Nineteen-year-old Amara Kalogridas’ life isn’t perfect: Her mother died nine years ago, after which her father struggled with alcohol abuse, but her family has pulled through. Now, Amara, her brother, Greg, her best friend, Sophie, and her archaeologist father are working on a dig in Tunisia, where they’re hoping to learn more about the rise and fall of Carthage. Amara is just an intern, but she’s determined to make a discovery of her own. Soon enough she does—and the artifact she uncovers sends her back in time to ancient Carthage. Time travel is bad enough, but Amara quickly learns that she’s in an alternate universe with harpies, djinn, and other beings. Amara has unwittingly become embroiled in the Punic Wars and an even older conflict involving beings that move between dimensions and have their own convoluted motivations. Magical Carthage and the possible futures it invokes make for thought-provoking exploration and speculation. The potential of the alternate-reality situation, however, is diffused by Amara’s preoccupation with her love life and the ancient love triangle that develops, which are less intriguing elements of the story. The plot is largely engaging, although the novel is at times overly reliant on dialogue for exposition.

Among the many scars left by the Holocaust remain the gaping grounds and bulldozed squares where houses of Jewish worship once stood. More than sites of faith, these buildings were community centers, nodes for family and social life. And in their shape and size, the European synagogues were structures unique to a time and place. They represent that blend of enlightenment reason with observant devotion that characterized Jewish life in towns and cities from Livorno to Aachen, from Dresden to Kaliningrad, from Tartu to Vienna. As Ismar Schorsch writes in a foreword to this collection of paintings of lost synagogues, “The synagogue emerged as an utterly new and revolutionary religious institution that privileged intimate verbal prayer over the operation of a vast sacrificial cult.” Synagogues were led by rabbis. They held copies of the Torah. They brought together communities of worship. Jewish tradition requires at least 10 men (a minyan) to form a functioning congregation. By traveling to places that no longer exist, the reader goes on a journey of worship, participating in a recreated minyan of the mind. Should readers use this book to travel to these sites—Strongwater’s colorful and folksy paintings recreate 77 lost synagogues—they will find themselves filling in lacunae in the history of Jewish life. There were once roughly 17,000 synagogues in Europe. Only 3,300 stood after World War II, and only 700 of those remain as synagogues. Strongwater writes, “Because the synagogues painted for this book necessarily represent only those important enough to have been documented in their time, they must do double duty, reminding us of the thousands more that were obliterated without leaving any historical record.” These thousands of buildings, magnificent in their time, cannot be rebuilt. But they can be reinhabited by the creative readers of this haunting travelogue through time.

Ellie Belmont and Kathryn Kepler, together for five years, live a happy and fulfilling life in Edina, a suburb of Minneapolis. Despite their contentment, an email from Kathryn’s high school boyfriend prompts Ellie to face her fear that Kathryn might leave her for a man. The recently widowed Gary Gibson, a successful Florida real estate agent, asks Kathryn to lunch while he’s in town. Although Kathryn has no interest in rekindling her relationship with him, the email ultimately leads Ellie and Kathryn to discuss getting married. While Ellie views marriage as a “public and legal affirmation of our love,” Kathryn is wary after weathering a bitter divorce from her philandering husband, Joe Martinson. On a getaway at the Temperance River, Kathryn meets a woman whose understanding and wisdom inspires her to propose to Ellie. The couple starts planning the ceremony with the help of Ellie’s friends and Kathryn’s son, Nate, and his wife. As the wedding date approaches, a family tragedy and a crisis lead to unexpected reconciliations and opportunities for new beginnings. The latest from Bohan, whose previous book was A Light on Altered Land(2020), continues the love story of Ellie Belmont and Kathryn Kepler, retirees whose relationship brings great joy to their golden years. Bohan’s tale ably balances the couple’s passion with a thoughtful exploration of how past relationships, especially Kathryn’s marriage to Joe and Ellie’s marriage to her late wife, affects their perspectives. The novel includes a well-developed cast and meaty subplots, especially one involving Kathryn’s emotionally distant daughter, Jennifer, who struggles to accept Kathryn and Ellie’s upcoming wedding. That said, while the prose is sharp, it could benefit from additional copyediting (Emily Dickinson instead of “Emily Dickenson”).

