A nice mix of non-fiction and fiction.

Featuring: Christopher Buehlman, D.K. Furutani, Luke Goebel, Gareth Hanrahan, Jordan Harper, Patrick Radden Keefe, Barbara J. Keys, John Lanchester, Jill Lepore, Roshan Sethi, Walter Stahr, David Thomson

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Christopher Buehlman, THE THRICE-BOUND FOOL (Tor Books)

Professional thief and inveterate trickster Kinch Na Shannack has always enjoyed a good book. But now his life, and the future of all of Manreach, depends on deciphering a very bad book indeed; a stolen, sentient tome that tries to kill him every time he opens it—and often when it’s closed.

Galva, veteran of the goblin wars and death’s sworn handmaiden, has vowed to protect Kinch while he mines the book for its dark magic and even darker secrets. She does so not for Kinch’s sake—though the cheeky bastard is growing on her—but because the book is the key to stopping the shadowy tyrants out to kill the queen she serves—and loves.

The ruthless, all-seeing Taker’s Guild dogs their every step, and thief and knight must flee the known world entirely if they hope to succeed. But trouble finds Kinch wherever he goes, and the pair may have traded the devil they know for horrors far darker and hungrier as they enter lands unknown.

This is the third book in Buehlman’s widely-acclaimed fantasy series. I have all three books, now, but have yet had a chance to read them. It’s a combination of so-many-books-so-little-time, eBook-blindness, and also a little bit that I’ve just not been in the mood to read fantasy of late, and more drawn to non-fiction. However, because I have read earlier novels by Buehlman, I have very high hopes for this series, and do hope to read them very soon. The Thrice-Bound Fool is due to be published by Tor Books in North America and Gollancz in the UK, on October 13th.

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Review copy received via NetGalley

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D.K. Furutani, WHEN MIKAN ROAD WAS OURS (Atria)

Amid a sweltering Los Angeles heat wave, Murano, a reclusive high school English teacher, is muddling through life. Reeling from his father’s sudden death as well as his own recent cancer diagnosis, he passes time hazily grading papers and appeasing disgruntled parents while counting down each day until summer vacation.

The monotony breaks when he inherits his great-uncle Benjiro’s unpublished memoir. What Murano expects to be a grim reminder of his position as the half-white son of the family’s outcast instead whisks him away to 1930s California, to a time when the Murano family was inseparable, relishing life together on their bucolic farm. As the memoir introduces him to relatives he never knew existed and unearths hidden complexities of the past, Murano is pulled close to the Japanese identity he’s dismissed all of his life. Faced with the reality of his family’s dissolution, Murano becomes determined to understand its breaking point following their incarceration in American concentration camps during World War II, no matter what hidden truths he might uncover about his ancestors or himself.

Lovingly crafted with poignant and profound attention to historical detail, When Mikan Road Was Ours is a rich meditation on belonging that seamlessly blends the intricacies of heritage, the resilience of family bonds, and the struggle to reconcile a past filled with both heartache and hope.

In the first of a number of new California-based novels I’ve recently been offered for review (I think it got out that I like it as a setting…), this is a multi-generational novel about a Japanese American family in California’s agricultural — so not LA, at least, which should keep things fresh. This is Furutani’s debut novel, and I’m very much looking forward to reading it. When Mikan Road Was Ours is due to be published by Atria Books in North America, on July 28th.

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

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Luke Goebel, KILL DICK (Red Hen Press)

At nineteen, Susie Vogelman should be coasting: she’s an NYU dropout with no responsibilities, endless prescription pills, and a Brentwood estate to waste away in. But Los Angeles has other plans. A string of brutal murders targeting addicts spreads through the city, and Susie’s ivory tower begins to crumble. The headlines point too close to home: her father’s ties to an opioid empire, a sinister secret society, and her own complicity in the systems holding it all together.

Then there’s Peter Holiday, a disgraced professor running a rehab scam so audacious it’s almost admirable. When their lives collide, Susie and Peter are dragged into a web of privilege, corruption, and violence, where every escape leads deeper into the rot.

