Book Reviews

Fiona Barton's latest — a followup to last year's hit The Widow — picks up with journalist Kate Waters as she digs into another cold case, this one an infant skeleton found at a building site.

Karin Tidbeck's new novel is set in the mysterious city of Amatka, an agricultural colony ruled by a totalitarian government — but this is no standard dystopia. In Amatka, language has strange power.

A family curse, a resurrection and a vengeful witch are at the center of Elle Cosimano's Southern Gothic chiller The Suffering Tree. But the book elides its setting's history of racial violence.

Anne Helen Petersen's new book is a thoughtful consideration of several public women — from Nicki Minaj to Hillary Clinton — who've run up against the invisible expectations our culture has of them.

Don Winslow's new novel is packed with crooked cops and crookeder crooks, all defending their territories and trying to maintain a status quo where everyone earns, everyone eats and no wars break out.

In Chain Letter, cartoonist Farel Dalrymple returns to The City, the mysterious metropolis at the heart of his early 2000s series Pop Gun War. It's a weird, complicated and charming place.

Scott McClanahan's semi-autobiographical novel is packed with loss, pain and existential anguish, but his narrator — also named Scott — refuses to give up, no matter how often he's knocked down.

Theodora Goss's novel takes bits and pieces from several different monstrous mythologies — Jekyll and Hyde, Dr. Moreau and more — but she makes something new and deceptively intricate out of them.

Nancy MacLean's book stretches back to 19th century Vice President — and ardent secessionist — John C. Calhoun to find the roots of modern libertarianism, which she calls a threat to democracy.

Of the scholars who set out on a 1761 quest to Yemen, only one came back alive. But don't let their looming doom distract from the drama in Thorkild Hansen's hybrid of history, fiction and travelogue.