What About the Bodies by Ken Jaworowski

Published by Atlantic Crime on September 2, 2025

What About the Bodies is built on dark humor and strong characters. Two characters are kids. Reed is autistic and Billy speaks with a stutter. Reed’s mother just died (a death for which Reed is blamed) and he’s lobbying to stay with his brother Greg, who wants to put him in a home for disabled adults. Billy’s mother, Carla, is trying to open a midscale restaurant in a barn she purchased, but she’s running out of money. Billy distracts her from that problem when he confesses that a body is buried in their back yard.

Liz is a singer-songwriter who has a chance to impress a music producer in Nashville if she can find a way to get there. She has no money and, when she gets her car repaired on credit, the mechanic’s carelessness causes her car to erupt in a ball of flame. When the mechanic insists on being paid anyway, her not-really-friend Luke decides to make a quick profit selling drugs but makes the mistake of transporting them in a truck that has been reported stolen. Since Liz is driving the truck, her odds of meeting the producer, like her car, seem to have gone up in flames.

The characters deal with one mishap after another as they work toward their goals. Subplots unfold as the characters pursue their adventures. Reed wants to place a doll in his mother’s casket (he made it for her in grade school and she told him she wanted to be buried with it) but the casket has already been sealed. Reed is forced to detour from his trip to the cemetery when his high school nemesis, now a small-town cop named Dan, tries to bully a Black family.

Carla and Billy decide to move the buried body but get into a scrap with a biker gang while the rotting corpse is stinking up the trunk of Carla’s car. To get money, Liz and Luke decide to steal something that Liz owns by breaking into her father’s house, which is now controlled by her stepmother. That criminal escapade, like all their money-raising plans before it, goes sideways.

The various adventures merge and diverge in amusing ways as characters drift together and apart. When it seems that things could not go worse for a character, they do. Perseverance is a theme that runs through the story. Never give up: even if you stutter, even if you throw fits when things to wrong, even if you have more debt than money and no clear way to achieve a goal. You can’t get there by quitting.

Carla and Liz use their wits to solve their problems, while Billy and Reed are surprisingly resourceful. All the key characters are drawn with realism, encouraging the reader to invest in their lives. They’re fundamentally kind people who occasionally make mistakes, as do we all. In one of my favorite scenes, Reed recalls how a young woman in high school danced with him, an act of kindness he has never forgotten. Ken Jaworowski seems to be illustrating the truth that a simple act of kindness can stay with another person forever. It might even change a life.

If reading promotes thinking that might make us better people, What About the Bodies? could be a life-changing novel for some readers. At the very least, it tells a fun story about decent people who overcome obstacles as they tenaciously pursue their own versions of a successful life without sacrificing their humanity.

RECOMMENDED

I Become Her by Joe Hart

Published by Thomas & Mercer on August 26, 2025

Victimized woman flees from abusive husband/boyfriend/ex before proving her toughness by saving herself from his clutches is a popular thriller subgenre. The stories tend to be formulaic. I Become Her twists the formula by adding a second victimized women and creating some uncertainty about the character of the abuser. The ending is predictable and the characters are unappealing, but fans of the subgenre will probably enjoy it.

Imogen Carmichael is on a honeymoon cruise when she becomes irrationally jealous of Lev, her new husband, because he touched the hand of a waitress. When she wakes up and her husband isn’t in their cabin, she thinks he’s gone ashore. She searches the bars, then spies a couple canoodling on the beach. The man is the same size and shape as her husband, but she can’t be sure if it’s him.

Back on the ship, Lev returns to their room and claims to have been in the ship’s casino, although Imogen didn’t see him there. They have a spat. Imogen shoves Lev. He hits his head and tumbles off the balcony and into the ocean. After a moment of hesitation, Imogen calls the ship’s emergency number, all but certain that Lev has died.

Lev is improbably saved by a fisherman but doesn’t remember the shove. He recalls Imogen as being his fiancé, not his wife. The last six months of his memory are gone. Lucky for Imogen, right? Not so much, since she will now live in fear that Lev will recover his memory and conclude that she tried to kill him. Which, to be fair, is the logical conclusion to draw. In any event, the story is just getting started.

