Otto Penzler, ed., The Best Mystery Stories of the Year: 2024 Amazon This is the fourth volume in the Best Mystery Stories of the Year series, edited by Otto Penzler and featuring an introduction by this year’s guest editor, Anthony ..read more

Stephen King, You Like It Darker Amazon Stephen King’s You Like It Darker is a collection of 12 titles—seven previously published short stories and five novellas. Looking back over the table of contents now, those that stand out for me ..read more

Blake Crouch, Run Amazon Blake Crouch's Run was originally self-published in 2011 and has now been re-released by Ballantine in 2024. (This publishing history unfortunately is not apparent in the description of the book on Amazon.) So it's an earlier ..read more

Blake Crouch, Summer Frost Amazon Blake Crouch's Summer Frost is a an entertaining short read about a not-too-distant future in which artificial intelligence has the potential to become life, or at least to approximate it very closely. So what happens ..read more

Tim Tigner, Twisted Lives Amazon Tim Tigner's latest thriller tells the story of a federal air marshall, Felix Sparks, whose career and family life are upended after an incident on a plane with an entitled Chinese princeling. Sparks is framed ..read more

Amazon In his newly released memoir—the title of which is from a poem by Charles Baudelaire (to whom, yes, the author’s Baudelaire orphans are an homage)—Daniel Handler writes about his “canon,” the words and music and art and incidents that ..read more

Ken Follett, The Armor of Light   Amazon   The Armor of Light is the fifth novel in Ken Follett's Kingsbridge series, which started with the publication of Pillars of the Earth in 1989. The book spans about thirty years in the history of Kingsbridge, from 1792 to 1824, and focuses on the city's cloth trade—its millworkers and clothiers and the issues of the day that impacted their lives: the adoption of labor-saving machines, the rise of Luddism, anti-union policies, a corrupt justice system, press gangs, and the Napoleonic wars. As usual with Follett's novels, the c ..read more

Truman Capote, In Cold Blood   Amazon   I'm late to the party reading Truman Capote's true crime classic In Cold Blood. Most people are probably familiar with the basics of the story, either from the book itself or from the film that was made of it (which I've not yet seen): In 1959, four members of the Clutter family were murdered in their farmhouse in Holcomb, Kansas, a crime that initially baffled investigators. Capote traveled to Holcomb (with his friend Harper Lee) to interview the townspeople and investigators and write about the case. His book, which was publi ..read more

Robert Harris, Act of Oblivion   Amazon   I've lived most of my life in or around New Haven, Connecticut, which means that the names Dixwell, Whalley, and Goffe are etched in my brain (alongside the locations of the best pizza places). They're the names of three main thoroughfares linking downtown New Haven with its suburbs. I've always been aware that the streets were named after the three regicides who fled here from England and hung out for a time in Judges Cave on West Rock. But that's about all I knew. Robert Harris's fictionalized account of the regicides—mostl ..read more

Lee Goldberg, Calico   Amazon   I don't particularly like police procedurals, and I don't particularly like westerns, but it turns out that I really like police procedural-westerns that are blended with a dash of science fiction—at least this one. Lee Goldberg's stand-alone Calico is named after a town in the Mojave Desert. In the 1880s, it was a squalid mining town. Nowadays—in real life and in the book—it's a restored ghost town with attractions like gunfights and gold panning and a trading post. The area surrounding Calico (at least as Goldberg describes it) is th ..read more