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Contemporary Fiction Views: RIP to Martin Cruz Smith, plus new releases this week [1]
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Date: 2025-07-15
No new book reviews for the next couple weeks as I'm having cataract surgery on both eyes (one down, one to go). So when I get accustomed to the brightness, I'll be back to the books. Meanwhile, here are some of this week's new releases with descriptions by the publishers. For more on these books, and a lovely place to buy them, check out The Literate Lizard.
And a sad note. Martin Cruz Smith has died at the age of 82, succumbing to the same Parkinson's Disease that he gave his character Arkady Renko. The final Renko novel, Hotel Ukraine, was published earlier this month.
The Payback by Kashana Cauley
Jada Williams is good at judging people by their looks. From across the mall, she can tell not only someone’s inseam and pants size, but exactly what style they need to transform their life. Too bad she’s no longer using this superpower as a wardrobe designer to Hollywood stars, but for minimum wage plus commission at the Glendale mall.
When Jada is fired yet again, she is forced to outrun the newly instated Debt Police who are out for blood. But Jada, like any great antihero, is not going to wait for the cops to come kick her around. With the help of two other debt-burdened mall coworkers, she hatches a plan for revenge. Together the three women plan a heist to erase their student loans forever and get back at the system that promised them everything and then tried to take it back.
(Note: I did start this novel before surgery and the voice is fantastic. This looks to be a great dark humor story that has a lot to say.)
Powerless by Harry Turtledove
When does silent compliance with an oppressive regime become unbearable? For Charlie Simpkins, the manager of a small vegetable shop in Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley, part of the West Coast People’s Democratic Republic, the breaking point comes when he is asked to display a meaningless propaganda poster in his shop window.
It is a seemingly insignificant act in a lifetime of obedience. But Charlie just can’t bring himself to doing it. This minor act of defiance, however, show too much independent thinking on Charlie’s part, setting off a chain of escalating consequences for Charlie and his wife and two children.
Hard Margins by Edward J. Delaney
Five teenagers take a joyride through the barren landscape of a small Wyoming reservation. Only four survive. It’s 1958, and the death triggers years of pent-up tensions between the town of Suncreek and the members of the Towuk tribe. The locals barely subsist in a tenuous small-town existence; the Towuk are still mourning the loss of their long-gone way of life. The white residents of Suncreek deeply resent what they see as the Towuk tribe’s windfall—oil deposits that have turned the desolate reservation into something of sudden value. But the tribe struggles with its newfound money, which has brought them a modicum of wealth for which they have been swindled and abused.
The town’s sheriff threatens to make an example of the teenage driver, Nelson Antelope. Tim Hubbard of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a troubled Korean War vet, acts to thwart that effort and protect the boy. Shut out by the tribe, Hubbard finds guidance in the archived reports from an earlier agent named Dorrance. A protégé of Horace Greeley and his Utopianism, Dorrance was recruited to make farmers out of a horse-borne nomadic tribe—and thus force hard boundaries on how and where they could exist. The dual tales of Hubbard and Dorrance chronicle these conflicted stewards and the devastating toll their reluctant mission takes on a culture not their own.
Blowfish by Kyung-Ran Jo
For readers of Han Kang and Sheila Heti, an atmospheric, melancholic novel about a successful sculptor who decides to commit suicide by artfully preparing and deliberately eating a lethal dish of blowfish.
Blowfish is a postmodern novel in four parts, alternating between the respective stories of a female sculptor and a male architect. Death is the motif connecting these parallel lives. The sculptor’s grandmother killed herself by eating poisonous blowfish in front of her husband and child, while the architect’s elder brother leapt to his death from the fifth floor of an apartment building. Now, both protagonists are contemplating their own suicides. The sculptor and architect cross paths once in Seoul, and meet again in Tokyo, while the sculptor is learning to prepare a fatal serving of blowfish.
Coded Justice by Stacey Abrams
Former Supreme Court clerk Avery Keene is back . . . trying to put the past behind her at a prestigious high-end law firm in Washington, D.C. Head down and focused on a new life, Avery is now working as an internal investigator when a high-profile client seeks her out. Camasca Enterprises has a big problem and a short runway. The tech company has developed a new integrated AI system poised to revolutionize the medical industry. To prove its potential, Camasca’s charismatic founder, retired Major Rafe Diaz, has picked a complicated target: delivering cutting-edge health care to his fellow veterans. The potential is staggering, but their prototype has been plagued by a series of disturbing anomalies—culminating in the mysterious death of a beloved Camasca engineer.
Avery and her colleagues, Jared, Ling, and Noah, are brought into the secretive company to investigate from the inside out. (Note: Third in the Avery Keene series)
I Don't Know How to Tell You This by Marian Thurm
(The novel) focuses on Judge Rachel Sugarman and her life both inside and outside the courtroom. Rachel is part of a close Jewish family whose lives are marked by significant emotional challenges, including the painful recognition that her beloved husband is slowly being diminished by memory loss, and the past trauma of her mother-in-law, a prickly Holocaust survivor who, in old age, continues to struggle with her grief.
Rachel’s career as a judge and the power she wields in her courtroom offer an intimate look at a woman navigating what is still, in the 21st century, a profession most often dominated by men. The novel explores the very topical issues of child and spousal abuse, which color the dark undercurrent of the courtroom scenes. And though it reflects serious issues, there is very clearly a pitch-black comic sensibility at work throughout the novel.
Jamaica Road by Lisa Smith
A transformative love story about two best friends who fall for each other, fall apart, and try to find their way back together in their tight-knit British-Jamaican community.
