NEW AND UPCOMING RELEASES WITH STARRED REVIEWS:

★ THE DARK HOURS

By Michael Connelly

Booklist - Starred Review

The fourth Renée Ballard and Harry Bosch novel is the best yet, both because Ballard has evolved into one of crime fiction's richest, most complex characters and because Connelly takes an unflinching look at policing in the post–George Floyd era. Still working LAPD's graveyard shift, Ballard is trying to survive the traditional New Year's Eve "rain of lead"—celebrants firing guns into the air, oblivious to where the bullets come down—when a man is killed at an outdoor party, not from a deadly raindrop, it quickly becomes apparent, but from an assailant's gun. After establishing a link between this murder and a decades-old killing on which the retired Harry Bosch worked, Ballard turns to Bosch, who takes a low-key mentoring role, for help. Meanwhile, though, she has another, equally difficult case: tracking a pair of serial rapists who have been terrorizing women in various Hollywood neighborhoods. Ballard's determined efforts to "get of my ass and work cases" (long a Bosch mantra) have earned her all variety of enmity from both supervisors and fellow cops, especially when the murder case points toward a former cop. Sadly, staying on your ass and out of trouble has become the department's unofficial policy. As always, Connelly salts the story with intriguing details of how detectives follow a convoluted investigative trail, but here he adds a deeply troubling subtext: Can good cops survive in a system so deeply broken?

Publishers Weekly - Starred Review

In bestseller Connelly’s stellar fourth novel featuring LAPD Det. Renée Ballard (after 2019’s The Night Fire), Ballard leads the way on two separate cases: the shooting death of Javier Raffa, a former gang member, and the search for a pair of serial rapists dubbed the Midnight Men. A recovered bullet connects the Raffa shooting to an old case of Connelly’s main series lead, Harry Bosch. Though Bosch is retired, he willingly helps out and ends up playing a key role in investigating both cases. Meticulous about actual police procedure, Connelly makes the fundamentals of detective work engrossing while providing plenty of suspense and action, including one genuinely shocking scene of violence involving Ballard. He also excels at imbuing his narratives with social commentary, a talent showcased in this entry, which opens with Ballard and her reluctant police partner, Lisa Moore, parked near a homeless encampment on New Year’s Eve 2020 (“It had been a bad year with the pandemic and social unrest and violence”). Along the way to a surprising, even hopeful ending, Connelly avoids polemics while exploring such issues as internal disaffection among the police (including Ballard’s ambivalence about her career), misogyny and domestic violence, and the political divide that resulted in the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol. This is a masterpiece.

Little, Brown & Co.: November 1, 2021; ISBN: 9780316301299: Hardcover

★ A BRAVE AND CUNNING PRINCE

By James Horn

Publishers Weekly -  Starred Review

Horn (1619), president of the Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation, delivers an immersive portrait of Opechancanough (c. 1547–1646), who helped build the powerful Powhatan chiefdom in America. Horn contends that Opechancanough was the same “princely young Indian” known as Paquiquineo who was kidnapped from the Chesapeake Bay region in 1561 and taken to Spain, where he was renamed Don Luís de Valasco. A Catholic convert, Don Luís traveled to Cuba, Florida, and Mexico before returning to the Chesapeake Bay to help establish a Jesuit mission in 1570. Shortly after his arrival, however, he left for his home village, where he organized a war party that killed the priests and destroyed the mission. He then helped his brother Chief Powhatan consolidate Native tribes along the East Coast to counter the European threat, and, in 1622, following a series of devastating raids on Jamestown, came “very close” to driving the English settlers—who knew him as Opechancanough—out of Virginia. Horn recounts Pocahontas’s marriage to John Rolfe and other famous events at Jamestown, and vividly describes brutal clashes between Powhatan warriors and English settlers before Opechancanough was captured and killed in 1646. Though Horn’s case that Paquiquineo/Don Luís and Opechancanough are the same person requires a good bit of speculation (he would have been close to 100 when killed), he builds a cogent narrative out of documentary fragments. Early American history buffs will be riveted.

