"You’ve Lost That Livin’ Feelin’"

New from Severn House: You’ve Lost That Livin’ Feelin’ (An Adam Parrall Mystery) by Nicholas George.

About the novel, from the publisher:

Introducing Adam Parrall—retired drummer, vinyl record store owner . . . and amateur sleuth!

Adam Parrall’s wild days as a drummer in a rock band are far behind him. Now semi-retired and running a record store in the sleepy town of Cordoba on the mid-California coast, life is considerably calmer, with pleasant surprises such as winning a lifetime achievement award (which Adam learns, depressingly, is intended for deceased artists).

There’s plenty of life left in Adam yet, though sadly the same can’t be said of Righteous Brother tribute artist Barry Haddon, whose dead body is discovered by Adam outside a nightclub. Suddenly Adam discovers an exciting new hobby—sleuthing! Is a knife-wielding robber terrorizing the locals responsible for Barry’s murder? As panic and confusion sweep through the town, Adam can’t rule anything—or anyone—out. Unfortunately, his meddling may mean that he’ll qualify for that lifetime achievement award sooner than he thought!

The first in an irresistibly charming cozy mystery series featuring a retired drummer seeking to recapture the excitement of his rock band heyday by solving crime. A page-turning must-read for fans of M.C. Beaton, Richard Osman and J.M. Hall!

Follow Nicholas George on Facebook.

My Book, The Movie: A Lethal Walk in Lakeland.

The Page 69 Test: A Lethal Walk in Lakeland.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Near and Desired Things"

New from Cornell University Press: Near and Desired Things: Shamanism in Late Imperial Local Siberian Museums by Marisa Karyl Franz.

About the book, from the publisher:

Near and Desired Things reveals nineteenth-century Siberian museums, built on Indigenous land and increasingly populated by political exiles, as active sites of ethnographic knowledge-making and centers of scientific research, regional identity, and colonial authority. Rather than collecting from distant colonies, these institutions concentrated on surrounding communities, their tools, beliefs, and everyday lives, to configure ideas about what counted as legitimate knowledge.

Marisa Karyl Franz traces how Siberian museums helped construct shamanism as an ethnographic category. Shamans, while familiar and embedded in local space, were recast as icons of cultural otherness or representatives of an imagined primitive past. Through the evolving languages of science, anthropology, and empire, the local was abstracted and exported, feeding global museum networks and shaping modern anthropology. Yet, the museums held onto the intimacy of place, preserving tensions between familiarity and spectacle, documentation and desire.

By placing Siberia at the center of a broader intellectual and political history, Near and Desired Things challenges assumptions about where modern knowledge is made and redefines provincial spaces as sites of innovation and as forces that reshape the terms of empire.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Bird Tribe"

New from Tor Books: The Bird Tribe: The Dreambird Chronicles, Book Three by Lucinda Roy.

About the book, from the publisher:

Lucinda Roy concludes her explosive speculative fiction trilogy, The Dreambird Chronicles, with the triumphant The Bird Tribe.

Yearning is the only compass you need to fly a way home.

Two years after Ji-ji’s miraculous flight on her own impossible wings, the Dream of Freedom has stalled. The Rising promised by Prophet Dreg has not occurred. Ji-ji’s fellow seeds, living in bondage on plantings, had started to believe the legend of Flying Africans was more than just a myth enslaved people told themselves.

But in a polarized nation, torn apart by a Civil War Sequel, faith is slippery.

Ji-ji’s quest to discover the truth behind her people’s origin story will send her, Afarra, and the men they love on a perilous transatlantic pilgrimage to find answers to questions that haunt her: Were Wingchildren engineered by those who experimented on imported humans? Or is she part of an improbable myth? An ancient tribe of Flying Africans from the Cradle, who etched their own remarkable story into the stuff of dreams.

Visit Lucinda Roy's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Empress Matilda"

New from Yale University Press: Empress Matilda: Queen of the Romans, Ruler of the English by Elisabeth van Houts.

About the book, from the publisher:

An authoritative new biography of Empress Matilda

Born in 1102, Empress Matilda combined the blood of two dynasties: the house of Wessex and their conquerors, the dukes of Normandy. As a widowed German empress, she was named as heir successor by her father, Henry I. But, after his death in 1135, Matilda’s place on the English throne was usurped by her cousin, Stephen of Blois. Civil war followed, and she ruled the south-west of England in opposition.