I don’t recall where or when I first heard about Goebel’s new novel, but it caught my attention — it landed on a lot of Most Anticipated lists prior to its publication. It has been described as a “fever dream… literary thriller that plunges into the chaos of Los Angeles, where addiction, privilege, and corruption combust.” Which sounds like it has potential. (I will say, though, that “fever dream” novels don’t always work for me, but I am always willing to give them a fair shake.) Looking forward to reading this, and hopefully soon. Kill Dick is out now, published by Red Hen Press in North America and in the UK.

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Gareth Hanrahan, THE DUNGEON BOOK (Orbit)

A young girl is left to die in a wizard’s dungeon but finds a new home with the monsters around her in this humorous and heartfelt standalone epic fantasy…

Enter a world of dungeons and dragons, magic and manticores, and goblins and gargoyles…

Bait doesn’t remember a time before the dungeon. Before the dragon stole her from her cot. She doesn’t know what her name was before she was handed over to the monstrous denizens of the dungeon beneath the sorcerer’s tower. Luckily for Bait, they decided not to eat her. And so she grew up in the dark – the goblins her adopted family, a vengeful minotaur her protector, a sentient skull her tutor, and a blob of corridor slime her main source of nutrition.

But the labyrinthine dungeon, with its haunted halls, buried temples and forgotten magics, draws treasure hunters like moths to flame. And as the outside world starts to intrude, Bait will learn what it means to be monstrous and she will have to decide where she truly belongs.

A new, stand-alone novel from the author of the Land of the Firstborn and Black Iron Legacy series (both of which are very good). Synopsis suggests something a little lighter, which might be a nice change for me. Will read it soon. The Dungeon Book is due to be published by Orbit Books in North America and in the UK, on August 11th.

Also on CR: Interview with Gareth Hanrahan (2019); Annotated Excerpt from The Sword Defiant; Reviews of The Gutter Prayer and The Sword Defiant

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Review copy received via NetGalley

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Jordan Harper, A VIOLENT MASTERPIECE (Faber)

This place is a crime that can’t be solved. And that’s why we love it.

LA is a brutal, burning city. It is America with nowhere to run. Each night Jake Deal captures it on a livestream to his blood-hungry subscribers. Above board, Doug Gibson is a street lawyer trying to fix the system one case at a time. Underground, Kara Delgado is working for a private concierge company – a make-a-wish foundation for the terminally rich.

When Kara’s best friend Phoebe goes missing, she soon finds herself in the worlds of both Jake and Doug. Will the remaining humanity of this fragile team kill them all or expose one enormous, unspeakable crime?

I’ve been a fan of Jordan Harper’s for some time, so every one of his novels is a must-read for me. I have, however, often forgotten that I have them — so I’m going to make a concerted effort to not only read this one ASAP (I’m already halfway through), but also catch up on the couple that I have yet to read. If you’re a fan of gritty, dark crime fiction, then Harper is a must-read. A Violent Masterpiece is due to be published by Faber in the UK (June 4th) and Mulholland Books in North America (April 28th).

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

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Patrick Radden Keefe, LONDON FALLING (Bond Street Books)

In the early morning of November 29th, 2019, surveillance cameras at the headquarters of MI6, Britain’s spy agency, captured video of a young man pacing back and forth on a high balcony of Riverwalk, a luxury tower on the bank of the river Thames. At 2:24 a.m., he jumped into the river.

In a quiet London neighbourhood several miles away, Rachelle Brettler was worried about her son. Zac had told her that he had gone to stay with a friend, but then he did not come home. Days later, a police car pulled up and two officers relayed the dreadful news: Her son was dead.

In their unbearable grief, Rachelle and her husband, Matthew, struggled to understand what had happened to Zac. He had his troubles, but in no way seemed suicidal. As they would soon discover, however, there was a lot they did not know about their son. Only after his death did they learn that he had adopted a fictitious alter-ego: Zac Ismailov, son of a Russian oligarch and heir to a great fortune. Under this guise, Zac had become entangled with a slippery London businessman named Akbar Shamji, and a murderous gangster known as “Indian Dave.” As the Brettlers set about investigating their son’s death, they were pulled into a different and more dangerous London than the one they’d always known, and came to believe that something much more nefarious than a suicide had claimed Zac’s life. But to their immense frustration, Scotland Yard seemed unable—or unwilling—to bring the perpetrators to justice.

