In a prologue set in Wisconsin, 51-year-old Robert Charles Landsness is at his mother’s deathbed, urging her to “tell me the God-damn truth.” He has “never quite been comfortable” in his military family, and he has visions of happier, distant past in a “beautiful suburban home.” His mother muses to herself about the “the night Robert had come to her” in 1955 Panama City, but she dies before answering his plea. The novel then jumps back to 1955 to unfurl a tale of young Long Island mom Colleen Goodson, who briefly leaves her 3-year-old son Bobby, along with his baby sister, outside an IGA supermarket, then returns to find them gone. The daughter is quickly found, but Bobby remains missing, resulting in “the largest search in the young history of Nassau County” in New York state. Local police pursue various false leads, at one point questioning a Black family whose car was seen in the area around the time of the disappearance. An ambitious young reporter scores an interview with Colleen, who, like her Air Force-base employee husband, appears strained and oddly detached. The Goodsons receive several ransom notes, but these prove to be the work of at least one opportunistic prankster. As years go by, the Goodsons divorce and move back to their native Kansas. When Landsness later claims to be Bobby Goodson, a new team of detectives reopens the case. By novel’s end, the mystery is solved after heading a surprising new direction.

Nine-time Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist Valenti, whose verse is included in the anthology 13 Poets from Long Island (2023), provides In Cold Blood-like depth to this fictionalized account of what this book’s subtitle notes is “One of the Oldest Unsolved Missing Child Cases in U.S. History.” In real life, 2-year-old Steven Damman disappeared while left unattended in front of a Long Island bakery in 1955, and he was never found. Valenti’s depiction of Colleen is particularly nuanced and multifaceted, noting her flaws and limitations while also the addressing emotional consequences of her abusive childhood; it also effectively explores how she was suspected of killing her own child. Valenti also dramatizes the scope and painstaking work of the police investigation, which grimly included scrutiny of area parents who recently lost children and may have been looking for a replacement. However, Valenti’s conclusion to the story is unbelievably convoluted, necessitating a rather complicated backstory. Many other elements of the story, however, are close to those of the actual case, which had many strange turns, including someone claiming 50 years later that he may have been the kidnapped child. An afterword separating fact from fiction would have been welcome, though, and readers will want to know how much Valenti reported on this fascinating case. Still, the book strikingly captures the angst of its well-sketched character, resulting in an often compelling read.

The best stories among the 35 set in workplaces in this volume, the second such anthology released in recent months by Whisper House Press, skillfully highlight the breadth of horror. Barry Charman’s “The Ghouls” is a timely tale about the catastrophic impact of misinformation specialists on society. “Cute Aggression” by Emily Flynn-Jones details the increasingly unhinged actions of a merchandiser haunted by a cartoon rabbit (“All day, Bella Bunny stares at me with her too-wide eyes, adorable button nose, puffball tail, stubby limbs, and blank space where a mouth should be”). Adam Rotstein’s “Ooh That Smell” focuses on what occurs when food is left in an office refrigerator for far too long. “Second Amendment” by Robert Bagnall describes the bloody outcome when a designer’s shooter game works too well. Rose Skye’s “Alignment” follows a man whose life gets taken over by a popular app. “Koschei’s Thread,” by Eóin Dooley, debates the morality and effectiveness of cryogenics. John Mahoney’s “Slacker” centers on a gruesome discovery made by a prison librarian. “Where’s My Meds?” by Andrew J. Pixton, shows what happens when two creatures can’t get the drugs they need at a recovery center. Lisa Morton’s “When Darkness Comes” reveals how one man attempts to combat ignorance following an alien invasion. And in “Stick to the Script,” by PW Interrobang, a new customer-service rep learns the hard way what lurks below the surface of his company’s toys. Editor Capone has done a masterful job, as this multifaceted collection offers something for everybody. There’s a variety of lengths, from one page to 15. Even readers who usually avoid the genre can find well-crafted stories that they can savor that depend more on suspense than scares. That doesn’t mean that hardcore horror fans won’t find the gore and frights they seek, as there are plenty of those. More SF-based horror (à la the film Alien) would have added to the spectrum provided by the anthology. Still, the modern horror called technology is prominently featured in this vivid compilation. This is a gripping compendium to curl up with on a spooky night or a haunted holiday.

