Bishop (vice president of product development at The Center for Leadership Studies) and Goldsmith (an executive coach and prolific leadership author) here combined their experience to provide a guide to individualized leadership coaching that focuses on adaptability. The authors themselves adapt the well-known Situational Leadership Model into a Situational Coaching Model. In Part 1 they explain how this particular style of coaching differs from other types while observing that “Regardless of the specialty the goal of a coach is the same: to influence another person’s behavior and performance for the better.” In Part 2 Bishop and Goldsmith outline the four steps of the Situational Coaching Model (identify assess match and manage) while emphasizing the idea that by focusing on individual goals and issues coaches can more efficiently help their clients achieve success. In the final part the authors discuss the ways in which their coaching model allows coaches to pivot in their approaches to fit the unique needs of those they coach. Interviews with and advice from other successful coaches (think CEOs of leadership companies advisers and executive leadership experts) are incorporated throughout the text. Bullet-pointed summaries conclude each chapter to condense the relevant information into concise digestible chunks; the chapters are frequently broken up with headings subheadings and various motivational and explanatory quotes to maximize the book’s readability. The frequent use of coaching terminology and leadership buzzwords (“That grounding function helps the coachee show up with intention inside the system”) may intimidate readers with little previous knowledge of the topic but for those who have at least some broad familiarity with coaching the authors’ straightforward language and engaging visuals expertly break down potentially complicated concepts. The result is an energetic and articulate step-by-step playbook detailing the ins and outs of a unique coaching model.

A year ago vampire Sophronia Vega changed the world with a dating app. A vampire-human dating app to be specific. After a century of coexistence and potentially dangerous intimacy humans and vampires who want to hook up can now take a simple test and use her app Stokr to find out immediately whether “safe direct feeding” is possible between them. Unfortunately just as she’s ready to celebrate its success the app unexpectedly starts failing and puts all its users in danger. With years of painstakingly perfect plans destroyed in an instant Sophronia frantically starts trying to figure out what happened with the help of human Casey Amato the universally adored manager of the tech team that programmed Stokr—who just so happens to smell like “heaven in a glass” from a vampire’s perspective. Though Sophronia is technically Casey’s boss and they quickly come to realize the issues with Stokr go much deeper than either could have imagined even their intense investigation isn’t enough to keep them from thinking about each other—but until they fix the app there’s no way for them to act on their attraction. Vasti is new to the vampire world but not to HEAs; she’s well known for her witty historical romances. Fans of her earlier work will find much to like about this first book in her Corporate Bloodsuckers duology as clever banter fun side characters and steamy scenes work just as well in vampire-led boardrooms as in Regency ballrooms. Though the story is technically a slow burn it has strong insta-love vibes which won’t work for all readers. But Vasti’s sexy take on vampire-human attraction and the interesting complex plot—especially a cliffhanger setup for the next book—will keep readers turning pages.

No one knows his real name or exactly what he looks like. He’s been fleecing women for years and he’s too smart to be caught. Despite a robust “r/WeWillFindYou” Reddit thread tracing the shadowy man’s many crimes no one can clearly identify him—so they call him “Mr. Disappear.” No one knows him that is except Alex Miller who worked a few cons with him several years ago in Los Angeles but now drives for Uber in the Denver area to pay her bills. A former news editor Liz Cunningham is struggling to find fulfillment as a stay-at-home mother to her baby Emma so she pours through Reddit threads dreaming of cracking a true-crime case and starting a podcast. When Alex and Liz move from talking on Reddit to meeting in real life (as they are conveniently located in the same town!) they uncover the man’s latest identity “Rhys” and his latest mark: Quinn Anderson a lonely resident manager at the Heritage Hills retirement home also in Denver! Quinn is grieving her father and their complicated relationship as her stepmother schemes to steal her inheritance—an inheritance Rhys is urging her to fight for so they can move in together and start a business. Liz and Alex confront Quinn with proof that Rhys has played this con before but when the police refuse to act without clear proof of fraud Alex Liz and Quinn decide it’s high time Rhys pays for the damage he’s caused—not realizing he long ago crossed the line into murder. Trench offers a trio of damaged redeemable women working against a system that makes it hard to hold this man accountable while also offering the occasional chapter in his voice. Writing both a true crime-esque romp and a commentary on true crime Trench packs impressive complexity into her characters their backgrounds and their friendship as well as the Colorado setting.

