Featuring: Dan Abnett, Jonathan Abrams, Gavin Bell, Michael Connelly, CJ Green, Robert D. Kaplan, Claire North, Temi Oh, Ian Rankin, Julie Schumacher, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Chuck Wendig

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Dan Abnett, HIVE (Black Library)

Head down into the depths of a hive world, where a corrupted planetary governor has sent the populace into a perilous spiral they may not recover from. Will the population revolt? Can the Adeptus Arbites save this benighted world?

Welcome to Sacramentus. Austerity and toil will teach the true measure of the Hive’s failing. No one is blameless. The planetary governor has fallen, deposed in scandal and treachery. The Adeptus Arbites roam the smog-choked vertics and zontals, rooting out traitors, enforcing the Imperial law without mercy.

As a new governor, an outsider, is crowned, the Hive teeters between order and anarchy. Whispers of rebellion echo from the heights of the Waistland to the depths of the Neg. Rival gangs seize both opportunity and territory, and forbidden cults grow ever bolder. But unbeknownst to all, a more terrifying threat awaits in the darkness.

May your light last, pilgrim. If the Emperor protects, perhaps we shall make it out alive.

A new, substantial WH40k novel from Dan Abnett is always a bit of an event, and this is no exception. Long-time readers of CR will know that I’ve been reading Abnett’s Black Library fiction since the first Gaunt’s Ghosts short story appeared in Inferno, way back when. Most of his novels for the publisher have been superb (with very few excerption), and have done a huge amount to expand and establish what readers now think of as the WH40k setting — on the battlefield and also off. This novel has an intriguing premise, and I’m really looking forward to reading it. (I may wait until we’re a little further into the summer, though: I had a peculiar habit of saving Horus Heresy novels to read in the summer, but now that it’s finished, other BL titles will fill the void.) Hive is out now, published by Black Library in North America and in the UK.

Also on CR: Interview with Dan Abnett (2011); Reviews of Horus Rising, Prospero Burns, Know No Fear, The Unremembered Empire, Saturnine, The Armour of Contempt, Only in Death, Blood Pact, Sabbat Worlds Anthology, Salvation’s Reach, The Warmaster, and Anarch

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Jonathan Abrams, WHEN WE WERE YOUNG AND FEARLESS (Harper)

A deep dive into the lives and careers of Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, and James Harden, using their entangled paths as a lens to view the myriad facets of the player empowerment era.

It’s one of the greatest “what ifs” in sports – what if the Thunder had kept Durant, Westbrook, and Harden, three of the league’s young, exciting stars and future MVPs, together? Their departure from Oklahoma City begins two decades of repercussions for basketball and the formation of the modern NBA.

When We Were Young and Fearless is The Social Network for basketball. As he touches on universal themes of loyalty, money, power, friendship, class and lost innocence, Abrams ponders the central irony of athletic greatness: how much is an individual willing to sacrifice to win in a team sport?

I think I only caught one or two games of the KD-Harden-Westbrook Thunder, in their playoff run against the Warriors (the team started to break up a couple of years after I moved to Canada). So, when I saw that this was available for review, I jumped at the chance to read it — and I’ll be doing so very soon. Really looking forward to this. When We Were Young and Fearless is due to be published by Harper in North America on November 3rd.

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Review copy received via Edelweiss

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Gavin Bell, 138 MAIN STREET (Gallery/Scout)

AN ADDRESS TO DIE FOR…

There’s a killer on the loose. And he’s targeting one specific address — 138 Main Street. The problem? There are over 7,000 Main Streets in the USA. And the police and FBI have no clue which one will be next.

For FBI Special Agent Ben Walker and his rookie colleague, Officer Zoe Hill, the pressure to solve the case is unimaginable. There aren’t enough police officers to cover every house, and vigilante residents are attacking anyone who rings their doorbell. Main Street might be one of America’s most popular addresses, but for those living at number 138, it comes down to fight or flight.

Then a manuscript is sent to the New York Times, purporting to be the manifesto of the “Main Street Killer” and demanding radical social change. As the effect of the terror campaign takes hold across the nation, Walker and Hill find themselves in a race against time to stop the killer. But with their target always several steps ahead, and almost 3,800,000 square miles of ground to cover, they’ll have to find him first…

I only learned about this novel a little while ago, when the author’s newsletter mentioned it — well, the author’s pseudonym, at least: Gavin Bell is the real name of the author Mason Cross (whose novels are excellent and very much recommended). I’ll be reading this very soon. 138 Main Street is due to be published by Gallery/Scout in North America, on June 2nd; it’s published by Simon & Schuster in the UK, and out now.

