THE CORONER'S SILENCE: Death Records and the Hidden Victims of Police Violence, damning indictment using evidence seldom seen by the public

THE CORONER'S SILENCE: Death Records and the Hidden Victims of Police Violence
TERENCE KEEL
Beacon Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: For readers of His Name Is George Floyd and Under the Skin

A landmark investigation into forensic medicine that exposes the systematic concealment of state-sanctioned violence through death investigations

Each year, police officers kill over 1,000 people they've sworn to protect and serve. While some cases, like George Floyd's and Sandra Bland's, capture national attention, most victims remain nameless, their stories untold. The Coroner's Silence reveals a disturbing truth about these coroners and other death investigators are often complicit in obscuring the violent circumstances of in-custody deaths.

Through rigorous research—including critical records analysis, public health studies, and interviews with victims' families—this book unmasks the systemic failures within forensic medicine. Terence Keel shows how incomplete autopsy reports, mishandled medical documents, and strategically lost evidence effectively shield law enforcement from accountability.

The Coroner’s Silence uncovers how the current system of death investigation operates as a mechanism of institutional safeguarding. By highlighting the structural powerlessness of coroners and their disconnection from the communities most affected by police violence, Keel demonstrates how bureaucratic processes can render human suffering invisible.

True accountability requires more than procedural reform. It demands a fundamental reimagining of how we investigate, document, and understand deaths at the hands of state institutions. The Coroner's Silence is a crucial intervention that challenges us to confront the deeply ingrained mechanisms that perpetuate systemic violence.

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My Review: Starting with an acknowledgment of the demands we place on the police, "...we have asked police in America to maintain law and order in addition to managing the problems of poverty, the unhoused, the mentally unwell, and people suffering with substance abuse," Author Keel peels back the layers of denial, obfuscation, and lying that enshroud the deaths of people in law-enforcement custody. Coroners, tasked with the responsibility of reporting on the condition of the deceased's body after their death, often use terminology that clouds what would be interpreted as signs of violence lest police be accused of criminal conduct.

The obvious problem arises when there has been criminal police conduct. It is not always the case, nor is it unknown; the system is intended to hold bad actors accountable for their actions; so how are victims' families, members of the public, to feel confident when principal figures are left to perform their role largely under the radar and so in practical terms unaccountably?

Author Keel studied the problem, saw the tensions in the system up close, and presents us this honest report with all its uneasy conclusions. I'm particularly taken with the concept of "second death," the erasure of the deceased's violent death at the hands of public safety professionals; men and women who collude to prevent the truth of the deceased's time in custody leading to their death is enacting a different sort of violence on them and their survivors, whether family or society at large, by shielding violent offenders from responsibility because they are the police.

It should surprise no one that racialized and marginalized victims disproportionately suffer fatal consequences on entering police custody. It is almost impossible for members of those groups to receive posthumous justice due to the bureaucratic sleight-of-hand defeating open and transparent accountability for deaths in custody. Medical jargon, grammatical skulduggery...much can be hidden by using bureaucracy's beloved passive voice, and ameliorative jargon eg, "shots were fired" by anyone in particular, or just impelled by hard breezes?, or "an officer-involved conflict" of what sort? initiated by whom?, etc etc.

Narratives constructed in this pettifogging fashion are not rigorous, and should be challenged at every turn. That they are not indicates the true purpose of coroners' reports by whatever name: exculpation by obfuscation.

It is infuriating that this is widespread, nay ubiquitous, and goes largely unchallenged. In bringing the abuse of public trust this behavior represents, Author Keel does his best to prevent as many "second death"s as he possibly can. I pray for his ongoing success and for this cultural poltroonery to be held up for public ridicule.

A TIME TO BE BORN, Author DAWN POWELL's scathing social commentary is evergreen

A TIME TO BE BORN
DAWN POWELL
Pushkin Press Classics (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A gorgeous new paperback of Dawn Powell’s razor-sharp comedy of manners, following a glittering tale of ambition and betrayal in prewar New York City.

