Another nice mix of new books received. I’ve already read a couple of these, and hope to get the rest read ASAP — the summer months are always good for catching up, because I generally don’t like to go outside when it’s gross, hot, and humid. (Best laid plans, and all…)

Featuring: Stacey Abrams, Lee Cole, S. A. Cosby, Mark Lee Gardner, Sophie Gilbert, Travis Kennedy, Melissa O’Connor, Riley Sager, John Seabrook, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Christopher J. Yates

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Stacey Abrams, CODED JUSTICE (Doubleday)

Former Supreme Court clerk Avery Keene is back… trying to put the past behind her at a prestigious high-end law firm in Washington, D.C. Head down and focused on a new life, Avery is now working as an internal investigator when a high-profile client seeks her out. Camasca Enterprises has a big problem and a short runway. The tech company has developed a new integrated AI system poised to revolutionize the medical industry. To prove its potential, Camasca’s charismatic founder, retired Major Rafe Diaz, has picked a complicated target: delivering cutting-edge health care to his fellow veterans. The potential is staggering, but their prototype has been plagued by a series of disturbing anomalies — culminating in the mysterious death of a beloved Camasca engineer.

Avery and her colleagues, Jared, Ling, and Noah, are brought into the secretive company to investigate from the inside out. At the epicenter of a burgeoning, controversial industry, and with billions of dollars on the line, their task is simple: to determine whether Camasca’s technical troubles and rising body count reveal something sinister at work. In Coded Justice, Stacey Abrams’s storytelling prowess is on full display — a deft combination of riveting twists and vibrant characters set against the fascinating landscape of the capabilities of artificial intelligence… and the moral boundaries that govern it. Coded Justice is Abrams’s most entertaining novel to date.

This is the third novel in Abrams’s Keene series! I’ve been looking forward to this for quite some time, after very much enjoyed the first two novels: While Justice Sleeps and Rough Justice. I’ll be reading this very soon. Coded Justice is out now, published by Doubleday Books in North America — no UK publisher at the time of writing, but the others in the series have been published by Harper Collins, so maybe the same for this in the future.

Also on CR: Review of While Justice Sleeps

Follow the Author: Website, Goodreads, Instagram, BlueSky

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Lee Cole, FULFILLMENT (Knopf)

A searing family drama set in Kentucky where the homecoming of two half-brothers—successful Joel with his restless wife Alice, and struggling Emmett—ignites a clash of ambitions and desires, exposing raw truths about class, privilege, and happiness in the American South.

Fulfillment tells the story of two half brothers—Joel, a successful academic and author, whose marriage is in deep trouble, and his younger sibling, Emmett, paralyzed by indecision and working in a shipping warehouse—who find themselves at their family home in Kentucky and upend each other’s lives in devastating ways.

Between them is Alice, Joel’s wife, a wry, passionate young woman whose dream of a small farm feels unattainable, and whose longing for a more authentic life collides with Emmett’s hunger for connection and desire to escape a sense of burgeoning failure. As the chemistry between them escalates, the family is plunged into a violent crucible, each character brought to the precipice of immutable catastrophe.

Incisive, poignant, gorgeously crafted, Lee Cole’s haunting novel about class, privilege, brotherhood, and the American South asks whether people can change, and at what cost, and what it takes to build a life of fulfillment and meaning.

I can’t remember where I first heard about this novel, but the premise sounded interesting, so I added it to my wishlist. Hope to read it sometime over the summer. Fulfillment is out now, published by Knopf in North America and Faber & Faber in the UK.

Follow the Author: Website, Goodreads

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S. A. Cosby, KING OF ASHES (Flatiron)

When eldest son Roman Carruthers is summoned home after his father’s car accident, he finds his younger brother, Dante, in debt to dangerous criminals and his sister, Neveah, exhausted from holding the family―and the family business―together. Neveah and their father, who run the Carruthers Crematorium in the run-down central Virginia town of Jefferson Run, see death up close every day. But mortality draws even closer when it becomes clear that the crash that landed their father in a coma was no accident and Dante’s recklessness has placed them all in real danger.