Also on CR: Reviews of Mason Cross’s The Killing Season, The Samaritan, The Time to Kill/Winterlong, and Don’t Look for Me

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

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Michael Connelly, IRONWOOD (Little, Brown)

Sworn to protect a scenic island meant to be far from the evils of the mainland, Detective Sergeant Stilwell can feel danger closing in.

Detective Sergeant Stilwell knows that his posting on Catalina Island is no paradise, but to most residents, it seems blissfully separated — by twenty-two miles of ocean — from the troubles of Los Angeles County. But now a threat is coming to his safe haven.

Acting on a tip from a confidential informant, Stilwell and his deputies watch a plane land in the middle of the night at the Airport in the Sky, a remote airstrip in the mountains. A duffel bag of drugs is dropped and the deputies move in, but things quickly go sideways. While Stilwell chases the fleeing pickup man into the mountainside brush, shots are fired on the runway and the plane flies off.

An internal inquiry follows, putting Stilwell on the bench until he is cleared of responsibility for the disastrous operation. But he is determined to find out who brought deadly violence to his island, and begins his own secret investigation into the drug deal gone wrong.

While under orders to remain in the sheriff’s substation, he finds in the lost and found a valuable backpack that was never claimed. He traces it to a woman who disappeared while hiking on the island four years ago. But then why was the pack only turned in two months back? Now thoroughly intrigued, he follows the mystery all the way to the LAPD’s Open-Unsolved Unit and Detective Renée Ballard.

Stilwell and Ballard work the case from both sides of the channel, and soon realize they are on the trail of a criminal who revels in taunting the authorities. Meanwhile, frustrated at being shut out of an investigation on his own island, Stilwell risks his already shaky standing in the department to pursue a case whose reach is wider than he ever imagined.

The second novel in Connelly’s excellent new series, set on Catalina Island and starring Detective Stillwell. If you’ve been following CR for even a short while, you’ll no doubt have spotted that Connelly is easily one of my favourite authors of any genre, so this was an immediate pre-order. (I feel like I write that a lot, but it’s true, and I will crow about each new Connelly novel to anyone who will listen/read.) I started reading this right away, and blitzed through it in two late-into-the-night sittings. Excellent. Ironwood is out now, published by Little, Brown in North America, and Orion in the UK.

Also on CR: ??

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CJ Green, RECORD LOWS (Cardinal/Grand Central)

It’s 1977 and in the town of Oneira, New York, a blizzard is gathering force…

Harmon Pond, editor-in-chief of the local newspaper, is struggling to keep afloat amid mounting debt and vanishing ad revenue. So when the creditor who’s been secretly funding him vanishes without a trace, Harmon thinks it’s his lucky break. Meanwhile, his eldest daughter, Teresa — the paper’s ambitious intern — sees a story that could make her name.

But for Harmon’s devout Italian American wife, Pauline, the disappearance stirs up memories of a childhood she has tried hard to put behind her, and secrets she would prefer to keep buried.

With the parents tangled in their own concerns and Teresa relentlessly searching for answers, no one notices that middle-child Fran has developed a habit of sneaking out at night, and Lonnie, the youngest, is taking dangerous risks of his own.

As the manhunt intensifies, and the snowstorm builds into one of the worst in history, the Pond family must find a way to accept the truth, and each other, before they lose themselves forever.

I hadn’t heard about this before I spotted it available for review on NetGalley, but I the premise sounded intriguing. Hope to get to it ASAP — I’ll hold off on posting my review, though, as it’s not out for quite some time. Record Lows is due to be published by Cardinal/Grand Central in North America (February 7th, 2027), and Picador in the UK (February 18th).

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

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Robert D. Kaplan, CHINA WHISPERERS (Scribner)

A probing and insight-filled look at the China experts who have influenced — and continue to influence — America’s policy toward its greatest rival.

No country or civilization is as big or as old as China. And in the minds of Americans whose job it is to contemplate international affairs, China has always been more than just the “ultimate place”: quite simply, it is the essential foreign policy challenge — one frequently thought incapable of being solved.

Enter the China Whisperers: American missionaries, travelers, journalists, linguists, and foreign service officers who, going back a hundred years, have been on the ground, fluent in Mandarin, and enamored of the culture. In the early and mid-20th century, these were the true China experts of the Western world. Some proved unwitting dupes, others showed their brilliance. What lured them to that distant nation? With its deep history and unstable present, China was something Americans could use both to fill their dreams and measure their own young nation directly against.

To this cohort of Americans, it seemed possible for outsiders like themselves to shape China and its destiny. And over a period of a few transformative decades they had front-row seats to the formation of both the Nationalist and Communist parties; crossed the Gobi Desert; searched out the young Mao Zedong in the wilds of Yen’an province; provided visionary analysis on the American predicament in Asia; bore witness to China’s World War II; and made invaluable contributions to journalism and diplomacy. But the China Whisperers may have gotten too close to the story. Washington rejected their counsel when they contradicted reigning ideology, and, tragically, these ground-level experts offered advice that was often ignored.

