"Baby Queen"

Coming November 17 from Harper Perennial: Baby Queen: A Novel by Ty Landers.

About the novel, from the publisher:

For lovers of Ozark or Breaking Bad, a page-turning debut involving an Alabama family business, a dead body, a dogged investigator, and three generations of women who are forced to confront the secrets, betrayals, and buried crimes that haunt their family.

When a queen bee can no longer do her job, the worker bees will kill her, producing a new baby queen.

A perfectly preserved but very dead body is found in a barrel of honey, and the town of Noccalula, Alabama, will never be the same.

Natalie Link has inherited the family honey farm from her beloved grandmother Lana, who raised Nat after her mother ran off to Los Angeles chasing stardom. But it turns out Nat has no idea what Lana has been hiding in the hives. Is Nat up to running what turns out to be a business enterprise of questionable repute? Suddenly she is caught between her grandmother’s very frightening partners and the ex-cop with a grudge who’s been looking into her family since she was a kid.

Bob Sauk torpedoed his once promising law enforcement career chasing a lead he couldn’t prove. He has always believed that Lana Link was a murderer. Will he finally get the chance to prove he was right all along? And what happens when Nat’s Hollywood star mom returns to town after twenty-five years?

Full of secrets, murder, and Alabama fried frog legs, Baby Queen is a sharp-as-a-blade tale of family crime.

Visit Ty Landers's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Bahamian Islanders on the Maritime Highway"

Coming soon from the University Press of Mississippi: Bahamian Islanders on the Maritime Highway: Wrecking to Make a Reckoning by Lisa Lawlor Feller.

About the book, from the publisher:

Once regarded as a critical maritime highway in the wake of British abolition, the channels of The Bahamas became a crossroads where freedom, commerce, and control collided. As trade relationships shifted and power was renegotiated across the Atlantic world, the archipelago’s porous geography created opportunities for newly emancipated Black people—and, at the same time, for those determined to reassert systems of racial and economic dominance.

In Bahamian Islanders on the Maritime Highway: Wrecking to Make a Reckoning, historian Lisa Lawlor Feller weaves together the microhistories of those who crossed these waters, illuminating a transnational Bahamian history often left at the margins. By placing The Bahamas at the intersection of Caribbean and Atlantic frameworks, she reveals the mobility, resilience, and complexity of everyday islanders whose lives shaped the region in lasting ways.

Colonial records—ships’ logs, governors’ papers, educational reports—may seem dominated by dry statistics, yet careful reading uncovers the subtle presence of these voices. Set against the unique geographic and political position of The Bahamas, these fragments open new dimensions of understanding.

This groundbreaking study calls for a reimagined framework of the “partially free” Atlantic world—one that embraces the fluid, liminal spaces of an archipelago that has long defied simple categorization. Centering Bahamian experience, Lawlor Feller deepens our understanding of the region’s past and affirms the islands’ enduring importance as a site of connection, transition, and cultural insight within Caribbean studies.

Follow Lisa Lawlor Feller on Instagram.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Freight"

New from Little, Brown and Company: Freight: A Novel by Ryan Lowell.

About the novel, from the publisher:

As a lone semi-truck makes its snowy way to the US-Canadian border, a series of vivid characters are inexorably drawn into a desperate, comedic, and murderous scheme to steal its precious cargo.

Curtis, a newly hired dispatcher with a newly pregnant wife at home, holds a scrap of paper that identifies a semi-truck trailer that shouldn’t exist.

Billy Trask is a weathered and charismatic sociopath, who thinks nothing of quietly killing whomever may come in his way, and carefully guards the coordinates for a truck loaded with $10 million dollars-worth of Canadian pharmaceuticals.

Jimmy, Theo, and Sarah are the not-so-innocent locals poised to stand in Billy's way, none more so than Sarah, a local party girl with the heart and will of a colossus, and who will leave her own trail of mayhem and carnage in her 75-mile-per-hour wake.

In the rough-and-tumble tradition of Dennis Lehane, S.A. Cosby, and classic American noir, Freight is a thrill-ride view of the world of labor, life and love—a searing portrait of men at work and also at their worst.

