CALLUM McSORLEY'S PAGE: DCI Alison McCoist, honest to a fault, leads two exciting stories

SQUEAKY CLEAN (DCI Alison McCoist #1)
CALLUM McSORLEY
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Half the Glasgow polis think DI Alison McCoist is bent. The other half just think she's a fuck-up.

No one thinks very much at all about car wash employee Davey Burnet, until one day he takes the wrong customer's motor for a ride. One kidnapping later, he and the carwash are officially part of Glasgow's criminal underworld, working for a psychopath who enjoys playing games like 'Keep Yer Kneecaps' with any poor bastard who crosses him.

Can Davey escape from the gang's clutches with his kneecaps and life intact? Perhaps this polis Ally McCoist who keeps nosing around the car wash could help. That's if she doesn't get herself killed first.

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My Review: Did Trainspotting or Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, those dialect stories, defeat you? Are you a bit on the squeamish side? Did The Wolf and the Watchman series' borderline body horror keep you grossed out and/or sleepless? Horseman, pass by.

Ready for inappropriate Scottish-inflected law-enforcement humor that you can't quote publicly to lodge in the folds of your brain, then, so let's us go.

DI Ally McCoist is in limbo, or maybe better to say purgatory. She really, really screwed up. She waited to unleash this screw-up until the stakes could not have been higher. Her colleagues are...not inclined to forgive, and unable to forget...so she's not allowed to forget and thoroughly ostracized. It's not like they can fire her (in the UK people have actual rights to employment security, amazing thought) so she's still a Detective Inspector, she's still a pair of hands, there are thinngs her bosses can assign her to do that no one else wants to do.

Or everyone else is scared to do.

Paulo McGuigan is the diametric opposite of DI McCoist. A criminal overlord with stunning amounts of influence over Glasgow's workings, he's been reputationally wronged by Davey, a nobody, a hapless loser; so he must save face by revenging himself on the perpetrator of the lèse majesté. a bloody beating; followed by indentured servitude in McGuigan's bloody underworld follows for dumb, hapless Davey. Who, logically enough, gets sick of it because he's sickened by it. How this loser intersects with McCoist, his equal in loserhood, is the point of the read.

What debut Author McSorley achieves in this pretty bog-standard mystery plot's confines is to bring cringe comedy into violent police procedural by way of social commentary. It's couched in thick dialect (why it gets less than four full stars) as its dialogue so it feels hyperlocal. That's most likely why it won the McIlvanney Prize for Best Scottish Crime Book of the Year in 2023. It's not like these voices would be heard outside Glasgow. Structurally everyone in the story wants something, always a very simple device but one that when missing is really missed. Readers may not *like* Ally, or Davey, or of course the Big Bad Paulo McGuigan (it'd be a little weird if you liked Paulo!) but they all want something and the others in the story either want it too or want to keep it themselves. It's easy to invest in characters whose wants one can readily grasp.

What happens when these separate wants collide is the reason to read the story. Author McSorley makes sure these collisions are quite...decorative, as in they're easy (if squirmy) to envision. I repeat: gore is your kryptonite, then go elsewhere. Adrian McGinty writes Enid Blyton pastiches compared to Author McSorley.

Ally and Davey and Paulo arrive at the plot's culmination with great finality. What is the set-up for another story, as this is a series? The concept of "failing upward" and of the adhesiveness of failure are great drivers of human activity. Ally is a character who's failed in multiple ways. She needs to figure out how to shed her failures, which we-the-reader all know is impossible but is lots of fun to watch.

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PAPERBOY (DCI Alison McCoist #2)
CALLUM McSORLEY
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A dark, raw, and comic Glaswegian detective thriller: the follow-up to Squeaky Clean, winner of the McIlvanney Prize for best Scottish crime book of the year.

DCI Alison McCoist is back in action, and her promotion hasn’t earned her any friends. In fact, it’s made her even more unpopular. Struggling to balance her new responsibilities with the growing pressure to prove herself, McCoist finds herself tangled in a web of crime and corruption.

Chuck Gardner owns a confidential paper-shredding business, but his addiction to gambling has left him deeply in debt. When he stumbles across some incriminating documents, Chuck becomes unwittingly caught in a deadly game of power and deceit.

Meanwhile, McCoist is called to the scene of a gruesome discovery—a rat-nibbled corpse under a flyover. As she investigates, both Chuck and McCoist are sucked into a deadly stramash of gangland wars and police corruption.

Can Chuck solve his gambling and gangster problems before some heed-banger feeds him into his own shredder? And can McCoist claw herself out of this latest shitemire without her own shady dealings coming to light? It might depend on how far she’s prepared to go…

Paperboy is the darkly comic follow-up to the McIlvanney Prize winner, Squeaky Clean. The author, Callum McSorley, has been hailed as one of the most exciting new voices in crime writing, and has been praised by authors like Chris Brookmyre and Kevin Bridges.

