The narrator of Patrick Parks’s surrealistic novel "Tucumcari" is a man who floats through memories and time, addressing ash-covered cities, the atom bomb, and his wife. Lean, direct prose anchors his feverish meanderings. Fantastical... Read More

Modern culture has some ’splaining to do. Climbing out of the Renaissance/Elizabethan age through to the late eighteenth century, an increasingly enlightened society emerged into the industrial wonders of the nineteenth century and... Read More

"The Two-Plate Solution" is a molten broth of comic, nonstop action from page one. The American TV show Natural Dish-aster is shooting in Israel, and producer Sara Sinek, a Special Forces veteran with a secret about her time embedded... Read More

A spirited trio of kid sleuths undertake a classic treasure hunt in J. I. Wagner’s "Legend of the Star Runner". Taking its inspiration from video games and cloak-and-dagger mysteries, this story for middle-grade readers is a visual... Read More

“There is nothing like reading your own police file to make you wonder who you really are,” Katherine Verdery reflects in her true-life, anthropological whodunit. "My Life as a Spy" describes Verdery’s ethnographic fieldwork in... Read More

Sloot Peril, a modest accountant who is “only as superstitious as required by law,” is an unlikely hero in the humorous fantasy "Peril in the Old Country". With a lyrical flair that evokes P. G. Wodehouse, Peril is funny and fun.... Read More

In Jodi Taylor’s An Argumentation of Historians, the eccentric historians of St. Mary’s return for another, more individually focused time-travel adventure. Dr. Lucy Maxwell—affectionately called Max—returns from 1536 after an... Read More

Inspired by the stories of refugees, "Alpha" is a moving and important account of the risks and hardships braved by illegal immigrants seeking a better life. A man’s extraordinary efforts to reunite with his family are the basis of... Read More