Every century or so, a city will “manifest” and become a living thing, an entity of its own. This has happened several times throughout history: Hong Kong, Paris, and São Paulo are all “living” cities. The transition can be fraught with peril and, if it doesn’t go well, the city and all of its inhabitants may be destroyed. New York is on the brink of becoming more. But when the time comes, eternal forces that oppose the birth of new cities lash out and injure the avatar chosen to see the city through its transition. In response, five additional avatars are selected from the city’s residents. One from each borough: Manhattan, Brooklyn, The Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island. Now, these five strangers must adapt to what has, and is, happening to them, locate the others like them scattered across the city and, together, find and strengthen New York’s primary avatar. If they are unable to accomplish this, New York, and all of its inhabitants, will be lost.

In The City We Became, N.K. Jemisin has written a love letter to New York City and that love pours off of each page of this engrossing novel. Readers should be warned, if you choose to read this, you may find yourself needing to make travel plans to New York to experience the city described for yourself!

The owner of a Boston bookshop specializing in mysteries posts a list of books on the store’s blog. It is entitled “Eight Perfect Murders” and it lists the novels he feels have described unsolvable murders. Murders in which the killers can not be connected with their crimes. Years later, he is contacted by an FBI agent. She believes that a series of unsolved murders in the area surrounding Boston are being committed to mimic the deaths in the books on the “Eight Perfect Murders” blog post. As he is the person who created the list, she needs his help to determine not only if this is true, but, if it is, how can they stop the killer before they commit another murder based on a classic mystery novel.

In Eight Perfect Murders, author Peter Swanson pays homage to the classic mystery literature he is using as a foundation for his clever and compelling new crime novel.

Rebecca Serle, author of 2018’s excellent The Dinner List (in which the protagonist shows up for her 30th birthday party to find the five people she would most like to have dinner with, living or dead, in attendance), returns with another wonderful novel that plays with a question that we have all asked or been asked: “Where do you see yourself in five years?”

Dannie Kohan is a young woman who knows exactly what she wants and how to get it. Her life is progressing exactly as she has planned, until one night she wakes up in the middle of the night. It is five years in the future and she is sleeping with someone other than her fiancé. The experience only lasts an hour, and it shakes Dannie, but not for long. Soon after, she dismisses the experience and continues to pursue the life she has planned. Then, four and a half years later, Dannie meets the man she was in bed with during her foray into the future. As a result, she begins to question her plans, her decisions and everything that she has done in her life so far...

In an age of handheld computers that also provide telephonic functions, it’s easy to forget that just a mere six decades ago if you wanted to place a phone call, ANY phone call, you needed the assistance of an operator. Operators were the, mostly, faceless voices that asked for the number you wanted to reach and then connected your call. First-time novelist Gretchen Berg resurrects this now defunct function of phone calls in a novel that chronicles the work of an operator in a small town in Wooster, Ohio and what happens when she hears something she shouldn’t have through her receiver. This is a heartwarming book with witty dialogue and a true sense of life in a small town over half a century ago.

In American Sherlock, Kate Winkler Dawson, (author of Death in the Air: The True Story of a Serial Killer, the Great London Smog, and the Strangling of a City; documentary film producer; and lecturer on broadcast journalism at University of Texas – Austin) draws readers into the story of Oscar Heinrich, a detective, and chemist that laid the groundwork for the field we now recognize as forensics. Chronicling Heinrich’s work through the cases he solved, Dawson compellingly lays out a career that changed how law enforcement solves crimes through the use of science to connect the seemingly disparate events and elements into the solution they seek.