Christina Kovac

Christina Kovac, author of the Watch Us Fall and The Cutaway, writes psychological suspense/thrillers set in Washington, DC.

Prior to writing fiction, Kovac worked in television news, covering crime and politics at Fox 5’s Ten O’Clock News in Washington, DC, and after that as a news producer and desk editor at the Washington Bureau of NBC News.

She lives outside Washington DC with her family. She loves morning writes with her cat on her lap, book hauls from her town library, and hiking national parks. Her favorites—C&O Canal National Park, Assateague Island, and Rock Creek Park—provided inspiration for Watch Us Fall. She’s currently at work on her third novel.

Recently I asked Kovac about what she was reading. Her reply:

I am re-reading Crooks by Lou Berney. I read an advanced copy last summer before the crime novel published in September. I’m a huge Lou Berney fan since his November Road blew me away in 2018. Then I went back and read The Long and Faraway Gone, which was so beautiful to me, all his books are. I tend to reread loved books when I’m really stressed—and it’s my pub week, so I’m really, really stressed! It’s relaxing to hear the music of his prose and feel the way he eases you into his character’s psyche. It’s my therapy.

The reason I picked up this particular Lou Berney book again: it’s a really insightful look at families and crime, and my book #3 in progress that I have to get back to (as soon as I’m done pub week) is also a book about families at war over a murdered girl. Mother-versus-mother type thing. Lou isn’t doing that in Crooks, but the family dynamics and psychology and shifting allegiances and sense of family crime-as-destiny is worth studying. Plus, it’s just a damn entertaining read, and I need that right now.

Visit Christina Kovac's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Cutaway.

The Page 69 Test: The Cutaway.

Writers Read: Christina Kovac (March 2017).

My Book, The Movie: Watch Us Fall.

The Page 69 Test: Watch Us Fall.

--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 Allan Bloom’s The Closing of The American Mind:

In the late l940s, before television made those who watched at best passive observers, radio engaged the attention, and the imagination, of those who listened. One show did this in what even then was considered an unusual way, The Whiz Kids, in which several young teenagers answered, or tried to answer, serious questions about serious things. Their age told part of the story. Instead of high school freshmen, they were already in college, and not just any college, places like the University of Chicago. One of them could easily have been Allan Bloom, who would years later write The Closing of The American Mind, a critique of American higher education that was not expected to sell more than the initial print run of 10,000 copies, but ended up selling more than a million copies in the Untied States and another million in the rest of the world. It was a book that would never have been written had Bloom not begun his undergraduate career at the University of Chicago just after the end of the Second World War, in 1946, when he was only fifteen years old.

Bloom understood the moment he stepped on campus that the University of Chicago was different. The buildings might be fake Gothic, gray stones that had the look of wind worn battlements, but they “were a bow to the contemplative life by a nation addicted more than any other to the active life.” A great university, it announced that “there are questions that…are not asked in ordinary life.” These were the kind of questions Bloom wanted to explore. Fifteen when he began his undergraduate education, he was eighteen when he graduated and began graduate school in the Committee on Social Thought which, in a way, was almost a university within the university. The only students taken were those who wanted to devote themselves, in that now quaint-sounding phrase, to the “life of the mind.” Bloom studied Greek history and thought, wrote his dissertation on the Greek statesman and orator Isocrates, was eighteen when he started and almost twenty-five when he finished.

Whatever else Bloom learned as a student in his years at Chicago, nothing was as important, or as influential, as what he learned from Leo Strauss. When Leo Strauss began talking about something Socrates had said in one of the dialogues Plato had written, it was as if you were listening to someone tell you what he had just heard in a conversation he had had with Socrates himself early that morning. Strauss knew what was worth reading and how that reading should be done. He explained it in a way that was really quite simple: The mind needs teachers, teachers are themselves pupils, but there cannot be an infinite regress, i.e. there must be teachers who are not pupils. These are the great minds, the greatest minds, and they are extremely rare. The only access to them are through the books they have written - the great books. It is what liberal education is all about.

One of the greatest minds - some would say the greatest mind - is Plato, who of course wrote in Greek. There are translations, but those who did the translations were not themselves very close students of what they were translating and were, many of them, satisfied with giving a kind of general account of what they thought Plato was trying to say. F. N. Cornford, whose translation was the most widely used, removed many of the exchanges between Socrates and other participants in the dialogues because he thought they were too formal and tended to become tedious. Bloom decided that a better translation was needed. In l968, his literal translation of Plato’s Republic was published and for the first time Plato could be understood by English speaking students as Plato understood himself. That did not mean students had to like it.

This is the thrust of Bloom’s The Closing of The American Mind. The proof, which at first does not appear to prove anything, is that “Classical music is dead among the young.” If this seems irrelevant to the question whether the American mind is open, as most would like to believe, or closed, as Bloom insists, his dismissal of the music those same young people came to embrace, will strike many as the closed-minded sentiment of a hopeless reactionary. Rock music, he writes, is nothing so much as a barbaric appeal to sexual desire. If few think this is in any way a problem, it is because, as Bloom puts it, “It may well be that a society’s greatest madness seems normal to itself.” But why, exactly, does it matter what kind of music appeals to the sensibility of one generation or another? What difference if the preference is for Mick Jagger instead of Mozart or Beethoven. Bloom has an answer. “To Plato and Nietzsche, the history of music is a series of attempt to give form and beauty to the dark, chaotic, premonitory forces in the soul - to make them serve a higher purpose, an ideal, to give man’s duties a fulness."