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My Review: Praise from Chris Brookmyre is a gift to be treasured in a writer's career. Callum McSorley earned it with DCI McCoist's (mis)adventures. Author McSorley's creation is a person who screws up without bumbling. She fails upwards by seeing the problem that needs solving and unerringly choosing the less effective means of dealing with it; yet it's always, in the story-logic Author McSorley's set up, not instantly obviously a bad choice. Doing this multiple times in a series of stories is impressive. Doing it better the second time, well...that's mastery.

The cringe-comedy body-horror ("rat-nibbled corpse" anyone?) procedural mystery told in Glaswegian niche is now established and further developed by Author McSorley. In this follow-up story, the lineaments of the first story (Squeaky Clean, above) are reused. It's more like the stagecraft tradition of reuse of scenery and props than it is making a control-C copy and using control-F to find and replace the names, though.

I'm sure many will still find the Glaswegian voices impenetrable, adding to the increased use of very local humor in making the read a hillclimbing experience. It's going to keep these dark and funny stories abou the screw-ups of relatably clueless, naïve people out of many readers' hands. I'm sad about that because learning, by way of reading, just what it is that makes other people laugh, what worries them enough to need to tell stories that work it through, and what words can do in their clutches is a fast track to cultural amity. Or its opposite of course, some people don't get on with each other. But at least you know from experience, not simply rumor and report.

Newly-minted DCI McCoist got her promotion...was kicked upstairs...but she's no more respected in this story than she was when we met her. Still, she achieved something, she fixed a problem for her higher-ups that needed fixing and that means a promotion within that work culture. And it means another opportunity to fail as nearly everyone around her is just *waiting* to occur.

Most especially the corrupt cops Ally now has reason to know the identities of.

Fuck-up that she is, her luck *has* to run out sooner or later, and these dirty cops/bastards are fully prepared to give her the rope she meeds to hang herself and hope she trips over it before she ties the noose. Either way, they win, she fails, and status quo ante.

Not today, Satan(s).

With the necessary narrative pressure to act on the results that define the end of book one applied by Paulo McGuigan's widow, the PTB can't really say no to Ally poking the embers of that fire despite their...and her own...reluctance to expose the embers to more oxygen. Because middle-school science class taught you what happens next: it's hot, destructive, and really dangerous for everybody around.

And that's the fun of reading about it. I was really invested in Ally before I started this read. I met Lottie, the widow, and formed a fondness for her scary-tough self. Chuck, well, really can anyone care about Chuck the cuck? Like Davey from . he's an extra in the movie of his own life, lacking rizz or main-character energy or whatever you want to call it. See? I can't even muster the investment to choose a single word for the smear that is Chuck.

I get that most of my readers, based in the US, won't want to do the work of reading in a dialect of English they don't hear on the regular. I wish y'all would try harder. Honestly though I kiinda like being a lone weirdo in my immediate peer group because I liked feeling I inhabited a place I don't think I'll ever see IRL. It's the power of intentional storytelling informed by a real passion for the way he's telling it in Author McSorley's capable hands.

Start with Squeaky Clean for sure, nothing will make sense if you don't, but please start.

A BIRD'S IQ: Innovation, Intelligence, and Problem Solving in the Avian World

A BIRD'S IQ: Innovation, Intelligence, and Problem Solving in the Avian World
LOUIS LEFEBVRE (tr. Pablo Strauss)
Greystone Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$28.00 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: For readers of Jennifer Ackerman comes a captivating exploration of avian intelligence that challenges traditional wisdom about animal cognition.

Surveying a wide variety of birds, including crows, finches, tits, and parrots, Louis Lefebvre, a world-renowned expert in animal behaviour, describes the remarkable innovations and problem-solving abilities of species often dismissed as ‘featherbrains’. From crows using cars as nutcrackers to cockatoos crafting tools, Lefebvre reveals how birds exhibit creativity, social learning, and even cultural transmission — traits once thought to be exclusive to humans and other primates.

Blending his decades of scientific research with engaging anecdotes, Lefebvre examines the evolutionary forces that have shaped avian intelligence. He explores how birds adapt to urban environments, innovate in response to challenges, and pass down knowledge across generations. This goldmine of bird behaviour yields an ‘innovation quotient’ widely used by researchers to measure and rank how innovative a bird species is. Using his encyclopaedic knowledge, Lefebvre answers questions such as:

When a bird species learns a new technique, how do their innovations spread?

Why is research on bird cognition being used to train AI models and even robots?

What makes certain birds endlessly innovative while others stubbornly repeat the same behaviors?

When a bird species learns a new technique, how do their innovations spread? Why is research on bird cognition being used to train AI models and even robots? What makes certain birds endlessly innovative while others stubbornly repeat the same behaviours? With vivid storytelling and groundbreaking insights, A A Bird’s IQ invites readers to reconsider their perceptions, celebrating the ingenuity of birds and highlighting the interconnectedness of all intelligent life.

