"A Death in Door County"

New from Berkley: A Death in Door County (A Monster Hunter Mystery) by Annelise Ryan.

About the book, from the publisher:

A Wisconsin bookstore owner and cryptozoologist is asked to investigate a series of deaths that just might be proof of a fabled lake monster in this first installment of a new mystery series by USA Today bestselling author Annelise Ryan.

Morgan Carter, owner of the Odds and Ends bookstore in Door County, Wisconsin, has a hobby. When she’s not tending the store, she’s hunting cryptids—creatures whose existence is rumored, but never proven to be real. It’s a hobby that cost her parents their lives, but one she’ll never give up on.

So when a number of bodies turn up on the shores of Lake Michigan with injuries that look like bites from a giant unknown animal, police chief Jon Flanders turns to Morgan for help. A skeptic at heart, Morgan can’t turn down the opportunity to find proof of an entity whose existence she can’t definitively rule out. She and her beloved rescue dog, Newt, journey to the Death’s Door strait to hunt for a homicidal monster in the lake—but if they’re not careful, they just might be its next victims.

Visit Annelise Ryan's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Modern Virtue"

New from Oxford University Press: Modern Virtue: Mary Wollstonecraft and a Tradition of Dissent by Emily Dumler-Winckler.

About the book, from the publisher:

Modern societies are plagued with conflicts about basic beliefs, values, and ideals. What some call virtue, others count as vice. This book argues that the cultivation of the virtues as well as contestation about them are part and parcel of the goods that Christians and democratic societies share in common. Drawing on the work of Mary Wollstonecraft, Emily Dumler-Winckler aims to dissolve the anxieties of both defenders and despisers of virtue ethics and so form a rapprochement. Influenced by religious dissenters in eighteenth-century England, Wollstonecraft revolutionized ancient traditions of the virtues in modern ways for feminist and abolitionist aims. For this modern feminist, as for premodern Christians, moral formation requires putting exemplars to the test of critical examination-discarding some, adopting others, and emulating the virtues of each.

By elaborating the specifically theological aspects of Wollstonecraft's account, this book demonstrates the important role religious traditions have played in feminism and radical socio-political movements in the modern era. By treating the relation between modern rights and virtues such as justice and friendship, Dumler-Winckler illuminates their vital relation and roles in modern democratic societies. With good reason, both modernity and virtue have cultured despisers. Modern Virtue provides an account of the virtues in modernity and, even, the virtues of modernity.

Follow Emily Dumler-Winckler on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Wildbound"

New from Tor Teen: Wildbound (Forestborn, Volume 2) by Elayne Audrey Becker.

About the book, from the publisher:

Wildbound is the thrilling finale to Elayne Audrey Becker's epic fantasy saga of forest magic and a kingdom on the brink of war.

With the assassination of Telyan’s king, the time for peace has passed.

Determined to make up for his failure to procure the stardust, Helos finds work as a healer at Fendolyn’s Keep, the historic garrison to which Telyan’s exiled royals—and half its civilians—have fled. Racing against the Fallow Throes’ ticking clock, he endeavors to repair his relationship with Prince Finley and dreams of his claim to a faraway throne, as the base around him prepares for war.

Half a continent away, his sister Rora is doing everything she can to reawaken the land and end Eradain’s slaughter of magical beings. Still reeling from the revelation that Eradain’s violent monarch is her half-brother, she journeys to the kingdom determined to infiltrate his court in disguise—and finds the seeds of rebellion are already stirring.

With a magical illness running rampant and the continent arming for battle, the three realms’ long-feared destruction seems inevitable. But the two shifters they believed would bring about Alemara’s ruin may in fact hold the key to its survival.

Visit Elayne Audrey Becker's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Benefits of Friends"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: The Benefits of Friends: Inside the Complicated World of Today's Sororities and Fraternities by Jana Mathews.

About the book, from the publisher:

In 2011, Jana Mathews's career took a surprising turn. What began as an effort for a newly minted college professor to get to know her students turned into an invitation to be initiated into a National Panhellenic Conference sorority and serve as its faculty advisor. For the next seven years, Mathews attended sorority and fraternity chapter meetings, Greek Week competitions, leadership retreats, and mixers and formals. She also counseled young men and women through mental health crises, experiences of sexual violence, and drug and alcohol abuse. Combining her personal observations with ethnographic field analysis and research culled from the fields of sociology, economics, and cognitive psychology, this thought-provoking book examines how white Greek letter organizations help reshape the conceptual boundaries of society's most foundational relationship categories—including friend, romantic partner, and family.

Mathews illuminates how organizations manipulate campus sex ratios to foster hookup culture, broker romantic relationships, transfer intimacy to straight same-sex friends, and create fictive family units that hoard social and economic opportunity for their members. In their idealized form, sororities and fraternities function as familial surrogates that tether their members together in economically and socially productive ways. In their most warped manifestations, however, these fictive familial bonds reinforce insularity, entrench privilege, and—at times—threaten physical safety.

Visit Jana Mathews's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"American Fever"

New from Arcade: American Fever: A Novel by Dur e Aziz Amna.

About the book, from the publisher:

On a year-long exchange program in rural Oregon, a Pakistani student, sixteen-year-old Hira, must swap Kashmiri chai for volleyball practice and try to understand why everyone around her seems to dislike Obama. A skeptically witty narrator, Hira finds herself stuck between worlds. The experience is memorable for reasons both good and bad; a first kiss, new friends, racism, Islamophobia, homesickness. Along the way Hira starts to feel increasingly unwell until she begins coughing up blood, and receives a diagnosis of tuberculosis, pushing her into quarantine and turning her newly established home away from home upside down.

American Fever is a compelling and laugh-out-loud funny novel about adolescence, family, otherness, religion, the push-and-pull of home. It marks the entrance on the international literary scene of the brilliant fresh voice of Dur e Aziz Amna.

Visit Dur e Aziz Amna's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Making Better Coffee"

New from the University of California Press: Making Better Coffee: How Maya Farmers and Third Wave Tastemakers Create Value by Edward F. Fischer.

About the book, from the publisher:

An anthropologist uncovers how "great coffee" depends not just on taste, but also on a complex system of values worked out among farmers, roasters, and consumers.

What justifies the steep prices commanded by small-batch, high-end Third Wave coffees? Making Better Coffee explores this question, looking at highland coffee farmers in Guatemala and their relationship to the trends that dictate what makes "great coffee." Traders stress material conditions of terroir and botany, but just as important are the social, moral, and political values that farmers, roasters, and consumers attach to the beans.

In the late nineteenth century, Maya farmers were forced to work on the large plantations that colonized their ancestral lands. The international coffee market shifted in the 1990s, creating demand for high-altitude varietals—plants suited to the mountains where the Maya had been displaced. Edward F. Fischer connects the quest for quality among U.S. tastemakers to the lives and desires of Maya producers, showing how profits are made by artfully combining coffee's material and symbolic attributes. The result is a complex story of terroir and taste, quality and craft, justice and necessity, worth and value.

Learn more about the book and author at Ted Fischer's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Good Life.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Deadly Spirits"

New from Severn House: Deadly Spirits by Mary Miley.

About the book, from the publisher:

Medium's assistant - and reluctant sleuth - Maddie Pastore is shocked when her long-lost sister is accused of murder, in this twisty, atmospheric mystery set in 1920s Chicago.

Summer, 1924. Young widow Maddie Pastore has been working for fraudulent spiritual medium Madame Carlotta for nearly a year - if 'work' you could call it. Investigating Carlotta's clients, and attending seances as her shill, keeps Maddie and her young son Tommy fed and clothed, and she's grown to love the kind, well-meaning spiritualist like family.

Still, Maddie - estranged from her abusive parents for over a decade - can't help but wonder what fates befell her brothers and sisters. So when she lucks into two free tickets to a glamorous Chicago speakeasy and recognizes the star performer as her pretty little sister Sophie, she's beyond delighted.

But before Maddie can meet with Sophie again, the telephone rings. It's Sophie's husband, calling in a panic to tell her that his wife is locked in the Cook County jail, charged with first-degree murder...