Created by Congress in 1870 the Department of Justice has on occasion been a force for the good writes Maddow MS NOW host and author (Drift 2012 etc.). More often she adds it has been abused to protect the interests of corporations corrupt politicians and self-serving presidents. In her fiery retelling of the DOJ’s checkered history there are few untainted heroes. In the 1860s Amos T. Akerman President Grant’s attorney general courageously prosecuted murdering Klansmen in York County South Carolina. A century later John Doar the assistant attorney general in charge of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division was fighting a newly emboldened KKK in Alabama. Actively undermined by FBI Director Edgar J. Hoover he nonetheless secured convictions of the killers of civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo. But in Maddow’s gallery of attorneys general the scoundrels and “narrow-minded and partisan hacks” predominate: Richard Olney who cozied up to railroad magnates and jailed labor organizer Eugene V. Debs; Harry Daugherty who under Presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge used the office to line his own pockets; Ed Meese “Ronald Reagan’s loyal and faithful parrot”; and most consequentially William Barr who under President Trump “levered the power and the prestige of the Department of Justice to save the president’s bacon.” The author’s style is delightfully caustic even Twainian as when she characterizes the DOJ under Daugherty as a “a ten-story bribe department store” and designates a DOJ recommendation that Trump be publicly cleared of election interference a “Cover Your Ass memo.” Written with a novelist’s skill for revelatory detail and a historian’s sharp eye for continuities the book both infuriates and inspires. The moral indignation seething through Maddow’s account culminates in her conclusion in which she calls on Congress to beef up the DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General and reminds us of the department’s long-forgotten purpose: “to fight for everyone in America to have the protections of the U.S. Constitution including against their own government.”

Winner of a Pulitzer Prize for a riveting article that gave visual context to Jeff Bezos’ wealth Chalabi proves a dab hand both at getting frank admissions from her interviewees about money and using surveys and statistics to put their individual experiences into broader economic contexts. She’s frank about her own situation too as she weaves in reports on her own finances (including the ways she divvied up much of the awesome publisher’s advance she got for this project) and records emotionally fraught years struggling to care for her Iraqi parents in the wake of her father’s heart attack and her mother’s stroke. If those latter passages lose the plot and even sometimes drag her observations elsewhere offer consistently fascinating insights into seemingly diverse topics from telling correlations between privatized health care and falling life expectancies in the U.S. to the pervasiveness of “money dysmorphia.” In fact all of her subjects she writes admitted to financial insecurity despite occupying household income brackets ranging from virtually nothing to multimillions. The charts and tables she strew freely through her chapters (including one in which she switches to an all graphic format) are likewise engrossing lit by imaginative designs and graphic elements that ingeniously reflect and enhance the import of the data they record. The author does at last find aid and solace for her personal travails in a large circle of relatives. She closes with references to the pervasive culture of anxiety that capitalism creates. “Capitalism is a profoundly individualizing force that nurtures fear” she writes. “It teaches us that we cannot support one another or be supported when we need to be. But of course that’s exactly what we do and what we have to do.”