In a bravura feat of reporting and writing, Patrick Radden Keefe chronicles the Brettlers’ quest, peeling back layers of mystery and exposing the seedy truths behind the glamorous London of posh mansions and private night clubs, a city in which everything is for sale, and aspirational fantasies are underwritten by dirty money and corruption. London Falling is a mesmerizing investigation of an inexplicable death and a powerful narrative driven by suspense and staggering revelations. But it is also an intimate and deeply poignant inquiry into the nature of parental love and the challenges of being a parent today, a portrait of a family trying to solve the riddle not just of how their son died, but of who he really was in life.

One of my most-anticipated non-fiction books of the year. I’ve been a fan of PRK’s writing for years, and I’ll read pretty much anything with his name on it. This new book is another engaging, very well-written investigation, which kept me interested from start to finish. It’s not his strongest book, but it is nevertheless a must-read. London Falling is out now, published by Bond Street Books (Canada), Doubleday (US), and Picador (UK).

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Barbara J. Keys, SUPER K (Simon & Schuster)

The untold story of how Henry Kissinger spent five decades shaping his legacy—and the institutions that helped him do it.

In the nearly fifty years after he left public office, Henry Kissinger remained one of the most admired — and controversial — figures in American public life. Super K reveals how he manufactured this extraordinary fame. Drawing on previously unseen private correspondence and interviews with journalists and editors he courted and battled, historian Barbara J. Keys exposes the machinery Kissinger used to build and defend his reputation.

From fierce battles over his record in Cambodia and Chile to high-stakes confrontations with television networks and major publishers, Kissinger spent nearly five decades shaping how the world remembered his eight years in power and leveraging those years into continuing influence. In the process, he helped write the playbook for the modern political celebrity.

Super K is not just a portrait of one man’s quest to shape history; it is a sweeping account of the media and elite institutions that enabled him, revealing vulnerabilities that still shape public and political life today. Insightful and deeply researched, this is a definitive look at how reputations are manufactured and why they matter.

For a number of years, Christopher Hitchens’s The Trial of Henry Kissinger seemed to stand alone in confronting Kissinger’s legacy (that is, amongst widely-available literature). It has been joined over the past couple of decades by a number of very good volumes, and Keys’s new book looks like it’ll be very interesting. Really looking forward to this, and intend to do so very soon. Super K is due to be published by Simon & Schuster in North America (November 10th) and Oneworld Publications in the UK (December 3rd).

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Review copy received via Edelweiss

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John Lanchester, LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO (Faber)

What if the year’s most talked about TV show was all about your marriage?

Kate, thirty years into her marriage, has a seemingly idyllic metropolitan, North London life. Phoebe, a young screenwriter, is the creator of the year’s hit TV show, Cheating.

When Kate’s world takes a darker turn, she thinks she sees details and intimacies in the show that only she and her husband Jack could possibly have known. But who has betrayed who? Who gets to tell whose story?

A black comedy of resentment and entitlement, Look What You Made Me Do is the story of two very different women from two very different generations, heading toward a battle only one of them can win.

I don’t think I’ve seen a John Lanchester novel that hasn’t caught my attention. Because I tend to buy the eBook editions, though, I keep forgetting I have them! I have read his short story collection, Realities and Other Stories, and I’m particularly keen to read Fragrant Harbour and some of his other earlier novels. This latest one really caught my attention, and I hope to read it very soon. Look What You Made Me Do is out now in the UK, published by Faber; it is due to be published in North America by W. W. Norton, on May 5th.

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Jill Lepore, THE RISE AND FALL OF THE ARTIFICIAL STATE (Liveright)

“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.

Long-time readers of CR will know that I am a big fan of Lepore’s work. Ever since I read The Whites of Their Eyes (2011) and The Story of America (2012), in quick succession, I have been an avid follower of the author’s New Yorker and journalistic pieces, and also her books. There was a piece in the author’s latest collection, The Deadline, that touches upon the tech world and its explosion in power/influence, so when I saw this book was on the way, it was no question that it would be a must-read. I was lucky enough to get a DRC, and started reading it that day. Full review soon. 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, on August 25th.

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

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Roshan Sethi, THE SIMP (Simon & Schuster)

A razor-sharp novel about the rise and fall of an unemployed actor who lands the greatest role of his life when he’s hired as a personal assistant to an absurd Hollywood family.

