When his eight-year-old son is abducted, a widowed crime writer looks to his estranged father, a retired former police detective, for help, only to discover a connection with the decades-old case of a convicted serial killer known as “The Whisper Man.” Watch trailer
Year: 2026
Massachusetts Passes Freedom to Read Law
After years of work by the state legislature and literary advocates, Massachusetts became the 13th state to pass a freedom to read law. Read more
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The Art of the Obituary
…a wry, witty, deeply researched survey of the art and history of the obituary, reflecting on why obituaries matter and what it’s like to be charged with writing them … Roberts ponders the origins of the obituary, muses on the peculiarities of word choice (“In some newspapers, people still ‘pass’ or meet their ‘demise’ or ‘untimely end’ ”), and explores how different publications decide who will be memorialized in their pages and how to address their cause of death. He confides that landing on a succinct description of the latter is often challenging, as illustrated by a list of “actual, incredulous comments from Times obit writers” that includes gems like “Can we say, ‘In a crocodile accident’?” Read more
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Psychedelic Toads, a Trail of Deaths, and the Guru Who Peddled Transcendence
South African journalist de Greef (Poacher), who has spent years reporting on global psychedelic movements, delivers a chilling saga about a former doctor who spearheaded the rise of toad smoking in the 2010s.
Part exposé, part Mexican travelogue, the narrative profiles Octavio Rettig, who claimed that he cured himself of cocaine addiction by smoking the dried secretions from the Sonoran Desert toad in 2012. The author details how Rettig stripped the rituals of the Indigenous Seri peoples for parts, claiming that the Seris had a long history of smoking the secretions. In addition to the trippy high the practice achieved, Rettig claimed the “medicine” could cure suicidal tendencies, PTSD, and alcoholism, drawing huge crowds to Sonora to attend his rituals. But even at the pinnacle of Rettig’s fame, stories circulated about people dying—including Rettig’s girlfriend—during those rituals. As de Greef digs into those deaths and Rettig’s motives, he takes the narrative on intriguing side quests, including a look at the heaps of corporate money being poured into the development of synthetic toad venom. Propulsive and rigorously reported, this wild work of true crime grips from first page to last. Read more
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EJ Swift Wins the 2026 Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction
The writer – who was also shortlisted in 2023 – has won the prize for her book When There Are Wolves Again, a speculative work of eco-fiction set in near-future Britain. Read more
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John Crowley, Acclaimed Fantasy Novelist Behind ‘Little, Big,’ Dies at 83
John Crowley, the American author whose novels earned him recognition as one of the most acclaimed fantasy writers of his generation, died on August 9, 2026, at the age of 83. Read more
Here Is Your Scandi Noir Syllabus Courtesy Of Renowned Author, David Lagercrantz
“If Agatha Christie asks, ‘Who did it?’, Nordic crime fiction is more interested in ‘Why did it happen? – and what does it say about our society?” Lagercrantz tells me. “The only thing that’s certain nowadays—or almost certain—is that the protagonists have more problems than the crimes they are trying to solve. There are few happy detectives in Scandi Noir.” Read more
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Ursula Hegi, Who Wrote Searing Novels About Nazi-Era Germany, Dies at 80
Ursula Hegi, a novelist who drew on her childhood in post-World War II Germany to write searing books about silence, community and historical memory, including the best-selling “Stones From the River,” died on July 27 in Sag Harbor, N.Y., on Long Island. Read more
Comedy’s Dark King Is the Internet’s Newest Book Tastemaker
‘Sunrise’ by Téa Obreht
A Wyoming ghost town provides the stage for this spectacular novel from Obreht about the enduring myths of the Wild West. Read more
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