Picket Line by Elmore Leonard

Published by Mariner Books on Sept. 30, 2025

Picket Line is a “lost” novella. A longer-than-necessary introduction explains the story’s history. Envisioned as a screenplay, Elmore Leonard wrote a prose version of the plot in 1970 and eventually turned that document into a novella. After several collaborative attempts to market the story as a movie (including brief interest from Clint Eastwood, who wanted to tell a different story), Leonard sold the novella to an online startup that folded before it could be published.

As the introduction explains, the novella begins with “a memorable opening scene depicting the Rojas brothers’ altercation with a racist gas station attendant.” The gas station employee explains his boss’ refusal to allow migrants to use the restrooms: “They go in there mess up the place, piss all over, take a bath in the sink, use all the towels, steal the toilet paper, man, it’s like a bunch of pigs were in there.” With a subtle threat that doesn’t quite invoke violence, Paco and Chino persuade the employee to allow a family of migrant workers to use the facilities.

Paco and Chino are from California. Paco is Francisco Rojas. Chino is Francisco de la Cruz, an ex-con with a grudge against the white power structure that denies opportunities to Mexican Americans. The introduction suggests that Chino was originally modeled on Cesar Chavez.

For reasons that are initially obscure, Paco and Chino are driving to Texas. When they’re stopped by a deputy sheriff, they claim that they plan to get work picking melons. The cop tells them they might get jobs at Stanzik Farms, although some of the migrant farmworkers are on strike. They take the Stanzik job, but Chino’s true goal is to meet someone he knew from his time in prison.

The labor leader who organized the strike is Vincent Mora, a character who takes over the Cesar Chavez role in later drafts of the story. Mora turns out to have a hidden past, one that might paint him as a man of peace or a coward, or both.

Other important characters include: Bud Davis, an Anglo making a half-hearted attempt at melon picking, who “with his muscular arms and shoulders and cut-off pants and tennis shoes — like he was at South Padre Island on his vacation — couldn’t pick his nose”; a Black picker from Detroit named Clinton who “was broke and needed money to get home”; an exasperated foreman named Larry Mendoza and a violent foreman named Ray Doyle; and Connie Chavez, who uses her bullhorn to implore the melon pickers to replace their sacks of melons with a picket sign (“Attention! Oigame, senores! Your foreman has returned from the toilet. Try to look happy while you work for a stinking dollar ten cents an hour.”). Connie is brash, funny, and fearless. She’s by far the story’s best character.

The story develops themes of social justice while recognizing the differing approaches that might be taken to solve injustice. Mora emphasizes that he’s trying to organize a union, not lead a revolution, while Chino is more aggressive. Mora scolds Chino because he doesn’t “want to bargain with the man, you want to punish him, kick his teeth out and burn his fields — the East LA pachuco out to teach the gringo a lesson. Do you know what you’re doing? Using La Causa as an excuse.” Chino knows the strike will be met with violence, and while Mora advocates turning the other cheek, Chino expects to see blood on the ground and would prefer that it be the blood of those who oppress Mexicans.

Leonard was still inventing his style at this point. The novella doesn’t include much of the dialog that later became Leonard’s trademark, and it includes a bit more exposition than his later work. Frankly, this is a style I prefer. An ambiguous ending gives the novella an unfinished feel, perhaps because it was meant to evolve into something bigger, but Leonard vividly captured the emotions and courage of migrant labor organizers, as well as the brutality and racial animosity of those who opposed them.

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Final Orbit by Chris Hadfield

Published by Mulholland Books on October 7, 2025

Set during Gerald Ford’s brief presidency, Final Orbit gains its thrills from China’s efforts to enter the abandoned Skylab to capture a secret weapon as astronauts from the US and Russia are cooperating in a mission that calls for the docking of an Apollo spacecraft and its Soyuz counterpart. Throw in an attempt to assassinate Ford while he’s visiting NASA in Houston and a Chinese attempt to launch a missile from Russia and you’ve got a conspiracy to turn the Cold War into a Hot Mess.

Kaz Zemeckis accompanies Nixon to China. Kaz is identified as “air crew,” but he’s there to spy for the Air Force Space and Missiles System division. He is accompanied by Dr. Jimmy Doi, an Air Force flight surgeon who speaks Chinese and Japanese. The Chinese assign their own spy, Fang Guojun, to shadow Kaz.

