Booked & Printed
by Laurel Flores Fantouzzo
Sometimes, individuals learn in ways only a changing reality can teach them. Do you assume the norms and laws inscribed in your surroundings’ codes will survive for years? Or will an entity crush them? If there are kind, years-old stories of you and a characteristic you carry, or a practice you hold, will present and future people respect them? Or will they ascribe to you dangers and evils you will suddenly find yourself needing to disprove? And the friends and communities and family members you once trusted: Are they loyal to harmful beliefs, only rarely questioning them? Booked & Printed finds authors attempting to answer those questions in new thrillers that shake faith, memories, and laws.
In Sublimation, by Isabel J. Kim, a phenomenon is normal for individuals the world over, for all of history. At the moment an immigrant crosses into the land of their new life, they instance. “Instance” here is both verb and noun. To instance refers to the process by which an original self produces a copy at the moment of crossing a border. An instance is the copy. The original self goes forward to the new country; the instance stays behind in the previous. Both live their own lives.
An instance and an original self can interact with each other, from a distance or in person. Or they can avoid each other entirely. If an instance and an original self physically touch each other, they will reintegrate—join together as one person again, albeit with both individuals’ sets of memories and skills. There does not necessarily need to be a mutual agreement about the decision to reintegrate. Only an opportunity.
In the present day, Rose, now in her twenties, reluctantly travels back to Seoul. She and her mother left for the US when she was a child. Her grandfather has died, and Rose will attend the funeral services. Rose has not spoken to her instance, Soyoung, since immigrating. Soyoung has a fiancé in Seoul. She has a childhood friend, Yujin, also in his twenties, who amuses her. A corporate job. A beloved niece. But Soyoung seethes with longing and jealousy over Rose’s life in New York City. When Rose arrives, her inheritance from her grandfather is unexpected, but Soyoung’s intentions shock her.
Back in New York City, Yujin’s instance YJ receives an unexpected promotion at his corporate job. Yujin and YJ are friends who game and text and call each other every day. They are, Yujin thinks in Seoul, building respective skills for each other to reintegrate, gain US citizenship, and avoid South Korean military service. When YJ wends deeper into the corporate leadership’s secretive contracts, his task turns to espionage. He reveals an earth-shaking change for the future, and he confronts his own nature as a copy of Yujin. Rose-Soyoung returns to the US surreptitiously, now a secret criminal, and meets YJ.
Sublimation is a daring, expertly drawn reimagining of immigration and diaspora stories. Novelist Kim brings us a set of indelible characters, anchored by Rose / Soyoung and Yujin / YJ. Globally, individuals both vulnerable and powerful work in the present day to arrest what the history of instancing and reintegration might mean for the future. Threaded throughout the book are melancholic and ominous reflections on the nature of borders, and what it means to stay or go.
The novel is vast and multivocal. It jumps between characters. Characters merge. Second and third person points of view reveal inner worlds. Kim wends instancing into Biblical stories, Korean mourning, Shakespearean quotes, and US immigration policy. Her methods are so convincing, readers can easily believe instancing has been naturally present for a millennia.
Like immigration itself, instancing has been characterized throughout history as threatening, a revered practice, poetic and storied, a criminal act, or a dire necessity. The US government even has clear policies for reintegration with the copy left in another country. There are dire consequences for disobedience.
Sublimation is a thrilling read filled with addicting unpredictability. Its mysteries strike at the pain, joys, dangers, and absurdities of what it means to immigrate from one land to the next. The novel reveals the arbitrary nature of borders, the varied emotional landscapes of diaspora, and the paper thinness of policies criminalizing humans and their movements. It forces us to face how quickly a person traveling from one land to the next might become a criminal, and how quickly corporate and governmental powers might act in criminal ways.
In She Waits Where Shadows Gather, Michelle Tang’s debut novel, a long-suffering wife, Avery, accompanies her handsome, selfish husband, Carlos, for a trip back to the Philippines. Avery and Carlos are Filipino-Chinese and living in Canada; Carlos immigrated as a young adult, while Avery was born in Canada, and does not know Hokkien or Tagalog.
Carlos is intentionally vague about why they are in the Philippines. Carlos is the popular TV host of a show that reveals hoaxes of the supernatural, ending each episode with scorn for the faith-filled people he’s interviewed. Carlos plans to scout Metro Manila for work ideas.
The couple meet Carlos’s family, who will host them. But the family’s ancestral home is filled with darkness. They have long-dead relatives about which they cultivate a fearful silence. Silence seems a practice to which each family member is most loyal. But despite their withholding truths from Avery, the house begins to tell her itself.
As the so-called coincidences within the estate introduce escalating torments, old, calcified regimes of faith and secrecy are overthrown. When Carlos crashes the family car, new terrors emerge, along with new norms, and new stories. To carry a healthy relationship to the past is to have specific tasks in the present. Whether individuals will complete them, or neglect them, carries consequences into the future.
She Waits Where Shadows Gather is strongest during the moments of a Filipino-Chinese family, a culture rarely included in English-language literature. Carlos’s spousal cruelty, withholding, scornful, and enraged, is its own living haunting. The novel is also interesting for its depictions of the lesser-known, Philippine supernatural. Readers may never again regard a single strand of hair as benign.
ALL POINTS BULLETIN: Expert procedural author Loren D. Estleman returns to gumshoe Amos Walker with Man One (Severn House), his 33rd installment of the series, now in its fifth decade. In classic mystery style, a tearful young widow drives in from a dark climate, looking for the private detective’s help. • The Secret of Saint Olaf’s Church (Pushkin Vertigo), set in 15th-century Tallinn, takes from real history the character of Melchior, an apothecary who investigates the murder of an eminent knight. Author Indrek Hargla is a popular and beloved crime novelist in Estonia, and her mystery travels to English-language readers with a new translation. • Hawaiʻi Rage (Thomas & Mercer), by Tori Eldridge, is the second installment featuring Ranger Makalani Pahukula. At Puʻukoholā Heiau National Historic Site, a sacred site for Kanaka Maoli, Native Hawaiians, a mysterious death thrusts Ranger Pahukula into the midst of a local family’s murky secrets. • Twentieth century Belgian novelist Georges Simenon, known widely as the “father of Maigret,” the pipe-smoking Parisian inspector, was also the author of noir standalone novels—the romans durs. Picador, which has been bringing out Simenon’s Inspector Maigret novels for the American audience for the past year, is publishing the first two of his romans durs: The Snow Was Dirty and The Blue Room. • The Mystery Writers of America announced the recipients of its special awards. Donna Andrews and Lee Child have been named 2026 Grand Masters. The Raven Award for outstanding achievement in the mystery field outside the realm of creative writing was presented to the Corte Madera, California, bookstore Book Passage. John Scognamiglio, editor at Kensington Books, received the Ellery Queen Award for outstanding writing teams and outstanding people in the mystery publishing industry. The awards were presented at the Edgar Awards Ceremony, on April 29 in New York City.