‹ Reviewer Book Marks

Colson Whitehead

Rave The Tampa Bay Times \"Throughout “Crook Manifesto,” Whitehead’s deft plotting and skill at bringing characters to life shine. The novel is so vibrant with details of daily life, from pop culture to politics, in the 1970s that it’s startling to remember he wasn’t born until 1969. He continues to be one of our most extraordinary storytellers and observers of the complexities of race in America. And, sentence to sentence, his writing is simply gorgeous.\

T. C. Boyle

Rave The Tampa Bay Times \"Satire has often been an important element in his work, and environmental disaster a running theme, and both are at play in this ironically titled, beautifully crafted novel ... Boyle does a brilliant job of writing about an enormous subject in utterly human terms. He draws the Cullens with all their flaws but with tender affection, too. Amid the climate apocalypse, life goes on, which is, maybe, a sign of hope.\

Salman Rushdie

Rave Tampa Bay Times Victory City overflows with magical realism and myth, with court intrigue and epic battles, with sly satire and heartbreak. And all of it shows us, yet again, the power of writing despite those who would try to stop it.

Philip Bump

Positive Tampa Bay Times The Aftermath is stuffed with enough charts and graphs to make any data-driven wonk swoon ... In between, in clear and lively prose, Bump delves into the changes the baby boom wrought on America ... I wish he’d given some space to second-wave feminism ... But he covers a great deal of ground and does it clearly.

Louise Penny

Rave Tampa Bay Times Powered by disturbing violence and thrilling pursuit ... Cozy it’s not, but A World of Curiosities is an irresistible read.

Barbara Kingsolver

Rave Tampa Bay Times It takes a lot of brass to undertake writing a contemporary version of Charles Dickens’ beloved novel David Copperfield. And it takes brilliance to pull it off. Barbara Kingsolver has both ... Although Dickens’ book is woven into this novel’s DNA, it won’t matter if you never read David Copperfield and faked your way through that 10th-grade book report. Demon Copperhead stands on its own.

Kate Atkinson

Positive Tampa Bay Times Exuberant, cinematic, immersive, elegant and witty — with a dash of darkness — it is, as someone says of one of its characters, \'quite the little bon-bon\' ... The plot follows serious threads ... The frenzy of fun all around them won’t stop. Shrines of Gaiety was a party I hated to see end.

Jonathan Escoffery

Rave The Tampa Bay Times ... eight stories linking to form a sometimes funny, sometimes shocking, sometimes wrenching novel about a Jamaican family in Miami ... Escoffery’s writing is lively and engaging, his stories well crafted, and he’s insightful and witty about Miami’s multiracial, multicultural, multilingual population. If I Survive You is a most promising debut.

Stephen King

Rave The Tampa Bay Times ... an enthralling, adventurous read that will, like any genuine fairy tale, scare you half to death and lift up your heart ... That takes a while, but Charlie immediately falls in love with that German shepherd, whose name is Radar. King paints her with a dog lover’s affection — she’s loving, funny, loyal and uncomplaining about the indignities of old age. He also paints that aging process with painful accuracy; anyone who has loved and lost a pet will know the heartbreak Charlie is in for ... a splendid work of world-building, rich with detail and crafted to be similar enough to our own world that the strange elements feel truly strange ... King reminds us that before they were Disneyfied, the traditional fairy tales were often brutal and tragic, cautionary tales that helped people cope with a world full of woe.

Maggie O'Farrell

Rave The Tampa Bay Times As the novel’s two timelines draw together, O’Farrell builds intense suspense. As always, her prose is beautiful, her characters finely drawn, her story wonderfully surprising ... Browning’s Alfonso might have closed a curtain over the portrait of his duchess to declare her his possession, but O’Farrell rips that curtain away and gives her a life.

Noviolet Bulawayo

Rave Tampa Bay Times NoViolet Bulawayo’s novel Glory is bound to evoke George Orwell’s Animal Farm for many readers. But this is no reboot. Beyond those broad similarities, Bulawayo’s story is her own ... Bulawayo skillfully deletes humans from the world of Jidada, right down to clever linguistic choices like \'femal,\' a portmanteau of \'animal\' and \'female\' used for animals who would be called women if they were human, and its sly counterpart, \'mal.\'

Michael Connelly

Rave Tampa Bay Times ... extraordinary ... This is the fourth novel Connelly has written about Ballard, the third in which Bosch plays a significant role, and they just keep getting better. He’s one of the best in the business at writing about investigations and creating intense suspense, but the relationship between Ballard and Bosch—a professional friendship that grows out of two brilliant minds dedicated to the same difficult but important work—is the cherry on top.

Lisa Unger

Rave Tampa Bay Times Unger...just keeps getting better at writing irresistible thrillers; this one thrums with tension from its first pages and never lets up ... Wren...narrates the book as if she’s speaking to Adam, but the repeated \'you\' has the effect of drawing the reader in so we feel we, too, have an intimate connection with Wren, whose voice is humorous and empathetic ... many finely tuned twists and surprises. But I promise you it will be a dark and wild ride—and you might think long and hard next time you swipe.

Ann Patchett

Rave The Tampa Bay Times \"Ann Patchett’s splendid new essay collection, These Precious Days, overflows with life—the joys of friendship, the bonds of family, the delights of bookstores and dogs, the mysteries (even to her) of writing. It’s warm and funny and smart and full of unexpected insights. What more could you ask from a book that is essentially a meditation on death?\

Gary Shteyngart

Positive The Tampa Bay Times ... engaging ... sometimes comic, sometimes poignant ... He borrows a bit from Boccaccio, a bundle from Chekhov, but gives the whole thing the same very contemporary satirical stamp he’s brought to books like Super Sad True Love Story and Lake Success. His satire is sharp-eyed, especially on matters of class and race, but tends to be more sympathetic than savage ... Shteyngart has a gift for writing realistically about love and sex in their myriad forms, from the seismic force of new lust to the comfort of a longtime spouse’s touch. In Our Country Friends, though, he focuses his insight on friendships, how they begin, how they endure, how they end

James Lee Burke

Positive Tampa Bay Times ... [the] dance between the harsh beauty of the landscape and the thrum of violence...is vintage Burke ... In many of Burke’s books, he breaches the curtain between what we think of as the real world and the past, the supernatural, the alternative, whatever lies on the other side. In Another Kind of Eden he sweeps that curtain back like a theater impresario, inviting the reader into a potent vision of the battle between good and evil that animates all his fiction.

Louise Penny and Hillary Rodham Clinton

Rave The Tampa Bay Times When politicians write novels, I usually try to avoid reviewing them ... State of Terror is a big, turbocharged, breathtaking exception: It’s one of the best political thrillers I’ve ever read ... what readers might hope for but not often get: a thriller that combines the firsthand, insider knowledge of a former Secretary of State with the writing skills of a master of suspense. Bonus feature: lots of wicked humor ... (You might recall that Clinton’s husband, former President Bill Clinton, has written a couple of political thrillers with megabestselling author James Patterson. They’ve done yeoman work, but the ladies outshine them) ... Every new discovery is more terrifying than the last, and what adds an extra layer of dread is that we know Clinton actually held this job. As each appalling detail emerged, I found myself wondering whether it had really happened ... keeps up a relentless pace, with more twists and turns and cliffhangers than I could count. Yet unlike any other thriller character I can think of, Ellen doesn’t punch anyone or shoot anyone or throw anyone out of an airplane. With her, it’s all brain work.

Louise Erdrich

Rave The Tampa Bay Times Few novelists can fuse the comic and the tragic as beautifully as Louise Erdrich does, and she does it again in The Sentence ... No one escapes heartache in The Sentence, but mysteries old and new are solved, and some of the broken places made stronger. The Sentence, a book about the healing power of books, makes its own case splendidly.

Lauren Groff

Rave Tampa Bay Times Her new novel, Matrix, takes us to another world entirely, but one Groff paints just as confidently, and surprisingly [as her last book] ... Groff gives her fictional Marie a rich and intriguing story ... Matrix shines throughout with Groff’s lush and vivid prose and her dark sense of humor. She writes tender love scenes, striking mystical visions and even a rousing battle scene ... an unforgettable vision.

Stephen King

Positive Tampa Bay Times King weaves Billy’s novel into this one, first a few paragraphs, then pages and chapters, and it’s a hell of a story ... Billy’s rescue of Alice Maxwell puts him at high risk ... Their complicated relationship pivots the plot in surprising directions, including a road trip that crisscrosses the country ... King slows the book down a bit as Alice and Billy recover and try to figure each other out, but then he cranks it back into high gear as they set out on a mission of vengeance against a genuine monster.

Julie K. Brown

Positive Tampa Bay Times Many journalists write books expanding stories they’ve covered, but one thing Brown does differently is show her methods. A basic rule of reporting is to keep yourself out of the story, but here her description of both the hard work of investigation and the perilous current state of newspapers adds an important dimension to the story ... Perversion of Justice does not explode any new bombshells about the Epstein case; what it does is put all of it together, revealing its scale and its appalling nature.

Cynthia Barnett

Rave Tampa Bay Times At several points in her enthralling new book, The Sound of the Sea, Cynthia Barnett warmly recalls her memories of shelling on Sanibel, the southwest Florida island long a mecca for seashell collectors ... offering readers a fascinating history of the shellmakers and of the multitude of ways they have interacted with and shaped human beings.

S.A. Cosby

Rave Tampa Bay Times Once in a while...a book grabs me by the shirt, gets up in my face and says, \'Let’s ride.\' Razorblade Tears is one of those, and what a ride it is. I sat down in my comfy chair, cracked it open and didn’t get up until I’d finished it five hours later, holding my breath most of the way—except when I was laughing out loud ... Make no mistake, this book brims with violence. If you do not want to read about the slinging of blood, the firing of many guns and the non-recommended uses of lawn care implements, read elsewhere ... Cosby can create a vivid character sketch in a few lines and knows how to counter the darkest situations with humor ... his voice is his own, his characters engaging and surprising, his narrative skill impressive.

John Brandon

Rave The Tampa Bay Times ... has echoes of many great books, but it has its own story to tell, and tells it with insight and brio ... The picaresque structure of the book lets Brandon move Gussie through encounters with many characters and settings. The author writes lyrically of natural Florida, even its perilous parts, in descriptions rich with detail ... Brandon gives us plenty of memorable characters ...a bracing mix of Florida history and fleet adventure, livened with dry wit and a tender regard for its characters. Take a walk across the state with Gussie — you won’t regret it.

Colson Whitehead

Rave The Tampa Bay Times ... full of deadpan humor and side-eyed satire, looking most like crime fiction but — of course — full of other surprises ... Whitehead populates Harlem Shuffle with a cast of rowdy characters, most of whom he treats with tenderness ... the book focuses warmly on its characters’ daily lives and on the place where they live. Rich with affectionate detail, it’s as much a love song to Harlem as a shuffle. Just as a lover strives to understand his beloved, ever fascinated, Ray can always be dazzled by his city.

Laura Lippman

Rave Tampa Bay Times Wait, you say, this is reminding me of Misery. Yes indeed, Dream Girl is a nod to Stephen King’s horror classic, and maybe a bit to his Gerald’s Game, and a lot to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. Lippman has a deliciously good time dropping allusions all over the book to a host of literary and pop culture works about the nature of fiction ... Lippman seamlessly weaves all that literary play and feminist satire into a well-crafted horror story — I might have held my breath for the last 100 pages as one shock barreled into another, to the wonderfully twisted end.

Jake Tapper

Positive Tampa Bay Times \"Sinatra is the most intriguing and fully developed of the book’s famous characters, but Tapper deftly sketches all of them. The book is deeply researched, and he incorporates some actual conversations and performances, which can be shocking in their casual expressions of racism and misogyny, all too true to the era ... rich in research, packed with pop culture and historical detail. The book is set six decades ago, but neither politics nor show business has changed as much as we might hope. Tapper connects the dots, but does it with a light hand that doesn’t slow down the Marders’ adventures. \

Ann McCutchan

Rave Tampa Bay Times ... an engaging, lively biography of an accomplished and complicated woman ... McCutchan quotes generously from...correspondence, offering intimate insight into the writer’s process ... McCutchan does not delve into literary criticism of Rawlings’ works but rather gives us the contexts in which they were written and the real people and places that the author brought so beautifully to life. Rawlings’ voluminous correspondence is put to effective use throughout the book ... Rawlings’ letters range from raucous humor to thoughtful dissection of her works in progress to abject expressions of self-doubt. All of it adds up to a rich portrait of a woman who loved Florida, and of a Florida that’s now all but vanished.

