Etna by Paul Yoon

Published by Scribner on August 4, 2026

The phrase “dogs of war” originates in Shakespeare’s Julius Caeser and is the title of an excellent Fredrick Forsythe thriller, but dogs are not characters in either the play or the novel. Etna is a true “dogs of war” story. It tells the story of war and its aftermath from a dog’s perspective.

The war is waged for four years in an unidentified country, presumably South Korea. American and European soldiers are among the combatants who have arrived to defend the country from an unidentified enemy. Given the use of drones and cellphones, this is a modern war, not a story from the past.

A doctor named Soojin belongs to the army of the country where the novel takes place. She has the ability to communicate with dogs. The Americans have hired her to identify and train dogs who can help with the war. On a farm, she finds a twelve-month old mixed-breed shepherd. She names him Etna, after a volcano, although a bird later tells Etna that in Greek his name means “to burn.”

The story is told from Etna’s point of view. Etna explains that animals communicate with each other silently (“it was like dark shapes appeared and lived in a space between our eyes, shapes we could translate”), but Etna feels Soojin’s words “more physically, and around me: it was like the air was pressing against my ears, and then a small door opened in my head into a corner I had never been inside before.” I’ve had dogs who seemed to understand everything I say (and some who have understood nothing, unless they were feigning ignorance), but I envy Soojin’s ability to understand their language.

Soojin named a second dog Fuji. She urges Etna and Fuji to find her when the war is over so they can move to Italy and live in peace.

The army trains the dogs to attack the enemy, going for the throat when necessary. They are also tasked with sniffing out IEDs and buried mines.

The war lasts four years. The soldier who handles Etna takes good care of him but doesn’t want to keep him when the war ends. “I wasn’t his dog. When he saw me, he saw the dog he had worked with and fought alongside and lost.” Before the war is over, however, the soldier proves his love of Etna.

Etna relates some of his wartime adventures, but most of the story takes place after the war ends. Etna has experienced the same trauma that human soldiers endure. “I had seen mountains burn. I had seen lakes burn and boulders burn and airplanes burn and tanks burn and animals burn and humans burn and bones burn. And when there was nothing left to burn, there was still the sound of it. I would always remember the sound of the burning.” Humans develop PTSD and I suppose there is no reason to think that dogs react to trauma any differently.

For much of his time after the war, Etna is on his own, trying to get back to the farm where he was born. The war has turned the country into a wasteland and left humans in desperate circumstances. Some humans are still fighting. Some want to eat him. He travels to a city and into the mountains during his quest to return to the coastal farm of his puppyhood.

Etna meets a couple of friendly dogs along the way. A dog named Semeru who shares his dreams of a well becomes his companion. Sometimes they play tug with an old rope because, well, they’re dogs. Pausing to play in the midst of turmoil is one of the many things I love about this novel.

For good reason, Etna is wary of humans, but he encounters another doctor, a kindly man who treats his wounds and helps him with part of his journey. Will Etna reunite with Soojin? That question provides the story with some of its drama.

The importance to dogs of being part of a pack is the novel’s underlying theme. It serves as a reminder of the importance to humans of community and relationships, or at least a sense of belonging. At the same time, Etna and Semeru make clear that being part of a pack doesn’t require us to attack everyone outside the pack or to regard others as outsiders. Etna defends himself and protects his humans as necessary but never condemns other humans or animals (even donkeys) simply because they are different.

Near the story’s end, a bird reminds Etna of the importance of having friends, even if the friends are not like us. If we lose our pack, the bird counsels, we need to find another. It is important not to be alone.

Maybe Etna learns that you can’t go home again. If Etna’s home still exists, it won’t exist as he remembers it. The smells will be unfamiliar. Change is difficult for humans and dogs alike, but the time may come to make a new home, to form or join a new pack. We endure because there is always hope that life will get better. Sometimes it does.

