"The Patriot's Daughter"

New from Crooked Lane Books: The Patriot's Daughter: A Novel by Brittany Butler.

About the novel, from the publisher:

Democracy is fracturing—and one woman may hold the key to saving it.

This electrifying new thriller from former CIA officer and TikTok sensation Brittany Butler is the perfect geopolitical thriller for fans of David McCloskey and Alma Katsu.

When a wave of Russian cyberattacks ignites a disinformation firestorm, the United States is pushed to the brink of a civil war. State governments defy Washington. Militias rise. As trust crumbles and chaos spreads, the CIA races to expose the source behind such unrest before democracy collapses from within.

Brilliant, relentless, and haunted by her mother’s disappearance, Ava was recruited for a moment like this. Dispatched to infiltrate Russia’s foreign intelligence service, her mission becomes personal when she locks onto her target, Konstantine, a charismatic SVR officer whose shadowed past intertwines with her own.

What Ava uncovers is more insidious than she feared. With the country unraveling, she must navigate a minefield of deception. Her only anchor is Ben, a veteran counterintelligence officer with complicated romantic feelings for Ava. But in a world where nothing is as it seems, trusting the wrong person could be fatal.

Ripped from tomorrow’s headlines, The Patriot’s Daughter is a fresh new take on the international spy genre.

Visit Brittany Butler's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"No Place Like Home"

New from Oxford University Press: No Place Like Home: Women Philosophers' Struggles with Domesticity by Sandrine Bergès.

About the book, from the publisher:

Why should we think about the home? Most would agree that it is central to children's development-a healthy, stable, and hopefully loving environment where they can prepare for adulthood. But for women, the duties and expectations bound up with life at home have historically often meant stunted development, confinement to the home and domestic work, subordination to a man who goes in and out of the home freely. While societal advancements have helped to close this gap for some, these problems endure for many. The writings of women philosophers, some going back many centuries, reveal insights on these challenges that deserve close study.

In No Place Like Home, Sandrine Bergès calls attention to women philosophers' ideas and arguments, starting in antiquity and continuing into the twenty-first century. Through their writings, she examines the concept of the home in all its historical richness and variety, thus reinstating the home as a philosophical problem, worthy of deep inquiry. Bergès examines writings about domesticity from numerous female thinkers and writers across history, including but not limited to, Perictione, Angelina Grimké, Mary Wollstonecraft, Catharine Beecher, Sojourner Truth, Margaret Cavendish, Simone de Beauvoir, and Marie Kondo.

Through their perspectives, she reveals the rich and varied history of philosophical reflections on the home, from which we are given the tools to draw our own conclusions about its place in our modern lives.

Visit Sandrine Bergès's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Covered Buttons"

New from Mercer University Press: Covered Buttons by Stephanie Saunders.

About the novel, from the publisher:

In the foothills of the Ozarks, seventeen-year-old Thea is stitched into a life she never chose. After losing her mother and best friend, and with no path forward beyond marriage and motherhood, Thea finds unexpected kinship in her unconventional stepmother and her infamous grandmother. Between a world of books and embroidery, secrets stitched in buttons, and the quiet defiance of women's care networks, Thea begins to imagine a life beyond her small Arkansas town. But when a violent betrayal shatters the illusion of love and tragedy strikes where a new family and a reunited friendship had just begun to grow, Thea must choose: remain bound by the threads of grief or step into a future of her own making. Set in 1939 and inspired by the grassroots birth control movement in Arkansas, COVERED BUTTONS is a story of friendship, resistance, and the quiet revolution of women who dare to dream differently.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Disneyland and the Rise of Automation"

New from Princeton University Press: Disneyland and the Rise of Automation: How Technology Created the Happiest Place on Earth by Roland Betancourt.

About the book, from the publisher:

A history of the engineering marvels behind one of America’s most innovative and beloved entertainment experiences

When Disneyland opened to the public in 1955, it demystified the hidden world of factory automation through its extraordinary new attractions. In this fascinating book, Roland Betancourt tells the story of how the visionary engineers and designers at Disney transformed the technologies of the postwar assembly line into an entertainment experience unlike anything the world had ever seen.

Disneyland and the Rise of Automation traces the origins and evolution of these technical innovations during the theme park’s first three decades in operation, exploring how engineers reimagined the systems and machines of industrial manufacturing and the military. The magnetic tape used to test ballistic missiles was repurposed to animate the talking macaws in the Enchanted Tiki Room. Programmable Logic Controllers, widely used on automotive assembly lines, brought to life the spectacular rides of the Matterhorn Bobsleds and Space Mountain. Betancourt shows how these and other attractions helped to allay fears about automation and job displacement in 1950s America. Along the way, he situates Disneyland’s remarkable creations within a broader history of the technologies that increasingly order and construct the world around us, from the Fordist factory to artificial intelligence.

