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.

WHACK JOB: A History of Axe Murder, does more than just titillate with true-crime gore

WHACK JOB: A History of Axe Murder
RACHEL McCARTHY JAMES
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A brilliant and bloody examination of the axe's foundational role in human history, from prehistoric violence, to war and executions, to newspaper headlines and popular culture.

For as long as the axe has been in our hands, we have used it to kill.

Much like the wheel, the boat, and the telephone, the axe is a transformative piece of technology—one that has been with us since prehistory. And just as early humans used the axe to chop down trees, hunt for food, and whittle tools, they also used it to murder. Over time, this particular use has as the axe evolved over centuries to fit the needs of new agricultural, architectural, and social development, so have our lethal uses for it.

Whack Job is the story of the axe, first as a convenient danger and then an anachronism, as told through the murders it has been employed in throughout from the first axe murder nearly half a million years ago, to the brutal harnessing of the axe in warfare, to its use in King Henry VIII's favorite method of execution, to Lizzie Borden and the birth of modern pop culture. Whack Job sheds brilliant light on this familiar implement, this most human of weapons. This is a critical examination of violence, an exploration of how technology shapes human conflict, the cruel and sacred rituals of execution and battle, and the ways humanity fits even the most savage impulses into narratives of the past and present.

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

My Review: End-noted to a fare-thee-well, this rollicking romp through axes as historical objects isn't academic and dry, or deeply in-depth; it's a mountaintop view into the foothills and valleys of human material culture. Using the axe as our viewpoint stand-in makes a lot of sense. In anthropology classes I took in the 1980s, stone tools came in varieties like flakes, blades, and scrapers, all discovered by the carloads; a hand axe was treasure indeed. The knack of flintknapping is easier to acquire for smaller objects. An axe was high tech indeed.

There's a reason an axe centers the fasces in Roman art; there's a reason the axe was buried as often as a sword in Viking graves. They're not just useful, they're mightily impressive and have always been difficult to fashion until fairly recently. A sharp axe is a supremely useful tool for the agricultural way of life. Splitting logs to burn for warmth, making fenceposts to contain cattle and demarcate property, etc etc, are all made trivially easy with ownership of a good, sharp axe.

Splitting wood is, of course, not the only splitting an axe does with effectiveness and relative ease. Author Rachel starts us with split skulls in Neanderthal prehistory, when possession of an axe was a major symbol of power. As the reasons humans kill each other really haven't changed over the millennia (spoiler alert: we enjoy it), the means we choose to do it with haven't either. Whatever is handy, be it rock, knife, or axe. What we don't know in any detail is why the owner of a particular skeleton was deprived of the ghost driving it, though the remains are clearly damaged in specific, tell-tale ways. So Author Rachel talks about axes more in the first third of the book than murders. (Seriously, stop at 30%...chapter six...if details of what happens are not to your taste.)

In historical times, as details become available, they are vouchsafed you.I do not find this particularly bothersome, but if you do, understand this is not going to be an easy book for you to read. We're still focusing on the axes, though, which is what enabled me not to feel queasy. The weapon of choice is contextualized to the extent possible based on the records surviving, be they legal, social, or religious in nature. And has Author Rachel done her archive diving! Literal hundreds of endnotes could probably result in a visit from the spooks if I followed them all up on Google. The thing I appreciate most in a history like this one, focused on a reasonably narrow bit of human behavior, is that sense the author's done a lot more than the minimum. That is definitely the case here.

I don't classify this as a microhistory to myself. It has a narrow focus. It doesn't, however, confine itself to just one bit of History like The Forger's Spell or Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World, both estimable books. I suppose when your topic is something as universal or as ancient as an axe, one can't feasibly stay in the micro.

Speaking of micro, Author Rachel does not spare us Y-chromosome-havers in her analysis of why axes represent authority. There's a good bit about male insecurity as it relates to symbols of power and status. If I felt she was factually incorrect, or grinding an academic axe (!) too finely to make her point, I'd say so. Instead I shrank a little more every time the topic arose. Well done, madam, point well made. Dealing with how the labrys became a feminist/matriarchal symbol was fascinating.

The structural elements of the book are largely thematic. We're in chapters called things like "In Truth, An Enemy and a Man of Violence" (chapter four, the 500s BCE) and "Five Axes in the Cellar, One Axe on the roof" (chapter nine, Lizzie Borden). Author Rachel's style lends itself to hooks, positioned carefully at the ends of chapters. It makes the read hard to portion out; I usually read a chapter of a book, take a few notes, move to a different book; not here. I read through five chapters in a long afternoon. That's not common for me. I simply didn't want to stop, and the hook-y chapter ends (can't quote them, the Spoiler Stasi will trade their hoses and chains for axes) were designed to keep the reader engaged.

So what happened to the fifth star? It's half there, and deserves to be. I can't offer the full five only because the way Author Rachel mixes it up felt at times as though there were topics she could not go into that she wanted to. That left me wishing for an extra hundred pages and more ridden hobbyhorses.

No matter about cavils so minor as that. If you're interested in anthropology and history through a narrow but deep time-lens, have a good tolerance for murderous acts, and enjoy sly witticisms, this is a solid read for you.

