Book Reviews

Somewhere inside a spreadsheet of 46,600 names, a killer is hiding, and Iris Starling is daring you to find them without a single narrative trick to lean on. No detective, no red herrings planted by a scheming author, no last-chapter twist you could never have seen coming. Just eighteen clues,

What does it look like when a stranger walks into your town and decides, for no reason he’ll explain, to spend a year making everyone’s life a little better? That’s the question sitting at the heart of “Theo of Golden,” the quiet phenomenon that has climbed all the way to

Four years is a long time to nurse a betrayal, and Rachel Schneider’s Light Wielder wastes no time reminding readers just how much damage that kind of silence can do. The sequel to Schneider’s breakout hit Metal Slinger picks up four years after Jovie made the choice that shattered her

Few political memoirs arrive with as much built-in scrutiny as a first lady’s account of the final chapter of her husband’s presidency, and Jill Biden’s View from the East Wing does not shy away from that spotlight. The memoir covers Dr. Biden’s four years as first lady, from the causes

Cape Carnage keeps a garden of secrets, and in Brynne Weaver’s Harvest Season, the second installment of the Seasons of Carnage trilogy, harvest time comes with a body count. Picking up moments after the explosive ending of Tourist Season, Harvest Season finds Nolan Rhodes and Harper Starling still tangled in

Barbara McQuade spent a career putting organized crime figures behind bars as a federal prosecutor in Detroit, most notably helping convict Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick on racketeering charges. In “The Fix: Saving America from the Corruption of a Mob-Style Government,” she turns that same prosecutorial toolkit on Washington, arguing that the

Every astrophysicist eventually gets asked the same question at a dinner party: do you believe in aliens? Neil deGrasse Tyson has spent decades fielding that question with a scientist’s caution and a showman’s timing, and in “Take Me to Your Leader: Perspectives on Your First Alien Encounter,” he finally gives

There is a particular kind of silence that falls over a room when a guitarist who spent three decades avoiding the spotlight finally decides to talk. Kim Thayil, the co-founder and lead guitarist of Soundgarden, has always been the quiet architect behind one of grunge’s most towering sounds, letting Chris

If you have ever watched a room full of teenagers sit together in total silence, each one lit blue by a phone screen, Jonathan Haidt has an explanation for that image — and he thinks it should worry you a great deal more than it probably does. The Anxious Generation:

Jonathan Turley has spent decades explaining the law to the rest of us on cable news and in courtrooms; in Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution, he turns that same explanatory instinct on the country’s founding itself, arguing that the revolution Americans think they know