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Detective Inspector William Brighton of Scotland Yard gets a possible break in his latest case when the person who allegedly kidnapped a young girl calls Brighton and asks to meet. This brings him to Zaliel a wizard who demands to know where Brighton’s estranged mother the author Anna Brighton is located. Brighton has no idea nor does he quite believe in Zaliel’s magic despite the wizard bringing some bronze statues to life. But there is an indisputable link to Brighton’s mother since Zaliel is a character’s name in Anna’s popular book series The Magical Wooded World. In the meantime the very real wizard who still wants Anna’s location abducts some other girls and Brighton’s own daughter goes missing. An interrogation leads the DI to a forested spot where he stumbles onto a world (not unlike the one Anna has written about) populated by fairies elves a pegasus and other fantastical creatures. In this place Brighton encounters some gun-toting goblins and the hefty explosive they’ve stolen. Howis deftly blends a fantasy narrative with a police procedural; even when the supernatural elements take center stage in the latter half the story remains grounded in the protagonist’s investigative work. (The kidnapping case for example involves infamous gangster Sid Fields who raises the stakes for Brighton by threatening the DI’s family.) Both the heroes and villains wield magic (like telepathy) as well as more familiar weapons such as firearms. Brighton is an appealing lead; he has the earmarks of a world-weary law enforcer who’s occasionally roughed up (“What happened to your face?” his wife asks at one point) but is still a devoted family man. Numerous mythical beings are introduced in the novel—a standout is Eddie a “tall stocky female” with pointy ears. This entry kicks off a series with the ending unquestionably setting the stage for a sequel.
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In this anthology of 11 tales ranging from 5 to 15 pages each Franz explores the lives of ordinary people who reside in and around Biloxi. They struggle with personal weaknesses unresolved tragedies and the persistent sense of longing that comes from the fact that Biloxi is home to the world’s “longest man-made beach” with all that this implies about a greater more natural world somewhere beyond the town limits. In “Tchoutacabouffa (Life on a River)” for instance a woman named Ashley Rose Jackson has tensely and carefully planned an escape for herself and her two daughters from their abusive father. She promises them that their new life will be better. “We’re going to a real ocean” she tells them. “They’ve got a boardwalk and everything.” Likewise in “A Good Home” set during the Covid-19 pandemic Emily and Ryan live in a shabby two-bedroom house off Interstate 10. Ryan’s a recovering addict in a methadone treatment program and he’s floored when Emily tells him she’s pregnant. As they make their grim plans Emily recalls an old dream: “The panes trembled in their white wooden grid from a big rig out on I-10 which she’d heard could take you all the way to the Pacific Ocean. To cold clean water a real ocean a real beach.” All of these stories are markedly sometimes startlingly spare which underscores Franz’s deft ability to convey whole lives and worlds with minimal very controlled brushstrokes. In “Broadwater” the older brother of a young man named Tyler who vanished 11 years ago spends the whole story reflecting on the events that led to his brother’s murder now a cold case. (“Hard to believe” he thinks at one point “my little brother would be thirty years old today.”) Rather than providing readers with an expected sense of closure Franz ends the tale with the brother reflecting “My best guess life’s a one-shot deal. Gone is gone.” This clipped almost brutal tone runs throughout most of these stories and makes them truly memorable.
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When a baby is born the child and family exist in the moment together. No cellphones ring and no pictures are taken—the family is fully unplugged and present with each other. As friends gather they spend time together unplugged as well. The narrative continues observing that unplugged babies learn words they hear around them and have adventures by interacting with the physical world. Bedtime is unplugged for better dreams: “Unplugged moon and stars above. / Unplugged time with you is love.” Hutton’s repetition of unplugged emphasizes the digital-free environment especially for the young lap learners who will hear it over and over in rereads. The rhythms scan well throughout with stanzas that limit the vocabulary used to keep the text and rhymes concise. Brown’s gentle digital illustrations have a watercolor feel and use red or blue outlines rather than black to give the shapes soft edges. Several babies are introduced throughout giving a sense of universality across diverse families. Brown also cleverly acknowledges that technology is present—just not in the child’s life. On the front and back cover as the central families take the subway cellphone users are around them; when friends visit one parent keeps a phone face-down on her knee. The device is there not centered but ignored.