Kirkus - Starred Review

An accomplished work of scholarly detection that plays out against the background of the English colonization of Virginia.
Opechancanough, the center of Virginia historian Horn’s narrative, was abducted from his Chesapeake Bay homeland by Spanish sailors in the 1550s and taken to Mexico and Spain, where he met King Philip II. Recorded in the Spanish annals as Paquiquineo, a name simplified as Don Luis, he converted to Catholicism and promised to help the Spanish establish a colony on Powhatan lands, the site of a tight confederacy of Native nations. After returning there, however, he organized the massacre of Jesuit priests who had established a mission not far from present-day Richmond. The brother of the king, and in the line of royal succession, Opechancanough then mounted a long war of resistance against the English. Horn ventures two potentially controversial suggestions: first, that Don Luis and Opechancanough were one and the same, since some historians have argued that they were not; and second, that Opechancanough and his elite band of warriors were responsible for the disappearance of the Roanoke Colony, long a matter of historical speculation. He provides convincing evidence for both assertions, building on a portrait of Virginia and its neighbors that, at the time of the European arrival, was the site of a sophisticated political and economic network whose participants were well aware of distant events and who coordinated to fight the newcomers. Some familiar figures appear, including John Smith and Pocahontas, on both of whom Horn sheds new light as players in a drama that would unfold over decades. He portrays Opechancanough as a man who, having seen the subjugation of Native peoples and the enslavement of Africans in Mexico, knew exactly what was coming on those English ships and fought to prevent their successful settlement—which, thanks to both the divisions of the English civil war and Opechancanough’s fierce fighting, almost didn’t happen.
Swift-moving prose along a twisting storyline lends this brilliant book the feel of a mystery.

Basic Books: November 2, 2021; ISBN: 9780465038909: Hardcover

★ HOW TO MARRY KEANU REEVES IN 90 DAYS

by K.M. Jackson

Publishers Weekly -  Starred Review

It would be enough if Jackson’s latest (after Real Men Knit) were simply a charming rom-com replete with laugh-out-loud one liners and pop-culture references, but it’s also a moving, heartfelt story about coping with grief, stress, and major life changes. It doesn’t hurt that Bethany Lu Carlisle, an endearing 40-something Keanu Reeves fangirl, and her best friend, True Erickson, are the kind of characters one can’t help but root for. Lu and True have known each other since they were school-age thanks to True’s friendship with Bethany’s late little brother, Cole. All this time, True’s nursed a massive crush on Lu that’s only gotten bigger as they’ve grown closer through their mutual grief. Meanwhile, proudly single Lu sees True as family and has never considered him romantically. When Lu reads tabloid reports that her beloved Keanu Reeves is getting married in 90 days, it makes her question her devotion to the single life—so she does the sane thing and hatches a plan to stop the wedding. True begrudgingly agrees to help her on this harebrained scheme, leading to some outrageous adventures as they race to California. The rom-com trappings keep things lighthearted and welcoming even as Jackson probes heavy emotions. Readers will be wowed.

Forever: November 2, 2021; ISBN: 9781538703502: Trade Paperback

★ BENDING THE ARC: My Journey From Prison to Politics

By Keeda Haynes

Kirkus - Starred Review

A Black, female former public defender and congressional candidate reflects on her experiences navigating the racist, sexist justice system that incarcerated her “for a crime I did not commit.”
Haynes was raised in Franklin, Tennessee, a town that, during her childhood, still celebrated its Confederate past. “My high school mascot,” she writes, “was the Franklin Rebel, a cartoon of a smug Confederate soldier.” Surrounded by multiple generations of loving family, Haynes grew up hardworking, ambitious, and well-loved. Through a combination of loans and retail jobs, she paid her way through college, where she majored in criminal psychology. While balancing work and education, Haynes met C, a charming man who lived in Memphis and whose attention Haynes found flattering. In a purported effort to help her pay her bills, C asked her if she would sign for a series of packages associated with his company, Beepers Plus. As a bonus, he offered her $50 for each one she accepted. Thinking that the packages contained only items associated with C’s business, Haynes accepted. Later, Haynes discovered that the seemingly innocuous packages were filled with marijuana, which she learned only when the police accused her of conspiring with C to sell drugs. Despite going to trial and pleading innocent, Haynes was sentenced to seven years in prison. This experience would inform the rest of her life. “I was one person—young, female, and Black—against a much larger, much stronger force, whose intentions, it seemed, were not to serve and protect but to intimidate and harass,” she writes. “To fit me into whatever narrative they had dreamed up and then punish me accordingly.” The author’s story is both inspiring and heartbreaking, and her voice is simultaneously impassioned and informed. Haynes is adept at using her personal experience to illustrate general truths about the flaws in the criminal justice system as well as specific avenues for reform.
A gripping, passionate memoir about a wrongly incarcerated Black woman's drive for judicial reform.