A rational person might take her husband’s near-death experience as a wakeup call, a warning about the consequences of excessive jealousy. Not Imogen. After she and Lev are safely home (in a house Lev doesn’t remember), Imogen searches for the name of the waitress (Lyra Markos) and begins to obsess about her yet again. After every man in a restaurant (including her husband) notices the entrance of a beautiful woman, Imogen has a nightmare about stabbing her (although in her dream, the bloody victim morphs into Lyra).

My thought at this point was that Lev didn’t know what he was getting into when he married Imogen and didn't deserve her paranoid suspicions — unless, of course, Lev really did sneak off to shag Lyra on his honeymoon. That would be naughty indeed, but still not an excuse for murder.

As these events unfold, Imogen makes occasional references to a man with whom she once shared an apartment. She clearly feels some guilt about an incident involving the man and a knife, but she doesn’t explain what happened until the novel’s midway point. None of this is likely to endear a reader to Imogen.

Imogen narrates most of the chapters, but some (including the first) are narrated by Sierra. Sierra’s short chapters reveal her fear of being discovered. She swims across a lake every day to build her strength, in case she one day needs to swim away from a predator. The novel is at its midpoint before we learn Sierra’s connection to the rest of the story. Only at the end do we learn the full truth about Sierra.

Also at the novel’s midpoint, Imogen manages to contact Lyra in Greece in the apparent belief that Lyra would confirm shagging her husband if that actually happened. Lyra’s function in the rest of the novel is to go missing, joining Sierra as a missing woman who is somehow tied to Imogen and Lev.

Joe Hart conceals the novel’s key surprise until the final chapters. Since I only figured it out when Hart planted the final clue, I rate the surprise as a success. Less successful is Hart’s attempt to make Imogen sympathetic. He can only accomplish that by making her nemesis a monster. That’s common in the subgenre, but my sympathy was dampened by Imogen’s disagreeable personality.

The ending is exciting despite its predictable nature. Ambiguity surrounding Lev’s character gives the reader something to chew upon for part of the novel, but once clarity emerges, the plot loses most of its interest. Subgenre fans will likely rate the novel a winner, but my recommendation is tepid.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Leverage by Amran Gowani

Published by Atria on August 19, 2025

The best financial thrillers are about people who are forced into tight spots. Leverage isn’t among the best, but the protagonist manages to get himself into an unreasonable amount of trouble.

Ali Jafar works for a large, successful hedge fund. His billionaire boss, Paul Kingsley, is a master of the universe. Paul’s son Brad is the typical entitled son of a billionaire who can never live up to his father’s expectation (not that he makes much of an effort). He has his tech bro vibe working, meaning he belittles female employees and calls Ali (who usually goes by Al) Al Qaeda or Habib, among other unkind nicknames.

Ali is in charge of a fund he created called VICE. True to its name, the fund invests in businesses that rely on crime and weakness to earn profits — opioid manufacturing, guns, payday lenders. Ali is doing well until he makes an unfortunate investment that loses $300 million. Rather than firing Ali, Paul challenges him to make back the lost money in three months. If he fails, Paul will accuse him of insider trading that was conducted by another employee. Now, insider trading is rarely prosecuted and even more rarely results in a significant sentence, but some of the fund’s earnings were allegedly diverted to shell companies and used to fund terrorism. Ali would rather not go to prison for even a few days, so he’s willing to cut corners to meet the challenge.

Ali’s best friend is a lawyer who gives him an insider tip that helps him gain back some of the loss. The lawyer then puts him in touch with a client named Simon Hellstrom, a man who trades information for money. Taking advantage of contacts provided by Simon, Ali learns of companies that are about to fail (although they may need a push that Paul happily provides). Ali shorts the stocks and his fund makes a ton of money, but his problems are only beginning. His chances of going to prison — or of being murdered — seem to increase with every page.