If you can’t abide sadness, don’t read Etna. Paul Yoon doesn’t shy away from tragic moments. He nevertheless balances them with moments of grace. The story is written with deceptive simplicity that almost masks its elegance. Lovers of dogs and literature should find Etna to be a memorable experience.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

John Grebble Is Gone by Peter James

 

Published by Amazon Original Stories on August 1, 2026

“John Grebble Is Gone” is a crime story, not a ghost story, yet it begins with the sentence: “John Grebble first learned he was dead when he got a letter from his bank.” The letter, addressed to Grebble’s estate, expresses condolences for his death. Grebble calls the bank to notify it of its error, but the bank (or its AI) tells him that, since he’s dead, he no longer has access to his account. Grebble doesn’t feel dead, so he sets out to investigate.

Grebble can’t take the bus to work because his Apple Pay and debit card have been deactivated. He decides to drive to work but, when he walks back home, discovers his car is being towed. Fortunately, he keeps a stash of cash in his home, so he takes a taxi to work, only to find that his pass card no longer allows him to enter the building. He calls HR, but “for security reasons” HR won’t speak to him. It sucks to be dead.

Grebble’s next stop is his bank, where he hopes to unfreeze his accounts. Because the bank received his death certificate, proving that he’s alive and hasn’t stolen a dead man’s identity turns out to be a chore. The only bank manager he knew is now retired, and his driver’s license photo is so old that it might or might not be him. He then tries the police, but the detectives can’t decide whether he is a crime victim or a criminal.

Grebble has little success convincing anyone that he’s alive. He has always been antisocial. He has no friends. “His two pets were the only living creatures he felt any empathy with.” Most of his coworkers took no notice of him. He might have to depend on his brother to vouch for his identity, but he hasn’t spoken to his brother in years. Perhaps the moral of the story is that relationships and friendships keep us alive.

Why is Grebble thought to be dead? That is the mystery the reader must solve. Suffice it to say that mischief is afoot.

Grebble’s ordeal gives him the opportunity for personal growth. He turns to one of his co-workers for help and, although he’s never had any interest in her, she takes a great interest in him. Grebble realizes by the novel’s end that having a friend really isn’t such a bad thing. He also has a chance to disprove the proverb, “Before you seek revenge, first dig two graves.” As Grebble sees it, “Do you need two graves if one of you is already dead?”

“John Grebble is Gone” is one of the better entries I’ve read in the Amazon Short Stories series. It’s funny, interesting, carefully crafted, and a good introduction to a crime novelist I haven’t followed.

RECOMMENDED

Undertow by K. T. Konkoly

Published by Thomas & Mercer on July 21, 2026

After consuming a large quantity of alcohol, Greg Stadt falls from his boat. A woman on the boat uses a boat hook to attempt his rescue, unless she’s pushing him under. The narrative leaves both possibilities open. The woman looks like Greg’s wife Stacy, with whom he has just had a loud and public fight, but the reader soon learns that she was not on the boat and did not kill Greg.

Stacy is nevertheless charged with Greg's murder. She retains Kari Sharpe, a former Navy JAG lawyer, to represent her. Kari has built a reputation as a winning criminal defense attorney. Kari has never liked Stacy because Stacy has been a bully since their childhood, but Kari decides to meet the challenge of representing a complete jerk, albeit at double her usual fee.

Greg was a member of the town board of Sweetwater, Maine. He opposed the local racetrack’s request to operate slot machines. Sweetwater is apparently the only government board that requires unanimous approval of zoning requests, as we are often told that Greg was the only board member standing in the way of the racetrack's request.

 The racetrack is owned by Beth Thornberry. Her customer base has abandoned harness racing for the lure of nearby slot machine casinos.Greg may have a selfish purpose for wanting the racetrack to fail, which is certainlly will without the slots.

The bank is about to foreclose on the racetrack. Beth borrowed a large sum from Ryker Jones to keep the track afloat. Ryker is a thug and her only chance of repaying the loan and surviving as a business is to install slot machines. Greg’s death may therefore benefit her.

The other central character is Lori Spec, who takes her daughter in the middle of the night and runs away from her abusive husband. It isn’t clear how Lori fits into the larger story until the novel nears its completion.

Related plot threads involve Kari’s relationships with her alcoholic brother Jimmy and with her law school boyfriend, Bill McGovern. Kari resumes her canoodling with Bill despite the unusual interest he seems to take in her defense of Stacy. Readers are meant to view that fact as suspicious, but the truth about Bill’s character remains a mystery until after the main story’s resolution.

