Debut author Rader expands on his social media account of the same name for this entertaining look at the visual parallels between art and athletics. He organizes the book by sport, finding the “violence, chaos, and tension” of football in Juan Gris’s cubist Portrait of Pablo Picasso, which he sets alongside an up-close shot of quarterback Trevor Lawrence, his features askew from a hit to the head. For basketball, an image of women’s college coach Dawn Staley cutting down the net after winning the national championship is paired with Benvenuto Cellini’s sculpture Perseus with the Head of Medusa, whose serpentine hair and entrails mirror the net in Staley’s hand. Elsewhere, a photo of baseball star Jackie Robinson sliding into a base is juxtaposed with Elizabeth Jane Gardner Bouguereau’s The Shepherd David, whose biblical subject straddles a lion in victory. (All three, the author writes, were pioneers—Robinson for breaking the color barrier in baseball when he joined the Dodgers in 1947, Bouguereau for succeeding in the male-dominated painting world, and David for “taking on the larger-than-life Goliath.”) That’s as deep as the analysis gets, but the parallels drawn here are surprising and often irresistibly funny. This will delight the author’s fans and win him some new ones. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 04/03/2026 | Details & Permalink

Entrepreneur Bradford-Scott debuts with a stranger-than-fiction account of growing up in Ontario and Florida as the daughter of a career criminal. Though Bradford-Scott’s father, Jean Claude Garofoli, was ostensibly a jeweler, the author learned of his criminality at age 12 in 1977, when she stepped off the school bus to find police cars on her lawn. Instead of explaining the scene, Bradford-Scott’s mother bundled her into her grandmother’s car and announced they’d be moving to Florida while her father handled some “business.” In the late ’80s, Garofoli went to prison on drug trafficking charges, and Bradford-Scott made peace with his legacy. Decades later, however, Bradford-Scott’s mother presented her with a binder containing a manuscript her father had written behind bars. Reading it revealed that Garofoli’s shady dealings went far deeper than she realized, and may have included helping the CIA fund the Contras in Nicaragua. Eventually, Bradford-Scott found closure by expressing her complicated feelings in letters she addressed to Garofoli after his death (“Your legacy isn’t just in the challenges I’ve had to overcome; it’s in the courage I’ve developed to keep moving forward”). Propulsive and emotionally nuanced, this satisfies. (May)

Reviewed on 04/03/2026 | Details & Permalink

This ambitious romantasy from Corland (the Broken Blades series) gets off to a slow start but develops into a tense locked-room murder mystery rife with political intrigue and secrets. Twenty years ago, the senators of Pryor murdered their tyrannical king and exterminated his magical Elusian bloodline, ending a century-long war and establishing a republic. Every year, these events are commemorated in the Revelry, a night of indulgence coinciding with the annual conclave, a weeklong gathering of the Republic’s leaders to debate and pass legislation. When one of the senators is murdered, Praetorian Torren Morvane’s investigation leads him to Kerasea Vestal, High Priestess of the Temple of Truth, though it quickly becomes clear that she is being framed. With the conclave under lockdown and more bodies piling up, Torren and Kerasea must overcome years of mutual distrust to determine who among them is a killer. Meanwhile, as the two grow closer and eventually give in to newfound desire, Kerasea hides her secret heritage as the last surviving Elusian. The ancient Rome–flavored worldbuilding gets somewhat muddled, but surly Torren and resourceful Kerasea have satisfying chemistry and, once the claustrophobic mystery picks up, it’s fun to watch them navigate this fraught situation. An abrupt cliffhanger ending leaves much to be developed in further installments. Corland fans will be eager for more. (May)

Reviewed on 04/03/2026 | Details & Permalink

This engrossing if formulaic grimdark adventure from the prolific Moore (The War Born), who died in 2024, provides red meat for sword-and-sorcery devotees. The eponymous protagonist is introduced looking back on his time as a prisoner of the Alhakka, a reptilian people at odds with his bloodthirsty father, Forris Grimm, who has already sacrificed the lives of Korrigan’s siblings by not adhering to the terms of a truce with his foes. During his years in captivity, Korrigan became enamored of Whisper, an Alhakkan princess, who trained him to fight. When he was 19, Korrigan escaped, with the help of pearls produced from the glands of dragons, after Whisper warned him that his execution was imminent. Following a brief reunion with Forris before his death, Korrigan seeks out the mightiest dragon, the immortal Great Wyrm, to gain immortality for himself. The prose can be clunky, but there’s never a dull moment as Korrigan fights battle after battle, utilizing magic to take on legions of foes. Readers looking for high fantasy with a classic feel should check this out. (May)

Reviewed on 04/03/2026 | Details & Permalink

The disappearance of a teenage boy sends shockwaves through a British beach town in the overstuffed latest from bestseller Clarke (The Surf House). The morning after Jacob Symonds’s 17th birthday party, his mother, Sarah, awakes in the family’s beach hut near Bristol to find him gone. The date of Jacob’s disappearance is exactly seven years after his childhood friend, Marley, drowned in the same area, stirring up speculation among the Symondses’ neighbors that Marley’s death and Jacob’s disappearance might be linked. Clarke alternates narration between Sarah and Isla, Marley’s mother, slowly teasing out the relationships between the boys’ families and the precise circumstances of Marley’s death. Eventually, the fragile tissue of the lies about his drowning, which have kept the women’s friendship alive and maintained peace in their town for nearly a decade, begins to dissolve, and the search for Jacob forces them to face long-buried truths. The novel’s first quarter lacks heat, and when the pace picks up, Clarke lays the implausible misunderstandings and wanton cruelty on too thick. It’s a bumpy ride. Agent: Gráinne Fox, UTA. (May)

