This review was first published in and is reposted with permission from Shelf Awareness.
In the inventive science fiction thriller Big Time by Ben H. Winters (The Last Policeman, Golden State), a woman wakes in a hospital bed after an abduction with what seem to be two sets of memories, and a Food and Drug Administration bureaucrat takes on a shocking conspiracy.
Before she regained consciousness in the hospital, Allie had escaped from the woman who had abducted her. She had tried desperately to call her husband, wondering what had happened to her baby from whom she was separated--except she also remembers never having married or had children.
Grace Berney works at the FDA, where she is asked to come in after hours to investigate an unusual portacath in a hospital patient, hoping it will help to identify her. When work begins in the morning, the patient, Allie, is gone, and the request has been dropped. But Grace can't let go of the suspicion that someone used her for some unspeakable purpose.
In most of Winters's speculative fiction, set in worlds clearly distinct from our own (such as in Underground Airlines, set in a U.S. in which the Civil War never occurred), his ability to make the setting feel real through small details draws in readers. Big Time proves his talent remains just as strong when the speculative premise is unknown until nearly the end: Winters slowly feeds information to both characters and readers alike through a high-stakes pursuit for information while Allie runs from abductors. Readers will remain enthralled even past the last pages, as the epilogue leaves ominous implications. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library

This review was first published in and is reposted with permission from Shelf Awareness.
​A murder reunites a group of former classmates who witnessed a terrible crime 20 years earlier in A Step Past Darkness, a twisty supernatural thriller by Vera Kurian (Never Saw Me Coming).
In 2015, Jia Kwon receives a phone call from Sheriff Zachary "Blub" Springsteen in her hometown of Wesley Falls, Pa. Jia sometimes has visions, and Blub, a former classmate, had called her last winter to find a woman who had wandered off from the local nursing home. Now he's asking about another missing person, and the body she leads him to turns out to be another classmate, Maddy Wesley. Twenty years earlier, Jia, Maddy, and four other classmates witnessed a violent attack in the town's abandoned coal mine, beginning a series of events that led to one of them fleeing town and the rest breaking off contact. But now Jia believes a secret that they kept about the leader of the local mega-church led to Maddy's death, and the remaining five of them are the only ones who can discover why.
In her sophomore novel, Kurian expertly interweaves two story lines--gradually and suspensefully revealing what the protagonists, as teenagers in 1995, discovered about the church that dominated social life in their small town, alongside the disturbing revelations that occur in 2015. The heterogeneous crew thrown together for a school project and bonded by their ordeal makes for an appealing team. Thriller fans will be eager to see what Kurian delivers next. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library

This review was first published in and is reposted with permission from Shelf Awareness.
​According to The Pursuit of Happiness by Jeffrey Rosen, president of the National Constitution Center, the famous phrase from the Declaration of Independence is best understood through the influence of Greek and Roman writers on the founding generation.
Benjamin Franklin wrote that "without Virtue Man can have no Happiness in this World." In his autobiography, Franklin recalled a project that he had undertaken based on Cicero's Tusculan Disputations, a Stoic philosophy self-help book, to define and practice a list of 12 virtues. During the first year of Covid, Rosen (Conversations with RBG; Louis D. Brandeis) worked his way through a list of books popular among the Founders, and discovered that most of them used the phrase "pursuit of happiness" and that they defined it in terms based on Tusculan Disputations and the quest for virtue.
Rosen sets forth his case with profiles of members of the founding generation--and the virtues for which they strove--plus a few who later shaped the U.S. government. As he researched, Rosen processed what he learned by setting his observations down in verse. He later found out this was a method some of his subjects also used, and he charmingly includes some of his poems as introductions to the chapters. Some make for positive examples, such as Benjamin Franklin's example of temperance. But Rosen's realistic evaluation never loses sight of the ways in which his subjects failed, especially those who admitted that virtue did not permit for holding people in bondage but did so anyway. The result is a fresh understanding of the opportunity for self-improvement as a founding principle of the United States. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library