Featuring: Emma Ashford, Robert Jackson Bennett, Elizabeth Castellano, Cory Doctorow, Janet Fash, James Islington, A. Natasha Joukovsky, Vaseem Khan, Erin Singer, David Swinson, Scarlett Thomas

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Emma Ashford, FIRST AMONG EQUALS (Yale University Press)

For the past thirty years, post-Cold War triumphalism and a desire to reshape the world have defined U.S. foreign policy. But the failures of the global war on terror, the return of conflict to Europe, and growing tensions with China all suggest that this approach to the world is flawed. For the United States — the country that has ruled the international system largely alone since 1991 — this moment is particularly perilous. Can policymakers adapt American foreign policy to better fit the twenty-first century, and in doing so avoid the pitfalls and excesses of the past three decades?
 
In this book, Emma Ashford proposes a return to a more pragmatic, realist set of strategic principles, ones better suited for the emerging multipolar world, that would pursue narrower U.S. interests, cultivate the capabilities of friendly states, and emphasize room for maneuver over rigid alliances. In this she provides a valuable counterpoint to today’s liberal internationalist consensus, as well as a road map for policymakers who seek to change the course of U.S. foreign policy.

I learned about Ashford’s new book through a in pretty positive review in Foreign Affairs, which suggested that the author had an interesting interpretation of US foreign policy, with some cross-over with my own (but, no doubt, far better articulated). I’ll be reading this pretty soon. First Among Equals is out now, published by Yale University Press in North America and in the UK.

Follow the Author: Website, Goodreads, BlueSky

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Robert Jackson Bennett, A TRADE OF BLOOD (Del Rey)

Detective Ana Dolabra must prove a condemned man’s innocence and confront a terrifying magical technology…

The heir to one of the Empire’s most powerful families sits in jail, accused of murder. His hands are covered in the victim’s blood, and he can neither deny his guilt nor explain his actions.

But if the great detective Ana Dolabra cannot save him from the noose, the farming canton of Sapirdad will explode into war, threatening to plunge the whole Empire into starvation and chaos.

As Ana investigates — her assistant Dinios Kol, as ever, acting as her eyes and ears — she fears her task is even more daunting than it seemed. For this murder is just the latest in a deeper, subtler web of death, woven by a mastermind with an ancient weapon at his disposal.

With their customary skill, Ana and Din pursue their adversary through the canton’s wild ranges, sprawling ranches, and reeking slaughterhouses. Yet even they are not prepared to learn the horrifying secret behind their opponent’s powers.

This series has been on my radar for a very long time, yet I keep getting distracted from it (work, etc.). After receiving this third book, I have decided to make a concerted effort to get caught up ASAP. I’m a big fan of the author’s past work, so it’s really inexplicable why I haven’t been keeping up-to-date. A Trade of Blood is due to be published by Del Rey in North America and Hodderscape in the UK, on August 11th.

Also on CR: Interview with Robert Jackson Bennett (2012); Guest on on “City of Stairs and the Super Tropey Fantasy Checklist”; Excerpts from City of Stairs and Locklands; Reviews of City of Stairs and Vigilance

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

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Elizabeth Castellano, PROOF OF PROGRESS (Harper)

A witty and sharp-tongued novel about an actress whose manuscript is thirty-seven years overdue — and the life moments that led to its delay.

Maria Astorini, once popular character actress and late-night talk show darling, is having a moment. The B-list actress has survived deaths, divorces, a famous mother, a Hollywood blacklist, a string of public embarrassments, an aging face, financial ruin, an empty nest, a difficult best friend, and a worldwide pandemic. Now, she’s back and bigger than ever. A small, unexpected role has heightened her celebrity status and propelled her, at age sixty-five, into the limelight. And then, along comes the call Maria has spent decades avoiding. It’s her publisher asking, “Where is that book?”

Maria knows the world doesn’t need another celebrity memoir. To finally fulfill her contract, Maria writes, or attempts to write, or, at the very least, sends a pile of pages meant to vaguely resemble the book she promised to deliver nearly four decades earlier.

In a series of bite-sized anecdotes, she candidly recalls her past, chronicling the significant, and insignificant moments of her full, funny, and extraordinarily unpredictable life.

Maria hasn’t been able to write a book about her life — she’s been too busy living it.

Thought this sounded very interesting, and when I spotted it, I was very much in the mood for something like this. I haven’t read anything else by Castellano, so I may read it next, or next-but-one. Proof of Progress is due to be published by Harper in North America, on September 15th.

