The best part of Callie McFee’s post-work evening run is chatting with Barney, an unhoused man who always sits on the same park bench on her route. Thanks to her brother, State, a local homicide detective, she’s one of the first people to hear the tragic news of her friend’s fatal shooting. Just as shocking is the notepad that cops find on Barney, which suggests he was compiling information on Callie herself. This discovery makes the McFees nervous; she’d confided quite a lot to Barney, and one particular tidbit—her power-broker father’s dementia—is one that the family has long fought to keep secret. The authorities surmise that Barney’s death was a mugging gone wrong, but something more sinister may be afoot. As Callie looks into the case, she discovers that he wasn’t the man she thought she knew; he’d jotted notes about other people as well, including Callie’s new “bench buddies,” whom she meets over the course of her investigation. These were Barney’s friends, but if there’s a chance that he uncovered something incriminating about one of them, they’re all potential suspects. One could easily say the same thing about the McFees, however—and indeed, Callie and State do what they can to prevent their father’s condition from going public. Circumstances become more dire when one of Barney’s friends is brutally murdered. Callie vows to get to the bottom of it all, even if it means confronting a merciless killer.

Conrad’s whodunit offers exemplary plotting, opening with a scene that reintroduces series hero Callie and establishes Barney as her warmhearted confidant. It’s not long before there’s a murder, followed by a string of surprises, such as what Barney’s pal Daisy finds when she pokes around his former bench. Callie is a smart and sublimely practical gumshoe; she knows exactly what police do at a crime scene, and although she doesn’t immediately tell State about every piece of evidence she finds, she keeps him informed as much as possible. The seemingly simple case turns increasingly complex, especially after more characters enter the narrative—each new “bench buddy,” for instance, comes with a fresh personality and a backstory that, on occasion, isn’t entirely true. Standouts among the cast include the gruff but reliable State; Gil Morales, Callie’s father’s plainspoken “number two”; and a few suspects whom Callie gradually learns to trust. The book’s abundant dialogue scenes pop, and Callie picks up many details through casual conversation. Her deductive skills are without question, as well; she takes her time deciphering the shorthand in Barney’s notepads, and she notices when people slip up (although maybe not right away). As in the preceding installment, Sins of the Family (2022), the humor is quick and sharp: Gil, for example, sidelines a discussion with Callie by noting, “I need to get you ready for a funeral.” “I’m not that bad off,” she jokes, to which he clarifies, “Not yours.”

In the opening story, “Christmas Holiday, 1945,” a veteran returning home to Chicago after Germany’s surrender prepares to meet the wife he hasn’t seen in two years. Upon arriving in America, he visits his sister, Edith, a nun who’s about to embark on a missionary voyage to China. In “The Visit,” a man named Rob struggles with feelings of guilt and loss as he travels from Detroit, Michigan, to Raleigh, North Carolina, in the wake of his mother’s death. In “Marooned in Marrakesh,” a married couple visiting their son, Mike, who’s joined the Peace Corps, find themselves stranded in Morocco on September 11, 2001. “Recluse” follows Vincent Jackson, a disabled Vietnam veteran who attends a music festival. A performer is murdered onstage, and Jackson—who was also onstage at the time—is wrongly suspected of murder. A married couple in “Maggie” must put down a beloved pet, and in “Hurricane Helene,” residents of Asheville, North Carolina, try to recover after much of the town, including the famous River Arts District, is destroyed in a flood; “Hitchhiking to Hingning” recalls the story of Edith that was begun in the first vignette. These deeply engrossing, slice-of-life episodes have the air of a folk song, in which characters are quickly introduced (often in medias res) and presented with low-stakes problems. The lack of resolution in several tales only further enhances a sense of the uncanny. Certain tales stand out: “Christmas Holiday, 1945” beautifully conveys the anxiety and jubilation of the first Christmas after the war’s end, “Marooned in Marrakesh” and “Recluse” feature people in desperate straits who command the reader’s sympathy, and the character of Vincent Jackson feels like someone dreamed up by Johnny Cash or Kenny Rogers. Despite the occasional anachronism (such as a woman in the 1940s eating sesame chicken, which didn’t gain popularity until the ’70s), the stories set in the past are immersive and credibly rendered.

