A VIOLENT MASTERPIECE, an apt (if too mild) title

A VIOLENT MASTERPIECE
JORDAN HARPER
Mulholland Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$29.00 hardcover, available now

One of Maris Kreizman’s Best of Books of 2026 So Far

Rating: 4.4* of five

The Publisher Says: This epic crime novel tells a story of Los Angeles power brokers and those at the edge—and a single shattering incident that threatens to bring it all crashing down.

Los Angeles, right now. America with its back up against the wall. This Frankenstein's monster of crimes and lurid dreams sewn together into something like a city.

A city ready to explode: A Hollywood pedophile is arrested, and is ready to tear down the city to get his freedom. A young woman goes missing—and men in black rubber gloves who look like cops clean out her apartment in the middle of the night. And the serial killer known as the LA Ripper is on the loose, leaving tragic/graphic/brutal crime scenes in his wake. Three people trying to keep their heads above the dirty water will find themselves coming together to unite these strands into one enormous, unspeakable crime...

JAKE DEAL is a gonzo live-streaming nightcrawler, beaming the city's chaos straight to his audience of blood-hungry subscribers, giving them the view from the top of the mushroom cloud—until a job he can't refuse drags him back into his old life of Hollywood glamour, drugs, sex and sleaze. Armed with cameras and hidden mics, he'll infiltrate private clubs, gather high-class dirt—and stumble onto a conspiracy woven into the center of LA's most powerful men, who call themselves "The Kids in the Candy Store."

DOUG GIBSON is a street lawyer, who fights for his clients against the army of cops, prosecutors and judges - he is the knife they bring to the gunfight. But when he's hired by a Hollywood pedophile ready to sell out his friends for a chance for freedom, he'll take on a fight bigger than he could have imagined. And when his client "commits suicide" in prison, Gibson will have to stop being a weapon—and become a warrior.

KARA DELGADO works for an underground private concierge company—a make-a-wish foundation for the terminally rich. She scores drugs, makes connections, and plans multi-million dollar sex parties. She has learned the secret truth of this world: there are no rules, only prices. Her best friend Phoebe has gone missing, and Kara's the only person who knows that Phoebe's place was wiped clean of evidence by men in black rubber gloves. But when she begins to unravel the mystery of what happened to Phoebe, and its connection to the killer known as the LA Ripper, it will drag her into the dark heart of the city.

As Jake, Doug and Kara all investigate these crimes, they'll encounter ketamine-addled sitcom stars, bloody riots, homeless gangsters, a killer cop on death row, secret vaults in Beverly Hills, tech-bro orgies, medical cannibals, true crime junkies, private security wet-work teams, reality shows, street takeovers, car chases, coyotes, a sadistic Tarzan, and a three day, fifty million dollar wedding, before everything is revealed and they must each make their choice about how to fight back in this violent world before the bloody, blazing conclusion.

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

My Review: A violent fever dream of a novel ripped from the fact-fueled fantasies of the next cult leader who will go about preying on bewildered, enraged, left-behind stooges. Nothing in this awful tale of those who serve the dreadful scum that has risen to the top of LA's heap as threats to their lives, their power, their money mount is ever clear. And each is more obviously from within their "charmed circle" than the last.

Author Harper's triumvirate of Jake, Doug and Kara each work on a corner of the to-them invisible puzzle of who threatens the elite, why, and work out what to do about it, they all draw more and more into one another's direct orbits. By the time Jordan Harper brings them together, the reader thinks "I am ready for the end to come."

No you are not.

If you have a trigger, you are warned. If you want to be ignorant of how very much misery the powerful feel entitled to inflict on others purely for their own amusement, you are warned. If you aren't willing to sit, slack-jawed and glassy eyed with horror, while brutality is described to you, you are warned.

Let the tumbrils roll.

THE FINAL PROBLEM, "Sherlock" and "The Woman" go head-to-head

THE FINAL PROBLEM
ARTURO PÉREZ-REVERTE (tr. Frances Riddle)
Mulholland Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$29.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In this locked-room mystery set in 1960, a washed-up actor puts his on-camera detective skills to the test when a suspicious death shatters the quiet peace for a group of strangers staying at an isolated Greek island resort. Perfect for fans of Knives Out, Benjamin Stevenson, and Anthony Horowitz.

June, 1960. Rough weather at sea leaves a group of strangers stranded on the idyllic Greek island of Utakos, all guests of the only local hotel. Nothing could prepare them for what happens next: Edith Mander, a quiet British tourist, is found dead inside a beach cabana. What appears at first glance to be a clear suicide reveals possible signs of foul play to Ormond Basil, an out-of-work but still well-known actor who in his glory days portrayed the most celebrated detective of all time. Accustomed to seeing him display Sherlock Holmes' amazing powers of deduction on the big screen, the other guests believe that the actor is the best equipped to uncover the truth.