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In his opening story “Come as You Are” the author introduces readers to an early-’90s teen named Toby who finds rock idol Kurt Cobain hiding in the back of his car. They end up jamming together and eating pizza with Toby’s dad who promptly asks Cobain about his thoughts regarding Mormonism—much to the discomfort of Toby who lied about the musician’s interest. Beneath the slapstick setup is the tension between secular culture and the tenets of Mormonism; the author develops this idea further in the story “Light Departure” which depicts a Mormon at the end of his mission who must come to terms with an African immigrant who comes out to him as gay. In “The Water Between Us” a young father flounders to find his footing and provide for his family in “the way we’d been taught and raised at church and at home” while in the moving story “The Righteous Road” two teenagers waver between activism and faith before ultimately choosing different paths. Stories like “Adam and Lilith. And Eve” and “Barry Dodson: The God Journals” demonstrate Shoemaker’s knack for satire spinning cosmically absurd setups into one deeply funny joke after another. (“It’s nice” the first woman in all of creation says evaluating the Garden of Eden like it was any suburban home. “But all the green’s like a little overwhelming. Don’t you think?”) Some stories notably “Parley Young: One Mormon Life” about a church elder who abuses his power feel rushed striving to tackle many ideas within a short amount of space but the author’s clever eye for detail and the prickly humor in the voices he brings to life consistently draw the reader back in. In stories like “In That Classroom” and the titular entry he shows his range focusing on specific emotionally charged and well-observed moments that crescendo to powerful revelations that are sure to connect with all readers Mormon or otherwise.
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As this odd slim work opens an unnamed narrator is contemplating the biscuit he’s preparing to eat. He gazes at its appearance runs over in his imagination its possible delights anticipates its joys in indulgent detail: “I studied it in the way one might study a photograph of a stranger’s face—not for beauty but for character” the narrator thinks. “It had none of the uniformity of factory-born pastries none of the glossy symmetrical perfection that exists to lure you at a glance.” Rather this biscuit is homemade and presumably one of a kind—something to be treasured before it’s consumed. The narrator spends a good number of pages cherishing it until his musings are interrupted by the sound of a phone ringing. It’s probably a telemarketer or some other such nuisance but does the narrator dare to distract his attention from the biscuit? “If ever a baked good could exude an air of quiet satisfaction this was it.” After finally eating the biscuit and finding it dry the narrator contemplates what might have happened if he’d drizzled honey on it as a moisturizer—but that would present dangers of its own if the honey dripped too fast he thinks. As the narrator moves on to the prospect of baking his own biscuit he begins talking to himself: “I feared the void” he says aloud. “But now…here I stand with something vaguely biscuit-shaped in hand.” As the story progresses in its weird nearly delusional level of rapt concentration Davis works hard to invest his readers in the mini-drama of a good biscuit: the anticipation the consumption and the baking. He cannily uses dramatic language (“I could see it: that perfect version of myself pulling the tray from the oven”) in order to color a story of “a biscuit worthy of folklore.” As such the storytelling is unquestionably passionate. Obviously readers’ results will vary depending on how excited they are by pastry since the biscuit is in essence the entire book.
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“It hurts to say it but we’re living in cruel and shallow times.” Thus in a nutshell this fluent catalogue of all the ways in which cruelty and shallowness have come to define our lives. Lewis a scholar at the University of Texas at Austin allows that his book is about a little of everything; among its topics are consumerism Elon Musk the attack on the Capitol Donald Trump homelessness idiocracy and well “sex robot brothels.” All are of a piece in explaining why he goes on to say America “often feels more like a woodchipper for the soul than a safe place to call home.” Blame it on “this strange red giant called Texas” where so many of these things get their start or at least accumulate force: Lewis finds plenty of good in its people yet little but toxicity in its politics. It all adds up to a “world of sick systems and faded dreams” governed by a president “American Caligula” for whom “big” is the ultimate superlative: “It’s what dullards confuse with greatness.” Committed to a vision in which we’re all just a bit “smaller sweeter slower lighter” the author looks to a few instances in which a bit of hope comes glimmering through the darkness: a blue-collar version of Burning Man the latter of which has become a corporatized plaything for the very wealthy; the inherent goodness of ordinary people who are “often quietly bitter about the way American life is structured by dislocation competition and corporate compunctions not to mention the unavoidable triad of race class and gender.” Lewis can turn a memorable phrase with apparent ease and these disparate pieces cohere nicely in the end. And more than recite all the manifold ills of America he offers at least something of a program of resistance: “Pivot from despair to action. Avoid violence but otherwise forget the high road.”
