Latest Reviews
Mercurial tech entrepreneur Inigo Frank has perfected commercial time travel. His company, Tempus Tours, has been approved for just one route so far: a journey back to London in 1941, to the days of the Blitz, allowing the super-rich to experience the awesome sights and sounds of the aerial bombardment of the capital during World War II. To immortalize his achievement, Frank enlists award-winning filmmaker Phoebe Hunt to create a fly-on-the-wall documentary. On her first day shadowing Inigo, she is set to witness the return of a billionaire property developer and his family from their trip to the past. But instead of their awe-filled return, she captures the group arriving bloodied and traumatized, with one of their number missing. Phoebe recognizes the missing woman, who is not who she claims to be and has every reason to harbor a grudge against her.
New Orleans, 1944. Odette has always been one of the Honore sisters, glamorous and admired in their Creole community. But while Odette’s older sisters are content to be wives and mothers, Odette has always wanted something else. It is only with her beloved cousin, Delphine, that Odette can tell her secret: she is in love with a woman, and she longs to be an artist. Delphine has a secret lover, too, a white man. In the hidden garden they’ve discovered, Odette and Delphine can dream of futures full of passion and freedom. But five years later, Odette's life is nothing like what she'd planned. She's a widowed mother, and she and Delphine have spiraled away from each other. When Delphine reaches a breaking point, Odette must make a shattering choice to try to hold her family together.
When Claire’s fiancé mysteriously dies of an unknown neurological illness, she’s prepared to sink back into the lonely life she lived before. Orphaned by a freak boating accident in her childhood, she never expected to find connection like she did with Elias. When Elias’ family reaches out and invites her to a three-day wake at Harrow Point, their family home on a private island, Claire is given the chance to find family again. Even if that family is a little strange. Even if their coastal home stirs up memories of the accident that killed her parents and sister. Even if Ash, Elias’ older brother, seems insistent on Claire leaving as soon as possible. As she dives deeper into the world of Harrow Point, she will uncover the nature of her own traumatic connection to the ocean. There is something swimming in the bowels of Harrow Point, and it is hungry.
The headlines are calling it the "summer of exsanguination" in LA. Girls are being murdered, the Santa Ana winds are blowing a strange energy into the city, and all signs point to fire season. Anya Morris receives a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, an invitation to work for the de Witt family, one of LA’s most influential film dynasties. Soon, she’s spending her days and nights at their strange villa high in the Hollywood Hills, where she meets Jude, a recluse who is both the family’s heir apparent and its most closely guarded secret. There’s a magnetism to Jude that Anya cannot resist, despite warning signs that scream like sirens in the night. Because the villa holds generations of bloodstained history, and an occult family curse may even live within its walls --- or within Jude himself.
Björn Diemel, once an overworked defense lawyer for very nasty organized criminals, has mastered the principles of mindfulness, and he only had to kill a couple of people to pull it off. Now, running his own practice, spending more time with his daughter, and arguing less with his wife, he should be sitting pretty, but he keeps losing his cool --- with deadly results. Why can’t Björn just enjoy his new mindful life? Over the course of one outrageous week, Björn and his inner child confront overzealous helicopter moms, hypocritical startup bros, and mysterious blackmailers as they race to solve all their problems at once before the criminal empire Björn has built for himself comes crumbling down.
An alien ship crashed into Alaska’s Mendenhall Glacier 150,000 years ago and froze within the ice...until glacial melting thawed out its deadly inhabitants in the present day. Kai and Jules Bevins, both professors of astrobiology at Caltech, are roused from their home and whisked away to the site where a special division of the army has taken charge. But not before something escaped through a breach in the hull. Thousands of miles away in Pakistan, the Nine --- a team of superbeings placed on Earth a million years ago by intergalactic colonizers that seeded our planet to create human life --- are lifted from their long slumber. This all leads to a confrontation on a volcanic island that will determine the fate of civilization, even as the Nine uncover the shattering truth behind their own tragic paths and learn of a much greater battle to come.
Set in a fictional country in the present day, this is a story told through the eyes of an ex-military dog, Etna. After surviving years of a devastating war, Etna decides one night to leave the men he has fought alongside for years and return home --- to the place where he was taken from when he was young, in the thin but persistent hope that if a home exists for him, it might be there. Thus begins an exhilarating odyssey told through the eyes of a dog as he traverses across ruined landscapes and fights to survive in a world that, even in peacetime, proves to be just as precarious. Along the way, he encounters other animals and humans who are attempting to figure out how to start again. What makes a life when there is no home to go back to? How do we begin to trust each other again after such profound loss?
Sisters Vivi and Calla Nguyễn have little in common. Vivi lives an orderly and predictable life. She works as an art conservator at a museum in Chicago, but she refuses to examine her own dark history. Calla leads a much bolder, if occasionally reckless, existence. She’s an accomplished artist with a flair for the dramatic. She’s also a recovering addict. Months after the two fall out in the wake of their father’s death, Calla appears on the steps of the museum with a sketch and a letter she found in their father’s belongings. The sketch is an exact copy of Blue Mirror, a striking painting by a Vietnamese painter named K.P. Lý. In the letter, Lý writes about a mysterious lost work of art. Calla is convinced it is meant for their family, and that it was their father’s deathbed wish for her and Vivi to find it together.
Violet “West” Shelley has unwillingly spent her life in the spotlight as the only daughter of a legendary poet and feminist icon who died tragically young. Now, as the self-described “lowbrow” crime journalist approaches 50 --- burned out, creatively blocked, and far older than her mother ever was --- she retreats to her hometown in the Colorado mountains hometown to finish a long-overdue book about the “Crying Killer,” a notorious serial killer who sobs for his mother after committing his crimes. But what begins as a bid for solitude quickly spirals into something far more sinister. A stalker emerges, insisting that West is their long-lost mother, though she has never had children. As the threats escalate, West is drawn into a chilling psychological web where the boundaries between fiction and reality begin to collapse.
Have you ever swapped stories on a porch with Amish snowbirds in Florida? Searched for reindeer with the Siberian Yupik in Alaska? Been a guest on a houseboat deep in the Louisiana bayou? Peter Santenello hadn’t either until, after years spent traveling through 85 countries and living abroad, he realized the most unfamiliar territory was often his own American backyard. And so, with a camera in hand and an open mind, he began visiting communities across the country, places that most of the media overlooks or misrepresents, from tiny towns in Appalachia to the streets of East LA. What began as curiosity became --- one story at a time --- an intimate, revealing portrait of America today.
