David McGlynn

David McGlynn's books include the memoirs One Day You'll Thank Me and A Door in the Ocean, and the story collection The End of the Straight and Narrow. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The American Scholar. He teaches at Lawrence University and lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

McGlynn's debut novel is Everything We Could Do.

Recently I asked the author about what he was reading. His reply:

Everything We Could Do is set in a hospital -- specifically within a small, locked unit inside the hospital. In the neonatal intensive care unit, the premature infants spend weeks and months on end inside climate and temperature controlled incubators, technically called Isolettes. The story's setting is a kind of Russian doll: tiny humans inside of pods inside of pods inside of pods. The people in the story, accordingly, struggle with isolation but also form deep, deep bonds with their other pod mates. A close friend, who teaches Russian literature, quipped that the story is like "Tolstoy in space."

In the course of writing Everything We Could Do, I spent a lot of time diving into books about hospitals as well as stories set in remote places. I grew sort of addicted to them, and several of those books I've read multiple times, cover to cover. The best example is Michael Ruhlman's Walk on Water: The Miracle of Saving Children's Lives. Walk on Water is a nonfiction book written more than 20 years ago, that's set in a pediatric heart surgery center in Cleveland. The doctor at the center of the story is among the most proficient and accomplished surgeons in the world at repairing congenital heart defects in newborn and very small children. But the book is about the surgical center, not just one guy. The stories Ruhlman tell are incredibly harrowing -- with as much drama unfolding in the OR as the best action movies -- and yet the book is tender, precise, and technical. It was the book that got me excited about writing a hospital novel, and whenever I pick it up, I lose several hours reading around in it.

A few weeks ago, I spent two extremely pleasurable weeks reading Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum's new novel, Elita. I've read Lunstrum for years, since her first book came out, but this book shines above the rest. It's set on a small island in Puget Sound in the 1950s, where a feral child -- a young woman -- is found naked in the woods near a state prison. She can't speak, so she can't say how she got there or how she managed to survive, and it falls to an academic psychologist, Bernadette, to try to solve the mystery. The women who populate the novel are often up against the destructive whims and demands of men, and so must fight to be believed and taken seriously even while fighting for a helpless child. The writing is moody and lyrical and so beautiful. I'm also extremely proud that Elita and Everything We Could Do share a press (TriQuarterly Books). Elita, especially, is evidence that some of the best books lurk among the smaller houses. The diamonds are in the remote corners.

Finally, I am currently reading Michael Deagler's novel, Early Sobrieties. It's a debut book, a first novel, and it also won the PEN / Hemingway Award. The narrator and main character is a young guy who is recently sober. The world seems intent on trying to get him to drink again and to haul him back into darkness, even while he's clawing his way toward goodness and light. But this tension is hilarious. Deagler takes off on hipsters, gentrification, cheesesteaks (Early Sobrieties is set in Philadelphia), and so many more topics. The pieces tumble around and lock together in a way I find so joyful and true and satisfying.

Visit David McGlynn's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kathleen Barber

Kathleen Barber is the author of Truth Be Told (2017, originally published as Are You Sleeping), which was adapted into a series on AppleTV+ by Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine media company, and Follow Me (2020). A graduate of the University of Illinois and Northwestern University School of Law, she now lives in Washington, DC, with her husband and children.

Barber's new novel is Both Things Are True.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Barber's reply:

One of the upsides of being an author is getting to read new books before they're released! I just finished reading an early copy of Lyn Liao Butler's The Deadly Book Club, which is about the murder of a high-profile bookstagrammer and the other bookstagrammers-slash-frenemies who are all suspects. It's dishy and a lot of fun!

I also just started an early copy of Michelle Maryk's debut, The Found Object Society, which is delightfully creepy and hooked me from the very first page.

I read across genres, although my favorite genres are suspense and romantic comedy — probably not a huge surprise, as those are the genres I write! The Deadly Book Club and The Found Object Society are on the suspense end of the spectrum, and on the romance side, I just finished Nora Goes Off Script by Annabel Monaghan. I love her books, and this one (about a screenwriter who starts a romance with the celebrity cast in her movie) was just so fun.

It also set me off on a normal people-celebrity romance book kick: I'm in the middle of Funny You Should Ask by Elissa Sussman (about a journalist reconnecting with a celebrity she interviewed years ago) and have Square Waves by Alexandra Romanoff (a companion novel to Big Fan, which is about political strategist who starts a romance with a former boy band member) high on my TBR.

