Book Reviews

Phoebe Stone arrives at Newport’s grandest oceanfront hotel wearing a green dress and carrying no luggage, which is the first clue that something is off. Every other guest that week is part of the same rowdy wedding party, dressed head to toe in white, and the front desk keeps assuming

There is a particular pleasure in watching a man try to stay retired and fail spectacularly, and Daniel Silva has built an entire career on it. “Ransom,” the latest entry in his long-running Gabriel Allon series, opens with its hero once again elbow-deep in a restoration studio rather than a

Some books earn their permanence through marketing, and some earn it because a reader who is barely holding on finds exactly what they need on page forty. This one belongs to the second category. First published in 1946 and never out of print since, it remains one of the most

A slim paperback that has spent close to three decades bouncing between the self-help and spirituality shelves, this book has quietly become one of the best-selling works of its kind in American publishing, the sort of title people pass along to a friend going through a hard year rather than

Few books can claim to have shaped the language of everyday persuasion the way this one has, and fewer still manage to stay on best-seller charts nearly ninety years after their first printing. Yet here it is in 2026, still moving copies by the truckload, still handed out in sales-training

Some true crime books get their power from the mystery of who did it. “If You Tell” gets its power from a much harder question: how did everyone around her not stop it sooner? Gregg Olsen’s account of Shelly Knotek, the Washington state matriarch behind what became known as the

Every September, somewhere between the new box of crayons and the nervous first-day goodbyes, a classroom of strangers quietly starts turning into something else. Shannon Olsen’s “Our Class is a Family,” illustrated by Sandie Sonke, has spent the past several years as the picture book teachers reach for when they

Imagine a Tuesday morning five years from now when a single vial goes missing from a research freezer, and by Sunday night, hospitals in four countries have run out of beds. That is the unnerving proposition at the heart of Annie Jacobsen’s “Biological War: A Scenario,” the follow-up to her

Six books in, most series are running on fumes. Matt Dinniman’s “The Eye of the Bedlam Bride” is the moment the Dungeon Crawler Carl saga proves it still has somewhere new and devastating to go. This entry drops Carl and Princess Donut onto the dungeon’s eighth floor, a level built

Three books into a series that started as a joke about a man and his cat surviving a game-show apocalypse, Matt Dinniman pulls off the trick that separates good LitRPG from great LitRPG: he makes the rules matter more, not less. “The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook” drops Carl, Princess Donut, and