Roman, a financial whiz with a head for numbers and a talent for making his clients rich, has some money to help buy his brother out of trouble. But in his work with wannabe tough guys, he’s forgotten that there are real gangsters out there. As his bargaining chips go up in smoke, Roman realizes that he has only one thing left to offer to save his brother: himself, and his own particular set of skills.

Roman begins his work for the criminals while Neveah tries to uncover the long-ago mystery of what happened to their mother, who disappeared when they were teenagers. But Roman is far less of a pushover than the gangsters realize. He is willing to do anything to save his family. Anything.

Because everything burns.

Like many, I discovered S. A. Cosby’s work with his incredible second novel, Blacktop Wasteland. He’s been a must-read author ever since, and each new novel has been bette than the last. I’ll be reading this very soon. King of Ashes is out now, published by Flatiron Books in North America and Headline in the UK.

Also on CR: Reviews of Blacktop Wasteland and All the Sinners Bleed

Follow the Author: Goodreads

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Mark Lee Gardner, BROTHERS OF THE GUN ()

A colorful and groundbreaking account of the most storied friendship of the American West: the bond between Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday

Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday: Legendary gunfighters and friends who gained immortality because of a thirty-second shootout near a livery stable called the O.K. Corral. Their friendship actually began three years before that iconic 1881 gunfight, in the rollicking cattle town of Dodge City. Wyatt, an assistant city marshal, was surrounded by armed, belligerent cowboys. Doc saw Wyatt’s predicament from a monte table in the Long Branch saloon and burst out the door with two leveled revolvers shouting, “Throw up your hands!” The startled cowboys did, and Wyatt and Doc led them off to jail. Wyatt credited Doc with saving his life, and thus began their lasting — and curious — friendship.

In this illuminating dual biography, the first about Earp and Holliday, the lives of these two men, one a sometime lawman and the other a sometime dentist, are chronicled in a swirling tableau of saloons, brothels, gambling dens, stage holdups, arrests, manhunts, and revenge killings. And while there’s plenty of gunsmoke in this saga, hero-worshipping won’t be found. Wyatt and Doc, just like anyone else then and now, had their flaws and failings, and the unsavory parts of their lives are here, too.

In Brothers of the Gun, Old West authority Mark Lee Gardner reveals fresh information about Wyatt’s and Doc’s early lives, their famous friendship, the O.K. Corral gunfight, and Wyatt’s controversial “vendetta ride” following the assassination of his brother Morgan. Drawing upon new research into diaries, letters, court records, and contemporary newspaper reports, as well as firsthand observation at several historic sites, this is the definitive book on Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and their enduring bond. Brothers of the Gun is edge-of-your-saddle nonfiction storytelling at its best.

Thought this sounded interesting. (Big fan of the movie Tombstone…) Brothers of the Gun is due to be published by Dutton in North America and in the UK, on November 11th.

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

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Sophie Gilbert, GIRL ON GIRL (Penguin Press)

A blazing critique of early aughts pop culture

What happened to feminism in the twenty-first century? This question feels increasingly urgent in a moment of cultural and legislative backlash, when widespread uncertainty about the movement’s power, focus, and currency threatens decades of progress.

Sophie Gilbert identifies an inflection point in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the energy of third-wave and “riot grrrl” feminism collapsed into a regressive period of hyper-objectification, sexualization, and infantilization. Mining the darker side of nostalgia, Gilbert trains her keen analytic eye on the most revealing cultural objects of the era, across music, film, television, fashion, tabloid journalism, and more. What she recounts is harrowing, from the leering gaze of the paparazzi to the gleeful cruelty of early reality TV and a burgeoning internet culture vicious toward women in the spotlight and damaging for those who weren’t. Gilbert tracks many of the period’s dominant themes back to the rise of internet porn, which gained widespread influence as it began to pervade our collective consciousness.

The result is a devastating portrait of a time when a distinctly American blend of excess, materialism, and power worship collided with the culture’s reactionary, puritanical, and chauvinistic currents. Amid a collective reconsideration of the way women are treated in public, Girl on Girl is a blistering indictment of the matrix of misogyny that undergirded the cultural production of the early twenty-first century, and continues to shape our world today.

