Eda Shaw is inching along a wooden beam above a full playhouse, knees shaking, trying not to think about what happens to the people below if she falls. She is following a small black mouse. When she reaches the gallery roof the mouse has become a man, and he has secured them the best seats […]
Halfway through Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck, a man called Hazel, who is kind and not clever, sits in the Monterey jail beside a vagrant fortune teller and asks what he insists is only a hypothetical question. Suppose a man is in trouble. Suppose there is one way out and he cannot take it himself. […]
The Betrayal of Cora Wexford by Bethany Joy Lenz on October 20, 2026 Genres: Fiction / Mystery & Detective / Historical, Fiction / Romance / Suspense, Fiction / Thrillers / Psychological Pages: 240 Format: ARC Buy on Amazon Goodreads 1880s London. Cora Wexford is alone at thirty-eight, with secrets that drove her to flee life […]
Rosa Williams watches her husband leave the house on her phone. The police have asked to see the doorbell footage, so she scrolls back past her own return from an early yoga class to the clip of Daniel at 6.50, pulling the door behind him, patting a pocket for his keys, glancing once up at […]
An emotionally charged yet forensic audit of inherited dysfunction and one man’s fight to preserve his truth “I realized that in my family, an intimate thought was not a confidence; it was a target.” Decades before David V. Gobel began auditing his family’s betrayals, he learned how to become a vault. In his deeply affecting […]
A gripping novel of fate, luck and choice set in the Vietnam War and its aftermath John Zaiss’s ambitious novel, A Confeluence of Fates, is a terrifically rewarding historical read, depicting the experiences of a soldier and a Vietnamese orphan with equal sympathy. With the spare efficacy of a literary thriller, A Confluence of Fates […]
Midway through The Red Pony by John Steinbeck, an old man comes up the ranch road one afternoon and announces to a ten-year-old that this is a return: there was a house on this land once, and it is where his life began. The boy has no idea what to do with that and runs […]
On Christmas Eve, with deep snow over New York and every flight to San Francisco cancelled, a novelist stranded alone in his Greenpoint apartment receives a five-dollar payment from the critic who destroyed his career. The memo suggests it is for eggnog for one. He sends five dollars back with a joke about skating alone. […]
The woman at the end of the counter has her hood up and has not said a word. Ellie, soaked through after crashing her car on a back road in a thunderstorm, fakes a stumble just to make her turn around, and finds the face she glimpsed in her headlights moments before impact. The bartender […]
A young man lies sedated on a psychiatrist’s couch in Merit, and his doctor talks him gently down into sleep. Then something begins to rise out of the patient’s chest, scaled and patterned, and the office fills with a darkness that has no business being there. When Dr Gabriel Gray shakes the young man awake, […]