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• A LIGHT IN THE DARKNESS Javier Suárez-Pajares, Walter Aaron Clark, Nelson Orringer

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• WE ARE HOME Ray Suarez

• ASCENT TO POWER David L. Roll

• OUR KINDRED CREATURES Bill Wasik, Monica Murphy

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The 23 most popular books of the past year, according to Goodreads members

When you buy through our links, Business Insider may earn an affiliate commission. Learn more

• If you're looking for a great new book, it can be difficult to know where to start.
• The books on this list are the most popular reads among Goodreads members in the past year.
• The titles range from new romances to classics and everything in between.

Because there are nearly infinite books in the world, it can be difficult to know which one to pick up next. When I don't know what to read, I turn to fellow readers for the books they've read and adored, gravitating towards the titles I hear my friends mention over and over again. 

Similarly, the internet can provide plenty of word-of-mouth reviews and rankings. The books on this list come from the most popular Goodreads members picked up in the last year, according to the 2021 Goodreads Reading Challenge (where readers aim to read as many books as they can in one year). Goodreads is the world's largest platform for readers to rate, review, and discover new book recommendations, with over 125 million members sharing their favorite reads.

If you're looking to start off the new year right with a great new read, here are some of the most popular books readers are snagging right now. 

The 23 most popular books right now, according to Goodreads members:

"the midnight library" by matt haig.

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $13.29

Nora Seed feels stuck in her life, bound to the choices she made that she still isn't sure were right. When Nora is ready to leave it all behind, she finds herself in a peculiar library, where each of the infinite books offers a portal to a parallel world, showing her all the many ways her life could have been slightly or drastically different, had she made other decisions.

"The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue" by V.E. Schwab

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $16.19

" The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue " is a genre-bending fantasy book about a young woman named Addie who, in 1714, makes a bargain with a dark god and becomes cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets. Addie's story spans three centuries and countless countries — until she meets a boy in New York City in 2014 who can finally remember her.

"The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo" by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $9.42

Evelyn Hugo was an iconic Hollywood actress, just as notoriously remembered for her seven marriages as she was for her movie performances. Finally ready to tell her story, Evelyn Hugo chooses a little-known journalist named Monique, who goes to Evelyn's luxurious apartment to hear the truth behind Evelyn's lifetime of friendships, ambitions, and many loves.

"To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $7.19

Considered one of the greatest novels of all time , " To Kill a Mockingbird " is an unforgettable historical fiction novel from 1960 that follows young Jean Louise Finch during a time of great racial inequality in her community. Her father, Atticus Finch, is a lawyer defending a Black man wrongly accused of a terrible crime as he faces a community desperate for a guilty conviction.

"The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $12.44

" The Great Gatsby " is a classic about the wealthy Jay Gatsby, set during the Jazz Age in New York. When Nick Carraway moved to Long Island to find a job in New York City as a bond salesman, he meets his next-door neighbor, Jay Gatsby, who throws extravagant parties and is constantly in pursuit of the stunning Daisy Buchanan.

"Where the Crawdads Sing" by Delia Owens

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $9.98

Kya Clark is known to most as the "Marsh Girl," running barefoot and wild in her quiet fishing village, having attended only one day of school. When a popular young boy is murdered, Kya's story unravels as the town accuses her of causing his death.

"1984" by George Orwell

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $7.48

" 1984 " is an iconic science fiction novel that imagines a dystopian future ruled by a totalitarian state, perpetually at war and at the mercy of strong propaganda. Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth, rewriting historical records to conform to the state's version of events while secretly dreaming of rebellion and imagining what life would be like without Big Brother.

"Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austen

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $5.47

" Pride and Prejudice " is a cherished, classic Jane Austen romance between Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy. Loved for their unique relationship comprised of witty banter and flirting, Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy fall for each other in this story of class, wealth, and the duty of marriage.

"The Song of Achilles" by Madeline Miller

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $10.35

In this Greek mythology-inspired tale , Patroclus is an awkward young prince, exiled by his father because of a misunderstanding when he meets the legendary Achilles. As the two form a unique relationship, Helen of Sparta is kidnapped and Achilles, along with all the heroes in Greece, joins the cause against Troy as they face a choice between love and fate.