“Few books have so bitingly and energetically captured the hunger for status and success that animate the city and enrage so many.” — The New York Times

Deemed “wittier than Dorothy Parker, [and able to] dissect the rich better than F. Scott Fitzgerald” (The New York Times Book Review), Dawn Powell earns her place as one of America’s great novelists with this biting satire of a wealthy, self-involved publisher and his scheming novelist wife.

Amanda Keeler has clawed her way out of the backwaters of Ohio and into the affections of Julien Evans, New York’s most powerful newspaper tycoon. With his ex-wife vanquished, Amanda reigns over their Fifth Avenue mansion, publishing wildly successful (ghostwritten) novels, charming guests at martini-soaked parties and furiously fending off Julien’s pesky advances.

That’s until the past comes knocking in the form of Vicky Haven, a timid school friend desperate for reinvention. Ever the strategist, Amanda lands Vicky a job in listings and a studio apartment—perfect for Amanda’s daytime trysts with old flame, Ken Saunders. But matters of the heart rarely follow orders. When Vicky begins to wise up to her scheme, and sets her own sights on Ken, she ignites a love triangle that threatens to topple Amanda’s carefully constructed empire.

Scathingly funny and irresistibly glamorous, A Time to be Born is a timeless portrait of social climbing, set in a 1940s Manhattan rife with backstabbing charm, brittle friendships and women who always land on their feet–heels first. Reissued in a stunning new package, it is the perfect introduction to Dawn Powell’s wicked wit and unsparing eye, guaranteed to delight both established fans and new readers alike.

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

My Review: My mother loved The Locusts Have No King and Angels on Toast. She always said it was unkind of Dawn Powell to make her bitches so funny, because in the end it was bitchiness or bust in these women's lives. I've read Edmund Wilson's famous (I think dismissive) "praise" for her writing that her audience...women...never cottoned on to her writing in droves because there was no one to relate to.

That did not age well, Mr. Wilson. It's misogynistic even for a very openly misogynistic age. My own read of the literary marketplace's lukewarm reception of Powell has more to do with my mother's observation that the women were bitches first and foremost: made up of 90% bitchiness, 8% ambition, and 2% fashion. It gets wearing when the glossy surfaces deliver gloss gloss and more shiny gloss. This takedown of Clare Boothe Luce is honest, unsparing, based in the author's cold phony-flensing eye's most well-illuminated view of a woman whose substance could never fill out the image she projected. It was one of Powell's few hot-selling titles on that basis.

But in 2026, most all y'all need to use Wikipedia to know who she is. This vitiates the power of a takedown, a roman à clef of bitter and contemptuous thoroughness, a book-length Vanity Fair hit piece. I think it's delicious. I think most people will read the sentences and enjoy the bitchery, the evocation of a vanished world of unquestionable elite power, no backfooting in this story until we get into the bedroom...it's wonderful at pitting women against each other over a man neither should even notice still less grace with their desires but he was A Man in a time that was enough.

I don't see that catching fire in today's social climate. It's out of step in 2026. It was cold, unfeeling, in 1942; and now it's a relic of a time so distant as to be semi-mythical. Because it is an evocation of coldness, fame, and the callous using of people, it really should work as a reminder that the same kind of people doing the same kind of social climbing are hollow images who stand bestride our world like they did Powell's, and are now forgotten...well, it ought to inspire us to see through them, to see the vapors they conjure for what they are.

It has the uphill battle of ongoing misogyny. It's still true that piercing social commentary is taken more seriously when it treats men as central to the story. Look how much ink is spilled about that traitorous fuck Zuck as opposed to Carly Fiorina, another evil person seen from a labor perspective. It's also the book's enemy, time (ironically enough) that's proving sic transit gloria mundi for the models its characters are based on.

I'm hoping more of y'all will pick up on the story's commentary on fame and see how deeply relevant Powell's observations are for our own time.

THE MYSTIC AND THE MISSING GIRL, first in a well-made paranormal series

THE MYSTIC AND THE MISSING GIRL
VIKKI VanSICKLE
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Reluctant psychic Drew Benson can read tarot cards and get impressions from objects—she just never expected to use her gifts to investigate an infamous cold case.

Drew Benson has a secret. She gets visions, something she hasn’t tapped into since she was a teenager, when her late aunt, a TV psychic known as Hannah Mystic, became the scapegoat in the unsolved disappearance of a local teenager. Twenty years later, Drew is happy to ignore her gift, focusing instead on keeping the metaphysical shop she inherited from Hannah afloat, wrangling her sole, astrology-obsessed employee, and dodging local rake Foster Banks in her picturesque lakeside hometown.

But when Drew's arch-nemesis from high school, now a big city reporter, decides to investigate the cold case from all those years ago, it’s Drew’s ability that could finally make a break in the decades old mystery. With bills piling up, a disapproving mother laying on the guilt, and a local vandal who wants Drew and her witchy store gone, Drew has a lot to lose. But what she stands to gain—finding out what happened to the missing teen, clearing her aunt’s name, and a second chance at belonging—could change everything.

In The Mystic and the Missing Girl, Vikki VanSickle seamlessly draws readers into an utterly charming world in this unputdownable, small town mystery.

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

My Review: Drew's a woman who just will not let unfairness or inequitable bullshit rampant in our world go unchallenged. Her "...but that's not right" meter's calibrated very finely indeed, which is probably why those who've gone before in dishonest or unkindly meant ways trust her to bring fairness and closure to their stolen lives.

What makes all that work on a story level is that Drew doesn't have evidence until she, and a very unusual partner in Nick, do the investigation to actually solve the crime. That was very satisfying to me, as was the fact that Drew had to overcome significant internal hurdles to accept and trust her psychometry practice was giving her accurate information to aim the shoe-leather-wearing investigation parts.

Nick being a normal adult and a reasonable guy who learns the right lesson...Drew can be trusted, the leads she turns up in this weird way all pan out or lead to the right data...is a relief. No disbelief carried beyond the point of learning Drew's correct, no rufftuff manly-man nonsense.

The small-town weirdness is played for laffs but that's how it goes in mysteries of a cozy bent. I didn't think any of them were incredible. Unlikely, but that's bog-standard nowadays; rolling with it was fine, especially as they were all adding their bits to the shoe-leather-wearing investigation part as well as fleshing out the history of Drew's late auntie Hannah, their former neighbor who also had paranormal abilities that quite famously failed her once...and that was all the town needed.

Drew needs to redeem her aunt's memory. Nick needs a resolved cold case. Their work styles mesh better than is the norm in cozy mysteries. It's clear we're going to get a series, sooner rather than later please, because the paranormal edge is neither overemphasized nor played for humor...that's all in the town's responses to it.

Drew's shop having a pweshus cutesypooh c-a-t was the loss of the fifth star.

THE LIGHT BETWEEN THE PINES, even Kirkus likes it!

THE LIGHT BETWEEN THE PINES
WARREN READ
Ig Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In the stillness of a pine grove, a wrecked car tells a story no one wants to hear.

Red Miller has lived long enough to know when someone is lying, especially his daughter, Gina. On an afternoon in early fall of 1979, Red gives Gina’s boyfriend money he knows he won’t see again, then watches his daughter slip further away, wondering where it all went wrong. Five years later, a call from an Idaho deputy changes everything: Gina has vanished after a fatal car crash, and Red has a grandson he’s never met. Haunted by his failures and the memory of a wife lost too soon, Red travels to a small Idaho town in search of answers. But what he finds is more than a mystery; it’s a reckoning-of love misspent, of the fragile ties that bind us, and of the strange, stubborn hope that still lingers in the quiet spaces between regret and redemption.

The Light Between the Pines is a powerful, slow-burning portrait of family and fallout, told with the sparse beauty and emotional precision of Kent Haruf’s Plainsong and Richard Ford’s Wildlife.

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

My Review: A grandparent who goes into battle for a dead child's child is a story that resonates with old-man me. By far my favorite iteration of it is Let Him Go by Larry Watson. This one's a close second.

Red Miller has the relatively common parenting experience of looking at a child's mate choice and thinking, "did I do *that* crappy a job?" Another not-uncommon event is the child whose own child is hidden from the parent for complicated emotional reasons, or uncomplicated practical ones; there are a million ways a family can fall apart, and Red's living through one or two...if the Idaho deputy on the other end of the phone telling him about his daughter's involvement in a fatal accident and subsequent disappearance, he's feeling like there's a few of her steps down the road of irresponsibility that he is due to catch up on.