Patrick Radden Keefe

Rave Tampa Bay Times Not only does he detail exactly how the opioid crisis began and grew—it was no accident—he drags into the spotlight one of the most secretive, wealthy and powerful families in corporate America and holds them to account ... Keefe is a relentless reporter and a graceful, crisp writer with a gift for pacing ... Keefe brings the receipts[.]

ed. by Les Standiford

Positive The Tampa Bay Times [Standiford\'s] choices for the 19 stories in this volume are fascinating ... Book excerpts demonstrate the skills of a couple of masters.

Sarah Penner

Positive The Tampa Bay Times Dual narratives don’t always work — I often find myself much more interested in one and rushing through the other. But Penner keeps both parts of The Lost Apothecary engrossing, with rich detail, assured pacing and effective suspense.

Michael Koryta

Rave The Tampa Bay Times ... hard-charging ... Koryta is adept at bringing such harshly lovely places to life, then pitting his characters against their perils ... the wild world’s threats combine with the human ones in a layered, twisting plot that Koryta steers skillfully. It’s an electric, fast-paced thriller, maybe Koryta’s best one yet. But it’s also an effective novel about families — how they shape us, how they can sometimes save us, or destroy us.

Kazuo Ishiguro

Rave Tampa Bay Times It’s a dazzling and deeply moving journey ... It underscores how well he deserved [the Nobel] prize, in its beautiful craft and prose and in its tender but unflinching sense of the human heart ... The quietly stunning finale of Klara’s story made me feel a little like one of the first famous AFs, the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, when he said, \'Now I know I have a heart, because it’s breaking.\'

Patricia Engel

Rave Tampa Bay Times Infinite Country is all about making escapes from one place to another, and about what is left behind ... a beautifully written and humane book, and an uncannily timely one. In the news we see photographs of immigrant families separated, of children crossing borders alone, and we look away. Engel gives them faces and names and hearts that can be broken, and sometimes mended.

Ibram X Kendi and Keisha N. Blain

Rave Tampa Bay Times Whether you know only a little about Black history or a great deal, it’s a rich and rewarding book ... In all of the essays, a Black perspective is brought to things history has often treated in terms of white experiences ... Some of the essays on individuals shine new light on well-known figures like Phillis Wheatley and Booker T. Washington. Others bring forward people history has largely left behind ... Other threads bind other essays together, with stories that are sometimes tragic, but often triumphant. Each of the book’s 10 sections is punctuated at the end by a poem, original works by brilliant Black poets like Jericho Brown, Patricia Smith and Ishmael Reed.

Ben Montgomery

Rave The Tampa Bay Times ... tells an amazing, compelling true story that was long lost to history — but that could not be more timely ... Montgomery embeds his story in rich historical background, but he lends it immediacy with extensive use of trial transcripts and newspaper accounts.

Walter Mosley

Rave The Tampa Bay Times Easy Rawlins takes a long strange trip in Blood Grove, and it’s a thrill to take it with him.

Ladee Hubbard

Rave Tampa Bay Times Hubbard weaves large issues into The Rib King: racism in all its manifestations, from the tedious everyday indignities its characters endure to staggering economic inequality and unpunished violence. The Great Migration, the early years of the civil rights movement and the rise of the Black middle class all provide background for the story. Hubbard’s measured, elegant style is a grounding contrast to it all, and she crafts a complex, suspenseful plot with skill. But, most of all, The Rib King is about its characters, complex, engaging, determined to rise.

Allan Gurganus

Rave Tampa Bay Times ... what I respond to first and last is voice: the personality of the narrative, the sense that a distinct individual is speaking through the pages. That’s why I was glad to dive into a copy of The Uncollected Stories of Allan Gurganus ... The North Carolina native is a master of voice, a born storyteller with a gift for balancing the darkness and the tenderness of the human heart in his fiction ... Fetch is a gripping account of a bystander watching as an attractive couple and their fat, happy old Labrador retriever make a visit to the beach that turns utterly terrifying ... Among the best of these stories are several that deal with aging.

Dantiel W. Moniz

Rave Tampa Bay Times [A] stunning debut ... As its title suggests, this book’s 11 stories are about human need, about intimacy physical and otherwise, and about what happens when it fails ... Moniz writes powerfully about adolescent girls as they navigate that perilous age ... Several of the strongest stories in Milk Blood Heat are about mothers and daughters.

Barack Obama

Rave The Tampa Bay Times The book is likely to garner other awards. It’s the best presidential memoir I’ve read, not only for the quality of its prose, which is sometimes beautiful and always fluent, engaging and clear, but for its subject’s complex view of the presidency and of himself ... Obama writes about world events with the detail of a historian, but moves effortlessly between the historical and the personal.

Gregory Maguire

Rave The Tampa Bay Times Maguire still has the magic touch ... charming ... But Maguire tells Laura’s story in lush prose, laced with humor and poignancy, weaving the fabulous into the quotidian world. It’s a spell you’ll be happy to have cast upon you.

Rick Bragg

Positive The Tampa Bay Times ... reads as if designed for our current short-attention-span state, many of the pieces just a couple of pages long, each of them offering a dose of humor or nostalgia or adventure or, quite often, descriptions of food that make you feel you can’t live another minute without a plate of fried chicken ... Many of the pieces are funny.

Barbara Kingsolver

Rave The Tampa Bay Times Trust Barbara Kingsolver to surprise you ... In these intensely political times, she delivers a gorgeous collection of poetry, How to Fly (in Ten Thousand Easy Lessons), that is the least overtly political of her 15 books. These poems unplug from TV and social media and the outrage of the moment and turn our attention to the immediate and the everlasting, human intimacy and the power and mystery of nature ... \'How to Fly\' is this book’s title and also the title of its first chapter. Its short poems are often wry riffs on self-help, like the hilarious \'How to Lose That Stubborn Weight\'. The title poem’s advice is both lovely and the last thing you expected.

Jess Walter

Rave The Tampa Bay Times Reading Jess Walter’s new novel, The Cold Millions, might be the most fun I’ve ever had with a history lesson ... fairly bursts with energy, adventure, humor, pathos and irresistible characters. Packed into its bravura storytelling is a closeup look at some of the most dangerous days of the labor movement in the United States and at some of the real people who drove it ... this big-hearted book is populated by an array of memorable characters who bring a slice of American history to vibrant life.

John Grisham

Positive The Tampa Bay Times ... a fine example of [Grisham\'s] well-honed skill at hooking readers right into a story ... As always in Grisham’s novels, the intricacies of legal strategy are laid out clearly, the good, the bad and the ugly. On the job as well as in his personal life, Jake is an endearing protagonist because he’s a plainly imperfect one. He makes mistakes, sometimes major ones; he cuts corners and keeps secrets and sometimes skates out to the edge of ethics.

John Grisham

Positive Tampa Bay Times ... a chilling chapter kick-starts the 35th novel by John Grisham, A Time for Mercy . It’s a fine example of his well-honed skill at hooking readers right into a story — a skill that has helped sell more than 300 million copies of his books worldwide ... Grisham was a lawyer himself before he found success as a writer, and his experiences bring deep authenticity to his books ... A Time to Kill and Sycamore Row both revolved around racial issues. In A Time for Mercy , Grisham doesn’t center racism; the Gambles and Kofers are white. In a small Southern town, though, racism is in the air people breathe. Ozzie might be the county’s well-regarded sheriff, but most of daily life, from Saturday barbecues to cemeteries, is strictly segregated. But not everyone in Clanton is hateful, and Grisham also shows readers the kind side of the small town ... in Grisham’s novels, the intricacies of legal strategy are laid out clearly, the good, the bad and the ugly. On the job as well as in his personal life, Jake is an endearing protagonist because he’s a plainly imperfect one. He makes mistakes, sometimes major ones; he cuts corners and keeps secrets and sometimes skates out to the edge of ethics. But he learns from all of it, and when it comes down to the crunch, he does the right thing.

Bryan Washington

Rave Tampa Bay Times ...engaging and beautifully crafted ... There’s a heart-wrenching revelation near the book’s end ... There’s also a tender, expansive ending that’s as satisfying as the first bowl of udon that Ben cooks and Mitsuko approves of, that Ben is so proud of he texts a photo of it to Mike ... In Memorial, love finds a way, whether it’s noodles or punctuation.

Jonathan Alter

Rave The Tampa Bay Times It’s somewhat surprising that there has not been, until now, a thorough and authoritative biography of the 39th president. Alter makes up that deficit, in style and substance. His Very Best is a deeply researched, carefully evenhanded and engagingly written journey through the life of a highly complex man. Although it’s clear Alter admires his subject, he doesn’t hesitate to address Carter’s faults and failures as well as his successes, to give us a fully developed portrait of the man in his historical context ... Alter’s recounting of Carter’s presidential run is fascinating.

Walter Mosley

Rave The Tampa Bay Times Since Walter Mosley published his first book, Devil in a Blue Dress, in 1990, he’s been exposing, dismantling and subverting stereotypes. Race, ethnicity, gender, class — he’s brought a fresh and discerning eye to all of them, in the midst of writing beautifully crafted fiction and thoughtful nonfiction. I can count on his books not only to engage me but to surprise me, and to make me think...He does all that again in his new short story collection ... One of the most striking things about this collection of stories is how many of them have happy ending.

Carl Hiaasen

Positive Tampa Bay Times ... riotously funny ... This time, he proves there’s plenty of weirdness to be found even in \'gilded, fussy Palm Beach\' ... If you’re a longtime Hiaasen fan, you might smell the roadkill-tinged aroma of his longest-running and most beloved character, a former Florida governor turned \'vagabond saboteur\' called Skink ... raucous.

Kristin Harmel

Rave The Tampa Bay Times ... [Harmel] bases her fiction on extensive historical research, including real-life forgers who had heroic roles during the war. Eva is fictional, but her story draws from fact ... It’s a thrilling story, with Eva dodging danger at every turn. Harmel weaves her extensive research into the story gracefully, and she keeps her engaging characters at the center ... Eva’s relationship with that long-lost book illuminates some of the unsung heroes of WWII, and she will reclaim the book, and her history, and more.

Ariel Sabar

Rave Tampa Bay Times Sabar offers plenty of fascinating arcana about scientific and historical methods for testing and analyzing such an object, and he also brings to life many of the people involved ... Veritas is packed with details and tells a complex story, but Sabar’s prose is clear and inviting, and the book is structured with a well-tuned sense of suspense. It’s a wonderfully absorbing example of truth being stranger than fiction.

Laura Lippman

Rave Tampa Bay Times These are personal essays, witty and poignant and thoughtful, about Lippman’s life ... both entertaining and universal ... Lippman is self-deprecatingly funny about motherhood, and age brings with it a confidence that serves her well ... Her confidence also shines.

Sarah Gerard

Positive The Tampa Bay Times ... about as far from a standard rom-com as a book can get. It’s acerbically funny and sharply observant, but this tale of romance among millennials is more bleak than bubbly ... Gerard gives readers an unflinching look at the grim economics of being a struggling artist of any kind.

Kent Russell

Positive Tampa Bay Times ...he fills in details about everything from oystering in Apalachicola Bay (and why you’re unlikely to get a real Apalachicola oyster anyplace else), to the shady origin story of Disney World ... Their stop in Tampa and St. Petersburg yields a couple of fascinating interludes. Russell’s insightful history of Florida as a retiree haven, inspired by St. Petersburg, explores just what kind of retirees came here (and still come), and how they have shaped the state ... There are moments of beauty as well, like a breathtaking vision of a Florida panther.

Brit Bennett

Rave The Tampa Bay Times ... moving and insightful ... skillfully structured and filled with richly developed characters who defy stereotypes. By turns poignant and funny, it’s a timely look at the dual nature of race — an abstract construct, a visceral reality — and the damage that racism can inflict.

Roddy Doyle

Positive Tampa Bay Times His new novel, Love, turns one such tale into a funny, poignant, profane, unpredictable conversation about friendship, marriage, parenthood, aging, Dublin pubs and the eternal mystery of the title ... Love, like much of Doyle’s fiction, is made up largely of dialogue, as if we were down the bar eavesdropping ... Doyle’s description of the place, the regular customers moving in and out, the polished rhythms of the bartenders, the changes in light and sound, will make anyone who loves a good bar feel a pang of longing. It’s their clean, well-lighted place, and Doyle gives a funny wink to Hemingway just to make it clear.