On Prince Edmund of Agnar’s 17th birthday his weapons instructor Slade gifts him a forbidden book containing an iron key. The key unlocks a secret library where Edmund learns more about his connection to the Darkness; he is its vessel and has only a year to find the vessel of Light before the world is destroyed. When Edmund’s home is attacked by the Dorcada servants of Darkness they release the goddess of Darkness Levitha from his soul (“I have become one with the Darkness”). After gaining control of Edmund Levitha causes chaos and destruction until Slade rescues him from her command. Slade then reveals that he is part of the Katori a group of shamans serving the god of Light Cedrwyn and that he has been protecting Edmund from the Darkness. They travel toward the town of Lyra in search of Cedrwyn’s vessel. In Lyra Edmund meets Rayne and her sister Sayen who is believed to be the vessel of Light. Edmund learns more about the history between Cedrwyn and Levitha while trying to keep the Darkness from consuming him. When the rebellious Lyra comes under attack Edmund is forced to face his brother and rival Magnus and the Envicta the king’s prestigious knights. Leto’s tale deftly balances personal conflicts with larger threats affording Edmund multiple opportunities for character development. There are several baffling moments as when a character whom readers presume to be dead returns to the living or when characters pursue puzzlingly trivial tasks such as creating a fire while gravely injured. Such moments occasionally weaken the story’s urgency and slow the pacing but the complex worldbuilding and intriguing magical abilities keep the narrative compelling.

Early on their relentlessly upbeat and energetic narrative the authors argue that their shared belief in the “American Dream” isn’t at all “naive” and that “poverty in America is not inevitable.” Instead they assure their audience that poverty is the result of nebulous “systems and beliefs that limit human potential.” But one has to immediately ask: Have Taylor and Janz failed spectacularly to read the room? With skyrocketing food costs unaffordable rents and the overall wealth disparity in the United States exceeding Gilded Age levels—many will no doubt greet a financial self-help book once again extolling “private enterprise” as somewhat suspect--to say the least. Taylor and Janz however forge ahead with their analysis despite their seeming tone-deafness to the times. In their approach however personal responsibility is somewhat tempered spreading the job of “teach[ing] a man to fish” across the whole community. The authors call it their “Mountain Model” and it consists of four steps that they say align community action employer engagement and policy design with personal responsibility. “Climbing out of poverty is possible but it requires community responsibility and partnership” the coauthors stress. The thesis is expounded on with brief case studies of hard-pressed working-class Americans desperately trying to make ends meet in an increasingly oppressive economic system. “Tiffany” represents one such case as the authors accurately acknowledge her inability to “keep pace with the rising cost of living” with just 1 to 3% annual raises. The common scenario shared amongst vast swaths of Americans today according to Taylor and Janz “reveals something fundamentally broken about what’s happened to the American Dream which is that for millions of people survival has replaced aspiration.” But whether this book actually lands with the average reader will largely depend on how one views that singular premise. Either way there’s a lot to digest here; thankfully though this is rendered without an excess of fiscal jargon and sans the reams of dense statistics that often accompany discussions about economics.

The first series installment saw Mia Terzian Tony Perez-Davis and River Alexander starting the After-School Kindness Crew in order to make their community a better place. Now the kids must prepare for a basketball fundraiser game. They aren’t natural athletes but they give it their all: Mia analyzes the physics of an ideal shot River designs a sea slug mascot costume and Tony hesitantly accepts the role of team captain. Their after-school practice hoop sits uncomfortably close to a creepy house whose owner is rumored to have blood-red teeth and to detest visitors. When the kids’ basketball flies right over the fence they swallow their fear retrieve the ball and discover that Mr. Beetler does have red teeth—he farms beets! He’s also a former pro basketball star who has tons to teach them about strategy and sportsmanship. The main storyline set outside the classroom follows a predictably positive arc but there’s plenty of school-related action too including calming brain breaks with Ms. Gold (a stand-in for Hawn she runs the school’s Creative Station and encourages mindfulness). Chambers’ illustrations capture the crew’s sweet friendship and their haphazard eager athleticism. Tony is cued Latine and has dark hair and skin; Mia Ms. Gold and River are lighter-skinned; the community is diverse.