"The Vanishing Half" by Brit Bennett

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $15.70

Though the Vignes twin sisters grew up identical in their small, southern community, their lives split in young adulthood as one sister now lives in the same community with her Black daughter while the other passes for white in a white community. A beautiful story of influence and decisions emerges as their lives intersect over generations when their daughters finally meet.

"The Guest List" by Lucy Foley

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $13.09

Set on a remote island off the coast of Ireland, a fascinating group of friends and family converge to celebrate the marriage of a rising television star and an ambitious magazine publisher. When someone is found dead, everyone becomes a suspect with their own strange and mysterious potential motives.

"People We Meet on Vacation" by Emily Henry

Alex and Poppy became best friends on a happenstance summer road trip in college, spurring a tradition of summer trips together — until two years ago, when everything changed between them. Though they haven't spoken since, Poppy desperately needs her best friend back and reaches out to Alex to see if they can try to rekindle their friendship in this adorable romance.

"It Ends with Us" by Colleen Hoover

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $12.99

Ryle Kincaid is a stunning, assertive neurosurgeon with a soft spot for only Lily, who can't believe her luck that there's a spark between them. As the two fall into a passionate relationship, Lily can't help but think of her first love, Atlas. As her relationship with Ryle becomes more and more complicated, Atlas reappears and further complicates everything.

"The Four Winds" by Kristin Hannah

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $14

" The Four Winds " is an award-winning historical fiction novel that illuminates the Dust Bowl era of the Great Depression, where farmers faced deadly droughts that often forced them from their land. To learn more about why we love this book, you can check out our review here.

"Malibu Rising" by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $16.80

Famous surfer Nina Riva is preparing to host her iconic, annual party with her equally famous siblings, though she doesn't know the party will be literally up in flames by morning. As each sibling's story unravels, this historical fiction novel traverses from the party in 1983 to the Rivas' childhood, revealing long-buried secrets and spinning the present entirely out of control.

"The Silent Patient" by Alex Michaelides

Alicia Berenson had a seemingly perfect life with a painting career, a beautiful home, and a photographer husband until one night her husband returned home and Alicia shot him five times in the face and never spoke again. As Theo Faber, a criminal psychotherapist, attempts to work with Alicia to get her to talk, his own twisted motives emerge in this gripping psychological thriller with many versions of the truth.

"Anxious People" by Fredrik Backman

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $13.12

When a bank robbery goes terribly wrong, eight strangers find themselves being held hostage in an apartment with more in common than they imagined. Each anxious for their own reasons, the tensions mount as the police surround the apartment in this thought-provoking story of compassion where all the pieces slowly fit together.

"Red, White & Royal Blue" by Casey McQuiston

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $9.97

First Son Alex Claremont-Diaz has a long-running nemesis: Prince Henry. When the tabloids catch the two in a confrontation, the plan for damage control includes staging a fake friendship between the boys in this fun, fan-favorite Queer romance.

"Normal People" by Sally Rooney

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $9.33

Connell and Marianne pretend not to know each other in school, dropping the facade when Connell picks his mother up from a housekeeping job at Marianne's house. The two form a peculiar connection, drifting apart and back together over the years in this story about class, friendship, and human nature.

"The Hobbit, or There and Back Again" by J.R.R. Tolkien

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $12.92

Originally written for the author's children, " The Hobbit " is a beloved prequel to the " Lord of the Rings " series where readers are introduced to the fantasy world of Middle-earth. When Bilbo Baggins is tricked into hosting a party, the wizard Gandalf convinces him to join him and a group of dwarves on an adventure to retrieve a treasure guarded by a dragon, igniting an epic tale adored by readers of all ages.

"Beach Read" by Emily Henry

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $7.35

January Andrews is a bestselling romance author, plagued with writer's block and staying at a beach house to try and write a new novel by her editor's deadline. When she meets the next-door literary fiction writer named Augustus, they decide to switch genres in an attempt to escape their creative ruts.

"The Last Thing He Told Me" by Laura Dave

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $13.50

Before Hannah's new husband, Owen, disappears, he manages to slip her a note reading "protect her," which she knows refers to his 16-year-old daughter, Bailey. When the FBI arrests Owen's boss and comes to their home unannounced, Hannah and Bailey realize Owen isn't who they thought and must uncover the truth behind his disappearance while building a future together of their own.