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My Review: I loved this read. I am, as I think those familiar with my writing over the years will know, a corvidophile...crows particularly but ravens and magpies as well...as I find their intelligence palpable. It is obvious to me that I am in the presence of a sentient being when I'm around corvids, there's that recognition of fellowship that really can't be denied. Or I can't deny it anyway.

Author Lefebvre seems to have had a similar experience though not specifically with corvids. His research into the intelligence of birds is built on a much longer tradition of inquiry into the subject than I ever suspected. It's a big part of my pleasure in reading this book to learn as much as I did about the history of research into avian intelligence. It felt as though I was sitting in an armchair next to him, having a wide-ranging conversation about science and its history wherein he answered my questions without my actually vocalizing them. It sounds fanciful, I know, but it was my emotional experience of this kind of intimacy that made the read so different from other popularizations of important scientific study.

It really isn't a bit surprising that I'd have this experience while reading A Bird’s IQ when you learn that Author Lefebvre is also a novelist...one nominated twice for Canada's Governor General's Award for French-language fiction, so clearly possessed of solid narrative-creation chops. I liked the experience I had learning about the intelligence of dinosaurs which is where I'm clearly going to go since I'm still an eight-year-old when it comes to dinosaurs. (And yes, birds are unquestionably dinosaurs.) It can, however, lead to a bit of prolixity about what the kids (ie anyone under fifty) seem to like calling "side quests" into matters like a scientist's name-change, or the challenges of gathering usable data from birding-centered magazines published in England between the World Wars. Fascinating, but better left in the source notes.

If I have a moment of...hesitation, let's call it, about some of Author Lefebvre's contentious assertions about cultural transmission of knowledge in bird populations, it's one that Author Lefebvre foresaw and forestalled by couching his contention of this fact in careful terms. The anecdotal evidence for this method of learning in bird populations is voluminous. It's not rigorous scientific data, and Author Lefebvre, to his credit, never tries to present it as such. He also very specifically states he does not share Rupert Sheldrake's more controversial ideas about how that kind of knowledge transmission could take place. As I am a bit uncomfortable with presenting that body of knowledge as scientific myownself, I am in harmony with Author Lefebvre on this point.

As I am very much a satisfied reader of this book, I want to assure all who read this review that it's not perfect in my eyes, or in the author's. It is an interim progress report on a career's-worth of experience, knowledge-gathering, and synthesis. It's well presented. It's well sourced. It's mae to bring fundamentals of the topic to broad attention, and couched in language that does this unintimidatingly well. It also affords the author's scientific peers access to his resources and his thinking leadiing to the conclusions presented...all in the same sentences and style. And, of the greatest value to both audiences, Author Lefebvre does not present his case as closed, does not claim a unique and conversation-ending breakthrough is in the text.

He is too sensible of work needing to be done and too respectful of the contributors to the overall field of research into intelligence. I was never more surprised in the read than when I learned how much two-way influence into robotics and "AI" there was. A story of how we got to where we are, and how much where we are has resonances beyond the obvious, in using our own intelligence to understand intelligence, expand its impact, and...I hope...gain humility about ourselves by learning about and from those unlike us.

VENGEANCE: The Last Stands of Custer, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull

VENGEANCE: The Last Stands of Custer, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull
TOM CLAVIN
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A dramatic new look at Custer's last stand in time for the 150th anniversary of the Battle of the Little Big Horn, by the #1 New York Times bestselling coauthor of The Heart of Everything That Is.

On June 25–26, 1876, the Battle of the Little Bighorn, commonly referred to as Custer's Last Stand, was fought between combined forces of the Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes and the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the United States Army. Along the Little Bighorn River in Montana Territory, the battle resulted in the devastating defeat of U.S. forces and was the most significant action of the Great Sioux War of 1876.

Now, for the 150th anniversary of this famous engagement, #1 New York Times bestseller and coauthor of the biography of Sioux warrior Red Cloud, The Heart of Everything That Is, Tom Clavin takes a fresh look at Custer's Last Stand.

This dramatic look at the Little Bighorn battle has to not only include the Native American point of view―with two dynamic Native figures, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, on prominent display―but also the impact it had on the Plains Indians. It turned out to be their last stand too because a vengeful nation quashed any remaining resistance, with a conclusive massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, almost simultaneous with the murder of Sitting Bull.

In addition, Custer’s character by June 1876 is at the heart of this world-famous disaster. For all his celebrated bravery, especially at Gettysburg 13 years earlier, Custer became a devout media hound, desperate to gain fame. Even, some say, his own demise was a misguided attempt at grabbing national headlines: He envisioned a massacre – just not his own. As both the camera and the tabloid came of age, George Armstrong Custer became America’s first bona fide celebrity.

