Featuring: Rachel Aaron, Rowan Beaird, Lisa Gray, Victoria Hayward, Elizabeth O’Brien Ingleson, Fiona McFarlane, Claire North, Sarah Pinsker, Richard Price, Sarah Rees Brennan, Colombe Schneck, Geoffrey Wawro

*

Rachel Aaron, HELL FOR HIRE (Aaron/Bach)

The Crew
A hulked-out wrath demon who eats gamer rage and loves cats, a shapeshifting lust demon who enjoys their food a bit toomuch, and a void demon who doesn’t see the point of any of this. They’re not the sort of mercenaries you’d hire on purpose, but Bex wouldn’t trust her life to anyone else.

Ever since the ancient Mesopotamian king Gilgamesh decided death wasn’t for him, killed the gods, and conquered the afterlife, times have been rough for a free demon. But the denizens of the Nine Hells aren’t the quitting sort, and Bex and her team have been choking a living out of the Eternal King’s lackeys for years. It’s not honest work, but when Heaven itself declares you a non-person, you smash-and-grab what you can get.

This next gig looks like more of the same… until Bex meets the client.

The Job
Adrian Blackwood is a witch with a problem. His family has skirted the edges of King Gilgamesh’s ire for centuries, but thanks to a decision he made as a child, Adrian is personally responsible for putting his entire coven in Heaven’s crosshairs.

Determined to set things right, Adrian drags his broom, caldron, and talking cat thousands of miles across the country to Seattle where he can fight the Eternal King’s warlocks without bringing the rest of his family into the fray. But witchcraft — like all crafts — takes time, and if the warlocks catch him before his spells are ready, he’s dead. So Adrian does what any professional witch would do and hires a team of mercenaries to keep the warlocks off his back. He didn’t expect to get demons, but when you’re already on the killing-edge of Heaven’s bad side, what’s a bit more fuel on the fire?

Sometimes you get more than you paid for.
Neither Adrian nor Bex knew what to expect when they signed their contract, but witch-plus-demon turns out to be a match made in the Hells. With this much chaos at their fingertips, even impossible dreams can come back into reach, because Bex wasn’t always a mercenary. She used to be the Eternal King’s biggest nightmare, and now that she’s got a witch in her corner, it’s time to put the old magics back on the field and show Adrian Blackwood just how much Hell he’s hired.

The first novel in a new urban fantasy series, Tear Down Heaven. I’ve enjoyed many of Aaron’s books in the past, and am looking forward to diving into this new world. Hell for Hire is due to be published by Aaron/Bach, in North America and in the UK, on June 4th.

Follow the Author: Website, Goodreads, Twitter
Review copy received from author

*

Rowan Beaird, THE DIVORCÉES (Flatiron)

Lois Saunders thought that marrying the right man would finally cure her loneliness. But as picture-perfect as her husband is, she is suffocating in their loveless marriage. In 1951, though, unhappiness is hardly grounds for divorce — except in Reno, Nevada.

At the Golden Yarrow, the most respectable of Reno’s famous “divorce ranches,” Lois finds herself living with half a dozen other would-be divorcees, all in Reno for the six weeks’ residency that is the state’s only divorce requirement. They spend their days riding horses and their nights flirting with cowboys, and it’s as wild and fun as Lake Forest, Illinois, is prim and stifling. But it isn’t until Greer Lang arrives that Lois’s world truly cracks open. Gorgeous, beguiling, and completely indifferent to societal convention, Greer is unlike anyone Lois has ever met — and she sees something in Lois that no one else ever has. Under her influence, Lois begins to push against the limits that have always restrained her. How far will she go to forge her independence, on her own terms?

Set in the glamorous, dizzying world of 1950s Reno, where housewives and movie stars rubbed shoulders at gin-soaked casinos, The Divorcees is a riveting page-turner and a dazzling exploration of female friendship, desire, and freedom.

I seem to recall noticing quite a few books published in the last few years about North Dakota’s divorce ranches — at least one history and another novel, at least. Anyway, I think it’s quite an intriguing setting for fiction. I’ll be reading this very soon. The Divorcées is out now, published by Flatiron Books in North America and Manilla Press in the UK.

Follow the Author: Website, Goodreads, Instagram, Twitter

*

Lisa Gray, THE FINAL ACT (Thomas & Mercer)

All she wanted was to see her name in lights. Now, her disappearance has made her front-page news.

It’s been twenty years since Madison James had any kind of success in Hollywood. Now she’s disappeared and a TikTok sleuth has found her purse discarded in a Los Angeles park. The news spreads like wildfire across a nation hungry for celebrity tragedy, and the struggling actress’s mysterious disappearance quickly becomes a national obsession.

