Albertalli, Becky. Amelia, If Only.

NY: HarperCollins, 2025.

When it comes to portraying the experiences, relationships, and problems of LGBT young people in the 21st-century world, Becky is simply one of the best there is. This is her ninth novel since breaking out with the bestselling Simon and the Homo Sapiens Agenda, and it certainly maintains her high standard with its skillful mix of dry humor, authentic banter, and serious life issues. And I will note that if you’ve read Imogen, Obviously (and you should have), the protagonist, Amelia Appelbaum, lives in the same upper Hudson River Valley universe.

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Pronko, Michael. The Last Train.

Np: Gravel Pres, 2022.

This is the first police procedural murder mystery set in Japan that I’ve read that wasn’t actually written by a Japanese author. I’ve read a lot of these, it’s a favorite fiction niche of mine, and I have to say this one certainly feels very “Japanese.” But there are definite differences, too. Pronko certainly knows Tokyo (he’s lived there for decades), and he understands the Japanese police system (which is both very similar and quite different from the U.S. system, remodeled as it was during McArthur’s postwar occupation), but the detectives in the story have a different feel in this one, especially in their less bureaucracy-bound approach to the job and their more freewheeling methods, which might be closer to the NYPD way of doing things.

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Manco, Jean. Ancestral Journeys.

Rev. & Updated Ed. London: Thomas & Hudson, 2015.

I’ve been a history junky all my life, and it started when I was an Army brat in the 1950s, living in and traveling all over Europe. Wandering around the Forum in Rome, actually putting my hands on solid history, and knowing that other people had been doing the very same thing in that very spot for more than twenty-five centuries — that realization hooked me for life. And my growing interest in the far past led me to wonder about things. Like, why were there so many blue-eyed blonde Italians in Milan? (Weren’t Italians supposed to be Mediterranean?) Why do Spaniards in the north of the country seem so different from those in the south? In college, I learned about the long history of human migration, beginning with the slow departure of the species from Africa and on into the many population shifts down through history, and the domino effect of population pressure that resulted in virtually everyone (at least in Europe) having a lot in common biologically with everyone else. I ended up with a couple of degrees in history and I’m still learning.

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Scalzi, John. When the Moon Hits Your Eye.

NY: Tor, 2025.

An ancient trope in writing science fiction is to ask the question, “What if?” Or more specifically, “If this happens, what comes next?” An experienced author thinks “Well, . . .” — and then off he goes, hopefully with interesting results that make a good story. But only John Scalzi would come up with a (ahem . . .) luna-tic what-if like “What if the Moon were actually made of cheese?” So, on one ordinary day, a little before 5:00 p.m. EST, our Moon, heretofore composed of basalt and similar rocky stuff, abruptly becomes globe of much more reflective white matter. Th director of the John Glenn Museum in Ohio, which owns a moon rock, notices the same change, opens the display, and discovers it smells like . . . cheese. President Brett Boone is informed of the change by his Chief of Staff (in carefully chosen small words) and NASA is driving itself cray. And you ain’t seen nothing yet.

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Johnson, Abigail. Every Time You Go Away.

Don Mills, ONT: Harlequin, 2023.

Abigail Johnson is an always reliable author of high-quality romcoms, and this one is no exception. But in most of her books, while there’s plenty of romance, there often isn’t a lot of comedy. Johnson doesn’t go in for fluff, and that’s true here, as well. Rebecca James has lived in the same house in Arizona nearly all her life, and next door lived Ethan Kelly, “He was my first friend, my first kiss, and the one person I trusted with all my secrets even as he held back so many of his.” The thing is, it was actually his grandparents’ house and Ethan only lived with them intermittently — when his addictive mother periodically felt guilty for dragging her young son around with her, from flophouse to druggie boyfriend to living in their car. And then she would park Ethan with her parents and disappear for a month or two or ten while she made an effort to rehabilitate herself.

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Eich, Raymund. Take the Shilling.

Np: The Author, 2012.

I’m kind of picky about military science fiction novels because so many of them are just shoot-’em-ups with plots and characters that could as easily be set in medieval Europe or the Wild West as in the future on another planet. This one is the first in a trilogy and it’s considerably better than most — a mix of quite original social worldbuilding and universal battlefield angst. Tomas Neuman is an eighteen-year-old in a rural town on Josephine, one of the Confederated Worlds, which is at war with a rival group of planets, the Progressive Republic (known as Unity). He’s convinced himself he should enlist — with multiple motivations, as has always been the case with young men going off to war — and hopefully to get into the Space Force (which gets all the headlines). But for various reasons, he ends up in the Ground Forces as an infantryman.

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Connelly, Michael. Nightshade.

NY: Little, Brown, 2025.

Connolly is best known for his twenty-year-long crime fiction featuring legendary homicide detective Harry Bosch, but he kind of wrote himself into a corner having Harry age in real time. He solved this dilemma, sort of, by inventing Harry’s half-brother, the “Lincoln Lawyer,” and then adding another lead character, Rene Ballard, a much younger detective to whom he became an unofficial mentor in his retirement. And Bosch always played a supporting role in both those spinoff series. But he isn’t going to live forever, so now the author has gone into completely new territory, and has even left L.A. proper, with Detective Sergeant Stillwell (he doesn’t seem to have a given name), once of the L.A. County Sherrif’s Department homicide squad, until he filed charges of misconduct against a fellow detective and was exiled to Catalina.

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Rickloff, Alix. The Way to London.

NY: Morrow, 2017.

Okay, I’m old. I was born during World War II. And everywhere I look these days, there are “historical novels” being published that take place during the war. I have to say, it’s a bit disconcerting to read a story marketed as “historical” that’s set at a time when I was already alive. Ah, well. Most of this new crop aren’t battlefield yarns, either, but “women’s novels” set on the home front. (That’s a marketing label I flatly ignore, by the way. There are no sections at the bookstore called “Men’s fiction,” are there? Besides, a book is either well written or it isn’t, and that’s all that matters.)

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Harkaway, Nick. Karla’s Choice.

NY: Viking. 2024.

I will say first that while I enjoy espionage novels — some of them — my tastes in that regard are pretty specific. James Bond is pure comic book. That stuff makes for exciting movies, but it bears not the slightest resemblance to real world intelligence work, and never did. Tom Clancy is not much better, frankly. Graham Greene and Eric Ambler and Len Deighton and Mick Herron are quite good. But John Le Carre is several heads and shoulders above all of them. He gets down into the nuts and bolts of the secret Cold War, a very gritty, cold-blooded and psychologically enervating world indeed. I’ve read every book and novella he ever wrote, and all the Smiley books at least twice each. And I always emerge with newly-discovered nuances and understandings. So this engrossing tale is custom-made for me.

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Beene, Jill M. Kill Girl.

Np: Beene, 2016.

Elayna Miller is a very professional assassin, trained by the CIA, but she went freelance after six years — which she says the Company actually likes, because they can put additional distance between you and them but still employ your skills. She has a rather personal approach to her work, though. She only hits the Bad Guys. And she spaces out the jobs she’s paid big money for with pro bono hits: People who got away with things because of money and connections, cases where the police and everyone else knew they were guilty but couldn’t find the necessary evidence to prosecute, not to mention drug dealers, human traffickers, and the like. She also has a small crew of specialists — a hacker, an electronics near-genius, a redneck explosives expert — and they’ve become like family.

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