Elisabeth van Houts explores the remarkable life of medieval England’s only queen regnant. Van Houts examines female rulership in the Middle Ages, from Matilda’s relationships with her husbands, to her self-identification as granddaughter of William the Conqueror. Matilda used her persuasiveness effectively with the men who surrounded her, including her father, husbands, half-brothers and cousins.

This is a fascinating account, which reveals Matilda to be an assertive, if on occasion disappointed, woman who made the best of her position with intelligence and stamina.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Cloak and Dagger Club"

New from Berkley: The Cloak and Dagger Club (A Cloak and Dagger Club Mystery) by Jackie McMahon.

About the book, from the publisher:

Inspired by Agatha Christie's real-life Detection Club, a murder among a group of golden age mystery writers meets a second chance romance in this debut novel from author Jackie McMahon.

London, 1930. Lucy Hubbard is on the cusp of achieving her dreams. With her first mystery novel debuting with strong sales and glowing reviews, she's been invited by Horace Hazelmoor, the king of crime fiction, to join his elite group of writers—the Cloak and Dagger Club.

Thrilled at the opportunity, Lucy finds herself swept up into Horace's glamorous world at the Ritz hotel. She's even willing to put up with the inconvenient presence of her former fiancé, Frank Murray, the club's rising star who is on track to eclipse Horace as Britain's most popular crime writer.

But when Horace is found with a knife in his back, Frank is the police's prime suspect. Despite their complicated history, Lucy knows he's not capable of murder. With suspects galore and the danger rising, these two mystery writers must race to solve the crime—and fight their lingering feelings for each other—before the murderer strikes again.

Visit Jackie McMahon's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Ganja Matters"

New from the University of California Press: Ganja Matters: Empire and the Pursuits of Cannabis in British India by Utathya Chattopadhyaya.

About the book, from the publisher:

Ganja is the popular name in Hindustani, Bengali, and other South Asian languages for intoxicating substances produced from the plant species Cannabis sativa L. Starting in the eighteenth century, British India's colonial administrators sought ways to systematically tax and govern how ganja circulated from the farms of peasant families in rural Bengal to pipes, plates, and cups elsewhere in the subcontinent. Ganja Matters follows the perpetual incongruity between regulatory efforts to pursue the plant through botanical observation, colonial reportage, and excise statistics and the leisurely, devotional, and creative ganja pursuits among people. Utathya Chattopadhyaya offers a social history of ganja in a multispecies framework that reveals how the cannabis plant co-constituted histories of empire, gender, subalternity, and labor under British rule. Against the weight of the criminalization and "drug-ness" of cannabis, Chattopadhyaya puts the multidirectional and polysemic history of ganja as plant matter at the center of analysis.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Thighs Wide Shut"

New from Dial Press: Thighs Wide Shut: A Novel by Hayley Fleming.

About the book, from the publisher:

A charming second-chance romance about a young woman determined to finally embrace vulnerability—a love letter to anyone who’s ever felt their body is a barrier to their happiness.

Emma thought her late twenties couldn’t get more complicated. But then she quit her teaching job and moved across the country—only to find herself living right below the man she tried for years to avoid.

Emma hasn’t seen Harrison since an explosive fight ended their college friendship and eliminated the possibility of anything more ever happening between them. Now that his apartment is right above hers, Emma is privy to every detail of his active (and noisy) dating life. She knows she has only herself to blame for their estrangement: her inability to be honest with Harrison drove him away. It’s clear he’s moved on; why can’t she?

Presented with an opportunity to reignite the long-smoldering flames of their relationship, Emma realizes that to seize the moment, she will have to finally face the women's health condition holding her back from intimacy and truly open up. But can she let her desires overcome the resistance in her mind and body?

Funny and tender, Thighs Wide Shut is an all-too-relatable story of how terrifying—and freeing—it is when we let our hearts take charge.

Visit Hayley Fleming's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Miami Nation"

New from Indiana University Press: The Miami Nation: A Middle Path for Indigenous Nationhood by Aamaawia John Bickers.

