"Strange Bedfellows"

New from Atria/Emily Bestler Books: Strange Bedfellows: A Novel by Amanda Mortlock.

About the book, from the publisher:

A dark and steamy debut novel about a girl, who is sometimes a cat, the witch she loves, and the toxic secrets from her past that are threatening to unravel the delicate balance of her future.

Cleo is a willfully aloof college student with an impossible secret. When she meets Wes, a brooding musician, at a Halloween party, their connection is instant, electric, and impossible to ignore. Their romance takes a mystical turn when Wes discovers what Cleo’s been hiding: sometimes she takes the form of his pet cat.

Enter Bailey and Ollie—their magical counterparts—who reveal a deeper tie between Cleo and Wes: he’s a witch, and she’s his familiar. As past secrets collide with their entangled present, Cleo faces her greatest fear—losing Wes. With long-gone threats returning and danger looming, Cleo must confront her role in their dark and violent shared history and decide if she’s willing to fight for their future.

Visit Amanda Mortlock's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Buscando la gozadera / Seeking Pleasure"

New from Wesleyan University Press: Buscando la gozadera / Seeking Pleasure: Timba Culture and Community by Sarah Town.

About the book, from the publisher:

Explores the forging of global community through Caribbean music and dance

Buscando la gozadera / Seeking Pleasure traces the rise and global journey of timba music and culture from its beginnings in 1980s Havana to its vibrant presence in 2010s New York City and beyond. Alongside timba, Cuba's most popular social dance―rueda de casino―began to spread internationally in the 1990s as the island reopened to tourism and foreign investment after years of limited global contact. Through bold performances and shared energy, timba and casino brought musicians and dancers together in moments of joyful intensity known as la gozadera. For Cubans, la gozadera was a form of resilience; for outsiders, it became part of the island's long tradition of offering powerful musical experiences to the world. Buscando la gozadera weaves together history, ethnography, and music and dance analysis to explore interactivity and improvisation. It also examines themes of race, gender, and neoliberalism, while probing issues of labor, economy, and virtuosity in the pursuit and circulation of pleasure through popular music and social dance. Sarah Town is a musician and dancer embedded in the Cuban dance communities she researches. She highlights the importance of grassroots networks of musicians and dancers that inhabit the margins, showing how they refuse narratives of scarcity to immerse themselves in communal pleasure.

Follow Sarah Twon on Instagram.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Trust Fall"

New from S&S Books for Young Readers: Trust Fall by Lynn Painter.

About the book, from the publisher:

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Better Than the Movies, Lynn Painter, comes a rags-to-riches rom-com about a small-town girl whose family inherits a fortune and moves to New York City, where she meets a big-city boy hiding an explosive secret.

Julia is just a small-town girl from Nebraska who loves her peaceful life. But when her elderly next-door neighbor—who just happens to be a secret multi-millionaire—leaves everything to Julia and her family after his passing, Julia is swept away to live in a historic brownstone in New York City and attend an elite private school for the super-rich.

It should be a dream come true. Wrong. Julia doesn’t fit in at her new school; worse, she’s failing. Enter Damion, the mysterious and handsome tutor who will get Julia back on track. Except Damion has a secret. He is the great-nephew of the man who left everything to Julia’s family. Damion doesn’t buy for a second that the person who was like a father to him would leave his home to strangers. And he’s determined to prove it.

To uncover the truth, Damion schemes to earn Julia’s trust. Not an easy task with Julia unsure about this rich boy with a rebellious personality. But the more time Damion spends with Julia, the more his plan begins to backfire. Because he is falling for the enemy—and the enemy is falling for him.

As Damion and Julia figure out where they belong, can they see past their differences and act on their feelings, or will the trust Damion has worked so hard to gain fall apart?

Visit Lynn Painter's website.

Q&A with Lynn Painter.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Ordinary Horror"

New from Stanford University Press: Ordinary Horror: The Aesthetics of Deformation from Leopardi to Ferrante by Andrea Capra.

