Rhodes, 1940. Sixteen-year-old Dora Behar and her cousin Sarah paint Mediterranean sunsets and plan their futures in the Jewish quarter of an island that still feels, just barely, like a safe place to be. Then the Nazis rise to power, and the peace that seemed durable reveals itself as fragile, and Dora’s family faces an impossible choice that will define the rest of her life. Uri Dushy sets the Art of Resistance series in one of the less-documented corners of the Holocaust—the Jewish community of Rhodes—giving the novel its historical specificity and its particular heartbreak. 🌊
The dual timeline structure connects 1940 Rhodes to 2023, where a young artist keeps returning to the same recurring painting: a solitary figure standing at an abandoned harbor, watching a ship sail away that will never return. The painting is the bridge between the eras—a piece of visual memory that has survived when so much else has not, carrying its grief across generations to someone who doesn’t yet understand what it means. Dushy handles the convergence between the timelines with the patience that this kind of dual-narrative WWII fiction requires. 🎨
The hope, family, and longing of the subtitle give the novel its emotional architecture—this is not primarily a story of atrocity, though the atrocity is present and real, but a story about the connections that survive catastrophe and the art that carries them forward. The Rhodes setting is specific and beautifully rendered, and the Sephardic Jewish community the novel depicts has a particular cultural richness that distinguishes it from more familiar WWII narratives. For readers who want historical fiction that finds the human within the historical, this is a moving discovery. 💙
Why this moves you: Rhodes 1940, a Jewish family’s impossible choice, and a painting eighty years later that holds a grief its artist never explained—The Girl in the Oil Painting is WWII historical fiction with genuine heart.
Allie Nighthawk is a flat-broke zombie hunter with more attitude than cash, rolling back into Cincinnati for a fresh start. What she finds instead: two murders, a substantial quantity of mayhem, and more zombies than you can shake a machete at. H.R. Boldwood opens the Corpse Whisperer series with the voice-driven urban fantasy comedy that lives and dies by its narrator’s personality—and Allie’s personality is considerable. The self-description as the Corpse Whisperer is not ironic; she can communicate with the undead, which is both professionally useful and personally exhausting. 🧟
The “good guys might not be so good” complication gives the novel its moral texture beneath the comedic surface—Allie returns to a city where the supernatural ecosystem is more compromised than she remembered, and the reliable categories she used to navigate it with have gotten murkier in her absence. The blast from her past who is decidedly not bringing flowers provides the personal dimension that anchors the chaos in something emotionally real alongside the zombie population management. Boldwood maintains the comic energy without sacrificing genuine stakes. 😂
The Corpse Whisperer series sits in the crowded urban fantasy comedy space where success depends almost entirely on whether the protagonist’s voice is genuinely funny or merely performs funniness, and Allie’s voice is genuinely funny—self-aware, deadline-oriented, and constitutionally incapable of taking a supernatural threat entirely seriously even when it is actively trying to kill her. For readers who love Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files energy applied to a female protagonist with zero patience for genre conventions, this is a series worth starting. ⭐
Why this entertains: A broke zombie hunter returning home to find two murders and an inexplicable zombie surplus, a past she can’t outrun, and a city where the good guys may be the problem—The Prodigal is urban fantasy comedy with real attitude.
Amanda’s lying, cheating, scam-artist husband Charley saves her life in a near-fatal motorcycle accident, which she could almost forgive him for—except that he had been dead for several hours at the time. Not just dead. Murdered. On the good side, at least they are no longer married. Sally Berneathy opens Charley’s Ghost with the premise perfectly established in three sentences, and then proceeds to make it considerably worse: Charley’s ghost shows up in her apartment, claims he was rejected from the afterlife and cannot go more than a few yards from her, and is almost certainly watching her get undressed. 😂
The cozy mystery engine runs on Amanda becoming the primary suspect in Charley’s murder while simultaneously being haunted by the victim—which gives her both an urgent reason to solve the crime and an unreliable informant who keeps making things more complicated rather than less. The revelations about Charley’s misdeeds accumulate with real comic timing: he blackmailed his murderer, blackmailed her father, lied about his entire family being dead when he’s actually related to half the town of Silver Creek, Texas. The iceberg metaphor is precisely accurate. 🔍
Berneathy writes cozy mystery comedy with the specific gift for character-driven humor that distinguishes the genre’s best practitioners—the joke is always rooted in who Charley actually was and who Amanda actually is, rather than in situational absurdity for its own sake. The ghost-as-sidekick dynamic gives the series its ongoing engine, and the growing revelation of just how comprehensively Charley deceived everyone around him gives the mystery its layered structure. The Charley’s Ghost series has a devoted readership for exactly these qualities. ⭐
Why this entertains: Her cheating ex saved her life while being murdered, is now haunting her apartment, can’t go more than a few yards away, and is probably watching her undress—The Ex Who Wouldn’t Die is cozy mystery comedy with an irresistible premise.+
We Are as Gods