The ranks of China Whisperers have been filled in recent years not so much by nomadic journalists and explorers as by multi-lingual policy experts who’ve had the ear of the person occupying the Oval Office. Often, their voices have proved critical, counseling engagement over precipitous moves.

China Whisperers is the story of how Americans both have succeeded and failed to interpret China over the past century. It paints a full-bodied portrait of the drama of trying to understand a radically different and age-old culture — one whose rivalry with America constitutes the most dangerous element of geopolitics.

I’ve been reading Kaplan’s histories for quite some time — I think the first one was The Coming Anarchy (1994), and I have enjoyed many of his more-recent books as well. His latest is very much in my wheel-house (and another recent book that probably would have been quite useful when I was still working on my PhD…), and I’ll be reading this very soon. China Whisperers is due to be published by Scribner in North America and in the UK, on November 10th.

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

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Claire North, AS WE FALL THROUGH TIME (Orbit)

Fall through history on a thrilling journey of shattered time, broken futures, and a love that can never be erased…

In the beginning, the world will end. This is the story of what happens next.

When Cal meets a soldier of the French Revolution, he knows his lover is destined to die. But what’s the point of being a time traveler if you can’t make a few small tweaks to the course of history? A little paradox here, an alteration there — nothing Cal can’t fix, to save the man he loves.

When Fadimatu walks into a museum in 2018, she stumbles upon her own mummified corpse, setting her on the path to a betrayal that has already killed her, and a murder that has not yet come to pass.

And when a sudden rupture in the fabric of history rips through the lives these travelers have built, breaking both past and future, they must reckon with death foretold, love forsaken, and a secret that will shatter time itself.

A new novel from Claire North is always to be celebrated! Like many people, I loved The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (it may be one of my favourite novels of the past couple of decades), and each of the author’s novels since has had an interesting and innovative take on various SFF tropes and ideas. Some have been particularly excellent, and even if the novel doesn’t fully work for me, I am always impressed by North’s imagination and skills. All of this is a rather roundabout way to note that I am very much looking forward to reading this latest novel. Hopefully very soon. As We Fall Through Time is due to be published by Orbit Books in North America and in the UK, on October 13th.

Also on CR: Reviews of The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, Touch, The Gamehouse Trilogy, The Sudden Appearance of Hope, and Sweet Harmony

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

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Temi Oh, NOT WITH A BANG (Saga Press)

“Our father had imagined the end of the world so often that, for a while, he believed that he summoned it.”

The Minton family is in crisis. After losing his job, Marcus begins stockpiling cans, running evacuation drills and digging a doomsday bunker in the back garden. At the same time, his daughters are unravelling in their own ways – Chantale is being haunted by dreams of disaster, and Briar’s obsession with a missing classmate draws her deeper into the seductive world of a UFO cult. Meanwhile, no one is aware of the diagnosis their mother has been trying to keep hidden.

When, on the morning of the eldest daughter’s wedding, an extinction-level event tears the world apart, the Mintons must fight their way through a devastated city — back to safety, survival, and each other.

This novel is pitched as a family drama at the end of the world, “Station Eleven meets Leave the World Behind“. A pretty intriguing premise, and I’m looking forward to giving it a read — it’ll be my first novel by the author. Not With a Bang is due to be published by Saga Press in North America on July 14th; it is out now in the UK, published by Solstice Books.

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Review copy received via Edelweiss

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Ian Rankin, THE HEIGHTS (Cardinal/Grand Central)

Facing Hyde Park, The Heights is London’s most coveted luxury high-rise apartment — designed to satisfy every need, with a gym, infinity pool, cinema, and more, where self-made owner-developer Allan Franklyn himself has claimed the penthouse duplex. His neighbors include some of “Money London’s” biggest personalities: a wealthy art dealer, a young heartthrob pop star, a foreign heiress, a gangster’s wife. The residents are used to service, deference, and privacy, all on their terms.

But when nighttime concierge Dwayne Hogarth is found dead in the lobby, none of that is in their control anymore, and everyone’s under the unwelcome scrutiny of Detective Sergeant Gillian Gish. Her questions begin with the party on the 4th floor the night Dwayne died, which ended with a fight; the missing key to one of the apartments; and a mysterious gap in the security camera footage. Before long, Gish uncovers the unsavory truths and dark secrets that lurk beneath the glittering facades of the building and its inhabitants.