Follow Ryan Lowell on Instagram.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Over and Over"

New from Rutgers University Press: Over and Over: Performance, Time, and Resonance in Serial Television Drama by Elliott Logan.

About the book, from the publisher:

How does serial drama earn, keep, and reward our attention for so long―over episodes, seasons, months, and years? While we know that characters are the focus of story and viewer interest in television fiction, scholars have for decades overlooked the way those characters are performed on-screen and the lure of performance as a key formal and thematic aspect of long-form television storytelling. In Over and Over, Elliott Logan offers close readings of performance in some of the most celebrated television dramas of the century, casting new light on the attractions and significance of the medium’s seriality. The book shows how the patterning and expressive resonance of performers on-screen binds together otherwise unconnected episodes of shows like The Sopranos and Mad Men. In doing so, it highlights the provisionality of identity and meaning as crucial to their interest in the sustenance of human relationships over long periods of time. In accounting for the resonance of performance over time in serial drama, this book shows, we find the terms of our own attachment to its compelling depictions of human life.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Thief's Folly"

New from Severn House: A Thief's Folly (A Dorothy Martin Mystery, 28) by Jeanne M. Dams.

About the book, from the publisher:

When a thief strikes, Dorothy Martin is quickly on the case...

Dorothy Martin is enjoying a conversation in the garden with her neighbour and best friend, Jane Langland, one perfect June afternoon, when Jane suddenly has a stroke.

Dorothy is devastated when she visits her friend in hospital and discovers that she’s unable to speak yet desperate to tell her something, and is soon convinced there’s something valuable hidden in Jane’s house – but what is it? A thief targeting the house suggests they’ve found it first...

After identifying Jane's treasured – and sadly stolen – item, Dorothy is determined to track it down, even if that means embarking on a trip overseas. One thing’s for sure – in taking on Dorothy Martin, this thief has made a huge mistake!

This twisty, absorbing mystery featuring an Anglophile sleuth is perfect for fans of M.C. Beaton and Faith Martin.

Visit Jeanne M. Dams's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Russia’s Rogue Masters"

New from Yale University Press: Russia’s Rogue Masters: Elite Criminal Trials in the Age of Reform, 1866-1884 by Sergei Antonov.

About the book, from the publisher:

Late imperial Russia’s criminal justice system examined through its most prominent public cases

In this book, lawyer and historian Sergei Antonov examines the largest and most prominent criminal cases following the landmark judicial reform of 1864 that introduced the public jury trial. Each case involved elite defendants or victims: nobles, officials, and wealthy merchants. Their crimes ranged from murder and arson to fraud, forgery, and embezzlement.

Antonov argues that, far from a reluctant concession of little consequence within Russia’s autocratic regime, the new courts were a crucial instrument through which the tsar and his government maintained a fragile political and social equilibrium. The new courts punished wayward elites and admonished the rest, teaching them about the limits of permissible violence, the exercise of power, and profit seeking. For the only time in Russia’s history, powerful persons could reliably expect to go on trial for major crimes, while also expecting that trial to be fundamentally fair.

Moreover, for the only time in Russian history, late imperial criminal trials exposed the hidden lives of Russia’s elites to public scrutiny and discussion. But the effects of this panoptic gaze were complex and ambiguous, and the narratives produced during the trials were unintentionally ambivalent―not only about those being prosecuted, but also about the new governing regime itself.

--Marshal Zeringue

"These Vile Hearts"

New from G.P. Putnam's Sons: These Vile Hearts by Melody Robinette.

About the novel, from the publisher:

A delightfully wicked, fizzy debut romantasy--an enemies to lovers tale about a desperate mortal woman and a cursed fae prince

Maddox Sinclair has run out of options. No job means no health insurance —a death sentence for a type one diabetic like herself. She flees to the forest to make a desperate deal with a dryad queen: kill the Redwood King and be cured of the illness that threatens her life.

In the redwood treetops, Prince Castor, is cursed-- anyone who loves him is doomed to die. Like Maddox, he has made an equally unwise pact with his brother, the Redwood King: get a mortal to fall in love with him by solstice and be free of his curse forever.