Seeing everything unravel is likely a very common experience among the older people, no matter how hard one works there's often enough something that comes along to muck it all up. His wife's early death, his subsequent descent into private grief, his daughter's youthful rebellion, all leading to this moment...well, the details are likely different but you probably know these emotional blows from having endured them.

Now, of course, he has to head east into territory he doesn't know, isn't excited to get to know, and meet people he could do without ever having known existed to see what the hell he has to do to get this mess cleaned up, see if he can actually find a future with his family after losing the heart of it, losing his heart, and making every last mistake he could for the past five years right again.

The quiet, compact...just over 250pp...story is never mired down in the gloopy goofy introspection that can get so tiring when what you want to read is a story not a mea-maxima-culpa. Instead we see the life that Red Miller wants is not the one he has because he's doing a lot of work in the present to create a different one. It's so refreshing; it shows Author Read really took on board the lessons of writing his first book, The Lyncher in Me, about his appalling family secret. It's best to set the scene, say the least possible number of words, and let we-the-reader think it over and decide what we're going to do with it all.

Well applied, that lesson; it's made a terrific story into a pleasure to read.

SONGS MY MOTHER TAUGHT ME: Why the Artist Must Take Sides, truth told, action called for

SONGS MY MOTHER TAUGHT ME: Why the Artist Must Take Sides
SAUL WILLIAMS
Haymarket Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, avaiable now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Award-winning poet and performer Saul Williams explores how artists today must respond to systemic violence and injustice—in the words of Paul Robeson, by choosing sides.

Songs My Mother Taught Me is Williams’ clear-eyed exploration of the role of the artist in these times by answering the question: what radicalized you? He answers by examining how his role models—writers and artists, from Amiri Baraka to local musicians in Brazilian bars to Palestinian hip-hop heads—have responded to imperialist violence, oppression, and genocide. Riffing on Paul Robeson’s famous declaration, Williams builds a provocative case for why today’s artists cannot remain neutral in the face of injustice. “We need songs that crumble empires,” he writes, “films that teach, remind, and inspire, poems that would make a despot revoke your citizenship.”

The radical artists of the Vanguard Series offer new poetry and prose to answer the question, What does poetry have to do with politics?

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

My Review: What does poetry have to do with anything, demands my inner poetry-averse Philistine. What all art has to do with politics, answers reasonable me.

Everything. Just as Reverend Jedidiah, here, says it does.

I was inclined to listen to the words of the Reverend from Sinners because everything he's saying in these barely-200 pages is so exactly what I'd like you to hear...art matters or "They" would not try to censor it, take it away from you, hide it if "They" don't approve of it...search engine enshittification is more complicated than a ban, but also flies under your radar and has built-in plausible deniability.

You are what you consume. Go light on the empty, sweet-tasting, pretty but pointless stuff for a healthy mind/body/spirit (health is the enemy of bullshit on every measurable axis). Reverend Jedidiah says so too, out of his complicated mind and mouth. I'm very impressed by Author Saul's meditations on the promises and beauties in spirituality being bait (my word) for the hook of obedience and deference to authority. It's deeply saddening, but true as even a brief glance at the world shows you. Taking sides in the culture wars is often hardest for people who see the misuse of their source of joy and consolaion in the world. So much of the noise in the world is, and always has been, intended to make it hard for you to focus for very long. Breaking through the noise is best done by listening to it, looking for what it's pushing you to accept. Advertising, for example, is pushing you to accept the "blessing" of capitalism...look at this maginificent abundance of stuff! see what an amazing life you can have!...without looking at the wages no one can live on, the cost of the plastic it's wrapped in, the fact that it's flimsy and will break. Begin your journey at church...why would Jesus say it's fine to rip kids away from parents, to take fathers from their families to be shipped away not even where they came from and might have needed to escape, when a huge part of the christian message is "love thy neighbor?" All very obvious. But the noise, the shouting, the struggle to afford all the brummagem gauds makes the obvious recede into shadows so it won't bother you with its obviousness.