The novel’s only notable subplot involves Kari’s widowed secretary Ruth, who once had an affair with Mack, Kari’s private investigator. Now that Ruth’s husband has been in a grave for a year, Mack is putting the moves on Ruth again. Ruth and Mack may be the only likable characters in the novel, but their roles are too limited to give the reader a good reason to care about them.

Most characters in Undertow have disagreeable personalities. Some deliberately so, including Greg (whose murder is secretly welcomed by most of the community) and Stacy. Bill seems to be unbelievably nice, which only alerts the reader (but, surprisingly, not Kari) that his decency is a pretense.

Kari still holds a grudge against Bill for dumping her in law school after she suddenly announced her decision to work as a Navy JAG. She didn’t bother to consult with Bill before making the decision but is angry that he didn’t consult with her before he ended their relationship. Bizarrely, she complains that he didn’t care enough about their relationship to fight for her. Why is that his job and not hers? Kari’s entitled attitude left me with no character to get behind.

The story is far from exciting and the mystery is surprisingly easy to solve. This isn’t a legal thriller — there are no courtroom scenes at all — and K.T. Konkoly failed to convince me that Kari knows much of anything about law. The only significant plot twist is revealed in the final pages, but it seems to set up a new story rather than shedding light on the story told in Undertow. Konkoly’s prose style is capable and her pace is acceptable, but I would shelve Undertow low on my “To Be Read” pile, given the ready availability of stronger legal thrillers.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Get Lost by Justin Halpern

Published by Grand Central Publishing/Cardinal on July 7, 2026

Get Lost is consistently amusing and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. That makes it a perfect beach read.

Mattie Wilkerson hated Los Armarios. She lived and worked and raised a daughter in the small California town, but every now and then Mattie disappeared. She always came back, but her daughter, Lila Dixon, often worried that Mattie wouldn’t return.

Lila’s father, John Dixon (known to all as “Dix”), loves Los Armarios. He played high school baseball there. He bought a house there right after he signed a minor league contract. He didn’t make it to the majors — in fact, he served time in prison — but he still enjoys the life of a small-town hero.

Dix wasn’t a great husband to Mattie and hasn’t been a good father to Lila, but he persuaded a friend to give Lila a job scouting high school baseball players. Lila hates the job but, to be fair, Lila hates pretty much everything about her life. She’s always hated getting calls when her mother disappears but has always dutifully traveled back to Los Armarios to await her return.

The story begins when Lila’s boss, Arturo Jimenez, calls Lila to tell her that her mother is missing. Lila is unconcerned because Mattie goes missing all the time. Arturo gets her attention by telling her that he learned about Mattie from Dix. When Lila points out that her father hasn’t spoken to her mother in twenty years and asks how Dix knows she’s missing, Arturo explains that Dix called him from jail and that the cops think he killed Mattie.

Lila drives to Los Armarios, where Sheriff John Bonsall tells her that video footage shows Lila’s mother entering her apartment building but no footage shows her leaving. All the windows in her apartment were locked from the inside and a security chain was on her door. Bonsall used to drop in on her to perform an informal wellness check from time to time, and he saw her there a day after she entered the building. The video showed her father entering the apartment building for ten minutes the following day. The day after that, a neighbor reported her missing. So how did she leave the building without being captured by the camera?

Lila is convinced that her mother is fine, but she devotes the rest of the novel to finding an answer to that question. She also interacts (reluctantly) with her father, who is soon released from jail for lack of evidence that he did anything to cause Lila’s disappearance.

Is Mattie alive? Lila receives a text message, purportedly from Mattie, that claims Lila’s investigation is making her unsafe. She also receives threats telling her to back off. Her investigation uncovers a large deposit to Mattie’s bank account and a large disbursement to a suspicious charity a few days later. The story turns Lila into an amateur detective as she tries to solve the riddle of her missing mother.

Many of the story’s laughs come from Dix’s attempts to convince Lila that he isn’t as bad as she thinks he is, followed by Lila providing copious evidence of his poor parenting skills and bad character. Lila’s long-held anger is easy to understand and may explain why she is so miserable. Yet Lila isn’t such a disagreeable character that readers will be disinclined to spend time with her.

