Assassin Erica Banks returns to New Orleans to execute a series of high-profile hits contracted by a Cuban drug ring. Banks is a highly experienced professional, and at first, the murders leave law enforcement baffled. Lawyer Harry Barnes, a fixer who doesn’t always stick to the right side of the law, gets involved when an ex-girlfriend asks him to help clear the name of her uncle, who was one of the victims: Chick Charbonnet, the umpire who “handed the World Series to the wildly underdog New York Mets” over the Red Sox. Accusations of game-fixing have been stirred up again by his gruesome murder. Barnes enlists his colleague, astute hacker Rhonda Dickerman, to help him look into Chick’s past, and they begin to uncover a much larger conspiracy involving high-rolling gamblers, the international drug trade, and an assassin. While this is technically an Erica Banks novel, with her perspective included, the protagonist of this series installment is very much Barnes. With connections to every major player in town, he robustly fulfills the well-connected, straight-shooting noir stereotype. Barnes’ previous activities are often described in a bit too much detail—the first handful of his reminiscences adequately establish his bona fides, but later inclusions become repetitive as he exhaustively details every meal and drink he consumes. While many of the restaurants visited are New Orleans institutions and furnish local color, the effect loses impact after so many interchangeable iterations. Though Barnes is the primary narrator, chapters from the perspectives of Banks, Dickerman, and several other supporting players provide necessary context and add compelling variety to the narrative. While readers may put together a few heavy-handed clues before Barnes does, the mix of action and investigation will appeal to fans of James Patterson and David Baldacci.

Cassie Bousquet has been estranged from her mother, Marla, and her twin sister, Ana, for years, ever since her marriage to Marsh, a wealthy California businessman. After her mother’s death, she returns to rural Connecticut to help her sister settle their mother’s affairs. While cleaning Marla’s house, they find a manuscript left for them written by their mother’s best friend, AJ Porter, about the unsolved murder of their mother’s distant cousin—the killing occurred in 1985, the year the twins were born. As they read the story, both sisters learn shocking secrets about the mother they thought they knew and begin to repair their relationship (“We need to sort this out, okay? This thing between us”). Cassie questions her marriage, finding something horrifying on a storage drive that her husband gave her; it transpires that she and Ana are in danger, and their family’s dark past is coming full circle. Blanchard’s novel is a masterfully constructed work, balancing the story within the story with excellent pacing. The connection between Cassie’s adult life and her mother’s past is a little far-fetched, but it effectively brings the plotlines together for a nail-biting showdown. Marla and AJ are vividly brought to life in the flashback section; the twin sisters are less distinctive. After all the years Cassie spent floundering in an abusive marriage, only to have her world upended by two massive lies, she seems a bit too together at the end. Ana also seems one-note—she’s initially presented as the ‘good’ twin, and the story makes no effort to subvert that trope. Marsh is too obviously villainous at first, but his portrayal ultimately strikes a perfect balance between menace and craven vulnerability. Any weaknesses in the characterizations are forgivable in light of the satisfying conclusion.

The prolific artworks of Derrick Adams (b. 1970) include painting, sculpture, collage, multisensory installations, performance, video, and public projects, all reflecting Black life and culture. Illustrated by 150 striking color plates, the comprehensive volume offers essays by curators and art critics and an interview with curator Sandra Jackson-Dumont, all of which offer insights into Adams’ practice, goals, and aesthetics. Ringle focuses on Adams’ use of color and form; Alyssa Alexander identifies the artist’s recurring themes of channeling, signaling, and mirroring; Wimberly examines Adams’ connection to Black experience; and Tillet writes about Adams’ “endless fascination with how Black people see each other.” The conversation between Adams and Jackson-Dumont reveals much about the artist’s background, education, and career. Memories of his childhood in a Black, working-class neighborhood, visits to his extended family, and the ambience of Baltimore shape his work. Committed to supporting and democratizing art, he is a teacher and the founder of the nonprofit Charm City Cultural Cultivation and the Last Resort Artist Retreat. Adams, writes Wimberly, is “a theorist, a philosopher, and a social commentator” who “uses accessible language and shared cultural references to illuminate our societal values, our shared histories, and our private aspirations.” One example is Playthings, photographs of wooden Masai sculptures dressed in clothes from Ken, Barbie, and G.I. Joe dolls. The project, Adams says, reflected his aim of exploring the relationship between Black culture and media. Widely exhibited in both solo and group shows, Adams has placed his work in parks, subways, and public places, such as New York City’s Penn Station, inviting people “to live with art, to play with art, and to laugh with art.”