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

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Cory Doctorow, THE REVERSE CENTAUR’S GUIDE TO LIFE AFTER AI (MCD)

A short, provocative guide to what’s good, bad, and stupid about AI and the discourse around AI, by the author of Enshittification.

In modern tech parlance, a centaur is a person who is able to use technology to be a better, more productive version of themself. A reverse centaur is a person who is forced by technology to work at an inhuman pace — a driver made to deliver all day long, nonstop; a warehouse worker made to work without food or bathroom breaks; a programmer made to crank out impossible amounts of code.

The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI is not another anti-AI screed. Cory Doctorow uses AI in his work every day. As a creative person, he has no moral or dogmatic issue with AI — he thinks the technology is useful, even exciting, and full of potential. And yet.

AI has arrived surrounded by unprecedented hype driven by a tech industry desperate to maintain its unprecedented valuation based on its own promises of endless financial growth. Despite the fact that almost all of AI’s real-world implementations have proved underwhelming, AI is projected to be worth more than $16 trillion — a number that only makes sense if AI replaces vast swathes of the wage-earning human workforce. To justify that level of “value,” every story about AI must be presented as inevitable, world-changing disruption. Even the tales of the robot apocalypse are a calculated attempt to bolster the fearsome power of AI.

For Doctorow, it is imperative to see through that hype to the real story, to understand the technology not just for what it does, but for who it does it to and who it does it for. From that point of view, the story of AI is indeed dramatic and unprecedented, having generated an investment bubble so big that it endangers the entire world economy. In The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI — as he so successfully did in Enshittification — Doctorow recounts both how we found ourselves in this dire situation and how we can get through it, to a life “after” AI in which the tools work for us, not the other way around.

I read this as soon as I got the DRC, and I am happy to report that it’s a very good follow-up/sequel to Enshittification. Definitely recommended if you enjoyed that book, but also for anyone interested in reading a well-thought-out, thought-provoking examination of the rise of AI and what it might mean for, well, everyone. I don’t agree with all of what Doctorow writes, but for the main I think he’s right on the money. [I’ll publish a proper review as soon as I can. Hopefully next week.] The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI is due to be published by MCD in North America and Verso Books in the UK, on June 23rd.

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

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Janet Fash, LIFEGUARD: A LOVE STORY (Simon & Schuster)

An unforgettable memoir from New York City’s first female lifeguard chief, this coming-of-age story plunges into the rough-and-tumble, sun-soaked world of Rockaway Beach in the 1970s and 1980s.

The first time I ever saw a lifeguard get horned was in the summer of 1974.

So begins the singular story of Janet Fash, the first female lifeguard chief at Rockaway Beach. Janet never expected to be a lifeguard, but when she got recruited by a friend to join the New York City lifeguarding corps, she never looked back. Rockaway Beach, her first post, had it all: sun, sand, and the imperative to be the best. After all, people’s lives are on the line.

Lifeguard: A Love Story is a singular memoir about Janet’s life on the beach. Rockaway is considered the most dangerous post in the city, with unpredictable rip currents and packed beaches. But it’s also the envy of lifeguards everywhere—a beach where all the action happens, where you’re as likely to save three lives before lunch as you are to stop the hot dog vendor from getting robbed. Janet started as a lifeguard there in 1979, making it through the customary hazing and binge drinking at Connolly’s, the local watering hole. She met and made friends with the surfers, who could always be counted on to help with a rescue. She met her husband on the beach and made sure her children, once they came along, were ocean-swimmers-in-training. Her fellow lifeguards showed up to her wedding and family funerals, and became her lifelong friends. Soon, forty years had passed and she’d spent almost every summer with a whistle around her neck. Lifeguard is an evocative picture of how a place as special as Rockaway Beach has changed over four decades. Yet at its most essential, it’s a coming-of-age tale, detailing what it was like to be a woman rising through the ranks in a male-dominated field, details of the legendary “Caveman Conventions” on the beach in the 80s, an inside look at the persistent union corruption that has plagued the corps, and a poignant through-line of grief, as the stakes of the job are life and death.

Lifeguard: A Love Story is about how a job can become something like a vocation, if you love it enough.

This sounded interesting, and different to much of what I read generally. Looking forward to giving it a try. Lifeguard is due to be published by Simon & Schuster in North America on June 23rd.

Follow the Author: Goodreads
Review copy received via Edelweiss

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James Islington, SCION (Saga Press)

My job, when you think about it, isn’t so different from a lot of people’s.