Steven Johnson

Rave The Tampa Bay Times Johnson is one of those polymath writers who links events and subjects most of us wouldn’t see as related, always to enlightening effect ... intriguing...relevant to our own world. Johnson doesn’t just write about the heyday of piracy; he connects it to the growth of nation-states, the history of the first multinational corporation, the origins of democracy and the birth of the tabloid media, among other things ... an amazing story, but the real one Johnson tells in Enemy of All Mankind is even more so.

Lawrence Wright

Positive Tampa Bay Times Like all good thrillers, The End of October diverts us from the real world while keeping a firm base there, letting us imagine not only disaster but the ways out of it. Wright also packs the book with fascinating factual information about past pandemics and how humanity weathered them ... there’s also a bit of comfort in this: In the book, a lot of things are much worse than they are in real life right now. And it offers a highly competent but flawed hero—Henry has secrets, some of them shocking—who might just save the day.

Paulette Jiles

Positive The Tampa Bay Times Jiles’ prose style is built on a skillful balance between formal language and events that are sometimes outrageous, sometimes brutal. Her wit is as dry as a West Texas arroyo, and she has a deft way with description, especially of the natural world ... reads a bit like those letters, come from someplace far way and long ago, but full of fresh feeling and beguiling adventure.

Robert Kolker

Rave The Tampa Bay Times ... engrossing ... shows readers the personal side of a family’s almost unimaginable struggle with multiple cases of mental illness, and he also writes a history of how such illnesses have been treated that is by turns heartbreaking, enraging and hopeful.

Anne Tyler

Positive The Tampa Bay Times These days we’re all learning just what an illusion control over our lives can be. Micah learns it on a smaller, pandemic-free scale, but it’s disruptive, and maybe freeing, all the same ... a short book — at 178 pages, closer to novella length than novel — but Tyler’s prose is crafted like the cabin of a sailboat, with no space wasted, and packed with telling details.

Hilary Mantel

Rave Tampa Bay Times She brings Cromwell’s unlikely, compelling story to a moving close in her brilliant new book ... There is much beauty in this book, especially in the luxuries of the court—Mantel’s rich descriptions of meals and fashions will make you want to eat plums and quail and then go shopping for embroidered velvets. More subtle beauties are found in Cromwell’s appreciation of the natural world, of tender dawns and icy nights. Mantel enthralls with her descriptions of royal life, from its bizarre rites and traditions to its practicalities ... To both the glories and the gore of Tudor England, Mantel brings an entirely contemporary eye. Her research is prodigious, her skill at complex plotting breathtaking, but her greatest strength is her characters and the dialogue she imagines for them.

James McBride

Rave The Tampa Bay Times In the first weeks of March 2020, there was nothing I needed more than a book that would make me laugh out loud more times than I could count — and remind me that when disaster strikes, the most unlikely people can reach out to help ... In McBride’s hands [Brooklyn] is a place alive with humanity. Its rollicking cast of characters insult and con and disappoint one another, but they also love fiercely and close ranks when the chips are down ... With its luscious prose, exuberant wit and outsized characters, Deacon King Kong echoes brilliant storytellers from Eudora Welty to Richard Pryor. It also buzzes with the energy and deep awareness of black history that animate McBride’s wonderful biography of James Brown, Kill ‘Em and Leave.

Louise Erdrich

Rave Tampa Bay Times No one can break your heart and fill it with light all in the same book—sometimes in the same paragraph—quite like Louise Erdrich ... her gorgeously written, deeply humane books are a compelling history of the long dance between indigenous and European cultures that has shaped the nation ... Erdrich’s writing about the bonds of marriage and family is one of the greatest strengths of her fiction. She captures all the affection, teasing, pain and forgiveness it takes to hold a family together.

Zora Neale Hurston

Rave The Tampa Bay Times ... the fiction writer and the social scientist complement each other ... Some [stories] are touching, some are dark, many are full of rollicking humor. Together, they give readers a window into Hurston’s development as a writer and into how her education shaped her fiction ... Hurston subverts white attitudes toward black people by simply ignoring them ... To contemporary readers, that dialogue might seem stereotypical or even offensive, but Hurston, in anthropologist mode, wanted to capture the flavor of language ... In the dialogue and everyplace else, there is plenty of music and magic in these stories ... Hurston is brilliant at playing scriptural style against vernacular.

Isabel Allende, Trans. by Nick Caistor and Amanda Hopkinson

Positive Tampa Bay Times Allende’s writing about war and its impact on civilians is harrowing. But among the most affecting parts of A Long Petal of the Sea are its latter chapters, about aging and the changing nature of love. Allende captures the heat of youthful love affairs, but she also brings to life the deep tenderness of taking care of someone when you know there is everything to lose.

Scott Carson

Positive The Tampa Bay Times The Chill’s sharply developed characters, taut suspense and meticulous research might remind some readers of bestselling thrillers by Michael Koryta ... [Carson] has been winning awards for his crime fiction since he was 21; with The Chill he’s making his assured mark in another genre.

Jeff VanderMeer

Positive The Tampa Bay Times ... a story whose timeline folds in upon itself like an origami centipede ... VanderMeer’s most formally experimental novel, and his most challenging. But it also echoes his constant themes, offering us a vision of a future in which disregard for environmental degradation has the direst of consequences — at least for the species that caused it.

Les Standiford

Positive Tampa Bay Times Les Standiford tells the fascinating story of how the mansion-turned-club, and the unusual community that surrounds it, came to be ... Standiford weaves together dishy tales of...significant figures in Palm Beach society ... Who knows whether Mar-a-Lago will meet the same fate as the Xanadu the author compares it to in his title. But it’s above water for now, and Standiford does a fine job of telling its story so far.

Meg Cabot

Positive The Tampa Bay Times ... you know the woman who wrote The Princess Diaries series will deliver a happy ending, along with engaging characters, lively dialogue and plenty of plot twists ... The descriptions in No Judgments of storm preparations, the hurricane itself and the dumbfounding aftermath all have the ring of authenticity.

Michael Connelly

Positive The Tampa Bay Times Several of Connelly’s recent books have opened up Bosch’s and Ballard’s personal lives and backstories to some degree. The Night Fire focuses more on their investigations and is closer to pure procedural, with those multiple cases structured and linked in a virtuoso performance of plotting ... mostly The Night Fire glows with the instincts and intelligence Bosch and Ballard bring to their pursuit of the truth. From bleak sidewalks where the homeless live and die to law offices in glittering Bunker Hill high-rises, they follow the case.

Susan Isaacs

Positive The Tampa Bay Times Isaacs takes the basic thriller form and lathers it with lots of saucy humor. (If you enjoy hate-watching HGTV shows, you’ll love Corie’s and Wynne’s critiques of other people’s houses.) She’s adept at sketching winning characters, like Phoebe, the gossipy eBay entrepreneur from the lunch group, and Corie’s father, Dan Schottland, whose lingering grief and depression over losing his police partner in the 9/11 disaster are assuaged when Corie draws him into the hunt.

Margaret Atwood

Rave The Tampa Bay Times Atwood is a hell of a writer, and, whatever else it may be, The Testaments is a splendid tale, splendidly told ... Aunt Lydia’s secrets and their uses drive the plot, which accelerates as the lives of the three narrators intertwine. Atwood moves gracefully from dystopian world-building to character study to breathless adventure, her map unerring.

Margaret Atwood

Rave Tampa Bay Times Before we get lost in all the analysis and pontificating and political connect-the-dots surrounding Margaret Atwood’s new novel, let’s remember this: Atwood is a hell of a writer, and, whatever else it may be, The Testaments is a splendid tale, splendidly told ... Atwood could rest on her laurels and royalties, but, as you might expect from someone with her brilliant, restless intellect, she has more to say ... Aunt Lydia’s secrets and their uses drive the plot, which accelerates as the lives of the three narrators intertwine. Atwood moves gracefully from dystopian world-building to character study to breathless adventure, her map unerring.

Jami Attenberg

Positive Tampa Bay Times [Attenberg] often writes about family relationships in all their complexity, and in All This Could Be Yours she does so with mordant humor and painful clarity ... In chapters that focus on one character at a time, Attenberg takes us inside the family’s history from different angles to create an in-depth portrait ... Victor Tuchman may be a \'monster,\' as his wife thinks, with a few last blows to deal before he dies, but the story of his family’s survival is engrossing.

Elizabeth Strout

Rave Tampa Bay Times The book is a collection of linked short stories...that allows the author to bend time and to explore the lives of what might seem to be minor characters ... One of the gifts of Strout’s fiction is how it opens the inner lives of her characters. In all the stories in Olive, Again, bitter regret and searing loneliness crash up against unexpected mercies and stubborn hope, with surprising but utterly believable results. Strout also writes with rare humor and fearlessness about aging ... If you’re feeling woozy from corny holiday movies, Olive, Again is just the astringent antidote.

Salman Rushdie

Rave Tampa Bay Times It reminds me of some of my favorites among his books—Midnight’s Children, The Satanic Verses, The Moor’s Last Sigh—in its postcolonial, cosmopolitan, exuberant and encyclopedic mashup of cultures, history, magic realism and family sagas. It fearlessly charges into scary territories like immigration, politics and sex, all in luscious prose. And it is LOL funny ... What of the power of storytelling? In Quichotte, it’s one of the questions that underlies all else. What’s the slippery line between a fiction and a lie? Does story give order to reality, create it or distort it? Or is this rambunctious and wise novel just a road trip to the end of the world?

Kristin Harmel

Positive Tampa Bay Times ...[an] engrossing new historical novel ... a suspenseful tale of betrayals personal and political, and of courage and sacrifice ... Harmel is a stickler for more recent details...Between the printing of the book’s galley a few months back and its final copy, she added a mention of the April fire at Notre Dame de Paris when Liv talks about that landmark. That kind of dedication makes me want to pop a cork and raise a glass. A votre sante!

Ace Atkins

Positive Tampa Bay Times That’s a lot of plot lines, but Atkins keeps them running smooth and hitting on all pistons as the action accelerates. Could Fannie’s power struggles and Caddy’s \'Ole Miss frat boy\' suitor and Brandon Taylor’s long-ago death and Vardaman’s current campaign all be related? You’ll be surprised.

Edwidge Danticat

Positive Tampa Bay Times ... [a] powerful new short story collection ... The author was born in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, raised in Haiti and in Brooklyn, and has lived for years in Miami. Her own ties to Haiti are strong; it’s not only her frequent literary subject but a political cause ... Danticat has a gift for the intriguing first line, as in \'Dosas\', this book’s first story: \'Elsie was with Gaspard, her live-in renal-failure patient, when her ex-husband called to inform her that his girlfriend, Olivia, had been kidnapped in Port-au-Prince.\' It’s even more complicated than it sounds ... The final story, \'Without Inspection\', has another of those arresting first lines: \'It took Arnold six and a half seconds to fall five hundred feet.\' During that instant, his life passes before our eyes ... Danticat gives us a warm portrait of the life Arnold and Darline make with her son, Paris — and she renders Arnold’s death even more heartbreaking by revealing how his undocumented status will shape it. But, she writes, \'There are loves that outlive lovers. Some version of these words had been his prayer as he fell.\' Danticat’s luckiest wanderers find their heart’s home, wherever it may be.

Maureen Callahan

Positive Tampa Bay Times American Predator hooked me ... The core of the book is Callahan’s vivid recounting of the interrogation of Keyes ... The interrogations are chilling ... In the end, American Predator is unsatisfying in the sense that any nonfiction book about a serial killer must be: Despite all the efforts of his interrogators, we never get inside Keyes’ head. If we come to true crime to try to understand how a monster is born, we finish still in the dark, and maybe it’s darker. But Callahan’s portrait of this monster, and of the men and women who do their best to uncover his secrets, is one that will keep you up all night.