Basic Books: November 16, 2021; ISBN: 9781541646308, Hardcover

★ HOW THE OTHER HALF EATS

By Priya Fielding-Singh

Publishers Weekly - Starred Review

Sociologist Fielding-Singh debuts with an enlightening examination of how socioeconomic inequities affect eating habits and health. Drawing on research she conducted as a Stanford University PhD student, Fielding-Singh profiles four families living in San Francisco’s Bay Area and documents their food choices and limitations over the course of several years. Nyah Baker, a Black single mother of two teenage daughters, relies on disability checks, payday loans, and occasional sex work to make ends meet. Meanwhile, Julie Cain, the wife of a corporate lawyer, spends roughly $900 per month on food for her family of four. Fielding-Singh reveals that an impoverished parent will spend more than she can afford on a luxurious meal because food is one of the few pleasures she can give her children, and that racial stereotypes affect ideas about healthy food choices (“There’s a reason why people sing the praises of kale but not collard greens”). Mealtimes are particularly complex for middle-class mothers balancing work and household duties, Fielding-Singh notes, while Blacks and Mexican Americans haven’t made the same dietary improvements as whites in recent decades. The author’s deeply empathetic approach allows her to personalize the copious data on nutritional and health disparities she cites. The result is devastating portrait of “the scarcity, uncertainty, and anxiety that permeates so much of the American dietary experience.”

Little, Brown Spark: November 16, 2021; ISBN: 9780316427265: Hardcover

★ THE NEXT SUPPER: The End of Restaurants as We Know Them, and What Comes After

By Corey Mintz

Booklist - Starred Review

Before a tiny virus upended the worldwide restaurant business, and the world, Canadian author Mintz (How To Host a Dinner Party, 2013) had already begun to fear for the future of restaurants for a host of economic, social, and political reasons. The rise of the internet anointed anyone a restaurant critic, and the cacophony of voices, both informed and ignorant, drove out those of experienced professional critics. Restaurants suddenly had to be sure their food was Instagram[1]worthy. Restaurant kitchens became dependent on the unpaid or low-paid work of recent culinary school graduates, flooding the the job market. While burgeoning immigrant communities multiplied the cuisines available in many places, immigrant and often undocumented workers were also exploited. The pandemic further upended all these trends, with restaurants pivoting from table service to delivery. Mintz delves into the economics and ethos of big restaurant holding companies and finds a large contrast between privately and publicly held ones. Environmentally aware diners worry not only about sourcing but also sustainability, while restaurateurs are beholden to today’s bottom line. Mintz writes with passion about how he foresees all these pressures working themselves out, and caring readers, too, will find themselves distressed and lacking easy answers.

Publishers Weekly - Starred Review

“I’m convinced there’s a better way to be a restaurant customer,” writes food journalist Mintz (How to Host a Dinner Party) in his fiery work exposing “the twisted DNA of the dining industry.” As the Covid-19 pandemic dragged on, he writes, it revealed a restaurant industry struggling to make ends meet, and one ravaged by a culture in which “fiefdoms” were rampant with “wage theft, tip skimming, and abuse.” Through conversations with owners, chefs, cooks, servers, and delivery people, Mintz offers a searing critique of the food world, explaining why many of its standard practices—such as relying on apps for on-demand deliveries and tipping—have “train[ed] us to value convenience over price, quality, and fair wages”; how the brutal treatment of kitchen staff—from the underpaid to those not paid at all—has led to the current labor shortage; and the harms of operating under the ethos that the “customer is always right.” As a corrective, he urges consumers to stop treating industry workers as “beneath our concern” and to “suss out... what kind of workplaces are worth supporting.” Mintz also describes how thoughtful urban planning can preserve family restaurants and protect neighborhoods from being inundated by corporate franchises. With the hospitality industry poised at a point of inflection, this offers plenty of food for thought.

