James R. Benn

James R. Benn is the author of the Billy Boyle World War II series, historical mysteries set within the Allied High Command during the Second World War. The series began with Billy Boyle, which takes place in England and Norway in 1942.

Benn's new novel is The Ninth Circle, the twenty-first installment of the Billy Boyle series.

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

Le Chambon-sur-Lignon is a commune in the Haute-Loire department in south-central France. During the Second World War, it was the scene of a remarkable conspiracy of goodness. Local residents made the commune a haven for Jews and other refugees fleeing Nazi Germany. The refugees were hidden both within the town and in the countryside while some were escorted to neutral Switzerland. Precise numbers are impossible to determine, but estimates of the number of people sheltered in Chambon and its area range from eight hundred to five thousand.

I am researching this chapter in WWII France for a Billy Boyle novel, and I’m reading two accounts which differ greatly in their tone and approach (both are excellent). One of the challenges in reading for research is finding a book that hits the marks you’re interested in as an author. Sometimes a book looks good but when you get into it, the material is disappointing.

Not so with these two titles.

Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There, by Philip P. Hallie.

This is perhaps the quintessential work on Le Chambon. It shows how quietly, peacefully, and in full view of the Vichy government and a nearby division of Nazi SS, Le Chambon's villagers and their clergy worked to save thousands of Jewish children and adults from certain death. At the center is Le Chambon pastor André Trocmé, who serves this primarily Huguenot Protestant area. His wife, Magda Trocmé, and Daniel Trocmé, his cousin, are key players. André Trocmé was an ardent pacifist who did not shy from aggressively confronting evil. Hallie’s book works at almost a spiritual level. He provides broad details about the rescue activities but also illuminates the deeply held beliefs which drove Trocmé, and the villagers, to act as they did at such great risk.

Village of Secrets; Defying the Nazis in Vichy France, by Caroline Moorehead.

Village Secrets also tells the extraordinary story of Le Chambon and the surrounding plateau where a cluster of tiny, remote villages are bound together by a long and arduous history. Moorehead goes beyond Le Chambon and brings in a wider circle of activists, but what makes this book different from Hallie’s is the extraordinary level of detail about people and places. As an example, I knew that the hotel at the center of Le Chambon had been taken over by the Germans to house their troops. But in Village of Secrets Moorehead tells us that they were convalescent soldiers from the fighting on the Russian Front. We read about their daily routines and how, perhaps, they noticed the larger number of refugee children and did not report it. She also goes into the logistics of supplying hundreds of hidden refugees with food and documentation. The distribution of supplies and ration books was taken up by pères tranquilles, or the older, married men in the village who worked at their jobs during the day and supported the Resistance at night.

Details like these are meat on the bone for a writer.

Happy Reading to all!

Learn more about the Billy Boyle WWII Mystery Series at James R. Benn's website.

The Page 99 Test: The First Wave.

The Page 69 Test: Evil for Evil.

The Page 69 Test: Rag and Bone.

My Book, The Movie: Death's Door.

The Page 69 Test: The White Ghost.

The Page 69 Test: Blue Madonna.

Writers Read: James R. Benn (September 2016).

Q&A with James R. Benn.

The Page 69 Test: Proud Sorrows.

The Page 69 Test: The Phantom Patrol.

Writers Read: James R. Benn (September 2024).

The Page 69 Test: A Bitter Wind.

Writers Read: James R. Benn (September 2025).

The Page 69 Test: The Ninth Circle.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lara Stokes

Lara Stokes grew up in Northern Ontario and now lives and writes in Kawartha Lakes, Ontario. Her work has appeared in The Danforth Review, The Ottawa Arts Review, Burnt Toast (newsletter for The Writer’s Union of Canada) and has been shortlisted for the Toronto Fringe New Play Contest and Geist’s CanLit Short Fiction contest. In 2007 she completed an Honors BA in Theatre and Creative Writing at York University, where she was the recipient of the b.p. Nichol award and the Judith Eve Gewertz Award.

Stokes's debut novel is Midsummer Nights.

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

I just finished Deep Cuts by Holly Brickley, a love story told through the soundtrack of the relationship. Set in the early 2000's, this was such a sweet spot for me, as the timeline coincides almost exactly with my university years, when I was very into music and had every back issue of SPIN magazine to impress boys with my musical knowledge. The book tracks the relationship between a music writer and the songwriter she inspires, and dips in and out of music trends of the time as well as classic 'deep cuts'. The author has created a great Spotify playlist to accompany - my only complaint is that I read this while camping, and didn't find the playlist until after reading. It made for a nice epilogue!

I also recently read We All Want Impossible Things by Catherine Newman. It follows a woman at the end of her best friend's life, as they move through their final goodbyes and the many complex layers of grief that can happen before we lose someone. It is based on Newman's own experience of losing a close friend to cancer, and I read this very much on purpose as I have just been through a similar loss. In grief, there is often the desire to escape (and trust me, I am reading plenty to escape) but there was something very cathartic about going into the fire with fictional characters, living there with them, and giving space to my own grief. This book is incredibly sad but also so incredibly funny, scandalous, human and healing. Sometimes the right book is grace in your hands. (And if grief books are also your thing, you must read Cleo Dang Would Rather Be Dead by Mai Nguyen. Incredible.)