Lori Roy

Rave The Tampa Bay Times ... electrifying ... Roy has always been deft at creating suspense, but she hits a new level with this finely crafted thriller ... Imogene and Beth are strong female characters, and they’re more effective because Roy doesn’t make them into superheroes. Plunged without warning into extreme situations, like Beth’s abduction and Imogene’s discovery of a terrible secret, they don’t behave like they’re in an action movie, they act the way most people do under great duress. They’re confused, they’re disoriented, they’re paralyzed with fear, and that makes their resourcefulness all the more admirable ... Family relationships are key in Gone Too Long, and Roy develops them with believable complexity ... Roy crafts the book’s triple plots with skillful misdirection and sure timing ... a compelling thriller, and a story of how hatred and violence toward the other create a legacy that follows those who hate home.

Richard Russo

Rave Tampa Bay Times For a while Chances Are ... turns into a mystery, and a riveting one ... and the novel culminates in a rush of revelations about all of its characters. Russo’s novels always wrestle with the complexities of human relationships, from first love to parenthood to aging, and they’re always rich with humor. He’s at the top of his fine form in Chances Are ..... Lincoln, Teddy and Mickey are flawed and damaged, but Russo treats them with such big-hearted warmth we feel as if we know them, and they’re well worth knowing.

Ellen Lacorte

Positive The Tampa Bay Times Call it Strangers on a Plane, with a twist ... LaCorte keeps the reader off balance early on — Claire and Rena are both so angry it’s tough to figure out where our sympathies should lie. But as the story’s suspense builds those roles clarify, right up to a chilly little twist at the end.

Sarah M. Broom

Positive Tampa Bay Times If, like many visitors, you think the French Quarter is New Orleans, Broom has another story to tell you. It is a rich and deep one, not just the story of her own life (although that is a rich enough tale) but the story of several generations of her family and of the city that is indelibly their home, both before and after what Broom calls the Water ... Broom writes lovingly but unsentimentally about her family’s complex relationships ... Broom writes movingly about how her siblings reach out to help each other and their mother, and about the traumas that don’t entirely heal.

Jill Ciment

Positive The Tampa Bay Times This book’s lean style and cool tone shape an unsentimental story with unexpected depths ... Ciment gives her story a series of wicked twists, some thrilling, some heart-wrenching.

Laura Lippman

Rave Tampa Bay Times ... terrific ... It’s a crime novel, but it’s the crime novel as social history, tackling big issues along with intimate violence ... Lippman nails the details when she paints the newsroom of the fictional Baltimore Star, from the smoky air, clattering typewriters and liquorous lunches to the casual, pervasive racism and sexism ... a compelling story of a woman making her way in the world ... If you’d like to see a master storyteller at work, dive into Lady in the Lake.

Thomas Harris

Rave The Tampa Bay Times ...the creator of Hannibal Lecter shows us he still knows how to send ice down our spines ... Harris builds the plot skillfully, with violence and betrayal punctuated by moments of calm and reminiscence. The contest for the gold turns into a fight for survival that rockets to the final pages. Cari Mora is a pulse-pounding thriller, and Cari is an engagingly badass character. But is Hans-Peter a next-gen Hannibal? Alas, no. He’s certainly dreadful, sadistic and relentless. But he just doesn’t have Lecter’s complexity and intelligence, his sophistication and startling contrasts[.]

Kate Atkinson

Rave Tampa Bay Times In the book’s first hundred pages or so, Atkinson develops her characters at a leisurely pace, making them so interesting we almost forget this is supposed to be a mystery. Then a body turns up in a garden, head bashed in, and it’s off to the races, the plot careening at such a breakneck pace it’s hard to turn the pages fast enough ... Atkinson is not only skillful but playful with the elements of mystery writing. She ends one chapter with a literal cliff-hanger ... As in all the Brodie books, Atkinson marries crime fiction with the comic novel genre, wedding the grim and the humane, all powered by her witty and exuberant prose. Brodie might not want to seem too Chandleresque, but Raymond Chandler once wrote that the best mysteries are those you’d read even if the last chapter were torn out — because the writing and the characters are so compelling. Big Sky is one of those.

Kristen Arnett

Rave Tampa Bay Times ...weird, funny and, in its own macabre way, warm-hearted ... Mostly Dead Things opens with a vividly detailed scene ... The chapter also is the first virtuoso display of Arnett’s masterful handling of structure, as she whips the reader with one quick cut from that childhood scene to the day a couple of decades later that Jessa discovers her father at the same work table, a gunshot wound in his skull, a note for Jessa next to him ... [Jessa is] a wryly engaging narrator.

Michael Koryta

Positive The Tampa Bay Times ... intense, inventive ... Koryta makes clever use of technology ... He structures a plot that accelerates like one of Abby’s beloved race cars. But it’s the human element, the stories of two young women trying to reclaim their lives, that makes If She Wakes so compelling.

Ed. by Michele Filgate

Positive The Tampa Bay Times Not all of these essays are about difficult relationships. Some of the writers look more deeply into their mothers’ lives because they love and admire them and want to understand them better ... Some of these essays are harrowing, some heartwarming, some — like a lot of mother-child relationships — a mix of both. All of them suggest, though, that if you can talk to your mother, you should.

Alafair Burke

Positive Tampa Bay Times Burke slowly, skillfully reveals the story ... Like all of Burke’s novels, The Better Sister benefits from her inside knowledge of the legal system ... Burke is just as adept at creating complex characters and the relationships between them ... As always, Burke keeps the book’s action fast-paced and full of surprises.

George Packer

Positive Tampa Bay Times \"... [the book] combines deep research with compelling, almost novelistic narrative ... One effect of Packer\'s strategy of telling a huge and complex story through the voices of individuals is that it has resounding emotional impact: The Unwinding is likely to make you angry, whatever your politics may be.\

Jacqueline Winspear

Rave The Tampa Bay Times Through it all [Maisie] has solved sometimes harrowing cases with a mixture of intelligence, intuition, determination and compassion that makes her — and it’s an odd compliment, I know — one of the most soothing characters in crime fiction. Reading a Maisie Dobbs book is a little like spending time with an old friend you don’t see often enough, if your old friend’s gig is tracking down and capturing criminals ... [Winspear] researches each novel so carefully that the series could almost serve as a history of the United Kingdom in the first half of the 20th century.

Dave Eggers

Rave Tampa Bay Times \"Dave Eggers\' new novel, A Hologram for the King, is remarkably fascinating for a book about people doing nothing in the middle of nowhere ... The novel is paradoxically suspenseful, but it\'s also rich in character and in Eggers\' evocative writing about place ... Alan is an Everyman, a Loman, a Gogo who can\'t, a hollow hologram, but he\'s also a strikingly real man whose strange story is all too familiar. A Hologram for the King, as far from home as it might seem, is an acute slice of American life.\

Benjamin Dreyer

Rave Tampa Bay Times \"[Dreyer] really is an expert — vice president, executive managing editor and copy chief of Random House — but he’s more interested in sharing his love for great writing than in rapping anyone’s knuckles ... The result is a very useful style guide that’s also a delight to read. Dreyer believes in rules, and he explains them with admirable clarity. But he also believes most rules have exceptions — and that some shouldn’t even be rules ... Do not skip the footnotes. They’re often home to Dreyer’s cleverest snaps ... [Dreyer] lays out the rules, but it’s done in a spirit of compromise, of wanting to help people understand them with the aim of making everyone’s writing better.\

Barry Lopez

Rave Tampa Bay Times \"[Lopez\'s] prose is beautiful, but what makes his nonfiction books... so memorable is the sweeping reach of his mind. He makes connections you might never have thought of before, yet they seem inevitable the instant you read them ... Horizon is an epic journey for readers, 512 pages of text dense with natural and human history, adventure tales and miniature biographies, science of all kinds — biology, geology, anthropology and more — as well as personal memoir. It’s a book to read slowly and contemplatively despite the urgency of its mission.\

Toni Morrison

Positive Tampa Bay Times \"One striking thing about these essays is how utterly timely many of them remain. The subjects that Morrison has focused her mighty intellect upon for more than half a century continue to be essential issues ... In an era when complex ideas are reduced to slogans and tweets, when language is dumbed down and truth so often debased, The Source of Self-Regard moves with courage and assurance in the opposite direction. What a gift.\

Pitchaya Sudbanthad

Rave Tampa Bay Times \"... stunning ... [the book is] so rich and alive I wanted to swim in it ... Much of the book’s power lies in its language and imagery ... The technology Sudbanthad imagines is a marvel, but it’s one that might be modeled on what this novel does so beautifully: bringing a place and its people alive through story.\

James Lee Burke

Rave Tampa Bay Times \"[Burke\'s] prose is as powerful as ever, his engagement with the dark corridors of America’s past and the light of enduring friendships just as deep ... As its plot lines accelerate and intersect, The New Iberia Blues becomes a very dark ride. But with Burke at the wheel, it’s irresistible.\

Dani Shapiro

Positive Tampa Bay Times \"... compelling ... Shapiro writes vividly about her immediate sense of shock and dislocation, and she also recounts the head-spinning speed with which she tracks down her biological father ... Shapiro moves skillfully among the separate strands of her story...\

Marlon James

Rave Tampa Bay Times Its sweep and complex world-building echo such fantasy epics as The Lord of the Rings and One Hundred Years of Solitude ... If graphic descriptions of violence or sex give you the fantods, go read something else. The fight scenes and battles royale in Black Leopard Red Wolf are many and pyrotechnical ... The structure of Black Leopard Red Wolf is episodic and complex, following that quest for the missing boy and bending back to Tracker’s and the Leopard’s origin stories. James offers guidance, including a list of more than 80 characters ... Black Leopard Red Wolf’s momentum is powered by James’ incantatory, lush prose and magical storytelling.

Michelle Obama

Positive Tampa Bay Times \"Becoming is a great read, a compelling narrative of an extraordinary life told with intelligence, humor, warmth and self-awareness. And it delivers some surprises ... the book delivers much of what readers likely hoped for. The story of how Michelle met, mentored and fell head over heels for Barack is as adorable as any rom-com ... The book is Obama’s personal story, but she also places herself in the larger arc of history, and not just in terms of the White House.\

Jonathan Franzen

Positive Tampa Bay Times \"In Franzen’s smart, often witty new essay collection, The End of the End of the Earth, he doesn’t so much embrace his curmudgeon image as unpack it ... Some of the book’s essays focus on varied subjects, such as technology, friendship and literature... But most of the essays migrate back to Franzen’s obsession with birds ... And when he catches sight of some of the rarest birds, he’s lyrically ecstatic.\

G. Neri

Rave The Tampa Bay Times Neri does a sterling job of telling a complex story—even its byzantine legal aspects—in a way that younger readers will understand, and he keeps it racing along with a skillfully constructed plot. The pen-and-ink graphics by illustrator Corban Wilkin (Breaker’s End) are muscular and inviting, giving both Ruffu and her horse a bit of superhero glow.

Michael Connelly

Rave Tampa Bay Times \"Connelly has written several novels featuring Bosch’s half brother, lawyer Mickey Haller, as well as stand-alones about other Bosch-adjacent characters. But none of them has clicked with Bosch in the way that Ballard does — like a master with a student who could become his equal ... moments [focussing on the charcters\' pasts] don’t slow the plot, however, which charges ahead ... Ballard brings a fresh perspective, and Bosch brings all the things so many readers love about him.\

Lisa Unger

Positive The Tampa Bay TImes Enthralling ... Unreliable-narrator thrillers have almost become a genre unto themselves, but Unger brings skill and freshness to the form ... a story that will get under your skin indeed, and the shocks don’t stop until the last page.

Ben Montgomery

Positive Tampa Bay Times \"In clean, briskly paced prose, Montgomery follows Plennie’s journey, and he walks the reader backward, too, into the history of America in the 1930s and before.\

Melanie Hobson

Positive Tampa Bay Times \"Summer Cannibals is sharply observed, its realism contrasted with gothic, even surreal touches. Hobson tells her tale of a family coming together and apart with psychological insight and acerbic wit, a combination that recalls some of the toxic families in novels by Margaret Atwood and Joyce Carol Oates. Readers might not love the Blackfords, but they’ll find it hard to look away from their bad behavior.\

David Small

Positive Tampa Bay Times \"Small’s illustrations are a powerful part of the story. His loose but elegant ink drawings with washes are uncluttered but wonderfully expressive ... The graphics work beautifully with Small’s text, which alternates between dialogue and Russell’s thoughts. The writing shares the understated style of the illustrations, allowing both elements to surprise the reader with their emotional punch. Russell’s story may be set some 50 years ago, but it\'s all too contemporary in its concerns — a story that might be even more urgent now.\

Robert Olen Butler

Positive The Tampa Bay Times Paris in the Dark is Butler’s 17th novel; he’s also published six short fiction collections, one of which, A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain, received the Pulitzer Prize ... Those credentials show in the novel’s well-crafted prose and Kit’s convincing voice, which ranges from tough-guy to lyrical. Butler doesn’t just bring literary cred to his spy novels, though. Like Cobb, the author grew up in the theater—his father was an actor and theater professor—and, even more saliently, he served in the Army Military Intelligence Corps during the Vietnam War. All that adds depth and authenticity to Cobb’s character—not to mention fallibility. Butler lets us see him constructing characters to play and analyzing the motives and goals of the people he deals with. Cobb is no invincible James Bond; he makes mistakes, sometimes serious ones. Much of the novel’s pleasure comes from Butler’s smart details about how different spycraft was a century ago ... In short, Cobb has to rely mainly on his wits. Fortunately, he has a robust supply, and following him through (and under) the streets of Paris is a satisfying, stylish thrill.

