Few sitting U.S. senators moonlight as biographers, and fewer still choose a subject as quietly polarizing as a sitting Supreme Court justice. That’s exactly the gamble Ted Cruz makes with “Going Further: The Incomparable Clarence Thomas,” a book that trades campaign-trail rhetoric for something closer to hagiography-with-footnotes, built on hours
A confession is supposed to close a case, not reopen one, but that’s exactly what happens when the man who confessed to killing a Seaside, Washington teenager twenty-five years ago suddenly takes it back. Jennifer Hillier’s “Heart of Glass” starts from that single, destabilizing premise and uses it to pull
An immortal warrior bound to a sword who would honestly rather you just let him die is not the traveling companion most people would choose, but Learned Edmund never gets much of a choice in the matter. T. Kingfisher’s “Daggerbound,” the second book in her Swordheart series, picks up the
A severed finger in a high school principal’s mail is not a subtle way to reopen old wounds, but subtlety was never really the point of Madeline, Celeste, Jane, Renata, and Bonnie’s corner of Pirriwee Public in the first place. Ten years after the events that made “Big Little Lies”
A century-old disappearance, a haunted island, and a leading lady who might be walking straight into the same fate as the woman she’s playing — Riley Sager’s latest thriller wastes no time announcing itself as this fall’s must-read gothic chiller. In 1926, five mediums vanished from the isolated commune of
Ten years ago, “Pardon My Take” was two guys yelling about football into microphones for a Barstool Sports audience that hadn’t fully materialized yet. Today it’s arguably the biggest sports podcast in the country, and “Pardon My Book” is its hosts cashing in a decade of chaos for something you
Somewhere between the sourdough starters and the linen aprons of the tradwife internet, there is a woman performing a life she does not actually live. Caro Claire Burke’s debut novel “Yesteryear” takes that performance and traps its heroine inside it, literally, and the result is one of the more purely
There is a particular kind of stranger who shows up in small-town fiction: quiet, a little mysterious, and armed with more generosity than the town knows what to do with. Allen Levi’s “Theo of Golden” bets its entire 300-plus pages on that stranger, and against the odds of a premise
Some books earn their spot on the bestseller list the week they’re published. “Verity” has earned it over and over again, years after its original release, which says something about how effectively Colleen Hoover engineered a story designed to unsettle readers long after they’ve closed the cover. The premise is
Small towns are supposed to be the places where everyone knows everyone, where nothing bad really happens, and where a Fourth of July celebration is just fireworks and lake water. Karin Slaughter has spent a career proving that premise wrong, and “We Are All Guilty Here,” the first installment in
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