As this debut novel opens 34-year-old Mona Melamed a married professor of linguistics in Southern California is trying to get a doctor to sign off on a hysterectomy. Mona’s decision not to have children springs from numerous sources. There is the sense that her ambitious mother’s career was curtailed by Mona’s arrival and Mona’s own feeling that she lacks maternal instinct. Most important is Mona’s drive toward tenure and a groundbreaking career. Mona is on the verge of a potential research breakthrough—she calls it “the Melamed generalization” and it revolves around patterns of word shortening in speech—when disaster strikes. Her husband’s brother and sister-in-law die while hiking in the desert leaving behind their 6-year-old son Miles. After Mona and her husband take guardianship of Miles Mona tries desperately to hold on to her old life despite a one-semester leave from her university job—but what will she lose and what will she gain when she becomes the mother she never imagined being? Nelson who holds a doctorate in linguistics maps the idea of language systems onto interpersonal dynamics cleverly: “We use [dismissive reduplication] when we want to trivialize something throwing in the Yiddish consonant cluster ‘schm’: feminist-schmeminist marriage-schmarriage mother-schmother.” This pop of wit is sorely needed: So much of the novel feels stiff and formal. Perhaps this makes sense for Mona’s character who comes across as cold and humorless though the novel offers promising setups for hilarity as when Mona explains phonology to other mothers at a pool play date. But Nelson’s arm’s-length approach reduces the novel’s other characters including the grieving Miles to mere foils to Mona instead of full characters in themselves.

After what he would later decide was probably one Malbec too many the author clumsily stepped into a job he never wanted: a seat on the board of the local Chamber of Commerce in the Sierra foothills of California. As if that wasn’t enough he quickly found himself its president. So he put his problem-solving skills to work and tried to rehabilitate a struggling rural Chamber in the wake of the pandemic by recruiting businesses repairing relationships and attempting to turn a loose collection of volunteers into something that can sustain itself. But small-town life has a funny way of refusing to be managed. A Christmas tree somehow became a civic controversy. Then there are the Outhouse Races which raised questions no Chamber president should ever have had to confront. And the extension cords? They became imperative. Who had them which worked where did they go and importantly who knew any of this without having to ask? What began as an effort to revive a Chamber of Commerce became something much more personal as Cantrell discovered that communities aren’t problems to be solved. Instead they’re built from relationships shared history and—perhaps most importantly—the people willing to keep showing up. Cantrell’s voice is conversational wry and sharply observant. “Small towns are very good at noticing when a person owns a shovel” he writes and later says with characteristic understatement “I do not recommend failure as a hobby.” His humor is never simply decorative; it’s part of his narrative control allowing him to move between the ridiculous and the meaningful without losing either. He generally knows how to shape a story even if he sometimes overexplains a point or a place.

In 2001 Annie Fagan and her group of DJ friends created a group called Bacchanalia to “forge connections between diverse but like-minded people.” Their crowning achievement was a rave at an abandoned burned out space in the Dublin mountains called the Hellfire Club but the night of their triumph was tainted when one of their friends Seán Salinger went missing. Now in the present day his body is found buried in a shallow grave and it becomes clear that he was murdered. Many of the original group have lost touch with each other; Annie is married to Colm and they have two kids but their struggle to stay afloat financially is taking a toll on their marriage. When she’s called in by the police to make a statement about that night so long ago she reconnects with her old boyfriend Fran. Sparks fly and so do suspicions: Who was behind Seán’s death? Why has no one seen Seán’s boyfriend Ozzy since that night at Hellfire? Who’s behind an attack on their friend Moe? As Annie fights to uncover the truth she also has to confront the bitter horror of her abusive marriage and begin to find herself once again in her music. Despite the high drama of the plot most of the confrontations and revelations are talk- rather than action-heavy which weighs down the pacing. Still McPhillips clearly knows her music and some passages read like love letters to electronic music and the artists who know how to touch and inspire a crowd. There’s some biting commentary on the current economic situation in Ireland; the class divide between characters is a real issue and McPhillips shows us how even idealistic youths get caught in the trap of capitalism.