Eleanor Kriseman

Positive Tampa Bay Times Eleanor Kriseman pulls us right into its young narrator’s world ... she’s a sure-footed guide to the novel’s world, giving Callie a narrative voice whose cool tone and wry humor keep her story genuinely affecting rather than melodramatic ... She has secrets of her own, and Kriseman makes us care about where they take her.

Barbara Kingsolver

Rave Tampa Bay Times \"Barbara Kingsolver’s legions of fans have waited six years for her new novel, and Unsheltered delivers double the pleasure ... As always, in Unsheltered [Kingsolver] tells a deeply engaging story populated by intriguing characters, built upon careful research and brightened with wry humor. And as always she imbues that story with larger social and environmental concerns ... [Kingsolver\'s] understanding of evolution in this book applies not just to ferns and wolves but to human beings and their societies, from the intimate level of families to the broad scope of politics.\

Kent Wascom

Rave The Tampa Bay Times \"The New Inheritors is the third mesmerizing historical novel by Kent Wascom, all of them set around the rim of the gulf and tracing an American dynasty, a family that begins with a penniless pioneer and, in three generations, accrues great wealth and bloody secrets ... His style and subjects echo great Southern writers like William Faulkner and Harry Crews, continuing a tradition of recounting terrible things in deliriously beautiful language.\

Gary Shteyngart

Rave The Tampa Bay Times \"Lake Success is often satiric, deploying the same sharp skills as Shteyngart’s earlier novels, like Super Sad True Love Story and The Russian Debutante’s Handbook: a cool control of tone, a Tom Wolfe-level eye for status markers, a knack for making the outrageous sound all too plausible. But Lake Success has depths. Barry might be the oblivious poster boy for white male privilege, but Shteyngart makes us feel for the people around him, especially Seema and their son ... Barry’s journey, and Seema’s and Shiva’s, take unexpected turns. Shteyngart’s satire raises timely questions about the state of our nation; his humane story of a family offers answers.\

Raymond Chandler

Positive Tampa Bay Times If you have never read The Big Sleep, don’t begin by reading with annotations; the notes are excellent but necessarily interruptive ... The notes also address some of the book’s thornier issues for 21st century readers ... A lot of the attitudes that crop up in the book are just as dated — sexist, racist, homophobic. The editors of The Annotated Big Sleep do a fine job of putting them in the context of the historical period and Chandler’s biography, and analyzing what they mean to readers today.

Ace Atkins

Positive The Tampa Bay Times There’s a lot going on in The Sinners ... The Sinners has plenty of breathless suspense and explosive violence, but it’s also a funny book. The series has always had its funny moments, but maybe wisecracking Spenser is influencing Quinn, or maybe the wedding lightens things up. This whole novel is laced with humor, much of it mordant and profane.

Gale Massey

Rave Tampa Bay Times [A] compulsively readable debut novel ... Massey creates a character who is hardly heroic, but always believable ... Crisply paced and stacked with surprises, Massey’s The Girl From Blind River is an impressive debut.

Tommy Orange

Rave The Tampa Bay Times There [is]...much bitterness and some sweetness to be found in Tommy Orange’s stunner of a debut ... The novel opens with a virtuosic meditation on the old Indian Head test pattern that used to appear on TV screens when TV wasn’t a 24-hour presence (technology’s impact being a recurring theme of the book), a meditation that becomes a searing summary of the history of native peoples since the European incursion. That leads us to the urban Indian ... The complexities of his many characters’ lives merge into a single channel that races toward the powwow and an explosive, heartbreaking finale. Orange gives eloquent voice to Americans too often voiceless.

David Sedaris

Positive The Tampa Bay Times Calypso is the most family-centered of his books yet and, although much of it is very funny, it’s also his most melancholy as it addresses aging and loss ... Calypso ranges across a number of other subjects as well, often with Sedaris’ trademark off-center, self-deprecating humor ... But most of the essays deal in one way or another with his family. Sometimes they’re mordantly funny ... But many of them deal, with grief and insight, with his sister and mother ... it’s clear where Sedaris’ storytelling skills come from. \'Her specialty was the real-life story, perfected and condensed,\' he writes [of his mother]. \"These take work, and she’d go through half a dozen verbal drafts before getting one where she wanted it. Over the course of the day the line she wished she’d delivered in response to some question or comment — the zinger — would become the line she had delivered.\" That functions perfectly as a description of what Sedaris does when he shapes real experiences into his stories.

Lauren Groff

Rave The Tampa Bay Times \" \'An Eden of dangerous things.\' Those last two lines sum up the Florida that provides the setting for most of these 11 finely crafted stories. Groff isn’t much interested in the beaches and theme parks; she’s focused on life beyond the boundaries, physical and emotional. Paradise is no paradise without peril, so every garden must have its snake — especially in Florida ... Some of the stories focus on other characters. \'At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners\' is a virtuoso performance, a man’s life story with as much plot and detail packed into its 15 pages as you’ll find in many novels ... Groff is adept at portraying people in desperate straits, recounting how their humanity is stripped away — but not entirely.\

Tessa Fontaine

Rave The Tampa Bay Times \"The Electric Woman is, among other things, an intimate portrait of a subculture that might be dying but still is vividly enthralling — and sometimes frightening ... The Electric Woman is also a meditation upon the body, how we and others perceive our bodies, what we do with and to them ... Trying to understand what has happened to her mother’s body and mind, Fontaine challenges her own.\

Michael Koryta

Positive Tampa Bay Times ...[a] compelling new psychological thriller ... [Koryta] builds a well-crafted mystery, and in Barrett he gives us a character who’s engaging.

Zora Neale Hurston

Rave The Tampa Bay Times \"Lewis’ dialect does require some patience from the reader, but it soon becomes familiar. And the story he tells Hurston rewards that patience, although it’s often horrifying and heartbreaking. Hurston doesn’t subtract herself from the narrative; she recounts how she develops a relationship with her sometimes resistant subject, bringing him peaches and hams, helping him work in his garden on days he doesn’t feel like talking. It’s a technique that brings both of them to life in all their humanity, etching all the more sharply the cruelties inflicted on Lewis and all of the enslaved.\

Jake Tapper

Rave Tampa Bay Times \"Tapper is obviously not only a politics addict but a history geek. Fans of such authors as Dan Brown and Brad Meltzer will recognize elements like clues hidden in paintings and old documents, which characters will pause to explicate before getting back to the chases and shootouts that escalate as the book goes on. The politicians in The Hellfire Club spend so much time plotting against each other it’s a wonder they get any work done at all, although maybe that’s realistic ... And the author has some distracting tics — it’s really not necessary to remind us that Margaret is pregnant every single time she’s mentioned. But The Hellfire Club’s fast pace and brio carry the story along. And if, like me, you’re fascinated by our nation’s political history, The Hellfire Club is hot summer reading.\

Gilbert King

Rave The Tampa Bay Times ...this book reads like a first-rate crime thriller, built on shocking plot twists and vivid characters and evidence of the darkest corners of human nature. But it’s not fiction ... Beneath a Ruthless Sun reveals a story that is horrifying to read but must be remembered. Willis McCall is dead, but the racism he embodied isn’t. Jesse Daniels is still alive. This extraordinary book’s story might have begun more than half a century ago, but it isn’t history.

Lawrence Wright

Positive The Tampa Bay Times \"Wright’s eclectic approach to the state combines his personal experiences with Texas history, politics, culture and current events, and the result is a portrait that is always complicated and often surprising ... The future, like that border, is always a moving target, but God Save Texas is a fascinating look ahead through the lens of a singular state.\

Meg Wolitzer

Rave The Tampa Bay Times \"Despite its politics, The Female Persuasion is far from being a polemic. Wolitzer devotes substantial portions of the book not only to Greer’s and Faith’s backstories, but to those of Cory and Zee, Greer’s college friend, all warmly told ... In some ways The Female Persuasion seems very much of the moment, from Greer’s nasty #MeToo moment in college to Loci’s projects to rescue human trafficking victims. But what’s really striking is how nostalgic much of it seems. Although most of the plot takes place no more than a decade ago, it’s lit with the warm glow of an era of progressive politics, when it felt as if feminism, gay rights and other human rights were blooming, if not fully realized then on the path.\

Aminatta Forna

Rave The Tampa Bay Times \"In Aminatta Forna’s splendid new novel Happiness, the tension between wildness — animal and human — and control is a central issue for the two main characters ... She brings a cosmopolitan world view and a beautiful prose style to this novel, as well as deep insight into how we connect and adapt to the world, or don’t.\

Luis Alberto Urrea

Positive The Tampa Bay Times A man dying of cancer plans his own 74th birthday party. Then his mother dies and he has to hold her funeral on the same weekend. That might not seem like a setup for a warmly hilarious novel, but The House of Broken Angels is, delightfully, just that ... Although they’re set in different times and cultures, The House of Broken Angels reminded me often of Eudora Welty’s lovely debut novel, Delta Wedding. Set in 1923 at the Mississippi home of the enormous Fairchild family, Delta Wedding has the same tone of rollicking chaos, masterful storytelling and deep affection for its countless characters that Urrea’s novel has ... a rich array of poignant moments and funny ones ... There is darkness, too, as confessions are made, secrets revealed.

Laura Lippman

Rave The Tampa Bay Times \"It’s an explicit salute to Cain — at one point one of its main characters takes certain inspiration from the classic film versions of Postman and Indemnity — and a more than worthy one ... It’s tough to say very much about Sunburn without risking spoilers, and this book deserves not to be spoiled. It’s a virtuoso performance of crafting plot, point of view and voice to reveal some things to the reader while withholding others to create a decadent, delicious tension.\

Amy Bloom

Rave The Tampa Bay Times \"Bloom chronicles this complex affair, and in Hick, who narrates the book, she creates an engaging, poignant, self-aware character who’s a delight to spend time with ... Bloom paints their happy times warmly, but she is just as deft at showing us Hick growing older, feeling her losses but still as self-sufficient as those carnival freaks: \'I have been lonely in my life but never when drinking strong coffee, wearing my fleecy slippers, and standing in my own kitchen.\'\

Paul Goldberg

Positive Tampa Bay Times \"In The Chateau, the stakes are a little less life and death, but Goldberg brings a similar brand of zany, absurdist humor laced with dark social commentary.\

Steph Post

Positive The Tampa Bay Times Post has a real knack for creating a complex plot that maintains its drive through sweat-slicked settings that range from raucous Daytona Beach strip clubs to the kind of lonesome roads where nothing good happens. She’s also adept at making us care about characters who in other fictional settings might be the bad guys. When Ramey says unhappily, 'I just held a gun on a man while he ate a Power Bar. Tied up. In my garden shed,' we feel for her.

Jillian Medoff

Rave The Tampa Bay Times In This Could Hurt, the mordantly funny new novel by Jillian Medoff, those people are far more than faceless numbers. Set in 2010, at the nadir of the Great Recession, the book focuses on the staff of the human resources department at Ellery Consumer Research, a midsize company headquartered in Manhattan ... Medoff, who has a long career in management consulting in addition to her work as a writer, paints her characters’ work life in sharp detail. She also warmly sketches their personal lives, as parents and children, husbands and wives, and especially in their friendships with one another ...in This Could Hurt, Medoff tells a tale that suggests that even in the worst of times, there really are human resources.

