Tracy Barrett

The music industry can be a cutthroat business when it comes to recording contracts, shady promoters, and new talent desperate to make it big. It can also be murder. Ezra MacRae learns that the hard way in Streets of Nashville, the new crime thriller from poet, novelist, and songwriter Michael Amos Cody.

A scholar of Jewish mysticism, a village idiot, and a beautiful girl walk into a haunted library. Sounds like the beginning of a particularly bad joke, right? With a setup like that, readers might be forgiven for wondering how there could be a coherent punchline. In A Fool’s Kabbalah, Memphis native Steve Stern has generated cohesion where none should exist, creating connections between the ridiculous and the sublime.

It has been said that if an author wants to create interest in a character, send them up a tree. If that isn’t enough, throw stones at them. Bé, 9 years old at the 1962 opening of Doan Phuong Nguyen’s Mèo and Bé, is subject to a nonstop barrage of metaphorical stones. Bé, whose original name is Thương, lives with her mother in a South Vietnamese village.