Detectives Sarah Delaney and Rob Moreno of the LAPD Missing Persons Unit take the case. But truth is a rare commodity in Tinseltown; some people will stop at nothing to get what they want and Delaney and Moreno soon find themselves mired in Hollywood’s dark underbelly with little in the way of clues.

As revelations from the past emerge, it becomes apparent there is more going on than meets the eye. With an obsessive public watching every step of the investigation, can the police find Madison before she becomes more than just missing?

This looks like a classic, Hollywood missing-person mystery. This will be my first novel by Gary, and I’m rather looking forward to it. The Final Act is due to be published by Thomas & Mercer in North America and in the UK, on July 1st.

Follow the Author: Website, Goodreads, Instagram, Twitter
Review copy received via NetGalley

*

Victoria Hayward, DEATHWORLDER (Black Library)

On a planet trapped in the closing jaws of the Great Devourer, Major Wulf Khan of the Catachan 903rd receives a final, desperate mission – one which will take her soldiers into the maw of the tyranid threat.

Lazulai is a world beyond the brink, its battle against the tyranids all but lost. Once-magnificent cities lie in ruin. The seas boil. The skies crack. Horrific alien bioforms devour. In mere days the planet will be consumed.

The 903rd Catachan ‘Night Shrikes’ defend one of the last fortresses still standing. Led by Major Wulf Khan, to die fighting is all that is expected of them… until she is given one last mission: to lead a squad through the apocalypse and recover a piece of archeotech that may doom or deliver the entire Lazulai System.

Facing impossible odds and zero hope for aid, the major must hold her squad together as they pick their way through an endless xenos jungle. The enemy is merciless, relentless, endlessly adaptable and formidably resourceful… but so too is Khan.

I haven’t read many of the recent Astra Militarum novels, but I think many of them have had pretty intriguing premises. I remember when the Catachan unit was first released by GW, and I’ve liked them ever since, so I’m very much looking forward to reading this as soon as I can. Deathworlder is out now, published by Black Library in North America and in the UK.

Follow the Author: Website, Goodreads, Instagram, BlueSky, Twitter

*

Elizabeth O’Brien Ingleson, MADE IN CHINA (Harvard University Press)

The surprising story of how Cold War foes found common cause in transforming China’s economy into a source of cheap labor, creating the economic interdependence that characterizes our world today.

For centuries, the vastness of the Chinese market tempted foreign companies in search of customers. But in the 1970s, when the United States and China ended two decades of Cold War isolation, China’s trade relations veered in a very different direction. Elizabeth Ingleson shows how the interests of US business and the Chinese state aligned to reframe the China market: the old dream of plentiful customers gave way to a new vision of low-cost workers by the hundreds of millions. In the process, the world’s largest communist state became an indispensable component of global capitalism.

Drawing on Chinese- and English-language sources, including previously unexplored corporate papers, Ingleson traces this transformation to the actions of Chinese policymakers, US diplomats, maverick entrepreneurs, Chinese American traders, and executives from major US corporations including Boeing, Westinghouse, J. C. Penney, and Chase Manhattan Bank. Long before Walmart and Apple came to China, businesspeople such as Veronica Yhap, Han Fanyu, Suzanne Reynolds, and David Rockefeller instigated a trade revolution with lasting consequences. And while China’s economic reorganization was essential to these connections, Ingleson also highlights an under-appreciated but crucial element of the convergence: the US corporate push for deindustrialization and its embrace by politicians.

Reexamining two of the most significant transformations of the 1970s — US-China rapprochement and deindustrialization in the United States — Made in China takes bilateral trade back to its faltering, uncertain beginnings, identifying the tectonic shifts in diplomacy, labor, business, and politics in both countries that laid the foundations of today’s globalized economy.

It feels like a very long time since I last read a book about US-China relations… I spotted this via the publisher’s Instagram account, I think, and they were kind enough to send me a review copy. I hope to read it very soon. Made in China is due to be published by Harvard University Press in North America and in the UK, on April 26th.

Follow the Author: Goodreads, Twitter
Review copy received from publisher

*

Fiona McFarlane, HIGHWAY THIRTEEN (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

A gripping, enigmatic collection of linked short stories about the reverberations of a serial killer’s crimes in the lives of everyday people.

In 1998, an apparently ordinary Australian man is arrested and charged for a series of brutal murders. The news shocks the nation, bringing both horror and resolution to the victims’ families, but its impact travels even further: into the past, as the murders rewrite personal histories, and into the future, as true crime podcasts and biopics tell the story of the crimes.