Ali spends most of the novel fretting about his future. Every few pages he tells the reader that he wants to stop living. He even puts a gun to his head at one point but lacks the courage to pull the trigger. He spends so much time wishing he were dead that his suicide would have been a break from his depressing complaints about his misery.

It isn’t unusual for a thriller to be farfetched, but Leverage makes it difficult to suspend disbelief. A central tenet of the plot — one I can’t reveal without spoiling the story — is preposterous. Our government works in nefarious ways, but the consequences of its actions in Leverage are harmful to stock investors and thus would never be authorized. The government is fine with screwing over little guys, but causing institutional investors and wealthy people to lose money is beyond the bounds of law enforcement propriety.

Notwithstanding its failure to deliver a credible plot — a failure that is common in modern thrillerworld — and despite its whiny protagonist, Leverage makes some strong points about greed, financial markets that are easily manipulated by the greedy, and the intersection of race and property. Amran Gowani also illustrates the double standard that protects the wealthy from the consequences that less fortunate people would experience for committing financial crimes. Gowani writes: “When The Economist bloviated about adhering to the ‘rule of law,’ what they really meant were governments, corporations, courts, and other White-dominated institutions needed to protect White financial interests.” The novel illustrates that point with moral clarity.

Unfortunately, the ending seems far too easy, given the setup. I won’t reveal how Ali solves his problems, but the ending requires Paul to all but surrender, something a master of the universe is unlikely to do. Leverage benefits from strong prose, a steady pace, and some exciting moments, but those positives are nearly offset by the novel’s improbable plot and weak ending.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The El by Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.

Published by Vintage on August 12, 2025

The El takes place in Chicago during the summer of 1979, when VCRs were still a novelty. From the perspectives of young males who are trying to find their place in the world, the story illustrates the role that gangs, like any other social group, play in the evolution of cities and their inhabitants.

According to Wikipedia, the Simon City Royals were founded in Chicago during the 1950s as a greaser gang. In The El, the Royals are a diverse group, its members bound primarily by their gang identity. One or two are doing well in school or getting lucky with girls, but they devote most of their time together to petty crime and nonlethal violence.

Teddy, a Native American known to his friends as Midget, is the novel’s historian and central character. Teddy credits the Royals’ mid-century founder with understanding that the “whole white alliance thing was bunk, that the future was mixed, that their future, our future depended on cross-racial bonds, just like America if it wants to have a future.”

Chapters are narrated by different characters. Teddy’s chapters are the longest, but other characters — Miguel, Mikey, Mikey2, Walter, Henry, Lil Demon, and more — also contribute their perspectives. An occasional outsider — a cop or a transit worker — narrates a scene from his own perspective, but most of the story is told by gang members.

The chapters are not narrated in markedly different voices, but it isn’t surprising that members of the same age and social group would share the same speech patterns and vocabulary. It becomes clear, however, that Teddy is the smart one in the gang, the one who appreciates books and other art forms, who understands government and culture in the abstract. The others are more impulsive, although they might just be better at living in the moment.

The story unfolds over the course of a very long day. The novel’s first half leads to a meeting with members of other gangs (Latin Eagles, Imperial Gangsters) with a view to creating a unified Nation. Mikey is among the skeptics because he believes the “only Folks that got your back is your folks.”

Attending the meeting requires travel through territory controlled by hostile gangs — every station is like an outpost in a foreign war — while the destination has not been well explored by the homeboys. They rehearse stories to tell the police if they are questioned outside of their neighborhood and take note of exit routes if they need to flee from a violent confrontation.

The meeting goes well enough, but it’s followed by a clash at a subway station that leaves a character frying on the third rail, although not for sufficient time to delay the subway. “You’d think a dead kid on the third rail would hold things up, but I guess since it wasn’t a whiteboy they just moved on,” Teddy notes.

A spirit taking the form of a Coyote helps Teddy in the brawl after appearing at other consequential moments in his life. Coyote offers life rules on occasion, but — like the novel’s author — he encourages people “to think deeper about it all. At the end you knew way more than when you started.”

