KILLER VIBES, the authorial and series debut novel set in "Keep Austin Weird" Austin...not Alex Jones Austin

KILLER VIBES (Peter Key Mystery Series #1)
JACK FRIDAY
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Meet Peter Key: self-proclaimed “laziest private investigator in Texas” (it’s harder than it looks), full-time bisexual, dedicated stoner, and the surprised recipient of a windfall inheritance from an uncle he barely knew. Peter’s life was a mess before he became the owner of a dilapidated house in one of the most desirable neighborhoods in Austin, but now he has a mountain of debt to deal with—and pushy realtors popping up on every corner to convince him to sell the land while the market is hot.

But Peter doesn’t like to be pushed around. And when he discovers a bag full of cash and a suggestion that his uncle's death might not have been an accident, he starts asking questions. When they said “Keep Austin Weird,” they weren’t joking. Just about everyone Peter meets seems to have a hidden agenda, and he soon finds himself pulled into a lethal game where not everybody plays by the rules. Fortunately for Peter, he’s never been a rule follower anyway.

Sexy, suspenseful, and packed with Austin’s quirks, Killer Vibes is the start of an iconic new series with a singular, unforgettable cast of characters.

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My Review: I lived in late 1960s, 1970s, and very early 1980s Austin. I've got a lot of nostalgia for that world. "Keep Austin Weird" is a resonant slogan to me. So I'm primed to be this story's booster by happy association.

There is always an ugly side to any place humans congregate. Austin produced vile scum Alex Jones the Sandy Hook liar, who is my direct peer, being only two years younger than me and a product of the same public schools I went to. Every sunny meadow has shadows, great and small, or you wouldn't see any depth at all.

Peter Key, connoisseur of life's finer things (sex, drugs, skiving off anything that looks like work), has pushed his boundaries with those who toil that he may chillax. He's a slacker in the mothership of slacker culture; but he is, when we meet him, a slacker with a housing and eating problem.

His deus coming ex machina is Uncle Forrest, a barely-remembered relative with a house (mortgaged) that Peter can go live in; and whose death is...hinky. How did a retired daredevil racer lose control of his car badly enough to go over a cliff and die from the injuries he sustained? Why, in his seriously past due mortgaged house, is there a bag of cash? Where's the money from? What was his gambler/adrenaline junkie uncle up to? Did it get him murdered? Peter's aunt's hired a PI to investigate, but with a serious stake in the solution (who doesn't want a home?), Peter takes the PI's offer to keep going only if he'll help help with the investgation seriously.

Practical people who care about Peter are all encouraging him to cash in on his real-estate windfall, as housing in Austin is insanely expensive. Peter decides he wants a home, rolls up his joint sleeves, and begins looking around at the people badgering him for stuff Uncle Forrest "owed" them. It's a classic origin story. It's billed as #1 in a series. It's got modern energy, in that our man-bunned hero is both slacker and hedonist enough to be bi in that casual way younger men often are in my own experience. The pacing is good, the thriller elements are well deployed, the most important element of a series...the hero's ability to command our emotional investment in him...is finely crafted.

I stopped at four stars not for any prose flaw or characterization lack, but for a structural quibble: WHY ARE YOU BREAKING THE SCENES SO OFTEN?! There's no reason, and certainly no excuse, for this choppy execution when there is literally no change of time, of PoV, of subject, between them! I'd lop off another star if I hadn't enjoyed Peter's disastrously bad judgment all coming out okay for...Reasons. I really hope, Author Friday, you won't succumb to the temptation to prevent Peter from growing, from making *new* mistakes in a field he's still learning how to work but which he clearly has a solid aptitude for.

That said, I'm sat for book two.

WORK TO DO: A Novel, like "The Office" only meaner

WORK TO DO: A Novel
JULES WERNERSBACH
University of Iowa Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$19.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: When Eleanor founded Guadalupe Street Co-op in the early 1980s, she was in her mid-twenties and madly in love with her girlfriend, Meg. Together, they envisioned an idyllic grocery store owned by its workers and customers.

