Book Review: Hanging and Burning

Title: Hanging and Burning 

Author: Walter Mosley

Publisher: Little Brown and Company

Publication Date: October 20, 2026

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Walter Mosley returns with the latest Joe King Oliver novel, and once again he's raised the bar on a series I keep insisting has peaked—only to be proven wrong. This is old-school LA noir done right: a PI with his own tangled code, bent cops circling the edges, and a client whose lies burn hotter than his sins.

The case starts simple enough. His grandmother, still in LA, still fighting cancer, still the moral center pulling King into other people's messes, urges King to take on a job. The case is for Arman Babylon, a dying gangster desperate to find his long-missing granddaughter, Twyla Mann, before he passes. What looks like a straightforward missing-persons search quickly curdles into something far uglier: a cold case involving a vanished jazz singer, decades of violence against the women in Babylon's orbit, and a client who's been lying to King from the start. The trail runs from LA to New York and back, and by the time it's done, King's had to call in his old frenemy Mel—the serial killer squatting in a deconsecrated church—just to keep his footing.

What makes this one sing is how Mosley refuses to let King's moral code sit still. He's not Reacher with better tailoring; he's a man who keeps discovering that righteousness and violence live closer together than he'd like. Mosley's prose has the same cold clarity it's always had—there's a line about the lights of Los Angeles as ignorant and hopeless that stuck with me long after I put the book down, and a piece of advice King's handed early on, that a person "should be like a chandelier, hanging and burning," which ends up haunting the whole book.

Fourth in the series, and somehow still the best one yet. Five stars, no hesitation.

A big thank you to Little Brown and Company and NetGalley for providing an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review. 

#LittleBrown&Company #NetGalley

Book Review: Chain Reaction

Title: Chain Reaction

Author: Lee Child & Andrew Child

Publisher: Ballantine

Publication Date: October 20, 2026

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

In the 31st installment of this iconic series, Lee and Andrew Child have delivered exactly what longtime fans have been craving: a return to the Reacher we know and love, fast-paced and unapologetically violent in all the right ways. From the opening pages, this felt like a course correction back to the character's roots.

The plot reunites Reacher with General Susan Turner, last seen in "Never Go Back," now firmly entrenched in the Pentagon and carrying real institutional weight. When a member of her team is brutally murdered on covert duty, Turner can't trust her own chain of command, not even her deputy, so she reaches outside the system for the one person built to solve problems and vanish. That's classic Reacher setup, and it works because the stakes cut both ways: the mission threatens to derail Turner's career just as surely as it threatens to end Reacher's life.

The trail leads to Summertown, Colorado, one of the more memorably strange settings in the series. A diner, a motel, five massive data centers, two solar farms, and a population of four. The authors know how to use isolation as a pressure cooker, and watching Reacher get sized up by the one person tracking his arrival is a great slow burn before the violence starts. The formula is familiar, Reacher and a sharp female counterpart working a mystery stacked with bad guys, but the Childs season it well here, folding in AI, cryptocurrency, and hackers who can kill a camera feed or pop a lock without breaking stride. Add the cross-country travel and you've got a crackerjack Reacher thriller that never lets up.

One line stuck with me long after I closed the book: "You did the right thing. What was he going to do to you? That's how you measure it. Like for like, but get your retaliation in first. That's what I used to tell my people. Words to live by." It's a perfect distillation of the Reacher ethos, and a reminder of why this character still resonates thirty-one books in.

I finished "Chain Reaction" with the satisfied exhaustion only a great Reacher book delivers. The Child brothers have crafted another winner that has me already looking forward to book 32. Whether you're a longtime fan or new to the series, this one earns its place on the shelf.

A big thank you to Ballantine and NetGalley for providing an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review. 

#Netgalley #Ballantine

Book Review: We Chase Shadows

Title: We Chase Shadows

Author: Richard Osman

Publisher: Viking Penguin

Publication Date: September 15, 2026

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Amy, Rosie, and Steve are back, and this time it's their case from the jump: a body on the steps of an Italian villa, a threatening note, and a client who very much does not want the police involved. What starts as a straightforward "find the note-writer" job spirals fast, pulling in Sweden's most-wanted, a sharp-elbowed ex-wife, and a business rival with plenty to hide—and the trail doesn't stay in Italy for long, bouncing from Barcelona to Palm Springs to, of all places, Steve's local pub.

The characters are, as ever, the real draw. The trio's dynamic has settled into something warmer and funnier than book one—Steve, the retired policeman still grieving, his bodyguard daughter-in-law Amy, and the wonderfully unfiltered older writer, Rosie, with an oversized appetite for life. The office manager, a former actor's agent with a negotiator's instincts, steals more scenes than a supporting player has any right to. Osman's British humor is in fine form throughout—tongue-in-cheek even in the tensest moments, like two m
ates casually griping about speeding tickets while one's mid-murder-investigation and the other's recovering in hospital from a beating. And yes, this might be the only book I've ever read to deploy "jibber-jabbering" completely unironically.

The mystery itself earns its keep. One murder becomes several, suspects multiply, and just when I was sure I'd cracked it, Osman pulled the rug out—a few times, actually. The soundtrack of 70s British rock references running underneath it all is a nice touch, giving the book a lived-in, needle-drop feel even without an actual soundtrack. And amid all the plotting, there's a line that stopped me cold: "Life itself isn't enough to hold you captive, but love is." Osman can write a punchy mystery and still land a gut-punch of a sentence when he wants to.

You don't strictly need to have read the first book, but it'll help you clock the trio's habits and rhythms faster. Either way, this is a hugely satisfying return, and I'm already impatient for whatever's next.

#NetGalley #VikingPenguin

Book Review: Bad Intentions

Title: Bad Intentions

Author: Iliana Xander

Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press

Publication Date: August 25, 2026

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

I do like a thriller that turns family secrets into a slow-burning fuse, and Bad Intentions lit mine early and kept it burning. Josie Boots is coming off a very public fall from grace when she returns to Burnville to care for her ailing grandmother, only to find that the town's oldest, ugliest secrets have been waiting for her right along with the casseroles and cold stares.

Josie herself is the book's biggest strength. I've never been "canceled," but we've all felt the burn of online hostility, and it made her an easy narrator to root for even when she was making questionable choices. Xander surrounds her with a town full of peo
ple who are, almost without exception, nasty, guarded, and sitting on secrets they'd rather die than share — and a few of them very nearly do.

The plotting is where this book really earns its keep. I guessed one of the central twists fairly early, which normally would have deflated some of the suspense, but Xander had two more twists in reserve that I never saw coming, and the way the third one brings the denouement was genuinely satisfying. 

What I appreciated most was the moral murkiness at the book's core: the idea that a community might choose its own version of justice over the law, and that this choice ripples down through generations in ways nobody quite intends. It's not a subtle theme, but it's an effective one, and it gives the mystery real emotional weight rather than just plot mechanics.

A big thank you to Poisoned Pen Press and NetGalley.  I received a complimentary copy of this book. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

@PoisonedPenPress @NetGalley @BadIntentions