On My Radar:

Fireworks Every Night

by Beth Raymer

Random House

Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Florida, we got it all. Motor sports, ribs, beer. You can drive on the sand right on up to the ocean. Fireworks every night.”
 
That’s how twelve-year-old C.C.’s father, who named her after his beloved Canadian Club whiskey, describes the appeal of their new home. The man is a born grifter, a used-car salesman who burned down his dealership in southern Ohio for enough insurance money to set up a life for himself, his wife, and his two young daughters in a place he picked largely at random, because the living seemed easy.
 
C.C.’s mother is thirty-five going on seventeen, a housewife who just wants to drive a Mustang and hang out at the mall. C.C.’s sister goes from being a sweet, cheerful pre-teen to having a full-on drug addiction and listening only to heavy metal, after enduring forms of abuse within her family. In the midst of this chaos, C.C. is trying to stay afloat and make it out—to achieve some semblance of a stable life in America while coming up against the structural and cultural challenges of growing up in poverty.
 

This tumultuous coming-of-age novel features an unforgettable protagonist, a character who narrates her life story with dark comedy and compassion for her family, even as she is failed by them. Those failures—and her self-taught methods for succeeding anyway—are the backbone of this surprisingly poignant story about hard bargains, family loyalties, and the grit of a woman determined to create a better life for herself than the one she was born into.

 

On My Radar:

The 9th Man

by Steve Berry with Grant Blackwood

Grand Central Publishing

Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Luke Daniels is in London, between assignments with the Magellan Billet, when he receives a frantic call from an old friend.  Jillian Stein is in trouble.  She made a mistake and now her life may be in danger.  She needs Luke’s help.  Immediately.  Racing to Belgium Luke quickly finds that she was right.  A shadow team of highly-trained operatives are there on the hunt.  Intervening, he finds himself embroiled in a war between two determined sides — one seeking the truth, the other trying to escape the past — a war that has already claimed one life and is about to claim more.   

Thomas Rowland is a Washington insider, a kingmaker, problem-solver, but also a man with a past.  For him everything turns with what happened on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas.  What history has recorded is wrong.  There is more to the story, much more, and Thomas Rowland is at the center of that terrible reality.  But forces are working against him, and Rowland will do anything to keep the world from learning what actually happened on that fateful day, including killing Luke, Jillian and anyone else who might be a threat. 

In a race from Belgium, to Luxembourg, to the bayous of Louisiana and the Wyoming wilderness, to a final confrontation in the Bahamas, Luke Daniels confronts a series of shocking truths which not only rewrite history but will forever change his own life — as he comes face to face with the ninth man. 

On My Radar:

Little, Crazy Children: A True Crime Tragedy of Lost Innocence

by James Renner

Kensington Books/Citadel

Hardcover

In September of 1990, in the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights, sixteen-year-old Lisa Pruett, a poetry lover and member of a church youth group, was on her way to a midnight tryst with her boyfriend, when she was viciously stabbed to death only thirty feet from the boy’s home.

The murder cast a palpable gloom over the upscale community and sparked accusations, theories, and rumors among Lisa’s friends and peers. Together they wove a damning narrative that circled back to a likely suspect: “weird” high school outcast Kevin Young. Without a shred of evidence the teen was arrested, charged, and tried for the crime. His eventual acquittal didn’t squelch the anger and outrage among those who believed that Kevin got away with murder.

With a fresh perspective and painstaking research culled from police files, court records, transcripts, uncollected evidence, and new interviews, James Renner reconstructs the events leading up to and following that heartbreaking night. What emerges is a portrait of a community seething with dark undercurrents—its single-minded authorities, protective status-conscious parents, and the deeply peer-pressured teens within Lisa’s circle.

Who had the capacity for such unchecked violence? What monsters still lurk in the dark? After more than thirty years, questions like these continue to fester among the community of Shaker Heights, Ohio, still deeply scarred by wounds that remain hidden, unspoken, and unhealed.

On My Radar:

The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

by Michael Finkel

A.A. Knopf

Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

In this spellbinding portrait of obsession and flawed genius, the best-selling author of The Stranger in the Woods brings us into Breitwieser’s strange world—unlike most thieves, he never stole for money, keeping all his treasures in a single room where he could admire them.

For centuries, works of art have been stolen in countless ways from all over the world, but no one has been quite as successful at it as the master thief Stéphane Breitwieser. Carrying out more than two hundred heists over nearly eight years—in museums and cathedrals all over Europe—Breitwieser, along with his girlfriend who worked as his lookout, stole more than three hundred objects, until it all fell apart in spectacular fashion.

In The Art Thief, Michael Finkel brings us into Breitwieser’s strange and fascinating world. Unlike most thieves, Breitwieser never stole for money. Instead, he displayed all his treasures in a pair of secret rooms where he could admire them to his heart’s content. Possessed of a remarkable athleticism and an innate ability to circumvent practically any security system, Breitwieser managed to pull off a breathtaking number of audacious thefts. Yet these strange talents bred a growing disregard for risk and an addict’s need to score, leading Breitwieser to ignore his girlfriend’s pleas to stop—until one final act of hubris brought everything crashing down.

This is a riveting story of art, crime, love, and an insatiable hunger to possess beauty at any cost.

On My Radar:

Other People's Children

by Jeff Hoffmann

Simon and Schuster

Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

HOW FAR WOULD YOU GO TO SAVE YOUR FAMILY?

As soon as Gail and Jon Durbin bring home their adopted baby Maya, she becomes the glue that mends their fractured marriage.

But the Durbin’s social worker, Paige, can’t find the teenage birth mother to sign the consent forms. By law, Carli has seventy-two hours to change her mind. Without her signature, the adoption will unravel. 

Carli is desperate to pursue her dreams, so giving her baby a life with the Durbins seems like the right choice—until her own mother throws down an ultimatum. Soon Carli realizes how few choices she has.

As the hours tick by, Paige knows that the Durbins’ marriage won’t survive the loss of Maya, but everyone’s life is shattered when they—and baby Maya—disappear without a trace.

Filled with heartrending turns, Other People’s Children is a riveting page-turner you’ll find impossible to put down.

Today's Featured Book:

Deliberate Cruelty: Truman Capote, the Millionaire's Wife, and the Murder of the Century

by Roseanne Montillo

Atria Books

Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

When Ann Woodward shot her husband, banking heir Billy Woodward, in the middle of the night in 1955, her life changed forever. Though she claimed she thought he was a prowler, few believed the woman who had risen from charismatic showgirl to popular socialite. Everyone had something to say about the scorching scandal afflicting one of the most rich and famous families of New York City, but no one was more obsessed with the tale than Truman Capote.

Acclaimed for his bestselling nonfiction book In Cold Blood, Capote was looking for new material and followed the scandal from beginning to end. Like Ann, he too had ascended from nobody to toast of the town, but he always felt like an outsider, even among the exclusive coterie of high society women who adored him. He decided the story of Ann’s turbulent marriage would be the basis of his masterpiece—a novel about the dysfunction and sordid secrets revealed to him by his high society “swans”—never thinking that it would eventually lead to Ann’s suicide and his own scandalous downfall.

Today's Featured Book:

What the Dead Know: Learning About Life as a New York City Death Investigator

by Barbara Butcher

Simon and Schuster

Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Barbara Butcher was early in her recovery from alcoholism when she found an unexpected lifeline: a job at the Medical Examiner’s Office in New York City. The second woman ever hired for the role of Death Investigator in Manhattan, she was the first to last more than three months. The work was gritty, demanding, morbid, and sometimes dangerous – she loved it. 

Butcher (yes, that is her real name, and she has heard all the jokes) spent day in and day out investigating double homicides, gruesome suicides, and most heartbreaking of all, underage rape victims who had also been murdered. In What the Dead Know, she writes with the kind of New York attitude and bravado you might expect from decades in the field, investigating more than 5,500 death scenes, 680 of which were homicides. In the opening chapter, she describes how just from sheer luck of having her arm in cast, she avoided a boobytrapped suicide. Later in her career, she describes working the nation’s largest mass murder, the attack on 9/11, where she and her colleagues initially relied on family members’ descriptions to help distinguish among the 21,900 body parts of the victims.

This is the fascinating and stunning real-life story of a woman who, in dealing with death every day, learned surprising lessons about life—and how some of those lessons saved her from becoming a statistic herself. Fans of Kathy Reichs, Patricia Cornwell, and true crime won’t be able to put it down. 

Today's Featured Book:

By All Means Available: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy

by Michael G. Vickers

Knopf

Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

In 1984, Michael Vickers took charge of the CIA’s secret war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. After inheriting a strategy aimed at imposing costs on the Soviets for their invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, Vickers transformed the covert campaign into an all-out effort to help the Afghan resistance win their war. More than any other American, he was responsible for the outcome in Afghanistan that led to the end of the Cold War.

In By All Means Available, Vickers recounts his remarkable career, from his days as a Green Beret to his vision for victory in Afghanistan to his role in waging America’s war with al-Qa’ida at the highest levels of government. In captivating detail, he depicts his years in the Special Forces—including his training to parachute behind enemy lines with a backpack nuclear weapon in the event of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe—and reveals how those experiences directly influenced his approach to shaping policy. Vickers has played a significant role in most of the military and intelligence operations of the past four decades, and he offers a deeply informed analysis of the greatest challenges facing America today, and in the decades ahead.

Riveting and illuminating, this is a rare and important insider’s account of the modern military and intelligence worlds at every level.