Three years later, Kaz is a military liaison to NASA, serving as the Capsule Communicator (CAPCOM) for a joint Soviet-American mission. The CAPCOM’s job is to talk to the astronauts from Mission Control. A Russian Soyuz vessel docks with an Apollo capsule and their crews exchange pleasantries. That event is taken from history, although the fictional version of the mission is a substantial departure from reality. Chris Hadfield adds a woman to the Russian crew and kills half the astronauts in this alternate history, but the novel’s foundation is based on actual events.

In addition to envisioning an accident that kills some astronauts, Hadfield adds a Chinese plot to board Skylab (the space station by that point had been abandoned) and steal a secret weapon. For plausible reasons, a person connected to the Air Force is working as a spy for China, accounting for China’s knowledge of the secret weapon. The spy’s identity is a bit too obvious.

China’s first manned space mission sends Fang Guojun, now an astronaut, into space to dock with Skylab and steal the weapon. The weapon’s nature is a bit murky, as is the explanation for leaving it on Skylab, but that’s the story.

When the American military detects the Chinese capsule and figures out its intent, the Apollo capsule is instructed to dock with Skylab, ostensibly to offload the dead bodies so that the space shuttle, when finally constructed, can recover them. Of course, a surviving American astronaut must keep the purpose of the diversion a secret from the Russians, lest America’s strongest rival learn about the secret weapon.

The Chinese also scheme to launch a missile from Russia, assuming (apparently correctly) that the American military is easily deceived. That subplot goes nowhere and its purpose is a mystery. An attempt to assassinate Gerald Ford (as if anyone would have noticed), a joint enterprise of the Chinese and America’s Weather Underground (seriously?), also adds little of interest to the story.

The plot is too far-fetched to encourage the willing suspension of disbelief. A scene near the end, when Kaz takes a moment away from his consoles to fight a spy, is a little silly, since the task could have been left to law enforcement. Turning Kaz into an action hero suggests a desperate attempt to add more thrills to the story. In a remarkable coincidence, Kaz also encounters suspicious behavior at a Chinese restaurant that gives him insight into an attempt to set off a bomb at NASA.

Hadfield performs a clever feint at the end, leaving the reader to believe that the story will not have a happy ending. Far be it from me to disclose how the story resolves, although I will caution readers that the story ends a bit too neatly.

Despite my difficulty buying into the story, I enjoyed the technical aspects of spaceflight. Hadfield’s substantial experience as an astronaut informs the story’s detailed background. The tension surrounding the joint Apollo-Soyuz mission gives Final Orbit its thriller status and encouraged my sustained interest in an improbable plot.

RECOMMENDED

Gray Dawn by Walter Mosley

Published by Mulholland Books on September 16, 2025

Walter Mosley is as dependable as any writer in the crime fiction business. That’s why he has a laminated spot in my list of the top three crime novelists.

Nearly every character who has played an important role in the Easy Rawlins series — at least, those who are still alive — makes an appearance in Gray Dawn: Mouse, Fearless Jones, Charcoal Joe, Jackson and Jewelle Blue, Melvin Suggs, Milo Sweet, and probably a dozen more. As if Easy’s adopted son Jesus and adopted daughter Feather weren’t enough to round out the cast, Mosley adds another member to Easy’s family (one he didn’t know existed), adds another woman who shows interest in him, and reunites Easy with an old lover.

The main story begins when Santangelo Burris hires Easy to find Lutisha James. Burris claims that Lutisha is his aunt and that his mother wants to get in touch with her. As Easy senses, there is more to the story than Burris has revealed.

Easy soon learns that Lutisha is well known among his less savory colleagues. She is, in fact, well known to legendary blues artists, one of whom wrote some lyrics about her (“Lutisha James had Satan’s son / If you see her comin’ duck down quick / Before you hear that thunderin’ gun”). Apart from being dangerous, she has an affinity for poker and a history of working in the numbers racket. Those leads send Easy into parts of LA that prudent people might want to avoid.

The story is set in the early 1970s. As Mosley explains in an introduction, “Easy, and his friends, exist to testify about a volatile time in Black, and therefore American, history.” A sense of danger permeates the novel, heightened by racial tension. When a white security guard questions Easy, one wrong move might cause the guard to invent an excuse for murder. It doesn’t matter that Easy is financially successful, having made some smart investments in real estate. “All I’d seen and experienced, everything I had built, meant nothing up against the lying word of this high school dropout rent-a-cop.”

A subplot involves Easy’s assistant Niska, a detective in training who has agreed to help a female college student find the man who “wheedled his way” into her life so he could steal her money. Niska is amazed by her client’s reaction when she finds the man. Easy has seen it all before.

