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Marriage is a once-indomitable institution in decline. Books like Rebecca Traister’s All the Single Ladies and Kate Bolick’s Atlantic article of the same name confirm this for us. We’re getting married less, and staying married less often. So what should we do about it? In Michelle Richmond’s thriller The Marriage Pact, power couples have decided to take the power of marriage back, by any means necessary. Meet the namesake Pact, a secret society intent on developing great marriages. Think of a chic, jetsetting, Scientology-esque group of obsessive mate-pleasers. But just what makes a successful marriage? When Alice and Jake are invited to join the secret club after their wedding, they’re all in. Every newly-wedded couple can use some help, right? What sounds simple becomes a controlling and torturous power game, as The Pact takes things to another level. Spousal support of all kinds is demanded, and The Pact will be there to enforce the rules when they aren’t followed. Sure, it sounds cheesy, right? And it is, a bit. The best thrillers are aware of the genre and not afraid to dive on into the deep end. Or they draw themselves on out of it and head away from the genre entirely. But I digress. I judge straight thrillers solely on how well they keep me craving the next page, drawing me forward into the story, not on how well they reinvent the wheel. The Marriage Pact had me falling deeper and deeper through a rabbit hole of exhausting demands with Alice and Jake. The novel’s exploration of society’s expectations of marriage was an interesting and thoughtful twist, like slowing down to peer at emotional wreckage while speeding ahead on a thrill ride.

Imagine The Wonder Years, if you are old enough. All that innocent nostalgia for adolescence, ice cream dripping curbside and first loves blushing as they slam lockers in school corridors. Now imagine The Wonder Years merged with a Law and Order: SVU episode, and all its treachery lurking around each corner. Finally, plop this summer break-turned-nightmare down in a muggy Louisiana neighborhood, a place strangely unique in the United States, with its lush greenery and delicious food, and you'll get an idea of M.O. Walsh's My Sunshine Away. The story focuses on the rape of Lindy Simpson, as it affected the town of Woodland Hills, Louisiana. We are told of Lindy's rise amidst schoolyard friends and fall after the assault through the eyes of an unnamed narrator, looking back at his adolescence in Woodland Hills. Just one of a handful of Lindy's followers, he worships her, lusts after her, and tries to track down her rapist. The narrator at times tested my tolerance--how much adolescent misunderstanding of love could I tolerate? Would I put the book down? Couldn't this kid see how wounded Lindy was? But he couldn't, and I didn't. This is a story of growing up, with all the awkward moments, all the aches and pains, that entails. As a debut novel, this one was highly praised, and M.O. Walsh's prose is smart and striking. Each meditation on Louisiana, its people, its weather, and its food is clear and crisp, set with a voice so memorable it makes up for what were, for me, the book's more icky moments. And the payoff is there, as we get to see this young, hungry, desperate boy grow up into something better. Despite its premise, this isn't one to end on a bad note--I promise.

Imagine your bright, brave friend is dying of cancer. Imagine she falls in love, in spite of her illness. And then, imagine your friend betrayed, as the man she fell in love with was already married to another woman. Inspired rather than scorned, she decides to write a book about the experience. And then she dies, less than a chapter of the novel created. Is this the plot of A.J. Rich’s The Hand That Feeds You? No, not at all. This is the plot behind the plot. A.J. Rich is not a person, but a pseudonym, a merger of three names: A. (Amy Hempel), J. (Jill Climent), and Rich for Katherine Russell Rich. Hempel and Climent wrote The Hand That Feeds You to honor their friend Katherine Russell Rich, who passed away without the chance to put to paper her own idea for a story. And out of heartbreak, out of death, comes a thriller of heartbreak and death. I love books unafraid to peer under the bed where the monsters live, and this is where The Hand That Feeds You goes. Hempel and Climent hand you a flashlight, and urge you to push into the darkness, beckoning you into the closets and basements where their bold questions about the nature of crime and its victims await. The Hand That Feeds You begins with a mauling. It’s gruesome, and it gave me nightmares. Victim and victimology student Morgan arrives home to what she thinks are rose petals on the floor. At second glance, she realizes she’s looking at red paw prints. Her dogs are covered in what looks like red paint. But it isn’t paint, and her fiancé’s body is in the bedroom. Morgan is shocked that her beloved dogs (big dogs, but tame ones) mauled her fiancé Bennett, and left him lying dead. As Morgan seeks to make sense of the tragedy, as she seeks Bennett’s family to notify them of his death, things that normally should fall into place after such an incident don’t. The body remains unidentified at the morgue--the man she knew as Bennett was a fraud, the family he told her lived in Canada nonexistent. Who was this man, and how was she, a student of the ways criminals take advantage of their victims, susceptible to such a lie? How was she not immune? This is a book that pushes boundaries at every twist and turn. Morgan, as narrator, isn’t a strong and independent femme fatale but a woman rocked to her very core by past events and current ones, a woman trying to protect herself by intellectually understanding the evils of the world, and failing miserably.