"The Duke and I" by Julia Quinn

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $8.27

" The Duke and I " is the first Regency-era romance in the " Bridgerton " series, about Daphne Bridgerton who agrees to a fake courtship with Simon Basset, the Duke of Hastings. While Daphne needs her own prospects to soar and the Duke intends to avoid marriage altogether, their plan seems to be working perfectly — until the two can't deny the spark that seems to be igniting between them. If you love this book already, check out our list of other Julia Quinn novels to find your next great romance read. 

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New Cold Wars review: China, Russia and Biden’s daunting task

David Sanger of the New York Times delivers a must-read on the foreign policy challenges now facing US leaders

R ussia bombards Ukraine. Israel and Hamas are locked in a danse macabre. The threat of outright war between Jerusalem and Tehran grows daily. Beijing and Washington snarl. In a moment like this, David Sanger’s latest book, subtitled China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West , is a must-read. Painstakingly researched, New Cold Wars brims with on-record interviews and observations by thinly veiled sources.

Officials closest to the president talk with an eye on posterity. The words of the CIA director, Bill Burns, repeatedly appear on the page. Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, and Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, surface throughout the book. Sanger, White House and national security correspondent for the New York Times, fuses access, authority and curiosity to deliver an alarming message: US dominance is no longer axiomatic.

In the third decade of the 21st century, China and Russia defy Washington, endeavoring to shatter the status quo while reaching for past glories. Vladimir Putin sees himself as the second coming of Peter the Great, “a dictator … consumed by restoring the old Russian empire and addressing old grievances”, in Sanger’s words.

The possibility of nuclear war is no longer purely theoretical. “In 2021 Biden, [Gen Mark] Milley, and the new White House national security team discovered that America’s nuclear holiday was over,” Sanger writes. “They were plunging into a new era that was far more complicated than the cold war had ever been.”

As Russia’s war on Ukraine faltered, Putin and the Kremlin raised the specter of nuclear deployment against Kyiv.

“The threat that Russia might use a nuclear weapon against its non-nuclear-armed foe surfaced and resurfaced every few months,” Sanger recalls.

The world was no longer “flat”. Rather, “the other side began to look more like a security threat and less like a lucrative market”. Unfettered free trade and interdependence had yielded prosperity and growth for some but birthed anger and displacement among many. Nafta – the North American Free Trade Agreement – became a figurative four-letter word. In the US, counties that lost jobs to China and Mexico went for Trump in 2016 .

Biden and the Democrats realized China never was and never would be America’s friend. “‘I think it’s fair to say that just about every assumption across different administrations was wrong,” one of Biden’s “closest advisers” tells Sanger.

“‘The internet would bring political liberty. Trade would liberalize the regime’ while creating high-skill jobs for Americans. The list went on. A lot of it was just wishful thinking.”

Sanger also captures the despondency that surrounded the botched US withdrawal from Afghanistan. A suicide bombing at the Kabul airport left 13 US soldiers and 170 civilians dead. The event still haunts.

“The president came into the room shortly thereafter, and at that point Gen [Kenneth] McKenzie informed him of the attack and also the fact that there had been at least several American military casualties, fatalities in the attack,” Burns recalls. “I remember the president just paused for at least 30 seconds or so and put his head down because he was absorbing the sadness of the moment and the sense of loss as well.”

Almost three years later, Biden’s political standing has not recovered. “The bitter American experience in Afghanistan and Iraq seemed to underscore the dangers of imperial overreach,” Sanger writes. With Iran on the front burner and the Middle East mired in turmoil, what comes next is unclear.

A coda: a recent supplemental review conducted by the Pentagon determined that a sole Isis member carried out the Kabul bombing. The review also found that the attack was tactically unpreventable.

Sanger also summarizes a tense exchange between Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel , over the Gaza war.

“Hadn’t the US firebombed Tokyo during world war two? Netanyahu demanded. “Hadn’t it unleashed two atom bombs? What about the thousands who died in Mosul, as the US sought to wipe out Isis?”

On Thursday, the US vetoed a resolution to confer full UN membership on the “State of Palestine”. Hours later, Standard & Poor’s downgraded Israel’s credit rating and Israel retaliated against Iran.

N ew Cold Wars does contain lighter notes. For example, Sanger catches Donald Trump whining to Randall Stephenson, then CEO of AT&T , about his (self-inflicted) problems with women. The 45th president invited Stephenson to the Oval Office, to discuss China and telecommunications. Things did not quite work out that way.

“Trump burned up the first 45 minutes of the meeting by riffing on how men got into trouble,” Sanger writes. “It was all about women. Then he went into a long diatribe about Stormy Daniels.”

Stephenson later recalled: “It was ‘all part of the same stand-up comedy act’ … and ‘we were left with 15 minutes to talk about Chinese infrastructure’.”

Trump wasn’t interested. Stephenson “could see that the president’s mind was elsewhere. ‘This is really boring,’ Trump finally said.”

On Thursday, in Trump’s hush-money case in New York, the parties picked a jury. Daniels is slated to be a prosecution witness.

Sanger ends his book on a note of nostalgia – and trepidation.

“For all the present risks, it is worth remembering that one of the most remarkable and little-discussed accomplishments of the old cold war was that the great powers never escalated their differences into a direct conflict. That is an eight-decade-long streak we cannot afford to break.”

New Cold Wars is published in the US by Penguin Random House

• Politics books
• US foreign policy
• US national security
• US military
• Biden administration

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How our treatment of animals has changed — and hasn’t — in 150 years

‘our kindred creatures’ takes readers through the history of the animal rights movement.

It was a “revolution in kindness,” we read in “ Our Kindred Creatures: How Americans Came to Feel the Way They Do About Animals .” That’s how Bill Wasik, the editorial director of the New York Times Magazine, and his wife, the veterinarian Monica Murphy, describe the animal welfare movement, launched in 1866 after the Civil War when Henry Bergh, an American diplomat, founded the ASPCA, the first animal protection organization in the United States.

This well-researched book is an enlightening if somewhat rambling survey of how our treatment of animals has changed over the past century and a half. It is also, frustratingly, a testament to how much has stayed the same.

The story Wasik and Murphy tell begins on the streets of New York, where workhorses forced to haul overloaded carts were routinely whipped by their owners, and dog and cock fights were staged for gambling and entertainment. Such public displays of cruelty offended the new urban elite, who were increasingly taking dogs and cats into their homes as pets. Those who had fought slavery now found other objects for their liberating zeal. The crusade for animal welfare, the authors tell us, was a small part of a larger ethical awakening that swept the nation after its fratricidal bloodbath. Within a year of the founding of the ASPCA, New York state had enacted an anti-cruelty law, and the organization was given the jurisdiction to enforce it. By 1871, Wasik and Murphy write, eight of the nation’s 10 largest cities had their own SPCAs, all of them granted legal powers by their respective states.

No one surpassed Bergh in sheer zeal and theatricality. Daily, the rail-thin son of a German shipping magnate took to the streets of Manhattan to command coach drivers to stop beating their horses, and to haul abusive butchers off to court. The Daily Herald compared Bergh to the inquisitor Torquemada, and cartoonists lampooned the sallow-faced activist with a drooping mustache as a sanctimonious sniveler. By contrast, the New-York Tribune (owned by the vegetarian and reformer Horace Greeley) editorialized that Bergh’s crusade deserved “the approval of all right thinking people.”

The authors dedicate an entertaining chapter to Bergh’s clash with circus magnate P.T. Barnum, who displayed a menagerie of exotic creatures in his American Museum, a five-story emporium in downtown Manhattan, which included hippos and electric eels, assorted snakes, and “the Learned Seals, ‘Ned’ and ‘Fanny.’”

While “Bergh had not ranked animal exhibitions highly, if at all, in his tallies of the worst offenders,” we read, he did draw a line at Barnum’s feeding boa constrictors live rabbits, a display of nature’s innate cruelty that he feared would erode the moral character of the young people who witnessed it. When Barnum went into the circus business after his museum burned down in 1865, Bergh focused on circuses’ mistreatment of animals, objecting to the use of sharpened bullhooks to train elephants. The Barnum and Bailey Circus, he declared, “should not be patronized by respectable and humane citizens.”

