The urge to get even runs like a thread through popular culture: Creators who successfully harness that primal drive in their fiction have often built successful careers around it, such as Clint Eastwood and Quentin Tarantino. However, the devil lies in revenge’s details, as author Epperson suggests in this technothriller, which is built around a simple yet hair-raising premise. On the popular and highly illegal KillStarter website, people can crowdfund and contract killings-for-hire at the click of a button: Dirty deeds done dirt cheap, with a high-tech twist. Users nominate potential targets, such as a drunken, bullying British lawyer or a racist, abusive American marketing consultant, and the murders are carried out, quickly and clinically, in return for bitcoin. For KillStarter’s creator—who, fittingly, remains anonymous for most of the book—the rewards lie in serving what they see as “the unseen hand shaping chaos, the mind orchestrating the unthinkable.” However, the game threatens to come undone after a viral frenzy breaks out around the nomination of a predatory Hollywood dealmaker, D’Wayne Robinson, who wastes no time barricading himself at his cliffside California home. The high-profile situation threatens to tear KillStarter’s tightly cordoned world apart. Monterey County Sheriff’s Deputy Lee Mann and FBI agent Miranda Walker have been investigating a string of murders related to the website and satisfying a public that loves KillStarter’s creator isn’t on their agenda. As Mann declares: “This isn’t about liking him; It’s about upholding the system.”

Epperson does an artful job of navigating moral gray areas as the chase ratchets up and Robinson’s potential assassins, who continue zeroing in on their target, are revealed. If the book has a weakness, it’s the relative lack of character development that Mann, Walker, and their colleagues in law enforcement receive. Instead, Epperson sketches them out in broad strokes, as regular Joes and Janes trying to do the right thing. Aside from Mann’s grief over the loss of his wife to cancer and his fiery, if somewhat predictable, “situationship” with Miranda, readers get few glimpses into these characters’ emotional worlds. Similarly, Mann’s computer-expert sidekick, Moss Pendleton, comes across mainly as a relentlessly chipper techie who’s a fan of cinnamon pastries. It’s a disparity that stands in sharp contrast to the villains, whose feral desires for control “over life and death in a world gone rotten” are amply and chillingly detailed. That said, many cyberthriller devotees may see this imbalance as more of a feature than a bug, especially in light of the ambiguity that Epperson weaves around the KillStarter architect’s destiny. This volume could provide a solid foundation for a franchise to explore the moral issues that the author raises so effectively. As it is, it offers readers a rollercoaster ride that brings to mind the chaos of an ever-changing political climate.

Dr. Vikki Barnes is a paleontologist at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. She loves her work, but she’s stayed away from fieldwork ever since her mother died in a freak accident while on a dig. Recently, Vikki, along with millions of other viewers, watched a viral video of something that seems impossible: an enormous, flying, fire-breathing monster attacking a group of people on a small island off the coast of Puerto Rico. At the end of the video, a young girl stands in the monster’s path and seems to somehow communicate with it and calm it down. Vikki’s had to answer more questions about dragons during her museum tours, but she doesn’t think much of the video—until her father, an Army science advisor, pays her a surprise visit. He tells Vikki that the video is real, and that there are “some things that I think you need to see” on the island. On top of that, he’s gotten in touch with Vikki’s ex-boyfriend Matt, who’s a scientist, as well. Together, Vikki, Matt, and a couple of friends they meet along the way travel to the island, dodge terrifying dragons, investigate the military base there, and more. Overall, Manas’ thriller feels a lot like a good action movie: witty, snappy, tense, and energetic. Most of the heroes are well developed, and all are easy to root for. The dragons themselves are intriguing and, eventually, become more complex elements of the story. The prose is clear and fluid, which will help to hook readers. Some of the supporting players feel like familiar types, and the plot doesn’t have any radical surprises. Still, many readers are sure to enjoy this Jurassic Park-flavored romp.