Music, it should be noted, meant more than singing or the playing of instruments; it included language, poetry and prose that produced a rhythm and a harmony in the souls of those who listened. The education Socrates discussed in The Republic consists of two parts - gymnastic for the training of the body; music for the training of the soul. The most important passages about the best regime in Aristotle’s Politics concern musical education; his Poetics is an appendix to the Politics. All this changed with the Enlightenment. Music became unnecessary. Rationalism, that is to say, the method of “the new science of nature that masters and conquers nature, providing prosperity and health,” provided “other ways to deal with the irrational part of the soul.” The desire for what came to be called “comfortable self-preservation,” was thought sufficient to keep everyone’s attention on what had to be done everyday to acquire the wealth that was needed. In Aristotle’s philosophy, “soul is at the center and what is highest in man is akin to what is highest in nature.” In the philosophy of Hobbes and Locke and the Enlightenment altogether, man is only a part, and not the microcosm, of nature, and nature itself has changed. It “has no rank order or hierarchy of being;” it is matter in motion which can be conquered for whatever use men want to make of it. This, however, eventually led to the belief that something was missing, that “life was meaningless.”

The “emptiness of modernity” led to Nietzsche and the last man, the man who is not unhappy, but “his happiness is nauseating.” Nietzsche’s attack on the Enlightenment is an attack on “rational equalitarianism,” the belief that everyone is equal in the most decisive respect, the ability to choose their own values, and that everyone’s values are as legitimate as those of everyone else. This, for Bloom, is the “most important and most astonishing phenomenon of our time, all the most astonishing in being almost unnoticed; there is now an entirely new language of good and evil….” The term ‘value,’ this “radical subjectivity of all belief about good and evil serves the easygoing quest for comfortable self-preservation.” This, for Nietzsche, was “an unparalleled catastrophe; it means the decomposition of culture and the loss of human aspiration.”

No one knows this. It is not part of the education we receive. Competing visions of what an educated human being is are no longer brought before us. We no longer have the kind of liberal education by which “the student’s whole life” is “radically changed,” so that “what he learns may affect his actions, his tastes, his choices, that no previous attachment be immune to examination and hence re-evaluation.” No one, or practically no one, reads the classic literature as they were once read - to find out if they are true. “Aristotle’s Ethics is not studied to learn what a good man is; it is read to find out what the Greeks thought about morality.” It is worse than that. “One need not have read a line of philosophy to be considered educated in this country.”

What is to be done? Somehow bring back the study of the Great Books, especially Plato’s Republic and Rousseau’s Emile, which Bloom translated from the French, the two greatest books ever written about education; two books that, according to most of those who write about education today “are the cornerstones of an outlived cannon,” a judgement that would have been dismissed as the height of ignorance when Emile first appeared on the scene and Kant called its publication “an event comparable to the French Revolution.” Emile was written to “defend man against a great threat which bodes well to cause a permanent debasement of the species, namely, an almost universal dominance of a certain low human type which Rousseau was the first to isolate and call the bourgeois: the man “whose primary concern is comfortable self-preservation,” someone who thinks only of himself when dealing with others, and only of others when he tries to understand himself. He is the rational and industrious man Locke insisted would make republican self-government possible, and the Founders had in mind when they created the American republic. The “rational and industrious,” however, are not the kind of men that are able to create the kind of poetry which depict “great human types who embody visions of the right way of life, who make that way of life possible, who produce admiration and emulation.” Rousseau sought to find a way to change this to turn attention to something more enabling than the endless pursuit of material advantage. He found it in sex.

One of the most important, if perhaps least noticed changes in American higher education is the way in which the relation between the sexes, and the way in which that relation is understood, has been transformed out of all recognition since the l960s. This happened, according to Bloom, in two successive waves: the sexual revolution, which marched under the banner of freedom, and feminism, which marched under the banner of equality. Bloom observed that sex had become in the minds of students, “no big deal.” Sexual passion “no longer includes the illusion of eternity.” This was precisely what Rousseau thought the result of the rationalism and equalitarianism of the Enlightenment: sexual differences would, like class and national distinctions, be destroyed. In Emile he tried to show sexual passion, the need that brings men and women together, could become the means by which to instill a genuine concern for the well-being of others, and how delayed satisfaction, the courtship by which friends become more than friends, could become the condition of idealism and love. Even more disconcerting to those who insist there are no essential differences between the sexes, Rousseau “argues that woman rules man by submitting to his will and knowing how to make his will what she needs to submit to.”

Emile teaches the importance of the family, that is to say, the way in which the private life of individuals leads to well-educated citizens. In The Republic, Socrates teaches the replacement of the family with the common ownership of property and women. Women and men are trained together to fight against those would attack, or in any other way destroy the city. To make sure they have no other loyalty, they have nothing of their own, no property, no husbands, no wives, and, though they produce children, never know who they are; they are taken at birth and raised in common. Everyone, everyone in this class of guardians, is educated the same way. Male or female, it makes no difference; everyone follows the direction of the wisest among them, that rare human being, the philosopher who loves nothing more than wisdom and for that reason cares only for what is best for the city he has been chosen to rule. Like the education given to Emile, this is an impossibility, but an impossibility that helps clarifies the understanding of what is better and what is worse among the things that may be possible.

