A fast-moving, page-turning thriller about a world in which antibiotics no longer have the ability to fight off disease.
CHILD ZERO
by Chris Holm
Mulholland/Little Brown, 2022
A quick, straightforward, fast-paced read about Mateo, a boy who not only can fight off disease in a world where antibiotics have lost all of their power, but can heal others. This amazing kid is being hunted by those who want to harness and potentially extinguish his ability. When two detectives find themselves caught in the crossfire of the pursuit, they put their careers and their lives at risk, deciding to deliver Mat to The Resistance—an organization they’ve been trained to view as an enemy to the State but soon start to realize is probably society’s last, best hope.
Chris Holm is a former molecular biologist with a U.S. patent to his name so in this case especially, he knows of what he writes. He is the author of the cross-genre Collector trilogy which recasts the battle between heaven and hell as old-fashioned crime pulp; the Michael Hendricks thrillers which feature a hitman who only kills other hitmen; and thirty-plus short stories that run the gamut from crime to horror to science fiction. His short fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcok’s Mystery Magazine and The Best American Mystery Stories. His Collector trilogy garnered praise from National Public Radio and was nominated for several awards, including a Stoker and an Anthony. His first Hendricks novel, The Killing Kind, was named a Publishers Marketplace Buzz Book, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a Boston Globe Best Book of 2015, and Strand Magazine‘s Top Book of 2015. It won the 2016 Anthony Award of Best Novel and was nominated for a Barry, a Lefty and a Macavity. He and his wife live in Portland, Maine.
Beginning in his own hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader through an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks—those that are honest about the past and those that are not—that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation’s collective history, and ourselves. It is the story of the Monticello Plantation in Virginia, the estate where Thomas Jefferson wrote letters espousing the urgent need for liberty while enslaving over 400 people on the premises. It is the story of the Whitney Plantation, one of the only former plantations devoted to preserving the experience of the enslaved people whose lives and work sustained it. It is the story of Angola, a former plantation-turned maximum security prison in Louisiana that is filled with Black men who work across the 18,000-acre land for virtually no pay. And it is the story of Blandford Cemetery, the final resting place of tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers. In a deeply researched and transporting exploration of the legacy of slavery and its imprint on centuries of American history, HOW THE WORD IS PASSED illustrates how some of our country’s most essential stories are hidden in plain view—whether in places we might drive by on our way to work, holidays such as Juneteenth, or entire neighborhoods—like downtown Manhattan—on which the brutal history of the trade in enslaved men, women and children has been deeply imprinted.
In its earliest days, WeWork promised the impossible: to make the American work place cool. Adam Neumann, an immigrant determined to make his fortune in the United States, landed on the idea of repurposing surplus New York office space for the burgeoning freelance class. Over the course of ten years, WeWork attracted billions of dollars from some of the most sought-after investors in the world, while spending it to build a global real estate empire that he insisted was much more than that: an organization that aspired to nothing less than « elevating the world’s consciousness. » Moving between New York real estate, Silicon Valley venture capital, and the very specific force field of spirituality and ambition erected by Adam Neumann himself, Billion Dollar Loser lays bare the internal drama inside WeWork. Based on more than two hundred interviews, this book chronicles the breakneck speed at which WeWork’s CEO built and grew his company along with Neumann’s relationship to a world of investors, including Masayoshi Son of Softbank, who fueled its chaotic expansion into everything from apartment buildings to elementary schools. Culminating in a day-by-day account of the five weeks leading up to WeWork’s botched IPO and Neumann’s dramatic ouster, Wiedeman exposes the story of the company’s desperate attempt to secure the funding it needed in the final moments of a decade defined by excess. Billion Dollar Loser is the first book to indelibly capture the highly leveraged, all-blue-sky world of American business in President Trump’s first term, and also offers a sober reckoning with its fallout as a new era begins.
After the first season of her true crime podcast became an overnight sensation and set an innocent man free, Rachel Krall is now a household name—and the last hope for thousands of people seeking justice. But she’s used to being recognized for her voice, not her face. Which makes it all the more unsettling when she finds a note on her car windshield, addressed to her, begging for help. The small seaside town of Neapolis is being torn apart by a devastating rape trial. The town’s golden boy, a swimmer destined for Olympic greatness, has been accused of raping a high school student, the beloved granddaughter of the town’s legendary police chief. Under huge pressure to make Season Three of her podcast a success, Rachel throws herself into covering the rape trial —but the mysterious letters keep showing up in unexpected places. Someone is following her, and she won’t stop until Rachel finds out what happened to her sister twenty-five years ago. Officially, Jenny Stills tragically drowned while swimming at night at a local beach, but the writer insists her sister was murdered—and when Rachel starts asking questions, nobody seems to want to answer. The past and present start to collide as Rachel uncovers startling connections between the two cases, connections that will change the course of the trial and the lives of everyone involved. Electrifying and propulsive, THE NIGHT SWIM asks: Can a small town ever right the wrongs of its past? And what really happened to Jenny Stills?
THE RED ARROW follows an unnamed narrator, a failed novelist deeply in debt to his publisher, on a high-speed train from Rome to Modena, where he is desperate to find the famous Italian physicist whose memoir he’s been ghostwriting, and an whose disappearance in the middle of the project has threatened the narrator and his newly formed family with financial ruin. Moving swiftly and seamlessly through his past—including a chemical spill in West Virginia, a failed New York art career, psychedelic therapy in California, and a luxury beach resort in Sicily—THE RED ARROW contains multitudes: it is at once one of the most authentic descriptions of the experience of depression I’ve ever read, and a joyously earnest celebration of freedom from the toxic power of the ego; a spiraling meditation on time, memory, and the nature of the self; and a novel with the ineffable mystery of a poem, one whose originality lies in admitting that it’s not original at all. For we are each just a cloud of quotations with no fixed center—or, as the Physicist might put it, we are nothing more than interactions, like subatomic particles—and when we’re finally able to let go of the fiction of our discrete selves, all that is left is love.