A look at the month’s best reviewed books in crime fiction, nonfiction, mystery, and thrillers, from Bookmarks.
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Michael Wolraich, The Bishop and the Butterfly
(Union Square & Co.)
“Wolraich’s account of the murder and the ensuing investigations, helmed by the former judge Samuel Seabury…is brick-dense yet propulsive. Unlike the sensationalist reporters of the era, Wolraich manages to handle even the seediest of underworlds with reportorial spareness and elegance, treating his material more as a nonfiction political thriller than a true-crime whodunit … The book also provides a fascinating portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then New York’s governor, as he navigated the fallout from Gordon’s murder and the public’s demands to clean up the state’s snakes’ nests … Equally unnerving is the book’s reminder of how infrequently and unevenly justice is meted out. While Wolraich justifiably marvels that Gordon’s murder led to the collapse of Tammany, this posthumous triumph was qualified by the fact that Gordon’s actual killers were exonerated by a jury.”
–Lesley M.M. Blume (New York Times Book Review)
Megan Nolan, Ordinary Human Failings
(Little Brown and Co.)
“Nolan begins by embracing the genre’s major tropes (dead child, plucky journalist, family secrets) only to turn their governing logics against them with prosecutorial persistence and precision. This is a murder mystery in which there is little mystery about the murder, a page-turner in which the suspense hinges less on what happened than on how and why certain people become the people to whom such things happen … Nolan’s prose is clean and exacting, with an almost clinical interest in the power of shame: class shame, sexual shame, national shame, the shame of the addict. It seems to rank high among Nolan’s writerly principles that the cure for shame is honesty, however ugly the truth is … Nolan’s vision is grim but not hopeless, unflinching yet uncynical.”
–Justin Taylor (The Washington Post)
Paul Theroux, Burma Sahib
(Mariner Books)
“The Burma that he conjures in these pages is wonderfully present in lush and dense prose … Theroux is now in his early 80s and this novel is one of his finest, in a long and redoubtable oeuvre. The talent is in remarkable shape.”
–William Boyd (New York Times Book Review)
Sarah Ruiz-Grossman, A Fire So Wild
(Harper)
“It’s a gripping page-turner with a surprising twist, as a set of disgruntled survivors form an unlikely alliance and take drastic action. The complex characterizations and realistic scenarios converge to deliver a satisfying punch.”
–(Publishers Weekly)
Brandi Wells, The Cleaner
(Hanover Square Press)
“Darkly humorous and sharply observed … Wells has brilliantly crafted an obnoxiously opinionated, delusional, yet sympathetic raconteur, tightly holding the reader’s attention while exposing existential dread gleaned from petty human drama. And it’s so inappropriately fun to read.”
–Andrienne Cruz (Booklist)
