John Banville is an exceptional writer. The Drowned is a dark and moody tale set in 1950s Ireland. A loner comes across an abandoned car (still running and with the driver door wide open). Against his better judgment, he has a closer look. What unfolds is a troubled story of a missing woman, presumed drowned, and the deviant nature of her husband and the people he turns to for help.
Called in from Dublin to investigate is Detective Inspector Strafford, and through him we are introduced to pathologist Quirke, Chief Hackett, and Quirke’s daughter Phoebe. Their stories, running in parallel to the mysterious disappearance of the woman, are all about the secrets we hide, and the complicated ways that justice is served.
If you like John Banville, this read is top drawer. Similar writers would be Claire Keegan (Small Things Like These) or Anne Enright (The Green Road).
Butter is a an international bestselling novel that follows a Toyko journalist trying to get an exclusive interview with a female gourmet cook accused of serial murder.
Manako Kajii is awaiting her retrial in the Tokyo Detention House. She is charged with the murders of three businessmen with whom she was engaged to be married. Kajii refuses to speak to the press or entertain visitors but journalist Rika Machida, who knows nothing about cooking, gets a tip from her best friend about how she might infiltrate: Rika asks Kajii for her beef stew recipes. Will Kajii soften like butter and reveal all to Rika? Or will Rika just be another victim who falls prey to Kajii’s manipulations?
Yes, the novel is inspired by the real case of a convicted con woman and serial killer (the Konkatsu Killer), but Butter is more an exploration of misogynistic attitudes and diet culture. There are several female journalists who are treated differently in the office and by sources. There’s the toxic fat shaming Kajii endures from the press and from readers; and as Rika explores the rich meals Kajii loves, she too is shamed by peers and colleagues for her weight gain.
Butter is the story of a tenacious journalist who is committed to uncovering the nature of an accused killer. In the process she discovers more about herself, her family, her values, and her friends. It’s social commentary, personal journey, and a bit of gawker culture. It is not a fast-paced, true crime read but it is worthwhile.
If you like books where a culture and cuisine are highlighted, then this is for you. Or if you like social commentary with wit or some twist, then give this a try. I don’t have a lot of comparable reads but Kazou Ishiguro, Paul Lynch, and Jason Mott come to mind.
Grounded in reality. Rooted in culture. The Firekeeper’s Daughter is a thrilling debut set in the heart of Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan.
In The Firekeeper’s Daughter, Angeline Boulley introduces us to Daunis Fontaine—a bright, science-minded Ojibwe teen navigating the fault lines of identity, family, and community.
Daunis is barely recovered from her uncle’s overdose death when tragedy strikes again. This time her best friend is killed by an estranged boyfriend. Are the two deaths linked? What’s the deal with the new hockey kid who Daunis has been showing around town? Is he involved? Who else is? Daunis suddenly finds herself connected to an undercover FBI investigation into a new, lethal drug that is threatening her community. Daunis must use her wits, her cultural teachings, and her fierce loyalty to protect what matters most. What follows is a suspenseful, emotionally rich journey of self-discovery, betrayal, and ultimately, belonging.
Most of my favourite passages include the French or Ojibwe words Boulley includes in the story. But there are also lessons in Indigenous medicine and healing. In one passage, Daunis reflect on love and control, “real love honours your spirit. If you need a medicine to create or keep it, that’s possession an control. Not love.” There is so much in this story about love and how relationships an be manipulated or used as a form of control. But there’s also a lot about how love can inform our actions.
Boulley opens the story with a gripping scene that sets the stage for Daunis’ complex, brave, and deeply rooted relationship to her family and her community. She struggles to be formally recognized by her father’s Indigenous community while also struggling with her connection to her mother’s prominent white family. There’s a ton of nuance to the story’s larger theme, which I see as the gap between how we’re seen and who we truly are.
The Ojibwe language and cultural references are expertly infused into the story, giving readers a better understanding of Anishinaabe traditions, values, and community structures. For example, in Ojibwe tradition, a Firekeeper tends the ceremonial fire that honours the dead and holds space for ritual. By the novel’s end, Daunis has claimed that role. She is her father’s daughter. She belongs. It’s a powerful reclaiming of heritage and agency.
The Firekeeper’s Daughter is a fierce, moving, and suspenseful coming-of-age thriller that challenges stereotypes and reinforces pride of place and identity. If you crave strong, justice-driven protagonists, this one belongs on your shelf.