In 1968, Stewart Brand wrote: “We are as gods—and we might as well get good at it.” Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler—bestselling authors of *Abundance* and *Bold*—take that declaration as both their title and their central challenge: humanity now has the capability to rewrite genes, edit embryos, build artificial minds, extend life, and terraform worlds. The old miracles have become standard operating procedure. The question the book is actually asking is whether we can wield those powers wisely. 🌍
The paradox at the heart of *We Are as Gods* is elegantly constructed: as our external power expands exponentially, our inner resilience must evolve to match it, and that inner evolution is not happening at anywhere near the same pace. Abundance without meaning leads to collapse. Intelligence without wisdom leads to extinction. The exponential century the authors describe is not a problem that more technology will solve—it’s a problem that requires the kind of psychological, ethical, and existential development that technology cannot provide. Diamandis and Kotler make this argument with the hard science and vivid storytelling that their previous books have made their signature. 💡
The authors’ approach is deliberately both warning and invitation—this is not a catastrophist text but one that genuinely believes the challenges are navigable if humanity chooses to navigate them with humility, creativity, and what they describe as flow. The breakthroughs in AI, robotics, genetics, longevity, and consciousness research are covered with the accessibility of writers who have spent careers making complex science legible to general audiences. As a new release from two of the most prominent voices in exponential technology thinking, this is essential reading for anyone trying to understand where we are headed. 🚀
Why this matters: Humanity can now do things the old world called miracles—the question Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler are asking is whether we’re wise enough to survive our own power—a new release of genuine urgency.
When Lewis and Clark returned from their journey in 1806 they brought an extraordinary tale starring themselves as courageous explorers, skilled survivalists, and peaceful ambassadors. Craig Fehrman, described as one of the most exciting new historians to emerge in the past decade, spent five years visiting more than thirty archives, interviewing more than a hundred sources, and collecting oral history passed down over centuries to ask what the expedition actually was—and who actually made it succeed. The answers reshape the conventional narrative significantly. 🗺️
Fehrman draws on lost documents and Native perspectives to reveal a fuller picture. We know Sacajawea. Some know York, the Black man Clark enslaved. But Fehrman introduces us to the full cast of people whose presence and capability made the Corps of Discovery possible: John Ordway, a working-class soldier who fought grizzlies and towed the captains’ hulking barge through impossible terrain. Wolf Calf, a Blackfoot teenager who watched his friend die in a battle with Lewis and his men. The eight thousand miles of rapids, mountains, forests, and ravines were not survived by two men but by many people—most of whose names the conventional narrative omitted. 🏔️
The archival rigor that grounds the revisionism is what distinguishes *This Vast Enterprise* from interpretive history that simply substitutes one narrative for another—Fehrman shows his work and shows why it changes the story. The result is a Lewis and Clark book for readers who thought they knew the expedition and are ready to find out that the story is considerably larger, more complicated, and more honest than the version they were taught. As a new release from a significant emerging historical voice, this is essential American history. ⭐
Why this is essential: Five years of archival research, thirty archives, oral histories, and lost documents—the Lewis and Clark expedition finally told with everyone who actually made it possible—a landmark new release in American history.
Four people were killed on King Road in Moscow, Idaho in the early hours of November 13, 2022. A suspect was charged, accepted a plea bargain, and many believed the case closed. Christopher Whitcomb—a former FBI special agent and author—believes the full story has not been told. *Broken Plea* is his meticulous examination of what the official investigation may have missed, minimized, or left unpursued, drawing on court records, investigative timelines, witness statements, and apparent inconsistencies that he argues deserve more scrutiny than they received. 🔍
The specific questions Whitcomb raises—was the crime scene cleaned and sanitized before police arrived? Was furniture staged? Was there more than one killer?—are presented not as conclusions but as the questions he believes were never fully answered. The book’s intellectual honesty is one of its distinguishing features: it explicitly does not claim certainty where none exists, but it does argue that the pressure to close one of the most closely watched murder cases in recent memory may have shaped the investigation in ways that precluded a thorough search for truth. 📋
The Idaho student murders generated a level of national media attention and online speculation that created enormous institutional pressure, and Whitcomb’s central argument is about what happens to criminal investigations under that kind of pressure—when closing the case becomes the goal rather than finding the complete truth. Whether readers find his analysis persuasive will depend on their prior views and their reading of the evidence, but the questions he raises are serious ones asked by a former federal investigator with real professional credibility. This is a new release that will generate significant discussion among true crime readers. 📖
Why this matters: A former FBI agent’s meticulous examination of the Idaho student murders—the questions that went unasked, the evidence that may have been sidelined, and what happens when closing a case becomes more important than completing it.