South London, 1981: Daphne is the only Black girl in her class. All she wants is to keep her head down, preferably in a book. The easiest way to survive is to go unnoticed.
Daphne’s attempts at invisibility are upended when a boy named Connie Small arrives from Jamaica. Connie is the opposite of small in every way: lanky, outgoing, and unapologetically himself. Daphne tries to keep her distance, but Connie is magnetic, and they form an intense bond. As they navigate growing up in a volatile, rapidly changing city, their families become close, and their friendship begins to shift into something more complicated. When Connie reveals that he and his mother “nuh land”—meaning they’re in England illegally—Daphne realizes that she is dangerously entangled in Connie’s fragile home life. Soon, long-buried secrets in both families threaten to tear them apart permanently.
Make Your Way Home: Stories by Carrie R. Moore
A debut collection of stories set across the American South, featuring characters who struggle to find love and belonging in the wake of painful histories. How can you love where you come from, even when home doesn’t love you back?
In eleven stories that span Florida marshes, North Carolina mountains, and Southern metropolitan cities, Make Your Way Home follows Black men and women who grapple with the homes that have eluded them. A preteen pregnant alongside her mother refuses to let convention dictate who she names as the father of her child. Centuries after slavery separated his ancestors, a native Texan tries to win over the love of his life, despite the grip of a family curse. A young deaconess, who falls for a new church member, wonders what it means when God stops speaking to her. And at the very end of the South as we know it, two sisters seek to escape North to freedom, to promises of a more stable climate.
Chilco by Daniela Catrileo
A near-future fable about love, life, and friendship in a world that’s coming apart.
Chilco is the name of Pascale’s home island. It is also the Mapudungun word for fuchsia: a word that evokes tropical lushness and the deep greenness of the forest. Pascale's partner, Marina, grew up in the vertical slums of Capital City, a place scarred by centuries of colonialism and now the ravages of feckless developers. Every day the couple fear a sinkhole will open up and take with it another poor neighborhood, another raft of refugees from the hinterlands: the indigenous, the poor, who are toiling for an all-consuming machine that is devouring the earth from beneath their feet.
When they finally flee the collapsing city to live in Chilco, are they escaping centuries of colonial repression or merely stepping into a twisted new version of it? From her first days in this place Marina can’t avoid the feeling that everything is decaying around her—there is a smell of putrefaction in the air that no one except her can detect; there are seismic rifts that the political cruelties of the times have opened up in her own relationship with Pascale; and she is haunted by insistent memories of her past.
The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Three women in three different eras encounter danger and witchcraft in this eerie multi-generational gothic horror saga from the New York Times bestselling author of Mexican Gothic.
“Back then, when I was a young woman, there were still witches”: That was how Nana Alba always began the stories she told her great-granddaughter Minerva—stories that have stayed with Minerva all her life. Perhaps that’s why Minerva became a grad student focused on the history of horror literature; she’s now researching the life of Beatrice Tremblay, an obscure author of macabre tales.
In the course of assembling her thesis, Minerva uncovers information that reveals that Tremblay’s most famous novel, The Vanishing, was inspired by a true story—Tremblay attended the same school as Minerva decades before, during the Great Depression, and became obsessed with her beautiful and otherworldly roommate, who then disappeared under mysterious circumstances.
The Convenience Store by the Sea by Sonoko Machida
A quaint seaside town in Kitakyushu, Mojiko is full of hidden delights. And one unexpected treasure is the 24/7 convenience store, Tenderness.
Sure, it's a bit odd that the incredibly handsome manager has his own fan club. And perhaps the customers are somewhat eccentric, if not entertaining. But there's a warmth about the store that draws you in.
The truth is, Tenderness is different. Operating only in Kyushu, Tenderness stands firm and proud by its motto “Caring for People, Caring for You”, no matter the cause. And for Mitsuhiko, dishing out delicious food is simply the appetizer to his unsolicited but hearty wisdom on the town’s shenanigans.
The Other Wife by Jackie Thomas-Kennedy
Zuzu met her best friend Cash on the first day of college, and nothing was ever the same. Tall, witty, and popular, his friendship represented a kind of belonging for Zuzu, who had always felt like an outsider growing up mixed race in her rural hometown. Though their friendship was charged with longing, it never progressed to romance. Now approaching her forties, Zuzu has built a stable life with her wife Agnes, a steadfast and career-driven lawyer. Yet Zuzu is haunted by the choices that have shaped her: living with her mother instead of her father in childhood, pursuing law over art, and marrying Agnes while harboring complex feelings for Cash.
When a sudden loss pulls Zuzu back to her hometown, the “what ifs” in her mind become louder than ever, and she begins to unwind the turns that have led her here.
If You Love It, Let It Kill You by Hannah Pittard
Divorced and childless by choice, Hana P. has built a cozy life in Lexington, Kentucky, teaching at the university, living with her boyfriend, a fellow academic, and helping raise his pre-teen daughter. Her sister’s sprawling family lives just across the street, and their long-divorced, deeply complicated parents have also recently moved to town.
One day, Hana learns that an unflattering version of herself will appear prominently—and soon—in her ex-husband’s debut novel. For a week, her life continues largely unaffected by the news—she cooks, runs, teaches, entertains—but the morning after baking mac ’n’ cheese from scratch for her nephew’s sixth birthday, she wakes up changed. The contentment she’s long enjoyed is gone. In its place: nothing. A remarkably ridiculous midlife crisis ensues, featuring a talking cat, a visit to the dean’s office, a shadowy figure from the past, a Greek chorus of indignant students whose primary complaints concern Hana’s autofictional narrative, and a game called Dead Body.
READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE
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