"The Fatal End"

New from Severn House: The Fatal End (A Teigan Craft forensic mystery) by A.J. Cross.

About the book, from the publisher:

Meet Professor Teigan Craft, a neurodivergent forensic psychologist getting into the minds of Birmingham’s most twisted killers.

Even in the safest of places, a killer lurks...

Young nurse Riley McCarthy never made it home after her late hospital shift in the Cardiac Unit. When forensic pathologist Professor Teigan ‘Tig’ Craft and Detective Chief Inspector Steve Thompson of West Midlands Police find Riley’s body, their focus quickly turns to her colleagues in the unit. Everyone is under suspicion, and almost everyone has a secret, including Riley herself . . .

As Craft and Thompson unravel the lives of Riley and her colleagues, they uncover scandal and dangerous ambitions, but what led to Riley’s terrible fate? One thing is clear: in a place where lives are saved every day, someone was determined to end hers.

This page-turning, suspenseful and mazey forensic mystery series set in the West Midlands is perfect for fans of Kathy Reichs and Patricia Cornwell.

My Book, The Movie: Something Evil Comes.

The Page 69 Test: Something Evil Comes.

Writers Read: A. J. Cross (December 2017).

--Marshal Zeringue

"Hit Doctors"

New from the University of California Press: Hit Doctors: Care, Harm, and the Art of Survival by Sarah Brothers.

About the book, from the publisher:

As overdose deaths continue to mount and debates rage over harm reduction, drug policy, and homelessness, Hit Doctors offers a crucial on-the-ground perspective pointing to a humane future.

Finding a vein is difficult. As veins collapse and scar over, it becomes almost impossible. For the millions of Americans who inject drugs and can’t do it alone, the solution is to find someone who can. Enter the “hit doctor.” Though uncredentialed, hit doctors develop expertise through necessity, providing injection assistance and addressing needs that dominant medical systems exclude or criminalize. They share the same conditions as the people they serve: sleeping in encampments and alleys, living in cramped single-room-occupancy hotels, suffering from untreated illness and trauma, and grieving friends who keep dying.

Sarah Brothers spent more than seven years observing and interviewing hit doctors and their clients across San Francisco. Hit Doctors is an intimate portrait of the daily lives, relationships, and ethical worlds of people managing extraordinary hardship at a pivotal moment, when fentanyl arrived and thousands began dying annually. Brothers’s long-term ethnography yields critical insights. People seeking help strongly prefer women hit doctors, perceived as more careful and less likely to turn violent. But even as their expertise is valued, hit doctors are targets for abuse, and they suffer as the people they care for decline and die. That is the cost of trying to keep each other alive when formal systems of support have failed.

Visit Sarah Brothers's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Lords of Serendipity"

New from Mariner Books: Lords of Serendipity: A Novel – A Moving Campus Satire of Strivers, Gatekeepers, and University Dreams by Randy Boyagoda.

About the novel, from the publisher:

An epic campus novel about the hopes and hypocrisies of 21st-century higher education, from one of Canada’s most celebrated literary novelists.

Devi is a Sri Lankan village girl who dreams of going to Harvard. Katrina is a middle-class American girl whose life has been designed to get her into an elite liberal arts college. Devi’s father cleans toilets in a five-star hotel to pay for his daughter’s Indian tutor, who might not be the Oxford student he claims to be on WhatsApp. Katrina’s father teaches extra courses at a mediocre technical university to pay for his daughter’s academic lifestyle experiences. Meanwhile, his tech-bro TA expertly extorts money from international students worried about flunking and getting deported.

Set between contemporary Sri Lanka and the United States, Lords of Serendipity is a wry, moving, and sharply observed story about how rich and poor alike try to get ahead by going to university. It’s about dreams and ambition meeting corruption and hypocrisy. It’s about what parents are willing to do for their children, and about what strivers and hustlers are willing to do when they meet gatekeepers.

This is the 21st-century global campus novel, a story about two teenage girls from opposite sides of the world with the same dream: four years in a quadrangle-shaped paradise that offers lots of super amazing courses and super amazing protests. The novel couldn’t be more timely in this absurd and perilous-feeling moment for both American life and higher education.

Visit Randy Boyagoda's website.

The Page 69 Test: Governor of the Northern Province.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Agrippina the Younger"

New from Oxford University Press: Agrippina the Younger: A Dangerous Woman in Rome's Early Empire by Mary T. Boatwright.