Curveball at the end to cheer things up: as per the above escape, I have been rewatching Fleabag, which has led me to read Fleabag: The Scriptures, the book version of the scripts with notes and essays from Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Part of my writing background is playwriting (my own book is set in the theatre) and having a strong foundation in theatre scripts has really influenced my own writing. It was great fun, then, to read the TV scripts of an adapted play, noting what changes from stage to screen to page. In any form, it's some of the weirdest, cleanest, funniest dialogue. We need more Phoebe!

Up next is Lady Tremaine by Rachel Hochhauser. Justice for Stepmothers!

Visit Lara Stokes's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sara Cooper

Sara Cooper is a novelist and an award-winning playwright-lyricist. She lives in New York with her husband John and their son Theo. Major awards include Richard Rodgers Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters (2022); ASCAP Foundation Lucille and Jack Yellen Award (2021); Grand Jury Prize, Barnstorm Media (2020); Jonathan Larson Grant, American Theatre Wing (2014).

Ravenous, her debut novel, was a Finalist for the 2025 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards.

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

I'm currently reading Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi. It's about the horrors of war made literal. I am absolutely loving it so far. I had just finished Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls, which was also excellent, and I was actually planning to take a little reading break, because I was working on rewrites for my new novel and I didn't want to muddy the voice. But I was scrolling through the Horror and Weird Girl Lit corners of Bookstagram (basically the only parts of social media I actually enjoy) and someone mentioned that this book was about a stitched-up corpse that seeks revenge for those killed in the war in Iraq. I have never raced to buy a book so fast. So far, it's fantastic, gorgeously written and completely devastating.

Visit Sara Cooper's website.

My Book, The Movie: Ravenous.

The Page 69 Test: Ravenous.

--Marshal Zeringue

J.T. Ellison

J.T. Ellison is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of more than thirty novels of psychological suspense, including the Lt. Taylor Jackson series, the Dr. Samantha Owens series, and numerous acclaimed standalones. She is the Emmy Award–winning cohost of A Word on Words, the literary television series on PBS. Over a twenty-year career, her work has earned widespread critical recognition, with titles optioned for television and published in thirty countries, and millions of copies in print worldwide. A dedicated voice in the writing community, she also publishes The Creative Edge, a newsletter and blog for writers navigating the craft and business of fiction. She lives with her husband and twin kittens—one of whom is a ghost—in Nashville, Tennessee. 

Ellison's new novel is You Know Why.

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

In my many years as a thriller author, there has been nothing quite as fun as Alice Feeney. I’ve read two of her books recently that absolutely bamboozled me. seeing other authors in my genre level up their craft and become deeper, stronger, more intense writers. One who I think is truly at the top of her game is The first was My Husband’s Wife, and the second was Rock, Paper, Scissors .

We’re talking first-class sleight of hand, which is an incredibly difficult move to pull off. It’s so much fun to set aside my own knowledge of the craft and get taken in by the story and the characters.

Feeney’s casts lie. They lie to one another; they lie to the reader. They are the most unreliable of unreliable narrators, and yet, you never feel cheated when the reveal happens. On the contrary, it’s usually a jaw-dropping how did I not see it moment, which is so much fun. The clues have all been laid out, a trail of breadcrumbs that, upon second reflection, are so incredibly obvious.

A master’s work, that.

The other book I read recently that truly moved me was The Correspondent by Virginia Evans. Sybil Van Antwerp is her own kind of unrelatable narrator. Told in an epistolary style, we only hear what she wants us to, and the mystery of her life and the ultimate acts of self-forgiveness made me weep. Well worth a few days of your reading life––it’s a love letter to words, vocabulary, and the enduring power of personal connection.

Visit J.T. Ellison's website.

The Page 69 Test: Edge of Black.

The Page 69 Test: When Shadows Fall.

My Book, The Movie: When Shadows Fall.

My Book, The Movie: What Lies Behind.

The Page 69 Test: What Lies Behind.

The Page 69 Test: No One Knows.

My Book, The Movie: No One Knows.

The Page 69 Test: Lie to Me.

My Book, The Movie: Good Girls Lie.

The Page 69 Test: Good Girls Lie.

Writers Read: J. T. Ellison (January 2020).

Q&A with J.T. Ellison.

The Page 69 Test: A Very Bad Thing.

The Page 69 Test: Last Seen.

--Marshal Zeringue

D.W. Buffa

D.W. Buffa was born in San Francisco and raised in the Bay Area. After graduation from Michigan State University, he studied under Leo Strauss, Joseph Cropsey and Hans J. Morgenthau at the University of Chicago where he earned both an M.A. and a Ph.D. in political science. He received his J.D. degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Buffa was a criminal defense attorney for 10 years and his seven Joseph Antonelli novels strive to reflect, from his own experience, what a courtroom lawyer does, the way he (or she) thinks, and the way he feels about what he does.

In Buffa's new novel, Immunity, the President of the United States has ordered the murder of his political opponents—and the Constitution seems powerless to stop him.