Tergit’s novel, hitherto unavailable in English, is in part a roman à clef, narrated in unadorned, matter-of-fact prose. The Effinger family is a blend of urban and rural, secular and religious, socialist and capitalist, its paterfamilias a watchmaker in a small German town, his children striving to find their places in the world as the 20th century nears. Benno, the oldest, works in a clothing factory; Karl is a bank apprentice in Berlin; Paul is a laborer who dreams of becoming an industrialist. Only Willy, the youngest son, has any interest in his father’s trade, while the older daughter, Helene, is engaged to be married. All find themselves in a Germany that is soon to be unrecognizable in changing times, with Benno taunting Paul, “You want German Romanticism, lilacs and half-timbered houses and strolls outside the city gates, and yet you want gas engines too.” Those gas engines will come along in the form of tanks on the frontlines of World War I, but well before then, the family is constantly reminded of its outsider status. Indeed, the world grows much darker for the Effingers and their kin: Paul, who has fulfilled his dream by founding a factory that builds the first “people’s car,” only to have it torn away from him by the rising Nazi regime, while Erwin, one of Karl’s sons and a war hero, proclaims, “We must stop lying to ourselves and admit that we love a Germany that no longer exists…the Germans of today are strangers to us.” He’s right, as Paul laments, “I believed in the good in people—that was the gravest error of my misguided life.” Pensive and full of foreshadowing, Tergit’s novel nonetheless suggests that things might have been otherwise, about which translator Duvernoy, in her helpful commentary, notes that the book, published in 1951, predated Germany’s full “postwar reckoning with the Holocaust.”

Fetterman’s memoir addresses three major themes. The first—and the one he leads with—is depression and mental illness, which, combined with a stroke and heart trouble, brought him to a standstill and led him to contemplate suicide. The second is his rise to national-level politics from a Rust Belt town; as he writes, he’s carved a path as a contentious player with a populist streak and a dislike for elites. There are affecting moments in his personal reminiscences, especially when he writes of the lives of his working-class neighbors in impoverished southwestern Pennsylvania, its once-prosperous Monongahela River Valley “the most heartbreaking drive in the United States.” It’s the third element that’s problematic, and that’s his in-the-trenches account of daily politics. One frequent complaint is the media, as when he writes of one incident, “I am not the first public figure to get fucked by a reporter, and I won’t be the last. What was eye-opening was the window it gave into how people with disabilities navigate a world that doesn’t give a shit.” He reserves special disdain for his Senate race opponent Mehmet Oz, about whom he wonders, “If I had run against any other candidate…would I have lost? He got beaten by a guy recovering from a stroke.” Perhaps so, and Democratic stalwarts will likely be dismayed at his apparent warmish feelings for Donald Trump and dislike of his own party’s “performative protests.” If Fetterman’s book convinces a troubled soul to seek help it will have done some good, but it’s hard to imagine that it will make much of an impression in the self-help literature. One wonders, meanwhile, at sentiments such as this: “If men are forced to choose between picking their party or keeping their balls, most men are going to choose their balls.”

“Prides are usually made up of lionesses, their cubs, and one to a few adult male lions,” the titular lioness explains. The savannah can be a dangerous place, and living together means “safety in numbers.” Our narrator is pregnant and knows her “babies need food to grow.” She dispatches prey with strength and skills she learned from her own mother, who was “a great hunter.” No matter how much prey the lions take down, the food is shared with the whole pride. Motherhood means the lionesses must work even more closely, raising the cubs together, sharing their milk, and hunting in turns. The lioness teaches her growing cubs “everything,” just as her mother taught her. Teamwork ensures survival: “We are mothers, we are hunters, we are protectors, we are teachers. And we are strong.” Kyung’s text, efficiently translated by Shin, provides an informative overview, complete with an appended page of further facts. The expansive spreads are what stand out, created in paint and pencil on traditional Korean handmade paper. Kyung leaves the realistic backgrounds in black and white, enhancing only the lionesses in rich, golden tones, artfully highlighting their essential authority. Though the hunts are sensitively portrayed, younger readers should be warned that hunting inevitably leads to killing.