Julie Mae Cohen

Julie Mae Cohen is a UK-bestselling author of book club and romantic fiction, including the award-winning novel Together. Her work has been translated into 17 languages. She is vice president of the Romantic Novelists’ Association in the UK. Julie grew up in western Maine and studied English at Brown University, Cambridge University, and the University of Reading, where she is now an associate lecturer in creative writing. She lives in Berkshire in the United Kingdom.

Cohen's new novel is Eat, Slay, Love.

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

I usually have several books on the go—one novel in physical form, and one nonfiction in audiobook.

Right now I’m reading Dear Miss Lake by AJ Pearce (to be published in the US in August 2025). This is the fourth and last in the WWII-set series of novels about Emmeline Lake, a plucky would-be agony aunt at Women’s Friend magazine, dealing with the problems of women on the home front and her own problems living in London during the Blitz. The novels are hilarious, with a cast of endearing characters. They celebrate courage in all its forms, from making cakes without any eggs or sugar to facing down the devastation of a bomb. While they’re goodhearted and uplifting novels, they don’t shy away from the reality of grief or living through the deprivations of wartime. I adore them.

I’m listening to Uncultured by Daniella Mestyanek Young, read by the author, which is a memoir of her childhood growing up in the Children of God cult, her escape, and her time in the similarly cult like surroundings of the American military. I’ve only just started listening to this but the account of the child abuse that the author suffered in the cult is incredibly harrowing. I’ve listened to several memoirs about cults, including Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing by Lauren Hough (also about the Children of God). I’m fascinated by groupthink and how the hierarchy and psychology of cults is echoed in our more mainstream institutions, including political ones.

Before this, I read What We Left Unsaid by Winnie M. Li (also to be published in the US in August 2025), which is a poignant, funny and insightful novel about three Chinese-American siblings taking a road trip across a divided USA. I loved it—not least how Li captures complex family dynamics and how one event can have so many different meanings.

And I listened to Rough Justice by Her Honour Wendy Joseph KC—a fascinating and often heartbreaking account of what it's like to be a judge in the Old Bailey trying serious crimes, and how justice has evolved, or not, since Old Bailey records began being kept in 1674.

Visit Julie Mae Cohen's website.

The Page 69 Test: Bad Men.

Q&A with Julie Mae Cohen.

The Page 69 Test: Eat, Slay, Love.

--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 ancient and modern writers reconsidered:

No one, at least no one who wanted to be taken seriously by serious people, ever talked about how much money they had, and no one running for public office would have thought to brag that money made him more qualified than anyone who was not rich. And now, suddenly, money, and vast amounts of it, seem to have become almost the only qualification anyone needs to have. The question is whether this almost slavish devotion to wealth, this idea that money proves ability, is a new phenomenon, or something that was there from the beginning, implicit in the very principles on which the modern world was created. It is not a new question. It is the question Thomas Hobbes in The Leviathan and John Locke in The Second Treatise on Government tried to examine: whether it was time to make a final break with what Plato in The Republic and Aristotle in The Politics had insisted were the ways in which human beings should live.

The question that Hobbes and Locke thought Plato and Aristotle had failed to answer adequately, is not a question that gets asked very often anymore. We know, or think we know, how we should live. We know, or think we know, what we want and what we need to do to get it. We know that nothing is more important than economics and that money is the only real measure of success. Instead of educating citizens, men and women who know how to rule themselves, our universities are judged by how many of their graduates are able to compete in the world market. The liberal arts have been replaced in importance by the schools of business, philosophy and history by accounting and computer science, and scarcely anyone thinks this a loss. Freedom, we are told, is the most important thing, and freedom can only exist where there are free markets, where men and women are free to buy and sell, where capitalism is allowed to work.

The ancients did not think so, nor did anyone else for nearly two thousand years. Montesquieu noted the difference, and the change: “The Greek political writers, who lived under free government, did not recognize any force which could uphold them but that of virtue. Those of today speak to us only of manufactures, commerce, finance, wealth, and even of luxury.” Rousseau expressed the same thought more concisely and with greater flair: “The ancient politicians spoke incessantly of morals and virtue; ours speak only of commerce and money.”

Why had this change taken place, what had happened to make the ancient way of looking at things seem outmoded and even difficult to understand? Why did the “ancient politicians” speak only of morals and virtue, and the modern ones only of “commerce and money?” The ancients thought that the pursuit of private wealth would destroy a republic and the moderns thought that it was the only thing that would save it. Montesquieu thought the ancients were right, that “the less luxury there is in a republic, the more perfect it is.” And then he adds:

“So far as luxury is established in republics, so far does the spirit turn to the interest of the individual. For people who have to have nothing but the necessities, there is left to desire only the glory of the homeland and one’s own glory. But a soul corrupted by luxury has many other desires; soon it becomes an enemy of the laws that hamper it. When those in the garrison at Rhegium became familiar with luxury, they slaughtered the town’s inhabitants.”