Enid, who’s nearly 70, is no stranger to grief, having lost her brother at a young age, but nothing prepares her for the death of her husband, Hugo.The two built a quiet life together, marked by pleasant morning coffees and strolls through the local grocery store. As they grew older, however, they came face-to-face with the inevitable: One of them would have to go on living without the other. Hoping to ease their future pain, the couple turned to Assembled Souls—a new artificial-intelligence technology that digitally recreates loved ones after their deaths. Enid was initially uneasy with the idea, but after Hugo died unexpectedly in his sleep, she must now confront the unthinkable. With just a year to decide whether to activate Hugo’s holographic Assembled Soul, Enid wrestles with uncertainty, writing letters to her late spouse, reflecting on their shared past and on her future without him. When she finally decides to bring the Assembled Soul online, she’s struck by how familiar the simulation seems: “He was perfectly Hugo. A shudder went through her. And then another.” Although she’s troubled by inconsistencies in its memory and the impossibility of physical touch, she soon settles into old patterns with the new Hugo. Equal parts heartwarming and bittersweet, Monier’s novel reimagines the universal experience of grief through the lens of technology, addressing both the comfort and the uncanniness that AI can bring. With cutting-edge technologies emerging around the globe, the author effectively asks what this kind of tech-assisted afterlife would look like in the real world, where people are already turning to chatbots to fill emotional voids. Some readers may wish that the novel probed the emotional and ethical implications of its premise more deeply. However, the bond between Enid and Hugo remains tender and affecting, while also reminding readers that not everything that technology allows can replicate reality.

This fourth installment of a series finds Farrell’s main characters, part-time private investigator Eddie O’Connell and his Uncle Mike, once again caught up in horse racing, bookmaking, and the mob. Mike, a retired cop, is the owner of O’Connell’s Tavern in Chicago, where Eddie acts as bar manager. As the novel opens, Eddie’s girlfriend, Nicole Nicoletti, gets a surprise visit from Jessie Rivera, who’s part of a “power couple” in Chicago horse racing. Jessie’s partner is Sal, Nicole’s horse trainer father, who is accused of doping his steeds. He maintains he’s being framed, but nevertheless, he faces a serious suspension. The mere hint of the crime initially chills Eddie’s sympathies, since he has grown up around the racing world and hates the idea of drugging horses. “I’d heard of other trainers being suspended for juicing, and all I had to say was ‘good riddance,’ ” he thinks. “Horses had suffered, and some had died during a race.” Eddie and Nicole begin to investigate Sal’s situation, which gets much darker almost immediately when Jessie is found shot dead. Eddie, Nicole, and Mike naturally suspect Jessie’s brother, Ramon, fresh from a stint in prison for drug running for a major cartel (“A proud man,” an exercise rider describes him. “And a proud man is the worst kind of man”). The murder also draws the attention of the local mob boss Rosario Burrascano (“If you’re the mob’s gambling boss and a murder occurs at the last race track in town,” Mike says, “you get a handle on it”). The heroes are soon neck-deep in a complex web of conflicting motives.

As in the previous volumes in this thriller series, Farrell once again strikes the perfect pace for this tangle of narrative threads. He dispenses with the usual exposition baggage that dogs later books in an ongoing series by gradually and subtly working background and context into the dialogue, which makes up by far the largest part of the novel. Readers see everything through Eddie’s eyes, and since he’s once again the least developed of the story’s characters, the effect is very close to impersonal narration. He’s convincingly emotional about the turmoil Nicole is going through, and when the strain of her father’s scandal and Jessie’s murder starts to fray the edges of her relationship with Eddie, the interpersonal stuff feels real. Farrell is adept at continuously complicating his narrative without leaving his readers behind; it’s a good bet that even newcomers to the series could start with this volume and get along just fine. And as usual, Mike steals the show, always both the voice of experience and the fountain of rough humor. “Uncle Mike had worked murder cases that could pull the heartstrings to the breaking point, yet he was still able to maintain his sense of humor,” Eddie marvels at one point. “His skin was thicker than cowhide.” The heroes’ bleak sentiments fill the gripping book’s darker second half. “We lived in a world where fentanyl could be cooked up in a kitchen in Mexico by first year chemistry students,” Eddie thinks at one point. “Chasing new drugs was like playing whack-a-mole.”