Raj Ladlani is a morose and unemployable actor. He has reasons to believe he is spectacularly talented, a legend in every way but for the success. He leads an anonymous life in LA, working part time at a frozen yogurt store, fantasizing about stardom and clinging to the encouragement of his aging and kindly acting coach.

At his life’s nadir, Raj reads a job posting detailing a relentless, laughable parade of menial responsibilities for an organization blandly described as “Hollywood Family.”

The Simp tells the story of Raj’s momentous employment with the H Family and the destruction that follows. Jim H is a massive and macho director in a creative rut. Anna H might uncharitably be described as his much younger trophy wife, quietly and neurotically seeking out her own independent sense of purpose as a screenwriter. Raj’s work as their executive assistant becomes his new sense of soaring purpose. But he procured the job through a sea of lies.

The job itself is an absurdist walk through a landmine of affluent domestic chaos, identity politics, and petty Angeleno grievances. And things only get weirder when it turns out Anna H has been working on a secret project of her own—one that will change everything for Raj.

More Los Angeles fiction! Yup. This one isn’t a crime novel, true, but novels set in and around Hollywood and the entertainment industry are also catnip for me. Sethi’s debut novel takes what looks like a fresh approach to that world, and when it was offered for review I jumped at the chance. It is “a novel without a hero”. I’m looking forward to giving this a try. The Simp is due to be published by Simon & Schuster in North America and Sceptre in the UK, on July 7th.

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Review copy received via Edelweiss

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Walter Stahr, WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT (Simon & Schuster)

William Howard Taft was perhaps not a great president, although his limited view of the president’s role looks better today than it did at the time. But Taft’s true claim to greatness lies in his work before and after the White House: five decades of selfless public service culminating as one of the most transformational chief justices in American history.

Taft was the only president to have spent much of his career as a judge, first in the state court system in Ohio, then as a federal judge on the Sixth Circuit. He dreamed of serving on the United States Supreme Court and yet, more than once, he declined a seat in order to continue his work as America’s first civilian governor in the Philippines. When he returned to Washington, he took a place in Roosevelt’s cabinet, effectively serving as deputy president before winning the presidency in his own right in 1908.

Tariffs. Immigration. Labor unrest. Colonial possessions. Free trade with Canada. Civil war in Mexico. The national deficit. Government efficiency. These were just some of the issues Taft faced in the White House. After his disastrous defeat in the 1912 election, due in part to Roosevelt’s decision to challenge him for the Republican nomination, Taft returned to private life, although often involved in public causes, such as the fight for the League of Nations. But all this was only a prelude to a second act as the most important chief justice since John Marshall, changing the very way the Court worked by securing it the power to select those cases it wished to decide.

So often overshadowed by his presidential predecessor (Teddy Roosevelt), Taft was nevertheless a very interesting person. I agree with the premise of this book, that Taft had greater impact pre- and post-presidency, and that his time in the White House was not particularly impressive. I’ve been familiar with Stahr’s books for years, and have dipped into a number of them when doing a bit of specific research. I have, however, not yet just sat down and read one in its entirety. This one will be the first. (Followed by Seward, probably — the author has written biographies of three of Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet members.) Really looking forward to reading this. William Howard Taft is due to be published by Simon & Schuster in North America on November 10th.

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

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David Thomson, A SUDDEN FLICKER OF LIGHT (Simon & Schuster)

An arresting new perspective on the sweep of film history.

David Thomson has been called “the greatest living writer on the movies.” Here is a career capstone of sorts—a one-volume history of film and screens as illuminating and provocative as his classic Biographical Dictionary of Film. In tracing the progress, from the Lumiere Brothers to the Coens, Thomson glories in the great movies, but admits to increasing unease over what the medium has done to us—promoting fantasy, misleading models of sexual identity, the cult of authority, power, and happy endings.

This revisionist history is as alert to technology and business as it is to art and fun in tracing our pursuit of the lifelike instead of life. By turns trenchant, lyrical, and comic, Thomson uncovers our addiction to voyeurism and villainy, and a habit of passivity that has betrayed our political and cultural identity. In a survey that reaches from Metropolis to Rear Window to Anora, this will redirect ideas about film everywhere.

Thought this sounded like an interesting read. Looking forward to giving it a read. A Sudden Flicker of Light is due to be published by Simon & Schuster in North America and Allen Lane in the UK (July 7th).

Follow the Author: Goodreads
Review copy received via Edelweiss