The slaughter at Rhegium is an ancient example, an example which shows that the ancient reliance on morals and virtue was not always sufficient, that despite what they may have been taught about how they should live, the passions of men were often stronger than their reason and always a threat to free government. This became the basis for a central criticism of ancient thought, especially ancient political thought that, as Descartes put it, built superb palaces on foundations of mud and sand. The problem, the modern problem, was how to build a structure that would last. The foundation had to be something that could always be relied upon, something that, no matter what happened, would not change. Plato had said that the human problem, how human beings should be governed, would only be solved when wisdom and power were joined, something that if it ever happened would almost certainly never last. But if reason would not work, only passion remained: the desires, the bodily motions, the pushing and pulling, the urges, which are part of the nature – some would say all of the nature – of human beings.

All of the passions, all of the natural desires, are important, but one of them is much more fundamental than the rest: the desire for life itself, what Thomas Hobbes in the l7th century called the fear of violent death. Not the fear of death, the inevitable passing away of everything that comes into being, but violent death, the fear of what, without someone to stop them, other men might do. This may not seem like much, little more than a statement of what human beings might have to face were they to be thrown back into a state of nature in which, as Hobbes described it, life was “nasty, brutish, solitary and short,” but it revolutionized so much the way we think that it now seems a commonplace, an assumption with which everyone agrees. The fear of violent death leads us to seek the protection of others. An agreement, a social contract, is formed in which one of us is given the power of all of us in exchange for his promise to use our combined strength to protect the lives of each of us. This absolute monarchy is necessary because otherwise difference of opinion will arise as to what government should do, and differences always lead to faction and faction always leads to “the death of the commonwealth,” civil war.

Writing later in the century, John Locke agreed that self-preservation was the strongest, and most reliable, passion, but precisely because everyone was concerned with their own preservation no one was as interested in protecting anyone’s life as much as his own. To give the power over your life to anyone else was as much to lose it as to save it. The only way to make sure your life was protected was to be free to choose for yourself the means by which to preserve it. This meant a republic in which everyone had liberty, and not just liberty, but property, because without that it was impossible to be free, because without that you would be dependent on someone else for the food, shelter and clothing which you needed to live. The protection, or as Locke put it, the “fence” for my life is liberty, and the fence for that liberty is property. Thomas Jefferson, who considered Locke one of the three greatest minds, not just of modernity but all time, made this the father to that famous phrase, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,’ which he wrote into the American Declaration of Independence.

For Hobbes and Locke, for modernity altogether, everything is based on the importance of the individual and what is most important to the individual, his own preservation. For the ancients, for Plato and Aristotle, and Cicero as well, the individual is an individual only as part of the whole, and whatever rights he may have are derived strictly from his duties. Everyone owes everything to the city, or the polis, in which the laws, the traditions, and the dictates of religion are obeyed without question or hesitation. In Sparta anyone could propose a change in the laws, but if that proposal did not pass, you were killed. This had a certain sobering effect on anyone who thought things could be improved. Everything had to be ordered in light of a single, overriding end. The serious question for the ancients was what that order or end should be. For Plato and Aristotle, and for Cicero as well, it seemed obvious that the proper end is the perfection of that which distinguishes the human being from all the other beings, his reason. Philosophy, the quest for wisdom, for knowledge of the whole, is the highest calling, the distinctly human aim, and that becomes the central thread around which everything else, including the question how people should live, how they should be governed, must be judged and decided.

The search for wisdom, knowledge of the whole, what the ancients were certain was the highest human achievement, the most important thing men could do, was for Hobbes and Locke, and with them modernity altogether, the most serious threat to the only kind of political and social order which can provide any stability at all. If self-preservation, the fear of violent death, is the only reliable foundation on which to build, anything which makes people believe there is something more important than life becomes a danger. Ancient philosophy had taught that how you lived your life, not life itself, was the only thing worth notice; that death in battle, for example, fighting for your city, was far better than to die of old age. Death did not matter; the only thing important was how you died. Hobbes, who translated the Greek of Thucydides into the marvelously elegant English of the l7th century, could argue that when soldiers ran forward to face the enemy and the possibility of death they were really running away from the certain death which would be inflicted upon them by the officers behind them, but it was not ancient heroics he was worried about, it was Christianity.

The promise of eternal life, of life after death, is a promise that, if believed, makes death something to be welcomed instead of feared, but Christianity, instead of turning our attention to the teaching of ancient philosophy, turns all the ancient virtues, like pride and magnanimity, the great-souled man of Aristotle’s description, into vices that damn one to the flames of hell. By demanding that instead of retaliating against an injury, one should turn the other cheek; by insisting that it is “evil to speak evil of evil,” Christianity emasculated humanity and turned everyone who was not a priest into a slave.

Hobbes thought to solve this problem by giving to the sovereign the power to decide all questions of doctrine; by placing the church, and religion altogether, under the control of the civil authority. Locke was more subtle and infinitely more effective. By arguing that the liberty required to preserve one’s life was meaningless without the right to acquire the means, that is to say the property, without which one could not live, he connected freedom with acquisition and made acquisition legitimate. Far from an outgrowth of the “Protestant ethic,” far from being an expression of religious belief, capitalism came into the world as a way to destroy, or at least diminish, the power of religion over the minds of men.