Seamlessly segueing into the third volume, Pullman continues to juggle so many themes and characters that keeping track of them slows the pacing to a grand, deliberate sweep. Still, wedging in references to previous events in The Book of Dust series, he spurs Lyra, her scattered circle of allies, and the sinister President of the Magisterium’s High Council, Marcel Delamare, on toward the remote desert that is the source of the mysteriously powerful rose oil while inscrutable forces are forcing the entire world to become a dimmer, grimmer sort of place. Meanwhile, in a nearly self-contained subplot, the author once again shows his uncommon gift for inventing memorable nonhuman species by flying in a race of magnificent gryphons to engage in philosophical discussions about the inner and outer kingdoms and join a group of northern witches to battle a powerful enemy. This plotline and the climax add some dramatic moments to a tale that seems long and doesn’t satisfactorily resolve all its threads. But along with supplying generous amounts of space for further ruminations about the nature of reality and the role of imagination, the story reunites fans with favorite characters and their daemons for one last go-round.

Seventeen-year-old Winnie Hayes wants to feel as excited as her Papa does about the free land in the Oregon Territory available to new arrivals settling there for a five-year period, but the family’s 2,000 mile journey there from Missouri as part of a covered wagon caravan is grueling. Winnie’s delicate newlywed sister, Nora, is even less enthused about the trip; however, her little brother, Elijah, perks up as he hopes to encounter some Indigenous people. Though Winnie misses the animals on the family farm, she soon finds other interests; one is the cowhand Hal Clark, who is sweet on her, and a friendship also grows with Mae Cook, daughter of the caravan’s trail guide, Big John. Winnie admires unmarried Mae’s freedom—she’s “a doer,” confident on a horse and able to handle firearms. Winnie wants to be similarly brave, but unlike Mae, she fears the Indigenous population. This distrust is one of the many attitudes Winnie must adjust during her eventful voyage. Bear and bandit attacks, injuries, sickness, deaths, and births bring about realizations regarding important subjects like marriage and bearing children, valuing different cultures, the existence of God, and what constitutes a family. While the author takes on large-scale issues, Curtis’ unadorned writing never feels heavy-handed. After a man’s accidental shooting death, Winnie reflects simply that “His body would lie here, all alone. Beneath a giant prairie sky.” There is an authenticity to the likable characters, even the most minor ones, including a fiddle player in the caravan and a grieving mother. The author has a gift of summing up people concisely; “tall and gangly” Jeb, Nora’s husband, is always “leaning this way or that, like a stalk of wheat.” Nora and Winnie are contrasted as being like “a gentle breeze” and “a runaway horse.” Whether the scenery is enormous rock monoliths, the carbonated waters of Soda Springs, or prairie grasses “tossing about like a rooted sea,” the compelling descriptions of the landscape along the Willamette Valley command attention.

In 2002, Swiss author and theater director Blubacher received a grant for a three-month residency at Villa Aurora, a 7,000-square-foot “Spanish colonial revival villa” in Pacific Palisades that was Thomas Mann’s house in the 1940s. That neighborhood, west of Beverly Hills, is now home to wealthy residents, many of them in the entertainment business. Sixty years before Blubacher’s arrival, the then-sleepy Palisades was where émigrés from Austria and Germany, including Mann, came to escape the Nazis and pursue a career in Hollywood. Blubacher’s objective during his residency and in this informative book is to investigate “the period when Pacific Palisades became ‘Weimar under the palms,’” when some of “the Weimar Republic’s most prominent cultural figures found their way here.” Among the figures presented in the book are the director Ernst Lubitsch, “who would become one of the most influential Germans in Hollywood” in the 1930s and 1940s; fellow directors Fritz Lang and Douglas Sirk; composers such as Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Hans Salter; and lesser-known figures such as Lotte Mosbacher, best known today as the “aged Holocaust survivor who recognizes the Nazi war criminal Dr. Christian Szell” in John Schlesinger’s Marathon Man. Some of the stories Blubacher shares are no less chilling for being expected, such as when Marlene Dietrich returned to Germany in 1945 to learn the fate of older sister Elisabeth and discovered that Elisabeth and her husband “had run a cinema at the Belsen barracks, where the murderers went for entertainment. Dietrich disowned her sister for the rest of her life.” But others are lighter and provide a welcome respite, as when Blubacher mentions that when Mann was taken around to many studios on his arrival in Hollywood, one of them was Disney, “where he was shown a Mickey Mouse film.”