Terra Slater is anticipating senior year—applying to college, making memories with friends—when her normal life suddenly takes an unexpected turn. At the Labor Day parade, she’s confronted by the mysterious Thorne Wilder, a rare new arrival in North Heights. Despite a rocky start, once Thorne reveals to Terra that she’s really a golem they form an unlikely alliance. Thorne is an apprentice witch who’s working for a coven that ensures that “magic is used honorably”—he’s on a mission to find and capture the notorious missing warlock Cyrus Quill, who perpetrated a crime generations ago. Terra knows Mr. Quill as the town’s adoption lawyer, but he actually created the golem teenagers who populate the small, bucolic town, all of whom were adopted. As Terra unravels her origin story, learning that she too has magical abilities, she must keep this history a secret until she accomplishes the one thing that will either save or destroy them all: assist Thorne in bringing Quill in, even if it means the end of Terra and the other golem teens. Romance, family, mystery, trust, and betrayal weave seamlessly throughout this highly imaginative story of survival and sacrifice, which has humanity at its thoughtful core. Most characters are cued white. Golems’ connection to Jewish folklore doesn’t arise in the book.

“Call this book a complicated grief response, if you like.” So writes Hercules, whose parents lived in the besieged Kherson region of Ukraine, less than 45 miles away from Russian-controlled Crimea and the center of savage fighting over the past three years. One way of reaching back to her birthplace was to speak to the spirits of her deceased grandmothers, for, as she writes, “to me, a non-religious person, my family—including, maybe especially including, my deceased ancestors—has always been the most important, most sacred thing in the world.” Another means of connection over the miles was to cook traditional dishes, not always successfully; when she reunites with her refugee parents in Italy, offering them a meal of borsch, her father, disappointed with precooked beetroot and the lack of dill, grimly says, “Mum should give you some tips.” A forgiving Hercules goes on to explain key points of Ukrainian history and culture, knowledge of which, in her parents’ childhood, had been suppressed by the Soviet state in a process locally called movchanka, “the great hush,” in which there was, she writes, not just “The Unsayable” but also “The Unthinkable.” Fortunately, if daringly, her father rebelled against a system in which, Hercules’s mother explains, the state seemed impossibly huge, and the people—“a blurry, intangible concept”—seemed tiny. That process of subjugation, Hercules notes, did not begin with Lenin or Stalin but with Catherine the Great, whose army seized Crimea, deported native Tatars, and began the process of Russifying a region whose language is different enough from Russian, she adds meaningfully, that “the thing is, we Ukrainians understand Russians, but they don’t understand us.”

First comes the murder of Jørgen Andersen, a retiree who had a restraining order keeping him from approaching taxidermist Monika le Fevre that was rendered moot by whomever asphyxiated him. Good riddance—except for the scratchy, stitched-up wounds dotting his body, which eerily echo similar wounds in the unsolved murder of financial manager Jan Hansen. Next comes the vanishing of animal-rights activist Zenia Dybbøl, the 17-year-old daughter of Chief Constable Margrethe Dybbøl—a disappearance hard on the heels of the case of Amalie Vedel, another teenager gone AWOL from her parents’ home. Since Margrethe is so upset that she can barely bring herself to acknowledge Zenia’s absence, she’s not the best person to head the investigation. So under the supervision of DCI Liam Stark, Inspector Dea Torp reaches out to Inspector Lene Erikson, the rival who’s already heading the inquiry concerning Amalie, in hopes of figuring out what the two young women might have in common. The deeper they dig, the more likely it seems that “everything had started with [Monika’s] exhibition” of domestic pets treated like laboratory animals, which aroused more than one kind of outrage, triggering disagreements about animal rights and abuses that overflowed the debate stage and generated a series of violent and vengeful crimes. Unlike in the authors’ last collaboration (Dissolved, 2023), the perpetrator is so well-hidden that fans will probably forgive some laborious exposition and a truly epic wind-down after the mask comes loose.

In a small city called Carbon, Hal, Carter, Cody John, Zachary, and Dylan are on the high school wrestling team. Most of the time they spend together outside of wrestling involves driving around in Dylan’s decrepit car and consuming drugs and alcohol. Hal, the narrator, is prone to dark thoughts and fixations on the litany of tragedies that have occurred in their town. He understands that he’s different from others, including his friends: “I had gone wrong somewhere. There was no fixing that.” Hal’s loathing is largely reserved for himself but not always; he got into wrestling after an incident in eighth grade when he beat another student so badly that the kid “looked majorly deformed.” Amid their roughhousing and drinking and this bleakness, the boys show affection in their own ways, and Cody John and Hal are especially tender to one another. In a moment of watching his friend, Hal thinks, “If I had only had eyes for one thing then it would have been Cody John, stood on the borderline, cradled in stars with his body whole.” On one particularly charged night, the boys drive out to a place “tucked under the summit of the mountain,” where something occurs that will destroy their lives. Mallon employs an unquestionably unique writing style in this debut novel; Hal narrates in plenty of short, blunt sentences (“Everything he did he hit it too hard. I understood that. I knew all about that”), but some of the language, while interesting, is embellished slightly past its peak (“Styrofoam beads torn away by the warm wind to pack out the cracks in the concrete”). This is an intense, bleak tale that gets even darker after its turning point. Readers (especially sensitive ones) should approach this powerful novel with care, exploring as it does the troubled bonds we hold dear and the traumatic events that people, even and especially younger people, can endure.

Nona, a Philly-based writer whose voice opens McKinney-Whetstone’s novel, has pancreatic cancer, and when she sits down to start a novel, her first draft revolves around a mesmerizing, dying woman, which is unsettling to her. She tries again, and before long she’s written a scene in which a girl named Ayana and her mother, Lorna, survive a car crashing into the store where they’ve been shopping. When 6-year-old Ayana confesses that she was able to avoid the wreckage because she’d had a vision of it minutes earlier, Lorna realizes that her daughter has inherited “the gift” from her paternal family. The Maces trace this trait back to Luda, whose parents were freed in Pennsylvania’s 1780 Gradual Abolition of Slavery Act. In the late 18th century, Luda saw a rainbow invisible to everyone else, and since then, the Mace women—many of whom retain their name even after marriage—have honored what they call Knowing. They hold regular meetings during which they counsel community members who have problems, and then share “after-feasts” complete with dances, chanting, and elaborate hand-sewn gowns that incorporate talismans like a pearl owned by Luda. Nona’s story then swerves from Lorna and Ayana to Ayana’s Aunt Lil, granddaughter of powerful Mace matriarch GG. As a young woman in the 1970s, Lil was banished from family meetings because she revealed the gift of Knowing to an outsider in her bid to build a career in media (she starts with an appearance on the era’s real-life Philadelphia hit, The Mike Douglas Show). Lil’s section sparkles with authenticity, as does a section about Ayana when she’s 22, torn between easy delights with two very different men and buckling down in her undergraduate studies. As Ayana wavers, Aunt Lil returns to Philadelphia. She has a personal reason for this visit, and a Knowing of her own that leads to her reconciliation with the family. As Nona builds the story of the Mace women, she also makes some choices—but it’s difficult to understand what links her actions with those of her characters. Is the titular spirit affecting her? Is she also related to the Mace family? It isn’t clear, and even a tiny glimmer of her ties to them might have held the book together the way Luda’s cherished pearl secures Lil’s long-abandoned ceremonial gown.