A third subplot begins when Easy learns that his son Jesus is in trouble with the police for transporting loads of marijuana on his boat. The cops think Jesus should be working for them rather than engaging in his own business.

Easy has a nice date with a woman that ends with a kiss. Just after the date, a final subplot takes shape in the pleasant form of a former lover named Amethystine who returns to Easy’s life. Amethystine is a killer but Easy doesn’t hold that against her. He says: “I had been wanting to see her every day since the day I told her that I’d never see her again.” After they shag, he reflects on the day: “I had kissed one woman and made love to another. My life was going well, quite well.” It’s good to be Easy if you don’t count the times when someone is trying to kill him.

A bomb drops about two-thirds of the way into the story. It’s the kind of bomb that might shatter Easy’s life. I won’t reveal it, but readers who regard Easy as a companionable friend won’t want to miss the changes made to Easy’s life in Gray Dawn.

The main plot and Niska’s subplot reach satisfactory resolutions. Mosley is a throwback to the days when crime fiction writers invented credible plots and substituted thought for mindless action. The novel moves quickly but Mosley takes the time to add flesh to his characters and nuance to Easy’s perception of the world.

Mosley fans know that the man is a born storyteller and that his prose is about as good as modern crime fiction gets. If you haven’t read an Easy Rawlins novel, starting with this one might be a reasonable plan, but you should treat yourself by starting at the beginning and reading them all.

RECOMMENDED

The Shattering Peace by John Scalzi

Published by Tor Books on September 16, 2025

The Shattering Peace is the seventh novel set in John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War universe. It works as a standalone for readers who aren’t familiar with the series.

Scalzi typically explores interesting questions. The question in The Shattering Peace is whether some technological advances are so dangerous that humans can’t be trusted with them. People are currently having that very debate about AI, a discussion that seems to have replaced concern about self-replicating nanotechnology. The technology at issue in The Shattering Peace is a form of transportation (a skip drive) that can send an asteroid into a planet’s orbit, causing a collision that will destroy the planet.

Skip drives are relatively tame technology in the future that Scalzi imagines. They cause a starship to disappear from one universe and appear in another, nearly identical universe. Because the universes are so similar, travelers don’t notice that they are in a different one. They replace themselves and in turn are replaced by versions of themselves in the universe they left. Skip drives won’t work in a gravity well, so they can’t be used near a planet. Nor can they cause a ship to skip into a universe that is significantly different from the one they leave. Until now.

Humans are still living on Earth in the Old Man’s War universe, but they have populated other, more important worlds that comprise the Colonial Union. Some alien species have formed a government called the Conclave. Among them are the Obin, a species that had no consciousness until the Colonial Union gave it to them. The Obin can turn off their emotions when they prove to be troublesome. I know some people like that.

The Colonial Union, Earth, and the Conclave entered into a treaty that limits further colonization. The treaty ended wars among species that are competing for resources that newly colonized planets provide. I’m a bit skeptical that it’s necessary to colonize planets to exploit their resources, given the vast resources available from planets, moons, and asteroids that can presumably be mined without inhabiting them, but that’s the premise.

Not a party to the treaty are the Consu, an alien race that is technologically superior to other species and regards every other race as culturally and morally inferior. The Consu are hard to kill (they have the usual alien carapace and bladed limbs) and they value their death rituals.

Scalzi skimped on the creativity when he created the aliens in this series. The Consu could be extras in a low-budget sf film. The other alien races are barely described in The Shattering Peace, although readers who have read every novel in the series will know something about them.

Unbeknownst to most, humans and the Conclave aliens have skirted the treaty by mutually colonizing an asteroid in an effort to determine whether cooperation is possible. The asteroid is not yet self-sufficient and therefore depends on supply ship deliveries to assure its survival.

As the story opens, the asteroid has disappeared. Probes have not detected the debris field that should exist if the asteroid had been destroyed. If the colony hasn’t been destroyed, the colonists will soon starve if they aren’t rescued.

Gretchen Trujillo, the novel’s protagonist, works for the Colonial Union Diplomatic Security Force. There’s no particular reason to send her to search for the missing asteroid, but her father negotiated the deal that resulted in the asteroid’s colonization, so nepotism contributes to Gretchen’s assignment. Also, Gretchen’s ex-boyfriend was assigned to the asteroid and her dad thought Gretchen might want to shag him again.