THE CANCER FACTORY: Industrial Chemicals, Corporate Deception, and the Hidden Deaths of American Workers

THE CANCER FACTORY: Industrial Chemicals, Corporate Deception, and the Hidden Deaths of American Workers
JIM MORRIS
Beacon Press
$29.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: The story of a group of Goodyear Tire and Rubber workers fatally exposed to toxic chemicals, the lawyer who sought justice on their behalf, and the shameful lack of protection our society affords all workers

Working at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company chemical plant in Niagara Falls, New York, was considered a good job. It was the kind of industrial manufacturing job that allowed blue-collar workers to thrive in the latter half of the 20th century—that allowed them to buy their own home, and maybe a boat for the lake.

But it was also the kind of job that gave you bladder cancer.

The Cancer Factory tells the story of the workers who experienced one of the nation's worst, and best-documented, outbreaks of work-related cancer, and the lawyer who has represented the bladder-cancer victims at the plant for more than thirty years, as well as the retired workers who have been diagnosed with the disease and live in constant fear of its recurrence.

In doing so it tells a story of corporate malfeasance and governmental neglect. Workers have only weak protections from exposure to toxic substances in America, and regulatory breaches contribute to an estimated 95,000 deaths from occupational illness each year. Goodyear, and its chemical supplier, Dupont, knew that two of the chemicals used in the plant had been shown to cause cancer, but made little effort to protect the plant's workers until the cluster of bladder cancer cases—and deaths—was undeniable. Based on four decades of reporting and delving deeply into the scientific literature about toxic substances and health risks, the arcana of worker regulations, and reality of loose enforcement, The Cancer Factory exposes the sometimes deadly risks too many workers face.

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

My Review: The problems of a corporatized economy are multitudinous. One of the biggest is the existence of actual, unkillable zombies: the artificial persons we call corporations. The existence of corporations is not, by itself, evil or even provocative of evil. What happens, though, when one endows a legal fiction with personhood without accountability or mortality is that it never develops morality or empathy.

No entity that could look at the actual people whose lives were ruined, or ended, by the awfulness that is bladder cancer, know that the actions to prevent others from suffering like fates were within its power to enact, and not do it because it might hurt profits, has any business whatsover being given "rights" to free speech or anything else. But that is what the legal fiction of corporate personhood does. The managers and legal eagles who fought the enactment of even the most minimal safety regulations are actual people and can be held accountable. The corporation is the source of the culture that encouraged these people not to see the suffering of actual human beings as a reality to be valued as highly as they saw more money...money they would share in minimally, if at all. They, in their fiduciary duty to the corporation, did not see human life as more worthy of protection and duty of care than corporate profits, and as these corporations are not real people but only fictions, this is utterly outside any system of moral accountability.

Fines, sanctions, no kind of economic penalty can train a corporation not to see its eternal quest for MORE as evil and as detrimental to the world as it is, because it is a gestalt, a culture, not a human being. The human beings who make up the corporations' staff and management can all, plausibly, point to the fact they are just following orders.

So was Adolf Eichmann.

This book, using decades of reporting, writing, and reasearch of the author's own and also from many sources, makes the case for abolishing corporate personhood indirectly and compellingly by bringing to life the consequences of profits before people in a dangerous, necessary business through personal stories of its victims. There are no innocents here...people needed jobs and ignored the evident consequences to get the paychecks. The problem isn't one way only. The problem is the widely pervasive mindset that enables such oblivious, unchecked greed to flourish.

But what about the law, the regulations that exist to protect the people who handle dangerous chemicals? Yes, indeed...what about them. First, does the substance meet the standards to have a regulation in place to restrict who can handle it and how they can do it? The steps needed to prove that exact regulation is needed must take place in specific ways and have specific thresholds of evidence met for regulations to be drafted at all...that involves both the maker and the user of the substance, who have entire law firms lying, obfuscating, paying off whoever needs paying off to prevent the regulations from taking place for as long as it can be avoided while more profits are stockpiled. Then there are the regulators...subject to bought-and-paid-for politicians' oversight, aka interference, delaying and derailing as much as possible while more profits are stockpiled. More lives lost, more havoc rained on the workers, who don't leave their jobs desite the evident hazards because they need the paychecks, even though evidence mounts that the jobs are killing them...literally. All while more profits are stockpiled.

So a regulation finally, grudgingly, attenuatedly takes effect. Who enforces it? The corporation, and this obvious conflict of interest is lightly supervised by a staff of very very overstretched regulatory enforcers usually drawn from the regulated industry...as often as not from the violator corporation. All of whom answer to the corrupted-by-corporate-money politicians and their appointees.

Does the magnitude of the problem begin to dawn on you?

This book does what I can't do in a review. It marshals sources and resources for you to look at the facts and make your own judgments about the nature of the corporate entities, as they present themselves in relation to workers they can no longer deny harming. It's been established in courts of several levels of jurisdiction. The journalists, activists, and the lawyers who worked with the victims to get them justice and compensation for the abusive practices used by their employers are much to be lauded. They are not, however, teaching a human being by imposing consequences on them. They are inconveniencing entities that are without minds or consciences in their profit-taking, and in their one effectively attackable weak spot: public reputation.

Bad reputation is the one way to punish the entities who remorselessly, repeatedly, and knowingly enact all the harms detailed in this book. They have used giant, costly media campaigns...that you pay for with higher prices...to distract and misinform you as they move the plants that cause this havoc to powerless minority communities, or countries that have even less regard than the US for their peoples' health.

If there is a solution to this problem, I do not know of it.