When Maddox mistakes Castor for the king, sparks fly and troubles ensue. Each must decide what is more important—survival and freedom, or the love they (kind of, almost) feel in their traitorous, vile hearts.

Darkly funny and brimming with magic, These Vile Hearts by Melody Robinette manages to be both wicked and warm, beguiling and moving—a richly woven story of survival and fate.

Visit Melody Robinette's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Frivolity: A Defense"

New from Columbia University Press: Frivolity: A Defense by Jehanne Dubrow.

About the book, from the publisher:

Why must everything be so important―so dour and solemn, so grim and austere? How about a feather boa, some frilly lace, and a bright splash of pink? In Frivolity, Jehanne Dubrow stands up for the seemingly shallow and trifling, calling for a reconsideration of what we find worthy and what we dismiss.

This book is a provocation. It offers a defense of the pursuits, objects, and people denigrated as frivolous, asking why we so readily scorn them and why, in particular, the label is so often tied to femininity and queerness. Its 101 sections move lightly across literature, art, and popular culture, from Susan Sontag, Sei Shōnagon, Jane Austen, and Mozart to Barbie, Nora Ephron rom-coms, exclamation points, and Dubrow’s own “Year of Perfect Skin.” Written in a lyrical style, this book takes both an intimate and a rigorous approach to thinking about the frivolous, blending personal essay with scholarship.

For Dubrow, frivolity is a way of affirming the importance of joy and silliness. And don’t we need a little more of both these things in an era made all too serious by autocracy and terror?

Learn more about the book and author at Jehanne Dubrow's website.

Writers Read: Jehanne Dubrow (April 2010).

Writers Read: Jehanne Dubrow (November 2012).

Coffee with a Canine: Jehanne Dubrow and Argos.

Coffee with a Canine: Jehanne Dubrow & Lola and Bandit.

Writers Read: Jehanne Dubrow (August 2022).

The Page 99 Test: Taste: A Book of Small Bites.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Dance of Burning Blades"

New from S&S/Saga Press: A Dance of Burning Blades (Invoker Trilogy) by M.H. Ayinde.

About the novel, from the publisher:

War rages on in the second heart-pounding novel in M. H. Ayinde’s relentless epic fantasy series The Invoker Trilogy, a sweeping epic of revenge and rebellion set in a richly drawn world of warring clans and ancestor magic.

A DANCE OF RAGE. A DANCE OF RUIN. A DANCE OF BURNING BLADES.

Tension simmers across the Nine Lands. In the capital, the people of Lordsgrave seethe with resentment after the horrors of the greyblood attack. Clan Adatali is in open rebellion against the king, and as war in the Feverlands rages on, a humble tree feller—who looks a lot like missing invoker Jinao Mizito—has not forgotten the promise he made to avenge his brother.

Meanwhile, in the shadows, the king’s daughter Lyela continues to move her pieces across the board. Can the people of the Nine Lands reclaim their stolen history and unlock the secrets that have been kept from them for centuries?

Visit M. H. Ayinde's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"On the Mark"

New from Basic Books: On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World by Florence Hazrat.

About the book, from the publisher:

A lively history of punctuation, from ancient times to the age of the emoji.

You know the lively exclamation mark, the controversial semicolon, and the often-omitted apostrophe, but would you recognize a percontation point? How about an obelus? In this irreverent and delightfully intellectual book, Florence Hazrat argues that all punctuation marks, from the most forgotten to the most ubiquitous, are worthy of our attention. After all, the history of punctuation is the history of humankind.

The first punctuation mark was a triangular symbol pressed into clay somewhere in Mesopotamia. Spaces between words were unknown for millennia, until a group of Irish monks pioneered them in the eighth century. Across ages and cultures, amid technological revolutions and radical changes in communication, these dots and dashes have reshaped the societies that created them. From the papyruses of the ancient world to our sprawling internet ecosystem, one thing has remained constant: Punctuation is powerful. These tiny marks can move markets, shift elections, topple political systems, and decide the fate of a precious human life on death row.

Weaving together anthropology, the history of writing, the philosophy of language, psychology, literature, and more, On the Mark masterfully proves that punctuation is at the heart of human communication.

Visit Florence Hazrat's website.

--Marshal Zeringue