Vengeance is a thrilling read, filled with action, legendary characters, and poignance for the impact this had on Native Americans and the shape of the American West.

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My Review: I wondered what the hell there could be left to say about this military engagement that could illuminate the events in a light, through a lens and filter, that could deepen the focus and increase the contrast. "Hold my beer" said Author Clavin.

I know there are full biographies of all the men at the center of the story being told, excellent ones that delve into psychology, racism, nationalistic myth-making and resistance to it. The short chapters and broad focus of this historical analysis of causes and effects can't offer that depth or completeness. It can, and does, offer more accessible takes on the dramatis personae and thus that much more context for the pyrrhic victory won at the Little Bighorn River.

It's not a story where breaking news is likely to occur...the souces cited in the notes tell you we're not hot on the trail of some newly discovered textual evidence breaking open some of the enduring mysteries of Custer's uncharacteristically stupid actions. It's not that book; it's very much a useful primer, broadening its intended white, history-buff audience's awareness of how the battle looked from its different combatants' eyes. I enjoyed the quick-hit chapters because I'm only very slightly interested in the battle bits, more in the people bits. The carnage is not stinted herein. But we're not *immersed* in it because no piece of the story as retold here lasts long enough to make the reader feel he's going to need to scrub blood off his footgear after the read.

It's a popularization of more scholarly, and a contextualization of more white-triumphalist, works that have come before it. As I do not care to subject myself to the dizzying heights/depths od historiographic work done on Manifest Destiny and its concomitant Native American genocide, it's a work that suited my reading needs.

THE SUMMER BOY, Philippe Besson's récit of coming of age during tragedy's aftermath

THE SUMMER BOY
PHILIPPE BESSON (tr. Sam Taylor)
Scribner (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99, preorder now for delivery on 26 May 2026

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: On an island off the coast of France, six teenagers come together for a summer of desire and discovery until one of them vanishes forever, leaving the rest with an enduring mystery.

Tell me, do you know why the most beautiful love stories must always end badly?

In the summer of 1985, on a scruffy resort island off the coast of France, six teenagers—five boys and one girl—band together for a final golden season before adulthood. Their days are drenched in sun and freedom, and their nights simmer with secrets, jealousy, and longing. Philippe is drawn to Nicolas, the quiet new boy who sees him in a way that no one else does. As their bond deepens, part of Nicolas remains unreachable—until a sudden tragedy brings their summer to a brutal end.

The Summer Boy is a lush and unforgettable autobiographical tale, capturing the ineffable summers of youth in amber. Celebrated novelist Philippe Besson has shaped his memories into an aching meditation on how one summer night—and one fierce connection—can echo across a lifetime.

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My Review: Author Besson, a mere stripling of fifty-nine, recalls That One Summer. We've all had it: the moment when all the boundaries and all the relationships change, whether at eighteen or forty-two or in winter, in Louisville, Kentucky, on vacation, or waiting for your bus to come. Falling in love often does the trick. Getting a crush can, too, but so can the ordinary murkiness of passing time in good company. It's a defining moment. It can, usually does in my own lived experience, change you and your thinking about the whole rest of your life.

Where Lie With Me was a récit about Philippe's very first true love, this is a récit about how love is not plot armor and no matter how it ends, love is always going to wind bonds and webs and fetters around among between the people in your life. Philippe, as in Lie With Me, is both author and character in equal measure. Here he is eighteen and having that magical last summer of childhood freedom before adulthood tightens around him. François is a close friend whom Philippe is a rival of without being in any way deliberate about it; Alice, a new friend of both boys, is enamored of Phillipe and by François, in that eternal tangle that (depressingly enough) persists in happening over and over during one's lifetime. Nicolas, a friend of François', is fascinating to Philippe, but he's sexually interested by Alice's brother Marc. And that soap opera is where we stay all story long as events unfold.

That sounds more kinetic than this story is. Events are, in this context, mostly off-screen/page; we're here for the feels or else we're in the wrong book. As it's Philippe's récit the feelings are all his but he's astute so he reports on others' lives and feelings with acuity and compassion. Of course Author Philippe is discussing the past so it's the adult who evokes those feelings for his long-ago companions, but I felt as though character-Philippe was empathetic enough to have experienced his friends' feelings with interest and compassion.

Regret for things ill-done or, worse, un-done is one of the most maturing experiences in a person's life. It's truly a before-and-after moment to realize you have seen signs of a looming disaster but done nothing to affect its outcome. Philippe did not understand that he *could* impact Nicolas' fate. He, as Author Philippe, is coming to terms with the emotional scars and the unbearably sad realization that we possess the power to alter history...if we choose to.