Here is Buffa's take on Tacitus and the dangers of history:

When Thucydides wrote his history of the Peloponnesian War, he insisted it was a “possession for all time.” This did not mean simply that it was a book that would always be available to anyone who might have an interest in what happened in the war between the Spartans and the Athenians. It meant that future generations would be able to learn what always happens in political life, that what happened in his time and place is the very essence of what happens in every time and place. Thucydides was what was once called a political historian. As one of his most perceptive readers explained, a political historian “must be more than a citizen or even a statesman: he must be a wise man.” Thucydides, a wise man, wrote about what happened when Athens became an empire. Cornelius Tacitus, another wise man, wrote about what happened when the Roman republic became the Roman empire; when the ambition for power lost all restraint, when the power to dominate everyone and everything became the only power worth having.

Born in the middle of the first century A.D., Tacitus witnessed the reign of terror during the last three years of the emperor Domitian, and the judicial murders of many of Rome’s best citizens. He learned early the virtues of discretion, and when he decided to write history chose his subjects with care, and was even more careful in the way he wrote. His two principal histories, The Annals and The Histories, were probably written together in A.D.115 or 116, when he was in his early sixties. The Annals provides a history of the Roman emperors of the Julian line from Tiberius to Nero, during the years A.D.14-68. The Histories continues the story, but only for the year, A.D.69, a year in which, incredible as it may sound, there were three civil wars and four murdered emperors. Tacitus writes nothing about Julius Caesar, and nothing about the half century in which Augustus completed the destruction of the republic and made Rome, for all intents and purposes, a monarchy. Tacitus is a great historian, and a great writer, a writer, who understood that the truth, to be written, has often to be disguised.

With a marvelous capacity for misdirection, Tacitus gives the reason, or hints at the reason, why he only wrote what he did. In “A Dialogue On Orators,” he takes up the question why former ages were “prolific of great orators, men of genius and renown,” but that now, “on our generation a signal blight has fallen.” He takes up the question, but not in his own name. Instead of putting forward “my own views,” he reports a conversation he claims he heard years earlier, “when quite a youth.” According to those engaged in this conversation, all of them long since dead, the decline in eloquence was the result of the decline of freedom. So long as the Roman republic was the theme of historians, they wrote with “eloquence of style and independence of outlook.” But after Actium, when power became concentrated in the hands of one man alone, “the great line of classical historians came to an end.”

In The Annals, writing in his own name, Tacitus appears to diminish the importance, which also means the threat, of what he writes by insisting that it does not measure up to what has been done before. There is no parallel between “these chronicles of mine and the work of the men who composed the ancient history of the Roman people.” No parallel, because, “I present a series of savage mandates, of perpetual assassination, of traitorous friendships, of ruined innocents, of various causes and identical results - everywhere monotony of subject, of satiety.” What has Tacitus to fear? Cremutius Corus, author of a history of Augustus, was prosecuted under Tiberius for publishing a history “eulogizing Brutus and styling Cassius the last of the Romans.” Condemned to death, Corus committed suicide, and all his books were burned, though some escaped the flames and were published later. By noting this, Tacitus reminds us that what is written may, despite persecution, last beyond the life of an author. Carus wrote about Augustus while Tiberius, his immediate successor, was in power; the emperors Tacitus writes about had all been dead more than forty years. There still remain, however, many descendants of those who “underwent either the legal penalty or a form of degradation in the principate of Tiberius.” Even assuming “the ancient families to be now extinct, you will soon find those who, from the likeness of character, add the evil deeds of others as an innuendo against themselves. Even glory and virtue create their enemies - they arraign their opposites by too close a contrast.” The enemies of Tacitus are readers who are themselves corrupted by the times in which they live, readers who might resent the comparisons he draws between what Rome once was and what Rome had become, the fall from greatness that has taken place.

Despite his caution, despite his understanding that the truth, to be written at all, has often to be disguised. he writes quite openly about what he believes led to Rome’s decline:

From time immemorial, man has had an instinctive love of power. With the growth of empire, this instinct has become a dominant and ineradicable force. It was easy to maintain equality when Rome was weak. World-wide conquest and the destruction of all rival communities or potentates opened the way to the secure enjoyment of wealth and an overriding appetite for it. This was how the mouldering rivalry between senate and people was first fanned into a blaze. Unruly tribunes alternated with powerful consuls. Rome and the Roman forum had a foretaste of what civil war means. Then Gaius Marius, whose origin was of the humblest, and Lucius Sulla, who outdid his fellow nobles in ruthlessness, destroyed the republican constitution by force of arms. In its place they put despotism. After them came Gnaeus Pompey, who, though more secretive, was no better, and from then on the one and only aim was autocracy.

The autocracy Augustus created was intensified, and perverted, by Tiberius, his chosen successor. Fearful, suspicious, resentful and vindictive, Tiberius became the willing prisoner of his own most sordid desires. For eleven years he lived in self-exile on the island of Capri where he “polluted with his lecheries the children of well-born parents.” Slaves “plied the willing with gratuities, the reluctant with threats,” and, when necessary, force and even abduction were employed. Tiberius trusted only one man, and for a while Sejanus had the “greatest power to help or to injure.” Everyone lived in a state of fear. Rewards were offered to anyone who reported, or invented, not only disloyalty, but even disagreement with anything the emperor had said or done. It went further still. To “speak of any subject was to be accused.” Children were abused, men were tortured and murdered. Women were not exempt from peril. One woman was put to death because she had “wept at the killing of her son.”