About the book, from the publisher:

What is horror? Setting aside the implausible circumstances typical of the horror genre, Capra investigates what he terms "ordinary horror"—the horror that haunts our world, and that we may encounter firsthand. Drawing from ordinary language philosophy and phenomenology, he reframes horror as a common human experience tied to a sense of forced powerlessness—the shattering moment when our control over a given situation, and our very sense of reality, unravels. By tracing this experience across texts beyond the horror genre, Capra reveals its significance for our time. Centering on modern Italian literature, Ordinary Horror shows a tradition not typically associated with horror to be rife with it. To this end, Capra emphasizes the centrality of the experience in canonical authors, as seen, for instance, in Giacomo Leopardi's pages on existential suffering, Primo Levi's writings on Auschwitz, and Elena Ferrante's descriptions of sexual violence. Literature, Capra argues, can convey horror's experiential magnitude through what he calls the "aesthetics of deformation"—scenes when otherwise realistic texts depart from verisimilitude and embrace a more disquieting style. Weaving together aesthetics and phenomenology, Capra shows that just as horror may rupture the fabric of everyday life, so too may it rupture the fabric of a literary text.

Visit Andrea Capra's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"House Haunters"

New from Tor Nightfire: House Haunters by KC Jones.

About the book, from the publisher:

From Bram Stoker Award finalist KC Jones comes House Haunters, a fast-paced thrill ride perfect for fans of How to Sell a Haunted House and Play Nice, in which a skeptical reality TV show producer and a misanthropic ghosthunter must team up to survive a shoot from hell.

Grace Wonderly needs a hit show, or her career is dead. But saving her job might just kill her.

With her studio relying on AI to greenlight new projects, finding the next breakout series is Grace's only shot to save her job. And her sanity.

Her solution may be Frank Pendleton: a brilliant but abrasive - and admittedly handsome - ghost hunter who claims he can’t feel fear, making him uniquely attuned to the paranormal.

Frank is either a fraud or the real deal. Skeptical, but hoping for TV gold, Grace assembles a crew to shoot a proof of concept.

But when the production descends into a nightmare, Grace is forced to face the impossible: ghosts are real, and though cold and distant, Frank may be their only chance of getting out alive.

Visit KC Jones's website.

The Page 69 Test: White Line Fever.

Q&A with KC Jones.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Madness of Markets"

New from Crown Currency: The Madness of Markets: Why Smart Investors Make Crazy Decisions–and How to Exploit Them by Alex Edmans.

About the book, from the publisher:

A groundbreaking look at what drives even the smartest investors to make irrational choices and a practical roadmap for profiting when the market loses its mind—from one of the world’s leading finance professors

Why did Isaac Newton lose a fortune in the South Sea Bubble? Why did people spend millions on cartoon apes during the NFT frenzy? Why does the stock market fall when a national soccer team loses, or rise on a sunny day?

In this lively, eye-opening, and highly practical book, Alex Edmans reveals the hidden psychological forces that push markets away from logic—and create opportunities for those who stay sane while others panic. Drawing on cutting-edge studies and his more than twenty years at the intersection of academia and Wall Street, Edmans explains why investors chronically overreact, underreact, and misreact—and how these mistakes lead to bubbles, crashes, hype cycles, and portfolio wipeouts.

But The Madness of Markets isn’t just about spotting irrationality—it’s about outsmarting it. Edmans shows you how to think sharper, invest smarter, dodge predictable traps, and recognize when the crowd has lost the plot. Playfully rigorous and packed with unforgettable stories—from Reddit frenzies to CEO ego trips to World Cup upsets—The Madness of Markets offers an accessible yet thorough guide for anyone looking to make smarter decisions in a noisy financial world.

This book is for anyone with a pension, an IRA, or a long-term stake in the market—whether you’re chasing crypto highs or simply protecting your retirement while the world spins out of control.

Visit Alex Edmans's website.

The Page 99 Test: May Contain Lies.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Death by the Sea"

New from Thomas & Mercer: Death by the Sea (The Misfit Detectives) by Hannah Ellis.

About the book, from the publisher:

From bestselling author Hannah Ellis comes a windswept mystery of meddling, murder and one very troublesome cat.

Jamie Sinclair is only meant to be minding the cat.

A temporary house-sitting job in a windswept Scottish seaside town feels straightforward enough. Keep the place ticking over. Tackle a few handyman jobs. Enjoy time away from London, with sea views and the steady company of a glossy black cat. What could possibly go wrong?

Quite a lot, as it turns out.

When an elderly client dies after a routine repair, Jamie finds himself at the centre of local gossip and under the watchful eye of Detective Constable Emma MacLeod―who has very firm opinions about civilians meddling in police business. But Jamie knows his handiwork was solid. And in a town where everyone has history, nothing is ever quite that simple.

