Set in near-future New York City, the premise is as simple as it is brutally effective: In an effort to combat rampant overpopulation, the city instituted a “controversial randomized extermination program” called the Kill Train initiative. Professional assassins murder all passengers on a random subway train by the end of the ride. The odds of being on a Kill Train are 1 in 10,000, so most of the populace are willing to take the chance when traveling throughout the city. Enter Vanessa Crow, a struggling single mother with a teenage daughter who is on the precipice of a mental breakdown. When circumstances force her onto a subway train, she knows the odds are in her favor as 580 passengers were just slaughtered on a Kill Train the day before. She fatefully meets an old college friend, Corwin, who reminds Vanessa of the badass woman she used to be. But when the two friends discover that they’re on a Kill Train, Vanessa is forced to battle much more than a group of psychotic killers. Powered by an intriguing, albeit absurd, concept and complemented by visually stunning (and potentially traumatizing) illustrations by Martina Niosi—dismembered and decapitated bodies, intestines hanging like party streamers, etc.—it’s Vanessa’s inner journey through past trauma that makes this graphic novel so memorable. Her problematic relationship with her mother, her unstable financial situation, and her tumultuous but intimate bond with her daughter make her a character that readers can not only understand and identify with but also root for as she fights for her life. Ass-kicking motherly characters like Terminator’s Sarah Connor and Alien’s Ellen Ripley have nothing on Cuartero-Briggs’ Crow.

In 1941 Leningrad, Katya Karavayeva, a former radio installer, finds herself in dire straits because “some senior Party official had taken the word of an envious liar,” resulting in her losing her Party membership and her job. Desperate to get herself back into the Party’s good graces, she leaves her 15-year-old daughter, Yelena, with her mother-in-law, Sofya, to join the Volunteer Corps; she’s soon helping to build antitank trenches near the town of Luga to thwart the invading German army. When her group finds itself under attack, Katya manages to escape with fellow comradeSvet Grigorova, a teenager with her own reasons for joining the Corps. Katya must rely on Svet’s survival skills to keep them alive as they stay hidden in the woods, and she learns much about herself in the process. After many months, Katya returns to her German-occupied hometown of Staraya Russa and begins to rebuild her life. There, Katya thinks about her choices that have led her into her current situation. She wants to atone for betraying her husband, who was arrested and imprisoned after she made a comment about his lack of patriotic devotion; she also dreams of returning to her daughter. After she joins the Soviet partisans, she gains a new perspective on the war—and on herself. Over the course of this follow-up to Lost Souls of Leningrad (2022), Parry richly develops her characters and crafts a compelling tale of second chances that will captivate readers; indeed, it grabs the reader’s attention with a tension-filled narrative right from the start. Her keen eye for detail, and her clear ability to infuse real-life history into her story, demonstrates her commitment and discipline when it comes to historical fiction. Newcomers will find that this series installment stands perfectly well on its own; however, they’ll surely be eager to read the next and final installment.

Jane Leigh—whose late husband, John Lo, was acquitted of killing a colleague at the law firm where he was a partner—is dying of cancer. When her children, Hunter, a reporter, and Brennan, an attorney, re-engage with each other during Jane’s final days, brother and sister realize they disagree on their father’s guilt. Their decision to try to solve this stone-cold case soon disrupts their schedules and psyches, and readers will find their sleuthing sound, if a little serendipitous, such as when an old family friend gives them access to confidential files. However, the best and most haunting writing in lawyer Suthammanont’s debut concerns John Lo himself, a first-generation Chinese American whose parents came from the region of Teochew culture. John recalls that his father expressed satisfaction (“pride was an overstatement”) with him only twice, when he graduated from college and when he got into law school: “John knew that was because it meant that his life would be better than his father’s.” His father gave John a springboard for success, but also the titular hollow spaces in his makeup—areas of dissatisfaction and longing that John unfortunately fills with alcohol, then with an affair with gorgeous associate Jessica DeSalvo, whose murder shatters his life. Chapters alternate between Then (before and after the murder) and Now (when Hunter and Brennan join forces), and while this is surely meant to destabilize readers, it also puts into stark relief how separate the experiences of an outsider parent can be from those of their multiracial children. While John Lo dealt with macro- and microaggressions from people in most areas of his life, Hunter and Brennan move through the same New York City world without friction, yet saddened and confused by their father’s deeds. It’s an intriguing, if ultimately slightly muddy, combination of sleuthing and character study from a talented writer.

“They were not normal, those girls”: This is the sentiment held by a majority of townsfolk in the riverside Oxfordshire village of Little Nettlebed not too long after the English Civil War. Sisters Anne, Elizabeth, Hester, Grace, and Mary Mansfield are “the fierce one, the pretty one, the tomboy, the nervous one, the youngest.” They range in age from 19 down to 6, have lost both their parents and, newly, their grandmother, leaving them to care for their farmer grandfather, who is losing his sight. No one can quite pinpoint what it is about them—their insular nature, their closeness, their standoffishness toward other villagers—but most of the townspeople keep their distance. When the town ferryman, the misogynistic alcoholic Pete Darling, claims to have seen the girls changing into dogs under cover of night, the rumor spreads through Little Nettlebed with lightning speed. Soon, the girls are being blamed for misfortunes: dead hens, falling levels of water in the river. As word spreads about the girls’ strange affliction and authority figures from the vicar to the doctor get involved, the town’s hysteria escalates until a catastrophic act of violence changes everything. Purvis shifts narration across multiple villagers, including Darling and the girls’ grandfather, to show the corrosive power of group mentality and social conformity—and to illuminate the simple bravery of being true to who you are. The novel is a master class in paranoia and strategic ambiguity. Like Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” it shows that the horrors lurking beneath small-town life are timelessly unsettling.

Olive interviews writers for a living, getting them to open up about their artistic processes. An audiophile since childhood, 33-year-old Olive has the unsettling habit of surreptitiously recording all her conversations. She stockpiles these snippets of life, a form of intimacy and control. When she meets Theo, a hunky surgeon, the recorder is on, giving her a perpetual loop of their meet-cute. When Theo finds out about the weeks of recordings of runs, dinners, sex, and more, he’s initially outraged. But he’s a little quirky, too—he has a collection of hair ties and notes found on the subway, some tissue from a patient—and soon recording becomes a kind of foreplay. But this is not enough for Olive, who watches Theo’s building on nights they’re not together, and is resentful of anything that occupies his attention. One night while hunching over his sleeping body, she pulls his teeth apart and splits his body down the middle, steps inside (shrinking to appropriate size), and snuggles between his beating, slushing organs, becoming covered in fatty ooze. Finally satisfied with this level of closeness, she becomes addicted to “climbing” into sleeping Theo and eventually brings her recording equipment. Things get weirder from there. Raising interesting questions about boundaries within relationships (Olive suspects her own clingy mother used to climb into her), the novel literalizes the romantic trope of becoming one with your partner, while ingeniously satirizing female neediness. There is a predatory nature to Olive’s possessiveness—or is that love?