Sam Shepard

Positive The Tampa Bay Times ...pare but not slight, surreal yet stoic, an intriguing and moving glimpse into what falls away and what still matters at the end ... The watcher fades, or is absorbed. The watched man is reticent about his disease, but near the end he does tell us he misses being able to scratch his dog’s belly, scratch his own eyebrow. 'One year ago exactly he could drive across the great divide. He could drive down the coastline. The rugged coast. He could yawn at the desert. One year ago exactly more or less, he could walk with his head up.' With Spy of the First Person, Shepard exited head up.

Joe Hill

Rave The Tampa Bay Times Not every story here is strictly a ghost story; in fact, one of the most satisfying surprises in this collection is Hill's fluent, confident crossing of genre lines. There are horror stories, but you'll also find realism, surrealism, romance and even a grisly take on Kafka's The Metamorphosis … Not all is sweetness here. Some of the stories are truly chilling.

Kevin Young

Rave The Tampa Bay Times We live in the age of the hoax. Believe me. And if you don’t believe me, believe Kevin Young, author of the sometimes disturbing but always fascinating new book Bunk … Young takes a sweeping, erudite look at the long and astounding history of his subject in American culture — positing that faking it might indeed be an essential part of that culture … The very idea of race is bunk, Young points out … Given Young’s meticulous research and transparent sources, it must have pained him to write, ‘What Trump really heralds is a time when there are no more experts.’

Louise Erdrich

Positive The Tampa Bay Times Erdrich’s dystopia in Future Home inevitably calls up comparison with Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, especially when that fine novel has seen a renaissance in print and on screen this year. There are similarities, but Atwood paints a world where the enslavement of women is accomplished fact, where a theocratic dictatorship has established order and handed out the uniforms. Erdrich focuses on an earlier stage in that process, the frightening historical moment when the old order collapses but only disorder has so far emerged in its wake. She skillfully conveys the cold dread that permeates a world where every assumption is undermined and anyone could be a betrayer.

John Banville

Rave The Tampa Bay Times The Portrait of a Lady was a psychological novel, focused on its characters’ inner lives, and the same is true of Mrs. Osmond. Long conversations and introspection make up most of the plot, although Isabel occasionally does something decisive … Banville does an impeccable job of re-creating James’ prose style and moving his characters forward in believable ways. As Mrs. Osmond progresses, his wicked sense of humor emerges more, and he adds twists to the plot James would have cloaked in reticence.

Mark Helprin

Rave The Tampa Bay Times On one level, Paris in the Present Tense is a caper, like The Sting, in which Jules comes up with an intricate and clever way to make his death pay off, quite literally. It’s also a bit of a romance, as he falls instantly and hopelessly in love (despite his devotion to Jacqueline) with a student named Élodi who is half-a-century his junior. Helprin’s style, however, elevates the story with sumptuous descriptions and complex characters whose conversations sometimes become analyses of such issues as anti-Semitism or meditations on the nature of music, time and love.

C. Morgan Babst

Positive Tampa Bay Times \"Babst effectively evokes the sense of unreality and powerlessness of survivors in a ruined city. She combines powerful imagery, a complex but well-crafted plot and deeply engaging characters to convey the enduring and sometimes surprising impact of a disaster like Katrina.\

Ace Atkins

Positive The Tampa Bay Times If you're a fan of Boston private eye Spenser, Little White Lies will keep you eagerly turning the pages to follow his latest adventures in the mean streets ...the 45th book in the series about Spenser created by Robert B. Parker, and the sixth one written by Ace Atkins, who was selected to continue the series after Parker's death in 2010 ...opens with a referral from Spenser's longtime love, Susan Silverman, who sends a patient from her therapy practice to him for a different kind of help ... Spenser's closest comrade, the enigmatic and invincible Hawk, plays a major role in Little White Lies ... In lighter moments, Atkins continues Parker's tradition of detailing Spenser's love for good food and drink... Before you crack open Little White Lies, lay in some doughnuts and pour some Blanton's neat, water back, just like Spenser likes it.

Stephen King & Owen King

Rave The Tampa Bay Times Sleeping Beauties is the first published collaboration between father and son. Whatever the co-writing process might have been, it produced a seamless, scary and satisfying story ... In Sleeping Beauties, the dynamics of male-female relationships are at the core of the disaster. What the men left behind must do is interpret what Aurora means. What caused the outbreak? What happens to the women while they sleep? Will they ever return? And what will happen if they do? ... Sleeping Beauties has myriad subplots, all reverberating with that theme of gender relationships, and a large cast — the character list at the beginning of the book is 3 ½ pages long. But the Kings keep all that machinery running fast and smooth, creating an all-too-credible picture of a world engulfed by a disaster for which absolutely no one is prepared ... Despite its 702 pages, I rushed through it headlong. Next time you're looking for a way to distract yourself from a potentially apocalyptic hurricane, try a totally apocalyptic novel. It worked for me.

Joe Hill

Rave The Tampa Bay Times Starting with the vanity license plate that forms its title, Joe Hill's NOS4A2 is one of the creepiest books I've read in a long time — and I mean that in a good way … He paces the story skillfully with humor, including literary jokes, some of them familial — Maggie's paperweight is a prop pistol marked ‘Property of A. Chekhov,’ and an eerie map includes the Pennywise Circus in Maine. And don't think he's done when he gets to the acknowledgements. That boring last page many books have called ‘A Note on the Type’? In NOS4A2, it's a chiller.

Amor Towles

Rave The Tampa Bay Times Amor Towles' sleek debut novel, set in the glittering and gritty New York City of 1938, nods smartly to Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Henry Thoreau, James Fenimore Cooper — and borrows its title from George Washington — yet makes something fresh out of those familiar materials. Chief among the novel's influences is Fitzgerald; Rules of Civility is in many ways a riff on The Great Gatsby, complete with a wealthy but elusive hero, an unattainable golden girl and a car crash. And just like Nick Carraway, Towles' narrator, Katey Kontent, becomes as intriguing as the more boldly drawn characters she describes to us … Towles has a lovely way with language and a deft wit, and his characters are that rare thing, both convincing and surprising.

Ian McEwan

Rave The Tampa Bay Times Although the central event of the novel's plot is the disastrous nonconsummation of their marriage, McEwan isn't here to tell us a smutty joke. The couple's ignorance of their own and each other's sexual needs is a symptom, not a punch line. And, far from being a relic of a quaint past, it's as contemporary as a misunderstood text message … McEwan reveals deftly how, despite their differences, the two fill holes in each other's emotional lives...McEwan understands those emotional dynamics, but Edward and Florence don't. They are in love with their ideas of each other, and when the first truly bad thing happens between them, they retreat back inside their own heads. Standing on the stones of Chesil Beach, neither can reach out to touch the real person standing there.

Kate Atkinson

Rave The Tampa Bay Times Teddy may get just one lifetime, but Atkinson does not deliver it in linear, chronological fashion. The novel moves freely — sometimes from one sentence to the next — across almost a century and four generations of the Todd family, from Teddy's parents, stalwart Hugh and dramatic Sylvie, to his grandchildren, the hapless boy Sunny and Bertie, the sweetly sensible girl whom Teddy considers ‘his legacy, his message to the world’ … Atkinson does a skillful job of interweaving history and fiction. Even more impressively, she combines brilliantly rendered traditional narrative and warmly believable characters with a postmodern sense of the nature of fiction, the story aware of itself as story. (Just wait for her ending flourish.)

Salman Rushdie

Rave The Tampa Bay Times In Rushdie's hands, that actual place becomes a magical one, a setting for intrigue and tragedy ... In The Golden House, Rushdie skillfully mashes up all manner of mythic, literary and pop culture tales. One of the great pleasures of his fiction is sailing upon the sea of stories he has such mastery of and discovering what forms he will shape it into ... Not all myths are created equal, though. Some are rich and complex and show us what it truly means to be human; others are debased and coarse and perhaps shape our world in ways we should be wary of. Often in the world of myth, disorder within a powerful family is a symptom of greater disorder in the world at large, and that's certainly the case in The Golden House.

Jessie Burton

Positive The Tampa Bay Times The story Nella begins to decipher from them and from other mysterious objects, such as a passionate love note hidden in Marin's room, grows more ominous by the day. She comes to realize that she has married into a family with immense power and wealth...yet even they can find themselves in peril when privilege collides with puritanism … The Miniaturist is an impressive debut, though not a perfect historical novel. In particular, Nella, although an engaging character, seems perhaps too sophisticated, too modern for her era and background. But Burton has created a world that, like the cabinet house, draws us in until we feel the dread and mystery and wonder that surround Nella.

Barbara Kingsolver

Rave The Tampa Bay Times Bright and restless, Dellarobia is painfully dissatisfied with her life but doesn't know what to do about it; she can't even consider leaving her beloved two kids, kindergartener Preston and toddler Cordelia. But she is marching up the mountain behind her house, on the way to meet a man she's been flirting with, when she's stopped in her tracks by a miracle … Flight Behavior deals in large issues, but Kingsolver addresses them on the personal level. In this book, climate change is not just something politicians and pundits argue over, but something that blasts the neighbors' peach orchard and threatens the Turnbows' sheep. Its economic complexities are painfully real.

Gabriel Tallent

Rave The Tampa Bay Times ...a harrowing story of child abuse that spirals into madness and violence. It's a terrific book, beautifully written and emotionally gripping ... My Absolute Darling is a strange hybrid of a book, part gorgeous nature writing, part psychologically astute family drama, part action-movie extreme violence. It is not a novel for the faint of heart, but it's a story that needs to be told, and Tallent tells it unforgettably.

David Finkel

Rave The Tampa Bay Times In Thank You for Your Service, Finkel follows some of those soldiers home. As harrowing and heartbreaking as the [The Good Soldiers] was, the second may be more so, because it focuses on those for whom the war doesn't end with homecoming — and that is a very large number of soldiers … Rather than focusing on the numbers or the politics they are entwined with, Finkel tells the stories of the soldiers themselves and the families they come home to (or don't). His reporting is astonishingly intimate yet utterly respectful, taking us inside the hearts and minds of these men and their families.

Joe Hill

Rave The Tampa Bay Times …[a] crafty, pedal-to-the-metal story of love, revenge and the devil in the details of both … Baffled Ig quickly discovers that the horns have peculiar powers. Other people seem to not really see them, yet when he's near they begin talking without inhibition about their dark secrets … Horns is not only scary, it's insightful, often funny and sometimes sweetly romantic.

Bruce Handy

Rave The Tampa Bay Times …[a] knowledgeable and charming book … There's much more to enjoy here, in chapters about Beatrix Potter and Beverly Cleary, L. Frank Baum and E.B. White. Even if you're a parent at the point of thinking the thousandth reading of Goodnight Moon might just drive you crazy, Wild Things can show you something new in it.

Robert Galbraith

Rave The Tampa Bay Times The Cuckoo's Calling was very good crime fiction; The Silkworm is even better. There's a real sense of Rowling enjoying herself, and that might well be a result of its setting: London's publishing world, which she satirizes gleefully … Rowling opens each chapter with a quote from a Jacobean revenge play, a particularly grisly genre, and The Silkworm makes clear revenge is still a fresh and forceful motive. Love is also a force, and not just among the suspects … But the mystery, twisted as Quine's book, drives The Silkworm.

Robert Galbraith

Rave The Tampa Bay Times ...the cloak of invisibility has been slipped off J.K. Rowling, we know that she wrote The Cuckoo's Calling ...as an avid reader of crime fiction, is: pretty darn good ... The Cuckoo's Calling is clearly meant to begin another series, a sign that although the multimillionaire Rowling doesn't need to write another word, she can't help herself ... The plot takes a number of skillful turns, no surprise given that the Harry Potter books have strong mystery elements ...have to say that Strike, who's described as 'massive; his height, his general hairiness, coupled with a gently expanding belly, suggesting a grizzly bear,' reminded me not a little of Hagrid. And Robin's chipper resourcefulness has the ring of Hermione Granger.

Laura Shapiro

Rave The Tampa Bay Times Laura Shapiro's fascinating new book, What She Ate, takes a 'you are what you eat' approach to biography .. Delving into written records — diaries, newspaper articles, cookbooks and more — Shapiro finds meaning in every morsel.