It’s been very interesting, for me, to read a lot of the recent (re)evaluation of the 1990s in recent years. I was born in the early 1980s, to the ’90s were pretty formative for me. (It’s also weird how that decade’s fashion is back in style, but I am sad I no longer have my cargo-pants…) I’ve been familiar with Gilbert’s journalism for a while, published by The Atlantic; but I only learned about the author’s book after seeing it in one of the publisher’s catalogues; I thought it sounded interesting, so made a mental note to check it out sometime. Then, I heard the author interviewed on Anne Helen Peterson’s Culture Study podcast (which I also recommend, and is available from probably all/most podcast services), and it got bumped up my TBR. I “read” the audiobook edition, and very much enjoyed it — there are some issues with support for arguments, and the final third of the book isn’t as strong as what comes before, but it is nevertheless well-written, interesting, and thought-provoking. Girl on Girl is out now, published by Pengiun Press in North America and John Murray in the UK.

Follow the Author: Goodreads, Instagram, BlueSky

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Travis Kennedy, THE WHYTE PYTHON WORLD TOUR (Doubleday)

Rikki Thunder, twenty-two-year-old drummer for the scorching new ’80s metal band Whyte Python, is about to have it all: absurd wealth, global fame, and a dream girlfriend. But an unwitting role as an international spy? That was definitely not part of the plan.

It’s Los Angeles, 1986, and metal rules the world. For aspiring drummer Rikki Thunder, life is beautiful, just like his hair — even if he is sleeping in a condemned paint store and playing with a band that’s going nowhere. But when Rikki gets a shot to join L.A.’s hottest up-and-coming club band, Whyte Python, his young life takes a mind-blowing turn. Soon he and his new band mates have a hit single rocketing up the charts, Whyte Python is selling out major clubs, and Rikki has a gorgeous girlfriend in the audience and in his life. He literally could not ask for anything more.

But good fortune can be deceiving. As the band gets a deeper taste of success in the US, the late-80’s Cold War is breathing its last gasps around the world. American music is blasting through the Iron Curtain and a youth revolution is taking hold — with a hair band unknowingly playing host to the final battle for the hearts and minds of young people everywhere. Rikki Thunder soon questions the forces that are helping to propel Whyte Python, and he realizes the stakes of his musical journey — to spread peace, love, and epic shredding across the globe — might be far more dangerous than he had ever imagined.

Crafted on the satirical knife-edge between high-suspense and head-banging hilarity, The Whyte Python World Tour is a raucous, uplifting, and refreshing debut. Travis Kennedy’s adrenaline-charged novel is delightfully steeped in ’80s music and cultural nostalgia, delivering one of the most entertaining reads of the year.

The synopsis caught my attention, and I am cautiously optimistic about it — I don’t have a great track-record with “amusing” novels. But, I do love metal, history, and fiction about both. Hopefully read this over the summer, and I am looking forward to it. The Whyte Python World Tour is out now, published by Doubleday in North America and Michael Joseph in the UK.

Follow the Author: Website, Goodreads, BlueSky

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Melissa O’Connor, THE ONE AND ONLY VIVIAN STONE (Gallery)

After her grandmother’s death, thirty-something Margot DuBois prepares to sell the house quickly so she can go back to her predictable life in Santa Barbara. There, no one knows she used to write and how not succeeding wrecked her confidence. While cleaning out the attic, she comes across eight unlabeled cassette tapes. Unable to use the damaged tape player, she calls in a favor from Leo—her first love and first epic heartbreak—and they strike a deal: he’ll fix the player if he can hear what’s on the tapes. When they manage to listen, the two are shocked to hear the voice of comedic legend Vivian Stone. Why did she record these tapes and how did Margot’s grandmother get them?

Between listening to Vivian recount everything from her forbidden love for Hollywood’s leading actor, to working under a misogynistic exec, to her chemistry with her costar-turned-husband on TV, Margot and Leo fall down a memory lane of their own. Margot is inspired by Vivian’s tenacity and courage to keep fighting for the life she wants, but everything changes when Vivian reveals a secret tied to her past in this moving exploration of how it’s never too late to start over.

This has been pitched as “The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo meets The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel“, which sounds like an interesting mix. (Hopefully a more the former than the latter, which I didn’t love as much as apparently many others). Looking forward to reading this quite soon (unlikely to get it read before release, unfortunately). The One and Only Vivian Stone is due to be published in Gallery Books in North America, on July 22nd.