"They" don't need to lie to you if "They" can distract you from the stone-cold obvious truth.

Author Saul follows in the footsteps of truly great souls, from Paul Robeson to his mother. He distills into readable, relatable prose the truths that can feel threatening to acknowledge, accept, and act on: You, no matter how "small" or "insignificant" you think you are, must take sides. You can't afford not to. There is too much at stake, too much happening that we can not let go on as it is.

Take comfort in reading Author Saul's wisdom. No, it's not easy. It never is.

It's necessary instead.

SWITZY, Emma Cline's latest and a Booker-longlisted smack in the face

SWITZY
EMMA CLINE
Random House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2026 BOOKER PRIZE Shortlist will be announced on September 22.

The Publisher Says: A mesmerizing portrait of an aging man’s last pilgrimage, from the New York Times best selling author of The Girls and The Guest.

A private plane cuts through the winter night, somewhere over Greenland. David, a retired executive, sits back in his leather seat, playing solitaire on his phone. Click. Click. Drag. Click. The notebook in his jacket pocket is filled with familiar phrases, urgent reminders to himself, but he struggles to recognize his own handwriting.

A mystery, among many mysteries. The world, once so knowable, has been rendered inscrutable.

This is what David Cody, his assistant, asleep in the seat next to him, will shepherd him along the voyage. A stopover in London. Dinner with his adult daughter. A meeting in France with an old friend, estranged for decades.

His final destination is Zurich.

David glides through hotel rooms and airports and foreign cities, running out the clock on his mortal life. His grasp on the present slips away, and the past rushes the Sunday roasts of childhood. The stiff clothes meant only for church. A summer at a school friend’s house. The losses and missteps that punctuate a life.

As David’s arrival in Zurich looms, an exquisitely rendered portrait of an unraveling mind emerges, both darkly humorous and profoundly moving. Hypnotic and startlingly original, Switzy probes the depths of human consciousness, revealing what a man is left with when the accomplishments and compromises that have defined him, and the illusions he's relied on, vanish.

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

My Review: First, read this:

And maybe it made sense that this task proved so difficult, that the attempt to write the letter only underscored the necessity of the letter: things really had become unmanage-able. Other words for it: unbearable; meaning-less.

Disconcerting, this mental ice floe, populated only by David, floating off into the polar darkness. He was some-times a figure standing on the shore, watching himself float away, and sometimes he was on the ice floe, losing sight of land.

The ice floe-he had tried to write about that. In the letter.

In his strange new child's handwriting, these fat, scratched-out blocks.

The ice floe. The white room in the brain. How he knew when he was smiling and it was an error.

This dark hour, this loneliness.

Fear which lacked a shape. A dark, crumpled coat thrown carelessly into the corner of an unfamiliar room.

It's not the creeping horror of the smartphone-reading generation's inability to see the meaning-carrying blocks of text I still call paragraphs this time, it's the unmooring, the complexification of a dementia-raddled mind that has these single-line statements progressing down the page exactly as David's mind progresses down the legibility scale. He can parse less and less information, understand fewer and fewer ideas and concepts as his mind decouples meaning and experience.

A life lived amid the intense and complicated whirl of global finance. A life lived without awareness of what he was undervaluing, like most of us lead. A life that, now that he's losing his Self to the unraveling of dementia, he's decided to end...seemingly without reference to anyone else, a final act of solipsistic capitalism as there are no other stakeholders left in his world.

An uncomfortable indictment of the entirety of the life he's choosing to end.

It's a story I read in fits and starts because I kept feeling the need to step away from David so I could (re)gain perspective on him; is he, was he, only ever a monster or has he lost the parts of his self-constructed identity that were warm and inviting and needing and needed to the ravages now making him feel the need to leave his world?

I never found an answer. I wonder if he did, and so disliked what he found that assisted dying sounded like a way out of the emotional reckoning that is the end of life.

It felt to me that it would be well within his character to choose that last for those selfish reasons. I support his decision, no matter how he arrived at it, because he like all of us deserves to choose what kind of ending he gets. But wow...to leave it until you've decided you're going to die to make the amends you should have made long ago?

So very solipsistic, fearful, cowardly, and typical.

