Top Stories

Some mystery writers hide the truth behind a locked door. Robert Jackson Bennett hides it behind several doors, each one leading somewhere stranger than the last — and by the time you reach the real answer, you’ve forgotten you were ever looking for something else. “A Trade of Blood,” the

Meghan Quinn has built a career on making “he falls first” feel like a genre unto itself, and Just for the Plot, the second book in her Bay Area Players series, might be the cleanest example yet of why readers keep coming back for it. Bennett Brinkman is San Francisco

Somewhere between a shipping route and a love letter is where Sarah Beth Durst has spent the last three books of her Spellshop series, and Sea of Charms — the newest stop on that route — proves the formula still has plenty of magic left in the tank. Marin is

A wedding where both parties would rather stab each other than say “I do” — that’s the premise crackling at the center of H. M. Wolfe’s viral dystopian romance, and it hasn’t loosened its grip on readers since the book shot to the top of the New York Times bestseller

Kathryn Stockett made her name writing about women who had to be resourceful because the world gave them no other option. “The Calamity Club,” her long-awaited return, drops us into 1933 Mississippi and asks the same question in harder economic terms: what happens when resourcefulness stops being enough, and the

A century of silence has a way of curdling into legend, and Riley Sager knows exactly how to make that legend walk again. “The Unknown,” his tenth novel, sends a film crew to a remote Vermont island to shoot a movie about the five women who vanished there in 1926

There’s an odd vulnerability in watching someone who built a career on carefully engineered pop hooks try to write something with no hooks to hide behind. Roland Orzabal, co-founder of Tears for Fears and the voice behind decades of songs about mental anguish dressed in synthesizers, has spent forty years

Peter Santenello built an audience by doing something unfashionable: showing up, sitting down, and listening. His YouTube channel has spent years taking cameras into coal towns, border communities, prison-adjacent neighborhoods, and reservations that most media coverage treats as backdrops rather than places people actually live. “Your Fellow Americans: Dispatches from

There’s a particular kind of dread that only isolated islands can produce, and Riley Sager has built a career out of mining it. In “The Unknown,” the bestselling author of “The Only One Left” and “Final Girls” sends a film crew to a fog-bound speck of land off the Vermont

Seventeen years is a long time to keep readers waiting for a follow-up, but Kathryn Stockett’s return proves patience pays off. The Calamity Club arrives as one of the summer’s most-talked-about novels, currently sitting atop bestseller lists from coast to coast, and it’s easy to see why: this is a