PublicAffairs: November 16, 2021; ISBN: 9781541758407: Hardcover

★ LEVIATHAN FALLS

By James S. A. Corey

Booklist - Starred Review

Leviathan Falls picks up where Tiamat's Wrath (2019) left off: the Laconian Empire defeated, Teresa Duarte onboard the Rocinante with Holden and crew, and the ancient enemy of the gate builders seeking ways to destroy reality itself. The final installment of Corey's Expanse series is
its strongest yet. It's a thrill ride of a tale, boasting the same kinetic momentum of the first book, with the highest possible stakes and profound emotional resonance. The story is masterfully paced and structured, filled to bursting with some of the genre's best world building. One of the central themes is how individual selfishness sabotages the greater good. It's easy to read this as a commentary on current real-world circumstances, but it is elevated into an exploration of universal truths. This book illustrates the greatest strength of speculative fiction: to imagine unique circumstances as strange mirrors to help us see ourselves more truly. Corey maintains an impressive balance between unflinching realism and hope, with no illusions about the myriad faults of humanity, but still holds a fundamental belief in the essential worthiness of people. This is a deeply satisfying and fitting conclusion to one of the best space opera series in many years.

Orbit: November 30, 2021; ISBN: 9780316332910: Hardcover

★ MAKING DARKNESS LIGHT: A Life of John Milton

By Joe Moshenska

Kirkus - Starred Review

A prismatic portrait of the canonical poet.
Oxford literature professor Moshenska takes a fresh perspective on John Milton (1608-1674), the art of biography, and the experience of reading to create a lyrical, meditative narrative about a poet who has seemed to generations of biographers and readers to be “perennially contemporary.” It’s not possible, Moshenska writes, “to separate the place of Milton’s writings in his lifetime from the questionings and imaginings that they can provoke in ours.” The author has been haunted by Milton, entangled with him as a reader and teacher, and his captivating, perceptive study reveals a deeply felt connection. Dividing the biography into three parts, the author considers Milton’s birth and early life, marked by his growing up in “a house full of music” that, Moshenska believes, made him particularly sensitive to rhythm; his experiences in his late 20s and early 30s, including a “formative and fraught” trip to Italy and meeting with the aged Galileo; and the latter half of his life, when he married, became a father, and emerged as a controversial public figure. At this point, “he presented himself as a learned, urbane, and respectable poet” whose writings on divorce “could make women leave their husbands” and whose political views “threatened the bonds between monarchs and subjects.” Moshenska follows Milton’s footsteps from his birthplace on Bread Street in London to his travels through Italy; visits Milton’s several homes; offers meticulously close, sensitive readings of poems and essays; and reveals “granular details” of turbulent 17th-century English political and religious life. Throughout, the author shares his own intimate responses to Milton’s sometimes “alien and challenging” views. Milton, he writes, “was able to be absolutely himself while remaining in some sense foreign to himself, and this strange kind of self-relation I have found rich and useful in making sense of myself.” With no aspirations to produce a definitive biography, Moshenska has crafted, instead, an incisive portrayal.
An inspired biographical and autobiographical journey.

Basic Books: December 7, 2021; ISBN: 9781541620681: Hardcover

★ THE REBEL AND THE RAKE

By Emily Sullivan

Booklist - Starred Review

Prim and proper lady’s companion Sylvia Sparrow is the last person on earth anyone would think of possessed a scandalous past. Yet someone has discovered her carefully hidden secrets. Now, unless Sylvia gives in to the demands of an anonymous blackmailer, her carefully cobbled- together new life will come tumbling down. While accompanying her employer to a house party in Scotland, Sylvia tries to complete her assigned task of retrieving and delivering an envelope to her blackmailer, only to find she is distracted by the presence of another guest, dissolute bon vivant Rafe Davies, who, unbeknownst to Sylvia, knows a thing or two about keeping secrets. After wowing readers with her superb debut, A Rogue to Remember (2021), rising historical romance star Sullivan returns with another entrancing addition to her League of Scoundrels series that brilliantly showcases her mastery of deep characterization as well as her gift for crafting a wit-infused plot that effectively threads the needle between desire and danger without dropping a single stitch.

