Upcoming: THE FINAL SCORE by Don Winslow (William Morrow)

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Later this year, readers will get a new book from Don Winslow! The Final Score is a collection of six never-before-published, all-new short novels. Learning about this book was a very nice surprise, because I had been under the impression that Winslow had retired from writing, after the publication of his Danny Ryan trilogy. I guess, as in the case with Stephen King, retirement is rather difficult for some authors… A long-time fan of Winslow’s, it’s great that we’ll be getting more fiction from him; and this is easily one of my most-anticipated books of the year. Here’s the synopsis:

In six all-new short novels written with the trademark literary style, trenchant wit, and incisive characterization that have made Don Winslow “America’s greatest living crime writer” (Providence Journal), this repeat New York Times bestselling author serves up a collection of tales sure to delight Winslow’s most devoted fans and first-time readers.

The multi-million-dollar casino heist is impossible — it can’t be done. That’s what makes it irresistible to a legendary robber facing the rest of his life in prison for his “Final Score.” An ambitious, hard-working college-bound teenager has a side job delivering illegal booze to “The Sunday List” until a crooked cop, a seductive customer, and a fake guru threaten to end his dreams. Two wise guys tell each other a “True Story” over breakfast at a diner. It’s all bullshit and laughs until someone else has to pick up the check. An otherwise honest patrolman has to make an excruciating choice between his loyalty to the job and his love for a ne’er-do-well cousin in “The North Wing.” The entitled, substance-addicted movie star that surfer/PI Boone Daniels and his crew are hired to babysit in “The Lunch Break” is a problem. She also has a problem — someone wants her dead. Finally, the one terrible, momentary mistake that a devoted family man makes sends him to prison and on a “Collision” course between the man he wants to be and the killer he’s forced to become to survive.

With a foreword written by award-winning crime author Reed Farrel Coleman, The Final Score is a propulsive, perceptive, and deeply immersive collection of crime writing — the ultimate testament to Don Winslow’s prowess as a living legend of the genre.

Don Winslow’s The Final Score is due to be published by William Morrow in North America (September 16th) and Hemlock Press in the UK (October 23rd).

Also on CR: Reviews of The Force, Broken, City on Fire, City of Dreams, and City in Ruins

Follow the Author: Website, Goodreads, Instagram, BlueSky

Upcoming: LAKE EFFECT by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney (Ecco)

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Some great news: there’s a new novel on the way from Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney! Some bad news: it’s not out until March 2026! I’ve been a fan of D’Aprix Sweeney’s work since her debut, the internationally-bestselling The Nest, and also very much enjoyed her second novel, Good Company. Ever since finishing the latter, I’ve been eagerly anticipating whatever D’Aprix Sweeney wrote next; so, I was very happy when I saw Lake Effect announced. I just have to be patient, now… Pitched as “a wry and tender portrait of two families forever changed by one lovestruck decision that will reverberate for decades”, here’s the full synopsis:

It’s 1977 and an air of restlessness has settled on the residents of Cambridge Road in Rochester, New York, a place long fueled by the booming fortunes of Kodak and Xerox and, for some, the mores of the Catholic church. When Nina Larkin is given a copy of The Joy of Sex by her newly divorced friend, she can no longer dismiss the nearly nonexistent intimacy of her marriage. Just as her oldest child, Clara, is falling in love for the first time, Nina finds herself longing for the forbidden: a midlife awakening. An intoxicating fling with a prominent neighbor brings Nina a freedom she never thought possible — but also risks the reputations of both families and unravels Clara’s world, just as she stands on the threshold of adulthood.

Years later, Clara, now a successful food stylist in New York City, has never been able to move past the long-ago scandal. Drawn back home by the pull of a family wedding and wrestling with her own demons, she makes a pivotal decision that turns her life upside down. Written with Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney’s signature humor and insight, Lake Effect is a wise and probing look at love and desire, mothers and daughters, loss and grief, and what we owe the people we love most.

Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney’s Lake Effect is due to be published by Ecco in North America (March 3rd, 2026) and Borough Press in the UK (March 12th).

Also on CR: Review of Good Company

Follow the Author: Website, Goodreads, Instagram

Very Quick Review: AUTOMATIC NOODLE by Annalee Newitz (Tordotcom)

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A cosy near-future story of finding purpose and found family — through noodles — in a bleak future.

You don’t have to eat food to know the way to a city’s heart is through its stomach. So when a group of deactivated robots come back online in an abandoned ghost kitchen, they decide to make their own way doing what they know: making food—the tastiest hand-pulled noodles around—for the humans of San Francisco, who are recovering from a devastating war.

