"The Faces of the Dead"

New from Severn House: The Faces of the Dead (A Cathy Marsden Thriller) by Chris Nickson.

About the book, from the publisher:

Sergeant Cathy Marsden investigates the death of a local gangster in WWII Leeds.

Leeds, 1944. Cathy Marsden’s happiness at her boyfriend Tom’s brief leave from the army and marriage proposal is short-lived as she embarks on a new case in the Special Investigation Branch.

Eric Carr, a local gangster, is dead after crashing his car on the outskirts of Leeds. Not only that, but an alarming discovery is made in the boot: weapons, including guns, stolen from a US military base, to be sold on the black market.

Was the crash simply an accident, or something more sinister? One thing’s for sure – Eric’s death has set a chain of murder and gangland chaos in motion. As the number of people disappearing increases, and men start dying, Cathy must work out who is pulling the strings, and why.

This fast-paced and twisty World War II thriller is perfect for fans of Kate Quinn, Rhys Bowen and Kelly Rimmer.

Visit Chris Nickson's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Constant Lovers.

The Page 69 Test: The Constant Lovers.

The Page 69 Test: The Iron Water.

The Page 69 Test: The Hanging Psalm.

Q&A with Chris Nickson.

The Page 69 Test: The Molten City.

My Book, The Movie: Molten City.

Writers Read: Chris Nickson (August 2021).

The Page 69 Test: Brass Lives.

The Page 69 Test: The Blood Covenant.

The Page 69 Test: The Dead Will Rise.

Writers Read: Chris Nickson (March 2023).

The Page 69 Test: Rusted Souls.

Writers Read: Chris Nickson (September 2023).

The Page 69 Test: The Scream of Sins.

Writers Read: Chris Nickson (March 2024).

The Page 69 Test: Them Without Pain.

Writers Read: Chris Nickson (September 2024).

Writers Read: Chris Nickson (March 2025).

The Page 69 Test: No Precious Truth.

--Marshal Zeringue

"American Bacon"

New from the University of Georgia Press: American Bacon: The History of a Food Phenomenon by Mark A. Johnson.

About the book, from the publisher:

In American Bacon, Mark A. Johnson asks (and answers) a seemingly simple question: How has bacon overcome centuries of religious prohibition, cultural contempt, and dietary advice to become a twenty-first-century culinary and cultural powerhouse? Starting in early modern Britain and tracing the story of bacon through the colonial era, Civil War, Progressive Era, modern fad diets, and the emerging craft bacon industry, Johnson provides a new perspective on some familiar American narratives. More than a story of production, marketing, and consumption, Johnson argues, this cultural history connects bacon to race, class, and gender while also illuminating major historical forces, such as migration, warfare, urbanization and suburbanization, reform movements, cultural trends, and globalization. For Johnson, bacon’s story from “most dangerous food in the supermarket” to pop culture and gastronomic phenomenon reflects the cultural values of a nation.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Harmless"

New from Dutton: Harmless: A Novel by Miranda Shulman.

About the novel, from the publisher:

A twisty novel of sisterhood, friendship, and obsession that asks: Can we ever really outrun what haunts us most?

Two years ago, Bea’s life was upended when her beloved twin sister died. Audrey was captivating, an extrovert, their mother’s golden child. Bea was “different,” too intense, and chronically lonely.

Now, in her late twenties, Bea is back home in Park Slope, Brooklyn, her spirits finally buoyed by her plan to start a dog kennel. Inspired by the childhood dream she once shared with Audrey and old, now-estranged friends Tatum and Layla, she’s sure this will be the perfect ode to her sister’s memory.

But as they reintegrate into one another’s lives, Audrey’s absence is keenly felt by all. Soon, simmering tensions and attractions emerge, and a sinister darkness breaks through to the surface. What do they really want? What happens when old secrets come to light? And when is it best to bury a dream, or a cherished friendship?

Visit Miranda Shulman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"God Bless the Pill"

New from the University of North Carolina Press: God Bless the Pill: The Surprising History of Contraception and Sexuality in American Religion by Samira K. Mehta.

About the book, from the publisher:

Most people today understand contraception as central to women’s liberation, and when the birth control pill arrived in 1960, the media thought it would usher in a sexual revolution. But a surprising number of religious Americans in the mid-twentieth century also saw contraception as part of God’s plan—a tool to create happy, prosperous American families in the post–World War II era.