Justin Halpern’s portrayal of Dix as a charming conman who lives in the memory of his past glories — enabled by townies who bask in the glow of his minor league celebrity — is consistently funny. Halpern could have ruined the story with a sappy reconciliation, but he makes the wise choice to sprinkle in a heartwarming moment or two, raising the possibility that with a lot of effort by both Lila and Dix, they might avoid being estranged for the rest of their lives. How that will work out is left to the reader’s imagination.

Lila eventually devises a theory that explains how the money that entered and left Mattie’s account might relate to her mother’s disappearance. By the end of the story, she also tumbles upon an explanation for the locked room mystery. The explanation comes with a reveal. As tradition dictates, a character who isn’t an obvious suspect turns out to be at the heart of the mystery.

Get Lost works well enough as a light mystery, but its value lies in the family dynamic between Lila and Dix. In addition to providing a vehicle for the comedy that poor parent-child relationships can inspire, the hope that the father and daughter might find a way to reconnect, that Lila might find a way to forgive or at least accept Dix, adds a sweetness to the story that blends well with the novel’s mix of comedy and crime.

RECOMMENDED

Traitors by Robert McCaw

Published by W. W. Norton & Company on July 7, 2026

Traitors is set in a post-Trump world. The new president, Roger Clayton, is a Democrat. A coup in Russia has replaced Putin with an even more hardline dictator, one who plans to invade Finland despite Russia’s botched attempt to capture Ukraine.

Robert Cooper befriended Clayton as an undergraduate, wrote position papers for him during his campaign, and is now the deputy assistant attorney general for counterintelligence in the DOJ’s National Security Division. That’s a pretty good job, but Clayton is about to nominate Cooper to become the assistant attorney general in charge of the NSD.

Cooper’s nomination will be undermined by Alice Boufort, a DOJ employee with more seniority who feels entitled to the position by her obsession with defeating Russian spies, a quest born of her desire to avenge her father, who was tortured and killed by “communist agitators aligned with the Russian KGB.” Boufort has the ear of a key senator who believes the gossip she feeds him about Cooper’s unreliable job performance.

As the title implies, the plot concerns Russian sleeper agents who are positioned in the US government. There are too many of them to be credible, but implausibility didn’t stop Robert Ludlum from premising some pretty good thrillers on networks of traitors who conspire with foreign governments to overthrow the US.

Cooper learns about one of the sleeper agents from a Russian spy who wants to defect in exchange for protection and a new identity. While wary that the Russian spy might be a double agent feeding him disinformation, Cooper confirms that a congressman is feeding classified information to Russia. Unfortunately, the congressman is murdered before he can be arrested and interrogated.

The Russian spy has warned Cooper not to trust the FBI, so the person who leaked information leading to the congressman’s assassination seems to be positioned close to Cooper’s office. Cooper spends the novel tracking down the remaining four sleeper agents who have infected American government before they can carry out a nefarious scheme to shift American political power to isolationists who refuse to oppose Russia's power grabs. Russia believes the scheme will enable it to invade Finland without resistance by the US, NATO obligations notwithstanding.

The elements of a conventional conspiracy thriller are present in Traitors, but the story is formulaic. It’s Ludlum light. The novel checks off the expected plot points without the excitement or tension that a good spy novel should evoke. I attribute that failure to Robert McCaw’s dry, “just the facts” writing style. The novel is blurbed as an “edge of your seat” page turner, but my butt remained firmly positioned in the middle of my seat as I yawned between page turns.

Cooper is a straightlaced patriot, someone we would want to hold an intelligence position in the real world, but his absence of passion makes him a dull bureaucrat whose personality is noticeably absent. James Bond, Robert Cooper is not. Nor is he the exemplar of bureaucrats in the spy game, George Smiley. Bond had panache and Smiley had emotional depth. Cooper is more of a Joe Friday. He would have made a fine black-and-white television character in the 1950s, but he’s a bit of a bore compared to the spies that genre fans embrace.

The power struggle between Cooper and Boufort is only mildly interesting. I appreciated the depiction of Putin’s vulnerability to far-right actors in his country but never got the sense of a world on the edge of a world war. In the end, Traitors struck me as the outline of a thriller that others have already written, without the fleshed-out characters and plot twists that might have made the novel stand out among its peers.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS