Category: Book Reviews

A mysterious dagger unlocks a world of ghosts and secret societies for a grieving young woman in this gripping paranormal fantasy. Grief weighs heavy on Gabbie Kress, but that doesn’t stop the world from carrying on. It’s been almost a year since Gabbie’s mother was hit by a car. A year of Gabbie just getting […]

Is confession enough if justice has failed? Noah Christopher understands that a good thriller requires more than inventive methods of dispatching victims. The Confessor succeeds not because of the body count but because it asks an unsettling question: What happens when the killer’s moral reasoning is just as compelling as the detective’s determination to stop […]

A detective comes to the rehabilitation unit a month after the shooting. He does not want to be there any more than the patient’s mother wants him there. He pulls a chair up beside a young woman in a wheelchair, takes out a notebook and a pen, and asks what she can tell him about […]

Terror stalks the pages of this arctic ecological horror novel. When Leandro Grass, an affluent if mysterious client, approaches Mark Steiner and Rob Granek about a trek to the North Pole, they should be delighted. As business partners and extreme guides, they have dreamed of an expedition to Antarctica for years. The cash Grass is […]

A clever sci-fi thriller that balances humor, suspense, and scientific curiosity while exploring the ethical dilemmas that emerge when extraordinary power falls into ordinary hands Schrödinger’s Glass starts with a bang: a catastrophic accident at the Heisenberg Accelerator and Research Center (HARC). When a failed experiment sends an unknown energy wave across the Chicago area, […]

A clear-eyed coming-of-age novel about how families use stories to disperse blame, hide harm, and keep one another alive “The day you were born was the worst day of my life,” JP’s older sister, Anna, tells him. A heavy legacy to hand to a thirteen-year-old. According to Griffin family mythology, JP’s birth set off a […]

Hitty Atkins sells herbs at the Woodhaven market, rain or shine, from one of the emptier tables. She is old, nearly toothless, a widow whose only child drowned after other boys pushed him in. She grows the best produce in the settlement and gets the least custom for it, because the town has decided she […]

There is a small dark room inside the Art Institute of Chicago: sixteen wooden columns, four illuminated Japanese screens, one bench. Clare DeTamble has been going there almost daily for three years because it is the only place in the city where she can weep without being observed. She is not waiting for anything. Her […]

Before a word of the story, there is a dedication naming seven men: Michael Collins, Dick Gordon, Jack Swigert, Stu Roosa, Al Worden, Ken Mattingly, Ron Evans. Apollo command module pilots. They flew a quarter of a million miles, parked in lunar orbit, and waited alone while two colleagues climbed down a ladder into history. […]