In God Bless the Pill, Samira K. Mehta traces the remarkable story of how mid-twentieth-century Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish voices promoted the use of birth control and made it more accessible for many Americans. They hoped birth control methods would curb divorce rates by encouraging sexually dynamic marriages and families unstrained by “too many” children—thereby creating a postwar upwardly mobile middle class. Religious leaders also promoted this understanding of the family as tied to Cold War capitalism and encouraged neither racial nor gender equity.

But then came the backlash, both from the Right—which failed to anticipate the feminist potential of contraception—and from the Left, where women, particularly women of color, sought to ensure that birth control was a tool of liberation rather than one rooted in patriarchal and racial oppression. Ultimately, Mehta offers compelling new insights into the way religion accommodates itself to social, technological, and medical change.

Visit Samira K. Mehta's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Porcupines"

New from Summit Books: Porcupines: A Novel by Fran Fabriczki.

About the novel, from the publisher:

A fresh and witty debut about a young immigrant mother and her increasingly inquisitive daughter, who wakes up one day and decides to find out who her father is.

Sonia is a Hungarian immigrant who is raising her daughter, Mila—her beloved Milosh—on her own in sunny Los Angeles. Her days are a blur of not-quite-illegal business activities, dodging PTA moms, and baking birthday cakes laced with rum—minor mistakes that nevertheless continually remind her of everything she doesn’t understand about America and parenthood. Mila, meanwhile, is juggling violin and swimming lessons and navigating the treacherous social politics of school with the help of a less-than-helpful guidebook on how to be cool in the sixth grade—all the while trying to get her secretive mother to share something, anything, about her past.

Sonia is sure that their bond, stitched from drive-through dinners, extracurricular activities, and a lot of exasperated affection for each other—will be enough to satisfy her daughter. But her guarded lifestyle has left Mila lonely, isolated, and ready to write herself into a bigger story. When she stumbles across emails between her mother and a man she’s never met, Mila decides to take matters into her own hands and forms a plan that will implode their carefully constructed lives.

Moving between Budapest before the fall of the Berlin Wall; Washington, DC, in the tense years of the Cold War; and the bright sunshine of early aughts Los Angeles, Porcupines is an irresistible novel about mothers and daughters, secrecy and loneliness, belonging and reinvention—and what happens when the truth can’t be held back any longer.

Visit Fran Fabriczki's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Bad Poor"

New from LSU Press: The Bad Poor: Race, Class, and the Rise of Grit Lit by Mitch Ploskonka.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Bad Poor examines the rise of Grit Lit, a movement in contemporary southern literature written by and about poor southern whites. Examining issues of genre, race, and culture, Mitch Ploskonka traces the emergence of this iconoclastic mode through its major authors to reveal a literary-cultural identity rooted in difference, marked by resistance to respectability and class performance, and shaped by reckoning with the legacies of whiteness and regional memory.

For those long dismissed as “white trash” and denied an active voice in their own representation, Grit Lit confronts the parallel concerns of finding a way to describe themselves and the means to communicate it appropriately. Beginning with Harry Crews and progressing chronologically to the present—including discussions of key works by Larry Brown, Dorothy Allison, Rick Bragg, and Tom Franklin, among others—Ploskonka examines how Grit Lit authors forge self-representations by experimenting with genres and engaging with identity politics. Through the ongoing search for a usable, unshameful identity, Grit Lit enacts a painful but heartening narrative of grappling with the realities of people and place by acknowledging difference.

As stories about the gritty or rough South proliferate across media, The Bad Poor relates an important story of literary self-fashioning by analyzing a body of literature that speaks to larger cultural discourses regarding racial identity, social justice, disability, and class divisions.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Sing Down the Moon"

New from Mercer University Press: Sing Down the Moon by Robert Gwaltney.

About the novel, from the publisher:

Sixteen-year-old Leontyne Skye yearns to escape Good Hope, the remote Georgia coastal barrier island where she resides. Leontyne's heritage is bleak. Tasked with tending Damascus, an ancient fig tree beguiling haints across the river with its wind chime song, Leontyne's mother, Eulalee, disintegrates into tufts of hair, teeth, and memory. This affliction befalls all Skye women, a fatal consequence of distilling Redemption, an addictive drug made from the figs of Damascus imbued with the essence of haints. Leontyne also tumbles apart, her memories and hand lost in a life-altering accident suffered two years back during an event known as Tribulation Day. Through unreliable recollections of her trusted friends the Longwood twins, Leontyne stitches a dubious understanding of who she was before she fell "the long-long ways." In the aftermath of Eulalee's death, Leontyne is pressured by the Longwoods to render Redemption, continuing the legacy upon which Good Hope depends.

