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In this wickedly dark and comic thriller, Kuhn brings back professional assassin John Lago and his nemesis and now wife, Alice. Is there a mole at Human Resources, Inc., the agency that places assassins as unpaid interns to get them close to their targets? Will the agency survive under the helm of John and Alice [...]

Q: I finished school two years ago (with a degree in literature) and was suffering from the worst reading burnout I've ever had in my life. I simply forgot how to read for entertainment. I recently broke up with Netflix and feel that I'm ready to jump back in to reading for me again. I [...]

Describe your latest book. I Saw a Man is a contemporary novel set between London, New York, Nevada, and Wales. The book opens with Michael Turner, a young widower, entering the house of his neighbors, the Nelsons, by the back door. Michael believes there is no one at home, but he is wrong. What happens [...]

Stephen King goes back to fertile territory — a vindictive reader furious at his favorite author's turn away from fiction. With gripping suspense, inventive storytelling, and returning characters from Mr. Mercedes (though this book works just fine as a stand-alone), Finders Keepers is vintage King — and a smart, entertaining account of the power of [...]

In this near-future thriller portraying a severely drought-ridden Southwest, the fate of the region depends on three people — Angel, a Las Vegas water knife whose job it is to ensure his city stays flush; Lucy, a journalist; and Maria, a young refugee. Frighteningly bleak but a pleasure to read, The Water Knife is a [...]

When Detective Gabriella Versado finds the strange deer-boy body, she's on the case, and her daughter Layla is on her own adventure! An immensely enjoyable, fast-paced, super-scarey read. Unforgettable characters are vividly portrayed in a Detroit city setting. The amazing Lauren Beukes skillfully weaves this captivating tale to its fantastical conclusion! Books mentioned in this [...]

What Caldwell excels at with The Fifth Gospel is a combination of exhaustive research applied to enhance the credibility of the subject matter and an exceptionally subtle literary style that's not so prevalent in genre fiction. Read it for the compelling, page-turning murder-mystery that it is. Read it also as an extremely well-considered and well-written [...]

Some train journeys I don't remember. Thankfully not for the same reasons as the protagonist of The Girl on the Train — in my case, I was simply too young to recall the first time I ever got onto a train (a trip from Durban to Umhlali in South Africa, I'm told). I don't remember [...]

I did have a playlist that I listened to over and over again while I was writing Glow, but three years on I'm a bit bored of those songs, which got their final blast at my book party in London last year. So here are the B-sides, so to speak: other good songs by the [...]

At Powell's, we feel the holidays are the perfect time to share our love of books with those close to us. For this special blog series, we reached out to authors featured in our Holiday Gift Guide to learn about their own experiences with book giving during this bountiful time of year. Today's featured giver [...]

Jamie Morton can't seem to shake the charismatic preacher he first meets as a child, later appearing randomly throughout his life. Each encounter becomes increasingly strange — right up to the astonishing conclusion. This gripping thriller demonstrates what King does best: evoking sinister, supernatural forces into the lives of seemingly ordinary people. Books mentioned in [...]

The Ghost in the Electric Blue Suit is set on the English coast in the hot summer of 1976, so the music in this playlist is pretty much all from the '70s. The songs follow David's journey of innocence to experience, and on the way he solves a terrifying personal mystery. 1. "In the Summertime" [...]

The three men lit up in my mind's eye, with footnotes. They were converging on me — and on the object I was carrying — in a way that had woken some sort of angry territorial lizard in my head. Something about the pattern of their approach, the vectors and the way they would all [...]

Like many writers, I'm constantly haunting coffee shops with a laptop out and my headphones on. I listen to a lot of music while I write, and songs do eventually get tangled up with certain characters. My novel Robogenesis is a techno-thriller that largely takes place in the country, pitting high-tech machines against decidedly low-tech [...]

Lightning fast with dark humor, this book will grab your attention and keep you up at night. Professional assassin John Lago has written The Intern's Handbook for novice assassins who join highly successful firms as innocuous interns so that they can get close to their targets. "You'll go to interesting places. You'll meet unique and [...]

At Powell's, our book buyers select all the new books in our vast inventory. If we need a book recommendation, we turn to our team of resident experts. Need a gift idea for a fan of vampire novels? Looking for a guide that will best demonstrate how to knit argyle socks? Need a book for [...]

On a sultry summer night, two teenage girls looking for a diversion take a rubber raft out into the Hudson River between Brooklyn and Manhattan. Only one returns. As much a character study of people and place as a mystery story, Visitation Street is both dark and engaging. It draws you into the grittiness of [...]

Most days, around noon, something very strange happens to me. It starts off with a headache. My head begins to feel stuffy and there is a slight pain behind my eyes. I feel distant from my body. Then, after a few minutes, a fog of unusual thoughts settles in. I stop thinking about the thousand [...]

Valentine's Day: the spirit of love is in the air. I've never been a big fan of the day myself — I can practically hear the sighs of disappointed lovers in the air, smell the copious amounts of cheap perfumes wafting down the avenue, and taste the low-quality imitation chocolate taped to the inside of [...]

I'm sitting in a bar in North Seattle, the kind of place where you only end up well after midnight in a blacked-out stupor. The place has got a name, but if I said it here I wouldn't be allowed back. It's that sort of place. It's also the middle of January, so the heat [...]

I should confess that I have a fault or difficulty or issue that has always mildly complicated my life. I am, at the same time, quite shy and a showoff. It's like being a world-class figure skater living in the middle of the Sahara Desert. Over time the shyness has lessened as has, perhaps, the [...]

You see, I don't believe the world exists, as silly as that seems. I'm not convinced that my warehouse of definitions actually explains or identifies anything. It's like the old question: Is the blue I see the same blue that you see? I have my plans and expectations for the next hour, but who knows [...]

The Burn Palace is my 21st published novel. There are also six novels that remain unpublished and, I expect, will continue to be unpublished. Three were the first novels I wrote and three are from the past 15 years. I say this not to brag but to attempt to articulate the words "how strange" because [...]

Describe your latest book: Right now, I've got a bunch of different things going on, most of them having to do with the interface of science and literature. I'm developing a show for HBO called Emoticons about punctuation that can turn into robots, but at the same time I'm doing some neuroscience research. It's about [...]

Koontz has a real knack for getting you hooked, then throwing a curveball of a twist that keeps you turning those pages until you read the last sentence. Intensity saw two film adaptations, one a mini-series, the other the infamous French rip-off High Tension. I'd recommend sticking with the book, for a tight wound thriller in its [...]