In the 1970s a Newsweek cover portrayed Henry Kissinger as a superhero. Unlike mild-mannered Clark Kent though writes historian Keys Kissinger’s “alter ego was a ruthless public relations manager.” Ruthless only begins to describe Kissinger’s constant campaigns to be heralded as the smartest man in the room his role in world history indispensable. Keys allows that Kissinger made real contributions including opening China to the West arriving at détente with the Soviet Union and negotiating a tenuous peace between Israel and Egypt. While he was doing all this Kissinger as Keys writes bombarded an all-too-friendly media with self-aggrandizing memos letters and phone calls. When someone wrote or spoke in other than exalting terms though he was even quicker to be in touch with loud complaints (“Colleagues and friends remarked that he had the thinnest skin of any public figure they knew”). Those complaints were often accompanied by bullying threats to go upstairs to publishers and CEOs and hints of lawsuits. Two of Keys’ case studies speak in depth to all this. First is British journalist William Shawcross’ 1979 book Sideshow: Nixon Kissinger and the Destruction of Cambodia which linked the murderous Pol Pot regime to Kissinger’s and Nixon’s secret invasion and bombing of the country—“Watergate’s foreign policy equivalent: a campaign of illegal actions concealed from Congress and the public through systematic lying.” That was a mild assault compared to Christopher Hitchens’ demand three decades later that Kissinger “a monster” be tried as a war criminal for among other things the installation of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Despite friendly treatment from among others TV newsman Ted Koppel Kissinger never quite got out from under that charge. And while he has his admirers he is widely remembered today for all his scrambling efforts to keep the narrative from “moving beyond his control.”

“As a kid I wanted to be Batman then a cartoonist” Gray says in a medical school interview. “But as I got older I fell in love with the idea of being someone whose job is to heal.” In medical school he begins with human anatomy where his first assignment is to carefully deliberately dissect a human cadaver. Though it’s the first class in eight challenging years of medical study it affects him throughout. Through a largely linear narrative he begins to understand his own relationship to healing. First there are the classroom years where he takes in “more…concepts than the human brain can realistically hold” followed by clinical years absorbing “the practice and the culture of medicine.” While completing an internal medicine residency he begins to see how far the day-to-day problem-to-problem structure of grueling hospital shifts have taken him from his Hippocratic oath. He yearns to “remember that there is art to medicine as well as science and that warmth sympathy and understanding may outweigh the surgeon’s knife.” Finally he makes a bold choice to pursue palliative medicine where he is able to prioritize the patient’s holistic experience instead of simply proffering a cure. Throughout each chapter he returns time and again to his formative experiences in cadaver lab where he was first haunted by the separation of the person from their parts—an experience elegantly depicted by a recurring motif of dream-dancing with his assigned cadaver. Gray’s intentional occasionally stiff cartooning becomes most moving when he returns his artistic gaze to the dissection table where his depictions of the slowly peeled-away human form become immediate visceral and impossible to ignore.

The story begins hundreds even thousands of years ago among Indigenous Amazonian peoples who until very recently had had no contact with Europeans. Among their impressive traditional pharmacopoeia was curare with its paralyzing alkaloid used to fell prey animals with blowgun-launched darts. O’Hara a professor of history at the University of California Santa Cruz—a place not shy of pharmaceutical experimentation—begins his narrative in Ecuador. Arriving there at the beginning of the Great Depression were a proto-back-to-the-land American couple Richard and Ruth Gill who were seeking their fortune. One forest hair-shedding remedy earned Richard the derisive nickname “depilatory Dick” and many other more or less marketable plants fascinated him. But it was the “flying death” of O’Hara’s book title that really caught Gill’s attention which “carried a mystique that made for easy translation to an audience back home.” By coincidence he developed a neurological disorder whose effects were manageable to some extent by that curare. Gill in both competition and loose alliance with other plant hunters including a well-schooled Russian expat tried for years to pitch imported curare to companies that were transitioning from the patent-medicine flimflam of old to the Big Pharma of today. Those companies in turn developed a few applications used generally to no lasting success to treat mental illness and other maladies. Among the plants they explored was ayahuasca a hallucinogen that “was yet another mystery of Indigenous botanical knowledge in the Amazon.” Gill’s quixotic journey “manic at times” lasted decades until his death in 1958 an unsung hero of ethnobotany. O’Hara finds deeper dimensions in an interesting story by noting the destructive effects of corporate resource extraction among the Amazonian peoples which speaks to “lack of respect for indigenous sovereignty decision making and autonomy.”

