Sometimes, you need a bit of soothing.

I was talking to a friend this week, and she said her husband was reading Stephen Graham Jones’ latest book, “The Buffalo Hunter Hunter,” and I told her that when I’d first started listening to the audiobook of Jones’s “The Only Good Indians,” I hadn’t known it was a horror novel.

A ...Read more

“I’m not a saint, William,” says Hannah, the main character in “The Art of a Lie.” She‘s not kidding.

Laura Shepherd-Robinson, whose last book was a twisty bit of historical fun called “The Square of Sevens,” returns to the bad behavior of another era in “The Art of a Lie,” which is alternately narrated by two characters who...Read more

“Dear Miss Lake,” the fourth and final book in the series begun by “Dear Mrs. Bird,” suggests that it was time to wrap things up.

It’s been a charming ride with Emmy Lake. As AJ Pearce’s “Dear Mrs. Bird” opened, it was World War II in London. Adventure-seeking Lake joined Woman’s Friend, a magazine that balanced news for ...Read more

Kashana Cauley, whose previous novel was the acclaimed “The Survivalists,” is the author of the just-published, “The Payback.”

Cauley has written for TV shows such as “The Great North,” HBO’s “Pod Save America” and “The Daily Show with Trevor Noah,” and has been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New ...Read more

LOS ANGELES — "The Carpool Detectives," a true crime mystery that reads like a novel, begins in the liminal moment before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the country and concludes on an upbeat note two and a half years later: Four L.A. moms with no law enforcement training have solved an icy cold case and moved on to their next, buoyed by ...Read more

“A Dog in Georgia” is Lauren Grodstein’s sixth novel under her own name, following the breakout success of “We Must Not Think of Ourselves,” a World War II novel set in Warsaw. The current narrative is also set in Eastern Europe — it’s that Georgia — but the history that affects the plot is much more recent: 2023’s wave of ...Read more

Here are the bestsellers for the week that ended Saturday, Aug. 2, compiled from data from independent and chain bookstores, book wholesalers and independent distributors nationwide, powered by Circana BookScan © 2025 Circana.

(Reprinted from Publishers Weekly, published by PWxyz LLC. © 2025, PWxyz LLC.)

HARDCOVER FICTION

1. "Atmosphere: A ...Read more

Growing up in Studio City, Daphne Woolsoncroft wanted to be one of two things: a detective or an author.

And you could argue she’s done both: As co-host of the true crime podcast “Going West,” which just celebrated its 500-episode milestone in May, she’s been doing plenty of detective work, albeit in more of an armchair-style capacity. ...Read more

1. Someone helped put murderers behind bars, solved the mystery of why jets kept crashing and contributed mightily to the rebound of the nearly-extinct whooping crane. But you probably haven’t heard of this person. One guess why.

2. Yup, she’s a woman.

3. Roxie Laybourne is the fascinating subject of magazine journalist Chris Sweeney’s �...Read more

You think books have covered everything there is to write about World War II skullduggery, and then you stumble upon the book about how spies used Monopoly to pull the wool over Nazis’ eyes.

The endlessly popular and sometimes just plain endless game figured into the war in several ways, according to “Monopoly X,” by game designer and ...Read more

In light of recent tensions between India and Pakistan, two newly reissued novels from the subcontinent chillingly resonate, decades after their original publication.

Taking distinct narrative approaches, “Tamas” (1973) by Bhisham Sahni and “The Women’s Courtyard” (1962) by Khadija Mastur revisit the messy emergence of the two ...Read more

A family of five happily embarks on a trip to a sporting event as “Culpability” opens. The vibe of fun and innocence lasts for precisely four pages.

That’s when their self-driving automobile, with teenager Charlie Cassidy-Shaw in the pilot seat, smashes into a car, killing its two elderly occupants and injuring all of the Cassidy-Shaws. ...Read more

MINNEAPOLIS -- I cut myself shaving right before I met Mary E. Roach. No big deal, but it’s worth mentioning because it’s so on-brand: I lost track of the number of times a character in her “We Are the Match” holds a knife to another character’s throat.

It’s a violent book. In the recent past, Paris is bent on avenging a tragedy she...Read more

Here are the bestsellers for the week that ended Saturday, July 26, compiled from data from independent and chain bookstores, book wholesalers and independent distributors nationwide, powered by Circana BookScan © 2025 Circana.

(Reprinted from Publishers Weekly, published by PWxyz LLC. © 2025, PWxyz LLC.)

HARDCOVER FICTION

1. "Not Quite ...Read more

You’ve heard of folks who are so close that they finish each other’s sentences? Meet the Duluth, Minnesota, writers who even speak collaboratively.

“We realized pretty quickly my strengths are in code and plot — ” began Andy Bennett, on a phone call last month.

“— and I’m definitely more character-driven. I was always looking ...Read more

An old literary friend — Sherlock Holmes — is back in August. Perhaps you’d like him to join you in an air-conditioned setting?

Holmes returns to solving cases in Nicholas Meyer’s “Sherlock Holmes and the Real Thing,” the latest in his series of supposedly newly discovered adventures of the great detective. But if you’re looking ...Read more

You might call Ivy Pochoda the bard of bad women, an auteur of feminine fierceness.

For proof, look no further than the bestselling, LA Times Book Prize-winning “Sing Her Down,” her stunning 2023 noir thriller about two women prisoners. After you read it, you might never see a fork again without thinking of a bloody weapon.

Pochoda has ...Read more