Power has no limit. Whoever has it always wants more. Sejanus had everything Tiberius had, or rather, all the power Tiberius gave him to use. Ruling an empire in everything but name, Sejanus wanted what he did not have, what he could only have if Tiberius died. Sejanus took his chance and, failing, took with him to death everyone, whether innocent or not, charged with complicity in the conspiracy against the emperor’s life. When, finally, Tiberius died in turn, it seemed a mark of how corrupt Rome had become that he recovered, started breathing, and had to be smothered to death before he could start to stand. What Rome thought liberation, Caligula, his successor, thought opportunity for new forms of oppression. A Roman senator who had observed the way Caligula had always affected agreement with whatever Tiberius said or wanted, and who lived to see what Caligula did in power, summed it up in a single sentence: “The world never knew a better slave, nor a worse master.”

The “decay of the old-fashioned virtue,” the virtue, it should be remembered, that had not only characterized the Roman republic, but had given Rome the strength to become an empire, is perhaps nowhere better revealed than in what Tacitus wrote about one of the most remarkable women, and one of the worst human beings, who ever lived. Agrippina did something never done before, and never done again. The sister of one emperor, the wife of another, she was the mother of a third. “Impatient of equality and athirst for power,” the sister of Caligula was the niece of Claudius, and when Claudius became emperor, wanted to become his wife. The senate, no longer willing, and if willing, no longer able, to exercise independent judgement, removed what would have been an obstacle to the marriage by issuing an edict allowing the union of uncles with the daughters of their brothers. Claudius expressed his gratitude and quickly discovered his mistake. Agrippina did not want to share his bed; she wanted to share his power. She wanted, and was determined to have, even more than that.

When Caractus, the leader of the British tribes that had fought against the Roman legions - an action he justified by the remark, “For if you would rule the world, does it follow that the world must welcome servitude?” - was brought captive to Rome, the crowd did not pay homage to Claudius alone. Homage was also paid to Agrippina, a “companion figure on another tribunal not far away - in the same terms of praise and gratitude which they had employed to the emperor.” This was “without precedent as ancient custom, that a woman should sit in state before Roman standards; it was the advertisement of her claim to partnership in the empire which her ancestors had created.”

A partnership was only half of what she wanted, and what she could not have with her husband, she thought she could have with her son. Claudius, weak, vacillating, despised by nearly everyone as an idiot or a fool, was persuaded to adopt her child and in that way place him next in the order of succession. Poisoning Claudius, she made Nero emperor; the difficulty of dealing with a husband replaced, she thought, with the loyalty of a son. She had taken what seemed all the right precautions. Seneca, known for his “learning in eloquence and his self- respecting courtliness,” had been put in charge of his education, and, for a while, had kept the young Nero within the “bounds of permissible indulgence.” But all that meant was that, for a time, Nero held back his tendency toward murder. Nero’s main deficiency, what made him uniquely unqualified to rule, will come as a surprise to those used to politicians who can barely read, much less write, the speeches they give. Nero, Tacitus informs us, was “the first master of the empire to stand in need of borrowed eloquence.” Nero was too ignorant, too undisciplined, to know what should be said, or how to say it. Tacitus does not leave it at a simple assertion; he compares Nero to his predecessors in power. Caesar “had rivaled the greatest orators; and Augustus had a ready and fluent diction appropriate to a monarch.” Tiberius was “a master of the art of weighing words,” and even “Caligula’s troubled brain did not affect his power of speech….” Seneca wrote Nero’s speeches.

No one seemed to notice. Rome was too busy with its own “peculiar and characteristic vices,” vices which bear a striking similarity to the prevalent obsessions of other, later, empires, including, perhaps, even our own: the “passion for play actors, and the mania for gladiatorial shows and horse-racing.” With his clear sense of how far Rome had fallen from the civic virtue of the republic, Tacitus asks: When “the mind is engrossed in such occupations, what room is left over for higher pursuits?” There was obviously no room in the mind of the emperor. His mother had murdered her husband, which, while it proved that she was “capable of presenting her son with an empire,” did not settle the question whether she could make herself content with “tolerating him as emperor.” Nero now had the power she wanted, but Nero could not see any reason why he should let anyone, especially a woman willing to kill her own husband, limit what he, the ruler of the world, could, or could not, do. Taught by his mother’s example, Nero had his mother killed.

Nero murdered his mother but, despite what, based on single line, everyone believe, he did not “fiddle while Rome burned.” He did everything he could to stop the six day fire that destroyed much of Rome, and then rebuilt it, better, safer, than it had been before. But he was Nero, and the rumor spread that he had started the fire so he could become Rome’s new founder. Tacitus states, without any apparent regret, that “to stop the rumor, Nero substituted as culprits and punished with the utmost refinements of cruelty, a class of men, loathed for their vices, whom the crowd styled Christians.” In the historian’s considered judgment, Christianity was a “pernicious superstition,” and the Christians were, accordingly, convicted “not so much on the count of arson as for hatred of the human race.”