I remember the hit “Damn Scientist” shirt design on Threadless, which featured a plain t-shirt that said: “they lied to us. this was supposed to be the future. where is my jetpack, where is my robotic companion, where is my dinner in pill form, where is my hydrogen-fueled automobile, where is my nuclear-powered levitating home, where is my cure for this disease.” Daniel Suarez‘s thriller Influx answers that question--in it, the government is gobbling up all that advanced technology, hoarding it away from the public and other countries. The government launched the Bureau of Technology Control (BTC for short) in 1948 to monitor new technology and its social implications. The Bureau started spying on the Albert Einsteins and Alan Turings of the world, the rebellious free thinkers on the brink of miraculous discoveries. And thanks to the BTC’s quickly snowballing accumulation of technology, they are now wildly ahead of the rest of us. Any scientific discovery too miraculous, and they swoop in like the hand of god, magically disappearing all involved. As the head of the Bureau of Technology Control explains: "Mankind was on the moon in the 1960’s. . . That was half a century ago. Nuclear power. The transistor. The laser. All existed even back then. Do you really think the pinnacle of innovation since that time is Facebook?" They offer scientists and engineers two choices: work for the BTC, or become a lab rat as they pick apart your genius brain. So the Bureau of Technology Control has been growing like a massive sponge, absorbing all the great discoveries of mankind since the 50’s and using them for their own good. At this point, they’re out of the rest of the government’s control--no one has tried to stop them in years, and those that do try to stop them just don’t exist anymore. They’ve grown out of their own control. There are splinter BTC’s in other countries, not all of them run by humans. Technology control is not an easy task. And trying to imprison the world’s geniuses and keep their discoveries secret is a tall order, even for a renegade government organization. Jon Grady is the BTC’s most recent victim, as he’s created a gravity mirror which has huge implications for physics, but also weapons. Without the BTC, it could earn him the Nobel Prize. With the BTC’s existence, it earns him some hard time in a harsh, artificial intelligence-controlled prison. This is a science thriller, mildly similar to Franck Thilliez’s Syndrome E series, but instead of rogue serial killers Suarez takes on a rogue government organization. Suggesting that technology is highly advanced, but kept secret from the public, allows for a bunch of bizarre and fantastical scenes, including a memorable anti-gravity battle in Detroit. There is a period in the beginning of the book when Jon Grady is imprisoned in the high-tech BTC facility, where the lines between the tech and Grady’s own biology blur and everything gets pretty gruesome. I was relieved when the prison scenes were over, although Grady’s mind games with his captor were interesting to read. If you like your reads fast and furious, but don’t like them to make you feel stupid in the process, this is a great book for you. This isn’t the tense, slow burn of a suspense novel, but the wham-pow of a world in which we all want our jetpacks and robot companions, dammit. And Jon Grady is going to fight to make sure we get them.

Peter Stamm’s All Days Are Night opens with TV host Gillian in the hospital, disfigured after a car crash. Her husband, the drunk behind the wheel, was killed. But really, this book isn’t as depressing as it sounds. Unlike other blockbuster books which feature a character with a disfigured face, John Darnielle’s Wolf in White Van or Invisible Monsters by Chuck Pahalniuk, this isn’t a book about looking different. This is a book about how life goes on, about how the clock ticks past moments both brilliant and brutal. What seems to be a story of Gillian’s struggle to recover dramatically shifts halfway through, to focus on an artist known for his paintings of nude housewives. As his life interweaves with Gillian’s several powerful times, this shift saves the book from an unbearable overexposure of one woman’s struggle. All Days Are Night morphs into a love story, a falling-out-of-love story, with steamy sex and moments of crazed artistic frustration. The title quote, despite its dismal insinuation, comes from Shakespeare’s Love Sonnet 43:“All days are nights to see till I see thee,/And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.” Stamm writes with little indication of change--conversations or shifts in scene blur in his writing as they do in life, time moving on unceremoniously. Stamm’s prose needs no formatting, as it cuts clearly to the big questions. He looks to what defines us, and what drives us, when we think we can’t go on.

Jessica Hendry Nelson‘s If Only You People Could Follow Directions is like a photo album of a family wading through the darkest depths of addiction. In a collection of personal essays, Nelson describes memories like snapshots, sad and bright and strange, jails and fear and funerals replacing the smiling faces that fill most family pictures. Rather than try to explain addiction, in medical or historical terms, Nelson leaves those general concepts unexplored and focuses on her own family’s story. This narrow view forms addiction into an ominous cloud, an elusive force pulling and pushing those around her. Nelson tells of fun, terrifying times with her father, dead early from alcoholism. She reveals guilt at having introduced her brother to drugs, as he’s now following in her father’s footsteps. And her mother does the best she can, smoking and drinking her way to something like peace. In one essay, Nelson traces that unquenchable thirst back for generations, to her great-grandmother. Nelson’s grandmother has memories of discovering her own mother so drunk she’d fallen out of bed, incoherent, and been sick on her nightgown. “Looking at her lying there, crooked and pale, I was so afraid.” Cynthia, Nelson’s grandmother says. In writing of this as an ongoing saga, Nelson is almost like the survivor of a car crash, or a plane wreck, but not really even that because she’s still lost amidst this familial struggle. So she’s in a car, right now, crashing against this beast of addiction. She’s glancing around, despite the high speeds and the loud noises, and relaying how this crash-in-progress looks. She’s telling us how much it hurts, and how little she can do to stop the forward movement. Books without much of a plot don’t work if the prose isn’t so moving that it propels you forward, and Nelson’s writing is sad in all the right ways. It’s bittersweet and at times so bare it hurts. It helps to be really interested in this topic, and people who haven’t experienced or been affected by addiction may just not get it. Other reviews are all over the map, and some people say it’s overwritten, or that the drifting format feels overwhelming at times. But sharp memories torn from a disorderly life seem to perfectly express addiction’s elusive, repetitious nature. In the prologue, a letter to her brother recalls the countless locales they’d visit to see their troubled father: rehabs, prisons, “Grandma’s big house.” Then, “He visits us every time you land in the same jail, your twin mug shots forever floating in the same county database, each one more fucked up than the last.” Addiction is such a muddy, messy thing; push up your sleeves, let down your guard, and grab your Kleenex.

X-files fans across the world, rejoice! With A Vision of Fire, Gillian Anderson has written a science fiction novel including just the right amount of homage to her eerie investigations as Dana Scully. Co-written with Jeff Rovin, the book is the first novel in what promises to be a supernatural and apocalyptic series called EarthEnd. UN translator Ben contacts child psychiatrist Claire out of desperation--something strange has happened to the Indian ambassador’s daughter. The Indian Ambassador just survived an assassination attempt, and his daughter’s condition is now distracting him from crucial peace talks, as India and Pakistan edge closer to war. Claire, who goes where the trauma takes her, sees the young girl, Maanik, and knows immediately that her bizarre behavior isn’t PTSD. As the world moves towards war, a few young people across the globe seem possessed. Could it be trauma, ghosts, aliens, seizures, past lives? Is there any difference between a traumatic event that I feel or a traumatic event that you feel? And is all this mystical stuff misplaced in a science fiction novel, as there might really be some sort of global conspiracy seeking contact with an alien race? What is really going on here? This is a quick read, as you’ll find yourself skimming frantically through pages, looking for solutions. But brace yourself, as this is only the first book of a series, and the conclusion here is a promise for more answers in the next book.

Detective Frank Mackey’s daughter, Holly Mackey, has some bad luck where murder is concerned. We met her in Tana French‘s third Dublin Murder Squad book, Faithful Place. In that story, Holly, along with Detective Mackey and the rest of his family, seemed inescapably weaved into the investigation of a long-forgotten disappearance. In French’s new novel, The Secret Place, it’s six years later, and Holly has sprouted up into a young woman, all sarcasm and hair-tosses. Once again, a murder investigation has found her. She comes to Detective Stephen Moran, also from Faithful Place, with a note she found on an anonymous board at her posh boarding school, Kilda’s. The note claims to know who killed a boy from a neighboring school on Kilda’s grounds last year. Last year, the investigation went nowhere. This year, Moran is determined to solve the case and move up to Murder from what he sees as the dead end of Cold Cases. Detective Antoinette Conway, a door-slamming, in-your-face woman in a Murder Squad that likes its women flirty and accommodating, agrees to let Moran ride along and talk to the girls. Holly came to him, after all. Thus the setup for a day of teenage interrogations, alternated with flashbacks of Holly and her girl gang the previous year, leading up to the murder. At first glance, The Secret Place seems to be a clash of two starkly different worlds. Placing these brash and calculating detectives into the dreamy, fantastical boarding school world of adolescent girls, with all their wide-eyed, moon-struck whimsy and best-friends-forever chatter, Tana French might as well have set this book on another planet. Moran and Conway could be wearing space suits as they walk through the bizarre landscape of the boarding school’s halls, listening to the choir’s melodies echoing from down a corridor, watching nuns walk slowly over the well-manicured lawns. But slowly, slowly, French lets us see that perhaps these boarders are the detectives perfect match. The girls are compared to carnivorous jungle beasts multiple times--jaguars with sharp, ripping claws, “big cats released for the night.” At one point Detective Moran says he knows he’s outnumbered by some of them as if he saw three guys with “a bad walk roll around the corner and pick up the pace towards you.” These girls are giggling ugg-wearing thugs; they’re long-haired, lip-glossed, yes, but they’re manipulative, and maybe murderers. Or are they? Moran seems to ebb back and forth in his views just as the girls seem to gain and lose their confidence. One moment these are young women in total control, and the next moment they’re kids, panicking, hysterical, too young and so easily manipulated. It seems like the detectives aren’t sure if it is naivety tripping them up, or its opposite. As the long day passes, the girls are kept in seclusion from the rest of the school, made available for the detectives to interview in groups and individually, kept quarantined to prevent their teenage gossip and outbreaks of hysteria from catching. A less talented author could have made this feel tedious, as the single day of investigation alternates each chapter with a flashback to Holly and her three best friends before the murder took place. But this isn’t a less talented author, this is Tana French, who takes the police procedural out of the squad room and finds it wherever she chooses--the darkness of the woods or the isolation of an abandoned construction site. She finds it here, too, amidst the art projects of teenage girls and the glades they find magic in at night. The flashbacks give the reader a chance to compare conclusions formed by the detectives in each interview with what actually plays out, what behaviors each girl reveals contrasted with her actual role in friendships and crimes, in an amateur sleuth’s ideal setup. Layers upon layers of motive and manipulation are peeled back in a way that seems possible only amongst teenage girls or incredibly dysfunctional families, where so much of what matters is how others behave. And for those that are concerned (no spoiler alert needed), this is a Tana French novel that answers the question “Whodunnit?” clearly, so you won’t feel left cheated if you are looking for a solve. But don’t expect to understand everything that happens on the grounds of Kilda’s, as so much of the magic of adolescence isn’t meant for the outside world.

Colson Whitehead writes uniquely brilliant and wordy novels, centering around such oddball and brilliant concepts it’s difficult not to wonder if something is going on with this guy. In The Noble Hustle, Whitehead’s secret is revealed under the pretense of poker memoir--he hails from the Republic of Anhedonia, where a poker face comes naturally. This revelation sets the tone for the book, in which Whitehead explores the rapid evolution of poker post-online gambling as he quickly evolves himself, prepping for the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, NV. The book bloomed from a Grantland magazine article, “Occasional Dispatches from the Republic of Anhedonia.” Grantland staked Whitehead, a (very) amateur player with a regular monthly Brooklyn writers game, to play in the World Series. That means they paid his $10,000 entrance fee, asked him to write about his experience, and if he reigned supreme in his clash with the titans, he’d get to keep his winnings. Whitehead preps, as anyone would for any sort of epic battle, and these are some of the most memorable scenes. He finds himself a mentor in a fellow writer who demurely answers “housewife” at the poker table when others ask her profession. He calls her Coach. He chooses his poker nickname (the ‘Unsubscribe Kid’). As a test of Whitehead’s writing ability, he’s tasked with explaining a complicated game and the complicated theories behind playing it in a short book. I was lost right away, but I wasn’t reading for the poker lingo. I was reading for Whitehead’s writing, and just as with his novels, Whitehead is able to concoct brilliant language, here with darkly funny commentary of America’s Leisure Industrial Complexes and his struggle to fit in amongst the bling and shine of Las Vegas. The most interesting parts of the book for me were the vignettes of Whitehead’s younger days, pre-success. He recounts driving cross country with friends Darren and Dan, visiting Vegas and eventually crashing on a friend’s floor in Berkeley. I was thinking as I read, “Could it be? Does genius attract genius like that?” And yes, it could be, Colson Whitehead was cruising the country with Darren Aronofsky, brilliant filmmaker of Black Swan and The Wrestler, among many others. Whitehead also roomed in college, and subsequently roamed Vegas, with the founder of The Source magazine. The Noble Hustle staggers ground between niche literature and being for the masses--those who understand the game well might find the explanations tedious but love the storyline, and those who aren’t familiar with the game at all might get lost in Whitehead’s final descriptions of the play. The New York Times review gave Whitehead a hard time for draping the entire memoir in these hints of malcontent, with his Anhedonia schtick, and I’m not sure what I think about that. At first I tended to agree, but you can’t be mad at a guy for not being shiny happy person, can you? Overall, any die-hard Whitehead fan shouldn’t miss this chance to glimpse the writer’s life, history, and native land.

Sue Miller‘s new book, The Arsonist, is about the biggest things that happen in the world and how anyone manages to keep going despite them, about the edges of the divides between us that we stand near and peer across, and most of all, about falling into or out of love, how easy and sudden and unexpected love creeps up on you or sprints away from you. Maybe, then, this is a book about how little control we really have in the world, and how coming to terms with that is never simple. After 15 years of working for an NGO in Africa, Frankie has come home. She usually drops by for a visit, but this time she’s not sure she wants to go back. But how can she stay? She’s been setting up food stations, fighting hunger at refugee camps, and compared to where she was in the world, life in the quaint New Hampshire town her parents have retired to is a life of ease, abundance, and in the face of all the world’s plight, insignificance. Frankie’s parents, Sylvia and Alfie, were once summer people in the town of Pomeroy, but in retirement they’ve chosen to move full-time to the old farmhouse which has acted as the family’s summer vacation home, hoping to ease the pressures of their own quiet crises with a quiet life. Intellectual Alfie’s memory loss seems to be getting worse and worse, and Sylvia keeps gulping down glasses of wine and early afternoon drinks, hoping to find a way to cope with what she fears could be the end of her husband as she knows him. In the midst of all this disaster, big and little, global and familial, an additional, artificial one is created: fires begin to bloom at night, setting homes ablaze. When Frankie first hears the siren of the fire truck, a foreign sound to her after her time in Africa, she doesn’t recognize it, and thinks it must be some sort of animal. The local paper owner Bud, a city refugee himself, reports on the fires as he struggles to decipher Frankie’s intentions--will she stay or will she go? Is she capable, after seeing so much world out there, of caring about this small little piece of it here? I’m a fan of long books, and I loved the time Miller took telling the beginning of this story. As other reviewers on both Goodreads and Amazon complained, however, the story is uneven, as the end quickly wraps up. If anything, though, I think this is a testament The Arsonist‘s ability to build characters that draw us in so much we are angry when they leave us. I could have happily read this book, doubled in length. I’m also a huge fan of leaving mysteries unsolved, and not wrapping up all the details precisely, and Miller manages to do this here, without leaving the reader feeling cheated. If you do finish this book wanting a simply conclusion to its many questions, big and small, you haven’t been paying attention.

I’ve debated how to review Lauren Owen’s The Quick since finishing it a few days ago. I don’t think this is a novel with a twist, as much as it is a novel which dedicates a bit of itself to misdirection. Even the cover could be misleading, as I realized through summaries that this was going to be a novel of secret societies and suspense, but I assumed it would be more in the literary vein, like Alena Graedon’s The Word Exchange. The Quick seems to tell the story of James and Charlotte Norbury, growing up with a distant father in their treasured but disintegrating Askew Hall. Where generations of the Norbury clan lived lavishly before them, James and Charlotte are mostly left to their own devices, losing track of time amidst old statues in the garden or building their bravery by creating tests of courage in the library. James grows into a young man and sets off for the big city of London, as young men are wont to do. He’s determined to be a writer, and rarely leaves his flat, sitting up at his desk all hours and staining his hands with ink as he creates long classic poems. He finds himself living vicariously through his roomie Christopher Paige, who comes home late to divulge tales of London high society, heavy drinking, and debauchery. But the story here hasn’t really begun, because much more than friendship is brewing between the aristocratic Christopher and the meek James. And even then, the story hasn’t really begun, because at a dinner party, James notices that Christopher’s brother looks ill--he seems so pale, and is he wounded? Is he bleeding? As the book doesn’t directly introduce its subject matter, some readers may be frustrated. The Quick is a historical novel, yes, but it is a supernatural historical novel. All this high society, all this classic London aristocracy--there is something horrible bubbling underneath. There are fight scenes, there are wild street children getting shot in the feet, there are fires and desperate carriage rides to safety. The book includes journal entries, scribbled and ripped in places. Those hoping for the story of James and Charlotte to continue as it did in the style of the book’s beginning may be dismayed, as reality shifts around them, and the narrative drastically changes. If you are seeking a mild-mannered historical novel, you may want to look elsewhere. If you are interested in what might be crouching in the shadows of that mild-mannered historical novel, overlooked and unexplored, then you’ll want to pick up The Quick.

Tom Perotta’s 2011 novel, The Leftovers, about a town recovering from a rapture-like event, is the basis for HBO’s brooding new series of the same name. Perotta is no stranger to book-to-screen adaptations: he wrote both Little Children and Election. The Leftovers, as a novel, has little of the darker style and mysterious mood conveyed with in the HBO series. The novel feels overwhelming, funny, and sad in the same way that Colson Whitehead’s Zone One feels overwhelming, funny, and sad. Perotta and Whitehead delve into what happens after an immediate global crisis begins to fade, and people must keep on living daily life. Survivors realize there is laundry to be done, homework to be completed, and small talk to be made at the dinner table. While Whitehead explores the equivalent of day-in-day-out garbage removal in a post-zombie apocalypse city, in The Leftovers, Perotta creates a more open, and perhaps more intriguing, concept. If you haven’t been watching the show, here’s the general plot summary for both the novel and the series: a “random harvest” of people throughout the globe has disappeared, in an event neutrally coined as the “Sudden Departure.” Immediate panic subsides as the event seems to be a singular occurrence, and government investigations find no clear answer or medical explanation. Connections to the rapture are obvious, but are in constant debate as those who disappeared seem so remarkably random, and not of one religion or belief system. The Leftovers, as the title indicates, is not the story of the event itself but of that time when life must go on, post-Sudden Departure. We join those left behind in a quaintly small town, as they try to pick up the pieces of society or encourage those very pieces to fall apart. Those who want to move on from the event struggle in private ways, and those who think there is an insanity in seeking normal life after such a disastrous event gravitate towards one of the various fringe groups which develop in response to the Sudden Departure. Each cult seeks to put their own spin on the tragedy, often with destructive results. There are quite a few negative reviews of the novel, which I found surprising. It was highly praised on its release in 2011, and has been sitting on my Amazon Wishlist for years. I found it be an ultimately jolting, but mostly beautifully meditative, examination of how we try to heal from things by claiming them as our own. We seek to possess tragedy in a way that ends up destroying us. As other reviewers note, there is a bit of shock at the ending, so if you invest in only positive endings in your reading then I’d suggest avoiding books about a post-Rapture world in general. Now to what people really want to know--how does the novel compare with the show? If you like the show, should you get the book? I think it depends on what you like about the show. Stylistically, the show presents post-Sudden Departure life as intriguing, while the novel goes for the tone of people living through just another day. I think this difference adds a level of mystery to the show which wasn’t sought in the book’s original tone. What the book does have is Laurie’s thoughts, as she goes about her days at the Guilty Remnant. With much narration from Laurie’s perspective, the reader learns about the Guilty Remnant, Laurie’s motives, and the history of the Sudden Departure and her family. This would be impossible on the show, as Laurie has taken an oath of silence and a voice-over narrating her thoughts would be incredibly awkward. If you’re curious to know more about both cults presented, the Guilty Remnant and Holy Wayne’s group, then the book has your answers. But if you are seeking some sort of greater-than-human explanation, prepare to be underwhelmed. The tone of the book is plain, the actions people take in the book are those of desperate, scared people, and none of it is dressed up by Liv Tyler’s beauty or haunting music (nothing against these two things, just don’t be disappointed in the book, when they aren’t there). The book mainly focuses on the Garvey family, and there are many characters mentioned in passing which the show seems to have fully fleshed out into their own episodes. If we see more of this, the post-Sudden Departure storyline planted in the book could grow much larger in the series. I’m interested to see if the show will follow the book’s actual plot. If it does, due to the jarring ending I mentioned before, it seems like they may have quite a few unhappy viewers on their hands. For this reason, if you’re worried about spoilers, I’d recommend holding off on reading the novel until the series is finished or led so far astray the original storyline the spoiler risk seems minimal. Tom Perotta is working on the series as a co-creator, writer, and executive producer, so he definitely could have started something in the book that he could finish in the series, exploring how society deals with an event that feels catastrophic, but maybe not catastrophic enough. When bad things happen, Perotta seems to be asking us, should the wheels keep turning? Or should they fall off?

If there’s one thing I love in this world, it’s mystery fiction. Sometimes I need a good literary mystery, with headache and nightmare-inducing twists and turns. Sometimes, I crave something more straightforward. I picked up Karin Slaughter’s previous novel Criminal on one of these whims, hoping for an easy, enjoyable read. Criminal was part of Slaughter’s Will Trent series, and the story alternated between Will’s present storyline and the vivid, gritty life of his supervisor, Deputy Director Amanda Wagner, as she joined the police force in the 1970′s. Slaughter’s historical fiction stood out to me, as rookie cop Amanda Wagner dealt with rampant sexism on the police force and navigated some of Atlanta’s worst neighborhoods. So you can imagine my excitement when I learned about Cop Town, Slaughter’s first stand alone novel, focusing entirely on women of Atlanta’s police force in the 1970′s. Amanda Wagner’s part of the story stood out to me in Criminal, and it definitely left me wanting more from that time period. It seems as if this is the world Slaughter is meant to explore and uncover: an “old boy” network in which the old boys are all haunted by various wars, a culture in which heavy drinking seems required to make it on the job, a police force where male cops aren’t your peers but cat-calling, leering father figures who won’t take you seriously. In Cop Town, smart, observant Maggie Lawson works in this type of environment, and she reluctantly takes Kate Murphy under her wing as she flails both literally and figuratively, in a uniform that is much too large for her. Someone is shooting Atlanta cops, killing them execution-style in the back of the head, and Maggie and Kate take it upon themselves to look for what the rest of the force, drunk and stuck in their own ways of thinking, can’t or won’t see. There’s some discussion of the accuracy of all the racism and sexism portrayed in these books. Could the police force have really been that horrible for the first few women on the force, in big cities like Atlanta? In both Criminal and Cop Town Slaughter notes at the end of the novels her attention to accuracy and historical facts in research. But the books are, of course, fiction. I think this is why the work Voice of Witness is doing, and the concept of oral history/personal narrative in general, is so important. I would love to see Karin Slaughter tell the stories of some of the first women on police forces in America, as they relayed those experiences to her. The larger thing to remember when reading Cop Town, however, is that this isn’t meant to be a textbook. This is a mystery. This will be a book you can’t wait to pick up, a book your heart beats a bit faster when you read, a book you feel a bit disoriented when you look up from because you were so lost inside its pages. Putting these protagonists in an unbelievably hostile work environment heightens the tension from all sides. There is a shooter on the loose of the streets of Atlanta, yes, but there are enemies everywhere else these young women turn.

Oh, the banes of this human form: the never-ending maintenance our bodies require, the obligatory strings attached through bloodlines to those we must care for or neglect. In her most recent novel, Big Brother, Lionel Shriver asks the question, “How do we eat?” and finds the answer to be a resounding “not well.” When Pandora, former catering whiz and expert chef, arrives at the airport to pick up her big brother for a visit, she’s shocked to see much more of the man than she used to know. Her brother has morphed into that class of people politely termed “morbidly obese,” more simply called very, very fat. Thus begins big brother Edison’s bull-in-a-china-shop visit with Pandora and her family, consisting of a series of startling cracks resonating through the home as things break, and never-ending awkward moments as huge amounts of food disappear from the fridge, as peanuts dropped on the floor are clambered after. What makes Shriver a good, if inconsistent, author to me is her ability to examine the least human parts of our experiences together. She questioned the roles of motherhood in her school shooting shocker We Need To Talk About Kevin, as a mother struggles to feel love for her dark, cruel son. And again, Shriver explores these limits of love and the obligations of family in Big Brother. The novel’s harsh characterizations of both the obsessively skinny and the overweight, its low boil of family tension bubbling up unbearably high, to resonant and unforgettable meltdowns (“…when I polish off a doughnut, that’s not doing anything to you!” Edison shouts at Pandora’s health-nut husband, at one point), seems reminiscent of what made We Need To Talk About Kevin so lulling and irresistible, so accurate in its unpleasantness, so precise in its displays of how we can fail in relationships, and how we can fail ourselves. The accuracy here comes from intimate knowledge of the subject matter. Although unaware of this until done with the book and researching for this review, Shriver tells the New York Times Magazine that she has a strict diet and exercise regimen herself. She eats one meal a day, and runs 10 miles a day. She also had an obese brother who died young, at age 55. Tragically, much of this book seems to be inspired by our real life struggles to find contentment in eating when surrounded with abundance. As Pandora notes in the book, and any addict can understand, “The most sumptuous experience of ingestion is in-between: remembering the last bite and looking forward to the next one.”

Something odd is happening to the teenage girls in the town of Dryden. The town itself seems a bit other-worldly, its dead lake fenced off and bright with glowing algae; its weather shocking, hot-to-cold in the blink of an eye; its rain almost heavy and almost acidic, shredding raincoats to pieces. The girls who attend the town’s high school begin dropping like flies. Literally dropping, their desks and chairs pitching to the side as they seize and jerk and ramble incoherently. Journalists arrive. The hospital overflows. An event, it seems, is occurring. The Fever, Megan Abbott’s new novel, contains more than just the literal kind. There is also the frenzied burst from adolescent upwards into adulthood, making the book’s high school setting a veritable hothouse of blooming sexuality and judgement, all bright colored tights and miniskirts, testosterone and swoon. The agony and ecstasy of adolescence seems to be Abbott’s expertise, as her first novel Dare Me focused on the heartless steeliness it takes to make it on a high school cheerleading squad. As with any high school saga, The Fever‘s story wouldn’t be complete without nearly maniacal parents, losing their daughters to a mystery illness. Could it be the HPV vaccine, which the school recommended? Could it be that mysterious lake, fenced off and smelling odd, forbidden and beautiful? Could there be a haunting in Dryden, or perhaps, something much more sinister but more simply human? High school seen through Abbott’s eyes isn’t a place you go and get educated, but a world unto itself. Anyone who was young once, who grew up awkward and gangly and full of hormones, knows this to be all too true. A place where everything is known by everyone simultaneously, like magic. A place where there are multiple languages, spoken in glances and movements and jangly bracelets tousled on wrists. And a place where once things start going wrong, everyone is a suspect, and no one is safe.

After last year’s English translation of Herman Koch’s internationally acclaimed The Dinner, an agonizing story of the anger and violence dragging under the surface at the dinner table, we know to except something searing and intimate from this master of the slow burn. I expected a car crash of a tale from Summer House with Swimming Pool, vehicles flipped and burned, while I’m left staring and braking as I pass by, unable to speed up and get going and leave the wreckage in my rear view. I wasn’t disappointed. Koch seems to choose the most mundane names for these books, which drastically juxtapose with their messy and dark guts: a dinner, a summer house, a swimming pool. Simple things. The books, however, take on the most private and tragic of subjects--those around you turning violent and pedophiliac, nights where too much drink goes from fun to bad to irreparable too quickly, choosing to seek revenge on those who have wronged you or your family, allowing revenge to be taken while you sit back and watch the clock. Summer House with Swimming Pool starts with Dr. Marc Schlosser, general practitioner, revealing to the reader his odd view of his craft and his patients. He seems almost maniacal as he rants of the artists who drink too much and then hide their vices from him, their doctor. He practices medicine with a careless abandon, spending twenty minutes with each patient to ensure they feel attended to while really dismissing most concerns outright. This part of the book, the lead up to the actual meat of the thing, seems to be the weakest, as the Schlosser’s character seems bordering on insanity, unbelievability. But then, we get past Schlosser’s introduction to his private practice as he recounts what can only be called a tragedy, one of those awkward and beautifully rendered modern family portraits executed so startlingly well by Jonathan Franzen and A.M. Homes in the past. Schlosser and his wife and two kids go camping, and meet up with a patient of Schlosser’s. An actor, with a house. A summer house, with a swimming pool. The booze is flowing and from the beginning things are not quite right--motives are unclear, and Schlosser’s wife wants to leave this new gang of friends. As with so many things, enough small warning signs are ignored, enough unusual events made usual, enough heads turned in the wrong direction, that everything is okay until it all has suddenly, horribly spun out of control. Someone is hurt, and revenge is taken. I just can’t say too much about this book without giving something or other away, as this is one of those books that illustrates so well our inability to ever truly know those around us, especially those closest to us. Clear your schedule if you pick this book up--I read it in a day or two, unable to stop until I knew what was truly going on, until I’d followed every paranoid twist and desperate turn to the final conclusion. Summer House with Swimming Pool, just as The Dinner before it, reminds us that every individual has a uniquely intimate private life, swirling with their own motives and fears, their own lies and truths. Koch’s writing deals with, as some of the best writing does, these monstrosities we keep within ourselves or place onto others: the unknowable within us, the rage we hold inside or are unable to hold inside any longer, desires filled or unfulfilled, beliefs rightly or wrongly held. One of the gifts of literature is that we are able to read what other people are thinking, but books like this remind us that we are luckily unable to know what those around us are thinking in everyday life.