Haruki Murakami

Rave The Tampa Bay Times Moving away from the magical realism of many of his recent novels, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage recalls some of the elements of Norwegian Wood. Its title character, at age 36, looks back on his youth and painful events that changed his life forever... Tsukuru's pilgrimage will lead to a shocking revelation, one that only becomes more dismaying as each person adds details to its recounting ... Dreams, too, play an important role — erotic dreams, frightening dreams, frightening erotic dreams — and those dreams sometimes leak into Tsukuru's waking life ... Full of melancholy and loss, it is nonetheless beautiful, rich with moving images and lush yet exquisitely controlled language, reverberating, like that piano music Tsukuru cannot forget, with elusive emotion.

Sarah Schmidt

Rave The Tampa Bay Times Sarah Schmidt's debut novel is a terrifically dread-inducing, claustrophobic, nightmarish immersion in a fictional version of one of the most famous crimes in American history ... Schmidt turns those facts about the case into a tense psychological study of family dysfunction, painted with a vividness bordering on the hallucinogenic. The reader is drawn into a house that feels as if it is slowly strangling its inhabitants ... Schmidt skillfully manages the challenge of writing about a historical murder case by introducing elements that make us doubt what we think we know ... I don't know whether many authors invite such haunting by their characters, but in Schmidt's case it led to a gripping and accomplished novel. Readers of See What I Have Done may feel haunted by Lizzie Borden, too.

Tom Perrotta

Rave The Tampa Bay Times \"Mrs. Fletcher boasts Perrotta\'s well-honed blend of sharp social observation, deadpan humor and characters the reader cares about even when they behave badly. When he zeroes in on that bad behavior, he\'s not a Puritan clucking at dirty pictures; he\'s a writer exploring the effects of a force that can isolate human beings rather than bring them together.\

Ace Atkins

Positive The Tampa Bay Times Quinn has a rigorous work ethic, a bone-dry sense of humor, an Elvis-loving mama, a sister with a troubled past, a cool dog named Hondo, a checkered romantic history and a fondness for bourbon and cigars. (Really, why isn't there a movie yet?) ... Quinn stays so busy with all that he hardly has time to pursue Maggie Powers, a childhood friend who's just returned to Jericho and is striking sparks with the sheriff. But he'll discover just how many of those separate threads of plot tie together, and in what disturbing ways. And once again he'll realize how handy Lillie's sharpshooting skills can be.

Michael Connelly

Rave The Tampa Bay Times The most intriguing mystery in The Late Show is Ballard herself. Connelly is too skillful to hand us her resume in one document dump; instead, he fills out her portrait with a subtle hand over the course of the novel, a little background here, a glimpse of her temperament there, the revelation of her unusual living conditions sketched in between ... By the end of The Late Show that portrait is fleshed out and fascinating, but there's still plenty we don't know about Ballard, and that I'm looking forward to finding out.

Kate Atkinson

Rave The Tampa Bay Times ...Life After Life is flat-out magnificent, a virtuoso performance that had me slowing down in the last chapters because I didn\'t want it to end — then speeding back up because I had to know what would happen ...less reincarnation, in which souls move on to new bodies and lives, than Groundhog Day — except that Ursula lives her whole life over, not just a day ... Ursula is, in every version of herself, engaging — smart, practical, quietly brave, self-effacing but independent ...Atkinson\'s trademarks is the multilayered, complex plot full of startling twists. Life After Life is a turbo-charged version of that...has often stunningly beautiful prose, wry humor and heart-wrenching emotion, deeply human characters and enduring mysteries, and, above all, brilliant storytelling that will propel you through every one of Ursula\'s lives.

Alissa Nutting

Pan The Tampa Bay Times I had a hard time stomaching Celeste Price...It's not that Celeste is a self-absorbed, colossally vain, amoral, sociopathic sexual predator of children, though she is. It's that I got bored with her … Celeste seems to have no past nor any interest in anything besides herself and her appetites. And she couldn't care less what the reader or anyone else thinks of her. One of her chief character traits is utter disdain for everyone except, very temporarily, her victims … Tampa has one focus: shocking sex — and it's not easy to be shocking these days. It doesn't bother with much of anything else, like setting, plot or character development (unless you count Celeste getting even meaner).

Peter Matthiessen

Rave The Tampa Bay Times Matthiessen did not just paste his original version back together...The rewriting begins in the second paragraph and ranges from micro — a phrase tuned even more finely, a dying man's words cut from two sentences to one — to macro: The second of the book's three portions, corresponding to Lost Man's River, has undergone major changes and been slimmed … Both new readers and fans of the earlier Watson books will find a fresh and fascinating novel … Most of the book is set in frontier Florida, a Florida virtually unimaginable in our air-conditioned, subdivided century…Shadow Country takes us there in unforgettable fashion. Even among a body of work as magnificent as Matthiessen's, this is his great book.

Stieg Larsson, Translated by Reg Keeland

Positive The Tampa Bay Times The brilliant, damaged, fearless young hacker who was the title character of the international bestsellers The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire returns for the third (and, alas, last) time in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest ...takes off pedal to the metal, directly from the harrowing finale of Fire in which Salander, having been shot and buried in a shallow grave, dug herself out and went after her lifelong enemy with an ax ... somewhat less kick-butt action than the previous books, with more of the story unfolding in courtrooms, boardrooms and newsrooms ... Hornet's Nest doesn't seem to have been written as a finale — there are many loose ends left in Salander's story, and the ending is, if not the cliffhanger of Fire, a new emotional frontier.

Roxane Gay

Rave The Tampa Bay Times Hunger recounts not just how Gay became obese but how the world treats her because of what she calls her 'unruly body.' She writes piercingly about everyday humiliations, small and large. She writes about the determined exercise and dieting that help her take off substantial amounts of weight — and about the ways she puts it back on ... Hunger is not an easy book to read; Gay tells us it was excruciatingly difficult to write. But her ferocious, unstinting intelligence addresses this topic in a way rarely seen. What she gains, she tells us at the end, is a measure of catharsis. What we gain is seeing not a fat person, but a person.

Sarah Perry

Rave The Tampa Bay Times There are set pieces reminiscent of Charles Dickens and nods to Arthur Conan Doyle and other Victorian writers in The Essex Serpent, but Cora's literary foremother is Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. She shares Jane's fierce independence and disdain for the expectation of feminine vanity ... Perry borrows much of her style and structure from Victorian gothic and romance novels, but infuses it all with a decidedly 21st century sensibility. Like our own, the Victorian era was a time of enormous social and cultural upheaval as well as rapid technological and scientific change. Perry weaves all of those elements into the lives of her engaging, often surprising characters to tell a story of new science and old magic and the ever-restless human heart.

Mark Bowden

Rave The Tampa Bay Times Hue 1968 will burnish that reputation and is likely to claim a place on the shelf of essential books about the Vietnam War. Based on hundreds of interviews, news accounts, histories and military archives, the book combines intensive research with Bowden's propulsive narrative style and insightful analysis ... What sets Bowden's account of the battle apart is his skill at moving from the macro — the history of the war, the politics surrounding it, the tactics of the battle — to the micro ... Hue 1968 is a book of history, the history of an era when a nation was lied to by its leaders and thousands of young Americans in uniform were sacrificed for no clear reason. Bowden brings that history to life — and makes clear how painfully timely it remains.

Arundhati Roy

Rave The Tampa Bay Times The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is worth the wait ... For many American readers, the details of politics and wars in India in the last several decades will be hazy at best. In a way, that won't matter. Roy is writing powerfully about specific wars but also about all wars, which inevitably blur together in their pointlessness, violence and waste of blood and treasure ... The world may be stunningly, absurdly cruel to her characters, but Roy is always tender with them. Despite the novel's often harrowing events and the difficult lives of many of its characters, it brims with lush description and humor of the most affectionate kind. Roy brings her large cast to life so vividly that when she zooms off from the main plot to fill us in on a minor character's back story it's a delight, not a delay.

Jennifer Egan

Rave Tampa Bay Times What an exhilarating, aching, mind-blowing dance to the music of time this book is. Jennifer Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad mashes up experimental technique with rock-solid realism to create a book that is at once a joyful blast of youth and an unsettling evocation of that universal phenomenon of middle age: Wait a minute, how the hell did we get old?

Dennis Lehane

Rave The Tampa Bay Times [There is] an opener worthy of Raymond Chandler or James Cain, and the rest of this novel — a sleek thriller that, despite its turbocharged pace, explores the nature of love and evil — is just as gripping ... Since We Fell feels distinctly cinematic. Its dialogue is crisp and often darkly funny, its characters vividly drawn, its plot a tightening wire of well-crafted suspense ... Suffice it to say that anyone who has read Mystic River or Shutter Island knows that questions of identity, memory and reality have long been Lehane's raw material — and that, along with being one of the best crime fiction writers in the business, he's also an adept, insightful chronicler of romance.

Elizabeth Strout

Rave The Tampa Bay Times ...[a] richly resonant new book ... Having read My Name Is Lucy Barton will certainly enrich your understanding of this book, but it's not necessary — these stories stand on their own ... Shame is a nearly universal motive in Anything Is Possible, which addresses class in a way that's rare in American fiction.

Sarah Gerard

Positive The Tampa Bay Times Sunshine State, her new collection of essays, is animated by the awareness of a native who knows Florida, for better and for worse, and wants to get at the truths inside the cons ... Florida is often played for laughs in literature, but Gerard knows it too well to do anything that simple. The shadows bring depth to Sunshine State.

Jack E. Davis

Rave The Tampa Bay Times Jack E. Davis, it seems, had as many questions about the gulf as there are sand grains on a beach (mostly quartz, washed down over millions of years from faraway mountaintops, plus finely ground shell) or feathers on a snowy egret (one of many bird species nearly wiped out by the plume hunters of a century ago, now happily recovered). He has answered a tide of those questions in his splendid new book ... The bulk of the book focuses on the gulf coasts of five U.S. states in the 18th to 21st centuries, and Davis brings that history alive by couching it in the stories of individual people ... Davis is a historian, and this book is packed with research, but The Gulf does not read like a textbook. He is a graceful, clear, often lyrical writer who makes sometimes surprising, always illuminating connections.

George Saunders

Rave The Tampa Bay Times His formal innovation, beautiful use of language and signature blend of postmodernism and surrealism are compelling — but what really resonates in his fiction is its deep sense of empathy, even for the strangest of characters in the most bizarre situations. Lincoln in the Bardo, his first novel, is a showcase for all of those qualities ... I rarely read a single book straight through, because I'm always shifting among several. Lincoln in the Bardo was an exception, because I couldn't put it down, reading it in a single afternoon ... Saunders is a satirist and a masterful comic writer, but he is up to something deeper as well. Lincoln in the Bardo is a virtuoso show of surrealism, but it also lets us, along with its ghosts, feel what is in the heart of a father who has lost his boy — and who must face the responsibility of sending countless other boys to battle. It is, finally, a human story, no matter which side of the veil those humans are on.

Timothy B. Tyson

Rave The Tampa Bay Times Tyson's account of the times helps the reader to understand the climate in which Till's murder occurred. The early stirrings of civil rights grew as black veterans returned from World War II unwilling to accept the old racist hierarchy ... Carolyn Bryant's confession adds yet another layer of tragedy and irony to Emmett Till's story. Tyson reminds us that it's a story that is not over. Young black men still die for no good reason, no reason at all ... Just as Mamie Bradley's decision shone essential light on what happened to her son, so does this book.

Roxane Gay

Rave The Tampa Bay Times ...in these stories, [Gay] writes fearlessly and with insight about love and power between men and women, about the horror of sexual violence and its inescapable aftershocks, about the fierce and flawed tenderness of mothers for their children ... 'Strange Gods' is a heartbreaking, powerful tale of betrayal and assault and the long-lasting effects — and the courage it takes to live with them.

Michael Tisserand

Rave The Tampa Bay Times ...[an] engaging, revealing biography ... 72 years after his death Herriman and Krazy Kat are a footnote in our popular culture. Tisserand's book just might change that by bringing back into the conversation not only Herriman's remarkable artistic creation but his extraordinary, very American life story ... As befits its subject, Krazy is a gorgeously designed book. It incorporates not only dozens of Herriman's cartoons (Krazy Kat and many others) but elements in page design and numbering that reflect his style ... Whether you're a longtime Krazy Kat fan, as I am, or a new acquaintance, this biography will enrich your knowledge of the Kat and its creator.