When Thomas Jefferson was asked why he had used that famous phrase about life and liberty from Locke’s Second Treatise on Government, he supposedly replied that “I understood my charge was to be correct, not original.” Locke’s influence went beyond the author of the American Declaration to the author of what might be called the bible of modern capitalism, The Wealth of Nations, a book published the same year, l776, as the Declaration itself. Adam Smith replaces the fear of violent death, for Hobbes the principle and decisive passion of human beings, with a slight modification of Locke’s emphasis on the freedom to acquire life’s necessities: “the uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition.” This desire, if “protected by law and allowed by liberty to exert itself in the manner that is most advantageous,” will produce a society that is both free and commercial. The traditional virtues, whether those of the ancients or those of Christianity, will be replaced by what the most insightful student of Adam Smith’s teaching describes as “the controlled passion of self-preservation through gain, the unhampered motion of which is commerce.” Capitalism, in other words, replaces virtue however understood. The moral restraints imposed by both civil and ecclesiastical authority, the prohibitions against unfair dealing or any other species of injustice, are now considered an infringement of liberty, an attempt to interfere with the free workings of a market that functions best, and, it may be argued, can only work at all, when everyone is free to follow the immediate promptings of their own self-interest or ambition.

The ancient and traditional belief that the object or aim of civil society is the common good and that reason is to determine what the common good requires, is replaced by the belief that the best political order, like the best economic order, is the result of actions which are not themselves guided by any concern for the public welfare. The good order, the rational order, is produced by the free expression of the passions, the desires, of human beings. The rational has no existence by itself, but is ultimately dependent on the irrational; like the atoms of Democritus, chaos produces order out of itself.

Thomas Jefferson, the author of The Declaration of Independence, followed Locke in his insistence that the rights of the individual are paramount, the foundation of everything else; James Madison, the principle architect of the American Constitution, writing in the tenth of the Federalist Papers followed Locke in his insistence that the first object of government is the protection of the different and unequal faculties of acquiring property. The function of government is not, as the ancients insisted, to teach character to its citizens, to make them better people; the function of government is to protect the ability of individuals to acquire as much of what they want as they think they need. Instead of a vice or a sin, acquisition has become a virtue; the desire for gain not the mark of an illiberal greed, but the very foundation of the freedom we enjoy. And if, as Adam Smith recognized, the system of economic competition leads to mediocrity and the dominance of small-minded men intent on making money, it at least provides a barrier against those who would use the power of religion to make it “evil to speak evil of evil,” in Machiavelli’s ingenious, not to say devilish, phrase.

And so we find ourselves wondering, once again, whether something has gone missing in the world, whether the “dominance of small minded men” is not itself too high a price to pay, whether it might be time to read again those ancient writers and with the benefit of what they teach us, decide whether the modern world that Hobbes and Locke helped create might itself need a new beginning.

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.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nancy Thayer

Nancy Thayer is the author of 35 novels, including Summer Love, Family Reunion, A Nantucket Christmas, and The Hot Flash Club. Her books are about families, friendship, and the beautiful island of Nantucket where she’s lived for 39 years with her husband Charley Walters and their spoiled cat Callie. Sometimes they invite their thousands of grandchildren to visit. She loves libraries, bookstores, and zoom parties.

Thayer's novels have appeared on the New York Times best-seller lists, in Redbook, Good Housekeeping, and Cosmo UK, and are translated into many languages.

Her novel Let It Snow was made into a Hallmark Christmas movie entitled Nantucket Noel in 2021.

A Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 1983, she was awarded the RT 2015 Career Achievement Award for Mainstream Fiction.

Thayer's new novel is Summer Light on Nantucket.

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

It’s A Wonderful Woof by Spencer Quinn is part of his mystery series starring Bernie and Chet the dog, from Chet’s point of view. Bernie is a detective with a Porsche convertible and Chet is his sidekick. It’s often laugh-out-loud funny, and also full of wisdom. It’s a complete hot fudge sundae with whipped cream and a cherry on top, or, as Chet would say, a handful of Slim Jims.

You Took the Last Bus Home by Brian Bilston is one of his several books of clever, witty, brilliant poetry or word play or tongue twisters or deep thoughts—his writing is like no one else’s and he’s clearly in love with words and maybe a little like a verbal Rain Man.

Bread and Other Miracles by Lynn Ungar is the last book I read every night before I go to sleep. Her poems are spiritual and earthy, deeply intelligent and hopeful. This book is my candle in the dark.

Visit Nancy Thayer's website.

The Page 69 Test: Summer House.

The Page 69 Test: Beachcombers.

My Book, The Movie: Beachcombers.

Writers Read: Nancy Thayer (May 2015).

My Book, The Movie: The Guest Cottage.

The Page 69 Test: The Guest Cottage.

The Page 69 Test: Summer Love.

--Marshal Zeringue

Leslie Karst

Originally from Southern California, Leslie Karst moved north to attend UC Santa Cruz (home of the Fighting Banana Slugs), and after graduation, parlayed her degree in English literature into employment waiting tables and singing in a new wave rock and roll band. Exciting though this life was, she eventually decided she was ready for a “real” job, and ended up at Stanford Law School.