It sobers a person up to know for certain that another person has their life altered because of our own in/action. No wonder Author Philippe is working this seam in the story-mine of gay coming-of-age stories. He does it beautifully and with palpable emotional honesty. In under two hundred pages he brings we-the-reader into full contact with the summer everything changed for him. It was a wrenching thing that changed his life. It's not sensationalized but it's not like there was room to do that in this page count...yet I got the impression there was little self-protecting editing of his personal memories. He was honest, our author, and gave us true biz about his life.

It made for a very good story to start my #PrideMonth reviewing with.

NOTHING ON EARTH, spy thriller for the Rachel Cusk reader

NOTHING ON EARTH
IAN MacKENZIE
The Unnamed Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$28.00 ebook, preorder now for delivery 26 May 2026

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: "I often traveled for work." So begins Nothing On Earth, a propulsive novel that tells the story of Anna Hendrix, an American spy, as she seeks answers for the appearance of a mysterious and potentially powerful metal of unknown origin.

For a long time, Anna was in counterterrorism, but now she is on a new mission, one which has friends and enemies across the globe scrambling to find answers. Her pursuit will take her from the Horn of Africa to Southeast Asia—through expatriate enclaves and the NGO communities in which she cultivates her cover and extracts information from a wide cast of characters: aid workers, diplomats, foreign correspondents, energy magnates, insurgents, dissident, and of course, other spies.

As the pressure mounts to find the original source of the metal, Anna must make choices with life-changing implications not just for herself, but for the people with whom she deals, always bearing in mind the young daughter waiting for her back home. In Nothing on Earth, novelist Ian MacKenzie reimagines a pivotal decade in the Pax Americana, from the killing of Osama bin Laden to the storming of the Capitol. Anna’s voice—lean, understated, unflappable—is our companion and guide through the dark topography of geopolitical power, and in the end, the furthest reaches of human comprehension.

For fans of Rachel Cusk and John Le Carré alike, this is a story of power and secrecy, geopolitics and science, parenthood and loss, and the question of how we know what we think we know, how we make sense of our existence on Earth.

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My Review: The macguffin in this story is a metal called for convenience "The Resource." It's never precisely named, but it has sci-fi-esque qualities that make it very important to the US and our new global competitor China. It also drags Anna Hendrix from pillar to post in a grail quest set at the end of the American imperial project.

The reading experience is the thing that peopelled me through the story, as Anna faces obstacles and overcomes opponents whose parallel grail quests for The Resource she thwarts and redirects and generally uses her personal charm and concomitant network of allies and enablers, and the occasional useful idiot, to shape events.

Events that are shaped are rife with consequences. Empires have ill-defined goals that form entire futures for people with no stake in the success of those imperial goals except surviving their aftermath. Anna Hendrix, unlike spies I'm accustomed to spending time with *cough*Bond*cough*, in delivering the story directly to us, allows her audience access to her ruminations on the enterprise she's embarked on, though always couched in interpersonal terms.

That makes her sound like a women's-fiction manipulative heroine. She's not that...she is but she isn't...Anna Hendrix, in Author Ian's hands, is a subtle character whose narration has layers of awareness and intentionality that are worthy of the publisher's comparison of the story to one by Rachel Cusk. As in Author Cusk's fiction, I found Anna Hendrix to be a self-aware narrator of her story, while remaining within that story. It's a tricky narrative effect to pull off. It requires sophisticated, self-aware use of tropes and conventions. (I'd cite examples were I writing a critique or analysis for scholarly purposes but I ain't got them chops.)

Setting the story amid the massive upheavals of the Teens and early Twenties allows Author Ian to, from the safe distance of Anna's story-role of first-person narrator, comment on the nature and responsibility of espionage. What result justifies the costs (there are always costs) of meddling in the affairs of sovereign nations, and more importantly the quotidian workings of people's lives? What happens to goals when those setting them change those goals? What is Anna Hendrix's responsibility as the world shifts in directions she can't predict?

That undersells the action part of the storytelling. I'm as susceptible to a chase scene as any other guy. I like Anna Hendrix telling me about how she rips and runs and fights off physical threats, because it's not mechanical...Anna's a mother, her stake in the world is as a result much deeper than her male counterparts in fiction. If she's fighting for her life, she's fighting for her motherhood at the same time.

Sexist though it may be to acknowledge it, mothers are fundamentally different from fathers in affect and effect. I'm not really interested in going deeply into that argument in reviewing this story but I feel it's important to say that the issue of Anna Hendrix As Mother is not glossed over, nor is it obsessed over; another fine balancing act Author Ian navigates with more aplomb than I'd expect from a man writing from a woman's PoV. So now let's talk about that.