Two hundred fifty years later, an emperor also named Tacitus claimed direct descent from the famous historian and ordered that ten copies of Tacitus’s works should be made every year and deposited in the public libraries. He also ordered the construction of a tomb to honor his memory. Most, though not all, of what Tacitus wrote has survived. Nothing remains of the tomb. Proving what Tacitus had written about the dangers of writing the truth about those in power, it was destroyed in the latter part of the 16th century by the head of the Roman Catholic Church. Pope Pius V no doubt remembered what Tacitus had written about the unfortunate followers of a “pernicious superstition” and its “hatred of the human race.” Power always remembers, and power never forgives.

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; The Closing of The American Mind; History of Rome; Before The Deluge; Herodotus's Histories; The Education of Henry Adams; Talleyrand; The Golden Bowl; The Life of George Washington.

--Marshal Zeringue

Linda Kass

Linda Kass began her career as a magazine journalist and correspondent for regional and national publications. Along with her forthcoming novel, World News from Waverley High (September 2026), she is the author of three previous works of historical fiction: Tasa’s Song (2016), A Ritchie Boy (2020), and Bessie (2023). A longtime civic leader, she is the founder and owner of Gramercy Books, an independent bookstore in Central Ohio. Kass lives in Columbus with her husband, Frank; they have four children, six grandchildren, and a labradoodle named Wally.

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

I See You’ve Called in Dead by John Kenney was the latest selection for my personal book club. I happen to love my book club, and all book clubs, because they bring community and connection around books! I may not have picked this book up on my own, but it was one of our selections because one of our book club members read it and was a fan. And isn’t word of mouth the way most of us find the greatest reads?

Anyway, back to this book. With a darkly comedic yet piercing tone, the author (who happens to be the New Yorker’s “Shouts & Murmurs” columnist) tells a story of life and death and the search for meaning through the novel’s narrator, a depressed obituary writer at the world’s largest wire service. Bud Stanely is a middle-aged man who has lost the spirit of his job and wonders the point of life. After one terrible night—a very bad blind date on top of his ongoing two-year depressed state since his wife ended their marriage—he drinks too many glasses of Scotch to drown his sorrows, decides to write his own fictional and ludicrous obituary, and accidently hits publish. The newspaper where he works wants to fire him but cannot legally terminate a dead person so suspends Bud without pay. While Bud awaits his fate at work, he attends the wakes and funerals of total strangers to learn how to live again. Bud rediscovers life’s joys, with a little help from his friends—Howard, his boss; Tuan, his gay officemate; Tim, his strikingly handsome paralyzed landlord; and Clara, a woman he met at his former mother-in-law’s wake who also attends funerals of people she doesn’t know.

The novel was voted one of the ten funniest books of all time, but the humor was sparsely integrated into a much more somber story about death and dealing with death, the antidote of which is to find the joy and beauty of being alive. Kenney told Scott Simon on NPR: “It's an intense subject, death, but the flip side of it is this valve release of humor, and I very much wanted that to be part of the book.” As a journalism major in college, Kenney was assigned to write his own obituary which sparked his interest in the topic. But, growing up with parents who always read the Boston Globe obituaries must have also made an impact. Kenney dedicated the book to his brother, Tom, who died in 2019 from pancreatic cancer. It was Tom’s ability to insert dark humor ploys even while facing death. That became Kenney’s catalyst for the book.

Visit Linda Kass's website.

Writers Read: Linda Kass (June 2026).

Writers Read: Linda Kass (July 2026).

--Marshal Zeringue

Barbara O'Neal

Barbara O’Neal is the author of more than a dozen award-winning, bestselling novels, including the runaway bestseller, When We Believed in Mermaids, which has been published in 21 countries and spent many months on both the most sold and most read Amazon Charts, as well as the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Washington Post bestseller lists. O’Neal is an avid traveler and passionate cook, and discovered the Oregon coast on a pandemic-era trip with her husband. She now lives on that rocky, moody coast in a quirky beach house and writes her books from a room overlooking the sea. She lives with her British husband, who has promised to never lose his accent, and their cats and dogs.

O’Neal's new novel is A Thousand Painted Hours.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. O’Neal's reply:

My agent and I both like a certain sort of quiet English novel, and when I was searching for things to bring with me on a trip to Japan recently, she recommended the 1931 novel A Fortnight By The Sea, by RC Sherriff. It is the story of a family who go to the seaside in England, day by day. It is ordinary and calming and so filled with English sensibilities of the period that I couldn't stop reading. My husband is English, and we once took his mother to Weston-super-Mare, a rather tattered seaside town, and as I read, that was what I pictured. I liked the acuity of the days in the novel, the various few points and shifting emotions--it's so human and contemporary even as it is also very much a product of a time that feels much simpler, though I couldn't help thinking they were only a few years away from the cataclysm of World War II.

Visit Barbara O'Neal's website.

My Book, The Movie: A Thousand Painted Hours.

The Page 69 Test: A Thousand Painted Hours.

--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 Wren & Wilson mystery is Killing in the Countryside (UK title: Poison and Peacocks in the Dales).

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

The Homemade God by Rachel Joyce

I’m in awe of Rachel Joyce, whose debut The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry remains a favourite, a book I often return to. Her latest, The Homemade God, is the story of a family, the messy, messed-up Kemps. Four siblings brought up by their hard-drinking, unreliable, father following the death of their mother. Vic is hapless when it comes to parenthood, but he can paint, knock out pictures in no time at all. His work is not especially original, and the art world is dismissive, but Vic’s paintings sell and money pours in, enough to buy a villa on Orta in the Italian Lakes, the scene of many good times for the family. Vic has a plan to do a final painting, his masterpiece, one that will bring the critical acclaim he craves. By now in his seventies and lonely, he meets a much younger woman, Bella-Mae, goes to Orta and marries her. Soon after, he dies while swimming in the lake. His mistrustful children cannot accept their father has simply passed away and gather at the villa determined to wrest control of his estate from his new wife – and find the last painting, the one destined to change the art world’s perception of Vic.