Reviewed on 04/03/2026 | Details & Permalink

A French coast guard officer confronts the existential dilemma of her job in the thought-provoking English-language debut by novelist and philosopher Delecroix. As a coordinator of sea rescues in the English Channel, the unnamed narrator is regularly forced to decide whether to send or withhold assistance for sinking boats. Most often the doomed crafts are carrying refugees making the perilous crossing to the U.K., and her decisions frequently come down to whether the craft is in her country’s waters, among other calculations. One evening, she communicates with a man on a raft of refugees drifting somewhere along the line between French and English waters. He calls her 14 times over the course of a couple of hours as the boat slowly sinks. All the refugees end up drowning. The news causes intense hand wringing on both sides of the Channel, and most of the novel consists of the narrator replaying that night as well as her subsequent exchange with a police investigator. The narrative takes on intriguing layers as the investigator grills her about her decisions and the recordings of her radio calls with the man, in which she attempts to absolve herself of guilt (“I didn’t ask you to leave”). It’s a satisfying exploration of a moral gray area. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 04/03/2026 | Details & Permalink

Journalist McDougall’s ambitious debut traces the evolution of modern dance in New York City in the 20th century. He explores how the city’s dancers and choreographers reworked familiar forms, with George Balanchine making New York the epicenter of American ballet in the 1930s and ’40s while drawing subtly from jazz in dances that broke “ballet’s familiar lines.” In later decades, Alvin Ailey Jr. reshaped modern dance, jazz, and ballet in performances like Revelations, a gospel-influenced ballet that drew on his Texas roots to “speak to African Americans’ shared experience of struggle and hope” and attracted new, nonwhite audiences to the art form. McDougall also explores how vastly different dance styles coexisted in the city, with the high-kicking “militant unison” of the Rockettes, whose popularity climbed in the ’30s and ’40s, contrasting with the looseness and abstraction of jazz and downtown troupes like the Communist Workers Dance League. While the author sometimes struggles to synthesize the wealth of material, he comprehensively catalogs the people and places who shaped the city’s dance innovations and teases out how dance intersected with or served as a testing ground for questions about race and gender. Dance aficionados will find plenty of interest. Photos. (May)

Reviewed on 04/03/2026 | Details & Permalink

Retired U.S. Navy officer and bestselling author Campbell (the Doomed Earth duology) puts his military experience to good use in this action-packed account of an extraplanetary mission to investigate new planets. Navy ensign Osiris Aquino has been assigned to command the marines stationed onboard the Darwin, a civilian vessel. While working to overcome his charges’ distrust of a leader from a different part of the military, Aquino must also figure out how the understaffed contingent, only half of a full squad, can function, a task made harder by his suspicion that the six marines and their sergeant are not the cream of the crop. Those concerns are tested after an interstellar jump takes Darwin to Janus Five, a planet whose former inhabitants appear to have gone extinct with no evidence of why they vanished. A reckless decision by the scientific team dispatched to that planet’s surface, possibly linked to the agenda of the private entities funding the expedition, puts lives in danger, and forces Aquino to learn his capabilities, and those of the marines, in an extreme situation. This taut, entertaining military SF plot will appeal to fans of Jack McDevitt. (May)

Reviewed on 04/03/2026 | Details & Permalink

Abraham Lincoln’s much maligned wife had her mental troubles but was also a smart political operator and loving helpmeet, according to this vivid debut biography. Journalist Romano explores Mary Todd Lincoln’s many issues: her volatile temperament, her extravagant shopping expeditions that generated negative press coverage during wartime, her unseemly lobbying for government appointments for cronies, and, later in life, her unhinged grief at losing three sons and a husband, which made her prey to charlatan spiritualists. But, Romano contends, Mary was a shrewd promoter of Lincoln’s ambitions—she advised him to refuse a post as Oregon’s territorial governor that would have scotched his presidential hopes—who, contrary to critics’ assertions, fully supported his opposition to slavery. Romano devotes much space to demolishing the conventional historiography that Lincoln and Mary’s relationship was an agonizing ordeal; instead, she paints them as well-matched—“he learned how to defuse her tantrums; she was adept at pulling him out of his funks.” Later chapters recap how Mary adroitly marshaled the public sympathy needed to regain her freedom after her son had her committed in 1875. Romano is sometimes too quick with pat psychotherapeutic rationales for Mary’s questionable choices. (“Shopping filled an emotional void... [it] gave her a feeling of power and control.”) Still, this revealing study dramatically recasts a proverbial ball and chain as a dynamic and constructive figure. (May)

Reviewed on 04/03/2026 | Details & Permalink

The suspenseful if uneven latest in Carlisle’s Secrets of Kincaid series (after Shadowed Witness) finds Kentucky-based accountant Hailey Neiman still reeling from the murder of her husband, Wesley, whose criminal activity left her a struggling single mother less than a year ago. She takes on extra work to boost her income and is surprised to discover anomalies in the files of Eukaria Investments, one of her firm’s most prestigious clients. Then she receives a slew of not so coincidental anonymous threats and enlists the help of Peter Lewis, a security guard in her building, to get to the bottom of things. The threats soon morph into physical attacks, and the pair races to puzzle out what exactly the culprit wants from Hailey while also grappling with their traumatic pasts and damaged faith. Though the pace of the central mystery plot can drag, readers will be drawn in by the intensity of the action scenes and Hailey’s enterprising, optimistic spirit as she works to remake her life in the wake of tragedy. It’s not perfect, but there’s enough here to keep Carlisle’s fans satisfied. (May)

Reviewed on 04/03/2026 | Details & Permalink