Book Beat

A young man sees both his father and then his brother go back to the country of Georgia in search of family; when he loses track of both of ...

In post-war 1940s Finland, an idealistic American couple befriend a Russian couple, and inadvertently wreck the lives of everyone around the...

On the tenth anniversary of her sister's disappearance, a woman's father commits suicide; the subsequent fallout finds that her fath...

A group of American Marines in Viet Nam set up a base, abandon it, then need to take it back, all at great cost, in Karl Marlantes' Matt...

A burning house is found to have a murdered woman inside, and the boyfriend is promptly convicted; but twenty years later, an ex cop--and th...

A crooked cop navigates a bad old town in PJ Woolfson's jet-black noir, Bodies are Dust . This tough slab of noir has been rediscovered ...

An affluent but cuckolded husband decides to get revenge by picking up a prostitute, only for it to have deadly consequences, in Alan Willia...

Railroad detective Gregory Quist hunts rail bandits who leave a string of corpses in their wake in William Colt MacDonald's Hellgate . M...

A space port in Tel Aviv provides the backdrop to a myriad group of characters, including a seller of ancient pulp paperbacks, a robot who p...

Big Jim Rand is hunting his brother's killer, but gets distracted rescuing a woman from an arranged marriage, in Marshall Grover's ...

In a bleak near future, a giant e-waste recycling area called Silicon Isle edges towards destruction brought on by class warfare and an inco...

A retired police detective, at the behest of a family friend, looks into a troubled young woman's death in Arnaldur Indridason's The...

A recent parolee finds himself on the wrong side of a prison gang with connections in the outside world, throwing the man's daughter in ...

On an alien planet, a group of colonists react unexpectedly to a sudden alignment of six moons in Michael G. Coney's Syzygy .   The moon...

A b-movie screenwriter comes to a bombed-out London looking for an actress, only to find her wrapped up in a crime network, in Lavie Tidhar...

An investigative journalist and her ex, a lawyer, stumble upon a network of organ traffickers and adoption fraud in Sergio Olguin's Ther...

Soldier of Fortune Neal Fargo aims to stop cattle rustling from the Mexican side of the border, but ends up in a double cross, in John Bente...

Two gun-hands help a town defeat a corrupt sheriff and a cold-hearted cattleman in Cole Shelton's Valley of the Lawless. Shelton is actu...

A hitman decides to finish one last job, only to find his life complicated after meeting a happy-go-lucky passerby, in Pascal Garnier's ...

A U.S. senator is assassinated, and a young agent is on the trail of the killers; but when her own father's name comes up in her search,...

In a dystopian future run by telepaths and evolved humans, a lone dissenter reaches out to an alien force in Philip K. Dick's Our Friend...

A rural cop struggles to solve a series of rapes and murders, passing the obsession onto his son when he follows in his father's footste...

A Lyft driver with songwriting dreams picks up a Stevie Nicks-like singer and strikes up a friendship; but when she is killed, he decides to...

This is the lowest reading total I have recorded since starting my book blog 15 years ago, but I struggled with depression this year as well...

Same Bed Different Dreams is a decades-spanning, multi-layered novel with a manuscript featuring real and imagined Korean history at its co...