"Bloody Numbers"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Bloody Numbers: The Early Atlantic Slave Trade and the Invention of Modern Corporeality by Pablo F. Gómez.

About the book, from the publisher:

Upends current thinking about how early modern people started to conceptualize human beings in terms of populations.

Bloody Numbers is a provocative account of the violent world of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century South Atlantic slave-trading societies, where traders, financiers, officials, surgeons, notaries, ship captains, and others began thinking about human bodies as aggregate populations understood through numbers: measurements, averages, and calculations of risk and value assessed through the tabulation of heights, weights, tumors, scars, and other characteristics. Pablo F. Gómez explores how figures within the world of slave trading used this model for understanding human bodies to generalize about behavior and disease in ways that foreshadowed the work of modern epidemiologists and public health officials—though they employed their calculations with the aim of protecting their financial interests rather than of caring for enslaved people. The ruthlessness inherent in these practices became ingrained in the modern corporeal mathematics that emerged from the early slave trade and diffused through its vast political, financial, logistical, and intellectual networks.

A pathbreaking work, Bloody Numbers reveals the historical actions that rendered populations quantifiable. In doing so, it shows that confronting these origins is essential to understanding the violent political, legal, economic, and scientific practices that ascribe numbers to our own bodies.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Death Row Club"

New from Gallery/Scout Press: The Death Row Club by V. A. Vazquez.

About the book, from the publisher:

A dark, dazzlingly original psychological thriller about a woman invited to an annual weekend getaway for the adult children of serial killers...but when one of the participants ends up dead, they begin to wonder if someone among them might be carrying on the family traditions.

When Nicola Fischer’s father is arrested for the murder of five women—including her best friend—the entire world watches it unfold on To Catch a Killer, the hit true crime TV show hosted by Greer Woods. Overnight, Nicola becomes a pariah: fired from her job, drowning in debt, and shunned by everyone she knows. And to make matters worse, Greer—once a budding friend and fellow child of a serial killer—hasn’t returned a single call since the show aired.

Then comes an unexpected invitation to the Death Row Club, a secret retreat for the adult children of serial killers—founded by none other than Greer herself. Desperate for answers and human connection, Nicola agrees to go. At first, it seems like exactly what she needs. The club members are strange but welcoming, and Greer seems eager to mend their fractured friendship.

But when a mysterious girl arrives, claiming her father is a killer too, the club’s fragile peace is shattered, unraveling the buried secrets at its core. By morning, the girl has vanished. By afternoon, one of the club members is dead.

Now everyone is watching Nicola. After all, she’s the daughter of a monster. And monsters raise monsters...don’t they?

Visit V. A. Vazquez's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"‘I Felt All This’"

New from Cambridge University Press: ‘I Felt All This’: Enslaved People's Emotional Lives in the Antebellum US South by Beth R. Wilson.

About the book, from the publisher:

Drawing on methods from the history of emotions to study enslaved people's lives, Beth R. Wilson exposes the social, cultural and political role that emotion played in the US South. Exploring both individual and collective emotions, Wilson shows how enslaved people resisted white people's attempts to restrict their feelings and expressions by developing their own emotional ideals and expectations. Moving through case studies that examine a range of underexplored forms of testimony, the book introduces readers to slave narratives, letters, written interviews and recorded testimony to show that emotion was central to how enslaved people resisted, survived and remembered the system of slavery. Enslaved people's descriptions of their individual experiences of love, pain, grief and joy are woven throughout this study, which provides a framework that historians can use to paint a nuanced, detailed and empathetic picture of the complex emotional impact of slavery.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Dragon Has Some Complaints"

New from DAW: The Dragon Has Some Complaints by John Wiswell.

About the novel, from the publisher:

In this heartfelt and humorous fantasy from the Nebula-winning author of Someone You Can Build a Nest In, a dragon whose three heads bear rather…different...personalities finds family in the most unexpected of places.

Garrodigh was once a four-headed dragon, among the most powerful in Kardoša. After an unfortunate incident, he now has three heads, one stump, and a daily whirlwind of internal bickering. Centerhead wants to rain death upon all humanity, Bottomhead is like a feral cat, and Upperhead is under the delicate delusion that he is, in fact, human.

When a nearby battle goes awry, Garrodigh sneaks into an elite dragon rider academy, pretending to be tame to get free food and a warm bed. Lucky for him, rider Rania Charvátová is desperate enough for a dragon of her own that she overlooks his eccentricities.