About the book, from the publisher:

Firmly based on ancient literature and material evidence, this illustrated biography assesses the life of Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE). Agrippina was declared "unique" by Tacitus, ancient Rome's most insightful political historian, both for her own political standing and as the daughter of a triumphing general and the sister, wife, and mother of emperors--respectively, Caligula (r. 37–41), Claudius (r. 41–54), and Nero (r. 54–68). Tacitus and other ancient historians depict her with horrified fascination as they vividly chart her growing presence through tumultuous vicissitudes, ending with her murder by her son Nero in 59.

Documentary evidence corroborates Agrippina as extraordinary. Among other "firsts," she is the first woman to be portrayed and identified on coins while alive; the first woman whose name is given to a veteran colony; and she appeared in more numerous statuary installations than known for earlier women. Agrippina's life sheds light on Rome's evolution into a monarchy dominated by her family; it also illuminates the endurance of Rome's ancestral patriarchy, showing the tight limits of power even for imperial women. Assessment of her reception up to the twentieth century highlights the importance of Tacitus for our understanding of this remarkable political creature. Neither damning nor glorifying Agrippina, this biography sensitively relies on ancient evidence to tell her story.

The Page 99 Test: Imperial Women of Rome.

--Marshal Zeringue

"No Higher Ground"

New from Blackstone: No Higher Ground by Nicole Brooks.

About the book, from the pubisher:

Perfect for fans of Lucy Foley and Will Dean, No Higher Ground is a high-stakes, race-against-time thriller of one family trapped during a flood of epic proportions.

In the midst of a terrifying, once-in-a-lifetime flood, Raven, her two children, and their Chihuahua are trapped on the rooftop of her childhood home along with her stepmother, Joan. Surrounded by a raging torrent, Raven fights to stay calm as her thoughts turn to her sister, Ivy, who died tragically when they were children in the now-flooded basement below.

As the water rises at an alarming rate, rescue becomes dangerous and nearly impossible. With her daughter’s asthma worsening, her newly defiant teenager challenging everything, and her stepmother behaving strangely, Raven’s control slips, and tensions in the family reach a boiling point. When shocking memories from her childhood unexpectedly return, fracturing the past, it becomes evident that no one on the rooftop will be the same after the storm.

If they make it out alive …

Set over six relentlessly tense hours, No Higher Ground is a powerful exploration of grief, guilt, and trauma—and a chilling reminder of our helplessness in the face of nature’s mercilessness.

Visit Nicole Brooks's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Need/Emergency"

New from Stanford University Press: Need/Emergency: Political Theater in Exigent Times by Benjamin Lewis Robinson.

About the book, from the publisher:

Modern politics is preoccupied with states of emergency. Yet emergency politics obscures underlying socioeconomic, infrastructural, and ecological conditions of need. Prompted by Hannah Arendt's claim that theater is "the political art par excellence," Benjamin Lewis Robinson treats this political perplexity as a theatrical problem. In the company of political thinkers including Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, Karl Marx and the Frankfurt School, Rosa Luxemburg and Martin Heidegger, Robinson revisits the entwined histories of politics and theater, analyzing plays that stage the political scene as an always asymmetrical coupling of need and emergency.

In Arendt's view, the defining tendency in modern politics is for need to emerge where it has no right to appear, posing a threat to politics as such. In contrast, the works of theater addressed in Need/Emergency concern moments when, whether it ought to or not, need does appear―demanding justice. Writing in exigent times, Elfriede Jelinek, Heinrich von Kleist, Georg Büchner, Bertolt Brecht, and Friedrich Hölderlin produced formally innovative political theater. Not reducible to the drama of emergency, these plays bring into focus the very need for politics. Moving fluently between theory and theater, Robinson offers a critical study of biopolitics and emergency politics in times of poverty, plague, infrastructural predation, and forced displacement, from the French Revolution to the climate crisis.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Black Orchid"

Coming September 1 from Montlake: The Black Orchid: A Novel by Loreth Anne White.

About the book, from the publisher:

A propulsive true crime–inspired thriller of masks, murder, and long-awaited justice by Washington Post bestselling author Loreth Anne White.

By invitation only, nine elite guests board the luxurious Black Orchid for its maiden voyage through the mythic Aegean Sea. Not all of them will survive.