I can't offer a full fifth star to this story because Author Ian, as a man, is projecting some cultural baggage of motherhood onto Anna Hendrix and her choice of a career that takes her away from her child. I regard that fact as an unfairness on my part, but I have to do it in the name of reporting my own honest reaction to an important fact of the story. Anna's just given birth as the story opens. I'm aware of that fact for the first quarter of our current action but then, as in life, my awareness of it drops away. I don't know this for a fact, obviously, but I...not a member of the Cult of Mother...found Author Ian's periodic refreshing of her motherhood both appropriate and awkward, as though the Author-Man thought "waitaminnit what about the kid?" I could easily be talked out of that perception by a woman taking issue with my statement. I was also unclear as to why Anna's relationship with her daughter Thea's Korean father was not more part of her calculations regarding The Resource and her pursuit of it.

Another writer would've leaned on The Resource's ill-defined otherworldliness, very much to the detriment of Anna Hendrix's story of how she sets about controlling events surrounding this Resource. I mention this to reassure those who experience story-hives at the lightest contact with things SFnal that you're not asked to invest more than passing interest in the nature of The Resource.

I'll say that as spy thrillers go I couldn't think of another one that so deftly combines the quest elements with the depth of a more interpersonal literary novel. It was a story praised by multiple very high-quality writers, and deservedly so. It's well worth your time and treasure to acquire, literary consumers, and yours too, spy-story folk.

May 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!

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Screen People: How We Entertained Ourselves into a State of Emergency by Megan Garber

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: From the popular and award-winning staff writer for The Atlantic, an eye-opening look at how the current media landscape has incentivized us to see our fellow citizens as characters in an ongoing entertainment—and how we can fight back against this phenomenon.

Whether it’s our reality-television-star President or our expertly curated Instagram feeds, the line between fact and fiction—between what’s real and what’s fabricated for entertainment—has never been more blurred. Screen People explores what happens when we cede our reality to spectacle. Megan Garber explains how today’s internet-inflected culture conditions us to see one another not as people but as characters in an ongoing show, and how some of our most chronic and harmful social conditions—loneliness, depression, mistrust, misinformation, cynicism—stem from our demand for diversion.

In ten chapters, each themed around an element of stagecraft—from “The Producers,” who edit our reality, to “The Props,” the strangers we turn into objects of our amusement, to “the Haters,” the worshipful Qanon-types who expect the prophecies of their anonymous leader to play out on live television—Garber argues that this comedy of our daily lives is quickly becoming tragedy. And we can’t understand our politics without first understanding our culture.

Like The Anxious Generation but about our media diet, Screen People shows why Megan Garber is one of the most respected and widely-read journalists of our day. It is an urgent, page-turning, and dazzling look at how we entertained ourselves into our current predicament, and how we might find our way out of the maze of misinformation and chaos.

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My Review: My key take-away from this read was the new-to-me framing of social media as "two-way screens." I find that idea very useful in understanding the intense and very recent driver of our twentieth-century discovery of the joys of staring at things coupled with our ancient desire to be heard.

It's an important text but I felt it might just end my life as a sentient being from the numbing effect of too many wrong examples that don't amplify the argument (or even sometimes make sense to me) coupled to no examples of things that badly need explication.

HarperOne (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) wants $14.99 for an ebook. Borrow it from the library.

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The Wasting of Borneo: Dispatches from a Vanishing World by Alex Shoumatoff

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Acclaimed naturalist Alex Shoumatoff issues a worldwide call to protect the drastically endangered rainforests of Borneo

In his eleventh book, but his first in almost two decades, seasoned travel writer Alex Shoumatoff takes readers on a journey from the woods of rural New York to the rain forests of the Amazon and Borneo, documenting both the abundance of life and the threats to these vanishing Edens in a wide-ranging narrative.

Alex and his best friend, Davie, spent their formative years in the forest of Bedford, New York. As adults they grew apart, but bonded by the "imaginary jungle" of their childhood, Alex and Davie reunited fifty years later for a trip to a real jungle, in the heart of Borneo. During the intervening years, Alex had become an author and literary journalist, traveling the world to bring to light places, animals, and indigenous cultures in peril. The two reconnect and spend three weeks together on Borneo, one of the most imperiled ecosystems on earth. Insatiable demand for the palm oil ubiquitous in consumer goods is wiping out the world's most ancient and species-rich rain forest, home to the orangutan and countless other life-forms, including the Penan people, with whom Alex and Davie camp. The Penan have been living in Borneo's rain forest for millennia, but 90 percent of the lowland rain forest has already been logged and burned to make way for vast oil-palm plantations. Among the most endangered tribal people on earth, the Penan are fighting for their right to exist.

Shoumatoff condenses a lifetime of learning about what binds humans to animals, nature, and each other, culminating in a celebration of the Penan and a call for Westerners to address the palm-oil crisis and protect the biodiversity that sustains us all.

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

My Review: Author Shoumatoff's eightieth birthday is in about six months. This book, a long-form journalism piece written ten years or so ago, is typical of his non-fiction hobbyhorse of the roots of climate change in human activity.

He'd like us to stop fucking the planet over. Now, thank you and please. Happen I agree, so here's my plug for his eloquent plea-cum-demand.