Emile and The Republic together provide a thorough investigation of all the known alternatives to one of the most fundamental questions of human society. This is what an education in the Great Books, and only such an education, can do. In the introduction to The Closing of The American Mind, Saul Bellow explained that he wrote the novel Herzog, the novel that brought him the Nobel Prize for Literature, “to show how little strength ‘higher education’ had to offer a troubled man. In the end he is aware that he had no education in the conduct of life….” Saul Bellow’s friend, Allan Bloom, with whom he walked every morning, tried to show how this could be changed.

It has been nearly forty years since the publication of The Closing of The American Mind and the American university has become even less than it was before a place where the liberal arts - the Great Books - are taken seriously. A college education, we are told constantly, provides the training necessary to compete in the world market and universities are measured and ranked by the salaries their graduates command. Bloom would not have been surprised. He understood that most students are content with what the present considers important and that only “a small number will spend their lives in an effort to be autonomous.” It is precisely for these few “that liberal education exists. They become the models for the use of the noblest human faculties and hence are benefactors to all of us, more for who they are than for what they do.” Without them, Bloom adds, “no society - no matter how rich or comfortable, no matter how technically adept or full of tender sentiments - can be called civilized.”

Now, forty years later, does anyone seriously believe that the American mind is more open to the liberal arts - the Great Books - than it was when Allan Bloom and Saul Bellow tried in their different ways to show how the American university had failed to provide the kind of education that teaches the only thing that really matters - how we, as human beings, should live?

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; The Remarkable Edmund Burke; The Novels of W.H. Hudson; America Revised; The City And Man; "The Use And Abuse Of History"; I, Claudius.

--Marshal Zeringue

Hien Nguyen

Hien Nguyen is a speculative fiction writer who hails from the Midwest. By day she is a social science researcher and by night she writes about Vietnamese ghosts, monsters, and mythology.

Nguyen is interested in the uplifting and haunting forms of human connection, and how SFF writing can lay those bare.

Twin Tides is her debut novel.

Recently I asked Nguyen about what she was reading. Her reply:

I am currently reading The Hunger We Pass Down by Jen Sookfong Lee. In it, we follow Alice Chow, a single mother struggling to juggle the delicate balance (or imbalance) of her life. A haunting intergenerational tale that is as heart wrenching as it is unnerving, it interrogates the legacies and violence the women in her family have inherited. I find myself drawn to horror by Asian women and other writers of color, in particular when the ghosts or monsters become manifestations of the violence inflicted on the colonized or feminine body. It seems to me horror has become a perfect genre to explore all the nuances of these types of inheritances—the incorporeal or horrific is a vessel that can take on as many forms as needed to tell a story that lives beyond the scope of a single generation.

Visit Hien Nguyen's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Cara Black

Cara Black is the author of twenty-one books in the New York Times bestselling Aimée Leduc series as well as the WWII thrillers Three Hours in Paris and Night Flight to Paris. She has won the Médaille de la Ville de Paris and the Médaille d’Or du Rayonnement Culturel and received multiple nominations for the Anthony and Macavity Awards; her books have been translated into German, Norwegian, Japanese, French, Spanish, Italian, and Hebrew.

Black's new novel is Huguette.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:

Right now I'm reading Generation (Volume 1) published in 1987 by Hervé Hamon and Patrick Rotman.

This is a non-fiction book in French (and I confess DeepL for translation is very helpful in reading this 600 page book!)

I found this book secondhand in Paris at the wonderful Gibert Joseph bookstore near Saint Michel.

My friend recommended to read this since I'm doing research on May 1968 and the Sorbonne student uprising for my next book. He was right - it's got everything - firsthand accounts of protestors, journalists, police actions. Descriptions of the demonstrations in the iconic locations of the Latin Quarter and the worker's unions arguments with Maoists, Trotskyites. This captures the spontaneity of people of all walks of life taking to the streets and voicing unrest and painting a picture of this time.

Fiction wise I'm reading Too Old For This by Samantha Downing.

I'm loving this unique take on a serial killer. Lottie, a serial killer, has retired. She's changed her identity and tucked herself away in a small town and is a grandmother. But when a podcaster tracks her down, and she might be exposed, she reluctantly returns to her old ways. But getting away with murder is hard enough when you're young and now in her 70's it's that much harder.

Visit Cara Black's website and follow her on Instagram and Threads.

The Page 69 Test: Murder at the Lanterne Rouge.

My Book, the Movie: Murder at the Lanterne Rouge.

The Page 69 Test: Murder below Montparnasse.

The Page 69 Test: Murder in Pigalle.

My Book, The Movie: Murder in Pigalle.

My Book, The Movie: Murder on the Champ de Mars.

The Page 69 Test: Three Hours in Paris.

The Page 69 Test: Night Flight to Paris.

Writers Read: Cara Black (March 2023).

Writers Read: Cara Black (March 2024).

The Page 69 Test: Murder at la Villette.

My Book, The Movie: Huguette.