Visit Kathleen Barber's website.

The Page 69 Test: Follow Me.

Writers Read: Kathleen Barber (March 2020).

12 Yoga Questions with Kathleen Barber.

The Page 69 Test: Both Things Are True.

My Book, The Movie: Both Things Are True.

Q&A with Kathleen Barber.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nolan Chase

Nolan Chase lives and works in the Pacific Northwest.

A Lonesome Place for Murder is his second book featuring Ethan Brand. It follows A Lonesome Place for Dying, which earned starred reviews from Library Journal and Publishers Weekly.

Recently I asked the author about what he was reading. Chase's reply:

The James Bond novels by Ian Fleming and Ian Fleming: The Complete Man by Nicholas Shakespeare

There’s an interesting paradox with the original Bond novels—they’re rooted in real-life espionage, yet pure adventure stories. Casino Royale and From Russia With Love are the best of them (From Russia was one of JFK’s favorite books).

Nicholas Shakespeare’s Fleming bio covers Fleming’s early life at Eton, his Navy service where he contributed to the creation of what became the CIA, and his years as a journalist and newspaper editor (where he was rumored to still run a spy ring). It’s not a particularly searching bio, but Fleming lived quite a life.

Visit Nolan Chase's website.

Writers Read: Nolan Chase (May 2024).

The Page 69 Test: A Lonesome Place for Dying.

My Book, The Movie: A Lonesome Place for Dying.

My Book, The Movie: A Lonesome Place for Murder.

--Marshal Zeringue

Arbor Sloane

Arbor Sloane grew up in the Midwest and earned her master’s degree of English at Iowa State University. She now teaches community college courses and resides with her family in the Des Moines area.

Sloane's new novel is Not Who You Think.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Sloane's reply:

I'm in the midst of reading two books right now.

I picked up the first one, Dear Future Me by Deborah O'Connor, while shopping for books to read on vacation this summer. The premise intrigued me... twenty years ago, an English teacher gave his students the assignment to write a letter to themselves twenty years in the future, and then he actually sends those letters out when the kids have grown up. The twist is that a student died mysteriously around the time the kids wrote the letters, and everyone only knows a piece of what happened to him. When one of the kids in the future receives her letter, she is so upset by her memories that she ends up taking her own life. Her best friend from the class, Miranda, becomes determined to solve the mystery of both deaths by interviewing former classmates. I'm really enjoying it so far.

The second one has been assigned through the community college I teach for. Every year they buy each student a copy of one book, and this year it happens to be The Measure by Nikki Erlick. Again, the premise is so fascinating... one day, everyone in the world wakes up to a box outside their door. The box contains a piece of string that indicates how long their life will be. Some have many years left, others only have a few days. I think this book will really grab my students' attention and we will have some great conversations about the finite nature of life and how we should live it.

Follow Arbor Sloane on Instagram.

The Page 69 Test: Not Who You Think.

Q&A with Arbor Sloane.

--Marshal Zeringue

Beth Morrey

Beth Morrey‘s work has been published in the Cambridge and Oxford May Anthologies and shortlisted for the Grazia Orange First Chapter competition. Her novels include The Love Story of Missy Carmichael and Delphine Jones Takes a Chance.

Morrey's new novel is Isabella's Not Dead.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Morrey's reply:

I tend to read in fits and starts – maybe three books in a week and then nothing at all for three weeks; it’s very erratic. I also don’t read very much when I’m writing, as it’s too tempting to copy the style of the book I’m reading. On holiday, I binge-read, and I’ve just been to Cornwall for two weeks, so I’ve got a few stone-cold bangers under my belt:

Annie Bot, by Sierra Greer

This was recommended by a writer friend and is absolutely outstanding. It’s a lightly speculative novel about the relationship between a man and a robot-woman. She’s virtually indistinguishable from a human and is programmed to be autodidactic so she learns from cues and interactions with others. The relationship between Annie and her ‘owner’ Doug is fascinating, creepy and completely gripping, exploring coercive control, autonomy and equality. It’s like Westworld meets Anora, but so much more – a tale told incredibly tightly, with great nuance and compassion. I really loved it and it was one of those books that felt like it was written just for me.