For the next twenty years Karst worked as the research and appellate attorney for Santa Cruz’s largest civil law firm. During this time, she discovered a passion for food and cooking, and so once more returned to school—this time to earn a degree in Culinary Arts.

Now retired from the law, Karst spends her time cooking, singing alto in the local community chorus, gardening, cycling, and of course writing. She and her wife and their Jack Russell mix, Ziggy, split their time between Santa Cruz and Hilo, Hawai'i.

Here Karst dreamcasts an adaptation of her new novel, Waters of Destruction:

My wife and I are in Fairbanks, Alaska for a 10-day vacation, taking in the magnificence of the aurora borealis, the marvel of the international ice carving competition, and the excitement of dog mushing. In anticipation of this trip, I’ve been saving to read City Under One Roof, Iris Yamashita’s gripping debut thriller that takes place in a tiny Alaskan hamlet where everyone lives in the same large building. Add to that the fact that it’s winter and the one road in and out of the village is closed by a storm, and what you get is a marvelous new take on the “locked room” mystery.

Sitting up late at night (waiting for the aurora to start its show) and reading this novel while myself in a home surrounded by pristine, white snow and dense birch forest, I’ve been riveted by the gripping story of Cara Kennedy, a detective from Anchorage who’s sent to the tiny town to investigate the discovery of a severed hand and foot found washed up onto the shore. But as soon becomes clear, not only are the residents of the town reluctant to talk to this outsider, but Cara, too, has secrets of her own.

Highly recommended—and for those in the Lower Forty-Eight and Hawai‘i, as well!

Visit Leslie Karst’s website.

Coffee with a Canine: Leslie Karst & Ziggy.

My Book, The Movie: The Fragrance of Death.

Q&A with Leslie Karst.

The Page 69 Test: Waters of Destruction.

My Book, The Movie: Waters of Destruction.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lincoln Mitchell

Lincoln Mitchell is an instructor in the School of International and Public Affairs and the political science department at Columbia University. He has written numerous books, scholarly articles, and opinion columns on American politics, foreign policy, the history and politics of San Francisco, and baseball. In addition to his academic interests, Mitchell has worked in domestic political campaigns and on foreign policy projects in dozens of countries, particularly in the former Soviet Union. Mitchell earned his BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and his PhD from Columbia University. He lives in New York and San Francisco.

Mitchell's new book is Three Years Our Mayor: George Moscone and the Making of Modern San Francisco.

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

I like to read both fiction and nonfiction, and usually switch back and forth between the two with each book I read. I have read a few novels recently, but my favorite was Rachel Kushner's Creation Lake. Some might say it comports with my background and personality that I'm a big Rachel Kushner fan. We are both Jewish, both grew up in San Francisco and both seem to have a particular love for the western part of the city. As a young person Kushner spent a lot of time in the Sunset District, which is just south of Golden Gate Park whereas I identify more with the Richmond District, just north of the park. While we didn't go to the same high school-Kushner went to Lowell and I went to University High School-I have a lot of friends who went to Lowell with her.

In Creation Lake, Kushner tells a story of aging lefty radicals in rural France and evinces a vague contempt, respect, admiration and sense of absurdity towards the group to which I could relate. The novel is told in the first person, and the main character is a woman sent to infiltrate this old lefty group. Kushner's portrayal of that character was mesmerizing and relatable despite being the kind of character who I knew if I met in real life, I probably wouldn't like at all. Creation Lake is very much a character and vibe, rather than plot, driven book, but it drew me in as these rather obscure French characters became very real to me. It is the kind of book that is best read slowly so that the characters seep in, and you have a chance to dip into and out of their world over a course of a week or two.

I also recently read Bill Graham Presents: My Life Inside Rock and Out, the memoir of the legendary music promoter Bill Graham. Most people who are familiar with the history of rock music and the 1960s counterculture know a bit about Graham-and this book is very much written from Graham’s perspective. Naturally, he was the tough guy and hero of every story-at least that’s how Graham saw it, but this book was much more than that.

Graham had an extraordinary life, one deeply intertwined with the Jewish twentieth century. His childhood journey of staying one step ahead of Nazi genocide before finally landing in the Bronx after being adopted by a Jewish American family captures the horrors of what remains the worst chapter in the long and difficult history of the Jews. Graham experienced that journey as a boy and recounts it powerfully.

By his mid-thirties, Graham was living a very different life. He was successful, his own boss, was able to do what he wanted and worked with some of the most important cultural figures of his time. Graham died in a helicopter crash when he was only 60, so the memoir is unfinished, but the contrasts of his life and, if you read between the lines, the trauma he carried with him throughout his life, make for a story that is not only important reading to understand rock music, but also to understand the Jewish American experience.

Both books, not surprisingly, have a connection to San Francisco. Kushner grew up there and Graham made a bigger impact on that city than any other. Additionally, Kushner, like me, grew up in the shadow of Moscone’s San Francisco, when it was already giving way to the more conservative 1980s iteration which eventually created the foundation for today’s San Francisco.

