Book Reviews

There is a particular kind of dread that sets in when a Karin Slaughter novel opens on an ordinary street, because you know by page thirty the street will not feel ordinary again. “The Secrets We Hide,” the second entry in her North Falls series, opens with gunfire at 1601

There’s a particular comfort in a fantasy novel that knows exactly how much danger it wants you to feel, and Sarah Beth Durst’s Sea of Charms knows precisely: just enough to keep the pages turning, never so much that you can’t fall asleep afterward feeling like the world is, on

Imagine waking up with no memory of who you are, strapped to a bed in a spacecraft, with two dead crewmates floating beside you and the fate of humanity resting on whether you can remember your own name. That is the jolt of an opening Andy Weir gives readers in

There is a particular kind of dread that comes not from a stranger in a dark alley but from a voicemail left on an ordinary afternoon — one that tells you the person you have shared a bed with for twenty years is not who you thought he was. That

Picture the worst day of your life — now imagine it televised to a few trillion strangers across the galaxy, with a talking cat as your co-star and a “helpful” AI narrator scoring your every scream. That’s the premise Matt Dinniman commits to without blinking in Dungeon Crawler Carl, and

Some novels ask you to suspend disbelief about dragons or spaceships. Theo of Golden asks something harder: that a stranger’s kindness might be real, unearned, and enough to change a town. One spring morning, a quiet, unassuming man named Theo walks into the small Southern city of Golden and takes

Few memoirs arrive with as much built-in controversy as “Assata: An Autobiography,” and few authors have lived a life that makes the controversy almost beside the point. First published in 1987 and written from political asylum in Cuba, the book has found a new generation of readers this year following

Some readers pull a tarot card for fun. Mikaela Broussard pulls one and sees her own murder. That’s the jolt that opens Jasmine Smith’s debut novel “Death Card,” a dark contemporary fantasy that turns a routine reading at a family occult shop into the first domino in a story about

Every wedding has an uninvited guest problem, but rarely is that guest the whole point of the story. Alison Espach’s “The Wedding People” opens with Phoebe Stone checking into Newport, Rhode Island’s grand Cornwall Inn alone, in a green dress and gold heels, for a weekend she never intended to

Imagine being illegal before you’ve said your first word. That’s the premise Trevor Noah opens with in “Born a Crime,” a memoir that turns a legal technicality of apartheid South Africa into one of the most disarming coming-of-age stories published this decade. Noah, born to a Black Xhosa mother and