Book Reviews | Chapter 16

Defining One’s Place in the World

A rare map points the way to a dreamlike — yet deadly — destination

By Tina Chambers | May 17, 2022

When a young woman’s estranged father is found dead, her investigation into a seemingly insignificant vintage map in his possession leads her down a path fraught with riddles, conspiracies, secrets, and lies. Peng Shepherd’s The Cartographers is an otherworldly thriller that will appeal to fans of V.E. Schwab’s The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue and Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library.

Secrets and Lies

J.T. Ellison channels Agatha Christie in the suspense-filled Her Dark Lies

By G. Robert Frazier | May 12, 2022

At the wedding of the year on an exotic island off the Italian coast, a Nashville artist and the wealthy man she intends to marry become embroiled in mystery and intrigue in J.T. Ellison’s novel, Her Dark Lies. Ellison will deliver the keynote address at the Clarksville Writers Conference banquet on May 19.

Teller of Tales

An unreliable narrator keeps readers guessing in Valerie Nieman’s In the Lonely Backwater

By G. Robert Frazier | May 11, 2022

From the outset, it’s clear that young Maggie knows more than she’s saying about her cousin Charisse’s disappearance and murder in Valerie Nieman’s coming of age/suspense thriller In the Lonely Backwater.

The Chance to Do It Over

Emma Straub’s This Time Tomorrow takes its middle-aged heroine back to her teens

By Sarah Norris | May 10, 2022

Emma Straub’s This Time Tomorrow is the touching and suspenseful story of a woman given the chance to relive her 16th birthday and make choices that have the power to change the course of her future. Straub will discuss the novel with Margaret Renkl at Parnassus Books in Nashville on May 18.

The Hard Beauty

Unsparing honesty about grief fuels Charles Dodd White’s A Year Without Months

By Emily Choate | May 9, 2022

At the center of A Year Without Months — the compelling new memoir-in-essays by Knoxville writer Charles Dodd White — lies a brutal biographical fact: the suicides of White’s father, uncle, and son. From these events, White fashions a work of candor, compassion, and hard-won beauty. Charles Dodd White will discuss A Year Without Months at Dos Gatos Coffee (sponsored by Atlas Books) in Johnson City on May 19.

Tracking a Killer

Journalist Kathryn Miles trails a 1996 cold case

By Jane Marcellus | May 5, 2022

In Trailed: One Woman’s Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders, Kathryn Miles sets out to find who killed Julie Williams and Lollie Winans in Shenandoah National Park more than 25 years ago. In doing so, she discovers problems with the justice system and persistent misogyny in outdoor culture.

The Rise and Fall of Treason in English History

By Allen Boyer and Mark Nicholls
Routledge
340 pages
$180

The book “explores the reasons why treason coalesced around specific offences agreed by both the monarch and the wider political nation, why it became an essential instrument of enforcement in high politics, and why, over the past three hundred years, it has gradually fallen into disuse while remaining on the statute book.”

~the publisher