The Page 69 Test: Huguette.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paula Munier

Paula Munier is the USA TODAY bestselling author of the Mercy Carr mysteries. A Borrowing of Bones, the first in the series, was nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark Award and named the Dogwise Book of the Year. Blind Search also won a Dogwise Award. The Hiding Place and The Wedding Plot both appeared on several “Best Of” lists. Home at Night, the fifth book in the series, was inspired by her volunteer work as a Natural Resources Steward of New Hampshire.

Along with her love of nature, Munier credits the hero dogs of Mission K9 Rescue, her own rescue dogs, and a deep affection for New England as her series’ major influences.

A literary agent by day, she’s also written three popular books on writing: Plot Perfect, The Writer’s Guide to Beginnings, and Writing with Quiet Hands, as well as Happier Every Day and the memoir Fixing Freddie: The True Story of a Boy, a Mom, and a Very, Very Bad Beagle.

Munier's new Mercy Carr mystery is The Snow Lies Deep.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:

This is my favorite time of year, so I was delighted to finally get to write a mystery set during the holidays. The Snow Lies Deep is my seventh Mercy Carr mystery (although you can read them in any order) and it was inspired by all the wonderful winter novels I’ve read and loved. Here are a few of my favorites:

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

This lovely fairy tale of a novel is set in Alaska in 1920. A childless homesteading couple scrape out a living in a remote area cut off from the rest of the world in the winter. They celebrate the first snowfall by building a snow child together—a symbol of their longing for a child of their own. The rest is magic…or is it? No spoilers, you’ll just have to read it…. I am a sucker for novels set in the wilderness, especially ones so beautifully written, as this Pulitzer-Prize nominee was. I loved this book!

61 Hours by Lee Child

I love, love, love Jack Reacher, my go-to when I travel and/or when I need to be reminded how to write good action. I’ve read them all and I keep rereading them. This is number 14 in the series, and it finds Reacher stuck in the middle of nowhere in South Dakota during an epic snowstorm. Read this, and you will feel the cold, the ice, the isolation, and the threat from within and without this embattled town on the frozen prairie. And of course it’s Reacher to the rescue. As well is should be.

Light on Snow by Anita Shreve

Anita Shreve is a wonderful storyteller, and I’ve read all her novels, but this is my favorite. Twelve-year-old Nicky lives with her father at the edge of the forest in New Hampshire. Her mother has died, and her father has retreated into his grief. One cold December day they discover an abandoned baby in the woods, and rescue her. Their lives will never be the same again, and Nicky will learn more than she wanted to about the power of love, the hard work of redemption, and the all-too-human flaws called adults in charge of her world. A book that begs to be reread the moment you reach The End.

Merry by Susan Breen

Dickens meets Maeve Binchy with a Gift of the Magi twist in this charming story about a American woman named Merry who is determined to heal her far-flung fractured family on a once-in-a-lifetime Christmas vacation in London. She has to sell her cherished signed first edition of A Christmas Carol to finance the trip, but she’s convinced it’s worth with the sacrifice—but the ghost of Dickens disagrees, and haunts her every step. This is a feel-good Christmas novel heartwarming enough to move Scrooge himself. God bless us, every one….

In the Bleak Midwinter by Julia Spencer-Fleming

I love every book in Julia’s fabulous Clare Fergusson/Russ Van Alstyne mysteries, but this first award-winning volume in the series is my lodestar as a reader and a writer. With its irresistible premise—someone leaves a crying baby on the stairs of Clare’s church on a snowy night in December—and compelling character-driven action, December—it’s everything you want in a mystery. And when you read it, you know you’ve got nine more—and counting—books I the series to go. I’ve read this entire series more than once—and enjoy every book every time.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

The classic that made Dickens very rich, not to mention famous forever. I reread it every year, and then I watch the great film The Man Who Invented Christmas, which all is about how Dickens wrote the classic that made him very rich and famous forever. All you need is some popcorn and hot chocolate….

Visit Paula Munier's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Paula Munier & Bear.

My Book, The Movie: A Borrowing of Bones.

The Page 69 Test: A Borrowing of Bones.

Writers Read: Paula Munier (October 2019).

My Book, The Movie: Blind Search.

The Page 69 Test: Blind Search.

My Book, The Movie: The Hiding Place.

The Page 69 Test: The Hiding Place.

Q&A with Paula Munier.

My Book, The Movie: The Wedding Plot.

The Page 69 Test: The Wedding Plot.

Writers Read: Paula Munier (July 2022).

Writers Read: Paula Munier (October 2023).

My Book, The Movie: Home at Night.

The Page 69 Test: Home at Night.

My Book, The Movie: The Night Woods.

The Page 69 Test: The Night Woods.

Writers Read: Paula Munier (October 2024).

My Book, The Movie: The Snow Lies Deep.

The Page 69 Test: The Snow Lies Deep.

--Marshal Zeringue

Connie Berry

Connie Berry is the author of the Kate Hamilton mysteries, set in the UK and featuring an American antiques dealer with a gift for solving crimes. Like her protagonist, Connie was raised by antiques dealers who instilled in her a passion for history, fine art, and travel. During college she studied at the University of Freiburg in Germany and St. Clare's College, Oxford, where she fell under the spell of the British Isles. In 2019 Connie won the IPPY Gold Medal for Mystery and was a finalist for the Agatha Award's Best Debut. She's a member of Mystery Writers of America and is on the board of the Guppies and her local Sisters in Crime chapter. Besides reading and writing mysteries, Berry loves history, foreign travel, cute animals, and all things British. She resides in central Ohio and northern Wisconsin with her husband and their adorable dog, Emmie.