Once Was Willem, by MR Carey

I’m such a fan of Mike Carey – The Girl with All the Gifts is one of my favourite books of all time. He builds worlds so effortlessly, making the unreal so real that you never question it. This is the story of a boy, Willem, who becomes something else entirely – not alive, and not dead; a monster, but also a saviour. It’s a mighty and profoundly mystical medieval tale, with the supernatural element woven through elegantly and matter-of-factly. Carey’s narrative is dense with detail, wildly inventive and deeply weird. It’s funny but also moving, and I found myself quite tearful at the epic finish, uplifted by its power and audacity. One of my favourite writers at the top of his game.

The Art of a Lie, by Laura Shepherd-Robinson

I follow Laura on social media and really like her style, so thought I’d probably enjoy her books, and this latest one is getting a great buzz, with good reason. It’s historical crime fiction, which is a juicy genre, and she’s pulled off something really special – a twisty, unexpected tale that constantly wrongfoots you. Stuff happens when it shouldn’t! It’s so deliciously unpredictable, riotous, yet impeccably plotted, plus the period detail is spot-on. A terrific yarn.

Just Like You, by Nick Hornby

I picked this up in the holiday cottage I was staying in and sank into it within about three seconds flat. Nick Hornby is another of my favourite writers – I particularly loved About a Boy. This is an unusual romcom – an age gap relationship between a middle-aged single mother and a 22-year-old man. I felt a bit uncomfortable about the idea – if it was the other way round, gender-wise, would it be a dodgy? – but I liked the challenging nature of the set- up. Hornby is such an engaging writer – his prose is so intensely readable, funny and resonant. I also felt that the female characters were very well-drawn – nice, funny, decent grownup women; no manic pixie dream girl in sight.

Next, I’m reading The Greengage Summer, by Rumer Godden, because I felt like something sumptuous, and I’ve recently discovered that I own a greengage tree. Life is full of surprises.

Visit Beth Morrey's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Beth Morrey & Polly.

The Page 69 Test: The Love Story of Missy Carmichael.

My Book, The Movie: The Love Story of Missy Carmichael.

Q&A with Beth Morrey.

The Page 69 Test: Delphine Jones Takes a Chance.

My Book, The Movie: Delphine Jones Takes a Chance.

Writers Read: Beth Morrey (April 2022).

--Marshal Zeringue

D.W. Buffa

The Dark Backward is among D.W. Buffa's more recent novels to be released. The story revolves around not just the strangest case William Darnell had ever tried;

it was the strangest case ever tried by any lawyer anywhere. It was impossible to explain; or rather, impossible to believe. The defendant, who did not speak English or any other language anyone could identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed, and charged with murder, rape and incest. He was given the name Adam, and Adam, as Darnell comes to learn, is more intelligent, quicker to learn, than anyone he has ever met. Adam, he learns to his astonishment, is a member of an ancient civilization that has remained undiscovered for more than three thousand years.

Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Here is Buffa's take on America Revised by Frances FitzGerald:

At the beginning of the novel, The Prosecution, the defense lawyer, Joseph Antonelli, tells the story of what happened when, a small boy, he broke his mother’s favorite crystal bowl and tried to hide the evidence of his crime.

“Holding one of the largest pieces in his hand, my father asked me that evening if I knew anything about it. I did what anyone would have done: I denied it.

“He did not seem to believe me. Sitting in his chair, he put his hand on my shoulder and started telling me about George Washington and the cherry tree. I knew then I was finished. That story was everywhere. You couldn’t run away from it. Every father told it to his son, and every schoolteacher told it to her class. You might go all the way through grade school without knowing anything about American history, but you knew young George had ruined it for the rest of us when he made his famous confession, ‘Father, I cannot tell a lie.’”

It does not occur to the young Antonelli - or to anyone else who was ever taught that story as a child - to ask why George Washington chopped down the cherry tree in the first place. Washington could not lie, but he could destroy for no apparent reason a tree that may have taken ten, or even twenty or thirty, years to grow! It is worse than you might think. Cutting down a tree in an orchard was no innocent boyhood escapade. Under the English common law, damage to an orchard was a felony. Felonies in the l8th century were punishable by death. George Washington, the Father of our country, was not just a felon, he should have been hung!