Drawn into an improbable team by an unlikely pair of locals―a burly gym owner and a sharp-eyed student―Jamie begins pulling at the threads of a family’s buried secrets. And the more they unravel, the more he suspects that solving this mystery might be the start of something far bigger than he bargained for.

Visit Hannah Ellis's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"News Machines"

New from Oxford University Press: News Machines: The Systems of Daily Journalism in Britain, 1785–1885 by Dallas Liddle.

About the book, from the publisher:

British daily newspapers transformed rapidly at the turn of the nineteenth century, ballooning in size and radically reorganizing staffing and production decade by decade. By mid-century, newspapers had grown from the folded single sheets of the previous century to large multi-page broadsheets, so impressive in the quantity of print they held and their speed of production that one of their nicknames was 'the daily miracle'.

Traditional news history has overlooked a key fact for understanding this era of news: that Victorian daily newspapers were high-pressure systems. As demand for newspapers outpaced their original production capacity, newspaper organizations began to build complex technical and production mechanisms to continue to grow and compete. As these systems expanded, newspapers became dependent on them, and decisions about how daily journalism should develop began to pass from editorial choice to systemic necessity. The previously untold story of Victorian daily news is that the personalities of editors and owners and the larger social forces at work in that era were not the only (or even primary) drivers of its history. Once set in motion, the systems of Victorian news gained major shaping agency over their own development.

Combining deep archival research and traditional historical analysis with modern data mining methods, News Machines reconstructs the systemic workings of Victorian daily news in unprecedented detail, offering new and counterintuitive accounts of when and why daily papers expanded, how and why steam-powered printing machines developed, how specialized news discourses evolved, and how newspaper leadership was organized.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Chain House"

Coming October 6 from Crooked Lane Books: The Chain House: A Novel by J. H. Markert.

About the novel, from the publisher:

A dangerous cult leader, days away from execution, reveals he is the famous author behind a bestselling series. With his death, the final, unpublished manuscript—and the crucial evidence it contains—will never see the light of day.

In the tradition of Stephen King, this multi-POV, page-turning horror thriller from author J. H. Markert is packed with mind-bending twists.

Days before his execution, notorious mass murderer Sal Batise, known as the Breaker of Chains by his cult followers, grants an unlikely interview to a young filmmaker, Sam Harper.

This interview could launch Sam’s career. But his carefully planned questions—including the one about the recently kidnapped governor’s wife—fall apart when Batise seizes control.

On live TV, Batise claims that he is Mallard Malone, the anonymous author of a blockbuster thriller series. Stay his execution, and he’ll release the final unpublished manuscript that holds the key to finding his victims’ bodies.

Meanwhile, a ransom note arrives with a single demand to save the governor’s wife: Batise’s execution must go on as planned.

Desperate for more information, Sam teams up with Jennifer Daley, a childhood survivor of Batise’s cult, to locate the missing manuscript and uncover the truth behind their own ties to Batise.

As fiction and reality collide, a deadly chain of events leads to a race against time to stop an execution that could have catastrophic consequences on the world.

Visit J.H. Markert's website.

Q&A with J. H. Markert.

My Book, The Movie: The Nightmare Man.

The Page 69 Test: The Nightmare Man.

My Book, The Movie: Sleep Tight.

The Page 69 Test: Sleep Tight.

Writers Read: J. H. Markert.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Camp Ford's Civil War"

New from Cambridge University Press: Camp Ford's Civil War: Captivity, Community, and Nature in the Dark Corner of the Confederacy by Matthew M. Stith.

About the book, from the publisher:

Camp Ford's Civil War tells the story of Union and Confederate soldiers and civilians, enslaved people and refugees, and the natural world around them during the Civil War. The focal point is a ten-acre piece of land where over 5,000 Union prisoners of war sat out of battle while fighting their own distinctive kind of war. The narrative also explains the conflict in the wider southern Trans-Mississippi theater, a place that remains in the historical and historiographical shadow of the Civil War elsewhere. This is a story of what became of the largest prisoner of war camp west of the Mississippi River, but it is also a story about the war in the 200-mile radius around the prison camp - the geographic medium in and through which a remarkably diverse range of human and nonhuman communities swirled and overlapped to create a fascinating, if understudied, narrative of the Civil War.

--Marshal Zeringue