Indice dei contenuti per Vol. 118, No. 17, 5/1/22 in Booklist

Journalism & Publishing Dinner for One: How Cooking in Paris Saved Me. By Sutanya Dacres. June 2022. 320p. Park Row, $27.99 (9780778333036). 070. In the midst of a midtwenties slump, debut author Dacres found her life shifting dramatically when she happened to meet a Frenchman in a Soho bar. The two started a long-distance romance and, after writing love letters to each other for months, Dacres went to Paris to be with her crush in person. Love ignited, Dacres quickly moved to Paris and the two eventually married. Three years in, though, the romance was over, with both Dacres and her husband unhappy and pretending to want to be in the life they built together. Their breakup calls into question everything that Dacres thought she knew, but it’s during the…

The best crime novels reviewed in Booklist from May 1, 2021, through April 15, 2022, breathe new life into some genre staples—the extended chase story and the psychosexual thriller, for example—while confronting contemporary social and racial issues and delivering a remarkable range of fully fleshed characters. —Bill Ott Billy Summers. By Stephen King. 2021. Scribner $30 (9781982173616). In this take on the one-last-job trope, King has multiple elements in play—a thriller, two coming-of-age stories, and a road novel—and he knits them together beautifully, never missing a stitch. City on Fire. By Don Winslow. 2021. Morrow, $28.99 (9780062851192). This immersive first volume in a trilogy, set in 1986 Providence, Rhode Island, combines a gang war with a passionate family drama centered on conflicted Irish Mob leader Danny Ryan. Dream Girl. By…

Older Readers The British Are Coming: (Young Readers Edition). By Rick Atkinson. June 2022. 208p. illus. Holt/Godwin, $19.99 (9781250800589). Gr. 6–9. 973.3. That 45 tons of tea were thrown overboard during the Boston Tea Party is just one of the fascinating details that brings history alive in this extraordinary survey of the Revolutionary War, which covers from the Battle of Lexington and Concord in 1774 to the Battle of Princeton in 1777. Pulitzer Prize–winning Atkinson (Battle of the Bulge, 2016) writes with beauty and insight in this young-readers’ adaptation of his adult, best-selling history. Deeply researched, the book constantly surprises in the telling of its story. For example, King George’s reaction to the news of the rebellion is “I am much hurt”; Louis XVI of France is “indecisive and a…

The big fall books are on their way, but don’t miss the high-profile titles still to come this summer from best-selling, award-winning authors. —Sarah Hunter Chester Keene Cracks the Code. By Kekla Magoon. Random/Wendy Lamb, $16.99 (9781524715991). Gr. 3–7. July. In this puzzle-driven mystery by award-winning Magoon, routine-loving Chester teams up with slightly chaotic Skye to solve a series of cryptic clues. City of Magic. By Avi. Scholastic, $17.99 (9780545321976). Gr. 3–6. June. In this companion to Midnight Magic and Murder at Midnight, Magnus the Magician and Fabrizio are on the hunt for a groundbreaking method for bookkeeping, and they’re not the only ones. The Door of No Return. By Kwame Alexander. Little, Brown, $17.99 (9780316441865). Gr. 5–10. Sept. Expect a long hold list for this forthcoming title from best-selling…

Body snatching, serial killers, dangerous secrets, and—French bread? There’s a mystery afoot! Ten excellent ones, actually, all reviewed in Booklist between May 1, 2021, and April 15, 2022. The Corpse Queen. By Heather M. Herrman. 2021. Putnam, $18.99 (9781984816702). Gr. 9–12. In 1850s Philadelphia, Molly Green endeavors to track down the man behind a series of brutal murders while also working for her aunt as a resurrection woman. Part mystery, part thriller, and part family discovery, this historical spine-tingler is a treat. Drew Leclair Gets a Clue. By Katryn Bury. 2022. Clarion, $16.99 (9780358639602). Gr. 5–8. Seventh-grader Drew is a true-crime buff, and, as such, she spends time observing and profiling her fellow classmates. But when her mom runs off, Drew wonders how she could’ve missed all the signs. The…

Manifesto: On Never Giving Up. By Bernardine Evaristo. Read by the author. 2022. 6. Blackstone, DD, $15.26 (9798200912261). Growing up as mixed-race children in London during the 1970s, Evaristo and her seven brothers and sisters often faced overt racism. While it would have been safer to blend in, she was encouraged by her white English mother and Nigerian father to dare to be unconventional. Years of fighting to get into theater schools, managing a theater that featured Black women, and writing of her experiences has led to a full, successful life. Evaristo reads her fascinating memoir with a strong actor’s voice and a distinct English accent. She vividly recalls relationships that formed her thinking and writing from tales of home to school days to British theater in the ‘80s. Particularly…

