Puzzling Mysteries: New Novels

Bruce Holsinger, a novelist and literary scholar, teaches at the University of Virginia. His debut novel, A Burnable Book, won the John Hurt Fisher Prize and was shortlisted for the American Library Association’s Best Crime Novel of 2014. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, Slate, and many other national publications, and he appears regularly on National Public Radio. His many nonfiction books have won major awards from the Modern Language Association, the Medieval Academy of America, and other international organizations, and he has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. His new novel, The Invention of Fire, imagines the beginnings of gun violence in the western world.

Ten years ago, Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason’s The Rule of Four became a literary phenomenon, which spent forty-nine weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, sold nearly two million copies in North America, and was translated into thirty-five languages.  Now, after a decade of painstaking primary research, Ian Caldwell returns with a masterful new thriller, The Fifth Gospel (Simon & Schuster), in which a lost gospel, a contentious relic, and a dying pope’s final wish converge to send two brothers on an intellectual quest to untangle Christianity’s greatest historical mystery.

John Katzenbach has written thirteen previous novels, including the New York Times bestseller The Traveler, Day of Reckoning, Just Cause, and What Comes Next. Katzenbach was a criminal court reporter for the Miami Herald and Miami News. His latest novel, The Dead Student (Mysterious Press) follows a young man set on avenging his uncle, no matter the consequences. When Moth wakes up on his ninety-ninth day of sobriety with an intense craving for drink, he asks his uncle Ed to meet him at an AA meeting. When Ed doesn't show up, Moth discovers a grisly scene—his uncle lying in a pool of blood. The police pronounce the death a suicide. Devastated and confused, he calls on the only person he thinks he can trust:, an ex-girlfriend he has not spoken to in years. Kirkus Reviews writes, “Boasting one of the freshest and most unlikely duos to appear in crime fiction in some time, the latest thriller by Katzenbach is one of his most enjoyable.”