If no one knows this, it is because of what we were taught in school; what, to be more precise, we learned from the American history textbooks we were given to read. We are always talking about history, debating what really happened in the past, but no one stops to wonder how much of our disagreements are because what we were taught in grade school and high school has changed; that what we think our history has a history of its own. No one, that is, until Frances FitzGerald wrote America Revised in 1979 and made the dull and prosaic business of textbook publishing come alive. FitzGerald begins with what seems obvious: Each generation reads only one generation of schoolbooks. “That transient history is those children’s history forever - their particular version of history.” More important than the historical facts they are taught are the impressions created, impressions which, like other things learned in childhood, become the unexamined assumptions on which most of us think and act for the rest of our lives.

FitzGerald grew up in the l950s when, according to the textbooks she was given to read, “America was perfect: the greatest nation in the world, and the embodiment of democracy, freedom, and technological progress;” a country that “never changed in any important way.” When she read the textbooks that had been published over the two hundred years of American history, she discovered that there had been a number of different, and substantial, revisions. The history books of l890, for example, appeared to have originated in a different world than the ones written before. The American educational system had been completely transformed after the Civil War. Education had become public. For the first time public high schools had more students than private academies. One consequence was that the basic history textbooks became “a kind of lowest common denominator of American tastes.” This, in part, was because in the l890s three major publishers formed the American Book Company and almost immediately controlled between 75 and 80 percent of the market. Everything was treated with a dull uniformity, even the way Americans defined themselves.

In the nineteenth century, textbooks defined Americans by religion; in the twentieth, Americans were defined by race and culture. This was reflected most profoundly in the distinction drawn between ‘we Americans’ and ‘the immigrants.’ Immigrants, especially Irish and Germans, had been coming to America in large numbers since the 1840s, but between l881 and 1890 more than five million had arrived, a number that rose to more than fifteen million by 1920. This not only increased the population, it “altered the ethnic composition.” After 1900, immigrants from southern and eastern countries in Europe “vastly outnumbered those from northern and western ones.” Some textbooks went so far as to insist that some immigrants were undesirable; nearly all of them agreed with the law establishing quotas based on the national origin of the American population in l890. The texts asked the question: “‘Would it be possible to absorb the millions of olive-skinned Italians and swarthy black-haired Slavs and dark-eyed Hebrews into the body of the American people.’” The answer was, “Yes, probably.”

Like most other things taught in the history textbooks, this gradually changed. In the l940s, the notion that the country was a ‘melting pot’ entered major history textbooks. Then, in the l960s, came the new orthodoxy, that America was a “nation of immigrants,” a change reflected in the often overlooked, and always under appreciated, fact that it was only in the late 1960s that history textbooks used in American high school contained pictures of Americans who were not white anglo Protestants. But the real “shattering of the single image of ‘an American’ took place with the civil rights movement of the l960s. To include a section on the civil rights movement, however, meant that “the whole of American history had to be rewritten to include blacks and their perspective on events. It was as if Tolstoy had first written War and Peace without the character of Pierre.” The most serious rewriting dealt with Reconstruction. Until 1900, Northern texts treated the South “almost as a foreign country.” The Confederacy was “the slave power;” the Civil War was “the great rebellion.” After 1900, the textbooks insisted that the situation in the South “improved only after ‘Reconstruction” ended, and “the Southerners regained control of their governments.” The speed of this change of perspective had been astonishing, but “it was matched by the one that took place in the nineteen sixties.”

With every change in what the textbooks taught about American history there was, almost always, a protest from an outraged public; protests which increased in size and intensity “with the establishment of universal secondary education in the twentieth century.” In 1939 the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Legion complained that a textbook by Harold Rugg intended for elementary and junior high school students, a book that had sold 239,000 copies that year, was socialistic and even communistic. Their protest was successful. In 1944, Rugg’s book sold only 21,000 copies. In the l950s, at the height of the ‘red scare,’ Ada White, a member of the Indiana State Textbook Commission, decided that Robin Hood, with his policy of robbing from the rich and giving to the poor, was clearly a Communist and urged that any book that included the Robin Hood story be banned from Indiana schools.

The most important protest, however, was the protest of the Detroit Board of Education in l962 demanding that a text treating slavery in a favorable light be withdrawn from the city’s schools. This protest began what FitzGerald describes as “the most dramatic rewriting of history ever to take place in American schoolbooks.” In addition to changing what American history included, there was a new emphasis on economic forces, social groups and political institutions. Social and political problems became the central focus. Foreign policy, urban blight, racial discrimination were given more extensive treatment than they had been given before. American history, according to one textbook, was “a gnarled experience involving problems, turmoil, and conflict.” What changed in the textbooks, according to FitzGerald, was “nothing less than the character of the United States.”

