Author: Civilian Reader

Excerpt: WHEN WE WERE ENEMIES by Emily Bleeker (Lake Union)

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BleekerE-WhenWeWereEnemiesUSHCToday, we have an excerpt from When We Were Enemies by Wall Street Journal best-selling author Emily Bleeker. A story about families, legacies, and the long impact of secrets, set in the present day and also during World War 2. Here’s the synopsis:

Two women, generations apart, in the spotlight. A powerful novel about family secrets, devastating choices, and hope for the future.

Camera-shy Elise Branson is different from the other women in her matriline. Her mother is an award-winning actress. Her late grandmother, Vivian Snow, is a beloved Hollywood icon. But when Elise’s upcoming wedding coincides with a documentary being made about Vivian, Elise can’t escape the camera’s gaze. And even in death, neither can her grandmother.

It’s 1943 when Vivian, a small-town Indiana girl, lends her home front support to the war effort. As a translator in the nearby Italian POW camp, she’s invaluable. As a celebrated singer for the USO, she lifts men’s spirits and falls in love with a soldier. But behind this all-American love story is a shocking secret — one vital to keep buried if Vivian is to achieve the fame and fortune, she covets.

For Elise and Vivian, what’s hidden — and what’s exposed — threatens to unravel their lives. The heart-wrenching choices they must make will change them both forever.

Read on for the excerpt: Chapter 5 of the novel…

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Quick Review: EXTREMELY ONLINE by Taylor Lorenz (Simon & Schuster)

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LorenzT-ExtremelyOnlineUSHC_2An excellent history of how internet influencers and creators changed the way we socialize and interact online

For over a decade, Taylor Lorenz has been the authority on internet culture, documenting its far-reaching effects on all corners of our lives. Her reporting is serious yet entertaining and illuminates deep truths about ourselves and the lives we create online. In her debut book, Extremely Online, she reveals how online influence came to upend the world, demolishing traditional barriers and creating whole new sectors of the economy. Lorenz shows this phenomenon to be one of the most disruptive changes in modern capitalism.

By tracing how the internet has changed what we want and how we go about getting it, Lorenz unearths how social platforms’ power users radically altered our expectations of content, connection, purchasing, and power. In this “deeply reported, behind-the-scenes chronicle of how everyday people built careers and empires from their sheer talent and algorithmic luck” (Sarah Frier, author of No Filter), Lorenz documents how moms who started blogging were among the first to monetize their personal brands online, how bored teens who began posting selfie videos reinvented fame as we know it, and how young creators on TikTok are leveraging opportunities to opt out of the traditional career pipeline. It’s the real social history of the internet.

Emerging seemingly out of nowhere, these shifts in how we use the internet seem easy to dismiss as fads. However, these social and economic transformations have resulted in a digital dynamic so unappreciated and insurgent that it ultimately created new approaches to work, entertainment, fame, and ambition in the 21st century.

This is another review I meant to write far sooner, but one that fell off my radar due to work. As with the other (S. A. Cosby’s All the Sinners Bleed), it’s a review of an excellent book. For anyone who’s spent time online over the last few decades, Extremely Online offers a fantastic, accessible and engaging history of how the social internet developed — even for those who are not extremely online. Continue reading →

Quick Review: ALL THE SINNERS BLEED by S. A. Cosby (Flatiron)

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CosbySA-AllTheSinnersBleedUSHCA Black sheriff. A serial killer. A small town ready to combust.

Titus Crown is the first Black sheriff in the history of Charon County, Virginia. In recent decades, quiet Charon has had only two murders. But after years of working as an FBI agent, Titus knows better than anyone that while his hometown might seem like a land of moonshine, cornbread, and honeysuckle, secrets always fester under the surface.

Then a year to the day after Titus’s election, a school teacher is killed by a former student and the student is fatally shot by Titus’s deputies. As Titus investigates the shootings, he unearths terrible crimes and a serial killer who has been hiding in plain sight, haunting the dirt lanes and woodland clearings of Charon.

With the killer’s possible connections to a local church and the town’s harrowing history weighing on him, Titus projects confidence about closing the case while concealing a painful secret from his own past. At the same time, he also has to contend with a far-right group that wants to hold a parade in celebration of the town’s Confederate history.

