s start with an introduction: Who is Jonathan D. Beer?

There’s an existential question and a half…

Hello, to you and your readers. I’m Jonathan D. Beer. I’m a freelance writer for Black Library, and more generally a writer of science fiction and fantasy stories. I live in Edinburgh, Scotland, with one tiny cat and another that is part-fox, part-sentient rug.

I read War Studies at university, which was less about studying maps with arrows on it than I had been led to believe. I started writing for Black Library in 2020, just after the Covid-19 lockdown, and I still can’t believe I actually get to do this.

You’ve had two recent novels published by Black Library: Tomb World and Dominion Genesis. How would introduce them to potential readers?

Dominion Genesis is an exploration of how the Adeptus Mechanicus deals with trauma and loss, through the eyes (or, rather, the ocular implants) of Explorator Superior Talin Sherax.

Tomb World is the journey of a Necron praetorian, a guardian of the necrontyr’s codes of law and honour, after she is stripped of that honour by a betrayal. Continue reading →

Upcoming: THE BREAKUP by Kurt Andersen (Random House)

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This August, Random House are due to publish the new novel from Kurt Andersen: The Breakup. It’s been quite a while since Andersen’s previous novel, True Believers (2013), but readers may also be familiar with his non-fiction — which includes the excellent Fantasyland and Evil Geniuses. In addition to his excellent non-fiction, the author on occasion turns to fiction to explore contemporary life and issues — he did this in the aforementioned True Believers, and also in Turn of the Century (2000). This latest book is about a marriage that is cracking apart during a near-future United States that is undergoing dramatic changes following a second civil war and its own break-up.

Here’s the synopsis:

Natalie and Asher’s marriage has long been marked by fault lines, quiet rifts in how they view their fellow Americans and navigate AI-suffused life in 2045. After twenty-three years together, and after surviving the two years of civil war in the 2030s, Natalie in rural Tennessee (part of the new Free American Republic) and Asher in San Francisco (in the now smaller United States).Natalie and Asher’s relationship mirrors America’s own unraveling — confused, messy, painful, ambivalent, and impossibly intimate.

When Natalie and Asher are brought back into proximity while touring far-flung colleges with their seventeen-year-old, they find themselves on a road trip through a strange, uncertain new American landscape, transformed by both the terrorist uprising and technology, all while dealing with the flux — and resilience — within their own family. They face the questions the nation has reckoned with for a generation: what differences are irreconcilable, and when is something broken worth saving?

Razor-sharp, ambitious, ranging from tragic to comic and brimming with imagination, The Breakup is a sweeping story where the personal and sociopolitical intersect in ways bracingly plausible, keenly insightful, and surprisingly hopeful.

I’m really looking forward to this. (And have also been reminded that I need to catch up on Andersen’s other novels…)

Kurt Andersen’s The Breakup is due to be published by Random House in North America, on August 18th.

Follow the Author: Website, Goodreads, Instagram, BlueSky

Excerpt: TWO TRUTHS AND A LIE by Mark Stevens (Thomas & Mercer)

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Next month, Thomas & Mercer are due to publish Two Truths and a Lie by Mark Stevens, the second novel in the author’s Flynn Martin series of thrillers. To mark the occasion, and give readers a short taste of the new book, we have an excerpt to share with our readers. Here’s the synopsis:

Reporter Flynn Martin gets ensnared in a copycat killer’s game where winning means solving a crime—and losing could cost her everything.

Lambasted for a tragedy caught live on camera, then lauded for her help capturing the elusive PDQ, a serial killer, Flynn Martin’s career has reached new heights. But now, the TV journalist and mother has much further to fall. And someone wants to push her over the edge.

PDQ is behind bars, for life and then some, but someone on the outside has picked up the killer’s mantle. Flynn is neck-deep in an investigation when the copycat emerges, targeting her sources and delivering cryptic messages. It’s clear that Flynn’s stories are getting deadlier. This one proves no exception.

A family of four has gone missing, leaving behind ties to New Hope Church more tangled than they appear. The dangerous web rivals the threat in Flynn’s personal life. And it’s up to her to unravel each knot.

Scandal. Conspiracy. Murder. Flynn hardly knows where to begin—and if her stalker has their way, she might not live to see the end.

Continue reading →