Things do not go well.

The story is about relationships, misunderstandings, misjudgements – how easy it is to form beliefs that are far from the truth, to get things horribly wrong and cling to an utterly false belief with devastating consequences. The portrayal of the family’s disintegration, the vitriol that erupts, feels powerful and real. The book is shot through with wisdom and a reminder that the people closest to us are to be cherished, not cast out. For me, this is a plea for understanding, for seeing the other point of view, however unpalatable – before it’s too late. A standout quote is: ‘You think people will wait until you’re ready. You think they will act according to your time. But they do things their own way. Life does things its own way.’

Amen to that.

Visit Maria Malone's website.

Writers Read: Maria Malone (August 2025).

--Marshal Zeringue

Jeanne M. Dams

Jeanne M. Dams, an American, is a devout Anglophile who has wished she could live in England ever since her first visit in 1963. Fortunately, her alter ego, Dorothy Martin, can do just that. Dams lives in South Bend, Indiana, with a varying population of cats.

Her new Dorothy Martin mystery is A Thief's Folly.

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

I'm usually working on at least three books at a time. Many of them are re-reads from my copious library. Right now I've read through almost all my Miss Silver books by Patricia Wentworth. This series, begun in the late 20s and continued through 1961, seems old-fashioned now. But then I'm 84 and enjoy a lot of things that are somewhat dated. The heroine/detective in this series is an elderly maiden lady, sometime governess, who has an insight into human nature and a comforting manner, that enable her to tease out answers to difficult cases, often cementing a romance in the process.

I just finished reading through Brother Cadfael. As he was in a TV series starring Derek Jacoby a while back (on PBS), some may be more familiar with him. The excellent series written by Ellis Peters, pseudonym of Edith Pargeter, stars a 12th century Benedictine monk of Shrewsbury Abbey. His worldly background as a crusader gives him a slant on life that is lacking in some of his more sheltered brothers. The Abbey, by the way, was a real place before the Dissolution; the church still exists in this fascinating city on the Welsh border.

And in an entirely different vein, I'm reading the biography of one Julian, and the book she wrote. That is the only part of her name that we know, and even that is somewhat uncertain. She's often called Julian of Norwich, as she lived, in the 14th century, as an anchoress attached to the church of St. Julian of Norwich, England. An anchoress (masc. anchorite) was a person who lived in a small cell attached to a church, never leaving it; a hermit of sorts. She was literate, which was amazing for anyone at that time, and especially for a woman. She wrote a book of theology, detailing visions she had over a period of time. The book was written in Middle English (think Chaucer), so what we read today is a translation. One small passage from that book has become famous, her declaration that "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well." That's become my philosophy of life!

Visit Jeanne M. Dams's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jacqueline Friedland

Jacqueline Friedland is the USA Today and Amazon bestselling author of both historical and contemporary women’s fiction. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and NYU Law School, she practiced as a commercial litigator for as long as she could stand it. She then returned to school to earn her Masters of Fine Arts in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College and has been writing ever since.

Friedland’s books have been awarded the 2020 and 2021 gold medals in fiction from Readers’ Favorite. Her novels have also been named the 2021 Kirkus Reviews Best Indie Book of the Year, the SheReads Best Book Club Pick of 2021, and the Women’s Fiction Writers Association Star finalist for 2022. She regularly reviews fiction for trade publications and appears at schools and other locations as a guest lecturer.

Friedland lives in Westchester, New York with her husband, four children, and two dogs.

Her new novel is Breathing Under Water.

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

I'm currently reading Summer State of Mind by Kristy Woodson Harvey. It's a big-hearted story about a burnt-out NICU nurse and a high school baseball coach who once almost made it big. It's full of fun summer themes, human connections, complex situations, and adorable side characters. I picked it up because I love a great summer read, and Kristy Woodson Harvey always delivers. It felt like the perfect book to throw in a beach bag or read poolside, and so far, I've been totally right about that!

Also just finished The Thoroughbreds by Elin Hilderbrand. I wasn't sure what to expect knowing it was co-authored with her daughter, but just like Elin's solo books, it was immediately gripping. There are a lot of fun, younger themes because it takes place at a boarding school, but it also includes storylines about the faculty with adult themes and issues. Highly recommend!

Visit Jacqueline Friedland's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jon St. Denis

Jon St. Denis (pseudonym for J. Sydney Jones) is a former journalist in Europe, filing stories from Austria, Italy, France, Greece, and Ireland. Formerly a college professor in California, St. Denis writes compelling historical mysteries with thriller and international espionage elements.

St. Denis's new novel is Killer Art.

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

I am spending the summer months in Hong Kong as usual and while here I always try to fill in some of my many blank spots in Chinese history and culture. This summer I am finally digging into a book I have long been looking forward to reading, Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age, by Stephen R. Platt.