Charon is Titus’s home and his heart. But where faith and violence meet, there will be a reckoning.

I must offer a mea culpa, here: I read this a long while ago, but right in the middle of an incredibly busy couple of months. As a result, writing the review just fell off my radar, much to my shame. Especially as this is easily one of the best five books I’ve read this year. I’ve been reading Cosby’s novels since Blacktop Wasteland, and he immediately became one of my must-read authors. All The Sinners Bleed is superb. Continue reading →

New Books (October-November)

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Featuring: Dan Abnett, Kaliane Bradley, Suyi Davies Okungbowa, P. Djèlí Clark, Katie M. Flynn, Max Gladstone, Kelly Link, Daniel Polansky, Nita Prose, David L. Roll, Alexander Sammartino, Stuart Turton

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Excerpt: SWEET THING by David Swinson (Mulholland Books)

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SwinsonD-SweetThingUSHCToday, we have an excerpt from David Swinson‘s Sweet Thing — one of my most-anticipated novels of the year. I loved Swinson’s Frank Marr trilogy (The Second Girl, Crime Song, and Trigger), and so this new novel went right on my TBR list as soon as it was announced. The publisher has kindly provided this excerpt to celebrate the novel’s release next week. First, here’s the synopsis:

Homicide Detective Alex Blum must answer a terrible question: ‘how far would you go to love the wrong woman?’

In a red brick house on a tree-lined street, DC homicide detective Alex Blum stares at the bullet-pocked body of Chris Doyle. As he roots around for evidence, he finds an old polaroid: the decedent, arm in arm with Arthur Holland, Blum’s informant from years ago when he worked at the Narcotics branch.

But Arthur has been missing for days. Blum’s only source: Arthur’s girl, Celeste — beautiful, seductive, and tragic — whom he can’t get out of his head. Blum is drawn to her and feels compelled to save her from Arthur’s underworld. As the investigation ticks on and dead bodies domino, Blum, unearths clues with damning implications for Celeste. Swallowed by desire, Blum’s single misstep sends him tunnelling down a rabbit hole of transgression. He may soon find the only way out is down below.

Set in 1999, Swinson, a former DC cop, offers a look back at a rougher, grittier, bygone DC replete with seedy strip clubs, pagers beeping, and Y2K anxiety. It’s here we’re taken inside sting operations, fluorescent-tinged interrogation chambers, and rooms that have seen irreversible mistakes. At once authentic, gritty, tragic, and profound, SWEET THING asks how far can you fall when the world teeters on the edge?

Now, on with the excerpt…!

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Excerpt: PIRATE COVE by Richard D. Bailey (Bancroft Press)

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BaileyRD-PirateCoveUSHCWe have something a little bit different, today: an excerpt from a biography about corporate intrigue and deception, and the dark side of finance: Robert D. Bailey‘s Pirate Cove. Due to be published by Bancroft Press on November 7th, the lovely people at Kaye Publicity have provided us with an excerpt from early on in the book. First, here’s the synopsis:

When Richard Bailey, a successful yet jobless businessman, receives a call from his old friend Jeff, he’s lured back into the high-stakes world of finance. Jeff, a charismatic corporate veteran, is now the number three guy at Southport Lane, a fledgling private equity firm. His boss invites Richard to inspect a pharmaceutical venture that reeks of mismanagement and financial disaster.

Bailey quickly finds himself navigating a sea of corruption as he attempts to rescue a floundering vineyard, Lieb Cellars, while unraveling a complex web of deceit at the heart of the corporate operations at Southport Lane.

Bailey provides an insider’s chronicle of a white-collar crime whose headline-grabbing elements first appeared on the front pages of The Wall Street Journal. It’s the true, unvarnished, previously untold, and fascinating story of how one honest man helped unravel the massive Southport Lane fraud perpetrated by the author’s former employer, 26-year-old, self-proclaimed financial prodigy Alexander Chatfield Burns.

A friend of the author once asked Burns how he got control of four state-regulated insurance companies. With a Cheshire cat grin, Burns cryptically responded, “Jesus with a telescope on Mars couldn’t figure out how I did this.”

But Bailey eventually did.