Forty years later, Guadalupe Street Co-op is an iconic Austin business with a loyal customer base, an antiquated business model, and a disgruntled staff. Roz, one of the store’s senior managers, is too caught up stalking her ex-wife online to notice that her girlfriend, Molly, is plotting with her coworkers to unionize. Roz also doesn’t see that Molly is not-so-secretly in a situationship with Randy, the dairy manager leading their collective.

Unfolding over the course of a single week during Texas hurricane season, Work to Do pings between the co-op’s first year and present day, as the unionization bid reaches fever pitch. The wind howls, the power goes out, and water creeps through the front door, as questions of who owns the grocery store and who has a right to its future are posed. And will the workers ever be paid enough to buy the organic groceries they shelve?

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My Review: Hierarchies change people, at the top and at the bottom. They're good for, and at, that...yet we're told that being "a family" is not to be in a hierarchy by the kind of lefty person who sets up a co-op. (I was transported to Wheatsville as I read this.) If that's the case, what kind of family did you grow up in? Parents are our first bosses, our first gods. The idea of hierarchy is instilled in us by "bedtime" and "naptime" and, most hated of all, "bathtime." These activities are policed by Authority, ie parents. Thus from a young age we are in a hierarchy called "family"; soon enough, we begin to rebel. We desire to make our own choices, our own lessons learned our own way.

A unionization drive at a co-op is the business equivalent of adolescent rebellion. It felt to me as though all the characters were coping with adolescent emotional states throughout the story. The nature of any group is to experience friction in different strengths and around different topics of disagreement. This story pits idealism...no co-op anywhere ever is founded to make a profit...and pragmatism...how the hell can I pay rent and buy food this month? It's all tangled up with personality conflicts, old grudges, and the inevitable recrudescence of Being Right in any group attempting to make decisions.

Eleanor, the founder of the co-op, is parent to the idea and has powerful, forty-year-old ideas about the concept of the workers as family. Of course no one's paid enough, no one ever is because capitalism runs on scarcity. No matter that you're structuring a business on a cooperative model, you're still in a capitalist system, its pressures still apply. As the founder (owner is not applicable, they all own the co-op) Eleanor's investment is truly, intimately personal. It explains but does not excuse how thoroughly unpleasant Eleanor is during the whole book.

In point of fact, everyone from Randy the unionizer to Roz the manager, through to Eleanor the founder, is thoroughly unpleasant. Not one of them behaves empathetically, with kindness, or in any way not narcissistically. This is not the read for someone who needs to like the characters they're reading about. It's well-observed, with lots of clever lines; it's got the hurricane and its aftermath to give the reader a serious jolt of adrenaline; it's been part of everyone's experience to be a member of a hierarchy that's experiencing change. I was kept in the flow of the story by these structural realities while not invested in any one character's success. It was an interesting experience of being on the outside of a story, looking on as events unfolded, feeling myself caring in an abstract way about these folks.

Anyone who wonders if queer people running things, leftist running things, or multigenerational structure including all ages, are happier workplaces should read this story. Anyone who thinks life is better when x thing is the center of your work, your relationship, your mind should read this story. People are people. They do and say stupid, ill-advised things. Sometimes hurtful words are fixable, sometimes they aren't...don't think you're being Right will carry you through to inevitable victory...or even to happiness. It's all laid bare in Author Wernersbach's smoothly polished prose.

Read Work to Do when you're after a cautionary tale about hubris, a reminder that empathy is always a better choice, that cooperation trumps selfishness but does not necessarily mean getting what you want. It's a very grown-up person's book, and looks at queer people in all their messy, human glory...and snickers behind its hand.

THE SLIP, debut novel that feels very assured and is very complex and involving

THE SLIP
LUCAS SCHAEFER
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

2025 National Book Critics Circle Award/The John Leonard Prize finalist for debut work!

One of The Washington Post's 10 Best Books of 2025!

A New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2025 selection

One of The Washington Post's 10 Best Books of 2025!

Rating: 4.5* of five

WINNER OF THE 2025 KIRKUS PRIZE for Fiction!

The Publisher Says: For readers of Jonathan Franzen and Nathan Hill comes a haymaker of an American novel about a missing teenage boy, cases of fluid and mistaken identity, and the transformative power of boxing.

