In Antoine Laurain’s acerbic cozy mystery The Readers’ Room, a debut novel makes waves among the Paris literati––and with two homicide detectives. Publishing darling Violaine Lepage is much admired for her impeccable taste and... Read More

Hard-boiled horror is leavened with witty dialogue and humor in S. Craig Zahler’s "Forbidden Surgeries of the Hideous Dr. Divinus". The story begins with an eerie episode in which a homeless man is drugged and taken to a hidden lab for... Read More

Estranged siblings deal with their dying father, and each other, in Charles Lambert’s novel "Prodigal". Jeremy and Rachel have never been close. Rachel, always their father’s favorite, resents her mother and brother for abandoning... Read More

"The Agent" is an understated mystery about a scam whose perpetrators are motivated by much more than greed. A trio of con artists converges on their latest mark in Marsha Roberts’s mystery novel, "The Agent". Victoria’s business... Read More

In Mathew New’s absurdist graphic novel, a teenage boy and his talking duck seek out adventure in an attempt to prove the boy’s worth as an explorer. Billy, a part-time janitor, is really an explorer. With Barrace, a duck who is also... Read More

Set in post-WWII England, Janet Todd’s grim mother-daughter novel, Don’t You Know There’s a War On?, is about boundaries, love, manipulation, and patriotism. Joan’s life was forever changed by the war and by the birth of her... Read More

Ryad Girod’s haunting novel, Mansour’s Eyes, is threaded with Middle Eastern cultural and geopolitical sagas. Hussein was an anguished observer on the day his friend, Mansour, was led through the streets and decapitated in the main... Read More

Though its circumstances are harsh, "Central City" is a thriller with surprising heart. In Indy Perro’s noir thriller "Central City", the mounting death count of so-called “undesirables” overshadows gang violence as cops and... Read More