After 17-year-old Linh Pham’s mother dies in a car crash Linh meets a young man with golden hair just like that of her imaginary childhood friend. The boy Elior Photenios attends the funeral claiming his parents were friends with her mum. He even speaks Aelfirian the language she used with Mum that she always believed was made up. Later on Linh whose father is Vietnamese awakes from a nightmare and finds herself in Ebrirene a kingdom with six types of magic: light space earth fire water and nature. Prince Elior and his family reveal that Linh is a space mage who can travel between worlds and that her Ebrirenian princess mum saved the realm from demons by sealing the portal they came through. Now Linh must save the day again by strengthening the portal’s weakening seal. Linh strikes a deal: Elior will train her in using her powers so she can accomplish this feat then she’ll go home and never hear from them again. But as she dives deeper into her magic her mother’s past and the kingdom’s affairs and history facing unimaginable dangers Linh is also pulled into a forbidden romance. After a slower first third the pacing ramps up in Nguyen’s debut immersing readers in a beautiful world filled with tantalizing magic horrifying creatures and cranky talking flowers. The complex characters deal with grief messy family relationships betrayal and burdensome responsibilities.

High school has begun but Dani still can’t catch a break. Ruda a girl who wears boys’ clothes appears as a new character in the internet novel Dani has been living in since middle school. Ruda takes an interest in her not that Dani realizes it—she’s oblivious to the point of comedy. Neither the Heavenly Kings nor best friend Yeoryeong who don’t realize that Ruda is a girl are happy about this new development. Dani continues to try to fend off handsome otherworldly guys while Ruda keeps showing up. Even as the novel is pushing a new character into the story Dani resists; it’s tough enough being a sidekick to the characters she already loves. But where the story goes may not be up to her. With new dangers lurking Dani will have to be more proactive if she hopes to defend those she cares about. This translated South Korean work sustains the series’ humor relying heavily on the illustrations to convey jokes. The full-color artwork shows expressive characters drawn in a classic manhwa style where for example eye size represents levels of innocence. While Dani’s cluelessness gets tiring at times friendship remains a strong thread in the book making for an enjoyable read.

“It’s hard to explain. Imagine someone suddenly starts saying Tuesday comes straight after Sunday. There’s no such thing as Monday. You learn not to mention Monday. Monday is not a thing in your house. At school you might write Monday on your page but you’d never make that mistake at home.” When Steffie Cartwright’s older sister Caroline disappeared at age 16 she knew better than to say a word. The rule of silence was already well established regarding the terrible difference between the way Stan Cartwright treated his two daughters though Steffie never really understood what went on or why. For sure she can’t forget her father retrieving two eggs from the coop then throwing the rest in the hedge to ensure that only the two of them would have any. With her gentle mother long dead Steffie’s adult life has revolved around caring for her father and her job at the dry cleaner’s. Laundry plays a profound role in this second novel from Hughes which she explains in an author’s note was inspired by a 14th-century poem known as “Purity” or “Cleanness” in which dirty tattered clothes are a spiritual metaphor. As much as Steffie takes pride in her work she gets herself fired by borrowing a customer’s clothes to wear to her father’s funeral then slapping her boss in the face after she’s caught. Losing this job sends her into a long period of free fall desperation drug and alcohol abuse promiscuity evictions and criminality throughout which she keeps wondering whether she should try to find Caroline and tell her their father is dead. Despite her bullheaded self-destructiveness violence and mistaken loyalty to her father Steffie’s sardonic never self-pitying voice is impossible not to fall for as is the part of her personality that prizes fabric and is obsessed with preserving and cleaning it. The last chapter of the book is unexpected and welcome shedding clarity on all that comes before.

