The Texas-Mexico border makes for a thrilling, violent setting for this gritty novel of drug cartels, police dedication, and family. If you live in the American Southwest,... Read More

Modern English-language mysteries seem to rely on two elements to satisfy readers again and again: a plotline wavering between original and predictable, and a dependably similar... Read More

One half of Cathi Unsworth’s latest novel, Bad Penny Blues, chronicles the ascent to success for young artists Stella and husband Toby. The other half of the story,... Read More

While the summer heat casts a stifling spell over Buenos Aires, Juan Maria Brausen loses his mind. He wavers between his usual daily life, which includes a fraught relationship... Read More

"The Last Supper" is, happily, one of the growing number of novels translated into English and published in the US. The Polish novelist Pawel Huelle has given us a wonderfully... Read More

Like the Ripley stories of Patricia Highsmith, some fiction invites us to inhabit the mind of an amoral sociopath. "Pariah", Dave Zeltzerman’s latest crime novel, asks us to... Read More

For some men, the path from boyhood to adulthood is only as difficult as learning how to shave. For the protagonist of Jonathan Trigell’s novel, "Boy A", winner of the John... Read More

A book written seventy years ago has just been translated into English, giving wider audience to Argentinean author Roberto Arlt’s work. The Seven Madmen is set in Buenos... Read More

Step aside Kurt Vonnegut here comes Don Taylor! Mr. Taylor puts his pile of dirty laundry together to be aired in front of all in this unsettling, sardonic book of hard-hitting... Read More

"No Pockets in a Shroud" and three other titles (They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye and I Should Have Stayed Home) in the Serpent’s Tail Midnight Classics... Read More

“Porn is sex without secrecy…but its users are secret,” anthropologist Bernard Arcand maintains. With this hushed realism fueling British author O’Toole’s take on... Read More