A Book A Week

When Michael Crichton passed away in 2008, readers lost one of the great masters of the techno-thriller, an author with a unique ability to merge cutting-edge science and technology with pulse-pounding storytelling. Yet even after his death, Crichton’s literary output has remained surprisingly active. Unpublished manuscripts have surfaced, unfinished concepts have been completed by other writers, and we’ve even seen unlikely collaborations, including a posthumous novel with James Patterson just a few years ago.

So perhaps it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that, eighteen years after his passing, a “new” Crichton novel has arrived. A Murder in Hollywood, originally written under a pseudonym back in 1973, is finally seeing the light of day.

Publicist Harvey Jason is no stranger to troubled productions. It’s the 1970s, and Hollywood is overflowing with oversized egos, rampant excess, and enough sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll to derail even the most carefully managed film set. Harvey’s job is to keep the chaos under control.

His latest project, the would-be Western blockbuster Bloodrock, has been cursed from the start. Endless rewrites and a screenwriter who keeps demanding more money have ballooned the budget and pushed the production behind schedule. And now things have gone from disastrous to deadly.

That very screenwriter has been found murdered in the bathtub of his motel room.

As the studio scrambles to keep the film afloat, Harvey finds himself caught between managing the increasingly volatile production and staying out of the way of Harlow Perkins, a brilliant and notoriously ruthless investigator determined to uncover who killed the writer. 

At first glance, A Murder in Hollywood reads like a throwback murder mystery steeped in nostalgia for a bygone era of glitz, glamour, and Hollywood excess. But then I reminded myself that when Michael Crichton originally wrote the novel back in 1973, this wasn’t nostalgia at all—it was contemporary fiction, offering a snapshot of the very industry he was beginning to break into himself.

That realization reframed the entire novel for me. What initially felt like a fairly straightforward murder investigation revealed itself to be something much more quintessentially Crichton. No, it doesn’t revolve around cutting-edge technology the way many of his later works would, but it still contains all the hallmarks of his storytelling: a compelling premise, brisk pacing, and a colorful cast of characters navigating a system built on ambition, ego, and illusion.

There’s also something fascinating about seeing traces of the writer Crichton would eventually become. Even this early in his career, you can feel his instinct for momentum and entertainment taking shape on the page. A Murder in Hollywood is an entertaining and intriguing time capsule, offering readers a glimpse into both 1970s Hollywood and the early evolution of one of thriller fiction’s most influential voices.

For more information, visit the author's website, Amazon, and Goodreads. 

(2026, 39)

How would you respond in a true emergency? We like to believe we’d stay calm under pressure, making logical decisions to protect ourselves and the people we love. I think about all the times I’ve watched a movie and yelled at the screen as a character makes a choice that only worsens their situation. It’s easy to say, “Just don’t do that!” But the truth is, none of us really knows how we’d react when fear takes hold.

In Seek Immediate Shelter, Vincent Yu explores exactly that question through the lens of a small community suddenly thrown into crisis.

It begins with a phone alert that everyone in town receives at the exact same moment:

BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.

Instantly, lives fracture into panic and instinct. David decides the safest place for his wife and baby is his parents’ basement. But in his desperation to flee, he peels out of the driveway before his family can even get into the car, crashing through the still-opening garage door. Nina uses what she believes are her final moments to send a text to her estranged daughter—the kind of message that can never be taken back. Russ squeezes his family into a bathtub, fully prepared to sacrifice himself because there simply isn’t enough room for everyone.

And then, just as suddenly, another alert arrives:

FALSE ALARM. PLEASE DISREGARD. ALL CLEAR.

In the aftermath, these characters are left to confront the reality of how they behaved when they thought the end had come.

Seek Immediate Shelter reads like a collection of interconnected short stories, with each chapter centering on a different character and their life in relation to the missile threat. In some chapters, Vincent Yu directly explores the fallout of how these individuals responded in the moment of crisis. In others, he broadens the lens, showing how the lives they lived beforehand shaped those reactions long before the alert ever arrived.

Though many of the characters never directly interact, they remain bound together by this shared event. Naturally, the episodic structure meant I connected more strongly with some perspectives than others, and as the pattern emerged, I worried the format might begin to feel repetitive. Thankfully, Yu continually finds ways to expand and play with the structure, exploring years before and after the false alarm and using those timelines to examine family bonds, betrayal, forgiveness, regret, and reconciliation.

What emerges is less a story about a missile threat and more a meditation on the moments that define us. It’s the kind of novel that turns the mirror back on the reader, asking not only how we might react in a crisis, but how our lives and relationships have already shaped the people we would become in that moment.

For more information, visit the author's website, Amazon, and Goodreads. 

(2026, 38)

Adora Hazzard has life figured out. Or at least, she believes she does. A philosopher and devoted follower of Stoicism, Adora has built her entire worldview around the idea that happiness comes from wanting only what you already possess. And so she finds fulfillment in the life she’s carefully constructed, raising her teenage daughter, avoiding the complications of romance, and working as a moral tutor for the twin sons of an old-money Manhattan family.

She’s even devised a practical—if slightly eccentric—plan for aging comfortably in her Upper West Side apartment. Together with a group of like-minded women, she’s formed a sort of communal “coven,” built on the idea of sharing resources and looking after one another. After all, who really needs an entire loaf of bread to themselves?

But as Adora is about to learn, life rarely respects our carefully curated philosophies.