But when their robot-run business starts causing a stir, a targeted wave of one-star reviews threatens to boil over into a crisis. To keep their doors open, they’ll have to call on their customers, their community, and each other—and find a way to survive and thrive in a world that wasn’t built for them.

I’ve not read as many of Newitz’s works as I would like, but everything I have read I’ve very much enjoyed. I happened to get the DRC of this one just after finishing a longer read, and I dove right in, drawn to the premise. Hooked from early on, I enjoyed this. Continue reading →

Quick Review: DEEP CUTS by Holly Brickley (Borough Press/Crown)

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The story of a complex, complicated, and oft-fraught relationship

Look, the song whispered to me, that day in my living room. Life can be so big.

It’s a Friday night in a campus bar in Berkeley, fall of 2000, and Percy Marks is pontificating about music again. Hall and Oates is on the jukebox, and Percy — who has no talent for music, just lots of opinions about it — can’t stop herself from overanalyzing the song, indulging what she knows to be her most annoying habit. But something is different tonight. The guy beside her at the bar, fellow student Joe Morrow, is a songwriter. And he could listen to Percy talk all night.

Joe asks Percy for feedback on one of his songs — and the results kick off a partnership that will span years, ignite new passions in them both, and crush their egos again and again. Is their collaboration worth its cost? Or is it holding Percy back from finding her own voice?

Moving from Brooklyn bars to San Francisco dance floors, Deep Cuts examines the nature of talent, obsession, belonging, and above all, our need to be heard.

Holly Brickley’s Deep Cuts got a lot of pre-publication buzz, with early readers name-dropping novels like Daisy Jones and the Six as a comparator (mainly because this is also connected to music, and with a complicated central relationship). As it turns out, the buzz was justified: this is a very good novel, and I quickly found myself invested in Percy and Joe’s fates. Continue reading →

Quick Review: VERMINSLAYER by David Guymer (Black Library)

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Gotrek Gurnisson once again faces off against one of his oldest foes…

Greywater Fastness – an industrial canker in the heart of Ghyran. Foundries and metalworks pump soot and fire endlessly into the skies of the Realm of Life. Dusty streets hide peril at every turn, and attacks by the Dreadwood Sylvaneth hamper the city’s relentless encroachment.

Gotrek Gurnisson barges into Greywater Fastness seeking answers as to why his Fyreslayer rune is mysteriously waning. But finding them in the stronghold’s clogged and blackened arteries may prove far more difficult than first thought, and with skaven warlocks building something deep underground – something that will cement their place in skavendom forever – Gotrek begins to wonder if he might instead find that which has eluded him these past ages – his doom.

In Verminslayer, David Guymer returns to writing Gotrek Gurnisson. Still wandering the Mortal Realms, the slayer is newly companion-less, and finds himself in an industrial city threatened by the evil machinations of the always-bizarre, incomprehensibly-competent Skaven. I enjoyed this. Continue reading →

Excerpt: SMOKE ON THE WIND by Kelli Estes (Lake Union)

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Smoke on the Wind, the latest novel by Kelli Estes, was published recently by Lake Union Publishing. A novel that tells the story of two mothers separated by centuries in Scotland. To mark its release, CR has been given permission to share the first couple of chapters as an excerpt! Before we get to that, though, here’s the synopsis…

Struggling with the tragic end of her marriage, Keaka Denney is on a bittersweet adventure in Scotland with her son, Colin. She’s joining him on a weeklong hike along the West Highland Way before he enters university in Glasgow. Soon into the journey, Keaka’s disquieting visions begin―a woman from ages past reaching for Colin, a burning cottage, violence.

Scotland, 1801. After Sorcha Chisholm and her son are wrenched from their home in a brutal eviction, they face an arduous trek toward a new beginning. When Sorcha learns she’s wanted for a murder she didn’t commit, she and her son run for their lives. Then help arrives from the strangest woman in the most unexpected ways.

Centuries apart, Keaka and Sorcha walk the same path―devoted mothers in circumstances beyond their control who will do anything to keep their sons safe. Defying logic, they find strength in each other. But what does their connection mean? And how far will it go?

And now, on with the excerpt…

Continue reading →

Excerpt: THE UNKILLABLE FRANK LIGHTNING by Josh Rountree (Tachyon)

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Today, we have an excerpt from the next novel by Josh Rountree: The Unkillable Frank Lightning, “a Frankenstein-inspired tale unlike any other”.

The novel is due to be published in a couple of weeks by Tachyon Publications. To mark the occasion, the publisher has provided CR with an excerpt to share with our readers. Here’s the synopsis:

Catherine Coldbridge is a complicated woman: a doctor, an occultist, and briefly, a widow. In 1879, her husband, Private Frank Humble, was killed in a Sioux attack. Consumed by grief, Catherine used her formidable skills to resurrect her husband. But after the reanimation, Frank lost his soul, becoming a vicious undead monster. Unable to face her failure or its murderous consequences, Catherine fled to grieve her failure.

