Book Reviews

Some duologies limp across the finish line. Others detonate. Ruinous Ends, the second and final installment in I.V. Marie’s The Souls of Blackwood Academy series, belongs firmly in the second camp, closing out one of this year’s most talked-about YA fantasy stories with the kind of ambition that either pays

A vanishing bride, a billionaire’s confession, and a spy who can’t stay retired — Daniel Silva’s twenty-sixth Gabriel Allon novel opens with a disappearance and doesn’t let go until it has rewired the reader’s sense of who the real villain is. The setup is deceptively simple. Alice Winter, the much-younger

Somewhere between prestige satire and beach-read wish-fulfillment sits “Yesteryear,” Caro Claire Burke’s debut novel and the season’s unlikely publishing phenomenon. It takes a premise that could have been a single viral tweet — what if a “tradwife” influencer actually had to live the life she performs online — and stretches

Every losing side in politics eventually produces a book asking the same question: what went wrong, and what do we do differently next time? “The Day After: How to Wield Power in a Post-Trump World” is Brian Tyler Cohen’s entry into that genre, and it arrives with a bluntness that’s

There is a particular kind of political book that arrives less like reporting and more like an X-ray — you already knew the body was there, but now you can see the shape of every bone. “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump” is that kind of book.

A decade after it first hit shelves, “The Mistake” is still doing exactly what it was built to do: making readers fall for a hockey player they have every reason to be annoyed with. The second book in Elle Kennedy’s Off-Campus series has become one of the defining texts of

Michael Connelly has spent decades proving he can do the LAPD procedural better than almost anyone alive, so it says something that his most interesting work right now is happening somewhere the LAPD barely reaches at all. “Ironwood” is the second entry in his Catalina series, and it confirms that

Some sequels tread water. This one sets the water on fire. “The Ballad of Falling Dragons” picks up the story Sarah A. Parker began in “When the Moon Hatched” and pushes it somewhere darker, bigger, and considerably more heartbroken, and readers who fell for the first book’s blend of dragon-riding

Ray Carney has spent two books trying to walk the line between respectable furniture salesman and quietly excellent fence, and “Cool Machine” finally makes him choose. Colson Whitehead closes out his Harlem Trilogy with the novel that has the most reason to feel like a victory lap and instead delivers

A decade after its release, “The Body Keeps the Score” still shows up on hospital reading lists, therapist waiting-room shelves, and TikTok book hauls alike, which is a strange kind of longevity for a book built on neuroscience footnotes. Bessel van der Kolk’s central claim is deceptively simple: trauma isn’t