This is a great read, filled with a legion of characters on the British, American, and Chinese sides of what became a deciding event in the creation of modern China.

At the time, the end of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, China was the fourth-largest empire in world history, a respected and wealthy land under the Qing (the ‘Q’ is pronounced like ‘ch’) dynasty. However, by the early nineteenth century, that Empire was slowly in decline, ultimately becoming the final Chinese dynasty.

Contact with the West hastened that decline, which was capped off by the Opium Wars with the British Empire between 1839 and 1842, in which the British Empire shamefully forced the sale of the drug, opium, on China. Defeat in this war led to China’s century of shame and humiliation that ultimately helped lead, in turn, to the rise of the Chinese Communist Party and the firm conviction by China and the Chinese that they would never be humiliated like that again.

And I promise that Platt’s book is nowhere as dry as this brief description.

But it’s not all historical reading for me. I have come late to the work of John Grisham. Better late than never. Currently reading The Chamber. A fine writer, but got to admit a bit of a rankle. Why the hell can’t these lawyer chaps stay in their own lane? They are already making a good living with the law. Now they come to cut into the literary pie as well?

But I forgive him.

Visit Jon St. Denis's website.

The Page 69 Test: Killer Art.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rachel Peterson

Rachel Peterson graduated from Miami University of Ohio with a degree in English and creative writing. Born and raised in Ohio, she started her career in advertising before spending nearly a decade in New York City as a marketing executive for technology companies. An avid traveler, Peterson now splits her time between Manhattan and the Midwest, where she lives with her husband, Ken; their dog, Olive; and horse, Hope.

Her new novel is Killing Sadie.

Recently I asked Peterson about what she was reading. The author's reply:

I love to vary my reading between commercial and literary fiction, as well as a healthy dose of historical nonfiction. My only rule as a thriller author is that I avoid reading the genre while in the middle of writing one! During writing breaks, I jump right into the massive thriller stack that has no doubt been accumulating. A few of my latest reads (and yes, these brilliant non-thrillers were read while working on a new manuscript … more on that soon!) include:

Kin by Tayari Jones: This story truly swept me away, and the deep female friendship at the heart of it felt as real and urgent today as it did within the mid-century setting of the novel. I love being transported by historical fiction, and this novel delivered in spades! I finished it when I was halfway through a flight from New York and I spent the last half of the flight just staring out the window thinking about it. It’s such a joy when a book can offer that kind of emotional investment.

Into the Blue by Emma Brodie: Okay, this one qualifies as the book I have been aggressively telling every single one of my friends to read! I haven’t picked up a romance book in a long time, although I love the genre, and this was a fabulous and gut-wrenching reentry within such a vast world! Seriously, I woke up early at 5am to finish it, sneaking downstairs to avoid waking my husband and dog. These are the kinds of books I remember five years later!

The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald by John U. Bacon: As a Midwesterner who grew up on the shores of the Great Lakes, the wreck of the Edmund Fitzerald was something I was always vaguely aware of, but honestly, I spent my entire childhood believing it happened centuries ago (nope! 1975). I’m a serious history nerd, and within that is a very specific, obscure interest in maritime disasters that my friends and family lovingly tolerate. This book is an absolutely fascinating account of the wreck itself and so many other details about the dangers and history of shipping on the Great Lakes.

The Stronghold by Dino Buzzati: This one is next up on my list! My brother-in-law and I share similar taste in books, particularly those that contain magical realism. It really has become a cornerstone of our relationship, which I just love. After I lent him You Dreamed of Empires by Àlvaro Enrigue, he came back to me with The Stronghold. Who knows what our next bookish volley will look like, but these selections always surprise me in the best possible way!

Visit Rachel Peterson's website.

My Book, The Movie: Killing Sadie.

--Marshal Zeringue

Arvind Ethan David

Arvind Ethan David has written seven graphic novels, including most recently his adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s Trouble Is My Business and the Bram Stoker Award–nominated Darkness Visible with Mike Carey. David has also written multiple hit audio originals, including the science fiction anthology series Earworms, The Crimes of Dorian Gray, and the nonfiction audiobook Douglas Adams: The Ends of the Earth.

In theatre, David’s plays include The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, both based on the novels by Douglas Adams, and he received an Olivier nomination for his family musical The Boy With Wings, based on Lenny Henry’s children’s book. He also contributed additional material for David Baddiel and Erran Baron Cohen’s musical The Infidel and was a lead producer of the Grammy and Tony Award–winning Broadway musical Jagged Little Pill.

David has written and produced extensively in television, including Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency for Netflix, Anansi Boys for Amazon, and the Asian Academy Award winner The Garden of Evening Mists for HBO.

The Great Game is his debut prose novel.

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

I tend to read three or four things at once, a mix of fiction and non-fiction, and consume some as audiobooks and others as print.

At the moment, like everybody else, I’m reading The Odyssey, but I’m simultaneously inhaling two different translations. I’m reading the print edition of Emily Wilson’s version whilst listening to Daniel Mendelsohn’s. The combination is so instructive. Wilson’s iambic pentameter is urgent, terse, resonant, modern, powerful, and really drives the story forward. Mendelsohn’s more prosaic rendition lacks music (unusually for him, as he is a usually graceful writer), but he makes up for it with enormous precision and detail that gives you the full context and meaning of every line. The fact that I’m reading both means it’s somewhat slow going, and I may not get to the film for another week or two!