Instead of resisting Bergh and his irksome crusade, Barnum shrewdly forged an unlikely friendship with his nemesis and eventually joined the board of his local SPCA chapter in Bridgeport, Conn. Whether this marked a sincere late-life conversion or a publicity stunt is hard to say. But Barnum’s public embrace of Bergh and animal rights helped to sway opinion at a critical moment.

Meanwhile, bison were being slaughtered to the edge of extinction on the Great Plains; passenger pigeons, whose massive flocks once darkened American skies, were wiped out in a matter of decades by hunters, as were Carolina parakeets and other birds decimated for feathers to adorn women’s hats. The Audubon Society was established in 1886 to help safeguard imperiled species.

Fashion could be cruel to animals, but so too could science. The authors introduce Caroline Earle White, a Philadelphia Quaker converted to Catholicism. White channeled her religious belief in the sanctity of life to the founding of the American Anti-Vivisection Society, an organization that opposed the testing of animals in laboratories.

The medical establishment of the day fought back. Animal experimentation had produced remarkable benefits, including several lifesaving vaccines developed by the French microbiologist Louis Pasteur in the 1870s and ’80s. However, in less-able hands, the authors point out, millions of animal lives had been needlessly wasted — and continue to be wasted — “to no good end.”

Like so many of the debates initiated by animal activists in the late 19th century, this controversy continues today. Medical experiments, now regulated, are still performed on countless creatures. But a still greater source of mass suffering is the treatment of livestock. Rudyard Kipling, who visited Chicago in 1889, described scenes in the packinghouses where pigs, “still kicking,” were dropped into boiling vats and cattle “were slain at the rate of five a minute.”

The Illinois Humane Society, we read, was co-opted by the burgeoning meat industry. (Beef baron Philip D. Armour was a major contributor and a member of the society’s board of directors.) And while Upton Sinclair’s muckraking novel “The Jungle” brought public attention to the abuses of the meatpacking industry, the Federal Meat Inspection Act, passed soon after it was published, would regulate sanitary conditions in plants but not animal suffering.

Serious efforts to improve the treatment of livestock would have to wait for the animal rights movement spurred by the writings of the Australian moral philosopher Peter Singer during the 1970s and beyond. But the authors remind us that progress has been slow. Sows are still imprisoned in metal gestation crates; chickens are raised so tightly packed together that they can barely turn around. America has more cows and pigs than cats and dogs, we read, but their welfare garners far less attention. And, while we remain focused on charismatic species like polar bears and whales, thousands of others teeter on the edge of extinction.

Yet Wasik and Murphy are finally optimistic that the “circle of our care” is slowly expanding. The question is whether this gradual blossoming of compassion will come fast enough in an era of climate change to save our kindred creatures — and ourselves.

Richard Schiffman is an environmental journalist.

Our Kindred Creatures

How Americans Came to Feel the Way They Do About Animals

By Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy

Knopf. 450 pp. $35

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Best books of 2023: See our picks for the 10 best books of 2023 or dive into the staff picks that Book World writers and editors treasured in 2023. Check out the complete lists of 50 notable works for fiction and the top 50 nonfiction books of last year.

Find your favorite genre: Three new memoirs tell stories of struggle and resilience, while five recent historical novels offer a window into other times. Audiobooks more your thing? We’ve got you covered there, too . If you’re looking for what’s new, we have a list of our most anticipated books of 2024 . And here are 10 noteworthy new titles that you might want to consider picking up this April.

Still need more reading inspiration? Super readers share their tips on how to finish more books . Or let poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib explain why he stays in Ohio . You can also check out reviews of the latest in fiction and nonfiction .

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Sophie Grégoire Trudeau says family life with PM post-separation 'gets messy,' but they have each other's back

New book, closer together, explores building 'emotional literacy' in difficult times.

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Sophie Grégoire Trudeau's new book isn't going to have the "gossip" that some people may be seeking about the end of her marriage to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

"I've met enough humans in my life to know that, yes, some will be trying to sniff out the gossip … [but] there's not much to sniff out, to be honest," Grégoire Trudeau told The Current .

"I'm in a family and I'm raising my kids, and I've had, you know, a partner where sincerity, open conversations, difficult conversations, are at the core of who we are as a family.

"I feel that this space of calm inside me, most people sense it. And the ones who don't, well, it's OK. I can't control that."

Grégoire Trudeau and the prime minister announced their separation last August, after 18 years of marriage.

Sophie Grégoire Trudeau played 'huge’ role in PM's career, reporter says

Canada does not have an official role of First Lady in the way that countries like the U.S. do, but nonetheless she became the spouse of a world leader when Trudeau's Liberals were elected in 2015.

It's not a role that she significantly identifies with.

"People were asking me, 'How is it to be the wife of a prime minister?'" she said.

"And I was like, 'What are you talking about?' Like, I'm just Sophie G. in the house. I'm staying the same person."

Book explores emotional literacy

Her new book, Closer Together: Knowing Ourselves, Loving Each Other , came out Tuesday.

Part memoir, part self-help guide , the book's press release says it invites readers on a "deeply personal journey toward self-knowledge, acceptance and empowerment." It's the first of a two-part book deal with publisher Penguin Random House. The second one will be a children's book, expected next year.

Grégoire Trudeau said the book was finished and submitted before the split was announced, and she wasn't tempted to update the manuscript with any details.

• A timeline of the Trudeaus' personal and political moments

The former couple have three children, Xavier, 16, Ella-Grace, 15, and Hadrien, 10. Grégoire Trudeau said the separation has been a learning process for them as a family, but she believes you "don't have to slay a relationship in order to restructure it."

"We are still bound by respect and love, and we have each other's backs and minds and hearts," she said.

"Sometimes it gets messy, like, you know, in all family life. And it should be, because it kind of makes us appreciate the better times."

Grégoire Trudeau started her career as a reporter and TV host in Quebec, and in recent years has worked as a public speaker and mental health advocate. She founded her own communications company, Under Your Light Communications, in 2022.

She interviews a range of experts in the book, from addictions and stress specialist Dr. Gabor Maté to Canada's Governor General Mary Simon. One of the topics she explores is emotional literacy, which she described as "emotional leadership."

"It means being aware of why we feel the way we do, how we can intervene on our own emotions and how we can cope better with stress and anxiety."

She acknowledged that finding that emotional equilibrium can be difficult when people are facing major crises, from climate change to political polarization to economic inequity. 

But she added that she meets people every day who are working hard to address those problems, well outside the political realm. 

"[They make] sacrifices in their own family, devotion to service, to helping each other to create more justice in this world," she said. 

Anger directed at PM Trudeau

The prime minister spoke with The Current earlier this month, and was asked about the polarization that has become apparent in Canadian politics — particularly in flags and stickers bearing the words "F--k Trudeau." 

The Liberal leader said there's "a level of polarization and toxicity" that is visible in both social media and real life these days, but it doesn't represent all Canadians.

PM on waning support and 'F--k Trudeau' flags

In the book, Grégoire Trudeau writes that her children have seen those slogans, as well as posters of their dad standing on a gallows in front of an executioner. She also writes about attempts to physically harm the prime minister, and that it's hard "to think that your kids might not be or feel secure in the midst of all of this."

She told The Current that the rhetoric saddens her. 

"It makes me sad to see that people, you know, have so much anger and fear, and that we have been taught in many ways to direct that anger and that fear at one person."

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Padraig Moran is a writer and digital producer for CBC Radio’s The Current, taking great stories from the airwaves to our online audience. He started his journalism career in Ireland primarily covering arts and entertainment, then spent five years at The Times of London in the U.K., before joining the CBC when he moved to Toronto in 2017. You can reach him at [email protected].

Audio produced by Alison Masemann

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Crime & Mystery

She Loves Amalfi, Aperol and Killing Off Her Ex in Fiction

Our crime columnist on mysteries by Catherine Mack, Katrina Carrasco, Marcia Muller and K.C. Constantine.

Credit... Pablo Amargo

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By Sarah Weinman

• April 25, 2024

Eleanor Dash, the Aperol spritz-loving narrator of Catherine Mack’s fizzy series debut, EVERY TIME I GO ON VACATION, SOMEONE DIES (Minotaur, 340 pp., $28) is a chatty, self-aware sort, a novelist with a best-selling series called “Vacation Mysteries.” Her books feature the devastatingly handsome detective Connor Smith, who bears the same name as the man who has vexed her life — romantically and financially — for an entire decade. But no more: She’s going to kill him off in fiction. Too bad someone’s trying to kill the real-life Connor, too.

