"The Next Lie"

New from Thomas & Mercer: The Next Lie: A Thriller (The Secrets of Chapel Roads) by Camden Baird.

About the novel from the publisher:

In the unputdownable sequel to The Last Morning, author Camden Baird delivers another harrowing tale of lies and deceit, where a marriage is put to the test while jealousy and revenge run wild.

Few marriages survive what Sadie and Allen Wilson’s did. They were lucky―they had each other, and their kidnapped daughter was found, unharmed. Now, just as their lives are getting back to normal, their neighbor turns up dead. Murdered. And Sadie feels the panic surge all over again. But this time, she won’t have her husband to lean on…because Allen’s disappeared.

As Sadie and the police try to piece together what happened, she begins to wonder if she ever knew her husband at all. The lies keep piling up, along with the body count. And when ghosts from Allen’s past reveal a shocking secret, Sadie’s not sure who―or what―to believe.

Packed with twists (and suspects), The Next Lie is a gripping exploration of marriage and trust. With old lies laid bare and new ones unfolding, when will the next lie finally be the last―and the killer be found?

Visit Camden Baird's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Islam and Maoism in Southern Yunnan"

New from Cornell University Press: Islam and Maoism in Southern Yunnan: State Violence and Resistance, 1949–2024 by Xian Aubin Wang.

About the book, from the publisher:

Islam and Maoism in Southern Yunnan investigates decades of contentious relations between the Communist party-state of China and the Muslim community of southern Yunnan centered on the village of Shadian, site of an incident of state violence in 1975 that resulted in 1600 civilian deaths. Examining the causes and legacies of the Shadian massacre, Xian Aubin Wang draws on an extensive review of internal official documents, original written testimonies, and firsthand interviews with Muslim villagers.

By exploring interactions among Beijing, the Yunnan provincial government, county officials, CCP Muslim cadres, and Shadian villagers against the backdrop of the CCP's nationwide political campaigns since the early 1950s, Wang shows how Islam and Maoism influenced the ways that local villagers and party cadres saw and dealt with each other―and how these encounters shaped the developing conflict and its aftermath. Providing an in-depth account of Chinese religious groups living under the CCP, Islam and Maoism in Southern Yunnan reveals how religion and politics shaped Muslim villagers' responses to the party-state's efforts to control and secularize them.

--Marshal Zeringue

"What Remains of You"

New from Lake Union: What Remains of You by Kimberly Hensle Lowrance.

About the novel, from the publisher:

A widow’s discovery of her husband’s devastating past threatens to destroy everything she believed about their marriage in a gripping and emotional novel about love and secrets.

Dear Diana, If you’ve found this letter, I’m gone.

Eighteen months after her husband Tom’s death, Diana Morgan is still grieving and struggling to move on, while striving to be the strongest parent she can for their two children. When she finds a letter from Tom meant for her eyes only, she expects a final declaration of love―not a cryptic confession to a terrible unnamed crime.

But Tom’s secret is not his alone. There are others who know, others who may try to insinuate themselves into Diana’s life. Tom warns: Don’t let them in. Reeling with disbelief and fear, Diana begins to doubt everything she remembers of their marriage. What was real? What was manipulation? And who can she trust?

Embarking on a dangerous quest for answers, Diana travels to her husband’s small hometown in Vermont. She knows the secrets Tom was holding all stem from here. But will the truth about the man she loved bring her peace, or will it shatter her world?

Visit Kimberly Hensle Lowrance's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"City of Fortune"

New from W.W. Norton: City of Fortune: Inequality and the Making of Contemporary New York by Mason B. Williams.

About the book, from the publisher:

A powerful history of New York’s transformation from a city of middle-class aspiration to one of entrenched inequality.

Postwar New York City famously expired in a 1970s tableau of burning Bronx tenements, subway graffiti, crushing debt, and the tabloid headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” From its ashes the city reemerged to reach new heights, whether in stock averages or the gleaming pencil towers punctuating Midtown. But at ground level the city’s basic institutions were cracking. The city was rebuilt on a foundation of deep inequality.

This elegant history traces the making of contemporary New York over the half-century from the fiscal crisis of the 1970s to the Covid pandemic. The focus is on city life in three of its key dimensions: housing, schooling, and policing. With finance and real estate driving the city’s growth, each of these areas became more exclusive, less democratic. Affordable housing grew scarce, with the homeless population surging and working New Yorkers paying rents well above the 30 percent standard of affordability. Underfunded public schools were crowded out by better-resourced charter schools and academies, magnet schools, and gifted-and-talented programs. Policing was the most volatile flashpoint over this fifty-year period. Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s Broken Windows strategy of attacking crime by cracking down on minor offenses escalated into Michael Bloomberg’s stop-and-frisk policy, which targeted young Blacks and Latinos and yielded relatively few arrests. The city’s deepening inequality was heavily racialized, one of many connections between this New York story and those of cities across the country.

