The Marlow Murder Club

The Marlow Murder Club by Robert Thorogood (2021), 384 pages

Murder is afoot in the sleepy town of Marlow. Never fear as septuagenarian Judith Potts is on the case. If you love cozy British mysteries, this is right up your alley. Overall, I did enjoy it, but it isn't a favorite. I have also already read The Thursday Murder Club and it is almost impossible to not compare the two. The MMC feels a bit heavier and less fun the then The TMC. The characters didn't feel as original and I enjoyed the relationship between the characters more in The TMC. But, if you love The TMC and have zoomed through the series and looking for something similar, definitely check out The MMC. 

That's What Friends Are For

That's What Friends Are For by Wade Rouse (2026) 344 pages

Four gay men, ranging in age from their sixties to early eighties, are living together in Palm Springs, in a pink house once owned by Zsa Zsa Gabor. They came out as gay in times when people were even less tolerant than they are today, and each of the men has been wounded along the way. They call themselves the Golden Gays, and they even put on shows regularly, modeling them after the Golden Girls TV show that aired from the late 80s to the early 90s. Teddy, who runs a vintage clothing shop, plays the role of Dorothy. Barry, who is an actor who never made it big, writes the shows for the Golden Gays and plays the role of Blanche. Sid, the oldest at eighty-one, is still working ten hours a week as an attorney. He was once married to a woman and has adult children and now grandchildren. He plays the role of Sophia. Ron keeps the house running and the others fed, as well as tends to various civic boards in the city. He plays the role of Rose.

Even now, as best friends and housemates, they have secrets from each other. The novel sets them in motion, and as we see their lives unspool, it's hard not to care about them a whole lot. I highly recommend this book.

This Inevitable Ruin

 

This Inevitable Ruin by Matt Dinniman, 870 pages.

Floor nine of the dungeon means Faction Wars! And, for the first time in history, the rich and powerful aliens who come to the dungeon to play games with their lives can die too. In this seventh book of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, the chaos is escalating as the system AI goes of the rails and pandemonium spreads outside the dungeon. 

I was really looking forward to this floor, and in some ways it met my expectations, and in some it didn't. On one hand, the out-of-dungeon politics are really interesting, and this book does a great job crystalizing a lot of details of the larger scale plot. On the other, I do feel like this book got a little bogged down in the logistics of a many factioned war, and it often felt less fun and breakneck than many of the other books because of it. I did still enjoy this book, and I will be reading more of the series. I'm excited to be almost caught up!

 

The Secret Public

 

The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture From the Margins to the Mainstream by Jon Savage, 784 pages.

This hefty book does pretty much what it says on the cover, tracing the intersection of queer history with music and pop culture. More specifically, from 1955 to 1979. I found this book a little lacking in focus, although supposedly about music, it also spent quite a bit of time on Hollywood and Andy Warhol. I'm also not entirely sure why the author decided to stop in 1979 after the fall of disco, when I think the 1980s might be one of the more interesting decades for this topic. 

That being said, it was still very informative, and I do feel like I learned a lot. This is indisputably a slow book, but everything in it is also thoroughly researched. I think I would recommend this more to people interested in the pop culture of the 1950s-1970s than anyone else. 

The Edge

The Edge (The 6:20 Man #2) by David Baldacci, 417 pages

While Baldacci does tend to be a bit formulaic and his character writing, to me, a little stilted, I did enjoy this follow-up to the 6:20 Man. I actually think it is better than the first book. It was a good twisty mystery with some heft. Baldacci even gives a shout out to his second cousin (former Governor of Maine). I do wish he would lay-off the ex-military, but super nice guy tropes. If you enjoy this genre of books, I think you will enjoy The Edge.

