Bethanne Patrick
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Jim Crace's superb new novel is a trickster — it seems to be a bittersweet tale of late-life love, but then it becomes a meditation on gentrification and the toll poverty can take on human beings.
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Some of the sex scenes in Fuminori Nakamura's new novel Cult X will disturb you — but that's beside the point, because the book has much more disturbing things to say about groupthink and free will.
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The latest installment of the Hogarth Shakespeare series sees crime novelist Nesbo taking on the Scottish Play in an adaptation that comes alive the farther he strays from Shakespeare's original.
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Christine Mangan's new novel, set in Morocco in the 1950s, centers on the sinister tension between two ex-friends — but the dusty, detailed Moroccan scenery sometimes gets in the way of the story.
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This tale of an RAF pilot, the Italian woman who rescues him after a crash, and 30 years later, his daughter, is so skillful and comforting that you may not even notice the fact that there's a war on.
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Nina Sadowsky's day job is high-level Hollywood producer, and it shows in the cinematic drive of her new thriller. But the book's nonstop action leaves little time for details of place and character.
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Graeme Macrae Burnet's stylish, atmospheric mystery can be read just as a dark little detective story — but it's worth paying attention to the novel's playful found-manuscript framing device.
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With The Pictures, British author Guy Bolton kicks off a mystery series set in classic-era Hollywood. He's clearly done his research on 1930s America, but sometimes all that detail obscures the story.
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Kathleen Barber's debut novel is an on-trend mashup of murder, social media and Serial-style true-crime podcasting, but though well paced, it suffers from thin characters and a lack of context.
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The title of Owen Egerton's new novel refers — mostly — to the old fable that the earth is hollow. But there's nothing hollow about this suspenseful tale of a religion professor's fall and rise.