Enter a dark and deadly world of seances and speakeasies, populated by fake mediums, sultry singers and dangerous mobsters! An ideal pick for readers who enjoy glitzy Jazz Age mysteries with feisty female sleuths.

Learn more about the book and author at Mary Miley's website, blog, and Facebook page.

The Page 69 Test: The Impersonator.

The Page 69 Test: Silent Murders.

My Book, The Movie: Silent Murders.

The Page 69 Test: Renting Silence.

My Book, The Movie: Murder in Disguise.

The Page 69 Test: Murder in Disguise.

Writers Read: Mary Miley (August 2017).

--Marshal Zeringue

"King's Vibrato"

New from Duke University Press: King's Vibrato: Modernism, Blackness, and the Sonic Life of Martin Luther King Jr. by Maurice O. Wallace.

About the book, from the publisher:

In King’s Vibrato Maurice O. Wallace explores the sonic character of Martin Luther King Jr.’s voice and its power to move the world. Providing a cultural history and critical theory of the black modernist soundscapes that helped inform King’s vocal timbre, Wallace shows how the qualities of King’s voice depended on a mix of ecclesial architecture and acoustics, musical instrumentation and sound technology, audience and song. He examines the acoustical architectures of the African American churches where King spoke and the centrality of the pipe organ in these churches, offers a black feminist critique of the influence of gospel on King, and outlines how variations in natural environments and sound amplifications made each of King’s three deliveries of the “I Have a Dream” speech unique. By mapping the vocal timbre of one of the most important figures of black hope and protest in American history, Wallace presents King as the embodiment of the sound of modern black thought.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Imposter"

New from Blackstone Publishing: Imposter by Bradeigh Godfrey.

About the book, from the publisher:

Two sisters, a lifetime of secrets

Lilian and Rosie were once the closest of sisters, but the untimely death of their parents pulled them apart. Now, three years on, Rosie has reached out to her big sister, asking to meet. Driving on an icy road in the middle of a snowstorm, Rosie admits that she has something important to tell Lilian—a secret she describes as a matter of life and death. But before she has a chance to tell Lilian, a car careens into theirs, with devastating consequences.

Lilian survives unscathed, but Rosie is left with a traumatic brain injury, unable to communicate. Lilian is convinced that someone deliberately rammed Rosie’s car. But why? As Lilian begins to explore her sister’s past, she uncovers disturbing secrets that make her question if she ever really knew Rosie.

The closer Lilian comes to the truth, the more danger she and Rosie find themselves in. But Lilian is certain of one thing: she abandoned her little sister once before and will never do so again. Even if it means sacrificing everything.

Visit Bradeigh Godfrey's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Weavers, Scribes, and Kings"

New from Oxford University Press: Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East by Amanda H. Podany.

About the book, from the publisher:

A unique history of the ancient Near East that compellingly presents the life stories of kings, priestesses, merchants, bricklayers, and others

In this sweeping history of the ancient Near East, Amanda Podany takes readers on a gripping journey from the creation of the world's first cities to the conquests of Alexander the Great. The book is built around the life stories of many ancient men and women, from kings, priestesses, and merchants to brickmakers, musicians, and weavers. Their habits of daily life, beliefs, triumphs, and crises, and the changes that people faced over time are explored through their own written words and the buildings, cities, and empires in which they lived.

Rather than chronicling three thousand years of rulers and states, Weavers, Scribes, and Kings instead creates a tapestry of life stories through which readers will come to know specific individuals from many walks of life, and to understand their places within the broad history of events and institutions in the ancient Near East. These life stories are preserved on ancient clay tablets, which allow us to trace, for example, the career of a weaver as she advanced to become a supervisor of a workshop, listen to a king trying to persuade his generals to prepare for a siege, and feel the pain of a starving young couple and their four young children as they suffered through a time of famine. What might seem at first glance to be a remote and inaccessible ancient culture proves to be a comprehensible world, one that bequeathed to the modern world many of our institutions and beliefs, a truly fascinating place to visit.

Follow Amanda Hills Podany on Twitter.

The Page 99 Test: Brotherhood of Kings.

--Marshal Zeringue