Graveyard Fields by Steven Tingle

August 18, 2021

In Steven Tingle’s debut, Graveyard Fields, he takes an inept cop turned equally incompetent private investigator, stomps him into the ground, and turns all of his actions into a tragic comedy. I don’t know when I felt so frustrated with a character, and...

The Reading List by Sara Nisha Adams

August 04, 2021

“Books aren’t always an escape; sometimes books teach us things. They show us the world; they don’t hide it.” Sara Nisha Adams’ debut novel, The Reading List shows us loneliness and grief and community and family and love. Although there...

People of Abandoned Character by Clare Whitfield

April 26, 2021

Remember that title, People of Abandoned Character. There’s really no one in Clare Whitfield’s debut historical mystery that I would care to know, not even the narrator. However, the more I thought about the book, the more I realized it did just exactly...

What You Never Knew by Jessica Hamilton

April 17, 2021

Two sisters, one living and one dead, return to the scene of their childhood in Jessica Hamilton’s debut, What You Never Knew. It turns out there’s quite a bit the Bennett sisters, May and June, never knew. April Bennett always told her daughters she sold...

Pickard County Atlas by Chris Harding Thornton

January 03, 2021

I thought Laura McHugh’s The Wolf Wants In was a dark, grim book. Chris Harding Thornton’s debut, Pickard County Atlas, has that beat. The story, set in north-central Nebraska, has a foreboding atmosphere, and one of the most disturbing endings I’ve...