When 23-year-old Corey Cordele graduates from the Theatre Conservatory in Dallas, her advisor, award-winning playwright Maxine Due, buys her dinner to celebrate. Now that she’s no longer Max’s student, Corey assumes they’ll be friends and that Max will use her status as “one of the few living main characters in the American theatre” to help launch Corey’s career. Instead, Max reveals that she will be leaving Texas because another former student, Daniel Cho, has offered her a playwriting residency at the Chicago theater where he’s artistic director. When Max doesn’t offer to take Corey with her, Corey lashes out, calling Max a “two-faced snake.” Max expresses disappointment in Corey, saying, “Middle-aged women need opportunities, too. It’s not all about you.” Enraged, Corey flees the restaurant and starts running, stopping only when she feels the pull of French clairvoyant Mélusine’s strip mall storefront. After surveying the shop’s menu of services, Corey strikes a deal with Mélusine to place a curse on Max. Feeling empowered, Corey then reaches out to Daniel Cho and—unbeknownst to Max—finagles a deal identical to her teacher’s, complete with a bedroom in the apartment where Max will be staying. Months later, when the women reunite in Chicago, it’s clear to Corey that Mélusine’s dark magic is working: Max’s mood is manic, her health is deteriorating, and her self-confidence is gone. Corey is unwilling to leave anything to chance, however, and embarks on a campaign to gaslight the woman into madness. This inventive novel adopts the structure of a three-act, two-interlude play, complete with dialogue blocks, stage directions, and scene breaks, but also incorporates swaths of fever dream–like exposition rendered in technicolor prose. Macon Fleischer may not exactly earn Corey’s blind vengeance, but as Corey herself observes, “playgoers [are] more willing to take a story at face value,” and that’s what readers become as the story progresses.

It’s 2021, and Charlie Minto is looking forward to a bright future in El Paso, Texas, when tragedy strikes him again. A decade ago, when he was 16,his parents were killed by a drunk driver. Charlie worked through his grief by completing a tour in Afghanistan as a U.S. Marine, then graduated from the University of Texas School of Law. Now, he’s studying for his bar exam when he learns that members of a drug cartel murdered his sister, mistaking her for an enemy target. He has little faith in the ongoing police investigation and employs a group of vigilantes to address the crime in their own way. They use a whiteboard to track their targets: “One heading was CAPTURED/OUR CUSTODY and a second heading read CAPTURED/FBI CUSTODY.…The last column heading was KILLED, with no names or photos.” Before long, Charlie’s squad fills in this last column. Carroll’s novel aspires to be an action-packed thriller, offering many twists and turns to keep the reader engaged. However, many of the plot turns will be familiar to genre fans. As complications and moral dilemmas arise, readers may wonder why Charlie and his group didn’t foresee them from the start: What happens if there are witnesses? What happens if relatives, children, and people not directly involved in the cartel are put in harm’s way as they hunt the bad guys down? What happens if a member of Charlie’s team—who all have regular day jobs—is shot or killed? An obligatory romance is included between Charlie and Stephanie Reyes, who’s innocent of wrongdoing but whose brothers work for the cartel. Readers may find it difficult to believe that the couple falls in love so easily, considering that Charlie’s vigilante group is holding her hostage and going after members of her family.

In her debut memoir, transgender influencer, actor, and author Rose memorializes events and details during a particularly difficult decade of discovery and desire. Writing with flair and panache, she effortlessly escorts readers across frenetic pages of Grindr app conversation extracts, text exchanges, thoughts about identity (“when does my gender stop being a “gotcha!!!”), and the obsessively portrayed, PTSD-inducive trajectory of her relationship with ex-boyfriend Finnegan. Rose isn’t shy about sex, either, as she presents an exhaustively detailed series of (numbered) sex hookups, some followed by post-sex crying jags, and all grounded with confessions about intimacy, connection, and “the distance between how I want to be cared for and what’s actually happening.” There are numerous themed lists, which are alternately entertaining and illuminating. Not all is lightheartedly frank, frenzied, or superficially queer, however: Most of Rose’s prose is poetic, heartfelt, and explicitly unfettered, particularly when describing the rape ordeal that forever changed her worldview and social outlook. Also heart-wrenching are episodes of caregiving for her wheelchair-bound grandfather, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. Rose lays bare the traumas that haunt her, yet she remains upbeat and proactive, leaving room for future joy and unexpected connection. Frank musings on sexual desire, gender identity, and emotional fulfillment saturate these chapters, which won’t appeal to every reader; an example is her detailed playbook on her own “funeral pregame”—a self-hosted life celebration preceding a medically assisted suicide, should she ever be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. The book can feel disjointed, but taken as a whole, it’s a moving account of pain and personal growth.

When Giuffre first fell into the orbit of Epstein and his partner/aide de camp, Ghislaine Maxwell, she was a teenager who’d already had long experience with sexual abuse. Her father and a family friend molested her, she writes; later, after escaping an abusive rehab facility, she was raped by a man proffering false promises of modeling gigs. In 2000, her father was working at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida and helped her get a job at the spa there. That’s where, she writes, she met Maxwell and Epstein, who, offering promises of massage training, forced her into a two-year hell of sexual service. The first half of Giuffre’s memoir, chronicling this experience, is at once highly disturbing and compelling reading; with the assistance of collaborator Amy Wallace, she’s delivered a composed yet righteously infuriated account of how Epstein manipulated and abused her, then shared her with others. Psychological conflicts abound—she appreciated the money and some of the creature comforts, but she needed to block out the abuses to appreciate them. Giuffre is careful about naming which of Epstein’s famous friends she was trafficked to—one “well-known Prime Minister” goes unnamed, and she admits being afraid to name powerful men. “First and foremost, I am a parent,” she writes, “and I won’t put my family at risk if I can help it.” Giuffre, however, is open about her experiences with Epstein, Prince Andrew, and the late MIT professor Marvin Minsky. The second half of the book chronicles how she balances marriage and raising a family while pursuing legal recompense for herself and other victims following Epstein’s death and Maxwell’s conviction. That material is less bracing, but it helps underscore the importance of the stakes for her. In light of her suicide in April 2025, it makes the story all the more tragic. She was just getting started as an activist, and her voice here is resolute and clear.

Poliquin’s epic journey opens, naturally, with an orange. Fast facts and anecdotes follow; though presented seemingly randomly, they coalesce into a rich exploration of the color through the lenses of culture, history, and nature. The rooster from The Canterbury Tales, “dreaming of a fox whose ‘colour was betwixe yellow and reed,’” precedes a spread about how oranges originated in India and southern China, accompanied by an illustration of the fruits traveling to Europe. Next, the author tracks the evolution of the word orange from the Tamil word naru, which means “fragrant.” The tidbits in this quirky “field trip” bounce around, referencing Mark Rothko’s painting Orange and Yellow, the “International Orange” of American astronauts’ space suits, the orange T-shirts Canadian youngsters wear annually to remember Indigenous children sent to government schools, Buddhist monks’ robes, monarch butterflies, and marigolds in an Indian market. The coda to this tale culminates in a page of color theory, with Morstad providing a painterly palette of variations on the hue. Her artwork, relying on watercolor, chalk pastel, and digital rendering, has a vintage, painterly feel that visually binds this series of postcardlike vignettes. Poliquin’s charmingly conversational prose is rife with asides that betray the author’s genuine enthusiasm for her subject (“This mineral is called crocoite. Isn’t it magnificently orange?”); readers will eagerly heed her advice to “find orange in your world.”