Ramona Sadler’s carefully curated life unravels after the loss of her professorship and her townhouse lands her in a mobile home at the Nearly Heaven RV Park in Jackalope, Texas— similar to the one she grew up in back in Snap Peas, New York. With her academic career in shambles due to apparent budget cuts and with her future uncertain, Ramona finds solace in volunteer work at a local hospital through the “Patient Pandas” program, despite her stickler supervisor’s annoying presence. After her relationship with her elitist boyfriend and fellow professor, Martin Smallwood, ends, she plans to spend the summer with her family in her Upstate New York hometown; her elderly mother is still recovering from a major surgery she had two years ago, and Ramona wants to be with her while she still can. When Ramona tells her favorite hospital patient, Butch, about her upcoming cross-country trip, he enlists his son to help her tow her RV 1,800 miles. That son is none other than Lonnie Acres, her frustratingly handsome and emotionally reserved supervisor, who also happens to live on a farm near her trailer. Although they’re reluctant travel partners at first, the two slowly open up to each other as the miles pass, revealing their dissatisfaction with their lives and other emotional wounds. Woodford’s novel explores Ramona’s guilt about living so far from her aging parents, and Lonnie’s grief over his mother’s recent death and his strained relationship with his father. The author expertly balances these heavier themes with humor, and a delightful cast of eccentric secondary characters pops in and out of the story. Ramona and Lonnie’s slow-burn relationship builds slowly but naturally, with just the right amount of romantic tension. It’s a straightforward road-trip romance, but also a thoughtful meditation on loss, growth, and the surprising ways that people can come into each other’s lives at just the right time.

In 1950 a well-off married couple, Philip and Stephanie Barber, opened Music Inn in Lenox, Massachusetts, in the Berkshires, a historically white area of deep cultural significance. They later fashioned a carriage house as a performance center for all kinds of music, lectures, and tutorials grounded in the Lenox School of Jazz. A “wellspring of American vernacular music” was born with first-class musicians like Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Stan Getz, and the Modern Jazz Quartet during a powerful postwar movement for racial equality. Lenox is Gennari’s hometown, and in this book, the University of Vermont professor writes of “learning to see jazz, the Berkshires, race, culture, and America itself in new ways.” After providing some historical background about the region, Gennari notes that jazz “may be singular in the strength of its attachment to place…and movement.” For Black “jazz pianist and Brooklynite Randy Weston, Lenox figured as nothing less than a life-defining experience.” He got a job at Music Inn and was encouraged to play piano in the front lounge. Jazz writer Marshall Stearns created influential jazz roundtables showcasing Black artists and writers and was a founder of the School of Jazz. Music Inn’s opening event featured folk singers Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger, and Woody Guthrie while still fostering blues, African, and Afro-Caribbean music. Gennari writes about eminent photographer Clemens Kalischer, whose photos of many Music Inn participants are included throughout the book. In time, Music Inn’s musical performances “mediated between the local and the national.” The author profiles a number of the jazz school’s outstanding students, including Ran Blake, Ornette Coleman, and Don Cherry. Dave Brubeck’s Time Out and Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, among other albums, all had a “deep connection to Music Inn.” Its liberal and multicultural ideology was key to the changes in jazz music throughout the pulsating 1950s.