The emphasis on movements, on structural changes, whether the massive influx of immigrants at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, or the changing relation of the races, changed not just what history included but how history was written. With all the attention now on the movement of forces, no one seemed very concerned with the question of who might have moved them. FitzGerald grasped what few others understood: “serious people who wield political power or influence are never credited by the textbooks with having thought anything.” A foreigner who read them “would have to conclude that American political life was completely mindless. For instance, the texts report that Thomas Paine’s Common Sense was an influential pamphlet without ever discussing what it says.” Major figures like Henry Clay and Daniel Webster “are stick figures deprived of speech,” while the Constitutional Convention of 1787, which involved some of the most brilliant men ever assembled to discuss the principles of government, “appears mainly as a product of interest group compromises….”

Contrary to the general belief that things are always getting better, that there is some kind of progressive movement always working beneath the surface of things, Frances FitzGerald does not hesitate to insist that earlier generations of American had the benefit of textbook writers who not only had a deeper understanding of history, but knew how to write. The best of them was David Saville Muzzey whose American History was read by perhaps a majority of schoolchildren from the time it was published in l911 until the mid-nineteen seventies. The book is “wonderfully lively and colorful,” full of characters, “people with beliefs, emotions, and voices of their own.” He tells the story of Lincoln’s assassination in a way that makes the reader - especially the schoolchildren who were reading it - remember it as if they had seen it themselves:

“As Booth leaped down onto the stage after firing his fatal shot, his spur caught in the folds of the American flag which decorated the Presidential box, and he fell, breaking his leg. He made his escape from the theatre on a horse that was waiting at the stage door, but was afterward trapped in a barn in Virginia and shot.”

No one writes textbooks like this anymore, and perhaps for this reason no American textbook has ever come close to its popularity. It makes a difference how a story is told. In the old schoolbooks the young George Washington speaks in his own name, and the young reader sees with his own eyes, and hears with his own ears, that remarkable confession that ruined it for so many would be liars, “Father , I cannot tell a lie.” Told now in the flat dull prose of the social scientists who have come to dominant the American educational scene that same story would read something like: “Washington as a young man was said to have admitted to a violation of a legislative statute affecting the right to property. There is no record that this resulted in a formal prosecution or that he served any period of incarceration.”

And no one has written a book like the one Frances FitzGerald wrote, giving us the history of the history we have learned and, given our ignorance, think we know. Faced with the differences in the history we have been taught, we are forced to ask, not just which version of history is true, but to go deeper and ask what kind of history we should have. It is question seldom asked by anyone since it was asked, almost a hundred fifty years ago, not by an American, but by a European in a now largely forgotten essay appropriately entitled, The Use and Abuse of History. But that is a matter for a later discussion.

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

Buffa's previous third reading essays: The Great Gatsby; Brave New World; Lord Jim; Death in the Afternoon; Parade's End; The Idiot; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; The Scarlet Letter; Justine; Patriotic Gore; Anna Karenina; The Charterhouse of Parma; Emile; War and Peace; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Bread and Wine; “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities; Eugene Onegin; The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay; The Europeans; The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction; Doctor Faustus; the reading list of John F. Kennedy; Jorge Luis Borges; History of the Peloponnesian War; Mansfield Park; To Each His Own; A Passage To India; Seven Pillars of Wisdom; The Letters of T.E. Lawrence; All The King’s Men; The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus; Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt; Main Street; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Fiction's Failure; Hermann Hesse's Demian; Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July; Caesar’s Ghost; The American Constitution; A Tale of Two Cities; The Leopard; Madame Bovary; The Sheltering Sky; Tocqueville’s America and Ours; American Statesmen; Ancient and Modern Writers Reconsidered; Père Goriot; Edmund Burke; The Novels of W.H. Hudson.