Music is everywhere in crime fiction, sometimes at the center of the story but most often providing the soundtrack for sleuths whose playlists help keep them sane amid the blood splatter. Here’s a list of music-loving sleuths organized by their preferred sounds. Classical Alexia Gordon’s Gethsemane Brown: In Death in D Minor, the first in this charming cozy series, Black classical musician Gethsemane Brown moves to Ireland and secures lodging in a cottage formerly owned by her favorite composer. There’s a hitch: the composer’s ghost is in residence and needs Gethsemane’s help to clear him of a decades-old murder. Great fun for paranormal fans who enjoy the classics. Barbara Paul’s Enrico Caruso: Only two of the titles in Paul’s three-book Opera Mystery series star the great tenor Caruso, but we’ll…

Summer’s end and fall will bring some suspense, a few big memoirs and one huge biography, and the return of beloved characters, series, and authors. Daisy Darker. By Alice Feeney. Flatiron, $28.99 (9781250843937). Aug. A family gathers to celebrate Nana’s 80th birthday, but at the stroke of midnight, she’s found dead, and then another family member dies, then another in this nod to Agatha Christie from a rising-star thriller writer. Daughters of the New Year. By E. M. Tran. Hanover Square, $27.99 (9781335429230). Oct. This debut, billed as Homegoing meets The Immortalists, traces the lives of five generations of Vietnamese women, from present-day New Orleans to twentieth-century Saigon, revealing long-buried secrets and thwarted expectations. Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing. By Matthew Perry. Flatiron, $29.99 (9781250866448). Nov. In his…

The Angel of Rome and Other Stories. By Jess Walter. June 2022. 288p. Harper, $27.99 (9780062868114). Closely following his historical novel, The Cold Millions (2020), Walter’s second shortstory collection features 12 sparkling, neatly varied pieces that range from Europe to the small towns of rural Washington State, and from the 1970s up to the present. The rambunctious title story shows Walter at his best, as his naive hero—a college student and aspiring writer from Nebraska adrift in Rome in the early ’90s—falls in by chance with a beautiful Italian actress and her boisterous American costar. Walter also reveals a gift for darker, more surreal humor, as in “Town & Country,” in which the narrator deals with the consequences of his father’s dementia, as he places him into a “manufactured Idaho…

This year’s top-10 crime fiction debuts, reviewed in Booklist over the last year, showcase domestic thrillers—perhaps today’s hottest subgenre—along with some noir and several gripping historical mysteries. —Bill Ott The Bangalore Detectives Club. By Harina Nagendra. 2022. Pegasus, $26.95 (9781639361601). Set in colonial India in 1921, this first in a projected series makes effective use of the oppressive British rule of the time to highlight the ingenuity and bravery of a young woman determined to solve a murder. Don’t Know Tough. By Eli Cranor. 2022. Soho, $27.95 (9781641293457). Driven by the crackle of Cranor’s electric prose, this hard-edged but deeply moving noir, set in the world of high-school football, pits a star running back against an uncompromising world looking for its pound of flesh. The Favor. By Nora Murphy. 2022. Minotaur,…

A body on an elevator? A modern Greek tragedy? A group hiding from white supremacists at Monticello? These top ten crime audiobooks, reviewed from April 15, 2021, to April 15, 2022 showcase stellar narrators and nailbiting suspense. —Candice Smith The Cage. By Bonnie Kistler. Read by Piper Goodeve and Chris Andrew Ciulla. 2022. 10.5hr. HarperAudio, DD (9780063089198). Two women step into an elevator, but when the doors open, only one is alive. A twisted plot and dramatic dual narration keep the tension high. Fan Fiction: A Mem-Noir; Inspired by True Events. By Brent Spiner. Read by Brent Spiner and others. 2021. 7hr. Macmillan, DD (9781250821393). Spiner, the android Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation, outwits a stalker in this hilarious thriller read by the author and full cast of…

In 2018, Melissa Albert arrived with The Hazel Wood, an auspicious debut that handed readers a delicately cracked looking glass, giving jagged edges to the fairy tales of our collective unconscious. Albert three times lured us into the Hinterland, enchanting fans with a witches’ brew of eerie urban fantasy, complex mother-daughter dynamics, and needle-tipped prose—ambitiously honing her craft along the way. Now, with Our Crooked Hearts, her first foray outside the Hazel Wood, she employs familiar themes and techniques, but at a new level of mastery, producing a standalone novel so precise and enthralling that the only possible explanation is that Albert herself is a witch. This time around, the brew features Ivy, a white 17-year-old whose suburban life is corrupted by a series of unsettling events: a naked young…

The Last Baron: The Paris Kidnapping That Brought Down an Empire. By Tom Sancton. Read by Arthur Morey. 2022. 9.5hr. Books on Tape, DD, $76 (9780593510070). Sancton (Death of a Princess, 2017) recounts the downfall of Empain, the industrial giant founded in 1881 by Édouard Empain. His company eventually helped to build the Paris Metro and developed major infrastructure projects in Egypt, Spain, Turkey, Congo, and China, along with the post-WWII construction of nuclear-power plants throughout France. Empain’s famously profligate grandson, “Wado” Empain, might still have been able to manage the company’s success well into the twenty-first century were it not for his notorious 1978 kidnapping. As Sancton details, it was less the kidnapping itself than it was the oddly cool reception Wado, once freed, received from both his family…