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In the pre-dawn moments of February 24 2022 Oceanheart and her husband were “jolted awake” by the sound of explosions in their city of Dnipro in eastern Ukraine. A call to her mother confirmed the author’s “worst fears”: War had begun. “War feels like a relic of history or a plot in a movie” Oceanheart writes and she and her family struggle with their new reality. While she had previously spent her days studying for a master’s degree in psychology identifying the best pediatricians for her daughters and watching Downton Abbey Oceanheart’s priorities abruptly shifted to fulfilling basic human needs—competing with neighbors for “scarce food supplies” and filling her bathtub with water for doing dishes and flushing the toilet. Initially Oceanheart invited her mother and younger brother to shelter in their two-bedroom apartment to escape the worsening danger in their hometown of Bakhmut. Eventually her father joined them but the strain of wartime cohabitation provoked a painful rift between the families. Later Oceanheart and her husband Artur make the difficult decision to move to the United States where they can stay for two years under “humanitarian parole.” Although the author’s prose can feel overly formal at times and the dialogue can be somewhat stilted the memoir’s strength lies in its intimate domestic details. Rather than focusing on military movements or geopolitical explanations Oceanheart captures small moments: entertaining children in the dark during nightly blackouts meant to avoid becoming bombing targets and her daughters’ terror at firecrackers during their first Fourth of July celebration in North Carolina. Particularly affecting is her heartbreak at realizing that the war “had woven itself into the fabric of their childhood.”
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Sepúlveda presents this book (translated from Spanish by Denise Kripper) as a memoir written by someone identified as Ilse a woman raised and brutalized inside Colonia Dignidad the real-life Chilean cult and torture camp founded by the German Chilean minister Paul Schäfer. Ilse recounts her removal from Germany as a child and her transport to the colony where Schäfer and his accomplices dissolved family bonds and enforced obedience through forced labor surveillance confessions and physical and sexual torture. Sepúlveda renders daily life with exacting excruciating detail. Central to the account is the colony’s medical regime mostly overseen by Dr. Strätling a former Nazi doctor with a wooden leg. She drugged women and men forced gynecological procedures and carried out sexualized torture under the guise of treatment (“Dr. Strätling applied electricity to a part of my body I didn’t know existed”). Ilse recounts the relentless violations of her body and those of other women in a flat clinical register that offers no relief. The narrative tracks the colony’s deep complicity with Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship and its shifting relationship to the outside world including its role as a weapons manufacturer and a detention and torture site for the regime. The narrative ends with Schäfer’s arrest in 2005 when Ilse was 54. Only in the acknowledgments do readers fully grasp that this harrowing testimony is fictional framed by the author as a memoir. As an artistic project the book is devastating in its depiction of suffering but its power raises ethical questions—the degree to which it draws on specific historical testimonies is unclear from the brief acknowledgments risking a manipulation of readers’ trust and an appropriation of survivors’ authority. Comparisons with works such as Leila Guerriero’s The Call (2024) a rigorously reported portrait of torture survivor Silvia Labayru under Argentina’s military dictatorship are unavoidable and unsettling.
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These stories cover a wide array of experiences locations and characters all in Provincetown Massachusetts. One story about the Feast of Saint Bonaventure follows multiple different characters throughout the evening showing readers what the Feast means to each of them. Some characters have supernatural aspects; Luna the “Queen of Land’s End” is a trans woman who’s lived in Provincetown since the late 1800s who acts as kind of a guardian angel for locals but also for the town itself. Without her who would keep the tides in sync? Throughout the various players are funny and vibrant but sometimes they really do feel like fictional constructs than real people. They serve as representatives of a vibrant mix of communities but the stories sometimes read more like parables than complex portraits. Provincetown is the real focus and the tales are strongest when they talk directly about the locale; readers get to know its festivals its summer routines its struggles during the offseason and they learn something about its past and how climate change encroaches on its future. López takes a great care to represent Provincetown in all its diversity; the majority of his attention is focused on cis gay men but there are stories here about lesbians trans and nonbinary people and straight people too; their cultural backgrounds are also varied with special focus on the Latine community. In “Scenes From Commercial Street” the narration discusses how white Provincetown still is: “Mexicans and Jamaicans haul garbage mow lawns and sand floors but there is not a single person of color running an arts institution or major businesses.…Despite these realities people of color are part of Ptown and they find Commercial Street as intoxicating as everyone else.” This collection portrays that intoxication and these realities with passion and care.