The more old-fashioned crowd do still get hung up on the “killing people” part of it, I guess, but that’s a them problem: it’s been perfectly legal to take out lifers for ages. Besides, once ultrawealthy morons realised they had a way to live forever—limited resources be damned—there was only ever going to be one genuinely practical deterrent.

So, sure, I have to deal with a ton of boring planning. Inconvenient hours. Some pretty awkward face-to-face interactions. And like most of us, I’m really only clocking in to try to crawl out from beneath my debts. But someone’s got to do it.

Luckily, my genetic compatibilities make me really, really good at doing it.

Still. This next job… I don’t know. It’s something I haven’t had to deal with in years. Kind of the opposite of my regular duties. Strange, that it got thrown my way.

I’m sure it’ll all go totally fine though.

A new, stand-alone sci-fi thriller from the author of the acclaimed Hierarchy series. Pitched as “John Wick meets Blade Runner“, this will probably find a pretty large audience — myself included. Looking forward to reading this. Scion is due to be published by Saga Press in North America on September 1st and Gollancz in the UK.

Also on CR: Interview with James Islington (2016)

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

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A. Natasha Joukovsky, MEDIUM RARE (Melville House)

Phil is ordinary. A mid-level Washington lobbyist for a decidedly unsexy organization, unhappy in the way all mildly successful, minimally influential men are. That is until the spring of 2019, when Phil’s picks for the NCAA March Madness Tournament start panning out, and heads begin to turn his way. He really may do it: predict a perfect bracket, for a billion-dollar prize.

At first, Cassandra is just along for Phil’s soaring rise—she had foreseen it happening, after all. Despite moving in different circles since their shared university days and Cassandra never much liking him, she recognizes in Phil the making of a legend worthy of the highest art. What Cassandra fails to predict, though, is just how much she’d grow to care about Phil’s wife, Raleigh—and that the grandest narrative arcs sometimes unfold at the steepest of personal costs.

Completely missed this until it was out, but the synopsis caught my attention and thought it might be interesting: the novel apparently “transforms the myth of Icarus into a blazing romp through bureaucracy, B-list fame, and college basketball” — that’s… ambitious-sounding, to me, and kind of delightfully weird. I read this pretty soon after it was published, and zipped through it in two sittings. There was a lot to like in it, but there were times when it was a little uneven or strange. I’ll post a proper review soon. Medium Rare is out now, published by Melville House in North America

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Vaseem Khan, THE EDGE OF DARKNESS (Hodder & Stoughton)

India, 1951. After wilfully ignoring orders from her superiors, Persis Wadia, India’s first female police detective, has been exiled from Bombay to the wild and mountainous state of Nagaland. As India’s first post-Independence election looms, and tensions rise across the country, Persis finds herself banished to the Victoria Hotel, a crumbling colonial-era relic, her career in ruins.

But when a prominent local politician is murdered in his locked room at the Victoria Hotel, his head missing — a case appears quite literally on her doorstep. As the political situation threatens to explode into all-out havoc, Persis has only days to stop a killer operating at the very edge of darkness…

I was a little slow, getting around to buying this one. I finished the previous book in the excellent series (City of Destruction) just the other day, and was reminded that I didn’t have this one, yet. I’ll be reading it very soon. The Edge of Darkness is out now, published by Hodder & Stoughton in the UK.

Follow the Author: Website, Goodreads, Instagram, BlueSky

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Premee Mohamed, WICKHILLS (Tor Books)

In the dangerous magical city of Wickhills, a streetwise secret agent is tasked with protecting a foreign defector from his pursuers… even at the threat of war.

Looking after a defecting scientist should have been Ferec’s easiest mission. But now he’s on the run from the intelligence agency he works for, dodging a handler who might have gone rogue and relying on a secret patchwork of illicit resources and dodgy contacts. Turns out his defector might be carrying an apocalypse-level magical weapon — and protecting it requires Ferec and his team to go underground, literally. Down here, the rules are very different… and the tense peace between every city in the world will shatter unless Ferec can drag their darkest secrets into the light.

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed many of Mohamed’s novels, so when I read the synopsis for this new novel — which made me think it might be a spy novel set in a fantasy world — I knew I had to read it. Luckily, I was able to get a DRC, so I’ll be reading it as soon as I can. Wickhills is due to be published by Tor Books in North America and in the UK, on September 8th.