Essential reading for anyone interested in engineering, corporate histories, or popular culture, Disneyland and the Rise of Automation invites us to consider how technology and the logic of automation become integrated into our lives through entertainment.

The Page 99 Test: Byzantine Intersectionality.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Dead Room"

New from Thomas & Mercer: The Dead Room by Catriona McPherson.

About the novel, from the publisher:

In this atmospheric thriller from Catriona McPherson, a young widow seeking refuge from her grief wades into the mists at the far end of memory lane―where something even darker awaits.

Reeling from the death of her husband, thirty-something audiobook narrator Lindsay Hale retreats to her Scottish hometown and the comforts of old times. The bungalow where she grew up is just as she left it, next to the scrapyard her family still owns. But something is wrong…something beyond grief.

Something she can only glimpse from the corner of her eye.

Lindsay’s brother and best friend are there to welcome her back. An elderly widow helps Lindsay make sense of her new normal, and a kind man hints at unexpected possibilities. But when her widow friend vanishes, only Lindsay seems to notice. And while she starts “recognizing” strangers, she begins forgetting familiar faces.

Every night, as Lindsay’s dream house fills with nightmares, she wonders whether she’s truly unraveling―or if something more sinister’s at play. Buried secrets surface and reality bends, forcing Lindsay to face the terrifying truth that her new haven isn’t so safe after all.

Visit Catriona McPherson's website.

The Page 69 Test: Go to My Grave.

Writers Read: Catriona McPherson (November 2018).

My Book, The Movie: The Turning Tide.

The Page 69 Test: The Turning Tide.

My Book, The Movie: A Gingerbread House.

The Page 69 Test: Hop Scot.

The Page 69 Test: Deep Beneath Us.

Q&A with Catriona McPherson.

The Page 69 Test: The Witching Hour.

Writers Read: Catriona McPherson (September 2024).

Writers Read: Catriona McPherson (December 2024).

The Page 69 Test: Scotzilla.

My Book, The Movie: Scotzilla.

The Page 69 Test: Scot's Eggs.

Writers Read: Catriona McPherson (November 2025).

--Marshal Zeringue

"Ignorance"

New from Columbia University Press: Ignorance: What We Do Not Know, Cannot Know, Must Not Know, and Refuse to Know by George G. Szpiro.

About the book, from the publisher:

Does the lack of evidence mean that aliens don’t exist? Why does an unproven mathematical hypothesis have profound consequences? Are humans capable of grasping the nature of divinity? Is it ethical to give a patient a placebo? Why do people persist in demonstrably false beliefs like flat earth theory? Should someone want to know when they will die?

George G. Szpiro examines these questions and many others, offering an engaging and witty tour of what we can learn from ignorance. In a series of fast-paced chapters, he unravels problems ranging across science, mathematics, law, economics, politics, religion, psychology, and philosophy—some esoteric, others drawn from everyday life. Ignorance comes in many forms, Szpiro shows. Some questions are only temporarily unsolved; others are inherently unanswerable. Sometimes authorities keep answers from us, for good or ill. Often our assumptions and biases keep us from overcoming our ignorance, and occasionally we choose to remain ignorant—for surprisingly rational reasons.

Ultimately, Szpiro argues, ignorance is not purely negative. It can motivate the pursuit of learning and wisdom—as long as we acknowledge it. Presenting sophisticated topics in an accessible way, this book shows how ignorance sheds light on the nature of knowledge.

Visit George G. Szpiro's website.

The Page 99 Test: Perplexing Paradoxes.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Great Houses of Pill Hill"

New from Soho Crime: The Great Houses of Pill Hill by Diane Josefowicz.

About the novel, from the publisher:

A scintillating, wickedly intricate locked-room mystery following an unconventional woman who makes miniatures of murder scenes and finds herself entangled in a real one when the client of her dream job turns up dead.

Hannah “Cookie” Cooke, an interior decorator with a sideline making miniature reproductions of crime scenes for the local police department, lands her dream job when New Preston’s wealthiest couple hires her to renovate their historic New England home. But things go spectacularly wrong when her client Chuck—with whom she is having an affair—is murdered at the housewarming party.

The detective on the case commissions one of Cookie’s miniatures to help solve the baffling murder. While grappling with her own complicated role in Chuck’s life—and the thorny layers of her own envies, resentments, and ambitions—Cookie delves into the strange details of his death, including his overly involved therapist, his wife’s nebulous textile empire, and a room decorated in nineteenth-century Egyptian kitsch hidden on the premises. In untangling the mystery, Cookie reveals an ugly truth about New Preston’s elite that might prove deadly.