About the book, from the publisher:

As the United States sought to expand its territorial holdings at the start of the nineteenth century into what is now Ohio and Indiana, the Indigenous Myaamia (Miami) peoples of the Wabash River Valley came together to form a united front to protect their lands and their people. The Miami National Council was designed by its founders to allow the Myaamia people and their leaders to engage with the federal government and American culture on their own terms.

The Miami Nation tells the fascinating history of both politics and people. Skillfully weaving together oral narratives, archival research, existing published histories, and his own family's recollections and stories, Aamaawia John Bickers illustrates the broader strategies and forces that affected how the Miami Nation responded to American imperial expansion, illuminating the challenges, achievements, and occasional missteps along the way. Bickers begins with the formation of the Miami National Council in the early nineteenth century, following their political development through two forced removals, the American Civil War, allotment and the Dawes Act, and finally the ratification of the constitution of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma in 1939. But throughout these experiences, the Miami Nation maintained its cultural identity and continued to sustain their community.

As the first academic history of the Myaamia people written by a tribal member, The Miami Nation centers Myaamia voices as it contemplates issues of Indigenous power, settler colonialism, and how a community can charter its own path through history.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Don't Look Away"

New from Scribner: Don't Look Away: A Novel by Daniel Kenitz.

About the novel, from the publisher:

From the author of The Perfect Home comes a harrowing domestic crime thriller where a former defense attorney is forced out of retirement to defend her husband—now the prime suspect in the serial murder case terrorizing Florida’s Gulf Coast.

Leslie Woodhouse’s most exciting days should be behind her. In a past life, she was a defense attorney with a reputation for finding loopholes in high-profile cases. Now, she’s enjoying a modest retirement in Florida in a seaside condo with her mild-mannered husband, Robert. The only things that get her heart rate up now are late-night coffees, playful banter with her beloved older sister, and the news: the serial killer ravaging Florida’s Gulf Coast has just made his first mistake. An eight-year-old girl has seen his face and lived.

To Leslie, the murderer is little more than a morbid fascination—until she comes home to flashing police lights. Robert is arrested, accused of being the Gulf Coast Killer. Leslie is convinced of his innocence, and despite warnings not to represent her husband, she starts work on his defense. But as she unravels the facts, she can’t shake the unanswered questions. What was Robert’s DNA doing at the scene of the crime? And if she’s right to defend Robert, then who is the real Gulf Coast Killer, and why is he framing her husband?

Don’t Look Away is a twisty, compulsively readable thriller that asks: what do we owe one another— and what are the consequences of ignoring the truth?

Visit Daniel Kenitz's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"We the Platform"

New from Columbia University Press: We the Platform: How the Internet Changed Twenty-First-Century Literature by Aarthi Vadde.

About the book, from the publisher:

Web 2.0 gave us the online world as we know it today. Popularized in 2004, it redefined the internet as social, a “platform” for self-expression and data gathering. The ensuing proliferation of user-generated content such as social media posts, fan fiction, self-published novels, and Instagram poetry has spurred a host of anxieties about the end of literature. Yet contemporary literary fiction is deeply indebted to the folk forms that Web 2.0 cultivated, even when it is sharply critical of the platform business models behind them.

We the Platform is a groundbreaking account of mass writing in the twenty-first century, identifying rarely recognized forms of literary possibility amid the profound upheavals in traditional publishing. Aarthi Vadde examines the explosion of textuality across digital platforms: countless writers, diverse publishing formats, and vast communities of readers responding to stories publicly and instantly. Countering ubiquitous decline narratives, she offers powerful examples of literary innovation, adaptation, and survival. Among them are Jonathan Lethem and Lauren Oyler’s challenges to individualist ideas of authorship, the Twitter fiction of Jennifer Egan and Teju Cole, Margaret Atwood and Naomi Alderman’s collaborative writing on Wattpad, conceptual projects like Book from the Ground, and the experimental use of chatbots by authors including Sheila Heti. Through nuanced and illuminating readings, this book shows how platform-based writing has altered cornerstone concepts of authorship, aesthetic form, and craft, delivering a bold new understanding of literature now.

Visit Aarthi Vadde's website.

--Marshal Zeringue