Poppy Buchanan, personal assistant to legendary war photographer Lillith McGregor, sees the cruise as her chance at a better life―if she can edge her way into Lillith’s will. But their exclusive company includes Lillith’s disinherited stepson and his ruthlessly ambitious fiancée, a silent Israeli businessman with a dangerous past, a charming Dutch antiquities dealer with an agenda of his own, and a retired FBI profiler hunting a serial killer he believes is aboard. Each passenger is a piece in a deadly puzzle decades in the making.

Within three days, their paths will collide during a catastrophic storm. Long-buried secrets surface. Masks fall away. And the ensuing revelations trigger a chain of events that leads to one of the most devastating maritime disasters in recent history. But the sinking of the Black Orchid is no accident―it’s a reckoning.

Visit Loreth Anne White's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Swimmer.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Profiling"

New from Stanford University Press: Profiling: How Predictive Algorithms Shape Identity and the Social Fabric by Philippe Huneman.

About the book, from the publisher:

In this book, philosopher Philippe Huneman aims to offer an unprecedented and systematic understanding of a simultaneously banal and singular phenomenon of modern life: the digital profile. Diving deeply into the algorithms that produce these profiles, Huneman examines the way in which an individual becomes a predictable subject, both as unwilling producer of their digital profile and unwitting subject of digital marketing's attempts to influence beliefs and behaviors.

As the book demonstrates, today's society of profiling has profound implications for our understanding of self and politics. The book unfolds across three sections. In the first, Huneman explains profiles and profiling as they operate today and describes their contemporary pervasiveness, using examples from a variety of fields and considering the wide range of types of data that can be digitalized―be they traces, search histories, metadata or the like. In the second section, on profiles, Huneman reflects on who is the subject of profiling societies and what kind of consequences profiling has on individuals―from behavior to memory. And, finally, entering into metaphysical questioning, the book shines a spotlight on the feedback loop that develops between algorithmic profiling and reality.

Visit Philippe Huneman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Ravenous"

New from Roseway: Ravenous: A Novel by Sara Cooper.

About the novel, from the publisher:

Breigh is a hot elder millennial who is obsessed with the brands she is ambassading for. Her policy is YES, and her livestreams are viral. But she’s pregnant now, and her body’s changing. It's not that she's hungry. She's definitely not depressed. She just sometimes eats boxes of makeup before passing out.

Daddy’s bought a brand-new home for Breigh and Baby, complete with a Greenguard Gold-certified, twice-imported velvet infant chaise — but is he cheating on her with a hotter, younger coworker? Breigh has to get Baby out before it ruins her. She has to create more and better content than the other Momfluencers. She has to unbox something new. She has to unbox … Baby! Baby approves of her seven-step marketing plan. Welcome to #LiveBirth.

Breigh’s increasingly unhinged life reflects her generation’s anxieties around psychological manipulation through social media platforms. Multi-award-winning author Sara Cooper presents a wild debut novel in this incisive satire of consumerism, performative femininity, and social media.

Visit Sara Cooper's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Is There Always Value to Adversity?"

New from Oxford University Press: Is There Always Value to Adversity?: Looking Beyond "What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stronger" by Eranda Jayawickreme.

About the book, from the publisher:

Clear and compelling, Is There Always Value to Adversity? presents an interdisciplinary exploration of the age-old idea that adversity can lead to personal growth.

Can adversity have an upside? Is there a purpose to suffering? Can difficult experiences involving trauma and hardship make us stronger? These age-old questions, both intuitively compelling yet scientifically problematic, have fascinated philosophers and researchers for centuries.

In Is There Always Value to Adversity?, Eranda Jayawickreme examines whether post-traumatic growth--the positive changes people report after adversity--reflects real transformation or is simply a coping mechanism. As Jayawickreme explains, the idea that struggle, trauma, and adversity can be a catalyst for positive outcomes has a long intellectual history. He outlines the history of this thinking, tracking its development in different cultural, religious, and philosophical traditions. He then discusses its recent emergence as a popular topic and evaluates the current research, highlighting guidelines for how we should think about this phenomenon.

Throughout the course of the book, Jayawickreme interrogates the quality of the research on post-traumatic growth. In the current age of worries about replication and the credibility revolution in science, can we trust this research at all? Is it possible to do good science on a topic with such intuitive appeal? Ultimately, Jayawickreme asks: is growth through suffering real, or just a comforting story we tell ourselves?

--Marshal Zeringue