A chance encounter with a handsome stranger at the ballet sends her carefully ordered existence spiraling in an entirely new direction. For the first time in decades, Adora allows herself to feel something she’s long kept at arm’s length: desire. And once that door opens, there’s no closing it. Soon, she finds herself swept into black-market art deals, secret rendezvous, and international intrigue—all while reckoning with the traumas of her past and confronting the possibility that happiness might require wanting more after all.

It’s been a decade since Maria Semple last released a novel. While I loved her 2012 novel Where’d You Go, Bernadette, her follow-up, Today Will Be Different, left me wanting something more. So when I heard she had a new novel, Go Gentle, coming out, I decided to wait and see how readers responded before diving in myself. Thankfully, it seems the time away served Semple well. Heck, the book was even selected for Oprah's Book Club—high praise if there ever was any.

In the hands of almost any other author, Go Gentle would feel completely absurd. But Semple has a gift for grounding her madcap plots in characters who feel emotionally authentic and deeply human. At first, the novel seems poised to be a fairly straightforward, unexpected romance story. But a pivotal flashback in Part III reframes everything we think we know about Adora and the life she lived before becoming the woman we meet at the novel’s opening.

It’s a dark section of the story, and content warnings for emotional and sexual abuse are absolutely warranted, but it also provides crucial context for why Stoicism became such a central pillar of Adora’s identity. From there, the novel becomes something more powerful. It's a story about reclaiming your voice and pursuing happiness after years of denying it.

Yes, the road to get there is chaotic and often delightfully over-the-top, but that’s part of the charm. Semple asks us to grapple with whether a life spent avoiding desire is really a life fully lived at all. In the end, Go Gentle is a celebration of second chances and the courage it takes to finally choose yourself.

For more information, visit the author's website, Amazon, and Goodreads. 

(2026, 37)

At the ripe age of seventy-seven, Pepper Mills is facing what’s supposed to be her final move. After a minor car accident—one that ends with a priest confiscating her driver’s license and snipping it into pieces—her children decide it’s time for her to relocate to Vista View, a retirement community in Austin, Texas. Pepper has plenty of reasons to resist, chief among them the fact that her ex-husband (and father of her children) already lives there. Still, she chooses not to fight it. It’s easier this way.

As she settles in, Pepper begrudgingly begins to make connections. To her surprise, she finds a sense of community, and even more unexpectedly, the possibility of romance. At seventy-seven, she didn’t think she’d feel giddy about a man again, but life clearly has other plans.

And those plans are just getting started.

Pepper begins to feel unwell—exhausted, nauseated, and increasingly forgetful. At first, she blames the food, but no one else seems affected. As her symptoms worsen, her family braces for the worst: dementia, cancer, something irreversible. But after a battery of tests, the diagnosis is something no one could have predicted.

At seventy-seven years old, Pepper Mills is pregnant.

Enormous Wings takes its title from Gabriel García Márquez’s short story A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings, a tale in which a literal angel is treated as a spectacle rather than something sacred. It’s fitting, then, that Laurie Frankel draws a similar thread in her own work. Here, magical realism becomes a lens through which Frankel explores aging, mortality, bodily autonomy, and motherhood.

What comes to mind when you think of the word sanctuary? In a world filled with constant noise—politics, work, even the demands of family—having a place to retreat can feel more essential than ever.

This spring, I set out to create that space for myself. I went into my backyard and started digging. Weeks were spent pulling up roots (so many roots), turning over the soil, adding nutrients, planting, edging, and mulching. Slowly, a flowerbed stretching nearly 100 feet along my back fence began to take shape. And at the center of it all, I placed a simple bench, positioned just right to take in the birdbath and the blooms.

Piece by piece, I had built my own small sanctuary.

In her novel, These Silent Woods, Kimi Cunningham Grant tells the story of a war veteran who has carved out his own fragile sanctuary deep in the Appalachian Mountains. Cooper, as he’s known, lives in a remote cabin with his young daughter, Finch. Their life is simple—no electricity, no running water—but it’s one they’ve made their own.

Finch spends her days reading from the books that line the cabin walls, learning from the classics while also being taught how to survive in the wilderness. But as any child would, she has questions. What happened to her mother? Why do they live so cut off from the world? The answers exist, of course, but Cooper isn’t ready to give them. For him, it’s easier to protect the quiet life he’s built than to risk unraveling it with the truth.

Only two people know they live there. One is a reclusive mountain hermit who keeps a distant, watchful eye on Cooper and Finch. The other is Jake, Cooper’s former army buddy and the owner of the cabin, who visits once a year with the supplies they need to survive.

But this year, Jake didn’t come.

His absence sets off a chain of events that threatens the fragile life Cooper has built. As the walls of his carefully guarded sanctuary begin to close in, Cooper is forced to confront a question he’s long avoided. Can he keep hiding, or will he finally have to reckon with the past he’s been running from?

There’s a rich sense of atmosphere and place that runs through These Silent Woods. Kimi Cunningham Grant transports readers to the Appalachian Mountains, immersing us in the stark isolation of Cooper’s chosen refuge. His calm, measured demeanor contrasts beautifully with Finch’s bright curiosity, creating a dynamic that feels both tender and uncertain—you can sense he’s doing his best, even as he struggles to fully step into the role of father.

That character work is balanced by a steadily tightening sense of tension as the story unfolds. What begins as introspective and contemplative gradually gives way to something more urgent, pulling the reader deeper into the narrative. The result is a novel rich in character, steeped in atmosphere, and anchored by a story that softly grips you from start to finish. It reminds us how important it can be to carve out a place of peace, even if it can’t last forever.

For more information, visit the author's website, Amazon, and Goodreads. 

(2026, 35)