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Playwright Okuni ranges through Shakespeare’s oeuvre for lesser-known snippets of dialogue which he reshapes into sonnet-like stanzas of 11 or 12 lines. The poems play very loosely on classic Shakespearean themes prominent among them being the travails and traps of (especially royal) power. “My Crown” features lines from Henry VI in which a furious Queen Margaret offers a paper crown to the pretender York before killing him and concludes with Falstaff’s jibe “and this cushion my crown” mocking all such foolish headgear and pretense. “Brutish” cites Richard II and Coriolanus on the insincere cant accretion of sycophants and henchmen and lack of integrity that attach themselves to power. “Proclamation” invokes various Henrys to skewer the theatricality and empty promises of demagogues. (“All the realm shall be in common. All things shall be in common. There shall be no money.”) “This is and is not” reprises Shakespeare’s fascination with false fronts and illusions while “How Like a Dream” explores his notion of life as a series of actors’ roles. Echoing Lear’s plaint—“Who is it that can tell me who I am?”—“This Abruption” ponders the confusion about identity and purpose that bedevils us. And the title poem—taken from a line accusing Coriolanus of shredding his oath as contemptuously as he would a ragged piece of cloth—warns of the indeterminacy and treachery of language and memory. (Okuni emphasizes this message by including versions of the poem in Arabic and Japanese repeating the English version verbatim two pages later.)
The writing in these poems is excellent since so much of it is cribbed from Shakespeare’s rich chewy dialogue as in “Beware My Follower” a lugubrious medley of lines mainly from Macbeth and Lear—“Croak not black angel I have no food”—on death hunger wounds and spookery. Okuni’s project is to arrange the lines to tease out—or at least obscurely hint at—patterns and cryptic meanings. But meaning is frequently a secondary concern to the sheer aural effect of Shakespeare’s verse; indeed “Kerelybonto” consists entirely of the nonsense language—“Throca movousus cargo cargo cargo”—that Shakespeare invented for All’s Well that Ends Well. Okuni’s arrangements emphasize the rhythm repetition and resonance in Shakespearean lines blenderized down in some cases to commonplace phrases and words. The surprising result is poetry whose hypnotic incantations supersede its sense giving it a high-modernist feel that brings to mind the work of Gertrude Stein as in the contradictory cadences on the enigma of the self in “I Am Hers I Am His.” (“I am hers. I am his. I am hurt. I am I. / I am in this. I am in this earthly world. / I am in this forest. I am in tune. I am left out. / I am light and heavy. I am like you they say. I am lost. / I am mad. I am meek and gentle. I am merry….I am not mad. I am not merry. / I am not of many words. I am not old. I am not sick.”) The Bard would have been impressed.
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When Callie aces her Briarwood entrance exam (thanks in part to having studied the science journal belonging to her great-grandfather Teodore Gartzia who worked with Nikola Tesla) her teacher accuses her of cheating and withholds her results from the contest. But when a personal invitation arrives from the camp director her summer takes an unexpected turn. Knowing her proud father will reject the much-needed scholarship Callie agrees to earn her way by working as an assistant mechanic helping to keep the steam-powered machines humming. Briarwood isn’t about typical summer camp activities like kayaking and crafts—it’s filled with mechanical marvels and science in which “inspiration and creativity combine in weird and wonderful ways to produce something unexpected.” As she navigates new friendships self-doubt and a missing-persons mystery Callie comes to realize that innovation depends on both intelligence and learning to trust and work with others. The camp setting is vividly imagined and bursts with energy. The prose is clear and brisk making even complex concepts accessible while the plot balances the thrill of discovery with reflections on belonging and confidence. Though one subplot feels underdeveloped the worldbuilding and emotional resonance make up for it. Readers will find themselves wanting to revisit Briarwood. Callie’s parents are immigrants from an unspecified country that’s “halfway around the world.”