Forever: December 28, 2021; ISBN: 9781538737347: Mass Market Paperback

★ ANTHEM

By Noah Hawley

Booklist - Starred Review

It begins with the suicide of 15-year-old Simon’s older sister, Claire, an act that presages a global wave of children’s suicides, numbering 1,000 per day. Devastated by his sister’s death, Simon is sent to Float, an adolescent center for anxiety. There he meets a Black teenager named Louise, who is 15, and a strange boy named Paul, who is 14 and calls himself the Prophet, claiming he receives messages from God, one of which asserts that He has a mission for Simon—the boy will be instrumental in building a new utopia. With that purpose, the three teens escape from Float. En route to their destiny, they set about rescuing a teenage girl, Bathsheba, from the so-called Wizard, billionaire E. I. Mobley, the sixth richest man in the world, who has a penchant for violating pubescent girls. Meanwhile, hordes of insurrectionists rise up to overthrow the government, launching a violent, epic Manichean war between good and evil. The apocalypse, it seems, is just around the corner. Yes, in Anthem, Hawley has written some of the most savage satire since Jonathan Swift, creating a ridiculous world in which only the young are viable. The plot-rich, cinematic story moves swiftly and compellingly, exciting reader interest and empathy. Anthem is truly an epic adventure.

Publishers Weekly - Starred Review

At the start of this grim, thought-provoking near-future thriller from Hawley (Before the Fall), five Wisconsin teenagers die by suicide in less than two weeks, each writing "A11" somewhere near where their bodies are found. The plague spreads nationwide and then internationally, creating a mind-numbing death count. Adults struggle to understand what's happening, some theorizing that the fatalities are a consequence of the Covid pandemic's social isolation. Many fear the suicides represent an "act of collective surrender" presaging the extinction of humanity. Meanwhile, 15-year-old Simon Oliver, who found his older sister dead from overdosing on the opioids their family business manufactured, is told by a fellow resident of the Float Anxiety Abatement Center near Chicago, who calls himself the Prophet, that Oliver is central to establishing a new utopia to be started by children to save the species and the planet. Oliver joins the Prophet and some others in escaping from Float to realize the Prophet's vision. From the ominous sentence that opens the main narrative ("The summer our children began to kill themselves was the hottest in history"), the author creates an all-too-plausible dystopia rendered believable through matter-of-fact prose. Hawley makes this sing by combining the social commentary of a Margaret Atwood novel with the horrors of a Stephen King book.

Grand Central Publishing: January 18, 2022; ISBN: 9781538711514: Hardcover

★ LOVE & OTHER DISASTERS

By Anita Kelly

Booklist - Starred Review

As a self-taught chef, Dahlia Woodson knows the odds of her winning Chef’s Special, but the mere fact that she is on the popular cooking competition show is more than enough to make her happy. Of course, the whole experience would be even better if one of Dahlia’s competitors, adorably cute London Parker, wasn’t such a total grump. Dahlia quickly discovers that London has a perfectly good reason for being cranky. Having to constantly explain to others that you're non-binary is exhausting. However, while both Dahlia and London dream of winning Chef’s Special, neither one expected that another prize might be within their reach—love. Kelly (a librarian by day) perfectly captures the zeal Dahlia and London have for cooking as well as the passion they discover for each other in this chef’s-kiss debut that brilliantly explores the idea of being true to yourself with insight and compassion. In between all the deliciously snarky wit, simmering sexual chemistry, romantic yearning, and quippy banter, Kelly also delivers some moments of romantic hope and happiness that will long resonate with readers.