--Marshal Zeringue

Darcie Wilde

Darcie Wilde is an award-winning and bestselling author of over 30 novels in multiple genres including science fiction, young adult, cozy mysteries, and historical mysteries. A Useful Woman — her debut mystery novel, and the first to feature her popular sleuth Rosalind Thorne — was a national bestseller, and the sixth book starring the Regency sleuth, The Secret of the Lost Pearls, was declared “a must read” by USA Today. Wilde's new novel is The Heir, the first novel in her new A Young Queen Victoria Mystery series.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Wilde's reply:

What am I reading? That’s always a complicated question. I’m an ecclectic and enthusiastic reader, not to mention a semi-pro history nerd. That means there are a whole lot of books opened at once. Here’s a sampling of the most recent:

The Wharton Plot by Mariah Fredericks

It is really hard to write a good mystery centered around a live person (something I learned while working on The Heir). But Mariah Fredericks does a fantastic job balancing the factual and the possible without straining credulity and while presenting a believable and compelling, if not always likeable, heroine. She’s also got a deft touch with the prose, bringing the reader into the time period without shading into parody of her heroine’s actual prose. But there’s something else here. One of the hardest parts of tracking a real life or real events is that reality doesn’t follow the pacing we expect in novels. This book is a master class in how to handle that partic.

The Lost Orchid by Sarah Bilston

Did I mention I’m a history nerd? This book details the Victorian era’s obsession with orchids. It digs into colonialism, capitalism, upward mobility, elite snobbery and an unexpected connection to the development of the theory of evolution. I am constantly fascinated by pieces of history like this, and how they fit into the larger picture of a given time period. And if the writing is good (which it is here), so much the better.

Lost Among the Living by Simone St. James

I am a huge fan of the Gothic. One of my all time favorite books is Rebecca by Daphne DuMaurier. It’s a book that rewards rereading. (P.S. Avoid all adaptations. They all get it wrong). Simone St. James speaks to this part of my reader-heart. I love Simone St. James work. Gothic and ghostly and some of the very best haunted houses I’ve ever read. While I am waiting impatiently for her latest release, I’m re-reading my absolute favorite. This books take all the gothic tropes, including all the ones in Rebecca and then subverts them beautifully, originally and believably.

A Gentleman and a Thief by Dean Jobb

Part of the job of the mystery writer is to research real crimes, and the people who committed them. Obviously, the writer needs to know about things like the state of the law, law enforcement, and social concerns of a give period. But it’s more than that. Real criminals are astonishingly creative, or foolhardy. Or both. This makes historical crime a constant source of inspiration and fiction writers like me owe non-fiction writers like Dean Jobb a huge debt. Now, I love a historical heist and have read a lot about them, but I’d never heard of Arthur Barry who, in the 1920s, boosted tens of thousands of dollars of diamonds and other jewels from private homes. Frequently while the residents were sitting down to dinner.

The Detection of Secret Homicide by J.D.J Havard

Remember at the beginning when I said I was a semi-pro history nerd? That means in addition to reading popular accounts, like Dean Jobb and Sarah Bilston write, I end up doing things like reading other people’s Ph.D. theses, including the footnotes (all the best stuff is in the footnotes). Which is where I found mention of this book. Published in 1960, it is a dense and academic look at the evolution of the coroner’s office and the UK’s unique medico-legal system. Would I recommend it for the casual reader? No. But if you want, or need, to get waaaaay too deep in the weeds of how the UK’s unique medico-legal system evolved, and how murder was really investigated (or not) from medieval times up through the 1950s, then this book is worth tracking down.

Visit Darcie Wilde's website.

My Book, The Movie: And Dangerous to Know.

The Page 69 Test: And Dangerous to Know.

The Page 69 Test: A Lady Compromised.

Q&A with Darcie Wilde.

Writers Read: Darcie Wilde (November 2021).

The Page 69 Test: A Counterfeit Suitor.

The Page 69 Test: The Secret of the Lost Pearls.

Writers Read: Darcie Wilde (January 2023).

--Marshal Zeringue

Maria Malone

Born in the North-East of England, Maria Malone worked in print journalism and television news and features. She has written TV companion books, ghosted celebrity autobiographies, and is a former Yorkshire Press Awards Journalist of the Year and Feature Writer of the Year.

Malone's new novel is Death in the Countryside.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Malone's reply:

The Winds from Further West by Alexander McCall Smith

“Sometimes you want to get away from something that’s become too much. You want to put something behind you.”

I picked this up recently, shortly after returning from a holiday in Scotland, during which a trip to the Isle of Mull was cancelled due to ferry problems. The book was the perfect read, leaving me determined one day to visit Mull. The story perfectly evokes island life and illustrates the ease with which something entirely innocent can abruptly get out of hand in today’s society.

