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  • The Body in the Castle Well

                  After reading Martin Walker’s The Body in the Castle Well, the 14th book in the series about Chief of Police Bruno Courrèges, I Googled real estate listings in the Périgord, known for its castles, caves, gastronomy and lush landscape of rolling hills, woods and vineyards. From Walker’s description, this region in southwestern France seems…

  • How to Forget: A Daughter’s Memoir

              Kate Mulgrew is just finishing lunch when I call at the pre-arranged time and she asks for a moment so she can order coffee. She’s eating and talking because her schedule is so tight it requires serious multi-tasking. Right now, she is juggling filming a new season of Mr. Mercedes and is also on…

  • Truth Worth Telling: A Reporter’s Search for Meaning in the Stories of Our Times

                  While other boys his age were reading Hardy Boy mysteries and articles about baseball, Scott Pelley was riding his bike down to the public library in Lubbock, Texas and checking out books on faraway places.               “I kept a stack by my bed and when I finished those, I’d return them and get more,”…

  • If She Wakes by Michael Koryta

                  There was a real sense of relief for Michael Koryta fans when the bestselling author finally killed off the evil Blackwell brothers several novels ago and so it’s with dread to see the son of one of the brothers appears in his latest mystery thriller, If She Wakes. Still a teen but already a…

  • The Mykonos Mob

                  In The Mykonos Mob, the tenth book of the Greece-based mystery-thriller series written by New York Times bestselling author Jeffrey Siger, Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis finds himself face-to-face with the nation’s top crime bosses, all of whom are as perplexed as he is about who’s responsible for the murder of a corrupt former police…

  • Wine Country Table

    Taking us on a road trip that meanders from northern to southern California, James Beard award winner Janet Fletcher shows us how diverse the state’s growers and growing regions are in her latest book, The Wine Country Table: With Recipes that Celebrate California’s Sustainable Harvest. Accompanied by lush photographs by Robert Holmes and Sara Remington,…

  • No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

                “Domestic violence is not a large part of our conversation,” says Rachel Louise Snyder, author of the recently released             “Domestic violence is not a large part of our conversation,” says Rachel Louise Snyder, author of the recently released No Visible Bruises, her exploration of this country’s domestic violence epidemic and what it means…

  • Night Moves

                  “I didn’t decide to write this book, it was already written,” says Jessica Hopper, a Chicago based music critic with a career encompassing over the last two decades, a time when she not only wrote for New York Magazine, Rolling Stone, Buzz Feed and Bookforum, was an editor at Pitchfork and Rookie and editorial…

  • Pride, Prejudice and Other Flavors

             In the 300-room Sagar Mahal, or the Ocean Palace built by her great times four grandfather on the Arabian Sea, 13-year-old Trisha Raje is coached by her father not to be overwhelmed by the sorrow she saw at a school of the blind that day but instead find a solution so she doesn’t feel…

  • Courting Mr. Lincoln

    Bestselling novelist Louis Bayard, author of the literary historical novel Courting Mr. Lincoln, has written about a fascinating story about the relationships between the future President and the two people who knew him best: his handsome and charming confidant (and roommate) Joshua Speed , the rich scion of the a wealthy hemp growing family in…