A fascinating story richly deserving a place in the Booker Prize conversation for this year. Also deserving of praise for contributing to multiple societal conversations we very, very badly need to have.

CHOSEN FAMILY: A Novel, Aussie lesbian-led found-family with all its loving flaws

CHOSEN FAMILY: A Novel
MADELEINE GRAY
Mariner Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An exuberant and irreverently funny novel about one gorgeously messy friendship-feud-unrequited-love-affair set in Sydney across eighteen years.

Nell Argall and Eve Bowman are both brilliant, odd, and friendless. When they meet on the brutal battlefield that is their posh all girls’ high school during their first year there, both their lives are changed forever. From school, to university, to careers, Nell and Eve’s relationship is a life raft that is also a poison apple that is also a Medusan stare, frozen in time.

When the passion, guilt, shame, and joy that perpetually twists and turns between them finally implodes, Nell abruptly walks away, leaving Eve alone at the helm of the gloriously unorthodox family they’ve built with their seven-year-old daughter, Lake. Eve finds herself left wondering: Can the wounds of adolescent betrayal ever really heal? Can we ever really understand what’s going on in someone else’s head? And what’s love got to do, got to do with it?

Written with Gray’s characteristic big-heartedness and dark wit, Chosen Family is a queer modern classic that reminds us again and again that sometimes the most fulfilling and life-saving relationships are the ones that are the hardest to define.

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

My Review: Who among us did not think "I'll do it right" when imagining parenthood?

No one does it right.

Kids hate their parents because they lack the perspective to understand what comes with the job of parenting, partnering, sustaining all of this all the time under all conditions in all moods with no meaningful support. This is true of all classes—genders—wealth levels.

You as a parent have one thing under your control: What your kids hate you for. Choose wisely.

Sound impossible? Of course it does, because it is, always was, and insofar as I know anything about humanity, always will be. So we read about how badly others fuck it up, or about how they say they didn't. It's all about getting a hit of fellow feeling that SOMEone is getting wronger than you. A book like this one is an excellent source of that schadenfreude. I might be screwing my kids up but it's got to be better than raising a kid with someone you're in love with but can't tell her or make a move on her to show your love's more than of the mind but only if she's willing but she can't do that so neither can you.

Talk about modeling dysfunction!

It's a story that's very much rooted in urban life, no one in small-town Anglophonia is going to do this; it's a very Australian story because the cultural references root it there...which facet of the story I quite enjoyed, though I'll bet Aussies reading it are wondering how dated/anachronistic (set fifteen or so years ago from when it was published and when I'm reading it) references made into the book. It's thus an advantage to read it in the US, a bit like reading Zazie dans le métro in English is appreciating a classic and in French is "they thought this was funny in 1959?"

Eve, one of our PoV moms, is a student making a good go of intellectualizing the queer experience in endless study and reading. "Look over there!" I kept wanting to shout, pointing at Nell. "A queer person to experimentally test your theories on who's DYING for a chance!!" But the thing about theorizing is that it keeps the messy, smelly reality of bodies at bay. The incredibly messy emotional realities of being human aren't susceptible to the keeping-at-bay delusion for long. Our framing device is Eve writing to Nell after a long estrangement, a letter unsent, atonement unsought; Eve's not a great one for introspection so her missed opportunities are legion whether past or present. Moving among the times of the family's life works well enough as a means of getting us to the story's heart; it's not a technique I love for itself, but Author Gray has the skill to use it well enough that I didn't make scoffing noises and slam the Kindle shut.

If you like Sally Rooney's messy stories about messy people whose love problems are lack of honesty with their communication and a *serious* need to see a therapist, only want it queer and Australian, your story awaits. I think most readers of "contemporary/women's fiction" in the Industry's reductive and condescending marketing terminology will enjoy the experience enough to make it worth their time and treasure. I was glad to see the back of Eve, and that seemed to me to be both the problem with and the explanation of my compulsion to finish the story.

People who are hard to love are no less..possibly more...interesting because of it; but interacting with them IRL is more exhausting than reading about them in doses we-the-reader get to set. Let Author Gray do the heavy lifting of living with the family, and enjoy the way it feels to leave without hurt feelings.