Beacon Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) will use their share of the $13.99 you spend on the ebook well.

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The Age of Walls: How Barriers Between Nations Are Changing Our World by Tim Marshall

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Tim Marshall, the New York Times bestselling author of Prisoners of Geography , analyzes the most urgent and tenacious topics in global politics and international relations by examining the borders, walls, and boundaries that divide countries and their populations.

The globe has always been a world of walls, from the Great Wall of China to Hadrian’s Wall to the Berlin Wall. But a new age of isolationism and economic nationalism is upon us, visible not just in Trump’s obsession with building a wall on the Mexico border or in Britain’s Brexit vote but in many other places as well. China has the great Firewall, holding back Western culture. Europe’s countries are walling themselves against immigrants, terrorism, and currency issues. South Africa has heavily gated communities, and massive walls or fences separate people in the Middle East, Korea, Sudan, India, and other places around the world.

In fact, at least sixty-five countries, more than a third of the world’s nation-states, have barriers along their borders. There are many reasons why walls go up, because we are divided in many ways: wealth, race, religion, and politics, to name a few. Understanding what is behind these divisions is essential to understanding much of what’s going on in the world today.

As with Marshall’s first two books, The Age of Walls is a brisk read, divided by geographic region. He provides an engaging context that is often missing from political discussion and draws on his real life experiences as a reporter from hotspots around the globe. He examines how walls (which Marshall calls “monuments to the failure of politics”), borders, and barriers have been shaping our political landscape for hundreds of years, and especially since 2001, and how they figure in the diplomatic relations and geo-political events of today.

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

My Review: Decent read, very outdated but I got interesting insights into conflicts still going on in 2026. It's time for a second edition!

I like the guy's style; it's footnoted well enough but again, it's an older book of more historical contextualizing utility than up-to-the-minute political analysis.

Scribner (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) thinks $13.99 is fair. I agree on reading merit, but think the library's even better for an 8-year-old title that could use a second edition.

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Immersions by Kyle McCarthy

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Taut and spellbinding, Immersions follows the aftermath of a celebrated dancer’s abrupt decision to quit her company and join an enclosed convent in France, and her younger sister’s obsessive conviction that her sister’s ex-husband is responsible.

Frances’s older sister Charley was a star of the modern dance world. But just as she was ascending, she fell in love with Johnny, an enigmatic trust fund artist, and married him. A few years into their turbulent marriage, Charley mysteriously leaves her dance company and joins an enclosed convent in Provence. Much to the shock of her family, she changes her name to Sister Anne and cuts off contact with the outside world.

Frances, a dancer herself, grew up in the shadow of her brilliant sister and is suddenly unmoored without her. From their first uneasy meeting, Frances has distrusted Johnny. Now, she is certain he had something to do with her sister’s abrupt abandonment of her art and family. When Frances discovers that Johnny has returned to New York, she reaches out to him, looking for answers and seeking confrontation. The two plunge into an ambiguous intimacy—diving ever deeper, as each tries to unlock the other's secrets. A slender and twisted tale of sexual coming-of-age and of the deep bonds of lust and loyalty, Immersions asks how we are made—and unmade—by desire.

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

My Review: Toxic straight people in obsessive tidally-locked orbit around their barycenter, obsessiveness; Charley and Johnny plus Frances among them all are incapable of not acting impulsively, breaking things that can't be repaired, then replacing them with poor copies.

Your pleasure in the read will vary in strength in direct proportion to how much you enjoy the prose style. Satanic-second person is an unfavorite of mine.

Tin House/Zando Projects (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) asks you to pass over $12.99 for an ebook. It's all second person. You decide.

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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.

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Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security (34%) by Todd Miller

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: As global warming accelerates, droughts last longer, floods rise higher, and super-storms become more frequent. With increasing numbers of people on the move as a result, the business of containing them—border fortification—is booming.

In Storming the Wall, Todd Miller travels around the world to connect the dots between climate-ravaged communities, the corporations cashing in on border militarization, and emerging movements for environmental justice and sustainability. Reporting from the flashpoints of climate clashes, and from likely sites of futures battles, Miller chronicles a growing system of militarized divisions between the rich and the poor, the environmentally secure and the environmentally exposed. Stories of crisis, greed and violence are juxtaposed with powerful examples of solidarity and hope in this urgent and timely message from the frontlines of the post-Paris Agreement era.

Todd Miller's writings about the border have appeared in the New York Times, Tom Dispatch, and many other places.

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

My Review: At 34%, when Author Miller quoted Joseph Nevins' Dying to Live about borders being conceptually related to apartheid, I started having chest pains. I was scolded for trying to fix the world, told to go lie down and watch a stupid movie, and stop scaring the staff.

Uncharacteristically, I obeyed because I didn't want another weekend-eating hospital trip.