The rich cast of characters ranges from mayors, governors, and headline public figures like Al Sharpton, to behind-the-scenes reformers like the progressive educator Deborah Meier, to the everyday New Yorkers who organized to support rent guidelines or local control of the schools. It is in a widespread civic engagement that the city’s progressive traditions continue to thrive.

The Page 99 Test: City of Ambition.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Should the Waters Take Us"

New from Doubleday: Should the Waters Take Us: A Novel by Stephanie Soileau.

About the novel, from the publisher:

An epic debut novel that follows one family across four centuries, from France to Acadia to the bayous of Southern Louisiana—a poignant examination of belonging, place, and how individual acts of moral compromise contribute to cycles of injustice and destruction.

In the shifting bayous of coastal Louisiana, on a rapidly disappearing spit of land, generations of Acadians have kept their heads above water any way they can. When an offshore rig explodes and unleashes a catastrophic spill, the people of Pelerin Parish face a reckoning that tests the bonds of family and the survival of their way of life.

As the toxic plume of oil advances across the Gulf, Boy Broussard, already living hand to mouth off another man’s land, finds himself raising a daughter he barely knows. His dying aunt, Rosa Terrebonne, tries to right the misdeeds of the past yet finds herself thwarted by her husband, Jacot, a retired landman for big oil who refuses to give up claim to the plot of ground where Boy makes his living. Meanwhile, the parish priest, Father Fabian, far from his home in the Niger Delta, lends his assistance to Boy’s all-but-motherless daughter, only to be met with suspicion and hostility from the insular community. When a powerful hurricane threatens to turn an already dire situation into a total cataclysm, this sharp-edged cast of characters collides in a thunderclap of resentment and violence. Throughout all this, Soileau unfolds a sweeping tapestry of loss, resilience, and the fragile miracle of hope.

Should the Waters Take Us reaches across four hundred years of history to illuminate the many epochs and peoples of this storied place. Soileau has crafted an emotionally explosive family saga, as well as a masterful literary crie de coeur about the ways in which moral compromise can eat away at the very fabric of the places we call home.

Visit Stephanie Soileau's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Problem with Personalization"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Problem with Personalization: How Advertisers Learned to Make and Break Us from Ancient Times to the AI Age by Joseph Turow.

About the book, from the publisher:

A respected voice on technology shows how seemingly simple ads help dismantle democracy and public discourse.

Whether you’re intentionally shopping or casually browsing social media, something is following you: ads. Their creators seem to know your income bracket, politics, age, location, medical conditions, and tastes in clothing, food, and romantic partners. As advertising firms use predictive AI to discover your hot buttons and generative AI to push them, your online world becomes an increasingly bespoke―and isolated―place. The fervid competition around personalization in digital marketing has given rise to an ecosystem of advertisers, media outlets, tech companies, and retailers who monetize your data while threatening the health of our media, discourse, and sense of community. In this urgent book, award-winning author Joseph Turow shows how we got here, and how to change direction.

The Problem with Personalization shatters common beliefs about advertising history by showing that individualized ads are not new. Today’s AI-enabled advertisers draw on past aspirations and assumptions about personalization while weaponizing data in unprecedented ways that drive social fragmentation and the disappearance of shared social reality. Informed by interviews with marketing insiders and covering the latest technology advances, Turow accessibly explains how artificial intelligence sifts through our data to tag and target us wherever we go with personalized videos, pictorial billboards, audio messages, and more. A logical next step for advertiser support is tailored entertainment and news, a shift that further destroys the common ground necessary for a functioning democracy.

A must-read for all who care about the future of public discourse, The Problem with Personalization reveals how targeted advertising has altered how we’re seen and what we see in return.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Beach Blonde Betrayal"

New from Severn House: Beach Blonde Betrayal (A Florida Beach Mystery, 2) by Elaine Viets.

About the novel, from the publisher:

Life’s a beach . . . until you die.

Fear is growing in sun-soaked South Florida. Hot on the heels of local resident Gil Shecker saving an heiress’s cat from the jaws of an alligator, one of Norah McCarthy’s misfit residents at her Florodora apartment complex finds a body on the beach.

It appears a serial killer is brutally strangling young blonde women. When Gil is stabbed in what seems to be a separate attack, Norah is persuaded to investigate his murder. But while Norah uncovers Gil’s spine-tingling secrets, the beach body count is rising . . . At least one deadly critter is intent on terrorizing the local community, and this time it’s no alligator.

This addictive, quirky crime series set in Florida is perfect for fans of Carl Hiaasen and Tim Dorsey.

Visit Elaine Viets' website.

The Page 69 Test: Murder with All the Trimmings.

--Marshal Zeringue

"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