Legend has it that a doubting Jewish man reviled Jesus on his way to the Crucifixion. Condemned to live forever, he walks the earth without a family or home. As Princeton University historian Mintzker writes, this is the origin of the “Wandering Jew,” a figure reimagined in modern Europe to symbolize the supposed rootlessness of Jewish people. He became a sighting, an apparition coalescing fear and angst into a man of rags. He became a literary figure, inhabiting the corners of the Yiddish imagination. But he came, ultimately, to stand as “an allegory of the history of the Jewish people.” He lived a diasporic life, exemplifying “Jewish progress…and the future Zionist movement, which envisioned a linear path leading Jews out of Europe and into a better future in Palestine.” But for others, the Wandering Jew embodied all that was alien about a culture of exclusive faith and practice. German stories proliferated in print and were revived in the 20th century to give weight to antisemitic legislation. This book is rich with scholarly inquiry. But it is also rich with personal reflection. The author’s own life—from a family of immigrants to Palestine, to an Israeli youth, to an American academic career—takes on new meaning, as ghosts of friends and relatives haunt his dreams and the modern state of Israel betrays his hopes. Mintzker writes, “The estranged lover leads a life of exile, constantly on the lookout for a way back to a lost (real or imaginary) home.” Historical research grants insight into our desires, and we make sense out of love and loss by turning to the myths of culture. “Aren’t all our lives bound in intimate bonds of fiction?”

Tess Hawthorne would rather be home in Norfolk, even though she’s seen as the “scandalous spinster of Wiggenstow.” But she’s happy to have found a job, so she’s in London helping a rich woman catalog her library, until a run-in with a “tall, broad-shouldered madman” leads to her losing her position. Back home, she’s excited to learn that a rich American has agreed to finance a dig in her town that she’s longed to work on—then discovers that the rogue from the library will be running things on the funder’s behalf. Dominic Prince comes from a family of antiquarians, so Tess has to admit he’s ideal to lead the project. They make peace after Dominic apologizes and welcomes her on the dig, though she’s dismayed to hear that any discoveries aren’t likely to stay in England. Despite her misgivings, they fall into an easy pattern, which leads to an undeniable attraction that turns physical quickly. And though their connection only deepens from there, things get more complicated when the dig starts turning up unexpected treasures. The second entry in the Princes of London series is a charming, low-stakes romance with lots of fun archaeological details based in the actual history of the area (though with a few small tweaks to the timeline). Tess and Dominic have a kind, easy chemistry that will please readers looking for a cozy story, as their relationship is both spicy and straightforward. Though this is a fairly traditional Victorian romance in many ways, the focus on Norfolk over London is compelling, and Carlyle’s fans will love the clever heroine who prefers digging for ancient artifacts over digging into society drama.

Sam is in her early 30s, two years out of her English and Comparative Literature Ph.D. program, and, like many of her cohort, barely scraping by as an adjunct. When she lands a spot at Rosedale, an elite private college, as a last-minute replacement for an older professor, her problems seem temporarily solved. Sam is optimistic, even if her schedule is grueling and her salary minuscule; even if the classes she’s teaching—The Masculine Voice and The Campus Novel—are barely veiled attacks on the #MeToo movement; even if the person who hires her says, “I just need a live body.” Then, on her first day, Sam runs into another recent hire: Tom Sternberg, her grad-school adviser, with whom she’d had a complexly intimate relationship. Sam discovers Tom’s long-awaited new novel centers around an older professor “reckoning with his checkered past” as the “feminist movement sweep[ing] the nation” emboldens a bitter former student to publicize their affair. The premise sounds familiar to Sam, as does the female antagonist—and she certainly sounds familiar to Sam’s grad-school classmates, who close ranks against her. Reeling under Tom’s repurposing of their shared history as a springboard back into relevance, and stung by reviews lauding the book as “fiercely honest,” Sam begins a downward spiral that gains speed as she nears rock bottom. The harsh realities of Sam’s exploitation by systems that were meant to both educate and employ her are leavened by the character’s wry humor; however, the novel suffers at times from a reliance on expository info-dumps to underscore its critique of higher education’s abuses, which are more effectively explored in-scene. Regardless, this exposé of academia from the perspective of its most vulnerable residents offers a vital message at a time when it’s easy to forget what’s supposed to be at the center of all institutions: people—messy, unpredictable, and filled with fragile hope.