Twenty-five years later, Catherine has decided she must make things right. She travels back to Texas with a pair of hired killers ready to destroy Frank. But Frank is no longer a monster; he is once again the kind man she knew. He has remade himself as the Unkillable Frank Lightning, traveling with the Wild West Show, and even taking on a mysterious young ward.

Now Catherine must face a series of moral dilemmas that cannot be resolved without considerable bloodshed.

Continue reading →

Upcoming: THE LAST KINGS OF HOLLYWOOD by Paul Fischer (Celadon)

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Early next year, Celadon Books are due to publish The Last Kings of Hollywood by Paul Fischer: a new biography of Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg, “and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema”. As a movie-lover born in the early-1980s, these three directors have been responsible for an incredible number of movies that I have watched many, many times. So this, combined with my love for behind-the-scenes books, means Fischer’s new book became a must-read as soon as I saw it in the publisher’s catalogue. I really can’t wait to read this.

Here’s the synopsis:

The untold, intimate story of how three young visionaries—Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg — revolutionized American cinema, creating the most iconic films in history while risking everything, redefining friendship, and shaping Hollywood as we know it.

In the summer of 1967, as the old Hollywood studio system was dying, an intense, uncompromising young film school graduate named George Lucas walked onto the Warner Bros. backlot for his first day working as an assistant to another up-and-coming, largely unknown filmmaker, a boisterous father of two called Francis Ford Coppola. At the exact same time, across town on the Universal Studios lot, a film-obsessed twenty-year-old from a peripatetic Jewish family, Steven Spielberg, longed to break free from his apprenticeship for the struggling studio and become a film director in his own right.

Within a year, the three men would become friends. Spielberg, prioritizing security, got his seven-year contract directing television. Lucas and Coppola, hungry for independence, left Hollywood for San Francisco to found an alternative studio, American Zoetrope, and make films without answering to corporate capitalism.

Based on extensive research and hundreds of original interviews with the inner circle of these Hollywood icons, The Last Kings of Hollywood tells the thrilling, dramatic inside story of how, over the next fifteen years, the three filmmakers rivaled and supported one another, fell out and reconciled, and struggled to reinvent popular American cinema. Along the way, Coppola directed The Godfather, then the highest-grossing film of all time, until Spielberg surpassed it with Jaws — whose record Lucas broke with Star Wars, which Spielberg surpassed again with E.T. By the early 1980s, they were the richest, best-known filmmakers in the world, each with an empire of their own. The Last Kings of Hollywood is an unprecedented chronicle of their rise, their dreams and demons, their triumphs and their failures — intimate, extraordinary, and supremely entertaining.

Paul Fischer’s The Last Kings of Hollywood is due to be published by Celadon Books in North America and in the UK, on February 2026.

Follow the Author: Website, Goodreads, BlueSky

Excerpt: SEVENTHBLADE by Tonia Laird (ECW Press)

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Tomorrow, ECW Press is due to publish Seventhblade by Tonia Laird, “a fast-paced, anti-colonial action-adventure fantasy”. Pitched as perfect for fans of N. K. Jemisin and Rebecca Roanhorse, I think it should appeal to a number of CR readers. To mark the publication, the publisher has provided CR with an excerpt to share (Chapter 1). Here’s the synopsis:

After the murder of T’Rayles’s adopted son, the infamous warrior and daughter of the Indigenous Ibinnas returns to the colonized city of Seventhblade ready to tear the streets asunder in search of her son’s killer. T’Rayles must lean into the dangerous power of her inherited sword and ally herself with questionable forces, including the Broken Fangs, an alliance her mother founded, now fallen into greed and corruption, and the immortal Elraiche, a powerful and manipulative deity exiled from a faraway land. Navigating the power shifts in a colonized city on the edge and contending with a deadly new power emerging from within, T’Rayles risks everything to find the answers, and the justice, she so desperately desires.

Loaded with complex characters and intricately staged action, and set in a fragmented, fascinating world of dangerous magics and cryptic gods, Seventhbladeis a masterful new fantasy adventure from a bright emerging Indigenous voice.

And now, on with the excerpt…

Continue reading →

New Books (June)

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Featuring: Jackson Ford, Phoebe Greenwood, James Logan, Alex Pavesi, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, Taylor Jenkins Reid, Charlotte Runcie, Eric Smith & Andrew Bricker, Maggie Stiefvater, Vladislav Zubok

Continue reading →