Highway Thirteen, Fiona McFarlane’s newest collection, takes murder as its starting point, but it unfolds to encompass much more: through the investigation of the aftermath of this violence across time and place, from the killer’s childhood town to Texas, Rome, and tropical northern Australia, McFarlane presents an oblique, entrancing exploration of the way stories are told and spread, and at what cost.

What damages, big and small, do these crimes incur? How do communities make sense of such atrocities? How does the mourning of families sit alongside the public fascination with terrible crimes? And can we tell true crime stories without centering the killers? From the acclaimed author of The Sun Walks Down and The High Places comes a captivating account of loss and its extended echoes in individual lives.

Despite the incredible popularity of fiction from Down Under — especially crime and thrillers — I somehow haven’t managed to read much of it. No idea why. McFarlane’s previous novels have been quite well-received, and I’m looking forward to reading this collection of linked stories. Hopefully I’ll get to it very soon (maybe next week). Highway Thirteen is due to be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in North America (August 13th) and Sceptre in the UK (July 25th).

Follow the Author: Website, Goodreads
Review copy received via NetGalley

*

Claire North, THE LAST SONG OF PENELOPE (Redhook/Orbit)

Many years ago, Odysseus sailed to war and never returned. For twenty years his wife Penelope and the women of Ithaca have guarded the isle against suitors and rival kings. But peace cannot be kept forever, and the balance of power is about to break…

A beggar has arrived at the Palace. Salt-crusted and ocean-battered, he is scorned by the suitors – but Penelope recognises in him something terrible: her husband, Odysseus, returned at last. Yet this Odysseus is no hero. By returning to the island in disguise, he is not merely plotting his revenge against the suitors – vengeance that will spark a civil war – but he’s testing the loyalty of his queen.  Has she been faithful to him all these years?  And how much blood is Odysseus willing to shed to be sure?

The song of Penelope is ending, and the song of Odysseus must ring through Ithaca’s halls.  But first, Penelope must use all her cunning to win a war for the fate of the island and keep her family alive, whatever the cost…

This is the third novel in North’s Songs of Penelope series. I have fallen woefully behind on North’s novels, but at least now I have plenty to catch up on! The Last Song of Penelope is due to be published by Redhook in North America (June 4th) and Orbit in the UK (June 20th).

Follow the Author: Goodreads, Twitter
Review copy received via NetGalley

*

Sarah Pinsker, HAUNT SWEET HOME (TorDotCom)

On the set of a kitschy reality TV show, staged scares transform into unnerving reality in this spooky ghost story from multiple Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Sarah Pinsker.

“Don’t talk to day about what we do at night.”

When aimless twenty-something Mara lands a job as the night-shift production assistant on her cousin’s ghost hunting/home makeover reality TV show Haunt Sweet Home, she quickly determines her new role will require a healthy attitude toward duplicity. But as she hides fog machines in the woods and improvises scares to spook new homeowners, a series of unnerving incidents on set and a creepy new coworker force Mara to confront whether the person she’s truly been deceiving and hiding from all along — is herself.

I haven’t read much of Pinsker’s work, but the premise for her next novella caught my attention — readers of CR should know by now that I’m drawn to fiction set in and around the entertainment industries. I hopefully will start this in the next few days. Haunt Sweet Home is due to be published by TorDotCom in North America (September 3rd) and in the UK (September 5th).

Follow the Author: Website, Goodreads, Instagram, Twitter
Review copy received via NetGalley

*

Richard Price, LAZARUS MAN (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

East Harlem, 2008. In an instant, a five-story tenement collapses into a fuming hill of rubble, pancaking the cars parked in front and coating the street with a thick layer of ash. As the city’s rescue services and media outlets respond, the surrounding neighborhood descends into chaos. At day’s end, six bodies are recovered, but many of the other tenants are missing.

In Lazarus Man, Richard Price, one of the greatest chroniclers of life in urban America, creates intertwining portraits of a group of compelling and singular characters whose lives are permanently impacted by the disaster.

Anthony Carter — whose miraculous survival, after being buried for days beneath tons of brick and stone, transforms him into a man with a message and a passionate sense of mission.

Felix Pearl — a young transplant to the city, whose photography and film work that day provokes in this previously unformed soul a sharp sense of personal destiny.

Royal Davis — owner of a failing Harlem funeral home, whose desperate trolling of the scene for potential “customers” triggers a quest to find another path in life.

And Mary Roe — a veteran city detective who, driven in part by her own family’s brutal history, becomes obsessed with finding Christopher Diaz, one of the building’s missing.