Teddy muses that Coyote might not be real, but understands that Coyote is part of Native American ancestral history and deserves to be part of the story. After all, “stories are truths we tell to keep ourselves sane, but they’re also lies we tell to keep others from losing it, too.” Teddy learned from his grandfather that he has a duty to tell his people’s stories because the stories keep them alive.

The story gains speed as the subway begins to move. The novel gives the impression of multiple lives flashing by in a city where neighborhoods are identified by strict boundaries — lives glimpsed and gone, something new occurring and forgotten in every instant. Clashes in the second half, with other gang members and with the police, combine the excitement of a thriller with the gritty realism of true crime writing.

Teddy’s story is to some extent autobiographical. The story rings with the powerful truths conveyed by lived experience. It presents its theme of racial division from the narrow perspective of a teen who only knows his neighborhood. It is easy to understand Teddy’s hope for a more harmonious future — his hope of gangs united against a common enemy, people who hold wealth and power — given his status as the only Native in his relatively diverse social group.

Toward the end, Teddy skips ahead and visits his future a few years down the road. Gang violence is on another level. “Humbugs and jumping each other in alleys mostly disappeared, drive-bys were the standard, and dealing had moved up to coke with lots of folks starting to hit the pipe.” Occupants of busses and subway cars are now “packed with Big Ten state school assholes who were gentrifying the neighborhoods farther north. They looked sweaty as fuck in their cheapish suits and power blouses with running shoes, uncomfortable in their own pale skins, lives of lame office hookups and hopes for big suburban houses already carved deep in their sad, doughy faces.” Harsh, but an understandable assessment from a person in Teddy’s position.

Future Teddy has served a hitch in the Navy to avoid serving time in prison. He took an entry level job at the Board of Trade, but he wanted more from his life than financial success. His laudable goal was not just to make art, but to live for it. “If we don’t have art, what do we have? What’s the point? To make money for some asshole?” This novel, he reveals, is a contribution to art, and indeed it is. While The El has a limited reach, its snapshot of young men in a particular social mileau at a particular time in American history is an insightful addition to the genre of gang fiction.

RECOMMENDED

Corvus by Marko Kloos

Published by 47North on August 19, 2025

Corvus is the second in a series of military science fiction novels called Frontlines: Evolution. The new series began with Scorpio [https://www.tzerisland.com/bookblog/2023/12/20/scorpio-by-marko-kloos.html] and is set in the same universe as Marko Kloos’s Frontlines novels.

In Scorpio, Alexandra “Alex” Archer was a colonist who survived her childhood by living underground on a planet that was occupied by Lankies. Lankies are really big aliens that like to stomp humans, as well as their vehicles and structures. The aliens are difficult to kill but humans, as well all know, excel at killing.

Having been rescued at the last moment from the Scorpio colony by the military, Alex decides to enlist. In Corvus, Alex has finished basic training and is assigned to a regiment that is traveling to the Corvus system to check on a colony that has gone silent.

The novel features the military jargon, command structures, and weaponry that appeals to fans of military sf. Alex and her squad are investigating abandoned buildings on the planet when, as the reader will expect, the Lankies attack. Battles ensue. Much of the regiment is wiped out, but Alex uses the knowledge of survival tactics that she gained in Scorpio to help most of her squad members avoid death.

During much of the novel, Alex and her squaddies are walking or using commandeered vehicles to reach destinations where they hope to dig in and await rescue. One of those destinations is occupied by friendly Russian soldiers who join the battle when their building (a terraforming facility) is attacked by the Lankies.

Like many military sf novels, Corvus features more than one “saved by the bell” moment. That’s not unusual in military thrillers, although it’s a bit more common in military sf, which tend to read like novelizations of mediocre military sf movies. While saved-by-the-bell moments make the story predictable, they also add to the excitement.

Alex is an agreeably modest and fast-thinking protagonist who has just enough personality to keep the reader rooting for her success. Kloos writes energetic action scenes and, if the story as a whole is predictable, he at least keeps it moving with a variety of ways to kill or elude the evil Lankies. Kloos is a capable military sf storyteller, and if there is little to distinguish Corvus from similar works, there is little reason to believe that the novel will fail to satisfy military sf junkies.

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