The new Kate Hamilton mystery is A Grave Deception.

Recently I asked Berry about what she was reading. Her reply:

Since I’ve finished the latest installments of all my current favorites—Richard Osman, Elly Griffiths, Anthony Horowitz, Sarah Pearse, Ruth Ware, Robert Galbraith—I decided to indulge myself by reading—or rereading—crime novels written during the Golden Age of Detective Fiction (the period between the two world wars). Guided by British crime writer and editor Martin Edwards, current president of the famous London Detection Club, I’ve enjoyed wonderful novels by E. C. R. Lorac (Fire in the Thatch, Death of an Author), Anthony Berkeley (Murder in the Basement), and a lesser-known author, Anthony Rolls (Family Matters). They were recommended by Edwards, who wrote introductions to them for their publication by the British Library Crime Classics. In my opinion, these novels hold up today as true puzzle pieces with plenty of clues, red herrings, and twists. They also provide a fascinating time-travel experience to life in rural England between the wars, which I love. The BLCC collection to date includes more than 130 titles, but I’ve stopped reading them for now so I don’t unconsciously begin imitating their style. I can do that.

Over the Christmas holidays, I’ll reread as I always do The Wind in the Willows and several of the P. G. Wodehouse short stories, along with watching the movie Holiday Inn.

At present I’m enjoying Vaseem Khan’s third book in the Malabar House series, The Lost Man of Bombay. Set in the 1920s, Persis Wadia, India’s first female detective, investigates the murders of three European men, whose corpses bear similar mutilations.

Visit Connie Berry's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Art of Betrayal.

My Book, The Movie: The Art of Betrayal.

Q&A with Connie Berry.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elena Taylor

Elena Taylor is the author of the Sheriff Bet Rivers Mysteries, dark and atmospheric police procedurals set in a small, rural mountain town in Washington State. As Elena Hartwell, she writes the Eddie Shoes Mysteries, about a quirky mother/daughter crime fighting duo.

Taylor is also a developmental editor with Allegory Editing, where she works one-on-one with writers to shape and polish their manuscripts. She also writes the Wait, Wait, Don't Query (Yet!) series of books on the writer's craft.

Her favorite place to be is home at Paradise, near Spokane, Washington. She lives with her hubby, their equines, dogs, and cats. Taylor holds degrees from the University of San Diego, the University of Washington, and the University of Georgia.

Her new novel is The Haunting of Emily Grace.

Recently I asked Taylor about what she was reading. Her reply:

Currently I'm reading Jennifer K. Breedlove's debut novel, Murder Will Out, which launches on Feb 17, 2026. I do a lot of work with the International Thriller Writers' Debut Author program, and try to read as many debut books as I can. It also often gives me access to Advanced Reader Copies. I'm only a few chapters in, but I'm totally hooked. Jennifer has a wonderful, almost literary voice, and the mix of mystery and paranormal is perfect for the dark days of autumn.

Then I'm going to be listening to Following Jimmy Valentine, an audiobook musical by Jeff Flaster. I can't wait to start that one! It stars several big names in musical theater, and is a reimagination of the O. Henry short story, “A Retrieved Reformation,” blending singing, jazz music, and noir comedy. I'll be reviewing that on Feb 3 to celebrate its launch. I don't do a lot of audiobooks, but I couldn't say no to this one when I heard the description. I worked in theater for two decades before moving into writing novels. My theater career included a lot of musical theater, so this felt like too fascinating a project not to sign up for.

It will be a lot of fun to go back and forth between reading and listening, both wonderful ways to experience fine storytelling.

Visit Elena Taylor's website.

Q&A with Elena Taylor.

The Page 69 Test: A Cold, Cold World.

My Book, The Movie: A Cold, Cold World.

--Marshal Zeringue

Cindy Jiban

Cindy Jiban lives in Minnesota, where she was awarded a 2023 emerging fiction writer fellowship through the Loft Literary Center. Jiban holds a Ph.D. in educational psychology; before writing novels, she was an educator and researcher who published frequently, particularly focusing on how students learn to read.

Like the main character in her debut novel The Probable Son, Jiban has taught in middle schools and is raising two sons. She was born and raised in the Seattle area but has now lived with her family in St. Paul for over twenty years.

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

I’m currently drawn to debut novels. The path to publishing is a roller coaster ride, one that’s hard to convey to people not buckled into that terrifying front car. Reading a debut right now feels like making a new friend.

A fast and weird and delightful debut I loved is My Sister, the Serial Killer, by Oyinkan Braithewaite. You know that feeling when your sister calls to say oops, I did it again – and he’s dead? Yeah, me neither. I tore through this tale in one sitting, completely bemused by the style of storytelling. Sparse and dryly funny, it’s a line drawing that gradually reveals its odd caption.

Right now I’m reading The Bright Years, a debut by Sarah Damoff. Forewarned, I keep tissues on hand for this multi-generational Texas saga of family secrets and addiction. What stands out so far: Damoff has an uncanny skill at focusing point of view on a simple detail, to great emotional effect. Just read the opening chapter, and you’ll see what I mean.

