In the entertaining middle grade mystery novel An Encrypted Clue, teamwork, brainwork, and generosity of spirit are fundamental to the solutions of more than just math problems. In David Cole’s chapter book An Encrypted Clue, a group... Read More

Ethan Rutherford’s "Farthest South" is a spooky, sweet, wondrous short story collection. Rutherford’s stories possess undeniable darkness, and his collection maintains suspense throughout. But the thread that connects the stories is... Read More

Historian Gordon H. Shufelt’s true crime book recounts the 1875 murder of a Black man by a white policeman. While racial police brutality is still not uncommon, the grim distinction surrounding Daniel Brown’s death is that, in late... Read More

In Henry Hoke’s novel "The Groundhog Forever", characters search for answers to questions both trivial and existential. Two film students in early twenty-first-century Manhattan find themselves trapped in a time loop, repeating the... Read More

In Elvira Navarro’s story collection "Rabbit Island", dreams and reality blur. The stories are surreal and disorienting, exploring dark and strange corners of the mind. Of the collection’s eleven stories, the first fits in a... Read More

The story of how the Jesuits began usually focuses on Ignatius of Loyola and Francis Xavier, but Jon Sweeney’s fascinating biography adds a third name: Peter Faber. Faber was born in 1506 and grew up in a French hamlet as the child of... Read More

The seven mini-biographies of Diana Gruver’s "Companions in the Darkness" cover historical Christians, from Martin Luther to Martin Luther King, Jr., who wrestled with their mental health. Gruver’s depression was diagnosed during her... Read More

Garments as holy relics, crime scene evidence, and archives that signal absent bodies: in Laura Levitt’s eloquent, moving, meditative book "The Objects That Remain", things stand in for human witnesses to trauma. Years after being... Read More