Ruby Spencer has two missions: She works to free men who are wrongfully incarcerated and facing the death penalty, and she searches for missing women. Mitchell Brown is the latest in a long line of death row clients, some of whom she has saved, many of whom she has not. In the small town of […]
She calls herself Kikiloa, but she’s better known as Mitochondrial Eve: the woman from whom all people now living are descended. Born in “the deep night of Africa’s great rift valley” some 200,000 years ago, she was betrayed by her father, impregnated, and enslaved. In the present day, we find her living in San Francisco, […]
The book’s novelistic terrain will be all too familiar to anyone who grew up in a small town in the Southern U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s. Readers first meet Liam, the youngest of the four Menschen kids. Their mother, Vivian, was a Marlowe, a firmly rooted family whose members were considered local gentry. They […]
The novel opens with narrator Jessica Morton, a junior at Helshire College and a member of an age-old crime family, taking Peter, her younger cousin and fellow Helshire student, on a climb—no, not the recreational kind. It’s actually a midnight trek up the school’s tallest building, from which Jessica ensures, at Grandmother’s orders, that Peter […]
Wemlinger prefaces his fictional story with true accounts from his time as an Army captain. He watched dozens of women face discrimination, harassment, and abuse at the hands of the countless men who surrounded them; now, 50 years later, this treatment continues. The young woman in question is 22-year-old Sergeant Rebecca Farnsworth, who works on […]
Fifteen years past college, Emily finds herself horribly unsatisfied. She’s on maternity leave from her ho-hum job, recovering slowly from a difficult childbirth, and feeling increasingly isolated from her husband and friends. She remembers her college roommate, Daisy, as her one true soul mate but, unfortunately, the women lost touch after freshman year, when Daisy […]
Sofia Mendoza injures her sister (after accidentally-on-purpose tripping her), so her father sends her to Forestjaw to reflect on her behavior. Things get off to a weird start: Monarch, Forestjaw’s leader and seemingly only real adult, greets the campers (or “candidates,” as she calls them) with a terrifying mechanical vulture on her shoulder before confiscating […]
“Ruth and Nino”—as Rovin Murphy refers to Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia—both loved many of the same things, from the law to travel, food, and opera. “But when they disagreed…they REALLY disagreed.” In a perspicuous study that will resonate with readers accustomed to seeing even the most casual dialogues in public […]
Findley, professor of History at Ohio State and author of The Turks in World History (2004), writes that the Ottoman Empire lasted six centuries under a single dynasty because Islam permits a man to have four wives, and the children of concubines are easily legitimized. With so many male heirs, until around 1600, it was […]
The 17 tales herein feature an array of horrors. Some are blatantly sinister, like a serial killer who’s more than she appears to be; others seem innocuous but have the potential to become outright menaces, like an apparatus for keeping pests out of a garden. In still other instances, the true horror doesn’t reveal itself […]