Transported

 Transported: The Everyday Magic of Musical Daydreams by Elizabeth Margulis, 240 pgs. © 2026

I saw the author speak at Left Bank two months ago and was really interested to read this. I've enjoyed reading other works about the latest scientific discoveries of music research. This one didn't quite hit the mark for me. Margulis is the director of the Music Cognition lab at Princeton so she's definitely in her wheelhouse, but a lot of this book reads like an extended version of a grad student's final paper. She relies on a lot of pop culture reference to illustrate her points about some of the latest research, probably to make it easier to understand for the layperson. And while connecting and quantifying imagination with music and daydreams is really interesting, it seems like a field that's still in it's infancy. That is to say maybe this book should've been written when there were more conclusive findings that actually pointed to answers. Still, there are some interesting takeaways, like how people in a group can hear a new piece of music and imagines similar themes and images--or how music can call forth autobiographical memories more readily in dementia patients. It's an interesting field, I'm sure there will be more to learn as research continues. 

The Unteachables

 The Unteachables, by Gordon Korman, 288 pgs. © 2019

Another night time read with my kiddo. Korman's definitely got a style and he knows how to cater to this age group but also make it fun for adults. Each chapter switches to a different character so that helps make the narrative interesting while also developing the plot. This particular story focuses on a band of misfit school kids who get a new teacher at the end of his rope--it's a fun premise that really gave me some Bad New Bears vibes, if anyone remembers that movie 😂 

The Eyre Affair

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde (2001), 374 pages

In this very clever book, we follow Special Operative Thursday Next as she tracks down Acheron Hades before he can snatch Jane Eyre out of the novel Jane Eyre. It is a fun fantasy/sci-fi novel that imagines 1985 England as a place where people can travel in and out of time and in and out of literature. It is creative (real life bookworms!), silly, and fun for folks who love to pick up on classic literature references. My only real criticism is that the actual Jane Eyre plot line doesn't pick up until the second half of the book. I kept thinking I had missed it somewhere. Also - I listened to the audio book version. The narrator, Susan Duerden did a wonderful job. Her voice, though, has such a soothing, classic British sound to it that I sometimes felt like the characters were woodland creatures a la Peter Rabbit. 

Wreck

 

Wreck by Catherine Newman (2025) 215 pages

Wreck is the perfect title for this short novel, which follows Rocky's family, the same family that was highlighted in Sandwich. Wreck empasses the emotional aftermath of a train wreck, but also the deep concern with a health blip that turns into a full-fledged health scare. Rocky's widowed father is living in a separate building on Rocky and her husband Nick's property in Western Massachusetts. Their daughter Willa is with them as well, not having moved out post college yet. Their son Jamie is married and living in New York City, but in spite of his distance, he is a key player in this story, as well.

This story has it all - realistic, close famiy relationships, frustration that sometimes comes with such close relationships, health concerns, as well as moral concerns: do we really know the people we think we know. One does not have to have read Sandwich to enjoy this book, but having read Sandwich gave me the chance to feel that I was coming home to a family that I hadn't seen for a bit, and didn't realize how much I missed them.

The New People

 

The New People by Andrea Uptmor, 320 pages.

Newly married, Emma and Rachel have just moved from Chicago to a college town in rural Indiana, into a shoddily flipped house that was foreclosed when the housing bubble burst. Emma is uneasy in the new house, overshadowed by her wife's success and surrounded by the type of community that was not easy to grow up in for a queer girl and isn't any better in 2008. But soon the house itself starts making her uneasy, things go missing, damage and mess come from nowhere, and something always seems to be going wrong. It turns out that this is because the previous owners never left. Charlotte and Dirk have been secretly staying in a hidden attic apartment, building resentment against the women who took their house and desperately waiting for what comes next for two retirees with nothing to their names. 

This was masterfully crafted in a way that I found surprising for a debut novel. I was impressed how our two protagonist's perspectives wound together, often mirroring each other in ways that the characters themselves would be surprised by. There is a real sense of uneasiness to this book that makes it hard to tell what genre direction it was going to go in, which I think fed back into the sense of uneasiness again. There is of course something very disturbing about the idea of someone secretly living in your home who means you harm. But rather than what could have been a fairly solid suspense premise, Uptmor instead focuses on a very human element, which makes the novel shine in a way that is both more complex and interesting. Definitely a recommendation from me. 

This book will be published on 21 July 2026