Another author I’ve been meaning to read for so very long… I spotted Lush Life on my in-laws’ bookshelves, and I just keep forgetting to read it… After I received this ARC, though, I have a feeling this will most likely be my first of his novels. Really looking forward to it. (It’s not out for some time, so I’ll hold of posting my review until a bit closer to its release.) Lazarus Man is due to be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in North America and in the UK, on November 12th.

Follow the Author: Goodreads
Review copy received via NetGalley

*

Sarah Rees Brennan, LONG LIVE EVIL (Orbit)

When her whole life collapsed, Rae still had books. Dying, she seizes a second chance at living: a magical bargain that lets her enter the world of her favorite fantasy series.

She wakes in a castle on the edge of a hellish chasm, in a kingdom on the brink of war. Home to dangerous monsters, scheming courtiers and her favourite fictional character: the Once and Forever Emperor. He’s impossibly alluring, as only fiction can be. And in this fantasy world, she discovers she’s not the heroine, but the villainess in the Emperor’s tale.

So be it. The wicked are better dressed, with better one-liners, even if they’re doomed to bad ends. She assembles the wildly disparate villains of the story under her evil leadership, plotting to change their fate. But as the body count rises and the Emperor’s fury increases, it seems Rae and her allies may not survive to see the final page.

I’ve been a fan of Sarah Rees Brennan’s for a while: I first discovered her writing through her blog (a hilarious post about The Vampire Diaries); and most recently I thoroughly enjoyed In Other Lands, which I would also recommend to anyone (I’ve found that it has pretty wide, genre-transcending appeal among my family). I’ve been looking forward to this book for quite some time, and I’ll be reading it very soon. Long Live Evil is due to be published by Orbit Books in North America (July 30th) and in the UK (August 1st).

Follow the Author: Website, Goodreads, Instagram, BlueSky, Twitter
Review copy received via NetGalley

*

Colombe Schneck, SWIMMING IN PARIS (Penguin Press)

A woman’s personal journey through abortion, sex, friendship, love, and swimming

At fifty years old, while taking swimming lessons, I finally realized that my body was not actually as incompetent as I’d thought. My physical gestures had been, until then, small, worried, tense. In swimming I learned to extend them. I saw male bodies swimming beside me, and I swam past them, I was delighted, my breasts got smaller, my uterus stopped working. My body, by showing me who I was, allowed me to become fully myself.

In Seventeen, Friendship, and Swimming, Colombe Schneck orchestrates a coming-of-age in three movements. Beautiful, masterfully controlled, yet filled with pathos, they invite the reader into a decades-long evolution of sexuality, bodily autonomy, friendship, and loss.

Schneck’s prose maintains an unwavering intimacy, whether conjuring a teenage abortion in the midst of a privileged Parisian upbringing, the nuance of a long friendship, or a midlife romance. Swimming in Paris is an immersive, propulsive triptych — fundamentally human in its tender concern for every messy and glorious reality of the body, and deeply wise in its understanding of both desire and of letting go.

I can’t remember where (or when) exactly I first heard about this novel, but it sounded interesting. Very grateful to the publisher for approving my review request. Translated by Lauren Elkin and Natasha Lehrer, Swimming in Paris is due to be published by Penguin Press in North America and in the UK, on May 14th.

Follow the Author: Website, Goodreads, Instagram, Twitter
Review copy received via Edelweiss

*

Geoffrey Wawro, THE VIETNAM WAR: A MILITARY HISTORY (Basic Books)

The first comprehensive military history of the war in Vietnam

The Vietnam War cast a shadow over the American psyche from the moment it began. In its time it sparked budget deficits, campus protests, and an erosion of US influence around the world. Long after the last helicopter evacuated Saigon, Americans have continued to battle over whether it was ever a winnable war.

Based on thousands of pages of military, diplomatic, and intelligence documents, Geoffrey Wawro’s The Vietnam War offers a definitive account of a war of choice that was doomed from its inception. In devastating detail, Wawro narrates campaigns where US troops struggled even to find the enemy in the South Vietnamese wilderness, let alone kill sufficient numbers to turn the tide in their favor. Yet the war dragged on, prolonged by presidents and military leaders who feared the political consequences of accepting defeat. In the end, no number of young lives lost or bombs dropped could prevent America’s ally, the corrupt South Vietnamese regime, from collapsing the moment US troops retreated.

This year’s new book about the Vietnam War… As someone with a professional interest in Cold War history, I appreciate the fact that this period of history is revisited so often, and that I frequently have new books to read. The Vietnam War is due to be published by Basic Books in North America and in the UK, on October 1st.

Follow the Author: Website, Goodreads, Instagram, Twitter
Review copy received via NetGalley