Eleanor has arrived in Amalfi for a 10-day trip with Connor and a group of lucky fans who have won a “once in a lifetime Italian vacation” with their favorite author. Not long after Connor informs her that he was pushed into the path of “one of those hop-on, hop-off buses full of bleeding tourists,” Eleanor starts to think someone might want her dead, too.

Mack, a pseudonym for the veteran Canadian suspense writer Catherine McKenzie, gleefully pokes fun at genre tropes while evoking Eleanor’s zany world. To my shock, I found all of it hilarious and not at all annoying — even the many, many footnotes, which advance the plot and Eleanor’s character.

ROUGH TRADE (MCD/FSG, 374 pp., $28) is Katrina Carrasco’s second historical thriller to feature the gutsy, Pinkerton-trained opium smuggler Alma Rosales, who loves nothing more than a good brawl. The novel brims with the sights, smells and sounds of Tacoma, Wash., in 1888, full of docks and taverns and illicit back rooms where all manner of appetites are explored discreetly, where secrets swirl and betrayals come quickly.

Alma — disguised to (almost) all as Jack Camp — is doing remarkably well in Tacoma, more or less recovered from the chaotic, criminal events that marked her appearance in“The Best Bad Things” (2018). But then she learns that the deaths of two blonde strangers might be connected to the opium she trades, which soon attracts all sorts of unwelcome attention — from lawmen, from a mysterious stranger named Ben and from her former Pinkerton partner, Bess Spencer, who’s now running a very different game.

The mystery smolders; desire and queerness suffuse the pages. When a lover runs her fingers over Alma’s bruised jaw, Alma brushes away her concerns: “It’s the only way I want to have a body,” she says. “Riding it hard. I’m not saving it for the next life.”

Ever since her 1977 debut, in “ Edwin of the Iron Shoes ,” the private eye Sharon McCone has investigated all manner of cases in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her creator, Marcia Muller, was one of the first to introduce a tough-as-nails female character into a largely male-dominated space, years before Sue Grafton or Sara Paretsky did. But Muller has never commanded the same love as either of those authors, which is a shame since her hard-boiled novels are so steady, unflashy and consistently entertaining.

In CIRCLE IN THE WATER (Grand Central, 210 pp., $28) , the residents of a gorgeous, private Presidio Heights street have hired the firm owned by McCone and her husband to investigate vandalism occurring there. The police, uninterested, have chalked up broken windows and the like to “anything from neighborhood jealousy to hatred of the elite to just plain cussedness,” but McCone’s gut tells her that more is going on. “The sudden feeling was strong enough to make me reach into my bag for my .38. Tension built between my shoulder blades, as it always did when I found myself in a potentially dangerous situation. The instinct had seldom lied.”

Finally, it’s become an accidental tradition to close one of my spring columns with a posthumously published novel by a beloved crime writer. This year’s it’s ANOTHER DAY’S PAIN (Mysterious Press, 232 pp., $26.95) by K.C. Constantine, the pseudonym of Carl Kosak (1934-2023). He wrote about small-town Rust Belt Pennsylvania and crimes petty and serious in a way that danced around genre conventions, slow when he ought to have been fast and fast when he ought to have been slow. Somehow, it worked. Most of his 18 books featured the Rocksburg police chief Mario Balzic (a standout: “ The Man Who Liked Slow Tomatoes ,” published in 1982). But upon his retirement, Detective Ruggiero “Rugs” Carlucci became the series protagonist.

Rugs returns one last time in “Another Day’s Pain,” which Constantine completed before his death. Rocksburg is still operating on an unhurried schedule, where the most exciting events center on the madcap, profanity-laced antics of an older woman who won’t stay on her medication. For Carlucci, approaching retirement himself, things are more fraught, with an ailing mother to care for and a relationship that’s stuck in the wrong gear — and that’s before a gunman goes on a rampage.

The dialogue crackles and the emotions run high without tipping into treacle. It’s a fitting farewell from a crime writer who deserves greater attention.

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