I haven’t read nearly as many of Rankin’s books as I would expect. I have most of his Rebus books, but keep forgetting I have them on my eReader. This novel is a stand-alone, but seems to be an expansion of his short story The Rise, which I have read and quite enjoyed — I did remember thinking it could have been longer and more developed, so maybe the author thought the same. I will read this soon, before (finally!) launching into his long-running series. Really looking forward to it. The Heights is due to be published by Cardinal/Grand Central in North America (November 3rd) and Orion in the UK (October 8th).

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

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Julie Schumacher, PATIENT, FEMALE (Milkweed)

An unsuspecting couple is treated to a luxury vacation by their deceased neighbor. After begrudgingly agreeing to volunteer at a nursing home, a middle school girl gambles over games of bridge with elderly residents. A single mother struggles to understand the unique bond between her autistic son and his dying grandmother. Four friends experience decades of highs and lows as pawns in The Game of Life. A professional gynecology patient runs into a high school flame while at work, undressed, on the job.

In this irreverent collection, celebrated novelist Julie Schumacher balances sorrow against laughter. Here, we experience story not only as narrative, but as syllabus and as board game. Each protagonist—ranging from girlhood to senescence—receives her own indelible voice as she navigates social blunders, generational misunderstandings, and the absurdity of the human experience. Exquisitely honest and expertly crafted, Patient, Female renders—with dark humor and wit—the foibles of human behavior and our endearing imperfections.

Dear Committee Members was one of my favourite books of the past decade or so, and each of Schumacher’s follow-up epistolary campus novels was superb: The Shakespeare Requirement and The English Experience. So, I’ve been keeping my eyes open for whatever Schumacher writes next, and that is this short story collection. I started reading this the day after it came out, and have been alternating between a couple of short stories in here and longer books. “Spin”, I think, is the best story in the collection. (Not sure how others feel, but I rarely find short story collections are satisfying start-to-finish read.) So far, this is very good. Patient, Female is out now, published by Milkweed Editions in North America and in the UK.

Also on CR: Reviews of Dear Committee Members, The Shakespeare Requirement, and The English Experience

Follow the Author: Website, Goodreads

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Adrian Tchaikovsky, PREACHING TO THE CHOIR (Solaris)

A family gathering in an English mansion devolves into horror…

Elena Mendes thought she understood what “old money” was.

She knew her boyfriend Ross Enderbough was rich. Like, “old money” rich. She knew he was the scion of some eccentric British line that predates the whole United States. She knew he didn’t really get on with his family, and that he fled to America to study free of their influence.

Ross has been summoned to Enderby, the family mansion built as a monastery centuries ago, for an exclusive, mysterious family gathering that happens only once a generation. Spouses and partners aren’t invited, but Ross has asked Elena to come anyway for moral support.

But there are secrets in the mouldering old pile, and terrors in the unkempt woods on the estate. And Elena slowly comes to realise that “old money” means so much more than she’d ever imagined…

The latest novella from Adrian Tchaikovsky coming out via Solaris — so far, each of these (many) novellas has been a great example of the scope and breadth of the author’s imagination and inventiveness. Always a highlight of the year when one of these comes out. I’ll be reading this very soon. Preaching to the Choir is due to be published by Solaris Books in North America and in the UK.

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

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Chuck Wendig, THE CALAMITIES (Del Rey)

The heir to one of the world’s most influential families reckons with the demonic secret of their power in this contemporary dark fantasy that melds occult magic with shocking family drama…

Mourning Mayne knows he’ll one day bear the duty of managing his family’s vast empire of wealth and power. But the feckless Mourning has always struggled to accept this legacy of cruelty, domination, and exploitation… and something even darker.

Because the Maynes are no ordinary family: Hidden in our world are the fiends — half-human, half-demon, and possessed of a dark magic born from buying human souls — and the Maynes are one of the oldest and most influential fiendish families.

But when Mourning’s estranged father, the formidable and terrifying Hadrian Mayne, demands that Mourning return to the fold, he has to decide whether to accept his legacy and embrace his role in the family or to forge his own destiny, and with it, change the course of the world.

Because along the way home, he will meet Key, a black-market seller of human souls, and Quinn, an artist who may hold the dark truth behind the fate of the fiends. Alone, they have all struggled with the darkness of their natures… but together, they might find a path out of the shadows.

I’ve been a fan of Wendig’s work for what feels like a very long time, now — I believe 2011’s Double Dead was the first book of his that I read, and I’ve been a long-time reader of his website. (Definitely recommend the latter too all fans of SFF.) While I haven’t been particularly good about keeping up-to-date on his novels, this latest one really caught my attention: the cover, of course, but it was the synopsis that put it on my must-read list. Really looking forward to reading it soon. The Calamities is due to be published by Del Rey in North America and in the UK, on August 18th.

Also on CR: Reviews of Double Dead and Bad Blood

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