As Garrodigh recovers under Rania’s care, all three heads start to turn, for the first time, in the same direction. Each wants to protect her from the invaders who killed their fourth head—the same invaders who seek to conquer Kardoša. When the academy comes under attack, can this wild dragon and his wilder rider save their homeland together?

This cozy fantasy intertwines epic battles with loving friendships, sharing an utterly unique perspective on what it means to be a “monster.”

Visit John Wiswell's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Stories of Raising Boys"

New from Temple University Press: Stories of Raising Boys: Masculinity, Disability, Gender Expansiveness, and Anxiety by Julie-Ann Scott-Pollock.

About the book, from the publisher:

In her poignant, affecting autoethnography, Stories of Raising Boys, Julie-Ann Scott-Pollock investigates the meaning of disability, gender, race, and privilege in contemporary culture. Scott-Pollock is a white mother living with a physical disability raising four boys—Theo, a three-year-old risktaker; Tony, ten, who lives with seizures; Vinny, eight, who is gender expansive; and five-year-old Nico, who is also gender expansive and experiences anxiety. They live on the southeastern U.S. coast with their father, Evan, and their baby sister, Rosalie.

Through narrative analysis, Scott-Pollock compares and contrasts her circumstances to the ways in which adult interviewees manage the same lived experiences as her sons. She also includes their opinions about masculinity and identity, as well as parenting boys. In doing so, Stories of Raising Boys deepens the cultural complexity of parent–child relationships and expands our collective understanding of how they form and emerge. In addition, Scott-Pollock uses a metaphor of swimming through the ocean near her family’s home to illustrate resisting marginalization while also promoting strong cultural identities, especially in turbulent waters.

Stories of Raising Boys offers an absorbing cultural reflection on the intersectionality of identity, power, and privilege.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Masala Chai Mystery Club"

Coming soon from Crooked Lane Books: The Masala Chai Mystery Club by MJ Soni.

About the novel, from the publisher:

Suspects abound when a much-despised neighbor is killed, perfect for fans of Only Murders in the Building and Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club.

Retired librarian Neeti Shah was hoping for a restful life with her chai-loving friends, but when the body of a neighbor, a childhood friend of Neeti's, turns up dead and the killer’s MO is similar to that of Neeti's most recent book club read, things start to get out of control.

When Neeti hears a commotion at a neighbor’s house, she finds Rohit’s body sprawled across the bottom of the staircase with Agatha Christie’s Dumb Witness nearby. Blackmailing his neighbors, threatening them with lawsuits, and calling them by nasty nicknames were only some of the hateful things that made him so disliked. But were they angry enough to kill?

Neeti is indebted to her old friend, and she's determined to find his killer. But she can't do it alone, so she enlists her mystery-loving friends, the Masala Chai Mystery Club, to get to the bottom of the murder.

But Neeti and her club members need to be careful. As more bodies turn up and more suspects start to appear, they’ll need to find the killer before they end up in hot water!

Visit MJ Soni's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Violent Interests"

New from Stanford University Press: Violent Interests: Capitalism and Social Transformation in the Eastern Mediterranean by Kristen Alff.

About the book, from the publisher:

Between the 1830s and 1930s, companies established by Beirut-based businessmen emerged among the largest shareholders in major British manufacturing and trading companies. These companies transformed from small family partnerships to large shareholder corporations that wielded significant influence across the Eastern Mediterranean and Europe. People, capital, and ideas flowed from Beirut to Haifa, Alexandria, Liverpool, and London. In so doing, collaboration and competition across companies and regions gave global capitalism its shape.

Violent Interests examines processes of capital accumulation in the Eastern Mediterranean and the dynamic relationships of Beiruti entrepreneurs with centers of capital in Western Europe to reveal the inner workings of capitalism on local, regional, imperial, and global scales. Kristen Alff shows how land, labor, and gender relations were reorganized across the region, and focuses on war―most notably World War I―as powerful points of political economic change critical to the naturalization of capitalism's new social order in the Eastern Mediterranean. With profit propelled by war and the logic of commodification, the companies of late Ottoman Beirut, Alff argues, advanced the subjugation of social relations to the driving demand of capital accumulation―and transformed the Eastern Mediterranean in ways that endured long after the dissolution of both companies and empire.

Visit Kristen Alff's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Our Marriage Is Murder"

New from William Morrow: Our Marriage Is Murder: A Novel by Carol Goodman.

