This review was first published in and is reposted with permission from Shelf Awareness.
​Love, class and scandal entwine in a web that stretches from the Gilded Age to 2019 in the intriguing The Lost Summers of Newport from authors Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig and Karen White (The Forgotten Room).
The book opens in 2019, when architectural historian Andie Figuero's job as producer of Makeover Mansion is rapidly going downhill. Instead of sharing details about restoration techniques and the stories of the houses, she is being pushed toward focusing on salacious tales of the families. These demands are coming at a particularly unfortunate time: Andie has been forbidden to speak with Lucky, the elderly owner of the Newport, R.I., mansion Sprague Hall, which is the focus of this season. In 1899, Ellen Daniels is hired at Sprague Hall to teach music to heiress Maybelle Sprague; her stepbrother hopes this will lead to a marriage to an Italian prince. Ellen is hiding from an unsavory past, but the new circles in which she moves have more connections to her old life than she had hoped. And in 1957, a young Lucky struggles with social clashes and an ill-advised marriage until a secret upends the shaky security she thought she had.
These three women contend in their separate eras with secrets they must discover or protect. The threads of their stories weave together in a tale of intrigue that spans multiple generations--and that involves more than one violent death, as well as other less literal skeletons in closets. Fans of these authors' joint and individual works will be thrilled with the ride. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library

This review was first published in and is reposted with permission from Shelf Awareness.
​Life sucks, then you die. Then the afterlife sucks, and then you might die again. In the deeply dark comedy Here Goes Nothing by Steve Toltz (Quicksand), readers meet no one who is sure what happens after that.
Angus, who drifted through life mostly via petty crime, is anticipating the birth of his first child when he is murdered by a man who is in love with his wife, Gracie, an unorthodox wedding officiant. Never having believed in any kind of religion or afterlife ("Heaven was a childish dream, Purgatory an obvious metaphor, Hell credible only on earth"), Angus is surprised to find himself in a world beyond death ("It's humiliating how wrong you can be") and, furthermore, one that is every bit as bureaucratic and full of drudgery and unrest as the world he knew. The realm of the living faces the beginning of another pandemic, and a huge influx of the dead creates a situation equivalent to a refugee crisis on the spiritual plane. Angus struggles through banal jobs, lousy apartments and amazingly few answers. When he learns of a machine that will let him haunt the home where he was killed, he devotes even more time to obsessing about Gracie. Circumstances might even give him the chance for revenge.
Toltz's vision of the near future and the afterlife is surreal, sharply funny and as dark as the grave. Fans of noir fiction and quirky thrillers, such as Adam Sternbergh's Shovel Ready, will dig right in. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library