I’m also reading the nonfiction book The Lost Girls of Autism, a roundup of all the research that is largely now showing us that we have massively underestimated undiagnosed and untreated girls and women with autism for many decades. It’s sobering and revealing on how heuristic bias (and a little sexism) can retard scientific research, urgent, and educational on what autism even is and more generally about how our brains work, and I’m learning more about my own neurotypical (as far as I know) brain by reading it.

Finally, just today I finished Percival Everett’s James, his bravura retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim/James, the enslaved man and Huck’s friend and companion. It was a book I’ve been wanting to read since it came out, but I was warned there were some thematic and formal overlaps with The Great Game, so, fearing the anxiety of influence, I couldn’t even look at it until my book was done and published. It was totally worth the wait: an extraordinarily audacious, funny, heartbreaking, revealing, insightful, and clever book.

Visit Arvind Ethan David's website.

Q&A with Arvind Ethan David.

--Marshal Zeringue

Allison Montclair / Alan Gordon

Allison Montclair (AKA Alan Gordon) is the author of the Sparks and Bainbridge mysteries, beginning with The Right Sort of Man, the American Library Association Reading List Council's Best Mystery of 2019. Under her real name, she has written more mystery novels and a damn good werewolf book, as well as short stories in many genres in magazines and anthologies. She is also an award-winning librettist and lyricist with several musicals to her credit that have been performed or workshopped across the USA. She currently lives in New York City where she also practiced as a criminal defense attorney.

Montclair's latest novel is Fire Must Burn.

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

I had the honor and privilege of conducting the Guest of Honor interview at the recent Malice Domestic Conference with Jim Huang, who has been involved in just about every aspect of the mystery world as a publisher, reviewer, bookstore owner, and conference organizer. I had used to prepare two of the compilations he had put together, drawing upon the collected knowledge of America's mystery bookstore owners, and am now actually going through them in their entirety.

100 Favorite Mysteries of the Century is a fantastically useful list of the classics, starting with Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles and finishing with Reginald Hill's On Beulah Height. Like all lists, it reminds me of how much I still need to read in my chosen genre. (I recently checked off Block's When the Sacred Ginmill Closes. Beautifully written and evocative of the time and place, troublesome in some of its attitudes.) They Died In Vain is a fun follow-up of mysteries that the booksellers consider unjustly overlooked, or have fallen by the wayside with the passage of time. Between them, I have my work cut out for me -- but that's what they're for.

Visit Alan Gordon's website.

The Page 69 Test: An Excellent Thing in a Woman.

Q&A with Allison Montclair.

My Book, The Movie: An Excellent Thing in a Woman.

The Page 69 Test: Fire Must Burn.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rosanne Limoncelli

Rosanne Limoncelli is a writer and filmmaker living in Brooklyn. . Her short fiction has appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Suspense Magazine, and Noir Nation, and her short films have been screened in festivals around the world. Limoncelli also writes plays, screenplays, poetry, games, mysteries, and science fiction and has taught writing and filmmaking for more than three decades at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Her new novel is Death at King's Cross: A Four Queens of Crime Mystery.

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

When I’m writing a new project, I usually keep my reading to books that will inspire me or keep me in the mood for what I am writing. But I will also take a break and read something completely different. Here are four books I recently read.

The Anatomy of Exile by Zeeva Bukai is a gorgeously written book about a young man and woman from two very different immigrant families growing up in Brooklyn in the 1970’s. It’s told from the mother’s point of view and focuses on her struggle to keep her family together. The beauty of this book is in the writing and the way that the mother’s understanding of the world grows through the love she has for her daughter as she learns what is important in life.

The Dutch House (2019) by Ann Patchett was a book I’d been wanting to read for a while and it pulled me in quickly. The story is about a family that grows up in a strange mansion, and the family dynamics of the brother and sister, their relationship with their father and the world around them, told from the point of view of the brother. The story spans five decades and the way Patchett tells the story through time, and through the experiences of the main characters is fascinating, funny, and heartbreaking all at once. I read it and then listened to the amazing Tom Hanks audio book, both brilliant experiences.

Unfinished Portrait by Agatha Christie writing as Mary Westmacott. This fascinating tale of a woman’s life that is so close to Agatha Christie’s own life that it must be read by any Christie fans who love her autobiography. I’d read all the Christie novels, except the Westmacott books, but once I read this one, immediately scarfed up the rest of them. Christie’s writing is at its best in these non-mysteries.

In keeping with my current need for an Agatha Christie mood, I recently reread The Clocks from 1963. Christie is best known for her murder mysteries, and this is a Hercule Poirot gem. Many of Christie's books written during and after WWII are at least part spy thriller and this one is one of the best. A typist is sent to private home for a job, is instructed to let herself in, but instead of the client she was supposed to meet, she finds a dead body and is then suspected of the crime. The Cold War details, the twisty and satisfying clues, and Hercule Poirot’s inimitable self, make this a fun read.

Visit Rosanne Limoncelli's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Four Queens of Crime.

The Page 69 Test: The Four Queens of Crime.

Q&A with Rosanne Limoncelli.

--Marshal Zeringue