Since she was little Sylvia has obsessed over the unknown sperm donor responsible for half of her genetics. Now a 24-year-old applying to Ph.D. programs and living in her hometown of New York City Veltfort’s protagonist messages Dean on Facebook. As her cryptic relationship with Dean intensifies—though he denies ever having donated sperm—Sylvia forges a strange yet profound friendship with her neighbor Molly who’s on her own quest to confront her biological father. Craving approval from both Dean and Molly—each elusive in their motivations and desires—Sylvia finds herself trapped in a deep reality-bending obsession: “I’d forgotten the feeling of not being able to see down to the bottom how readily my whole being could reorient around the desire to know.” Veltfort delves into the often obscure aspects that form the basis of human relationships and whether things like biology even matter at all. “I liked how between us all now lay so many possible permutations” Sylvia thinks looking at an evidence board Molly made “…as though between any two of us lay only absent string.” The novel is propelled by Sylvia’s obsessive thoughts leaving the reader constantly questioning every progression in a gripping plot. Some of the scenic descriptions are lackluster though and Sylvia’s internal monologue frequently leaves little room for the reader to draw their own conclusions. Similarly some of the characters like Sylvia’s mothers Celeste and Lucia—who incite her initial curiosity about Dean—feel underdeveloped and as a result bear a confusing relevance to the central plot.

Every Sunday Jamaicans around the world enjoy a family meal—perhaps chicken in brown gravy with peas and rice—and in Alaska even as the seasons change things are no different. In the winter with the snow piled high two parents and their two children all brown-skinned jump from their roof to sled down a massive hill. In spring the youngsters “pounce through puddles scattered across the dirt road” while Grandma gardens. Daddy works as a fisherman in the summer and the family stays with him in a one-room cabin by the sea. Autumn signals the salmon to swim home to spawn; Grandma having returned from a trip to Jamaica prepares ackee tamarind balls and more foods that make “Mama and Daddy long for a distant home.” And each Sunday as everyone sits down to a family meal the house seems to fill with palm trees and vibrant flowers as the family imagines themselves back in Jamaica. Mikai draws a brilliant contrast between the warm hues of a Caribbean sunset inside and cool brisk blues of the night sky outside. Inspired by her own childhood experiences Gopo relies on sensory-rich language to paint vivid portraits of both her homelands—and to offer a vivid example of a family staying connected to their culture despite physical distance.

It’s been only three years since Savannah baker Katie Lightfoot learned from her aunt Lucy that she like her aunt is a hereditary hedgewitch. She’s joined the spell book club her aunt’s group of witchy women and has learned a great deal about her powers while infusing her bakery’s yummy goods with something extra. Out for a morning run without Mungo her Cairn terrier—who's her witch's familiar—in Whitemarsh Preserve she finds Steve Dawes a member of a druid clan with whom she has a complicated past standing over the body of a woman. Steve is a crime reporter but it’s Katie who calls Det. Peter Quinn who’s not surprised that she’s reporting another suspicious death. The body is upside down within a pentagram indicating bad magic. The first new arrival to the scene is Katie’s husband Declan a fireman training to become a paramedic who knows about Katie’s use of her powers but doesn’t always approve. The dead woman turns out to have been Helena Rose a podcaster specializing in murder cases with psychic twists who'd wanted to interview Katie. After it turns out that Helena was poisoned with oleander Katie can’t resist investigating with assistance from her powerful friends. A group of Helena’s devoted followers seek out Katie’s help in solving the crime and they invite her to a get-together that evening. Their insight may help solve the case—or may involve her in a dangerous situation that will take all her powers to escape.