Prairie Fox Reads

    Review: The Blue Hour Paula Hawkins Mariner Books, 2025 (Paperback edition) 320 pages Disclaimer: A softcover advance reader copy (ARC) was provided for the purposes of this review. All opinions expressed are independent and reflect an objective assessment of the work as presented in the advance edition.   Overview The Blue Hour is Paula Hawkins’s latest work of psychological suspense, arriving in paperback via Mariner Books following its October 2024 hardcover debut. Set on Eris, a remote Scottish island accessible to the mainland for only twelve hours each day, the novel centers on the decades-old disappearance of Julian Chapman—the notoriously unfaithful husband of celebrated artist Vanessa Chapman—and a present-day discovery that draws three new figures into the orbit of that unresolved mystery. The book’s marketing positions it squarely within the tradition of Shirley Jackson and Patricia Highsmith, invoking themes of ambition, power, gender, and the instability...

  Review: Baseball in the Roaring Twenties: The Yankees, the Cardinals, and the Captivating 1926 Season Thomas Wolf University of Nebraska Press, 2025 (Hardcover edition) 264 pages Disclaimer: A hardcover advance reader copy (ARC) was provided for the purposes of this review. All opinions expressed are independent and reflect an objective assessment of the work as presented in the advance edition.   Overview Baseball in the Roaring Twenties is Thomas Wolf’s focused and richly contextual examination of the 1926 Major League Baseball season, centering on the rivalry between the New York Yankees and the St. Louis Cardinals while situating that rivalry within the broader cultural and social landscape of a decade defined by Prohibition, the Jazz Age, and the explosive growth of sports gambling. Rather than functioning as a conventional season recap or team biography, the book makes an ambitious and largely persuasive argument: that baseball in 1926 was not merely a sport but a cu...