Case Histories is the first Jackson Brodie novel by Kate Atkinson, author of Shrines of Gaiety, Transcription, and Life After Life. She’s a marvellous writer but I have only read some standalone titles, not any of her series. In Case Histories, we are introduced to Jackson Brodie, former police inspector turned private investigator, who is following three 30-year-old cold cases, each unconnected but set in Cambridge.
In the first case, we read of a little girl Olivia who disappears in the night. In the second, a young office worker Laura falls victim to a maniac’s knife attack. And in the third, a new mother Michelle is overcome by anger and postpartum depression and brutally kills her husband with an axe.
Jackson attempts to unravel these unusual cases but as he pulls one thread, he realizes there is a great web at work. Olivia grew up in a house that shares a back lane with a current client, Binky Rain. Olivia and her sisters thought of Binky Rain as the witch. Are her missing cats linked to missing girls? Laura’s father Theo was the intended target of the attack, or was he? When Theo ends up having an asthma attack in a park, it is Olivia’s sisters who save him and call for the ambulance. In the same hospital, but in the ICU department, works Michelle’s younger sister Shirley, who has also come to Jackson for help. It’s an strange set of cases, not linked in the past, but with connections in the present.
The Man Who Saw in Seconds is an absolute thrill ride. The first hundred pages read like the single, continuous long shot opening of a Jason Bourne film. The novel is also packed with physics, philosophy, and intel on military and police procedures.
If you liked “The Queen’s Gambit,” this novel has a bit of chess in it and a lot of human dynamics, mastermind thinking, and an anti-hero prodigy. If you liked, the British science fiction mystery thriller miniseries “Bodies,” featuring detectives from different eras investigating the same murder, then you’ll appreciate that time is not absolute. Our main character Preble Jefferson, can see 5 seconds into the future. To paraphrase Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, the past, present, and future is a stubbornly persistent illusion.
Preble finds himself in a Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare when his snarky comments to New York police officer in a subway car has him running through a hail of bullets to escape custody. Things escalate from there (truly possible). Preble, with the help of his paranoid, anarchist, Hungarian friend (and lawyer) named Fish, turns himself into police, which makes matters worse (truly possible).
Political thriller, spy novel, science fiction time travel, philosophy of time, police satire, revolutionary drama—this book is exciting.
Michael Crummey is shortlisted for the 2025 Dublin Literary Award and this submissions is a stellar read. The Adversary has hints of Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell (The Wolf Hall trilogy) in the character of Mr Clinch (also known as The Beadle). The Beadle’s formidable opponent is the Widow Caines and his charge, boss, and godson Abe Strapp is a thorn in the side of all concerned.
The Beadle effectively runs the show in his isolated corner of Newfoundland’s northern coast (Mockbeggar). He is second in command to Cornelius Strapp and after Cornelius’ death, then to his son Abe Strapp). The Beadle is a meddler and plots Abe’s marriage to a young woman who stands to inherit one of Mockbeggar’s largest mercantile firm. It’s a marriage to bring together two of the shore’s largest mercantile firms vs. one of love. And the wedding is sabotaged by the Widow Caines who is equally conniving (and the owner of Mockbeggar’s next largest firm). The Widow Caines is also the sister of Abe Strapp. What follows is a story of lies and betrayal, petty grievances, community gossip, and all the animosity, vendettas and violence you can imagine in a mid-18th century Newfoundland outport.
If you enjoy Michael Crummey novels, then The Adversary has the dark, quirky setting and superbly crafted characters you have grown to love from Crummey. I was a huge fan of River Thieves and The Wreckage. The Adversary picks up from some of the characters in The Innocents, and it’s a top-notch read.
James by Percival Everett is a rewriting of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, this time told from Jim’s point of view. The story follows the same general path as Twain’s book. But the central figure is Huck’s enslaved companion, Jim. The novel offers an unsettling reflection on race, freedom, and identity, while still paying homage to Twain’s classic work.
As the story unfolds, we learn that Jim has a wife and child. He is intelligent and perceptive, but also deeply aware of the dangerous absurdities of the world around him. Jim is not just intelligent, he is literate and secretly teaches his friends philosophy and grammar, as well as the accepted (by whites) slave speech.
When Jim learns he is about to be sold and separated from his family, he goes on the run. Jim is hoping to free himself and his family but a slave on the run does not have a lot of options. He has to work within the system in order to get out of it, but systemic racism has a way of being … systemic.
Travelling the Mississippi River with Huck brings its own challenges. The dynamics between the duo are heartily explored. Huck looks up to Jim. But he also knows he has to pretend to own Jim. Likewise Jim wants to protect Huck but not the world Huck represents. The depth of the dilemma is often encapsulated in Jim’s hallucinatory conversations with Voltaire and John Locke where Jim argues against oppression and slavery.