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As a baby the protagonist is embraced by her grandmother (“her petals wrap around me and keep me safe”) who “teaches her to be strong like the branches of an ancient cedar tree.” As she learns to talk her grandfather (“like an ocean”) teaches her to be “courageous like a thunderous waterfall.” As she learns to walk her mother (“like a valley”) shows her how to be “gentle like a warm spring day” and instills in her an appreciation for the hills (“your relatives”) and the Earth (“our mother”). And when she begins to run her father (“like the sun”) teaches her to “dream big and shine like a brilliant rainbow.” As they sing to her the family emphasizes that her connection brings with it a duty to serve as a place keeper a guardian of the Earth. Littlebird (Oregon’s Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde) weaves together multiple themes; this is simultaneously a story of intergenerational bonds a tale of growing up and building self-confidence and an appreciation of our planet and its resources. Relying on daring colors that resemble those seen in nature and in powwow regalia Littlebird’s sweeping illustrations pair with invigorating text; soaring butterflies birds and bees crisscross the pages uniting the girl with the land.
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In this revealing and dishy memoir Rinna leads with intense family trauma describing the tragic losses of her beloved mother Lois from a stroke in 2021 as well as intimately detailing her father’s assisted suicide and her half-sister’s accidental overdose at age 21. Rinna attributes her Season 12 departure from Bravo’s Real Housewives of Beverly Hills to the immense grief and repressed anger she was processing while trying to film episodes for the series and keep her composure intact. Her on-camera appearances became rage-filled and volatile; she posted about them on social media and they collectively drove home the fact that her relationship with the Real Housewives franchise has always been complicated. Rinna’s juicy ordeals with Bravo form the simmering centerpieces of the book giving fans what they want most despite the author’s attempts to dispense early-career highlights or perspectives on how she lost her mojo in her 30s but regained her power in her 40s and beyond. She never skimps on the scandalous when describing the “enemy territory” toxic atmosphere of a Housewives reunion her resignation from Bravo at age 60 or warning then-newcomer Erika Jayne that “Bravo is the casino we’re the players and the house always wins.” Incorporating plenty of sass hype personality and unflinching honesty Rinna presents a smoothly written satisfying combination of intimate anecdotes and family stories commentaries about aging and cosmetic preservation in Hollywood female friendship dynamics motherhood marriage to Harry Hamlin fashion and “the ongoing evolution of being a woman.” Then she gleefully circles back to the melodramatic “blood sport” dustups on the series a subject she reliably depicts with brio.
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There are any number of reasons why people prefer pat formulas—get tough on offenders keep an eye out for broken windows—over science when addressing crime. Science is hard. Yet nonscientific outcomes are as social scientists say suboptimal. In the vein of Freakonomics Doleac turns to scientific method to test a number hypotheses arguing “I…see a lack of rigor as unethical.” As any economist might do she weighs reward versus punishment as incentives for behavior. One insight is that yes there are plenty of people who belong in prison having committed violent crimes such as rape and murder. But a related insight is that most people who enter the justice system are “more sad than scary” perpetrators of misdemeanor offenses such as shoplifting and drug use. Given that most crime by Doleac’s account is not well thought out in advance and that much crime goes unpunished there are remedies such as building a vast national database of DNA—which she maintains has a greater deterrent effect than the threat of imprisonment since DNA evidence can help improve the likelihood of identifying those who commit a crime quickly and thus act as a strong disincentive. (For privacy advocates she notes that such a database is accessible only to law enforcement.) “This intervention breaks the incarceration cycle rather than perpetuating it” Doleac argues. Perhaps counterintuitively she also advocates for lighter sentences for nonviolent crimes given experimental results that show that leniency “reduced the likelihood of showing up in court again with new charges by 53 percent and it reduced the number of future charges by 60 percent.” Other remedies are more counterintuitive still such as providing air filters in school classrooms which “have a meaningful effect on pollution exposure in a way that has big real-world benefits”—including reducing crime.