Visit Lincoln Mitchell's website.

The Page 99 Test: San Francisco Year Zero.

The Page 99 Test: The Giants and Their City.

The Page 99 Test: Three Years Our Mayor.

--Marshal Zeringue

Doug Corleone

Douglas Corleone is the international bestselling author of Gone Cold, Payoff, and Robert Ludlum’s The Janson Equation, as well as the acclaimed Kevin Corvelli novels, the Simon Fisk international thrillers, and the stand-alone courtroom drama The Rough Cut. Corleone’s debut novel, One Man’s Paradise, won the 2009 Minotaur Books/Mystery Writers of America First Crime Novel Award and was a finalist for the 2011 Shamus Award for Best First Novel. A former New York City criminal defense attorney, Corleone now resides in Honolulu, where he is currently at work on his next novel.

His new novel is Falls to Pieces.

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

Over the past few months, I’ve been digging back into the horror classics. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson is one of my favorite books of all time. The themes of duality and the repression of desires have always fascinated me. I’ve also read a couple modern takes on the story.

Mary Reilly by Valerie Martin tells the tale from the point of view of a housemaid, who thinks the world of her master Henry Jekyll but fears his new assistant, Edward Hyde. Both men have taken more than a passing interest in her. The 1990 novel was made into the 1996 movie with Julia Roberts and John Malkovich. The film received a less than stellar reception, but I love it.

Another retelling I recently read is 2014’s Hyde by Daniel Levine. Levine’s writing is exquisite and telling the tale from Edward Hyde’s perspective was a bold and brilliant choice. Both Hyde and Mary Reilly are literary novels that bring something entirely new to the classic story.

I’ve also recently reread Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Next up is Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi. Originally published in Arabic in 2013, it was a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize. While not a retelling of Frankenstein, it’s said to capture the surreal reality of post-war Iraq, using a combination of white-knuckle horror and black humor.

Visit Douglas Corleone's website.

The Page 69 Test: Good as Gone.

My Book, The Movie: Payoff.

The Page 69 Test: Gone Cold.

My Book, The Movie: Gone Cold.

Writers Read: Douglas Corleone (August 2015).

The Page 69 Test: Falls to Pieces.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew Welsh-Huggins

Andrew Welsh-Huggins, a son of the Finger Lakes and now longtime Ohio resident, is the Shamus, Derringer, and International Thriller Writers-award nominated author of 10 mystery novels and two nonfiction books, and editor of a short-story anthology

His latest novel, The Mailman, is a Library Journal pick of the month. Publishers Weekly said of the thriller: “With full-throttle pacing from start to finish, this will have Jack Reacher fans hoping Carter is back in action soon.”

Recently I asked Welsh-Huggins about what he was reading. The author's reply:

My recent reads reflect my attempt to read across genres as widely as possible while acknowledging that I spend most of my time devouring crime fiction.

The Left-Handed Twin, by Thomas Perry

Perry, a fellow Mysterious Press author, is a veteran writer of compulsive thrillers. Among his books is an ongoing series about Jane Whitefield, a woman who helps people in trouble disappear. In this outing, Whitefield takes the case of a young woman named Sara, whose charmed life as the girlfriend of a Hollywood fixer turns dark when her boyfriend kills a man Sara had a brief affair with. After Sara testifies against the boyfriend at trial, he vows to kill her and gains the ability when he’s found not guilty and released. Whitefield is a compelling character not least because, while she possesses above-average skills and talents, she comes across as an everyday person who uses what’s at hand to defeat the brutes (in this book, Russian mercenaries) who come after her and her clients.

How to Sell A Haunted House, by Grady Hendrix

You’ll never look at hand puppets, marionettes, or dolls the same way after reading Hendrix’s horror novel, at turns terrifying, thought-provoking, and witty. Supernatural events suffuse the book and the monster at the heart of the action comes off as evil personified. What sets this book apart, however, is the way Hendrix grounds the horror and otherworldly events solidly in the real world. When Louise is called home to Charleston after her parents die in a car crash, she dreads dealing with her failure-to-launch brother, Mark, and the house her parents crammed full of puppets related to her mother’s Christian puppet ministry. Louise’s dread is well-founded but not for the reasons she thinks. The equally horrifying and uplifting book is as much about family dynamics and dysfunction, and the corrosive effect of keeping secrets, as it is about inexplicable occurrences.

Master Slave Husband Wife, by Ilyon Woo

This meticulously researched nonfiction book tells the true story of an enslaved couple, Ellen and William Craft, who escaped bondage in Macon, Georgia, in 1848 with the lighter-skinned Ellen disguising herself as a white man and taking William along as her “slave.” Woo writes with a historian’s eye for detail and a thriller novelist’s attention to drama, parceling out excruciating accounts of life in the antebellum South that somehow we never learned in high school history class. Although the Crafts’ escape from the South is gripping enough, Woo keeps our attention for the second half of the book as the Crafts grapple with their new-found fame and the nation tilts toward civil war. While the book recounts events nearly two hundred years old, its focus on the racial prejudice engrained in our country’s beginnings feels equally relevant today.