About the book, from the publisher:

In the latest thrilling mystery from Mary Higgins Clark Award–winning author Carol Goodman, a writers’ conference at an Italian castle turns deadly when a killer begins using a husband-and-wife writing team’s novel as a blueprint for murder.

Fred and Thea Morgan-Lane are the envy of the mystery community, the perfect partners in life and in writing. Together they coauthor the wildly successful Death Takes a Holiday series, and they’ve been invited to the Italian castle where it all began for a mystery conference celebrating their first novel, Death Takes the Castle.

But their story isn’t quite the fairytale it seems to outsiders. Twenty years and twenty books after they met, Thea wants out. Their marriage and partnership haven’t been working for some time, and what better place to announce the end of the series than where it started?

Except shortly after their arrival at the beautiful Castellarosa, a shocking death takes place when the wrong person drinks a cocktail meant for Thea. The stunned conference-goers put it down to an unknown allergy, but Thea isn’t so sure. Could someone be trying to kill her? Perhaps her loving husband isn’t as ok with their series ending as he pretends, or maybe Nadine, the upstart young author who is vying to take Thea’s place, wants her out of the way. Suddenly, it seems like everyone has a motive, and when a second death occurs, a disturbing pattern emerges—these deaths aren’t random, they’re following the murders in Death Takes a Castle exactly. Murders that Thea and Fred wrote.

In order to save the day—and maybe even their marriage—the unhappy couple will have to work together to figure out who is using their book as a blueprint for a killing spree. That is, if they can trust the person they’ve spent twenty years plotting murders with…

Visit Carol Goodman's website.

Writers Read: Carol Goodman (April 2018).

--Marshal Zeringue

"Albert Sabin"

New from Yale University Press: Albert Sabin: The Life of a Polio Vaccine Pioneer by Karen Torghele.

About the book, from the publisher:

The untold story of Albert Sabin, who developed the oral polio vaccine and became a controversial public health advocate for children worldwide

Jonas Salk may be the name most associated with the polio vaccine, but it was Albert Sabin’s oral vaccine that made the goal of global eradication of poliomyelitis a possibility. Epidemiologist Karen Torghele draws on exclusive interviews, archival research, and the scientist’s own lab notebooks to deliver the first definitive biography of Sabin (1906–1993). She reveals a man driven by compulsion, whom Yale virologist John R. Paul described as “a fierce joy” when he was making new discoveries. But though his work reshaped virology and vaccine development, he was burdened by ego and an abrasive personality that would haunt his legacy.

Sabin’s journey spanned continents and conflicts, from being a World War II hero to facilitating Cold War diplomacy, culminating in a risky experiment to test his vaccine in the USSR near the peak of the McCarthy era. Torghele combines biography and science to establish Sabin’s place in medical history, illuminating the research, politics, and private issues behind one of the twentieth century’s most controversial personalities―and offering insight into what we can learn from Sabin’s experiences as we address vaccine misinformation, deal with deadly new viruses, and face the threatening resurgence of vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles, diphtheria, and polio.

Visit Karen Torghele's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Voice in the Dark"

New from Thomas & Mercer: A Voice in the Dark (Benedict Hoffman and Helen Belle) by Barbara Nickless.

About the book, from the publisher:

An online manipulator with a deadly hold on his followers challenges an FBI agent to stop him in a gripping novel of psychological suspense by a Wall Street Journal bestselling author.

When a husband, wife, and son are murdered in their Denver home and the family’s teenage twins vanish, the case draws the attention of FBI profilers Helen Belle and Benedict Hoffman. It triggers more than professional alarm. It mirrors a horrific case they investigated five years ago, when a boy slaughtered his family and went mute after speaking only a handful of haunting words. Among them: Midnight Man.

Then, nearly thirteen hundred miles away, one of the twins is found dead in a snowy Ohio field, and the parallels between the past and present cases grow more disturbing. Identical suicide notes. The same symbolic blood imagery. And a shared obsession with an online fantasy game. Its mastermind is an influencer who manipulates his most vulnerable and alienated players into killing the people they love most.

The Midnight Man is back.

Helen and Benedict must hunt the darkest corners of the internet to find him before someone else falls prey to an insidious evil that, for now, is in total control of the game.

Visit Barbara Nickless's website.

The Page 69 Test: At First Light.

Q&A with Barbara Nickless.

The Page 69 Test: Play of Shadows.

Writers Read: Barbara Nickless (February 2025).

The Page 69 Test: The Drowning Game.

--Marshal Zeringue