But when a second body is discovered, there is not a doubt in Basil's mind: a murderer walks among them. What's more, the killer is staging each crime as a performance, leaving complex clues that bear an eerie resemblance to those found in the pages of Conan Doyle stories. This is a criminal who knows every trick in the book and is playing a deadly literary game. As the storm rages, Basil must become the genius detective he has only pretended to be.

This clever, whip-smart, locked-room mystery from internationally bestselling author Arturo Pérez-Reverte is a love letter to golden-age detective novels. The Final Problem delights in exploring the tension between an investigator and his suspects, as well as a writer and his reader, delivering a revelatory twist that will shock even the sharpest of mystery fans.

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

My Review: There is an old-fashioned expression for the story at the heart of this book: "hoist with his own petard." It's meant to convey the sense that there are unfortunate consequences to making yourself the object of your own expertise.Imagine being famous for playing Sherlock Holmes, then investigating a real crime.

Despite being long past the fame. Despite having no training. It's feeding his need for the adrenaline rush of fame, it's reinforcing his bruised ego's sense that he couldn't have been *just* a guy playing a part, speaking lines scripted for him and looking fabulous on camera. He's an actor, sure, but he found that character inside himself. All of this, the mash-up of knowing self-analysis and willing self-delusion, is where this locked-room mystery shines. I knew from the moment "Ormond" (legally and distinctively different from another famous actor or two who played Sherlock Holmes as a career) was introduced that he would be conducting an investigation. It seemed to me his dithering about doing it, in circumstances that could plausibly be used to justify the act in fiction (though in fact nothing like this would result in anything like what happens here), went on too long; what I didn't care for about that was the long, whiny self-evaluation it elicited.

What happens after we get going is a fun locked-room mystery like Dame Agatha so enjoyed creating (many times I thought of Ten Little Indians to give it the period-appropriate title). I'm glad that I wasn't coming to the read expecting more than an entertaining read. After our overlong dithering came our period-appropriate-name dropping, a fourth wall break or twenty, many call outs to literary lights of yesterday and today, and some fairly heavy-handed moralizing during The Big Reveal, all conspired to extinguish the fifth star. Even chunks of the fourth. The truth is the verve and the bravado of the performance of writing was enough to sweeten me back up to a full four stars.

It's not profound. It's nit brilliant. It's good fun, it's got tons of cleverness as its foundations, it's told in stylish sentences. By glory, that is enough...a gracious plenty...in the world of 2026.

SALT BONES, Demeter & Persephone on the Mexicali border

SALT BONES
JENNIFER GIVHAN
Mulholland Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: For fans of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic and Ramona Emerson’s Shutter: a gripping retelling of Persephone and Demeter in the Mexicali borderlands

At the edge of the Salton Sea, in the blistering borderlands, something is out hunting. . .

Malamar Veracruz has never left the dust-choked town of El Valle. Here, Mal has done her best to build a good life. She’s raised two children, worked hard, and tried to forget the painful, unexplained disappearance of her sister, Elena. When another local girl goes missing, Mal plunges into a fresh yet familiar nightmare. As a desperate Mal hunts for answers, her search becomes increasingly tangled with inscrutable visions of a horse-headed woman, a local legend who Mal feels compelled to follow. Mal’s perspective is joined by the voices of her two daughters, all three of whom must work to uncover the truth about the missing girls in their community before it's too late.

Combining elements of Latina and Indigenous culture, family drama, mystery, horror, and magical realism in a spellbinding mix, Salt Bones lays bare the realities of environmental catastrophe, family secrets, and the unrelenting bond between mothers and daughters.

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

My Review: There's Spanish in here.

Everybody still here, this is a retelling of Demeter and Persephone, probably the original mother-myth in Western culture. It is also notable that Demeter's the oldest sister of baby Zeus...that energy surrounding maleness surrounds this entire story.

Are the whiny man-babys gone yet? Good.

The gynergy is strong in this one, folks. All the horror, and there's a lot of it, stems from problems and issues around femaleness in our highly misogynistic culture. Women are, for a wonder, presented as misogynistic as hell in here, and all the monstrous, horrifying behavior is portrayed as affecting women. (Why the fathers aren't ever fussed I'll leave to your imagination.)

Invest in the first quarter to third of the read as your acclimatization, get used to Mal and her pueblo's speech patterns, and (ebook users only) try out the built-in translation feature to get the hang of Spanglish, then cruise through the story that fills in the lines of the old myth in a really fun...not the right word, but "interesting" is so juiceless and "involving so cerebral...unexpected way.

It's a dark reality that Mal's fears and worries are rooted in the ugliness that is femicide, a too-easily-dismissed issue plaguing la frontera. Stories like this one are ways to increase awareness of the precarity of simply existing as a female, or in a female body, in so many parts of the world. And like the real world, some people have privilege, even when bad things happen to and around them. Seeing the author present this as a reality, well...brava for doing it at all, and do it more, please.

The Salton Sea is important enough to the read that I recommend you acquire basic knowledge of it, its existence and origin, before embarking on this fascinating thriller. I found the pace fast. I don't think everyone will. I hope you'll try, though.