During a lecture, Dr Neil Anderson unknowingly offends a student and finds himself the subject of a complaint. All he has to do to make the problem go away is apologise … for something he never said. Madness. He can’t, he won’t.

With one seemingly small event, a single flimsy allegation, everything is about to change.

Soon, his life in Edinburgh – ordered, settled, happy, unremarkable – is in a state of collapse. Discredited, facing an uncertain future, he resigns. On impulse, he decides he needs a break to get away from things, and escapes to the Hebridean island of Mull, off Scotland’s west coast, where he plans to live simply in a remote spot surrounded by the sea. A chance to think, to evaluate his old life. Society has changed, he believes, tolerance replaced by anger and hostility, mob justice. On Mull, his nearest neighbour, Maddy, says the island will enable him to put things into perspective. She’s right, and soon he discovers, “Time had become different, elongated somehow, the hours moving at a slower pace than they had done in his previous existence. Perhaps people lived longer here … an island life being drawn out by the simple fact of its insularity.” At some point, however, he must confront the unfinished business in his past – which may well involve another life-changing decision.

Alexander McCall Smith is an absolute master when it comes to handling big subjects like love, betrayal, injustice. This gorgeous book left me thinking we all need to be better, more tolerant – and that in tough times escaping to an out-of-the-way cottage on the Isle of Mull (or similar) is sometimes the best, the only, thing to do.

Visit Maria Malone's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Chessler

Michael Chessler was born and raised in Los Angeles. He graduated from Harvard College with a degree in English and American literature, and also studied Italian literature at the Università di Firenze. After working various odd jobs in the entertainment industry—perhaps the oddest being a short stint as a motion picture literary agent—he began a career writing, producing, and directing television. Chessler has developed pilots for all the major networks, and has been a showrunner, producer, director and writer on a number of TV series.

His new novel is Mess.

Recently I asked Chessler about what he was reading. The author's reply:

I recently devoured both of Robert Plunket’s novels, My Search for Warren Harding and Love Junkie. They’re riotously funny, but also moving in a tragicomic way that sneaks up on you. I was left wondering why I hadn’t heard about this great writer sooner. I just finished Old Filth by Jane Gardam, which we read in my book club. It is such a fantastic book—so rich in detail, slyly humorous and profoundly moving. It is the first novel in a trilogy, so I am looking forward to reading the next two, The Man in the Wooden Hat and Last Friends.

For inspiration for my work-in-progress novel, I have been re-reading Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley books, as well as reading Jerzy Kosinki’s Being There for the first time. The 1979 movie is fantastic and a favorite of mine, but I’d never read the source material.

Visit Michael Chessler's website.

The Page 69 Test: Mess.

Q&A with Michael Chessler.

--Marshal Zeringue

Carla Malden

Raised in Los Angeles, Carla Malden began her career working in motion picture production and development before becoming a screenwriter. Along with her father, Academy Award winning actor Karl Malden, she co-authored his critically acclaimed memoir When Do I Start?

Carla Malden’s feature writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, highlighting the marvels and foibles of Southern California and Hollywood. She sits on the Board of the Geffen Playhouse. Her previous novels include Search Heartache, Shine Until Tomorrow, and My Two and Only.

Malden lives in Brentwood with her husband, ten minutes (depending on traffic) from her daughter.

Her new novel is Playback.

Recently I asked the author about what she reading. Malden's reply:

Like half the country (thanks, Oprah!), I’m currently reading Bruce Holsinger’s Culpability. Aside from absorbing the general buzz around the book, I felt compelled to read it because my husband – who does not tend to be an avid reader of fiction – zipped through it in a few days. Now that I’m halfway through the book, I understand what snared him: the theme of AI which happens to be a particular interest of his. Regardless, as someone more interested in interpersonal relationships and the landscape of the human heart than in the insidious perils of quasi-sentience, I am absorbed by the family dynamic illuminated in the book, particularly that of the couple at its core. The shining wife, the slightly less-than husband, and the tension that lies therein – these elements are holding me (although, currently at 70% in accordingly to my kindle) I’m wondering if the plot is teetering on melodrama.

Visit Carla Malden's website.

My Book, The Movie: Playback.

--Marshal Zeringue