Some men lie for money. Paul Skalnik lied for freedom, and along the way he helped send at least one innocent man to death row. That’s the rot at the center of “Catch the Devil,” Pamela Colloff’s first full-length book, and it’s the kind of rot that doesn’t wash out
There’s a reason “salary” comes from salt: for most of human history, a handful of white crystals was worth fighting wars over, taxing into rebellion, and building entire cities around. Mark Kurlansky’s “Salt: A World History” takes that unglamorous kitchen staple and turns it into one of the most quietly
Some books don’t need an introduction so much as an accounting: nearly three decades after publication, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” is still selling well enough, week over week, to land on current bestseller charts alongside books released this year. That’s not nostalgia keeping it there. It’s a first
True crime memoirs tend to fall into one of two traps: they either lean so hard into the crime that the person at the center disappears, or they lean so hard into the person that the crime feels like an afterthought. Eva Benefield’s “Ghost Girl” manages to avoid both, and
Second books in a fantasy romance series have a way of either coasting on the first book’s goodwill or swinging for the fences. Elise Kova picks the second option with “Prince of Swords,” and the result is the rare sequel that’s both meaner and more assured than what came before
A man wakes up alone on a spacecraft with no memory of who he is, why he’s there, or why his two crewmates are dead in their bunks. That’s the opening of “Project Hail Mary,” and by the time Ryland Grace — a former middle-school science teacher turned reluctant astronaut
Some novels announce themselves with a twist or a body count. “Theo of Golden” announces itself with a front porch, a pot of coffee, and the patient, unhurried rhythms of a small Southern town. It shouldn’t work as a breakout bestseller in an attention economy built on cliffhangers — and
Picture this: you’re standing in your apartment in your boxers, arguing with your ex-girlfriend about her cat, when the building disappears from around you. Not collapses — disappears, replaced by dungeon corridors, and a chipper alien voice announces that Earth has just been sold to the highest bidder as raw
Stacey McEwan’s BookTok breakout A Forbidden Alchemy earned its audience by pairing gritty, industrial fantasy with a slow-burn romance that refused to play nice. Its sequel, A Forsaken Prophecy, doubles down on both instincts, sending its fractured couple deeper into a war-torn world while making them work considerably harder to
Five books deep into a series built on relentless escalation, Matt Dinniman does something unexpected in The Butcher’s Masquerade: he slows down. The dungeon is no less lethal, but the fifth installment of the Dungeon Crawler Carl saga trades some of its trademark chaos for something closer to intimacy, and
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