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Lindsey Norris Sullivan must fight to keep the library open in her Connecticut town of Briar Creek on the shore of Long Island Sound. Her nemesis Gideon Trask is an obnoxious town councilman who wants to get rid of the library to lower taxes. So Lindsey and her staff come up with the idea of a book boat to serve the population of the nearby islands creating more interest in the library. Lindsey’s husband Mike “Sully” Sullivan is just the one to help—he’s a boat captain. Needing a patron to fund the book boat Lindsey enlists the services of her friend Robbie Vine a famous actor. He sets up a meeting with the membership committee of The Club an exclusive country club on nearby King’s Island which is desperate to have him join. Dressing Lindsey in the designer clothes he buys for his girlfriend Chief of Police Emma Plewicki Robbie brings her to meet Mallory Masterson Leslie Stone Tina Baldwin and Harper Winslow who agree to help fund the boat. On its first run the boat stops at Split Island home of the Capshaws and Montgomerys whose long-standing feud has been supercharged by the elopement of artist Ariel Montgomery’s son and Gwen Capshaw’s daughter. On a second trip Lindsey and Sully find Gwen stabbed to death with a palette knife. Of course Ariel’s a suspect but Lindsey doesn’t believe she did it and when they find Club member Leslie Stone killed the same way it looks like Ariel’s being framed. Lindsey thinks the answer lurks within The Club and with Robbie’s help uncovers plenty of motives.
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“I feared AIDS” Kennedy’s speaker declares bluntly in the opening poem “and Cindy feared / being alone so we forged a compromise” (“The Pact”). The speaker fulfills his role of heterosexual husband to Cindy quasi-dutifully killing “dozens then hundreds” of beetles to maintain his “aggressively healthy” roses and grilling brats in the backyard (“Beetle Graveyard”). But the actual orientation of his desire is clear—he covertly meets up with his gardener at an airport hotel (“Sheraton by the Airport”) and grows erect as he watches a man in a public restroom “piss[ing] loud full throttle a mist / of drops against his legs” (“Oasis”). Kennedy moves deftly from Cindy’s salt-craving pregnancy (“Having It”) to the speaker’s own childhood a time of profound confusion and disorientation. His father is killed by a drunk driver (“Accident 1982”) leaving him with a brother and a violent alcoholic mother who sexually abuses him (“Small Bother”). Cruelty and discipline characterize the speaker’s turbulent childhood; he overhears his friend being beaten after the two watch MTV (“Turning the Key”) and receives a black eye from his classmates which his mother ignores (“Open Secret”). Returning to his adult life the speaker finds a lover Randy and comes out to his mother who responds with skepticism and denial (“Out | comes”). Kennedy’s clear novelistic narration is broken up by two poems titled “Mouth of Many Endings”; these are fragmented abstracted interjections in which “a mother marks the water’s anger / the child failures into length.”
Kennedy is at his strongest in passages of acute glistening physical description. Images jut out at the reader hyper-saturated with the intensity of childhood memory—a father’s amputated little toe a “dangling comma” that is “purple // in a frosty jar”; a mother’s backyard “burn barrel” in which a “donut caramelizes / into a small fist.” These objects defamiliarized yet recognizable in Kennedy’s quasi-prosaic language stand in for everything that is unsaid and unsayable in the speaker’s life the sublimated strangeness that cannot be named: “Every house a house / of sin” the speaker and his mother observe “besides our own” (“Until We Saw Our Faces”). The speaker’s tenderness for his mother is profoundly expressed in poems like “Snapshot of a Girl Refusing to Smile 1956” where he pities her hardscrabble North Carolina childhood and her loneliness even as he points out that he “never wanted to be her son.” One or two poems hit duller more expected beats particularly in the framing poems that provide an entry point for the denser weirder childhood material. The scenario of the rendezvous with the gardener feels well worn for instance and “No Leaks” a poem about a suicide attempt is glancing and vague. (“At the hospital I learned to paint butterflies. / I watched the anorexics pick at their meals.”) The collection is at its most piercing when it operates as a dreamlike scatterplot of childhood omens.Read more...
In this candid if carefully crafted memoir Newsom revisits his fourth-generation San Francisco roots lingering over the family mythology behind his political rise. After his parents’ separation Newsom and his sister were raised by their mother Tessa who struggled financially; his father William an appellate court judge and at one time manager of the Gordon P. Getty Family Trust remained a powerful presence. Newsom underscores the hardships that marked his youth—severe dyslexia and academic frustration—while pointing to the confidence and discipline he found on the basketball court and baseball field. Yet even as the likely presidential candidate casts himself as an underdog entrepreneur who built the PlumpJack Estate Winery and hospitality empire before entering politics his origin story cannot entirely escape the glow of the Getty connection which he acknowledges shadowed his rise from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to mayor and eventually governor. “In my life as a husband father and politician the Getty connection would cloud and distort many things” he writes. “In the eyes of the press I was forever the ‘golden boy’ whose daddy had prospered because of his ties to the Gettys and now the son was simply following suit.” The tension between bootstrap resolve and inherited access to privilege becomes the book’s lingering subtext. Newsom surveys his record which includes authorizing same-sex marriage in San Francisco ahead of national consensus and advancing legislation on climate policy gun safety and reproductive rights. He also acknowledges personal missteps among them the collapse of his marriage to Kimberly Guilfoyle. He presents his later partnership with Jennifer Siebel and their four children as steadier ground. The memoir closes in 2024 before the next chapter of national turbulence though he recounts a revealing 2018 meeting with President Donald Trump on Air Force One following the deadly wildfire in Paradise California. That exchange even more than the measured recitation of achievements offers a sharper glimpse of the political instincts that define him.