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

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Riley Sager, WITH A VENGEANCE (Dutton)

One train. No stops. A deadly game of survival and revenge.

In 1942, six people destroyed Anna Matheson’s family. Twelve years later, she’s ready for retribution.

Under false pretenses, Anna has lured those responsible for her family’s downfall onto a luxury train from Philadelphia to Chicago, an overnight journey of thirteen hours. Her goal? Confront the people who’ve wronged her, get them to confess their crimes, and deliver them into the hands of authorities waiting at the end of the line. Justice will at last be served.

But Anna’s plan is quickly derailed by the murder of one of the passengers. As the train barrels through the night, it becomes clear that someone else on board is enacting their own form of revenge—and that they won’t stop until everyone else is dead.

With time running out before the train reaches its destination, Anna is forced to hunt the killer in their midst while protecting the people she hates the most. In order to destroy her enemies, she must first save them—even though it means putting her own life at risk.

The latest instant-bestseller from Sager. I still haven’t read any of the author’s books, but I was drawn to the fact that this takes place on a train — there’s something intriguing about trains as a setting for mysteries. Like a larger, moving locked-room… With a Vengeance is out now, published by Dutton in North America and Hodder & Stoughton in the UK.

Follow the Author: Website, Goodreads, Instagram

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John Seabrook, THE SPINACH KING (W. W. Norton)

The riveting saga of the Seabrook Family…

“Having left this material for his writer son, my father must have wanted the story told, even if he couldn’t bear to tell it himself.” So begins the story of a forgotten American dynasty, a farming family from the bean fields of southern New Jersey who became as wealthy and powerful as aristocrats — only to implode in a storm of lies.

The patriarch, C. F. Seabrook, was hailed as the “Henry Ford of Agriculture.” His son Jack, a keen businessman, was poised to take over what Life called “the biggest vegetable factory on earth.” But the carefully cultivated facade — glamorous outings by horse-drawn carriage, hidden wine cellars, and movie star girlfriends — hid dark secrets that led to the implosion of the family business.

At the heart of the narrative is a multi-generational succession battle. It’s a tale of family secrets and Swiss bank accounts, of half-truths, of hatred and passion — and lots and lots of liquor. The Seabrooks’ colorful legal and moral failings took place amid the trappings of extraordinary privilege. But the story of where that money came from is not so pretty.

They say behind every great fortune there is a great crime. At Seabrook Farms, the troubling American histories of race, immigration, and exploitation arise like weeds from the soil. Great Migration Black laborers struck against the company for better wages in the 1930s, and Japanese Americans helped found a “global village” on the farm after World War II. Revealing both C. F. and Jack Seabrook’s corruption, The Spinach King undermines the “great man” theory of industrial progress. It also shows how American farms evolved from Jeffersonian smallholdings to gigantic agribusinesses, and what such enormous firms do to the families whose fate is bound up in the land.

A compulsively readable story of class and privilege, betrayal and revenge — three decades in the making—The Spinach King explores the author’s complicated family legacy and the dark corners of the American Dream.

John Seabrook’s The Song Machine is one of my favourite non-fiction books. After discovering it through, I think, an excerpt, I have since read everything I can find by Seabrook — his book No Brow, for example, but also his journalism. His latest book is a family memoir, which sounds intriguing. Based on how much I’ve enjoyed his other work, I have no doubt that I’ll enjoy this, too. The Spinach King is out now, published by W. W. Norton in North America and in the UK.

Follow the Author: Website, Goodreads, Instagram

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Adrian Tchaikovsky, BEE SPEAKER (AdAstra/Head of Zeus)

The end of the world has been and gone.

There was no one great natural disaster, no all-consuming world war, no catastrophic pandemic. Only scores of storms, droughts, and selfish regional conflicts. Humanity was not granted a heroic end. Instead, it bled to death from a thousand cuts.

But where Earth fell apart, Mars pulled together. Engineered men and beasts, aided by Bees – an outlawed distributed intelligence – survived through co-operation, because there was simply no alternative.

