James Polchin’s "Indecent Advances" extracts more than its title from true-crime press clippings dating back to the 1920s, examining both what appeared in print and what was sanitized or excluded. “Indecent advances” was just one... Read More

In Varley O’Connor’s historical novel "The Welsh Fasting Girl", Sarah Jacob is a humdrum farm girl. When she stops eating in the 1860s, she swiftly gains notoriety throughout the United Kingdom and United States, becoming the... Read More

Allen Morris Jones’s "Sweeney on the Rocks" is a quick-witted, dark-humored crime novel whose clever plot twists and morbid sarcasm never let up. Its characters, relationships, and mob-versus-the-law moralities are excavated to an... Read More

Decades after twentieth-century pharmaceuticals, urbanization, and television put traveling medicine shows out of business, Stephanie Allen’s "Tonic and Balm" resurrects one worthy of giving prescription drugs, industrialization, and... Read More

Mia Couto’s Rain and Other Stories is reminiscent of centuries-old legends told and retold from one generation to the next. They read like stories designed to preserve a culture’s history, traditions, and way of life. These stories,... Read More

Chuck Caruso’s "The Meaning of Blood" promises a descent into a netherworld of blood and perversity, and it delivers on this as well as something even more heinous: the idea that ordinary people crave blood and perversity just as much... Read More

Maureen Aitken’s "The Patron Saint of Lost Girls" pretends to be a collection of short stories but is not. Instead, advantages of both short-story and novel formats are fused into a mutation which is neither. By the time this... Read More

The rush of a whodunit pales next to Barbara Barrow’s what’ve-they-done-and-why, "The Quelling". The novel instantly achieves page-turner status through vexing questions. Why are two youngsters being raised by television nature... Read More