Forever: January 18, 2022; ISBN: 9781538754849: Trade Paperback

★ AZURA GHOST

By Essa Hansen

Booklist - Starred Review

On the run for 10 years, Caiden has stayed away from his friends in order to protect them from his hybrid makeup—his Graven genes (as discussed in Nophek Gloss, 2020). While that power can be useful when employed to escape adversaries, to Caiden it is an evil to be avoided whenever possible—he fears it is changing him, that he will become worse than those he wishes to stop. While escaping a well-arranged ambush, Caiden encounters a deadly biomechanical bounty hunter and discovers it was controlled by Leta, the childhood friend he thought killed in the same raid he escaped many years ago. Leta has been trained by a powerful enemy to use her mind to travel across space and time while leaving her unconscious flesh-and-blood body safely behind. Caiden is determined to find and free Leta’s body but is unaware that she is also trying to protect a found family and has been deliberately sent to lure him into a more elaborate trap. Intriguing metaphysicals concepts, more fast-paced action, and a climactic revelation regarding Caiden’s mysterious genetic heritage will have fans eager for the next book in the Graven series.

Orbit: February 1, 2022; ISBN: 9780316430685: Trade Paperback

★ THE GOODBYE COAST

By Joe Ide

Booklist - Starred Review

Ide takes a break from his wonderful IQ Quintabe series to reimagine Philip Marlowe. This version of Raymond Chandler's iconic PI patrols the mean streets of contemporary Los Angeles, and while he shares the original's bone-deep iconoclasm, he's distinctly his own man, complete with a rich backstory. We learn that Marlowe and his father, Emmet, a revered but alcoholic L.A. cop, are at odds—Marlowe unable to forgive Emmet for his booze-fueled absence while Marlowe's mother was dying of cancer; Emmet disgusted with his son for quitting the police. Mired in two missing-persons cases, however, Marlowe turns to Emmet for help. Finding Cody, the stepdaughter of Kendra James, a fading movie star ("Grace Kelly without the grace"), proves easy enough, but Marlowe needs to stash the smart-mouthed teen with Emmet while he determines if, as Cody claims, Kendra killed her father. Meanwhile, Marlowe searches for another disappeared daughter, this one snatched by her father in a custody battle. These toxically dysfunctional families bring forth the depth of Marlowe's melancholy ("Nothing ever came out completely right. . . . Why? People. They fucked up everything"), but at the same time, he finds himself drawing closer to Emmet. The sleuthing here is top notch, but it's the bantering father-son interplay (evoking Jim Rockford and father Rocky in The Rockford Files) that really gives the book its zip. More Marlowe and Emmet would be most welcome.

Little, Brown/Mulholland: February 1, 2022; ISBN: 9780316459273: Hardcover

★ PHANTOM PLAGUE

By Vidya Krishnan

Kirkus - Starred Review

A penetrating social history of a virulent disease.
Drawing on two decades of reporting on tuberculosis and HIV in India, Krishnan makes her book debut with a hard-hitting indictment of the greed, politics, and racism that have led to the prevalence of drug-resistant tuberculosis. The disease, medical historians speculate, likely began in ancient Egypt and traveled across the world along trade routes. It ravaged 19th-century slums, where overcrowding and filth incubated an illness that had no cure. Its victims, though, were hardly limited to the poor. Among TB’s sufferers were Orwell, Kafka, Eleanor Roosevelt, Chopin, and all of the Brontë sisters. Krishnan traces early efforts to stem contagion, including a campaign in the U.S. to ban spitting; although that effort failed, it led to the creation of public and hand-held spittoons. If men would not stop spitting tobacco, at least the mucus could be contained. The development of germ theory led to the creation of antibiotics, but while curing TB, overuse of antibiotics for all manner of maladies caused drug-resistant strains, especially rife in India. Ramshackle housing, inadequate medical care (doctors who fail to diagnose TB or prescribe correct treatment), and the rationing of drugs because of big pharma’s patent monopolies all contribute to the rise of drug resistance. “Tuberculosis,” writes the author, “demonstrates what happens to science when it leaves the lab setting and interacts with flawed human beings: patients, doctors, politicians, and rabble-rousers, all of whom have a unique effect on the course of the plague.” Krishnan writes that the World Health Organization estimates 25% of the world population has latent TB, fueled by an “architecture of unfairness,” inequality, and ignorance. Underscoring the vulnerability of the poor, Krishnan asserts that TB epitomizes “a new form of medical apartheid in which preventable and curable diseases, such as TB, are thriving while lifesaving medicines remain in a stranglehold.”
A timely, significant analysis of the dire consequences of public health failures.

PublicAffairs: February 1, 2022; ISBN: 9781541768475: Hardcover