Up next for me is The Safekeep, Yael van der Wouden’s debut novel. Two women, initially strangers, find themselves sharing a house in the Dutch countryside in 1961, with the post- WWII vibe not quite over and done with. Does anyone else choose movies based on Rotten Tomatoes, searching out very-fresh tomato ratings from both the critics and the ticket-buying audiences? This book is like that: it has earned both prestigious literary awards and a wide fan base of regular old readers. I’m in.

Visit Cindy Jiban's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Probable Son.

Q&A with Cindy Jiban.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brionni Nwosu

Brionni Nwosu is a writer, educator, and joyful creative based in the vibrant city of Nashville, where she lives with her husband and their three children. After more than a decade teaching students and mentoring teachers, she shifted her storytelling craft from a side passion to center stage. A 2021 We Need Diverse Books mentee under Rajani LaRocca, Nwosu writes bold, heartfelt fiction that explores connection, purpose, and what it means to live a life well.

Her debut novel, The Wondrous Lives and Loves of Nella Carter, is a sweeping, centuries-spanning tale about love, loss, and one woman’s fight to prove that humanity is worth saving.

Recently I asked Nwosu about what she was reading? Her reply:

I just finished Razorblade Tears by S.A. Cosby as part of one of my book clubs, The Virtual Book Club for Black Women, and it was a fantastic pick, enjoyed by our entire group. I even recommended it to my father, and he enjoyed it as well. I really liked seeing a story written by a Black male author with two male leads, especially how they handled fatherhood, grief, and their complicated feelings about their sons’ sexuality. The descriptions were so vivid, and there were several craft moments I highlighted because they were just that strong.

One moment that stayed with me was when the characters had to make a hard decision. Instead of explaining it outright, Cosby had one of the men look up at the sky. One cloud looked like one object, another looked another object, and the third cloud reminded him of his son. That helped him decide what to do. I loved that — using the environment and small details to help a character make a big emotional choice. It’s something I want to pay attention to in my own writing.

We also talked a lot in my book club about how both fathers carried so much regret. The sad truth is, they probably never would have reconciled with their sons while they were alive. It took losing them to really face how much time they wasted. Watching the two men slowly build a friendship — almost a brotherhood — over the course of the book was really moving. And I appreciated seeing different communities show up in the story, too, from the bikers to the judge to all the side relationships that gave the book texture.

Next up for me is Wrong Place Wrong Time by Gillian McAllister, which is our next book club read, and The Lost Heiress by Elizabeth Klehfoth, one of the Amazon First Reads titles for November 2025, alongside mine. I’m excited to dive into both.

Visit Brionni Nwosu's website.

--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 Robert Graves's I, Claudius:

In 1929, Robert Graves published Goodbye to All That, a memoir of his life as a British soldier who fought in the trenches in the First World War. In the prologue to the edition published almost thirty years later, he provided the reason why he wrote it and what happened because of it: “I partly wrote, partly dictated, this book twenty-eight years ago during a complicated domestic crisis, and with very little time for revisions. It was my bitter leave-taking of England where I had recently broken a good many conventions; quarreled with, or been disowned by, most of my friends; been grilled by the police on a suspicion of attempted murder; and ceased to care what anyone thought of me.”

The title of the book became “a catch-word,” his “sole contribution to Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. More importantly, Goodbye to All That made him enough money that he could move to Majorca and spend all his time writing. Among the dozens of other things he wrote were the two volumes, or the two novels, I, Claudius, published in 1934, and Claudius the God, published two years later in 1936. In an Author’s Note to the second volume, Graves takes up a frequent criticism of the first volume, a criticism which betrayed a complete failure to understand the difference between books of history and historical fiction; a failure, that is to say, between the report of events that had happened at some point in the past, and the attempt to understand what those involved in those events thought they were doing; the difference between seeing things from a distance, the present looking back at the past, and seeing things as they unfold.

Some reviewers, according to Graves, “suggested that in writing it I had merely consulted Tacitus’s Annals, and Suetonius’s Twelve Caesars, run them together and expanded the result with my own vigorous fancy.” Insisting that this “was not so,” he proceeds to list, in addition to Tacitus and Suetonius, twenty-four Greek and Roman authors, including Plutarch, Pliny, Dio Cassius, Diodorus Siculus, Juvenal, Josephus, “and Claudius himself in his surviving letters and speeches.” He then explains that, “Few incidents…are wholly unsupported by historical authority of some sort or other. I hope none are historically incredible. No character is invented.” Graves knew what he was doing.

In what might easily have gone unnoticed, Graves thanks, as he did in the preface to the first volume, “Aircraftsman T. E. Shaw for reading the proofs.” Not everyone then, and very few now, would know that T. E. Shaw was his close friend, T. E. Lawrence, who had played a different role in the First World War when he became known, to Lawrence’s own great displeasure, as Lawrence of Arabia.

I, Claudius purports to be the autobiography of the Emperor Claudius, a “confidential history” intended for his “eventual readers of a hundred generations ahead, or more,” which means, of course, readers of the twentieth century. The main point of this history, the principle lesson to be learned, is that Rome has become entirely corrupt, and all because that instead of a small republic, it has become an empire. “The money madness that has choked Rome since she…made herself mistress of all the riches of the Mediterranean. With riches came sloth, greed, cruelty, dishonesty, cowardice, effeminacy and every other unRoman vice.”