Visit Andrew Welsh-Huggins's website.

My Book, The Movie: An Empty Grave.

Q&A with Andrew Welsh-Huggins.

The Page 69 Test: An Empty Grave.

Writers Read: Andrew Welsh-Huggins (April 2023).

My Book, The Movie: The End of the Road.

The Page 69 Test: The End of the Road.

Writers Read: Andrew Welsh-Huggins (November 2024).

My Book, The Movie: Sick to Death.

The Page 69 Test: Sick to Death.

The Page 69 Test: The Mailman.

--Marshal Zeringue

Chris Nickson

Chris Nickson is the author of eleven Tom Harper mysteries, eight highly acclaimed novels in the Richard Nottingham series, and seven Simon Westow mysteries. He is also a well-known music journalist. He lives in his beloved Leeds.

Nickson's new novel, No Precious Truth, is the first title in a brand-new WWII historical thriller series introducing Sergeant Cathy Marsden – a female police officer working for the Special Investigation Branch – who risks her life to protect the city of Leeds from an escaped German spy!

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

Over the last several days, I've been re-reading Mick Herron's Slough House series, possibly more widely known as the Slow Horses series on Apple TV. The books are an absolute delight, full of twists and unexpected turns, spy novels that can make you laugh even as they crank up the tension. At the centre is Jackson Lamb, a former crack field agent who now runs his kingdom of agents exiled from the Park – the home of MI5 – for various offences. Lam, a dissolute-looking reprobate who seems to have no redeeming qualities, is still a supremely gifted agent, able to run rings around both opposition and those in charge at home, and his agents prove themselves better than those who were once their colleagues. They're just, you know, damaged.

The books are unapologetically British in their references, and reading one of the books is a rush of adrenaline. Smiley's cold-blooded Circus it's definitely not. This has plenty of unmanaged anger and more than its quota of thrills. A series to drag out every so often and lose yourself inside.

Visit Chris Nickson's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Constant Lovers.

The Page 69 Test: The Constant Lovers.

The Page 69 Test: The Iron Water.

The Page 69 Test: The Hanging Psalm.

Q&A with Chris Nickson.

The Page 69 Test: The Molten City.

My Book, The Movie: Molten City.

Writers Read: Chris Nickson (August 2021).

The Page 69 Test: Brass Lives.

The Page 69 Test: The Blood Covenant.

The Page 69 Test: The Dead Will Rise.

Writers Read: Chris Nickson (March 2023).

The Page 69 Test: Rusted Souls.

Writers Read: Chris Nickson (September 2023).

The Page 69 Test: The Scream of Sins.

Writers Read: Chris Nickson (March 2024).

The Page 69 Test: Them Without Pain.

Writers Read: Chris Nickson (September 2024).

--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 American statesmen:

Perhaps the best, but certainly the most interesting way, to get a real understanding of the present occupant of the White House is to read a biography written more than sixty years before his birth, a biography of Andrew Jackson written in 1882 as part of a series on “American Statesmen.” The author, William Graham Sumner, who taught politics and economics at Yale, quotes without adverse comment Thomas Jefferson’s remark that Jackson had no business being President, that he was, in fact, “one of the most unfit men I know for the place,” a “dangerous man” who has “very little respect for laws or constitutions.” This was especially the case after Jackson lost the presidency in what he became convinced was a stolen election.

In the election of 1824 Jackson had finished first with 99 electoral votes, but three other candidates, led by John Quincy Adams, had a total of 166. The election went to the House of Representatives. Henry Clay, who had come in fourth, threw his support to Adams, who then won the vote of 13 of the 24 states. Jackson finished second with 7. Adams became President, and Clay became Secretary of State. For those who were most zealous in their support of Jackson this was all the proof needed that Adams had bought Clay, and that had it not been for this “corrupt bargain” Jackson would have been elected. This, Sumner is convinced, would have come to Jackson “like a revelation, and his mind would close on it with a solidity of conviction which nothing could ever shake.” Four years later, when Jackson ran again, he demanded a constitutional amendment prohibiting the appointment of any member of Congress to any federal office during, or for two years following, their term in Congress. Jackson won the election, did not pursue the amendment, and appointed in one year “more members of Congress to offices than any one of his predecessors in his whole term.”

Though the administration of John Quincy Adams was, in Sumner’s judgment, “more worthy of respectable and honorable memory” than any of those that had come before it, Jackson was not interested in an objective, dispassionate analysis of what the Adams administration had done. He believed he was elected to get rid of a “federalist administration which had encroached on the liberties of the people, and had aimed to corrupt elections by the abuse of federal patronage.” His election marked the beginning of a new era in American politics. The “presidency was no longer to be the crown of public service, and the prize of a very limited number of statesmen of national reputation.” Jackson had not been elected because of a long, distinguished career in government or because of the power of his mind and the depth of his understanding; his popularity was based entirely on his “military success.” The highest office in the land would now be “reserved for popular heroes, or, in the absence of such, for ‘available’ men, as the figureheads with and around whom a faction of party leaders could come to power.”