At once an irreverent interpretation of the hard-boiled genre and a skewering of traditional domesticity, this show-stopping work of crime fiction is crackling with narrative voice, resulting in a read that is equally engrossing and electrifying.

Visit Diane Josefowicz's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Markets of Pain"

New from Oxford University Press: Markets of Pain: Opium, Capitalism, and the Global History of Painkillers by Benjamin Robert Siegel.

About the book, from the publisher:

Markets of Pain offers a sweeping history of the business of licit opium--following cultivators, merchants, scientists, and policymakers--and shows how this potent crop reshaped global trade, medicine, and geopolitics.

For centuries, opium has been a source of both profit and peril, its legacy entangled with addiction, imperialism, and the complex interplay of global trade and national development. While the illicit opium trade is infamous, the history of licit opium--how it was farmed, refined, and used to build modern medicine and shape state power--has remained largely untold.

Drawing on archival sources from Asia, Europe, and the United States, Markets of Pain traces the global arc of licit opium from poppy fields and processing plants in India, Turkey, and Australia to the clinics and laboratories of modern medicine. It shows how both the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic treated the opium poppy as a national resource and a means of securing global stature. In postcolonial India, by contrast, nationalist leaders initially rejected opium's imperial legacy before embracing its strategic value amid the shifting currents of the Cold War. At the heart of this story are the cultivators, scientists, bureaucrats, and policymakers who shaped the licit opium trade and grappled with its far-reaching consequences. Their work and visions demonstrate how colonial empires and postcolonial states helped forge the global pharmaceutical industry as it struggled to govern a drug it could not abandon.

Markets of Pain reveals how a seemingly marginal crop became an unlikely engine of modernization, a tool of Cold War geopolitics, and a harbinger of today's global opioid crisis. Blending vivid scenes from opium's fields and factories with incisive analysis of scientific and diplomatic archives, Benjamin Robert Siegel recovers a buried history with urgent relevance for global supply chains, international power, and public health.

Visit Benjamin R. Siegel's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Language of Liars"

New from Tordotcom: The Language of Liars by S. L. Huang.

About the book, from the publisher:

Speak another people's language. Know them. Become them.
And discover you've destroyed them.

In his training as a spy, Ro was warned: you will always be living a lie.

Jumping into a Star Eater's mind in the first place requires a moment of perfect psychic connection, and he has studied all his life to comprehend their species. Admires them, respects them, is reverent at the idea of being one of them―the only species physiologically capable of mining the element needed for lightyear-spanning space travel. The species all others crave to know more of, but who have notoriously shared so very little. The species Ro's own small civilization, with its dwindling resources and withering reach, needs to know more about.

It will feel real, his elders impressed upon him. It will never be real.

But Ro's certainty runs deep: he will be different. Ro will not be an imposter hiding the truth of his past, because his heart will be one of them. He will be one of them.

To understand is to become. It never occurs to him that the mere act of understanding can destroy.

Visit S. L. Huang's website.

The Page 69 Test: Zero Sum Game.

The Page 69 Test: Null Set.

Writers Read: S. L. Huang (September 2019).

The Page 69 Test: Critical Point.

--Marshal Zeringue

"On the Future of Species"

New from The MIT Press: On the Future of Species: Authoring Life by Means of Artificial Biological Intelligence by Adrian Woolfson.

About the book, from the publisher:

A bold and visionary account of how genome writing can help preserve the planet—but may also undermine human nature and disrupt ecosystems.

From a scientist at the forefront of synthetic genomics.

Imagine a future where we grow houses rather than build them. Where smartphones are alive, clothing has opinions and all human knowledge fits into a speck of DNA. A world where disease is a thing of the past and the human lifespan is dramatically extended.

To achieve this, says Adrian Woolfson, founder of the genome writing company Genyro, we must transform biology into a predictive, programmable engineering material. That means decoding the generative grammar of DNA: the language of life itself. We will then be able to author genomes—and, if we choose, even rewrite our own.

In On the Future of Species, Woolfson describes how we are at the cusp of a technological revolution, driven by the convergence of artificial intelligence and synthetic biology. Currently at the scribbling phase—writing the genomes of viruses, bacteria and yeast—we will eventually author the genomes of extinct and never-before-realized species. Life will become computable, detached from its past and no longer bound by Darwinian evolution.

While offering extraordinary opportunities, this power also carries great risk, and it is vital for everyone to understand what the future might hold. In this groundbreaking work, Woolfson provides a guide to this bold new world, offering a moral compass to help us do so safely, wisely and ethically.

Visit Adrian Woolfson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue