April 2026's Burgoine and Pearl-Rule reviews

Author 'Nathan Burgoine posted this simple, direct method of not getting paralyzed by the prospect of having to write reviews. The Three-Sentence Review is, as he notes, very helpful and also simple to achieve. I get completely unmanned at the idea of saying something trenchant about each book I read, when there often just isn't that much to say...now I can use this structure to say what I think is the most important idea I took away from the read and not try to dig for more.

Think about using it yourselves!

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

When I Was Death by Alexis Henderson

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: A group of teen girls does Death incarnate's bidding in this haunting speculative young adult novel.

Roslyn Volk isn’t herself anymore. It’s been a year since her sister, Adeline, died in the woods under mysterious circumstances, and Roslyn is still tormented by her absence. So when the elusive caravan of girls that Adeline spent her last summer with rolls back into town, Roslyn joins them to finally figure out what happened to her sister.

Strange, beautiful, and intriguing, the girls are closed off from the world. And as it turns out, they’re brought together by a force more sinister than Roslyn’s nightmares could have conjured: Death himself.

Death has spared the girls from untimely endings, and to pay for their lives, the girls travel the country reaping souls on his behalf. Now Roslyn must decide if finding closure is worth the price of striking the same deal.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Death as a character, death as a life passage for the survivors, grief and grieving are all worthy and interesting topics to explore; the bonds of siblinghood are of eternal interest to us who were siblings and often to those who were not for the same reasons: The closeness arising from being family, born or made, never fails to involve readers.

I was no great fan of this iteration of the story because I thought it pulled its punches too often for a YA novel and not often enough for a middle-grade one. It was an okay way to spend an afternoon, but no more.

G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) wants $10.99 for an ebook.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Liar's Dice by Juliet Faithfull

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A heart-rending and hopeful debut about a teenage girl in 1970s Brazil who is unexpectedly torn away from her disabled twin sister—and who must learn what it means to fight for those we love when all the odds are stacked against us.

Everyone knows, but no one talks.

Identical twins Dolores and Mita grow up in lockstep in rural Brazil, speaking their own secret language, dancing together, inseparable even when they sleep. But at age seven, they discover that Mita has a degenerative condition—and Dolores does not. On the cusp of adolescence, Mita's illness becomes debilitating, and without telling Dolores, their parents send Mita across the Atlantic Ocean to a hospital in their father’s native London.

The rest of the family moves to Rio and begins to live a bourgeois lifestyle, but Dolores is miserable there. She misses her small-town and most especially her twin, who her parents seem to have forgot ever existed. And she has no way to contact Mita—particularly since, at twelve years old, Dolores still cannot read or write. She is desperate to speak to her again—and desperately alone and unhappy at her posh new school. But everything begins to change when she meets a brave, headstrong girl from the favelas who shows Dolores a new side of Rio, and how to survive it.

Tensions are on the rise with the dictatorial government cracking down on protesters and dissenters. Both at home and in the country at large, there are cover-ups at play—and Dolores pushes to find the truth about right and wrong, her lost sister and her place in life. In a setting where repression and silencing were part of everyday life, Liar’s Dice is about the secrets we hold, both personal and political, and the consequences of keeping them. Atmospheric and intimate, Juliet Faithfull's coming of age novel captures the intensity of forming your own identity, and the courage and love required to forge a different life.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Coming of age, authoritarian politics, intellectual disabilities, twinhood bonds, adolescent-female angst, dual timelines, disappearing siblings...holy crap, lady, pick two and master those before going wide! Debut novels get graded on a curve around here but wow is this ambitious story trying to do too much and not succeeding at most of it.

I feel sure the readers who enjoy coming-of-age stories with a political edge, and the readers who recently discovered Brazil's fascinating culture, will love this read.

Random House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) would like $13.99 for you to legally access an ebook. I myownself would point you to the library.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Dark Is When the Devil Comes by Daisy Pearce

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Unrelentingly scary and thrilling, Dark Is When the Devil Comes is an ambitious and chilling novel from acclaimed horror author Daisy Pearce.

The woods are known as the place to avoid. What goes in, doesn’t come out.

Hazel has been gone from her small hometown of Idless in the English countryside for years. Now returned in the wake of a traumatic divorce and crumbling personal life, her simple plans are to lay low at her parents’ vacated house, reconnect with her prickly sister Cathy, and slowly get back on her feet.

Cathy is surprised when Hazel doesn’t show. Their relationship strained from a fallout half a decade ago, she didn’t expect them to get back into a sisterly rhythm…though she hadn’t counted on Hazel bailing, either.

But something isn’t adding up. Other people in town whisper of a threat that can’t be shaken. The woods are known for being restless. And Cathy knows the old saying.

If you go looking for trouble, you just might find it.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Hazel returns to her childhood home covered in mud and misery, smeared with the wreckage of a horrible divorce. She wants to see if her bond with Cathy, her sister, is still functional,if home is still home, if there is in fact another life to replace the one she's lost.

Home is, unexpectedly, scarier than her ruined life in deeply weird and uneasy ways. As she tries to make sense of the changes and the alienness surrounding her, Hazel vanishes leaving Cathy to discover dark and stormy lies underpinning both women's lives.

Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) thinks $14.99 is a just and reasonable demand to make on your wallet in exchange for this story. Sure, why not.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Morsel by Carter Keane

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The Blair Witch Project meets The Ritual, with a generous helping of The Menu, in Morsel, a delicious folk horror novella perfect for fans of T. Kingfisher, Cassandra Khaw, and Paul Tremblay.

Lou did what the children of parents with back-breaking, poor paying jobs are supposed to do; pulled up her bootstraps, went to college, and got an office job with coworkers who won’t stop talking about their multi-level marketing scheme disguised as self-betterment.

Determined to lift her ill mother out of poverty before it's too late, and in the spirit of climbing the corporate ladder, Lou accepts an assignment in the rural hills of Ohio. She quickly finds herself stranded in the middle of nowhere with a sabotaged truck, a dog she’s determined to keep safe, and something stalking her through the ancient Appalachian woods.

If she can’t escape the woods in time, she’ll come face to face with the fact that her job isn’t the only thing that wants to eat her alive.

Morsel is a chilling testament to the burden of generational poverty and the all-consuming nature of capitalism, where the monster and the monstrous, in the end, are not the same.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Monstruous is the right term for the system excoriated in this story. I use it in place of the modern "monstrous" to send you on the hunt that will cast you up on John Knox's tedious doorstep to show you how long (since 1558, at least) we've been shouting at the Powers That Be there's something very wrong with the way things are and, if you're all not very careful, 1789 could be prologue not footnote.

The huge challenge of the novella form is to keep the pace up while still using your story to make the point you're after making; this story chose pace over story so gets a tiny ding off its stars, but what an ambitious swing it was!

Tor Nightfire (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) needs you to give them $12.99 to read it. Unless your library is very good about buying horror, buying it's your best bet.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Blood Trail by Matt Query and Harrison Query

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: A poacher-turned-game-warden is on the hunt for a bloodthirsty cult in this unnerving thriller from the authors of the “artful chiller” (Lincoln Child, #1 New York Times bestselling author) Wilderness Reform.

Clark Rickert was once the most prolific big game poacher throughout the Rocky Mountain west but when he lost both his son and his wife, he turned away from hunting. Now a game warden working for the very law enforcement officers that once pursued him so aggressively, Clark is overwhelmingly successful at his job.

So, when there’s a string of disappearances in rural Montana, Clark is selected to join a task force on an operation targeting a mysterious, violent cult in the area. As he works to uncover the truth, Clark begins to be plagued by visions and starts to realize that there is a deeper purpose to his assignment and the cult might up to something far more terrifying than anyone could have guessed.

From two authors who “set themselves apart with sterling prose” (Publishers Weekly), Blood Trail is an eerie and suspenseful horror novel that will sink its teeth in you.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: A dark, violent mix of dad-book, supernatural/cult thriller, and weirdly ambiguous redemption arc for a bad hombre. I was awash in acronym soup, annoyed by the way Clark vacillates between his draw towards and repulsion by the acts of the baddies, and the sheer overwhelming sausage party atmosphere of the whole exercise.

It's not bad, it's not great, and it is too damn long.

Emily Bestler Books/Atria (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) takes $14.99 for your access to the ebook.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Stay for a Spell by Amy Coombe

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A cursed princess must discover what her heart truly longs for in this charmingly cozy romantic fantasy for everyone who’s ever lost—or found—themselves in a bookshop.

Princess Tanadelle of the Widdenmar is disillusioned with life as a princess. She longs for real conversation, the chance to build a life of her own making, and uninterrupted reading time.

During a routine royal visit to the town of Little Pepperidge, Tandy’s dream comes true when she finds herself cursed to remain in a run-down bookshop until she unlocks her heart’s desire. Certain that someone will figure out how to break the curse eventually, and delighted by the prospect of an entire bookstore of her own, Tandy settles into life among the stacks. She finds it easy to exchange balls and endless state dinners for teetering piles of books and an irritatingly handsome pirate who seems bent on stealing her stock.

She even starts to believe she's stumbled into her very own happily ever after.

There's just one, minor problem: as Tandy's royal duties go unfulfilled, her frantic parents start sending princes to woo her, each one of them certain their kiss will break the curse. After all, what more could a princess want but a prince?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Found-family romantasy with an utterly ensorcelling premise of being cursed to spend your life in a bookshop (!!) until you figure out what your heart's true desire is. That scenario being my heart's true desire I guess I'd be there the rest of my days. Boo hoo.

Don't look for world-building, magic-system development, or deviation from heteronormativity. All vibes, no plot, and you're golden; I was modestly involved throughout.

Ace (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) asks you to hand over $14.99 for an ebook. Do it if you're in need of an "aaawww" read.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The Heavy Side: A Novel by Ben Rogers

Rating: 2* of five, all for the idea

The Publisher Says: The Heavy Side explores the unlikely and fateful collaboration of a hotshot Silicon Valley programmer and a Mexican drug cartel.

Vik Singh has developed a clever app for drug dealers, and now both the DEA and the cartel are after him. Narrated by Vik's girlfriend, Remi, the story grapples with America’s insatiable hunger for drugs and the human toll it takes on our neighbors to the south. We witness a young man confronting his artistic pride and a young couple trying to make up for past betrayals.

"The Social Network" meets "Narcos" in this suspenseful and intelligent literary thriller.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Very very dull. I took over five years to finish it but I did, so I'm counting it as a full-blown read. The idea appeals to me, the nerdy tech scum agreeing to make an app to *help*a*drug*dealer*succeed* without irony, or implicit condemation.

I wondered if the author's ever had an actual conversation with a female human. The "girlfriend" character was laughably "seductive"...even your sister could tell you no woman thinks the word "coquettish" in reference to blotting her lipstick.

CQ Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) wants $19.95 for a paperback.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

This space is dedicated to Nancy Pearl's Rule of 50, or "the Pearl Rule" as I've always called it. After realizing five times in December 2021 alone that I'd already Pearl-Ruled a book I picked up on a whim, I realized how close my Half-heimer's is getting to the full-on article. Hence my decision to track my Pearls!

As she says:

People frequently ask me how many pages they should give a book before they give up on it. In response to that question, I came up with my “rule of fifty,” which is based on the shortness of time and the immensity of the world of books. If you’re fifty years of age or younger, give a book fifty pages before you decide to commit to reading it or give it up. If you’re over fifty, which is when time gets even shorter, subtract your age from 100—the result is the number of pages you should read before making your decision to stay with it or quit.

So this space will be each month's listing of Pearl-Ruled books. Earlier Pearl-Rule posts will be linked below the current month's crop.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Before Evil: Young Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Mao, and Kim (29%) by Brandon K. Gauthier

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: Should we humanize the world's most inhumane leaders?

Adolf Hitler. Joseph Stalin. Benito Mussolini. Mao Zedong. Kim Il Sung. Vladimir Lenin. These cruel dictators wrote their names on the pages of history in the blood of countless innocent victims. Yet they themselves were once young people searching for their place in the world, dealing with challenges many of us face—parental authority, education, romance, loss—and doing so in ways that might be uncomfortably familiar.

Historian Brandon K. Gauthier has created a fascinating work—epic yet intimate, well-researched but immensely readable, clear-eyed and empathetic—looking at the lives of these six dictators, with a focus on their youths. We watch Lenin’s older brother executed at the hands of the Tsar’s police—an event that helped radicalize this overachieving high-schooler. We observe Stalin grappling with the death of his young, beautiful wife. We see Hitler’s mother mourning the loss of three young children—and determined that her first son to survive infancy would find his place in the world.

The purpose isn’t to excuse or simply explain these horrible men, but rather to treat them with the empathy they themselves too often lacked. We may prefer to hold such lives at arm’s length so as to demonize them at will, but this book reminds us that these monstrous rulers were also human beings—and perhaps more relatable than we’d like.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I finally admitted to myself, as I was about to embark on the chapter where Lenin's brother is executed by the tsar's regime, that I do not care. These men were not monsters, but they were bloody-handed, bloody-minded murdering bastards, so knowing they were once belovèd sons/brothers/husbands did nothing to make me loathe them less.

The author's written a darn good book, carefully sourced and cited, that tried to do something to me I did not want done. YMMV

Tortoise Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) only wants $9.99 for the ebook! Go get one!

KILL DICK, a strangely compelling long stare at too-smooth, too-shiny surfaces

KILL DICK
LUKE GOEBEL
Red Hen Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction For the week ending April 19, 2026

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A fever dream, Kill Dick is a literary thriller that plunges into the chaos of Los Angeles where addiction, privilege, and corruption combust.

At nineteen, Susie Vogelman should be she’s an NYU dropout with no responsibilities, endless prescription pills, and a Brentwood estate to waste away in. But Los Angeles has other plans. A string of brutal murders targeting addicts spreads through the city, and Susie’s ivory tower begins to crumble. The headlines point too close to her father’s ties to an opioid empire, a sinister secret society, and her own complicity in the systems holding it all together.

Then there’s Peter Holiday, a disgraced professor running a rehab scam so audacious it’s almost admirable. When their lives collide, Susie and Peter are dragged into a web of privilege, corruption, and violence, where every escape leads deeper into the rot.

Dark, satirical, and razor-sharp, Kill Dick is a modern literary thriller that unflinchingly dissects wealth, exploitation, and the perilous line between survival and self-destruction.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Health scammers, like Peter Holiday in this story, might be the lowest scum on this wide, green Earth. Preying on those desperate for their very lives...! My mother's father fell for the Laetrile scam in the 1970s. Luckily he survived more than a few years after it was exposed to all as a hoax, but it cemented my powerful disdain for health scammers as it was an expensive lesson. Fast-forward from my family's 1970s to Susie Vogelman, our PoV character, in a circle of hell called the glittering world of too-rich too-dimwitted 2016 LA.

What's worse than an addict without morals or boundaries? Worse even than an enabler of the addict? The addict turned enabler. Susie, who apparently never so much as once looked into a mirror that showed her anything except her surface, is a participant in a lot of different kinds of enabling in this story. It's very well done, it never lets the pace of revelations slacken, but it also never once shows even a glimmer of realization in Susie or her coterie of criminally negligent creeps. But their surfaces are pretty! And their credit cards are limitless!

I wanted to shake Susie into awareness of her hollowness, lest she implode causing still further damage. But Author Goebel is careful to make this world honest by giving it consequences despite no one in the cast being anything but appalling. Bad things are going to happen, and I didn't care about the consequences to any of the cast just to the folks who were victimized by the cast. The suppurating wounds of vapidity exacerbated by the absence of empathy (honestly, I'm not sure Susie in particular even has a theory of mind) in every character are never allowing anyone to escape dire consequences.

When they come I was deeply surprised to feel...sad is too strong, sympathetic is in the wrong emotional register, wistful is too kindly meant...to not feel triumphant? I think that's closer. I was eager for the comeuppances to be passed around, and Peter the scumbag to get seconds. After all, this was the moment that the country saw Trump installed in entirely the wrong kind of government housing. What use is fiction of not to redress horrifying imbalances?

Showing them to us, forcing us to see that the rot is there even when it's plastered over, and there are ways you can recognize it despite the glittering surface. Less wish fulfillment than cautionary tale. It's well done. Author Goebel (Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours via the deeply cool publisher FC2) has storytelling chops. He has very cool film scripts in his CV, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Anne Hathaway in them. His current publisher is Kate Gale's always interesting and frequently tastemaking Red Hen Press. Given these bona fides why is this not a full-five review?

Because I got uneasy as I crested the halfway mark, feeling I was still outside Susie's world with my sarcastic voyeur of a guide being invited to laugh at and judge these buffoons. It's what they deserve! is implicit in each and every moment I'm in the story's flow. Which, fair—it is indeed what they deserve; but is it your point, Author Goebel, to stop there or is it to force me-the-reader into looking deep into the shine of these surfaces and ask myself "why are you still here with these tacky people." I didn't think it was terribly clear what your purpose was; the only reason that was an issue is its consequence of popping me out of the story-flow to examine the whole read again and again.

That's a big ask, but your story is a national bestseller so I guess it worked. I'm glad it did, and does, and will do the trick again in future.

THE PERFECT CIRCLE, exploring the odd geometry of Love

THE PERFECT CIRCLE
CLAUDIA PETRUCCI (Tr. Anne Milano Appel)
World Editions (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Two women far apart in time, a mysterious unsellable mansion in Milan that connects them: two lives that start to overlap as impossible parallels are revealed in this story of passion, betrayal, and selfish desire.

In the round house on Via Saterna, its Palladian square exterior nothing but a trompe-l’oeil, the sun pierces through the central skylight. Its rays pass three floors unobstructed, before reaching the circle below at the heart of the house: four fingers of water filling a little silver basin. It is here that young Lidia dies, setting an end to her clandestine love affair with the ambitious architect. It is this house that real-estate agent Irene is asked to sell, decades later, as the climate catastrophe escalates, cloaking the divided city in a permanent orange haze. Returning to her native Milan for the sale, Irene feels the brunt of her father’s judgement. He is a proud Italian and prouder architect—how could his own daughter make a living selling cultural patrimony to the highest foreign bidder?

As she faces this new Milan and the old family tensions she had avoided while living in Rome, Irene throws herself into the impossible sale, getting to know Via Saterna intimately—this space that is as unsettling as it is hostile, with the slowly emerging traces of Lidia’s interrupted life. In every room of the house, the burden of a mysterious, unresolved past can be felt, remnants of a selfish and manipulative love.

The Perfect Circle tackles themes like time, death, and repetition with depth and originality, while carrying its philosophy lightly. Through it all, the novel is a subtly disturbing page-turner, every new page adding a new layer and twist.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The Performance, my previous experience by this author/translator duo, was not a success the way this read was. It was not the prose that presented me with a problem, it was the story the elegant and insightful prose was telling that turned me off. "Positive gaslighting" is a bridge too far for this old-man brain to go along with.

Thank all those useless gods I'm not confronted by this issue in The Perfect Circle. I remember the Milan of the 1980s, and it's evoked very clearly in the setting of this strange, almost sentient-seeming house at 7 Via Saterna. I spent my earliest years in a house that, like this one, felt deeply and unnervingly like it was aware. I hope whoever lives there now has made friends with the house, otherwise it will eat their happiness the way my house and the Via Saterna did to its earlier inhabitants. I'm clear about why Lidia, the owner from 1985 and Dario, the architect she hired to revamp the place ended up the way they did. Their passionate, relationship-destroying affair, the tragedies (see the "CW" tag and heed it) that come from it...all of it was that damned house! In truth, the house should be exorcised.

If you're not clear which house I'm referring to, both is your best assumption.

The evevnts of the 1980s provide the foundation for a story in the near future, in a Milan that's more entombed than protected from a dystopian world as the smog of the 1980s is now...um...fog/mist/atmospheric weirdness. 7 Via Saterna is unoccupied, never was, and will finally be sold once Irene gets to work on the problem of how to present it to buyers. She didn't count on discovering the unoccupied house is lived in by a young woman called, interestingly, Lidia. Now what can she do to shift this property as she's contracted to do? Who is the mysterious young Lidia, who can't be the 1980s woman who owned the house or a descendant of hers as there were no descendants?

What's so wonderful about Author Petrucci's Italian text and Translator Appel's rendering of it is how sinuous and beautifully recursive it is. The clues as to your place in time during any given moment of the story are subtle, easy to miss; I missed them all...I was only aware that I had missed them once I twigged to the storytelling technique that had worked so perfectly on me.

I'm a pretty experienced reader. It takes a masterful hand to wave my attention away without also losing my interest in so doing. I was left feeling really impressed, really delighted, when at the very end of the story I caught on to what was happening.

That sounds like a five, or even five-plus star review. There aren't five full stars on the rating scale. What happened? The hints and tickles of a lesbian attraction, that's what. It was so underdeveloped as to be pointless, a distraction that added nothing to the story. In 2026 that feels like queerbaiting, not character-building; it could easily be snipped out without the smallest change to anything being needed. So no, no perfect rating...but a whole huge leap up over the first Petrucci I read in my esteem.

I hope this team will bring more stories to the anglophone world.

YOUR BEHAVIOR WILL BE MONITORED, as it ever has been...only now it's by machines in place of god

YOUR BEHAVIOR WILL BE MONITORED
JUSTIN FEINSTEIN
Tachyon Publications (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: This compulsively readable novel wrestles with vital questions of our time: sentience, purpose, life, death…and how to make a really good commercial. Told entirely through questionably obtained company emails, chat messages, TED Talks, bot trainings, and more, Your Behavior Will Be Monitored presents an all too plausible near future in which emotionally intelligent AI go up against emotionally stunted humans.

Megacorporation UniView is poised to cement their reputation as “the most trusted name in AI.” After pioneering self-driving and HR bots, UniView is now barreling toward an audacious new launch. That is, if they can pull it off in time.

Enter Noah. A down-and-out copywriter reeling from a midlife crisis, he isn’t the typical hire for a groundbreaking tech company full of brilliant engineers and run by a cutthroat CEO. But Lex, UniView’s Head of HR and one of their greatest successes, makes no mistakes—her algorithm ensures it.

UniView’s latest venture—a bot named Quinn that creates revolutionary personalized advertising—needs expert training. Noah needs to teach Quinn—who is a much better student than he ever could have hoped for—the finer points of consumer motivation and the art of writing a catchy tagline. But when corporate competitors force UniView to accelerate their timeline to market, guardrails around the AI loosen just as Quinn seems to be learning a bit too much.

Addictively readable and ridiculously entertaining, Your Behavior Will Be Monitored is a page-turning, hilarious science fictional romp through the promise and perils of an AI-driven future that we probably deserve.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'll lead with this line of dialogue from the story: “So, you work on bots with bots, while a bot monitors your behavior and handles all aspects of your life?”

And there it is. Debut Author Feinstein isn't coming at you from behind, or left field. He's using the language of today in the delivery media of right now to interrogate the encroachment of inaptly termed "AI" into every aspect of our lives. "LLM" ≠ "AI" and we're still in the age of the LLM. No, there is not any sign of the "AI" creating something wholly new. For it to be intelligent, truly intelligent, it would need to cross over from quality synthesis-making into insight-having, new-idea-making territory. It's scary enough as it is, as this novel aptly and eptly illustrates in the tradition of The Sheep Look Up and Stand on Zanzibar. Like those novels, Author Feinstein affords us access to the inner world of Noah...and Quinn and even Lex...by delivering it in media screen grabs. I realize for a lot of you I just put a bullet in the base of your interest in reading's brain. I can't change that; I can only encourage you to do your future self a solid and challenge the prejudice, make the effort to see it as the limiting factor it is, not just keep going as though it's immutable truth that all stylistic innovation is inherently bad. May I remind the true heel-diggers among you that Laurence Sterne began these same experiments in 1759 with The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman?

Two hundred sixty-six years and countless riffs on the style later, isn't the experiment over? It's maybe not to your taste but it's not fringe weirdness anymore. Do make an effort to meet this trenchant, intelligent, deeply humane story about "AI" and human intelligence meeting, blurring lines, and generally developing the ideas Humanity's been tossing around for millennia into...

...

...uh oh.

This story will, given the opportunity, likely cause you to think, think hard, about what you're being bombarded with fear-mongering noise, stampeded by half-baked shouting into staking an ill-considered stance that runs the risk of becoming immovable despite the situation in reality being fluid and ever-developing. Reading this novel is a deeply corrective attitude check on hardening prejudices. I strongly urge you to take the story in, mull it over, and add it to your tool kit for coping with the world's ever-speedier developments.

THE LOST BOOK OF ELIZABETH BARTON, Tudor times religious shenanigans with your second course in darkest academia

THE LOST BOOK OF ELIZABETH BARTON
JENNIFER N. BROWN
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A dual-timeline murder mystery set in an English country manor, when an ambitious professor discovers the long-lost manuscript of a Reformation-era prophetess

Historian Alison Sage has made a groundbreaking archival discovery―she found a manuscript containing the prophecies of a 16th century nun, Elizabeth Barton. Barton’s prophecy condemning Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn led to her execution and the destruction of all copies of her prophecies―or so the world believed.

With Alison’s discovery, she is catapulted to academic superstardom and scores an invitation to the exclusive Codex Consortium, a week of research among a select handful of fellow historians at a crumbling manor in England, located next to the ruins of the priory where Elizabeth herself once lived.

What begins as a promising conference turns into a nightmare as the eerie house becomes the site of a murder. Suddenly, everyone is a suspect, and it seems that answers lie at the root of a local legend about centuries-old hidden treasure. Alison’s research makes her best-suited to solve the mystery―but when old feelings resurface for a former colleague, and the stakes of the search skyrocket, everyone's motives become murky.

Alison’s cutthroat world of academia is almost as dangerous as Elizabeth Barton’s sixteenth-century England, where heretics are beheaded, visions can kill, and knowing who to trust is a deadly art. The Lost Book of Elizabeth Barton is a thrilling novel, crackling with the voices of the past and propelled by a mystery that will leave readers in suspense until the very last page.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: A woman of faith such as the factual Elizabeth Barton, but no education or privilege such as the factual Elizabeth Barton, who has visions and claims they're sent by her god such as the factual Elizabeth Barton, and whose country...world, really...is rocked by religious and political strife is going to be very useful to The Powers That Be. No matter what the factual Elizabeth Barton says, believes, or promotes, both sides o any fight are going to do everything they can to gain control over her person and her message. That she already lives in a convent is the first big win for the Catholic/anti-Lutheran/no-divorce-for-Henry pole of the Tudor social spectrum.

Elizabeth Barton was not educated but also was not stupid. She knew what her handlers wanted her prophecies to point towards, and while I believe her statements were sincere in representing her god's will I'm in no doubt that she made the statements to align with her handlers' interests. Not least because she shared them, though also because she believed her god was of one mind with herself and her handlers.
Was the factual Elizabeth Barton a pawn, a manipulated victim of powerful men seeking a political edge in a very consequential power struggle? Or was she a canny survivor who put her credibility behind what turned out to be the losing side in a societal upheaval, with catastrophic consequences? My response to that is yes.

In the 21st century another woman living through a time of upheaval, fictional Alison Sage, discovers the book of prophecies written by Elizabeth Barton during her lifetime. As there are many, many juicy tea-spills that resolve seriously vexing issues of faith, foreknowledge of events, and Elizabeth Barton's real thoughts, fictional Alison Sage becomes famous and powerful overnight. In a passage of History where megalomaniacal murderous tyrants are suddenly back in fashion as heads of state, Elizabeth Barton's true thoughts and honest purposes in making her prophecies bid fair to be as powerful in shaping public opinion as they were when the Royal Serial Killer was on the throne.

If the story had stayed in this register I'd've lapped it up like a camel hittin' the oasis after crossing the entirety of the Empty Quarter on a mouthful of salty water. Alas, fictional Alison Sage is a Good Girl who still reminds her ex that his mother's birthday is coming up, defers to the men in her academic discipline while getting infodumped on, and doing her own infodumping, gets entangled in the literal dopiest fatal entrapment-cum-treasure hunt scheme ever devised...you know there's really no point in trying this story wanted to be a romantic novel but Clio, Muse of History, said "Ἄρα οὐκ" and made it a chase/quest mystery with too much talking...even for academics.

It all hangs together, Author Brown doesn't drop any story-threads, the ending is the one that best fits the developments in the story. It just does this while taking its own sweet time to get from A to B while everyone infodumps each other, which even academics who luuuv them some monologuing would not put up with their colleagues giving the 101 course synopsis to everyone they meet at a conference. Of subject matter experts.

Nope.

Nor does fictional Alison Sage deciding to trust someone from her past with crucial information about her career-altering discovery. Nor...well, my point is made. Structural integrity does not make for structurally supported magnificence of edifice design. I'm not sorry I read the story because I think Author Brown made her historical-resonance points obvious enough to be meaningful, made the factual Elizabeth Barton aka "The Holy Maid of Kent" or "The Mad Maid of Kent" or other such obscurative labels as suited the dismissive purposes of male historians of different eras take a more solid shape than she usually does, and managed still to leach all the propulsive drive I thought would be inherent in this set-up, a female Cotton Malone tale of derring-do, out.

It's a sadness to me because this is the kind of idea I batten on finding in a novel.

DOUBLE SHADOW, second Splinter Effect series time-traveling archaeologist story

DOUBLE SHADOW (Splinter Effect #2)
ANDREW LUDINGTON
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In this thrilling installment of the Splinter Effect series, time-traveling archaeologist Rabbit Ward returns to the past to help save his former adversary and track down a murderous thief in first century Jerusalem.

ROME, 2019. Time-traveling, Smithsonian archaeologist Rabbit Ward is back in the present, but not for long. Helen, his former adversary and growing ally, is in trouble with the law after being framed for a murder she didn’t commit. Stuck in hiding and running out of other options, she turns to Rabbit for help. "Help" in this case involves a trip to first century Jerusalem to track down a mysterious man named Einar Eshek.

But Rabbit won't have to do this mission alone; as soon as he arrives in 68 CE, he meets a younger version of Helen, one who has never met him before. Together, they work to track down Eshek, who turns out to be not only a time-traveling thief, but a murderous psychopath.

As they pursue Eshek through time, Rabbit and Helen feel something even bigger pulling them together. Torn between the two versions of the woman he knows, and with the clock ticking down on Helen’s fate in 2019, Rabbit might have no choice but to betray her past self to secure Helen’s safety in the future. Tensions rise as Jerusalem prepares to go to war with Rome, and Rabbit races to capture Eshek, clear Helen’s name, and make it back to 2019 in one piece—a feat that’s proving to be easier said than done—before everything falls apart.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Author Ludington...are you stark staring mad?! In this absolutely bonkers passage in world history, which no matter how long the editing process on this story took you were writing while the US political landscape's ablaze with AIPAC news, you release a book set in a rebellious Judea! It's a choice....

So, aside from the geopolitical timing seeming to my eyes a bit on the nose, I was verschmeckeled at the twist of Rabbit...I really wish his nickname wasn't evocative of Rabbit bloody Angstrom, that pusillanimous milquetoast...encountering a younger version of his frenemy Helen from the first book. I know a lot of people who find time travel stories not to their taste for this very trope, to the point of not watching Doctor Who despite the glorious beauty of Alex Kingston as River Song, if you can imagine such masochism, because she meets the Doctor at asymmetric moments in each of their lives. "It can't happen! It's never happened!" Maybe...but don't you crave a Jake-and-Sadie moment from 11/22/63? I, clearly, do not share this cavil. In this particular iteration of the trope, I found a real aha! moment for some things in the first book. I really like that in a series story. I want to feel there are webs of interconnection that I sense but don't yet see because that happens in life as well.

So all that to say I found this story as much to my liking as it's ever gonna get when there are straight people centering it. Rabbit and Helen's dynamic in particular feels richly textured with powerful emotions clashing and shifting in each of them every time they meet. In this story, as Helen does not know Rabbit yet, we get the unedited version of her responses to him. If the fact she's trying to kill him says anything, it's something *good* about her character...she is a professional with clear goals. I admit that, as the story began, I was a bit surprised that Helen reached out to Rabbit for this specific kind of help, but it made perfect sense as I was swept along in the tides of developments. Einar Eshek, our villain, was villainous. Rabbit, our hero, was resourceful, determined, and required always to think on his feet; that's a feat any author who's using this character trait gets kudos from me the more successfully they pull it off. I didn't notice Rabbit navigating his altered relationship to Helen as awkward or forced into convenient resolutions to knotty conflicts. That is a rare compliment from someone like me, very experienced in reading series stories.

I found the resolution to the central conundrum...chasing Einar, exonerating *2018-Helen...fit the facts, satisfied the overarching plot, and resolved the immediate story tensions with a very clear intent to publish more of these characters' stories in the future.

Bring it. Soon, please and thank you.

LIVONA CHOW MEIN, amazing how long scumbaggery can go on without causing a revolution

LIVONA CHOW MEIN
ABIGAIL SAVITCH-LEW
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In the vein of Happiness Falls and Family Lore, a gripping story of family history and political upheaval centered around a Chinese family-owned restaurant in Brownsville, Brooklyn and its impact on the neighborhood’s Jewish and Black residents over the course of a century.

In 1978, two tenements on Livonia Avenue in Brownsville burn to the ground, killing one resident and displacing dozens of others. It remains unclear who set the buildings ablaze, but the survivors are convinced the culprit is Mr. Wong.

Who exactly is Mr. Wong, and what allegedly drove him to this extraordinary act of violence, is the question that consumes this novel as it plunges into four generations of Wong family history. First is Koon Lai, an immigrant who runs a Chinese restaurant on Livonia Avenue; second, his son Richard, a man desperate for his own chance at the American Dream; and third, Jason, a poet who seeks his escape in the bohemian counterculture of the 1970s, but finds himself an unwitting participant in Brooklyn’s gentrification. In the 21st century, Jason’s daughter Sadie returns to Brownsville as a journalist, determined to unravel the mystery of what happened decades earlier on the night the buildings blazed.

Joining together the present and the past is the community organizer Lina Rodriguez Armstrong, who was also displaced by that fire and who has spent the intervening years fighting for the rights of Brownsville’s residents and organizing a Livonia Avenue community land trust.

A stunning debut from a new talent, Livonia Chow Mein contemplates how the American pursuit of freedom relies on a collective amnesia and challenges us to consider what it would take for us to truly live in harmony.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: As debut novels go, Author Savitch-Lew picked a doozy of a topic...the arson plague that hit New York's working-class and immigrant housing, the war on the communities that were criminally negligent of their duty to provide landlords with their just and fair profits, and had the audacity not to be white or, often enough, to speak English. The communities that were forming and re-forming and growing also were guilty of demanding the landlords obey the laws of New York City! Can you imagine such arrogance? It costs actual money, money that could be profit!, to obey all those idiot safety and health rules!

It's a shameful, revolting tale of greed and racism.

It's also an immigrant descendant's reckoning with US racism and capitalism at their most nakedly unabashed. Ambitiously attempting to use dual timelines to tell different stories in different eras and (fatally for my reading pleasure) suspense-destroying levels of intertwinedness, the result is two good stories about a family dreaming the "American Dream" as evidence of its fictionality mounts in their faces. Had these been presented in sequence, the 1940s then the 1970s, much more could have been wrung from each era's challenges. As it was, the effort to keep the reader in suspense felt misplaced...obviously this situation worked out we've already seen that person in the 1970s!...so I was left sitting there with my teeth in my mouth wondering "why am I here again?"

Because both these stories are trenchant and apt for today's developing social landscape, that's why. I'm not the biggest fan of the execution but I am deeply interested in the Toisanese diaspora now. I liked what I learned if not deriving pleasure from how I learned it.

Social-issues readers (like me) encouraged to get a sample to see if your mileage will vary.