Austin, It’s the summer of 1998, and there’s a new face on the scene at Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym. Sixteen-year-old Nathaniel Rothstein has never felt comfortable in his own skin, but under the tutelage of a swaggering, Haitian-born ex-fighter named David Dalice, he begins to come into his own. Even the boy’s slightly-stoned uncle, Bob Alexander, who is supposed to be watching him for the summer, notices the change. Nathaniel is happier, more confident—tanner, even. Then one night he vanishes, leaving little trace behind.

Across the city, Charles Rex, now going simply by “X,” has been undergoing a teenage transformation of his own, trolling the phone sex hotline that his mother works, seeking an outlet for everything that feels wrong about his body, looking for intimacy and acceptance in a culture that denies him both. As a surprising and unlikely romance blooms, X feels, for a moment, like he might have found the safety he’s been searching for. But it's never that simple.

More than a decade later, Nathaniel’s uncle Bob receives a shocking tip, propelling him to open his own investigation into his nephew’s disappearance. The resulting search involves gymgoers past and present, including a down-on-his-luck twin and his opportunistic brother; a rookie cop determined to prove herself; and Alexis Cepeda, a promising lightweight, who crossed the US-Mexico border when he was only fourteen, carrying with him a license bearing the wrong name and face.

Bobbing and weaving across the ever-shifting canvas of a changing country, The Slip is an audacious, daring look at sex and race in America that builds to an unforgettable collision in the center of the ring.

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My Review: Does the publisher's synopsis sound like A Lot? That's down to the fact that it is. Don't fret, though, there's room for it all in close on five hundred pages. It's told in multiple layers of PoV, it's told across points in time, and it's told at an unfolding pace, not the heady adrenaline rush of a boxing match. (Y'all remember from May's Pearls & Burgoines how I feel about boxing.)

The truth is that "Boxing" isn't quite the same as what I see in the fights here. It's the reasons and techniques and substance of boxing, not the performative violence I'm so repelled by, that are on display. The way young Nathaniel is drawn in to the world of the gym, discovers himself, and makes such a stir as he and David, his Haitian boxing mentor, discover his natural abilities is what it means to be young and find your gift.

Then Nathaniel, all of sixteen, disappears.

To say this was upsetting to me is to understate its impact within the story. It is that dramatic pivot point that many books either lack, or squander the impact of. That almost happens here, which is why the fifth star is partial. There are a welter of viewpoints, some more impactful than others...what's the self-defense hen-class all about anyway?...but the fact is everything does tie in by the end. I think comparisons to Jonathan Franzen are appropriate; I'd say they're not quite all there is, though. Franzen's undeniable way of summing a character up in a phrase is here, but so is John Kennedy Toole's bitter, snarky, unkind edge. I'll say that I encountered these thoughts as I was shifted and rearranged in time, therefore was more than usually alert for new ways of seeing the characters. This is a read that repays your attention and will escape you if you just scan the pages looking for distraction from the world. Attentively read it will be a strong accent on many of the issues we face in the world today.

The gay subject matter in the book is not foregrounded, but foundational all the same. It is not accidental that absolutely nothing in the author's biography is in any way indicative of his own sexuality. He wrote this story well and treated the gay characters well; does that mean anything except he's a good observer, and a sensitive storyteller? ¿Quién sabe? And does it really matter? I'm of the opinion it does not.

The ultimate payoff of the story is down to the much-delayed and very tellingly told investigation into Nathaniel's disappearance that his uncle comes to launch, acting on a strange tip. It becomes a very different story, honestly, as Uncle Bob Alexander does not seem to get too far yet the police still seem to want to stand in the way...but the idea doesn't seem to be to stop him discovering something so much as preventing him from ruining their image.

Quite a lot happens in the last third of the book that tucks odd strands of character development into proper place in ways I wasn't expecting. The trans representation is excellent, sensitive, and as fearlessly written as the white author's Black characters are. In fact, if I were to pick one word to sum up the affect of this debut author's novel, "gonzo" would be my choice: He sees no obstacles in his difficult choices, only climbable walls.

It is hard to spend almost five hundred pages learning about these folks then leave them behind. A better recommendation to get yourself a copy is hard to imagine.