“A smart crime package, both funny and serious.” the lightning rod
with Alcott’s section memorably beginning with her calling Whitman “a shameless ass” and Whitman himself prone to more poetic reveries, as when he ponders the human cost of war: “I think there is a grand regiment of the dead, which is enlisting men and boys, white and black, from every corner of the nation.” A haunting novel that offers candid portraits of literary legends.
LITTLE NOTHINGS
Mayhew, Julie Bloomsbury (272 pp.) $26.00 | June 28, 2022 978-1-52660-634-1
A friendship is exposed as toxic during a luxury trip that ends in violence. Growing up, Liv had few friends, a fact that upset her mother, whose advice to her daughter was to “eat the fucking cake” and stop being so sensitive. So when she meets fellow mothers Binnie and Beth, she’s thrilled to finally be inducted into the seemingly mythic world of female friendship. Through play dates and book clubs, dinners and the occasional trip, the three are supportive of each other’s highs and lows as only true friends can be. When Beth introduces Ange to the group, she immediately finds a core role as listener and organizer. When Ange wants to plan a trip for all four of them and their families to Corfu, everything seems perfect. They can lounge and drink, get dressed up for dinner and comment cattily on the other guests. An accidental revelation about another trip that didn’t include Liv leads her to realize that Ange, who once seemed like the glue of the foursome, has actually wormed her way into their group in service of her own narcissistic personality. Estranged from the other women, Liv strikes up a friendship with a wealthy socialite who has a wicked sense of humor—and the willingness to help Liv rid herself of Ange once and for all. Mayhew explores both the affirming side of female friendships and the darker currents of judgmental talk, financial peer pressure, and neediness. The most interesting part of the book is Liv, who’s the narrator, for she is often not a terribly sympathetic character. Yet there is something admirable in how she fights to recognize and celebrate her true, autonomous self, even if that person is inherently selfish and grudging. Driven by an honest, authentic main character who is imperfect and damaged.
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1 may 2022
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DEATH AND THE CONJUROR
Mead, Tom Mysterious Press (288 pp.) $25.95 | July 12, 2022 978-1-61316-318-4
Mead’s debut novel is a valentine to the locked-room puzzles of John Dickson Carr, to whom it is dedicated. London, 1936. Shortly after a mysterious and unexpected late-night visitor leaves the home of Dr. Anselm Rees in Dollis Hill, the uneasy members of his household contrive to enter his locked study and find the Viennese-born psychologist with his throat cut. Suspicion immediately falls on his daughter, psychologist Dr. Lidia Rees, and her all-but-fiance, playboy financier Marcus Bowman, but it isn’t long before Inspector George Flint, still baffled by the killer’s ability to escape a room locked from the inside, turns instead to the three patients the dead man had taken on since arriving in London. Floyd Stenhouse, Patient A, is a Philharmonic violinist tormented by dreams of snakes. Della Cookson, Patient B, is a kleptomaniac actress currently starring in Miss Death, which has just opened at the Pomegranate Theatre. Claude Weaver, Patient C, is a suspense novelist subject to blackouts. The waters are further muddied by the equally miraculous theft of a valuable painting from the home of theatrical impresario Benjamin Teasel and a murder at Dufresne Court, where Stenhouse lives. Luckily, Flint’s friend Joseph Spector is a professional magician whose eyes are alert to every deception and whose experience with illusions of every kind allows him to pierce the veil at Dollis Hill with a panache that would make Carr proud. Mead faithfully replicates all the loving artifice and teasing engagement of golden-age puzzlers in this superior pastiche.
THE LIGHTNING ROD
Meltzer, Brad Morrow/HarperCollins (432 pp.) $18.42 | March 8, 2022 978-0-06-289240-9
Zig and Nola are back in this fastmoving thriller laced with blood and wit. In “the last fourteen minutes of his life,” Wojo the valet steals Archie Mint’s BMW and drives it to the Mint family home, led there by the car’s GPS. It’s a robbery scheme that’s worked before, but this time both the valet and Mint—who followed him—end up dead, shot by someone waiting in the house. Jim “Zig” Zigarowski works at Calta’s Funeral Home and is an artist in making the dead look their very best. One woman “hasn’t looked this good since Reagan was President,” he’s told. Before Calta’s, he’d been a mortician at Dover Air Force Base, which houses “America’s most secretive funeral home,” for two decades. Zig’s gift is to be able to repair any body, no matter
