Welcome back!
We have a couple non-fiction titles, plus a mystery and a spooky retelling. It’s an odd bunch, for sure!
Any recommendations you’d like to share? Drop them in the comments!
Are They Dead Yet?
I’m a sucker for non-fiction on niche topics and industries. I also love Caitlin Doughty’s books on death. This is a good marriage of the two!
From celebrated New York Times obituarist Sam Roberts, the art of the Who we remember, how we forget, and where we find the true meaning in a life.
After nearly a decade behind the obituaries desk at the paper of record, Roberts knows obits aren’t really about deaths. In fact, they usually only mention dying once. Over the course of the nearly 1,500 obituaries he has written throughout his career, he has instead come to understand that they’re about distilling an entire life lived-for someone whose name he may have learned that morning.
In Are They Dead Yet?, Roberts explores the major questions that arise from the task of producing a succinct yet record-defining account of a life. Who deserves an obituary, and how do we decide who gets one? How does an obituarist choose what to include-and to omit? What happens when embarrassing information, like a crime, affair, or wonky cause of death, makes itself known? What makes a legacy, a claim to fame? And what happens when that claim to fame, so important in death, isn’t what mattered in life at all?
With wit, wisdom, and behind-the-scenes intrigue, Roberts examines the practice of writing advance obituaries, of which there are more than 2,000 on hold and regularly updated at the New York Times, America’s relationship to death in the wake of 9/11 and the pandemic, classic euphemistic language, and more. Through it all, Roberts brings his humor, shrewdness, and experience to prove what he has learned from a long career in There’s no such thing as an ordinary life.
Bad Company
If you really just want to get mad and frustrated, I highly recommend this one. Few things make me more incensed than the concept of private equity. This one gives me Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe vibes.
A timely work of singular reportage and a damning indictment of the private equity industry told through the stories of four American workers whose lives and communities were upended by the ruinous effects of private equity takeovers.
Private equity runs our country, yet few Americans have any idea how ingrained it is in their lives. Private equity controls our hospitals, daycare centers, supermarket chains, voting machine manufacturers, local newspapers, nursing home operators, fertility clinics, and prisons. The industry even manages highways, municipal water systems, fire departments, emergency medical services, and owns a growing swath of commercial and residential real estate.
Private equity executives, meanwhile, are not only among the wealthiest people in American society, but have grown to become modern-day barons with outsized influence on our politics and legislation. CEOs of firms like Blackstone, Carlyle, KKR, and Apollo are rewarded with seats in the Senate and on the boards of the country’s most august institutions; meanwhile, entire communities are hollowed out as a result of their buyouts. Workers lose their jobs. Communities lose their institutions. Only private equity wins.
Acclaimed journalist Megan Greenwell’s Bad Company unearths the hidden story of private equity by examining the lives of four American workers that were devastated as private equity upended their employers and a Toys R Us floor supervisor, a rural doctor, a local newspaper journalist, and an affordable housing organizer. Taken together, their individual experiences also pull back the curtain on a much larger how private equity reshaped the American economy to serve its own interests, creating a new class of billionaires while stripping ordinary people of their livelihoods, their health care, their homes, and their sense of security.
In the tradition of deeply human reportage like Matthew Desmond’s Evicted, Megan Greenwell pulls back the curtain on shadowy multibillion dollar private equity firms, telling a larger story about how private equity is reshaping the economy, disrupting communities, and hollowing out the very idea of the American dream itself. Timely and masterfully told, Bad Company is a forceful rebuke of America’s most consequential, yet least understood economic forces.
He Burns By the River
Moreau does complicated sibling relationships with a dash of spookiness so well! This a Cain and Abel retelling.
Author of The Princess of Thornwood Drive, Khalia Moreau, returns with a Cain and Abel retelling set in post-colonial Trinidad, in which family rivalry drives one brother on a desperate quest to save—yet possibly damn—his older sibling.
The Dead Live In Sapo. And They Will Claim A Soul, Come Hell or High Water .
When sixteen-year-old Roran’s saintly and light-skinned older brother falls ill in 1963 Trinidad, people in his village, Sapo, blame obeah. Blaming dark sorcery, the same kind believed to have sunk the southern half of Sapo thirty years prior, is ludicrous to Roran. He’s a boy of science and his brother is just ill, albeit the doctors aren’t quite sure with what.
But when Roran hears the cries of those who died in southern Sapo, he seeks out Father Basdeo, a man rumored to have eyes that can see the living and the dead. Father Basdeo explains to Roran that Roran has the eyes on him, too, and only Roran can save his brother by communing with the spirits. He just needs to put his jealousy aside and risk the one thing most people in his village would never dare risk—having his soul trapped in Sapo’s sunken side.
A historical horror-fantasy set in post-colonial Trinidad, He Burns By The River explores themes of colorism and racism while incorporating folklore and culture unique to the Caribbean. And, it just might keep you up at night.
Come wade in the murky waters of Sapo, if you dare.
Our Marriage is Murder
If you like a locked room mystery, this features a married, mystery-writing couple whose relationship is on the rocks. A real life murder mystery might just save their marriage.
In the latest thrilling mystery from Mary Higgins Clark Award–winning author Carol Goodman, a writers’ conference at an Italian castle turns deadly when a killer begins using a husband-and-wife writing team’s novel as a blueprint for murder.
Fred and Thea Morgan-Lane are the envy of the mystery community, the perfect partners in life and in writing. Together they coauthor the wildly successful Death Takes a Holiday series, and they’ve been invited to the Italian castle where it all began for a mystery conference celebrating their first novel, Death Takes the Castle.
But their story isn’t quite the fairytale it seems to outsiders. Twenty years and twenty books after they met, Thea wants out. Their marriage and partnership haven’t been working for some time, and what better place to announce the end of the series than where it started?
Except shortly after their arrival at the beautiful Castellarosa, a shocking death takes place when the wrong person drinks a cocktail meant for Thea. The stunned conference-goers put it down to an unknown allergy, but Thea isn’t so sure. Could someone be trying to kill her? Perhaps her loving husband isn’t as ok with their series ending as he pretends, or maybe Nadine, the upstart young author who is vying to take Thea’s place, wants her out of the way. Suddenly, it seems like everyone has a motive, and when a second death occurs, a disturbing pattern emerges—these deaths aren’t random, they’re following the murders in Death Takes a Castle exactly. Murders that Thea and Fred wrote.
In order to save the day—and maybe even their marriage—the unhappy couple will have to work together to figure out who is using their book as a blueprint for a killing spree. That is, if they can trust the person they’ve spent twenty years plotting murders with…