Michael Chabon

Rave The Tampa Bay Times Moonglow is a marvel of melancholy enchantment, the story of one man's life seen, as its title suggests, through last lingering light before darkness. But it's as rich and strange as any dream ... In this novel, told in a voice droll and tender and sometimes dark, in language as lovely as its title, Chabon makes those secrets into riches for readers.

Michael Connelly

Positive The Tampa Bay Times Connelly is an old hand at weaving together several major plots. The two he creates in The Wrong Side of Goodbye are just the kind of plots that make the Bosch books so irresistible: They combine the procedural, with its emphasis on the detail-oriented mechanics of investigation, with engaging human stories to which both Bosch and the reader connect. Sometimes an investigation turns on something as small as a still-warm bag of fast food or that solid-gold pen; sometimes what leads Bosch to the truth is his talent for seeing into the human heart, for good or ill.

Zadie Smith

Rave The Tampa Bay Times The narrator's wry voice, mostly sharply self-aware but occasionally painfully not so, is just one of the strengths of Swing Time. Smith creates a large cast of convincing, vivid characters and moves them through a plot that finally partners the two timelines of the narrator's life, bringing all those dancing shadows together. It's a story that's surprising, sometimes shocking, but filled with energy and grace.

Beth Macy

Positive The Tampa Bay Times Macy puts their story into its larger historical context, giving the reader an understanding of the virulent, often violent racism of the Jim Crow era, which affected the Muse family deeply. She also provides a fascinating history of the circus ... Macy also offers an understanding of people like the Muse brothers that goes beyond our contemporary tendency to dismiss their plight as a relic of the past.

Caroline Leavitt

Rave The Tampa Bay Times Leavitt gets the reader inside Lucy's head so that we understand the mixture of rebellion and desire that makes William's plan so enticing ... Leavitt builds her story around characters who are warm and engaging but very much flawed. The 1960s setting provides a few unsettling details that murmur in the background — the Manson murders, the Kent State shootings — but this is essentially the timeless story of a family, one that's unorthodox and fractured but rings emotionally true.

Bruce Springsteen

Rave The Tampa Bay Times The book is an affirmation that, along with his musical brilliance and matchless performance skills, the man is a terrific storyteller and writer ... Much more than most celebrity autobiographies, this one has a distinctive voice, and one that bears a wide range of literary influences.

Carl Hiaasen

Positive The Tampa Bay Times ...[a] rollicking new book ... Hiaasen sets all those plots spinning and then whirls them closer and closer to one another. Will Buck make it back home, and will Coolman keep his job? Will Blister get a role on Bayou Brethren? Among Trebeaux, Brock and the actual rats, who will survive?

Lisa Unger

Positive The Tampa Bay Times Finley is a believable 20-year-old, often impatient, sometimes too confident for her own good and careless about consequences, but smart and open to the ever-stranger experiences the case brings her, despite her skepticism about her own powers. Ink and Bone takes the reader into dire places, but into the light as well. And Finley? My psychic vibes predict she'll be back.

Michael Koryta

Positive The Tampa Bay Times In Rise the Dark, Koryta again constructs a hold-your-breath thriller around believable characters and the bonds, familial and romantic and ideological, that bind them. It's a wild ride, and if you're out West, you might never want to drive over a cattle guard again.

Colson Whitehead

Rave The Tampa Bay Times This brilliant, elegant novel is a ruthless and moving look at America's original sin ... blends historical fiction with magical realism to create a striking, beautifully crafted novel.

J.K. Rowling, Jack Thorne & John Tiffany

Positive The Tampa Bay Times As a reading experience, Cursed Child has much to recommend it. The characters are vividly drawn, and the plot is full of great twists yet consistent with the earlier stories ... Cursed Child might not be quite a magical as Rowling's novels, but it's enough to hold me until I find a spell for putting one of those [play] tickets into my hand.

Jeffrey Toobin

Rave The Tampa Bay Times Toobin skillfully enlarges and deepens the story I remembered, filling in gaps with material that will be new to many readers ... American Heiress may never quite get us inside Patricia Hearst's head, may not definitively answer the question of whether her conversion was real or a survival tactic. But this book certainly gives us a panoramic picture of her times and a gripping, insightful account of her place in them.

Ted Geltner

Rave The Tampa Bay Times ...a deeply researched, fascinating and even-handed biography of an enormously complex figure ... Geltner doesn't flinch from the dark side of Crews' character. He details how often the author's drinking and drugs derailed his classes and public appearances, how many friends spent enormous amounts of time and patience looking after him, how often Crews got into physical fights (and, Geltner notes, usually came out on the losing end; a lifetime list of his injuries occupies nearly a third of a page) ... On the page and in the flesh, Crews was a controversial figure, and Geltner gives us the rough edges. Crews was as improbable as many of his characters, and so was his success.

Bob Shacochis

Rave The Tampa Bay Times He melds his personal experiences of some of the globe's wildest places with incisive analyses of history, culture, politics and more, crashing the postcolonial hangover into future shock to see what sparks it sets off ... The book's title piece [is] a rip-snorting adventure yarn about traveling to the mind-boggling elevations of the Himalayas ... Some of the book's shorter pieces are fascinating, deeply researched journalism ... Shacochis' accounts sometimes boom with macho swagger, but it's balanced by wry self-awareness, a tender heart and a brilliant, analytical intellect. His writing is simply splendid.

Annie Proulx

Rave The Tampa Bay Times Proulx's delicious prose is often at its most vivid when she's writing about the harshness of frontier life and the tremendous dangers of its occupations, and that's certainly true of this book ... Barkskins has a large cast — there are four pages of family trees in the back of the book — but that's a showcase for Proulx's gift for creating lively, complex characters. Even minor characters get memorable descriptions ... As the decades passed, I often found myself wishing to know more about one character or another, but the author braids all those people and all their plot lines together so skillfully that the book becomes a satisfying whole. Proulx's style is inimitably her own, but it echoes here with those of great influences: Dickens, Melville, Twain, Faulkner and more.

Max Porter

Rave The Tampa Bay Times Surreal, sometimes disorienting and sharply emotionally resonant, it is a beautifully written distillation of the experience of shocking loss ... its shifting forms, its beak-by-jowl juxtapositions of the quotidian and the hallucinatory, render perfectly the bafflement of extreme grief, which can never be anticipated, only survived ... literary allusions enrich Grief, but it stands without them as well — the reader need not ever have heard of Dickinson or Hughes to feel its emotional dive and soar. It's a novel about grief that in some ways mocks the traditional novel about grief.

Stephen King

Positive The Tampa Bay Times King wrote the first two books of the Hodges Trilogy as straight crime fiction, without major paranormal or supernatural elements. This time around, the powers Brady develops go beyond that realistic territory, to chilling effect. King, who has occasionally been dinged by fans for not offering enough explanation for how some of his fantasy elements work, is careful in End of Watch to walk us through exactly how Brady came to be an even more formidable threat than he was before the brain injury. It's fantasy, sure, couldn't really happen. But, as always, King creates such a compelling scenario that it will leave you wondering. And maybe rethinking your kid's video games.

Louise Erdrich

Positive Tamp Bay Times LaRose fits like a carefully cut quilt piece into the world of Erdrich's fiction...[which] is woven from some of the darkest, bloodiest threads of the history of the collision of indigenous and European cultures — and from the bright beauty of the bonds of tradition, family and friendship that the survivors share.

Richard Russo

Rave Tampa Bay Times As good as Russo was in 1993, he's even better now. And Everybody's Fool is a delight...In the novel's two-day time span, there will be enough bizarre events, startling revelations, unlikely heroes and touching moments to supply a dozen small towns. Although Everybody's Fool, like all of Russo's fiction, is driven by engaging and believable characters, he is also a master of plotting, from cliffhangers to twists that deftly link apparently unrelated threads. This book's tone is largely comic, but Russo writes with uncommon insight about love, families and friendship.

Patricia Engel

Rave Tampa Bay Times ...The Veins of the Ocean is [Engel's] best yet...Reina's own voyage toward freedom is never smooth sailing, but Engel makes it a worthy trip, filled with fascinating characters and beautiful prose.

Gary Rivlin

Rave The Tampa Bay Times ...a riveting, wide-ranging but detailed account of Katrina's immediate impact and its aftermath, as a city that has long been one of America's cultural jewels struggles to repair not only its infrastructure but its social fabric.

James McBride

Positive The Tampa Bay Times The author brings special strengths to the recounting of Brown's life ... yields an illuminating portrait of Brown and the culture that rewarded and rejected him.

Dana Spiotta

Rave Tampa Bay Times In Dana Spiotta's dazzling new novel, Innocents and Others, movies play a starring role. But they are just one form of storytelling examined in this smart and fascinating book, a hall of mirrors full of shifting identities so intriguing it's hard to look away...Spiotta keeps us always eager for the next twist, and her characters are both believable and freshly original. Their lives also give her a path to explore the art of narrative that is her own medium.

Claire Harman

Positive Tampa Bay Times ...a deeply researched and highly readable look at an extraordinary life...

Jim Harrison

Positive Tampa Bay Times Memoir in general has always been a pretty slippery genre, and whether the narrator of The Ancient Minstrel is the real Jim Harrison or some carefully constructed performance might just be a distinction without a difference. Whoever he is, he tells a fine story. All three of these novellas traverse Harrison's familiar turf: the human relation to nature, how we live in it and consume it, how we believe we can rise above our natural urges and how often that makes us fools, and how nature's mortal effects on humans always win in the end.

Oliver Sacks

Positive Tampa Bay Times Gratitude collects four of his essays, one written before his illness and three written during it. Each one expresses his characteristic, unquenchable curiosity about the world around him, a thirst for experience and understanding that seems to have sustained him until the end.

Elizabeth Strout

Positive The Tampa Bay Times ...a memorable story of a mother and daughter ... Lucy Barton is a novel, but it too layers many stories, many of them told by Lucy's mother, whom she has not seen for years.

Suzanne Berne

Rave The Tampa Bay Times Revelations will come, but the real payoff of this novel is getting to know the characters Berne creates. Littlefield is a great place to visit — although you wouldn't want to live there.

Stephen King

Positive Tampa Bay Times ...[King] has always had a wicked (in more ways than one) sense of humor, too, and it's often on display along with the scary stuff in his new short story collection, The Bazaar of Bad Dreams.

B. A. Shapiro

Positive Tampa Bay Times Shapiro keeps her story moving at a brisk pace as she cuts back and forth between Alizée's life and Danielle's reconstruction of it. It's a portrait in bold strokes, and one well worth experiencing.

Michael Connelly

Positive Tampa Bay Times Finding the connections between the parts of the case — the crossings of the title, the places where apparently unconnected people encounter one another — gives readers Harry at his best. We get the bonus of seeing Mickey take that case to court for one of his bravura performances.

John Irving

Positive Tampa Bay Times Avenue of Mysteries is entirely Irving's, his best novel since the years of The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany. Like Lupe and Juan Diego's quest to visit Guadalupe's shrine, it has an ending you may anticipate —but the journey is full of richly imagined surprises.

Elvis Costello

Positive Tampa Bay Times [R]eading Costello's Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink feels like sitting next to him at a long, tipsy, laid-back party and listening to him spin tales until the sun comes up.

Lauren Groff

Rave Tampa Bay Times \"...Fates and Furies takes a leap into unforgettable territory. It\'s a swoony love story, a complex mystery, a modern fairy tale, a comedy of manners, a dark and shocking revenge drama, all expertly interwoven and told in prose so lyrical and lovely that its sentences can sweep you off your feet.\

Margo Jefferson

Positive The Tampa Bay Times In some ways, it isn't [revealing]. But in many others, Margo Jefferson's Negroland shines a spotlight on a fascinating slice of the American experience of which many people are barely aware.

Padgett Powell

Positive The Tampa Bay Times Some of the stories are dreamy, such as the nostalgic 'Dusk' and the trippy 'Solitude'; others are nightmarish, like 'Wearing a Meat Shirt and Killing a Snake': 'We hoped that olive loaf would appeal even less to them than it did to us.' Others lean toward political satire, like 'Change of Life,' about a man who discovers the great secret of capitalism in a machine that shoots cookies, or simply play with the surreal nature of politics, as in a cluster of stories about former Russian President Boris Yeltsin, who tells us, 'To Putin I have given over everything but the nuclear suitcase...I have found the nuclear suitcase to be a superior chick magnet.' And then there are a few that will flat crack your heart ... Every one of them is a voice worth hearing.

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December 16 – 20, 2024