Visit Robert Gwaltney's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Figures of Crisis"

New from Yale University Press: Figures of Crisis: Alberto Giacometti and the Myths of Nationalism by Joanna Fiduccia.

About the book, from the publisher:

A major reevaluation of a towering figure in twentieth-century art and the relationship of his sculpture to the crisis of nationalism in modern Europe

In 1935, Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) abruptly abandoned his surrealist experiments and devoted himself to sculpting portrait busts and minuscule figurines, many no larger than a fingernail. Joanna Fiduccia traces the origins and progression of Giacometti’s notorious artistic crisis, revealing its connection to a broader crisis of national identity in modern Europe. In this decade-long interval, the central features of his artworks—their turbulent surfaces, unsettling generality, severely reduced scale, and compulsive repetition—gave form to the experience of social breakdown and war, even as they laid the groundwork for his iconic postwar sculpture. Pursuing a concept of crisis as both an irreducible encounter with uncertainty and the clarification of a conflict, Fiduccia reimagines this fragmentary and inconspicuous body of work as the pivotal phase in the artist’s career as well as a vital episode in the history of modern sculpture. This fresh account, told through the philosophical, political, and aesthetic thought of Giacometti’s time, shows how ideologies of nationalism helped generate the problems of selfhood at the heart of modernism.

Visit Joanna Fiduccia's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Morsel"

New from Tor Nightfire: Morsel by Carter Keane.

About the novella, from the publisher:

Carter Keane's Morsel is a delicious folk horror debut about learning to bite back when the world is determined to eat you alive.

Lou did what the children of parents with backbreaking, poorly paying jobs are supposed to do: pulled up her bootstraps, went to college, and got an office gig with coworkers who won’t stop talking about their multilevel marketing scheme disguised as self-betterment.

When Lou accepts a property appraisal assignment in the rural hills of Ohio, she knows it's her last chance to save her job and keep making rent. But she quickly finds herself stranded in the middle of nowhere with a sabotaged truck, her dog, and someone--or something--stalking her through the ancient Appalachian woods.

If she can’t escape the woods in time, she’ll see firsthand that her job isn’t the only thing that wants to eat her alive.

Morsel is The Blair Witch Project meets The Ritual, with a generous helping of The Menu, perfect for fans of T. Kingfisher, Cassandra Khaw, and Paul Tremblay.

Visit Carter Keane's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Powered by Smart"

New from NYU Press: Powered by Smart: A Prehistory of Everyday AI by Sarah Murray.

About the book, from the publisher:

A critical feminist history of the techno-cultural evolutions that make AI possible

Powered by Smart traces the techno-cultural evolutions that made artificial intelligence feel more familiar than futuristic. From wearables and streaming platforms to home voice assistants and AI toasters, smart is an inescapable feature of postdigital life. Today, thousands of products and platforms define smart as routine automation and friendly digital kinship. Yet smartness was not always so digital. Sarah Murray uncovers the century-long process through which smart became synonymous with seamless interaction between bodies and machines, showing how this intimate interfacing helped to normalize today’s algorithmic world.

Offering a critical, feminist prehistory of everyday AI, Powered by Smart reveals how the pursuit of convenience, comfort, and efficiency has long been a gendered campaign. Smartness has often been associated with women ― from early switchboard operators and industrial designer Lillian Gilbreth’s test kitchens to Jane Fonda’s Jazzercise empire and Disney’s computer-housewife PAT in Smart House. These moments illuminate how machine intelligence has already been made ordinary, and how the smart ideal was built over time through domesticity, discipline, and desirability.

Moving across factory floors, suburban kitchens, exercise trends, and digital homes, Murray shows how twentieth-century innovations in wearability, solutionism, and recognition laid the groundwork for our contemporary tolerance of ― and attachment to ― AI. Far from a sudden technological revolution, everyday AI emerged through decades of cultural conditioning of smart life as a caring, attentive endeavor that cast human–machine harmony as both natural and necessary. Powered by Smart reframes artificial intelligence not as the next frontier of progress, but as the logical extension of a much older dream of efficiency made ordinary and personal.

--Marshal Zeringue