Blake Crouch, Upgrade   Amazon   Logan Ramsay lives with the guilt of having been involved in his brilliant mother's accidental destruction of the world as we know it. Now, in a post-apocalyptic world in which lower Manhattan is under water and dark gene labs are producing exotic new species to sell to Russian oligarchs, Logan—who only ever wanted to follow in his mother's scientific footsteps—is doing his penance as a federal officer tracking down rogue geneticists. At least until he's attacked at a cellular level and transforms into a kind of superman. And then he ..read more

Patricia Highsmith, Mermaids on the Golf Course   Amazon   I enjoyed this batch of eleven short stories by Patricia Highsmith more than I did the last collection of hers that I read (The Black House), though I can't offhand say exactly why. These stories, not surprisingly, feature mostly unhappy—or soon to be unhappy—people. They are driven to murder or suicide, or they realize that their ostensibly happy relationships were a mirage. They seek an escape from loneliness in imaginary dates, imaginary (?) friends, and nearly imaginary penpals. "Life was nothing but tryi ..read more

Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone   Amazon   Lori Gottlieb is a therapist and columnist, and I guess a podcaster too, though I haven't listened to her podcast yet. She has a background in writing, which may go some way toward explaining why this memoir is so very good. In it, she weaves together stories about her therapy clients (disguised versions thereof) with an account of her own struggles, principally the breakup that led her to seek therapy herself. So it's a book about a therapist giving and getting therapy and about the process of therapy itself ..read more

Douglas E. Richards, Time Frame   Amazon   Not too long ago, I accidentally reread a book I'd read and reviewed already in 2016, Douglas E. Richards' time travel novel Split Second. It wasn't until I was halfway through that things started to seem familiar, and I finished the book again anyway because I couldn't remember what happened. I had a similar reaction to the book as I did the first time through. (My consistency was heartening.) And this time, too, I said to myself, yeah, I'd read another book by this author. Turns out, the sequel to Split Second was publishe ..read more

Yishai Sarid, The Memory Monster   Amazon   This short book is written in the first person and purports to be a letter written by the unnamed narrator to his boss, the chairman of the board of Yad Vashem, explaining "what happened there." We don't find out what event he's alluding to until the very end of the book. In seeking to explain it, the narrator provides an account of pretty much his whole adult working life, and in quite a lot of detail. He is trained as a historian and wrote the book, literally, on the Nazis' methods of execution in the Polish camps. He als ..read more

Tivadar Soros, Masquerade: Dancing Around Death in Nazi-Occupied Hungary   Amazon   In his memoir Masquerade, Tivadar Soros (the father of George Soros) writes about his experiences during the ten-month period between March 1944, when the Nazis occupied Hungary, and January 1945, when the Russians arrived in Soros's neighborhood in Budapest. Soros determined early on that his and his family's best chance for surviving the war would be to try to pass themselves off as Christians and live apart from one another, a plan that involved a lot of back-and-forthing with doc ..read more

  Amazon   Normally, if I don't like a book as much as I didn't like this one, I don't bother finishing it. So you won't find a lot of really negative reviews on this blog. But in this case, I persevered because I was intrigued by the concept—it's a modern retelling of the Oedipus Rex story—and because the writing was sometimes good, but mostly because of the sunk cost: by the time I was really unhappy with the book, I'd already invested enough time in it that I wanted to be able to review it. Sophocles' Oedipus grows up unaware that the people raising him are not his bi ..read more

Kara Thomas, Out of the Ashes   Amazon   This book starts out well. Samantha Newsom, driving past a police cruiser, reminds herself not to behave like a criminal: "I hadn't killed anyone. Not yet." That line hooked me for a while. Sam is heading back to her hometown to take care of that "yet," and while there, she confronts the defining fact of her life, the unsolved murder of her family and her life afterward as the unloved ward of a miserable relative. She starts playing private detective, hunting down old acquaintances and anyone who might have some insight into h ..read more

Hannah Beckerman, The Forgetting   Amazon   In The Forgetting, Hannah Beckerman tells the story of two women in problematic relationships. Livvy married Dominic after a whirlwind romance, and they now have a baby, Leo. She's still in the honeymoon phase of her marriage, and what she doesn't see clearly—and we do—is that Dominic is manipulative and controlling. Our second protagonist, Anna, has been married longer to her husband, Stephen, and their relationship isn't perfect either. Stephen can be a little controlling, too, but it's harder for us to recognize and cond ..read more

Melanie Raabe, The Trap   Amazon   Linda Conrads is a best-selling author who hasn't left her house in 11 years. She went into seclusion not long after finding her sister Anna murdered—and seeing the face of the murderer before he ran off. The murder is still unsolved, and Linda is still haunted by that face. So what if she sees it one day on TV? Melanie Raabe's debut novel, translated from the German, is a twisty thriller that really did keep me guessing until the end. With very pages to go, I still half expected a different outcome. There's also a story within the ..read more