Much of what happened to Claudius, much of what happened to Rome, was because of his grandmother, Livia, whom Augustus had taken as his second wife when he became the first Emperor. Though only seventeen, she had been one of the three most beautiful women in Rome. Augustus had been expected by those closest to him to give up power and return to private life after he had defeated his rivals in the civil war that followed the death of Julius Caesar, but the proscriptions which had among the thousands killed ended the lives of three hundred senators, had “carried away the boldest and the best” of the Roman aristocracy and the survivors “tended more and more to behave like family slaves to Augustus and Livia.” The return to the republic had to wait. Livia insisted that there was still work to be done, and, as she constantly reminded Augustus, “Rome was not yet ready to be free.” What she thought in private was even more emphatic. The Roman people, so far as she was concerned, were “Rabble and slaves! The Republic was always a humbug. What Rome really needs is a king again.”

Livia was Claudius’s grandmother, but all that meant was that Claudius was a source of embarrassment. When he wrote a biography of his father, Germanicus, who had been one of the most respected Roman generals, Livia dismissed it as little more than trash. She wrote to Augustus: “Claudius has singled out for praise his dear father’s one intellectual foible - that willful blindness of his to the march of time, the absurd delusion that the political form that suited Rome when Rome was a small town at war with neighboring small towns could be re-established after Rome has become the greatest kingdom since the days of Alexander.” And to make her point as clear as possible, she adds, “Thank God for Tiberius and Germanicus,” referring to her two sons. “There is no republican nonsense about them, so far as I know.”

When Augustus dies - dies, as Livia will later confess to Claudius, of a poison she gave him - Livia’s son, Tiberius, whom Augustus had adopted, became Emperor. Livia insisted in public that this was only because she decided he should. “She made a boast of it not only to strengthen her position as Augustus’s widow but to warn Tiberius that if her crimes ever came to light he would be regarded as her accomplice, being the person who principally benefitted from them.” What else, one might ask, should a mother do?

Claudius, thought to be a stammering fool by his grandmother and nearly everyone else in Rome, had acquired an unusual insight into the characters with whom he is forced to find ways to survive, including especially his uncle, the new Emperor, Tiberius. He was, “at times, easily tempted to virtue, and in a noble age might well have passed for a noble character: for he was a man of no mean capacity. But the age was not a noble one and his heart had been hardened, and for that hardening Livia must, you will agree, bear the chief blame.” And yet, despite that, Claudius does not disparage what Livia was able to achieve. However criminal the means by which she won the direction of affairs, first through Augustus, then Tiberius, “she was an exceptionally able and just ruler.”

Livia’s career of treachery and violence, begun when, only seventeen, she married Augustus, continued until she was eighty-three and to protect herself against her son, gave a public reading of some of the letters written to her, years earlier, by her husband. The reading lasted an hour and a half, and though her voice was weak, she “held her audience spellbound.” It is not difficult to understand why. Augustus had written her tens of thousands of letters, but she chose the fifteen most damaging to Tiberius she could find. In one letter, Augustus called Tiberius, “a man whose character I confess I continue to feel the greatest repugnance, and I pray to Heaven that by giving way to you now I do not inflict lasting damage on the commonwealth.” The last letter she read, written a year before Augustus died, was devastating: “If I did not believe that when I am dead he will be guided by you in all matters of State and shamed by Germanicus’s example into at least a semblance of decent living, I would even now, I swear, disinherit him and ask the Senate to revoke all his titles of honor. The man’s a beast and needs keepers.” Tiberius did not enter the Senate for two whole months; he could not look senators in the face with the knowledge that “their wives had heard Augustus’s letters about him.”

Claudius is more than surprised, astonished, when shortly after this his grandmother invites him to dine with her on her birthday. “I had never in my life been allowed to visit her on her birthday. I had never even dined with her. I had not spoken to her, except ceremoniously at the Augustan festival, for ten years.” At dinner, Livia asks, “Do you dislike me, Claudius? Be frank.” He replies with candor: “Probably as much as you dislike me.” Livia laughed. “Frank enough! By the way, have you noticed that monster there?” she asked, nodding toward another grandson, Caligula. “He’s going to be the next emperor.” Claudius thinks she is making a joke. She was not.

“Tiberius will make him his successor,” she explains. “He can’t bear the idea of a successor who is more popular than himself.” Then, with clinical detachment, she describes what Caligula is, and what will happen to Claudius when Caligula takes power. Caligula is treacherous, cowardly, lustful, vain and deceitful, but he will never kill you, she tells him, because he is going to be murdered and you are going to avenge him. It is all a question of fate. “And now that Rome has been ungrateful and mad enough to let my blackguardly son put me on the shelf, and insult me - me, can you imagine it, perhaps the greatest ruler the world has ever known, and his mother, too….”

But there are compensations. She has been told by a soothsayer she trusts that she will, after her death, be acknowledged as a Goddess, and not just that, but “the greatest Deity the world has ever known.” This, she tells Claudius, is only reasonable. “If Augustus is a God, it’s absurd for me to be merely his priestess. I did all the work, didn’t I? He no more had it in him to be a great ruler than Tiberius has.”

