1. Sarah Trembath’s review of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad (Knopf). “One Day is also a call to conscience. It isn’t just for those of us who agree with every word. It is for anyone with the courage to peel back the veil of delusion that enshrouded the West the day it committed to condoning ‘the world’s first live-streamed genocide’ in Palestine. Most Westerners, El Akkad contends, have developed a ‘terrible immunity’ to preventable mass-scale cruelty and have concluded that ‘certain peoples simply need to be crushed.’”


2. Diane Kiesel’s review of Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser (Penguin Press). “Fraser intersperses the disturbing stories of multiple serial killers with her own; in August 1961, when she’s 7 months old, she lives in the same Tacoma area where Charlie Manson served a 10-year federal-prison sentence on nearby McNeil Island for forgery and where Ted Bundy and Gary Ridgway (the Green River Killer) grew up. That is the month, Fraser suggests, that Bundy might’ve gotten his murderous start by sneaking into a local home during a thunderstorm and snatching an 8-year-old girl in her nightgown. The child was never seen again.”


3. Terry Zobeck’s review of Nightshade by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown and Company). “But his idyll is shattered one fine morning when the body of a young woman wrapped in a sail bag and weighted by an anchor is discovered in Avalon Bay. The corpse has dark hair with a dyed purple streak the color of nightshade, the beautiful but poisonous flower that grows on the island. Homicides on Catalina are investigated by detectives from the mainland. One of the two assigned to this case is Ahearn, the cop Stil tangled with half a year prior. Ahearn orders him to stay away from the case. Of course, Stil ignores the order and begins his own investigation when he concludes Ahearn is again about to go for the easy (and wrong) solution.”


4. Raima Larter’s review of The Afterlife Project: A Novel by Tim Weed (Podium). “What would you do if you were the last human on Earth? This is the situation Nick Hindman finds himself in as he and his team of scientists work to save our species from extinction. Their plan has a name, ‘the Afterlife Project,’ and it involves sending Nick far into the future — 10,000 years ahead — to find a way, against seemingly insurmountable odds, to repopulate the planet.”


5. Tara Campbell’s review of So Far Gone: A Novel by Jess Walter (Harper). “Rhys Kinnick, a retired journalist in his 60s, has spent the past eight years living off the grid in a remote cabin north of Spokane, Washington. His solitary life began on Thanksgiving Day in the wake of the 2016 election. When his right-wing, religious-extremist son-in-law, Shane, veered into to yet another diatribe about vast elitist conspiracies and media complicity, Kinnick reached his breaking point and, after a physical altercation with Shane, dismantled his life and sought refuge in books and writing in the woods. Kinnick’s eight-year seclusion ends abruptly when his daughter Bethany’s neighbor arrives at his doorstep with his two grandchildren, 9-year-old Asher and 13-year-old Leah.”

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