City Lights Publishers (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) wants $17.95 for any edition. Well worth it if you're stout of heart and hale of constitution.

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Our Bodies, Our Data: How Companies Make Billions Selling Our Medical Records (51%) by Adam Tanner

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: How the hidden trade in our sensitive medical information became a multibillion-dollar business, but has done little to improve our health-care outcomes.

Hidden from consumers, patient medical data has become a multibillion-dollar worldwide trade between our health-care providers, drug companies, and a complex web of middlemen. This great medical-data bazaar sells copies of our prescriptions, hospital records, insurance claims, blood-test results, and more, stripped of names but still containing identifiers such as year of birth, gender, and doctor s name. As computing grows ever more sophisticated, these patient dossiers are increasingly vulnerable to re-identification, which could make them a target for identity thieves or hackers.

Paradoxically, comprehensive electronic files for patient treatment a key reason medical data exists in the first place remain an elusive goal. Even today, patients and their doctors rarely have easy access to full records that could improve care. In the evolution of medical data, the instinct for profit has outstripped patient needs. This book reveals the previously hidden story of how such a system evolved internationally.

This investigative narrative seeks to spark debate on how we can best balance the promise big data offers to advance medicine and improve lives, while preserving the rights and interests of every patients. We, the patients, deserve a say in this discussion. After all, it's our data.

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

My Review: At the beginning of chapter 11, "The Patient's Data Tower of Babel," I realized how much has changed in the 10 years since this book was published. It needs a second edition.

Not at all poorly written, and still *very* useful for orienting newbies to the scope and scale of this disaster; just check it out of the library, and keep in mind how much worse it's gotten.

Beacon Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) says "$17.95 please" for an ebook to get on your device. Library it...it's out of date, but still urgent to know about.

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DARK ECHOES OF THE PAST, (Heredia Detective #13) is first one to make it into English

DARK ECHOES OF THE PAST (Heredia Detective #13)
RAMÓ DÍAZ ETEROVIC (tr. Patrick Blaine)
AmazonCrossing (non-affiliate Amazon.com link)
$3.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The first novel by multiple-award-winning Chilean author Ramón Díaz Eterovic to be translated into English―a landmark event for fans of crime fiction.

Private investigator Heredia spends his days reading detective novels; commiserating with his cat, Simenon; and peering out over the Mapocho River from his Santiago apartment. The city he loves may be changing, but Heredia can’t stop chasing the ghosts of the past. This time, they’ve come to him…

Virginia Reyes’s brother, an ex–political prisoner of dictator Augusto Pinochet, was killed in an apparent robbery. Yet nothing of value was taken. The police have declared the case closed, but Virginia suspects that things aren’t quite as they appear and turns to Heredia for help. Heredia couldn’t agree more―but he can’t shake the feeling that there’s something Virginia’s not telling him.

Heredia knows this is not a simple crime. His investigation proves it. Drawn back into a world where murderers nest, secrets are to kill and die for, and Pinochet’s legacy still casts a long, dark, and very threatening shadow, it’s all Heredia can do to crawl out of it alive.

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

My Review: I love a late-life career change story. I love a PI who drinks whiskey, takes mysterious women's troubles seriously, and reads books in the book I'm reading.

I'm annoyed that book thirteen is the first book to be translated from this long-running series. I'm still more annoyed that, after then translating book four, AmazonCrossing abandoned the project. "I guess they didn't sell enough of them" is an idiotic statement when referrering to a "they" that controls over half the US book-sales market and is part of a multi-billion dollar company. Define "enough" please.

Okay, the story itself: Dark as a black kidnapper's hood on a moonless night. Dark as a victim locked in a car trunk on a one-way trip to torture and death's mood. That's what it's about, after all. What happened in Chile under the US-backed Pinochet regime was full of stories like Virginia Reyes' and of course like her dead brother's.

Oh wait...maybe I have a glimmer as to why this series wasn't continued, and even maybe why the translator chose this one to start the Englishing with. Some glimmers of why I never heard much about the series crease my brain at last.

There is darkness at the heart of every empire. Look a millimeter under the shiny surface that's there to dazzle and entertain you and stories like this one are common as pig tracks. Kudos to Translator Blaine for using the dazzle to be a magnifying lens for the ugly, horrifying acts you're dazzled into not seeing. Have none of us really understood "The Lottery"? Or "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas"? And those two, going back fifty, seventy-five, years weren't the first in their "look past the surface" genre.

A tense, intense, dark and twisty ride through the ugliest parts of an imperial project we still operate today. The definition of extraordinary rendition exists because of this story's well-explored historical roots. It should disgust and shame us all.

Authorial styles arise from decisions on how to present ugly facts. I found Author Eterovic's style, as ably translated by Patrick Blaine...you can feel a op-flight translation just like you can top-flight prose in your own language, and this is the stuff...right up my alley.

Recreational stress with a side order of ugly history, anyone?