After Livia dies, Tiberius names Caligula his successor just as she said he would. More than the question of their respective popularity, Caligula was “one of the few people wicked enough to make Tiberius feel, by comparison, a virtuous man.” The proof was soon to come. When Tiberius becomes seriously ill, but does not die, Caligula watches while someone smothers him to death with a pillow. He does not worry that anything like this will ever happen to him, because unlike Tiberius, unlike anyone who has ever lived, he is not mortal. He is, as he explains to Claudius, undergoing a metamorphosis, a very painful one, “as if I were my own mother.” If Claudius has not noticed this it is because Caligula is “still in mortal disguise, so it is not remarkable that you did not notice my Divinity at once.” It is the reason, he admits, that he killed his own father. “He stood in my way. He tried to discipline me - me, a young God, imagine it!” Caligula does not just admit, he brags, that he slept with all three of his sisters; Jupiter had slept with only one of his. He knows he is the son of a God - Augustus. “I am his son by his incest with Julia,” his daughter. “I must be. That’s the only possible solution. I’m certainly not the son of Agrippina, her father was a nobody. It’s ridiculous.”

There seems to be no limit to what people will believe, or pretend to believe, about those who have power, no matter how insane it might be. Caligula’s “Divinity was accepted by everyone without question.” No one objected, no one questioned - no one was willing to risk the danger - when he ordered that all the most famous statues of the Gods be removed from the temples of Greece and sent to Rome so he could have their heads removed and replaced with his own. No one was willing to say anything that might incur his wrath, and there was hardly a citizen in Rome who did not want him dead. The inevitable conspiracy was formed, a conspiracy to kill Caligula and all his family, including Claudius, and restore the Republic. “If only the idiots had taken me into their confidence this story would have had a very different ending. For I was a better Republican than any of them.”

The citizens of Rome may have wanted a Republic, or thought they did, but the Roman army wanted an Emperor, and when two soldiers found Claudius hiding in the palace, the army ignored his protests and declared him Rome’s fourth Emperor. What thoughts or memories passed through his mind? Not what you would expect. Nothing about his three Imperial predecessors - Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula - their lives and their deaths; nothing about the promise he had made to his grandmother, Livia, to deify her when he became Emperor. He thought instead in the way of an author that now at least “I’ll be able to make people read my books.” He also thought, more seriously, that as Emperor he would have the opportunity, not given to other people, “for consulting the secret archives and finding out just what happened on this occasion or that.” And, as the readers of I, Claudius have now discovered, “I took full advantage of my opportunities."

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; America Revised; The City And Man; "The Use And Abuse Of History".

--Marshal Zeringue

Brittany Amara

Brittany Amara is an author, screenwriter, actress, and model with a passion for science fiction and fantasy that ventures beyond space and time. She loves writing about curious aliens, morally gray protagonists, other dimensions, rifts in reality, and all things playfully wicked. When she’s not working on something new, Amara can be found stargazing, collecting stuffed animals, and baking pumpkin bread. She grew up in Bronx, New York, and graduated summa cum laude from SUNY New Paltz in 2021 with a degree in digital media production, creative writing, and theater arts. In 2024 she furthered her storytelling journey at Queen’s University Belfast. Since then, her work in various genres has been recognized by film festivals and writing competitions across the globe.

Amara's new novel is The Bleeding Woods.

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

Reading is such a beautiful and inspiring part of my writing process. Not only does it illuminate unexplored parts of my own imagination, but it allows me to surf the seas of endless imagination and connect with creatives outside of space and time. It is through our work that we forge bonds that would have otherwise been impossible. In some strange, inexplicable way, I can meet with Mary Shelley as she unveils the tale of Frankenstein. Centuries sit between us, and yet, we speak. I’ve never met her in person, but Stephanie Garber’s Once Upon A Broken Heart pierced my soul in a way no series has before. We are complete strangers, but in her work, I felt found.

The stories I read always become worlds I settle into, so I tend to fill my bookshelf with books that ignite in my highest happiness. I read about places I’d like to explore, places currently unavailable on our Planet Earth. I read about people I’d like to meet, befriend or fall in love with, even if they haven’t taken physical form on this plane. By some intuitive, indescribable magic, the stories I end up reading are always the ones I need most, exactly when I need them most.

I'm a feral fiction reader, just as I am a feral fiction writer. Most often, I read sci-fi, fantasy, romance, or anything that blends the three. Currently, I’m reading Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros. In it, we follow Violet Sorrengail as she strives to survive in a cutthroat academy for dragon riders, finding strength she never thought she had and love she never thought possible in the process. Before becoming an author, I worked at my local Barnes & Nobles, and witnessed the beautiful mayhem every time a new installment in her series was released. Still, back then, I never felt quite called to dive in myself. Then, on a random, dreary Autumn afternoon… my dog started pawing at the hardcover copy. I went outside, perched on a rock, and let myself fall into Yarros’s world right away. I am so grateful I did. The explosive joy she takes in building her beautiful, complex, expansive world is exactly the kind of joy I needed to reignite in my own writing. The sweeping, swoon-worthy romance is exactly the kind of love I needed to remind myself I deserve in my own life. Violet’s journey of self-acceptance, self-empowerment and self-discovery is exactly what I needed to embrace in my own heart.

As I continue to read, Rebecca Yarros’s work speaks directly to me. She may not know it, but from miles and miles away, the story she shared years ago is helping and healing me. That’s the magic of writing so that others may read, and reading so that I may find the courage to write.

Visit Brittany Amara's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Bleeding Woods.

--Marshal Zeringue