As a popular hero, Jackson viewed his re-election in 1832 as “a triumphant vindication of him on all the points in which he had been engaged with anybody, and a kind of charter to have, as representative, or rather tribune, of the people, to go on and govern on his own judgment over and against everybody, including Congress.” Everyone was either a friend or an enemy. “To offend him was to incur extraordinary penalties.” To make sure everyone understood what he expected from his friends, he issued a message every day through The Globe, a paper under his control, a paper to which every office-holder who wished to signal his allegiance subscribed. Every day, through the paper’s editor, Jackson gave warning of what had to be done to stay in his good graces and to avoid his displeasure. His “personality came more and more into play as a political force.” The laws, the Constitution, were simply set aside. In “the midst of a surging democracy,” only the Supreme Court under the guidance of the Chief Justice, John Marshall, held the country on the course of “constitutional liberty and order.” But Marshall died, and the justices Jackson had appointed to the court brought it all to ruin, a process that reached its climax “when the court went to pieces on the Dred Scott case, trying to reach a decision which should be politically expedient, rather than one which should be legally sound.”

If, as Sumner suggests, the court had saved the country from “surging democracy,” it did so by insisting that the Constitution gave far more power to the federal government than Thomas Jefferson and the Democratic party had originally believed. For Jefferson, and for Jackson, and for everyone who had fought against what Washington and Hamilton and John Adams had tried to do, the federal government had only those limited powers expressly given it in the Constitution; all other powers were left to the States. They believed this, believed it fervently, until they had power and suddenly thought themselves the only proper judge of the powers they should have. Jackson, as President, refused to acknowledge that the States had the power to nullify an act of Congress, but it was Jefferson who changed everything. He bought Louisiana, and with that single act put the original thirteen states, including especially the Southern states, on their way to becoming a distinct minority in the country they had started. How this happened, how Andrew Jackson became possible, is told in a different volume in the American Statesmen series, the biography of one of the strangest men ever to serve in Congress, a man who, even at the time, was thought an impossibility, a man brilliant, erratic and, eventually, almost certainly insane, John Randolph, one of Thomas Jefferson’s own relations.

We hear everywhere the insistence that what someone has done will go down in history, that what has happened will be judged by history, that someone is, or is not, on the right side of history, but someone has to write that history, and the way it is written may not be anything close to what we think it is going to be. The biography, the history, of John Randolph was written by Henry Adams, and unlike most of those who call themselves historians, Henry Adams, the great- grandson of John Adams and the grandson of John Quincy Adams, knew how to write. He knew something else as well, that the only way to understand the American past is to see things the way they were seen at the time, when, without the benefit of hindsight, without the easy comfort of a retrospective judgment, those with the responsibility of governing the nation had to make decisions.

Adams begins at the beginning. John Randolph, he tells us, was born June 2, 1773, “into a world of cousins, a colonial aristocracy all its own, supported by tobacco plantations and negro labor, by colonial patronage and royal favor, or, to do it justice, by audacity, vigor, and mind.” His father died two years later, in 1775; his mother remarried three years after that, in 1778, “and meanwhile the country had plunged into a war which in a single moment cut that connectionr with England on which the old Virginian society depended for its tastes, fashions, theories, and above all for its aristocratic status in politics and law. The Declaration of Independence proclaimed that America was no longer to be English, but American, that is to say, democratic and popular in all its parts, - a fact equivalent to a sentence of death upon old Virginian society, foreboding dissolution to the Randolphs with the rest, until they should learn to master the new conditions of American life.”

Randolph’s early education reflected the standard then in place. He read Shakespeare, Homer, Don Quixote, Plutarch’s Lives, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver, and Tom Jones before he was eleven; Rousseau, Voltaire, Hume and Gibbon a few years after that. He had, from birth, as it were, “aristocratic prejudices” and “democratic theories.” When he made his first public speech, speaking after Patrick Henry, he was said to have held his audience for not less than three hours on the question whether it was right to resist the federal government. He was, like most Virginians, convinced that every government had a tendency toward despotism, and that only the States could provide protection against the central government.

Elected to Congress when he was only twenty-six, the Speaker of the House, Nathaniel Macon, was so fascinated by “this young Virginian Brutus, with eyes that pierced and voice that rang like the vibrations of glass,” that he made him chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. Randolph had the “intense self-confidence of the Virginian…a moral superiority which became disastrous in the end from its very strength.” He could not, he would not, change his mind about anything that had to do with what he thought first principles. He became, not just disenchanted, he became an anachronism, a man without serious political support, a man thought too fanatical to trust or have anything to do with, when Thomas Jefferson decided to buy Louisiana, and with that purchase “completely changed the condition of the constitutional compact; rendering the nation, independent of the States, master of an empire immensely greater than the States themselves.” New states would have more power than the old. The federal government would now be “the measure of its own powers.”