Also on CR: Guest Post on “Influences & Inspirations”; Annotated Excerpt from The Annual Migration of Birds; Excerpt from We Speak Through the Mountain

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

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Erin Singer, DANGERLAND! (Summit Books/S&S)

Kurt Richter has been in love with Eugenie Zepp since he was eight years old. Now he’s in his fifties, twice divorced, a father of four. The entire neighborhood is suing him, and he’s been estranged from Eugenie for a decade.

In other words: perfect timing to declare himself to her.

Kurt and Eugenie grew up in Vegas among the glamour and the grit, slot machines in pharmacies, off-Strip tiki bars, all night poker games, shimmering desert heat. They’ve spent a lifetime orbiting each other, building families and making a beautiful mess of them while trying to decide if what they share is destiny or disaster.

Now their adult children are back in town with grudges, heartbreaks, and schemes of their own. As secrets surface and loyalties shift, will this be the right time for Eugenie and Kurt, after everything they’ve been through?

In this delicious, darkly funny, romantic comedy, everyone is looking for love in all the wrong places and gambling on the biggest games in life—but in Dangerland, there’s always one more chance to win.

“Nora Ephron meets The Hangover” is a pretty compelling pitch. Hadn’t heard of the book before I was offered it for review, but I’m very much looking forward to reading it — Las Vegas is such an interesting setting for crime/mystery fiction, and also contemporary fiction. (I wonder, also, if my fondness for the city as a setting is due to the sheer amount of CSI I watched when I was younger…?) Dangerland! is due to be published by Summit Books/S&S in the US on July 7th.

Follow the Author: Goodreads
Review copy received via Edelweiss

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David Swinson, FROM THE DUST (Mulholland Books)

When a murder occurs in a small town in Upstate New York, retired police detective Graham Sanderson is drawn back into the vortex of violence and deception, facing a case that demands a terrible personal reckoning.

Graham Sanderson thought he’d left it all behind. His years as a Washington, DC, homicide detective, his tragically dead wife, pain, violence. Taking over his father’s house in the remote Finger Lakes region of rural New York, and looking after his shut-in brother, Tommy, seemed like a respite. That is, until the first body is found.

The chief of the town’s small police jurisdiction, who is also a family friend, asks for Graham’s assistance. Graham’s instincts immediately kick in and he soon discovers there’s more to the area — the people, its brutally quiet, sophisticated hierarchies — than he or his family ever knew.

David Swinson’s latest novel is a soulful, rural noir story about belief: the extremities to which it pushes a community, the fear it instills in the hearts of adherents and doubters alike, and need for it nevertheless. As Graham delves deeper into the strange and then stranger circumstances of the murders, his own beliefs become challenged. What do you finally stand for when you’ve got nothing left to lose?

I’ve been a fan of Swinson’s work since 2016’s The Second Girl, the first in the author’s Washington, D.C.-set Frank Marr series. After that novel, he became a must-read author for me, and thus far each of his novels has met my high expectations. I can’t recommend his work highly enough. I’ll be reading this very soon (probably next). From the Dust is due to be published by Mulholland Books in North America.

Also on CR: Reviews of The Second Girl, Crime Song, and Trigger; Excerpt from Sweet Thing

Follow the Author: Website, Goodreads, Instagram, BlueSky

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Scarlett Thomas, THE RUNNER (Simon & Schuster)

He’s running for his life. And he’s running out of time.

Jay has been hunted since he was twenty years old. A contract on his life has been traded like a commodity, rising and falling with Bitcoin for decades. On the run once again with no passport and airmiles as his only currency, Jay will have to choose between love and survival, and run for his life.

While staying at an all-inclusive resort, surviving off of the points he accrued in a previous, more successful life, Jay meets Ellie, a beguiling fellow runner who may even be faster than he is, and is harboring secrets of her own. When an assassin appears poolside, Jay is on the run again, but this time with Ellie, as they find themselves on a catamaran helmed by a sinister and reckless crew.

The Runner is about high-finance, con artists, the Book of Jonah, ultramarathons, and how falling in love can change everything. Darkly funny, sexy, and exciting, Scarlett Thomas—author of the “work of gonzo genius” (The New York Times), The Sleepwalkers—transports readers from the sun-drenched roads of Cyprus to the rain slicked streets of Kent in this high-concept literary thriller.

Scarlett Thomas is an author whose books have pretty much universally appealed to me, based on the synopsis. Some how, though, I haven’t actually got around to reading any of them… despite owning most of them. (I blame a Kindle-out-of-sight issue…) The synopsis for this new novel, though, is particularly intriguing, so I hope to read it very soon. The Runner is due to be published by Simon & Schuster in North America (November 3rd) and Scribner in the UK (July 16th).

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