Now, read on for the excerpt, about the author’s early encounters with Burns…

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Excerpt: THE MURDER OF ANDREW JOHNSON by Burt Solomon (Forge)

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SolomonB-MurderOfAndrewJohnsonUSHCEarlier this month, Forge Books published the third novel in Burt Solomon‘s John Hay Mysteries series, The Murder of Andrew Johnson. To celebrate, the publisher has provided CR with the first chapter to share with readers. First, though, here’s the synopsis:

Andrew Johnson was called The Great Commoner, appealing to the masses, loathing the establishment and anyone he deemed elitist. Once Johnson made an enemy, you became his enemy for life. He saw insults where none were intended and personal loyalty meant everything…and his devoted fans would follow him into the depths of Hell. He was also the first U.S. president to be impeached.

Time however waits for no man and even the Famous (or Infamous) must leave this world eventually. But when a man has as many enemies as the Devil, what death could really be a natural one? From political opponents to most of his own family, the suspects are endless, and the truth not really wanted. John Hay, lawyer, sometimes governmental bureaucrat, and now journeyman investigative reporter, is set on finding that truth. And it may wind up killing him.

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Quick Review: THE HELSINKI AFFAIR by Anna Pitoniak (Simon & Schuster)

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PitoniakA-HelsinkiAffairUSHCPitoniak’s engaging, gripping first foray into espionage fiction

IT’S THE CASE OF AMANDA’S LIFETIME, BUT SOLVING IT WILL REQUIRE HER TO BETRAY ANOTHER SPY — WHO JUST SO HAPPENS TO BE HER FATHER.

SPYING IS THE FAMILY BUSINESS. Amanda Cole is a brilliant young CIA officer following in the footsteps of her father, who was a spy during the Cold War. It takes grit to succeed in this male-dominated world — but one hot summer day, when a Russian defector walks into her post, Amanda is given the ultimate chance to prove herself.

The defector warns of the imminent assassination of a US senator. Though Amanda takes the warning seriously, her superiors don’t. Twenty-four hours later, the senator is dead. And the assassination is just the beginning.

Corporate blackmail, covert manipulation, corrupt oligarchs: the Kremlin has found a dangerous new way to wage war. Teaming up with Kath Frost, a fearless older woman and legendary spy, Amanda races from Rome to London, from St. Petersburg to Helsinki, unraveling the international conspiracy. But as she gets closer and closer to the truth, a central question haunts her: Why was her father’s name written down in the senator’s notes? What does Charlie Cole really know about the Kremlin plot?

I’ve been a fan of Anna Pitoniak’s writing for quite some time — I read an advance review copy of the author’s debut, The Futures, and have been a fan ever since. In The Helsinki Affair, the author offers her first espionage thriller. I really enjoyed this, and I hope it’s a sign of more to come. Continue reading →

Quick Review: KENNEDY 35 by Charles Cumming (Harper/Mysterious Press)

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CummingC-LK3-Kennedy35UKHCKite and Co. confront a loose end from decades ago

1995: In the wake of the Rwandan genocide, 24-year-old spy Lachlan Kite and his girlfriend, Martha Raine, are sent to Senegal on the trail of a hunted war criminal. The mission threatens to spiral out of control, forcing Kite to make choices which will have devastating consequences not only for his career at top-secret intelligence agency BOX 88, but also for his relationship with Martha.

2023: Eric Appiah, an old friend from Kite’s days at school and an off-the-record BOX 88 asset, makes contact with explosive information about what happened all those years ago in West Africa. When tragedy strikes, Kite must use all his resources to bring down a criminal network with links to international terror … and protect Martha from possible assassination.

This is the third novel in Charles Cumming’s Box 88 series. I’ve been a fan of the author’s since Typhoon (2008), and each new novel has been superb and often better than the previous one. Kennedy 35 is no exception, and delivers everything one could hope from an espionage thriller (and, especially, a Box 88 novel). I really enjoyed this. Continue reading →

New Books (October)

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Lots of non-fiction, this time, and a fair few Hollywood-/entertainment-related titles.

Featuring: Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, Martin Baron, Bernard Cornwell, Guy Haley, Sarah James, Michael Lewis, David Mitchell, Joanna Robinson, Alan Sepinwall, Casey Sherman, Patrick Stewart

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