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Juliet Capshaw may be heavily pregnant with twins but that doesn’t slow her down; she’s still coming up with new delicacies for Torte her bakery in Ashland Oregon and keeping up a social life with her husband Carlos and their neighbors. One of her dearest friends is Lance Rousseau artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival whose productions bring in hordes of tourists. Lance’s wedding to longtime partner Arlo is nearly foundering in the face of Lance’s ambitious plans. At the moment the play on view is Perfect Crime and behind the scenes there’s a great deal of tension between the actors and their director Kean Armitage which Lance hopes will be mitigated by the fabulous cast party he and Jules are planning. Once Jules meets the actors she’s surprised by the hostility surrounding Armitage who harasses the women; feuds with his bitter soon-to-be ex-wife Vera Armitage who claims to be a reviewer; and insists on a method approach that’s turned his male lead into a stalker. Given the short notice Jules and her staff are busy preparing food for the party but it all comes to a screeching halt when Armitage is shot dead in a dressing room. Jules has already helped her stepfather who’s the law in Ashland solve a long string of crimes so she’s ready to pitch in to help the police. After all she’s already spent enough time talking to cast members to know there may be a surfeit of possible killers.
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When Lizzie Dowling Queen Victoria’s Irish-born parlor maid is found drowned near the Quarr Abbey ruins on the Isle of Wight Julia who happens to be vacationing there with her grandfather examines the body over the objections of the local constabulary that the death was obviously accidental and a woman has no business messing with corpses. Julia Scotland Yard’s first female medical examiner doesn’t establish conclusively that Lizzie was murdered but she does discover that she was four months pregnant. And when Lizzie’s younger sister Brigid who’s been summoned from Cork by Lady Susan Styles a lady-in-waiting to the Princess of Wales is strangled along the way it’s hard to believe that both women weren’t killed by the same person for the same shadowy reason. Once his pursuit of criminal fugitive Edgar Romilly ends with an unexpected jolt that sends him back home Richard is free to rejoin Julia to solve this new case. The path to a solution will lead through thieves smugglers gunrunners multiple murders and several acts of anti-English terrorism rumored and actual. Sadly it also leads though dozens of characters some real some fictional some aristocratic some impoverished but very few of them memorable before the secrets that link the Dowling sisters the royal family and the Troubles come to light with little detective work by Julia and not much more by Richard.
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Dr. Gwen Griffith is no stranger to Dillynaidd where she did her undergraduate degree. Now having watched print journalism fade away she sees no future for herself despite her star credentials so she’s delighted to take up the offer from Dean Carolyn Montgomery her old college friend to return to the university. Upon her arrival Ellis her teaching assistant escorts Gwen to her lovely faculty housing. Carolyn arranges a meet and greet with her fellow professors all of whom seem happy to meet her—except Alice Rice who expected to get her job. Soon after Gwen returns to her rooms she hears a loud banging on the door and when she opens it Alice starts to say something and then falls on top of Gwen. When Gwen screams Professor Rhys Davies arrives but though they give Alice CPR they can’t save her. She’s dead. The attractive Det. Gareth Jones seems suspicious of Gwen and questions if it was a natural death. As a long-time investigative reporter Gwen is curious. So is Ellis who wants to write a story that Gwen supports as a teaching exercise. Since Alice was mean to her students the staff and her fellow faculty members the number of people who might have wanted her dead is overwhelming. As Gwen and Ellis take a deep dive into Alice’s past looking for clues it’s clear that Det. Jones doesn’t approve even though forensics has revealed that she was poisoned. When Gwen is followed and gets death threats she knows she’s hit a nerve. Can she uncover the truth and can her new friends help keep her alive?
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