Fast forward to today. A signal – ‘For the sake of what once was. We beg you. Help.’ – reaches Mars.

How could they refuse? A consortium of Martian work crews gather the resources for a mission: a triumphal return to the blue-green world of their ancestors. And now here they are – three hundred million kilometres from home.

And it has all already gone horribly wrong.

The third novel in Tchaikovsky’s acclaimed Dogs of War series. Strangely, I haven’t read the first two books in this series, yet — not at all a criticism, but it can be tricky to keep up with Tchaikovsky’s incredible (not to mention varied) output of work. I really hope to get caught up with the series as soon as I can. Bee Speaker is out now, published by AdAstra/Head of Zeus in North America and in the UK.

Also on CR: Interview with Adrian Tchaikovsky (2012); Guest Posts on “Nine Books, Six Years, One Stenwold Maker”, “The Art of Gunsmithing — Writing Guns of the Dawn”, “Looking for God in Melnibone Places: Fantasy and Religion”, and “Eye of the Spider”; Excerpt from Guns of the Dawn; Reviews of Empire of Black & Gold, Guns of the Dawn, Children of Ruin, Spiderlight, Ironclads, Made Things, and One Day All This Will Be Yours, Shards of Earth, and Ogres

Follow the Author: Website, Goodreads, BlueSky

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Christopher J. Yates, THE RABBIT CLUB (Hanover Square Press)

A mesmerizing new novel about a dangerous secret society at Oxford University, and the first-year Literature student whose life begins to unravel in its shadow

When Ali McCain, an eighteen-year-old from Los Angeles, is accepted at Oxford, it’s a chance to fulfill his dreams. To study English literature in England; to meet true intellectuals; and to glimpse the life he might have lived had his father — British rock star Gel McCain, legendary frontman of the Pale Fires — not abandoned him and his mother when he was a toddler.

But not long after he arrives at the storied campus, Ali is drawn into a dark, disorienting world where events grow more and more curious by the day. Trading on his father’s name, he gains entry into one of Oxford’s oldest and most selective secret societies, the Saracens. As he immerses himself in this rarefied world, he inadvertently sets in motion a series of events that might culminate in disaster.

This is Christopher Yates’s third novel — after Black Chalk and Grist Mill Road. I actually have all three of this novels, now, but I keep forgetting about them… (It’s far too easy to forget about eBooks that you can’t see on a shelf.) With the rise in “dark academia” as a genre, I think many people will find their way to Yates’s novels. Hopefully I’ll get caught up on all of the author’s novels very soon, and very much looking forward to doing so. The Rabbit Club is out now, published by Hanover Square Press in North America and in the UK.

Follow the Author: Website, Goodreads

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Various, ERA OF RUIN (Black Library)

Horus is dead. His Heresy is over. The scars of mankind’s great schism will never fully heal. For those left behind, a new Era of Ruin is dawning, promising both new beginnings and fresh peril for an Imperium riven by trauma and war.

This is the final instalment of the Horus Heresy – but that was just the beginning of a much darker tale which will be 10,000 years in the telling. These short stories show us glimpses of the stories that spun out of the Siege of Terra as the fledgling Imperium put together the pieces after the galaxy-shattering destruction, and those who fought on both sides, as they try to move on from the unthinkable events of the bloody conflict.

In Chris Wraight’s Homebound, Ilya Ravallion must choose between the decimated White Scars and living out what remains of her life in peace. An embattled Ahzek Ahriman must race against time to learn what he can of the warp before its gates close to him forever in Ex Libris by John French.

Featuring tales from Dan Abnett, Aaron Dembski-Bowden, Guy Haley and many more, this anthology follows mighty Custodians, scheming sorcerers, and the lowly footsoldiers of the Imperial Army as all negotiate the devastating aftermath of Humanity’s greatest reckoning.

The final book in the Horus Heresy series. (Probably. I feel like we’ve heard this before.) It’s an interesting collection of short fiction, albeit imperfect. Each story is good, yes, but not all of them felt like they were moving the story forward. The final third(ish) of the book was very strong, though, and did deliver what I’d hoped from the book. A must for long-time readers of the HH series. Era of Ruin is out now, published by Black Library in North America and in the UK.