There was one last chance to right the balance, one last chance to bring the nation back to its senses and stop the movement of power from the States to the federal government, one last chance to put an end to what the Supreme Court under John Marshall was trying to do. The impeachment of a Supreme Court Justice would force the court to change direction, to respect the sovereignty of the States and recognize that the Constitution was a compact of the States and not a contract the people had made with themselves. Samuel Chase, who had, among other misdeeds, instructed a grand jury that Jeffersonian democracy was a serious threat to liberty seemed an easy target.

Jefferson was the moving force behind Chase’s impeachment, but it was Randolph who, on January 5, 1804, made the motion for an inquiry into the conduct of Judge Chase, and when the trial finally got under way in the Senate, Randolph led the prosecution. It was his misfortune that the defense was led by “the notorious reprobate Luther Martin.” There was no comparison between them. It was the difference “between show and strength, between intellectual brightness and intellectual power.” Martin destroyed Randolph’s “indictment and humiliated his pride” to such an extent that during closing arguments, Randolph seemed “more like a criminal fearing sentencing than like a tribune of the people dragging a tyrant to his doom.” Randolph lost more than the trial. It was the end of the Jefferson republicans; it was here that they “fought their last aggressive battle, and, wavering under the shock of defeat, broke into factions which slowly abandoned the field and forgot their discipline.”

Impeachment had failed, and so had almost all those who had sworn allegiance to what, for Randolph, remained an article of faith. Two years later, in 1806, Randolph “saw, what so few Virginians were honest enough to see, that the Virginian theory had been silently discarded by its own authors, and that through it pure government could never be expected.” Randolph had wanted to be a Pericles, a Caesar, someone who had done, not just great things, but things that made a country, a nation, what it was supposed to be. He had instead achieved nothing. He had fallen back “among common men with vulgar aims and mean methods.” He had “failed as a public man and had dragged with him in his failure all his friends and all his principles.” He knew it, “and it drove him mad.”

At the end of the War of 1812, “Mr. Jefferson’s party was still in power, but not a thread was left of the principles with which Mr. Jefferson had started on his career in 1801.” The South became the friend of centralized power, and, especially when it was a question of extending or protecting slavery, was not afraid to use it. Randolph’s failure was the failure of the South altogether, the failure of an aristocracy with its inherent belief in inequality to adapt to a set of governing principles completely different than its own. Randolph could never understand that democracy “was a force against which mere individuality strove in vain.” It only needed the presidency of Andrew Jackson to prove it.

Toward the end of his life, in a rare moment of lucidity, Randolph remarked with sad regret: “Time misspent, and faculties misemployed, and senses jaded by labor or impaired by excess, cannot be recalled.”

It is a fair summary, not just of the history of John Randolph, but of the South, and even, perhaps, of more than that.

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.

--Marshal Zeringue

Amy Shearn

Amy Shearn is the award-winning author of the critically acclaimed novels Dear Edna Sloane, Unseen City, The Mermaid of Brooklyn, and How Far is the Ocean From Here. She has worked as an editor for Medium, and her work has appeared in the New York Times Modern Love column, Slate, Real Simple, Martha Stewart Living, Oprah, Coastal Living, Poets & Writers, Literary Hub, Catapult, The Millions, The Rumpus, and many other publications.

Shearn has an MFA from the University of Minnesota, and currently lives in Brooklyn with her two children.

Her new novel is Animal Instinct.

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

I tend to read several books at once, which confounds my friends who are more organized readers. Right now it happens to be:

Lifesaving, a memoir by Judith Barrington published in 2000. I teach personal essay and memoir-writing, and I often use Barrington's writing about writing memoir, but it only recently occurred to me to read her actual memoir! This is a gorgeous and thoughtful book about the aftermath of her parents' sudden death when she was 19 -- she expatriated to Spain, had some adventures, and started to come to terms with her sexuality and queerness. It's every bit as good as her craft writing would suggest!

Hot Air, a brand new novel by Marcy Dermansky. I've just started this one -- it has the same pub day as Animal Instinct, and Marcy and I are doing an event together. I've long been a fan of her eccentric and hilarious books (I teach parts of The Red Car in my "Writing for Women on the Verge" class), and am always excited to dive into another one. In this book, a divorced woman's first date is interrupted by billionaires crashing their hot air balloon, which just feels so very now, doesn't it? Marcy and I were just texting about how our novels have weirdly similar lines in them about some of the darker aspects of marriage; I love that we were somehow on a similar wavelength but ended up with such different fictional iterations of midlife rebirth stories.

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë. I felt like a re-read of a classic was in order, and as one of the original Women on the Verge novels, this felt like a good one to revisit. I first read it in college, and related so much to Jane, and was so hot for Mr Rochester -- I imagine I'm going to have a really different reaction on this read. So far it's really fun. What a narrative voice!

Visit Amy Shearn's website.

The Page 99 Test: How Far Is the Ocean from Here.

Writers Read: Amy Shearn (March 2013).

Q&A with Amy Shearn.

My Book, The Movie: Dear Edna Sloane.

The Page 69 Test: Dear Edna Sloane.

The Page 69 Test: Animal Instinct.

--Marshal Zeringue