Everett’s writing is subversive and funny. Jim is not a caricature as he is in Twain’s novel, but instead is a blend of satire and social critique wrapped up in a man who has to act without dignity to get through the day safely.
The story is full of moral complexities. It’s a journey to the heart of darkness.
James is a great read with a notable nod to its predecessor. If you enjoy reimagined classics then this is for you. Or if you enjoyed Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, then give this a read.
This is a crazy book about a time when the Brits have discovered time travel and they are testing out whether they can bring people from the past into the present. They choose people who they know died in their original timeline so that if time travel does not work or they get sick from it and die then they would have died anyway. It’s a way, I suppose, to not alter history.
There are several civil servants who are assigned to be a “bridge” for the “expats”. Their job is to live with the expats and help them integrate into modern society. Imagine that. If you are Commander Graham Gore (1847), Royal navy commander, and part of the Franklin expedition that disappeared, what do you think about finding yourself in modern-day London? Well that’s exactly what happens. His bridge, our narrator, is an expat from Cambodia and falls in love with Gore. The story line is charming and funny, as Gore is shocked to be living with an unmarried woman, but towards the end things become very complicated. Gore becomes unsure of his purpose in the experiment and who to trust.
Gore’s expats are Captain Arthur Reginald-Smyth (1916), extracted from the Battle of the Somme, WWI, gay or bisexual (modern London is welcoming and he is good friends with Gore); Margaret Kemble (1665), extracted from the Great Plague of London (friends with Gore and Arthur); Lieutenant Thomas Cardingham (1645), Battle of Naseby (suspicious, untrustworthy); and Anne Spencer (1793), woman extracted from the French Revolution (she is not picked up by scanners and is deemed a problem).
The Ministry of Time is a great lark but also clearly about how perspective changes meaning. How do those from the past view the present? How do the modern characters view the lives and values of the expats? How do the expats look back on their lives and actions with a lens of today’s values? How does the Ministry view the expats? Their bridges? How is the Ministry viewed by both. Overall it’s an unforgettable tale with a bunch of hidden lessons.
If you liked The House in the Cerulean Sea then give this a read. It has the same bonkers look at bureaucracy and odd-ball characters.
Remarkably Bright Creatures is the story of the remarkably bright Pacific octopus, Marcellus, who lives at the Sowell Bay aquarium. Marcellus is counting down his days. He was a rescue, brought to the aquarium as a young octopus, and he’s on his last legs. Marcellus has charmed Tova, the aquarium’s night-shift cleaner, who is remarkably clean. She discovers Marcellus on the run from his tank (he’s quite the escape artist) and keeps his secret. But Marcellus has other secrets. For example, when he comes across Tova’s lost house key on the aquarium floor, he recognizes that it is a key he has seen before–at the bottom of the ocean near the pier, which is also where Tova’s son Erik disappeared years ago. Marcellus has clues and he’s dedicated to revealing them to Tova. The third main character in the story is Cam, who is in Sowell Bay looking for his estranged father. Cam is remarkably bright but makes remarkably stupid, short-sighted choices. In his case, it’s Tova who has clues to how he can get his life on the right track.
Remarkably Bright Creatures is a novel about charming creatures, some with 2 legs, some with 8. Each of them is dealing with loneliness and looking for a sense of family and connection in different ways. This is a quiet, gentle read with a few mysterious plot twists.
Deadly Game by Michael Caine (yes, the actor) is actually pretty good. Remember when Tom Hanks published his first novel? Well, this is kind of the same deal in that the guy writing is more familiar with being on screen. Both novels read like movie scripts in some ways. But again, both are pretty good, probably the name recognition helps too.
Caine’s novel is basically a cop drama with international intrigue around lost nuclear weapons. DCI Harry Taylor is the gritty copper who breaks the rules but is well loved. His team is always assigned the get-shit-done jobs, with a healthy dose of keep-quiet-about-it demands from the top. In this case, a box of uranium unceremoniously appears in an East London dump site. There’s a violent raid and the uranium disappears. DCI Taylor has a few suspects, each wild characters, and the trail takes him from London to the Barbados and back.
Some of the language feels dated. Some of DCI Taylor’s actions are dated. But overall it’s a compelling thriller. If you like Slow Horses the Shetland tv series, or police detective stories with some global issue/international intrigue, then set the bar lower but give this a go.