Today's Featured Book:

The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune

by Alexander Stille

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Hardcover

In the middle of the Ozzie and Harriet 1950s, the birth control pill was introduced and a maverick psychoanalytic institute, the Sullivan Institute for Research in Psychoanalysis, opened its doors in New York City. Its founders, Saul Newton and Jane Pearce, wanted to start a revolution, one grounded in ideals of creative expression, sexual liberation, and freedom from the expectations of society, and the revolution, they felt, needed to begin at home. Dismantling the nuclear family—and monogamous marriage—would free people from the repressive forces of their parents. In its first two decades, the movement attracted many brilliant, creative people as patients: the painter Jackson Pollock and a swarm of other abstract expressionist artists, the famed art critic Clement Greenberg, the singer Judy Collins, and the dancer Lucinda Childs. In the 1960s, the group evolved into an urban commune of three or four hundred people, with patients living with other patients, leading creative, polyamorous lives.

But by the mid-1970s, under the leadership of Saul Newton, the Institute had devolved from a radical communal experiment into an insular cult, with therapists controlling virtually every aspect of their patients’ lives, from where they lived and the work they did to how often they saw their sexual partners and their children. Although the group was highly secretive during its lifetime and even after its dissolution in 1991, the noted journalist Alexander Stille has succeeded in reconstructing the inner life of a parallel world hidden in plain sight in the middle of Manhattan. Through countless interviews and personal papers, The Sullivanians reveals the nearly unbelievable story of a fallen utopia. 

Monday, June 19th, 2023

The Spare Room

by Andrea Bartz

Ballantine Books

Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Kelly’s new life in Philadelphia has turned into a nightmare: She’s friendless and jobless, and the lockdown has her trapped in a tiny apartment with the man she gave up everything for, who’s just called off their wedding. The only bright spot is her newly rekindled friendship with her childhood friend Sabrina—now a glamorous bestselling author with a handsome, high-powered husband.

When Sabrina and Nathan offer Kelly an escape hatch, volunteering the spare room of their remote Virginia mansion, she jumps at the chance to run away from her old life. There, Kelly secretly finds herself falling for both her enchanting hosts—until one night, a wild and unexpected threesome leads the couple to open their marriage for her.

At first, Kelly loves being part of this risqué new world. But when she discovers that the last woman they invited into their marriage is missing, she starts to wonder if they could be dangerous . . . and if she might be next.

Today's Featured Books:

Tough Titties: On Living Your Best Life When You're the Fucking Worst

by Laura Belgray

Hachette Books

Hardcover

What does it take to grow up cool and popular, master adulthood, fast track your success, and always be your best? Laura Belgray wouldn’t know.

Her wildly relatable coming-of-age stories include hate-following her 6th grade bully on social media decades later; moving home post-college to measure her self-worth in hookups with Upper West Side bartenders; dating a sociopathic man-baby; proving herself in the early ‘90s at New York’s coolest magazine (as the world’s worst intern); falling for get-rich-quick schemes on the Internet; and, most of all, saying “tough titties” to the supposed-to’s in life: driving a car, being on time, handing in your paperwork, learning to roast a chicken, and having kids. 

Peppered with cutting insights on our confusing, self-helpy culture that calls hair removal “self care” and tells us to give our 110% but also to give zero f*cks, Tough Titties will leave you feeling better about, well, everything. Let’s face it: we’re all tired of shame-spiraling after being told what to do when we know we’re not going to do any of it.

Tough Titties is one big permission slip to be a dork, a sometimes-unspiritual slacker, a late bloomer and, ultimately, 100% yourself. It’ll also have you snort-laughing in public and tapping whoever’s nearby to say, “Lemme read you one more part!” Which is annoying, but tough titties.

Better Living Through Birding: Notes From a Black Man in the Natural World

by Christian Cooper

Random House

Hardcover

Christian Cooper is a self-described “Blerd” (Black nerd), an avid comics fan and expert birder who devotes every spring to gazing upon the migratory birds that stop to rest in Central Park, just a subway ride away from where he lives in New York City. While in the park one morning in May 2020, Cooper was engaged in the birdwatching ritual that had been a part of his life since he was ten years old when what might have been a routine encounter with a dog walker exploded age-old racial tensions. Cooper’s viral video of the incident would send shock waves through the nation.

In Better Living Through Birding, Cooper tells the story of his extraordinary life leading up to the now-infamous incident in Central Park and shows how a life spent looking up at the birds prepared him, in the most uncanny of ways, to be a gay, Black man in America today. From sharpened senses that work just as well at a protest as in a park to what a bird like the Common Grackle can teach us about self-acceptance, Better Living Through Birding exults in the pleasures of a life lived in pursuit of the natural world and invites you to discover them yourself.

Equal parts memoir, travelogue, and primer on the art of birding, this is Cooper’s story of learning to claim and defend space for himself and others like him, from his days at Marvel Comics introducing the first gay storylines to vivid and life-changing birding expeditions through Africa, Australia, the Americas, and the Himalayas. Better Living Through Birding recounts Cooper’s journey through the wonderful world of birds and what they can teach us about life, if only we would look and listen.