The plot sends Gretchen and a team of scientists to the asteroid’s last location. It isn’t there, but the scientists find a Consu in a container where the asteroid used to be. Gretchen strikes a deal to protect the Consu from other Consu who arrive with malicious intent. In exchange, the Consu in the container agrees to share the location of the missing asteroid. Battles ensue. Gretchen has been trained to fight by the Obin (one of them is her bodyguard) and she plays a role in the action scenes. She will eventually be challenged to a duel by a Consu.

Without revealing too much, the most interesting aspect of the story involves the Consu’s discovery of new skip drive technology that overcomes the limitations of existing inter-universe travel. Since the tech could be used to destroy worlds, it probably well be. Scalzi deals with that predicament in a clever way to produce a happy ending.

The rest of the story is standard fare, but Scalzi is always a good storyteller. The action is credible, the plot moves swiftly, and Gretchen gets laid, so good for her. Scalzi doesn’t explore his characters in any great depth, a missed opportunity when it comes to aliens who can turn off their consciousness. While the novel is fun, it doesn’t live up to the standard that Scalzi set in Old Man’s War, the first and best novel in the series.

RECOMMENDED

The Elements by John Boyne

Published by Henry Holt and Co. on September 9, 2025

The Elements is a collection of powerful moments, all related to the central themes of child sexual abuse and healing. While several characters commit or are victimized by sexual abuse, their stories are neither conventional nor filled with melodramatic weepiness. In one case, the abuser is a woman who victimizes fourteen-year-old boys. In another, an abuse victim grows up to be an abuser. These are not happy stories, but they illuminate facets of abuse that are often neglected in fiction.

True to its title, The Elements is divided into four parts: Water, Earth, Fire, and Air. A celebrated swimming coach in Water, Brendan Carvin, has been sexually abusing children on his team. His wife, Vanessa, was aware that his parents “had instilled a fear of sexuality in him from an early age, convincing him that he should be ashamed of his natural desires.” One of the Carvins’ two daughters commits suicide by drowning herself for reasons that the reader will quickly suspect. Whether Vanessa was aware (or should have been aware) of her husband’s misconduct is left for the reader to decide.

Mortified by her husband’s misconduct and ashamed that she failed to protect her family, Vanessa has changed her name and moved to a small island off the coast of Galway. Vanessa no longer listens to her favorite talk show on the radio. “Brendan and I were the subject of debate on many occasions and, masochist that I am, I couldn’t stop myself from obsessively listening as strangers called in to denounce us both.” She has endured scrutiny that is “corrosive to the soul.”

Vanessa claims she traveled to the island to learn the truth about herself. Vanessa likes “the idea of walking along the cliffs like an actress in a television advertisement, staring out to sea and contemplating the ruins of my existence.” Her younger daughter, Rebecca, habitually blocks and unblocks her mother on her cellphone. Whether Vanessa deserves a reader’s sympathy is a question each reader will need to decide.

The most dramatic moment in Water occurs when Brendan, having served his time, appears on the island, having apparently learned nothing. Vanessa asks him whether he will ever stop “asking the world to excuse you, because you still feel like a teenage boy and, somehow, you can’t help yourself.” The ability or inability to take responsibility for one’s actions is a continuing theme.

Also living on the island are Charlie Keogh and his son Evan. Charlie wants Evan to try out for a professional soccer team, but Charlie — despite his undeniable talent for the sport — doesn’t enjoy it. He’d rather be an artist. He has a dramatic moment of his own when he takes a small boat alone into the ocean. His motivation isn’t fully explained until later in the story.

The second part, Earth, focuses on Evan who, as a young adult, is working his way up the ranks of professional soccer. Before deciding to earn a living by playing a sport he doesn’t enjoy, Evan earned money by being pimped out to wealthy men. Evan is accused of being an accessory to (by recording on his phone) the rape of a young woman committed by a teammate. Some of his story is told through trial testimony.

Fire begins a couple years after the story in Earth ends, although it completes the story that Earth tells. The protagonist is Freya Petrus, a surgeon who specializes in burn injuries. Freya sat on Evan’s jury. Freya seduces a frightened boy, much against his will. Freya’s motivation for her latest act in a pattern of sexual misconduct with young male teens traces to her victimization by young teenage males when she was twelve.

Air is a family drama and the most redemptive of the four parts. Years after the events in Water, Rebecca is now married to Aaron Umber, whose own history of abuse is described earlier in the novel. They are in love, but their marriage is sexless apart from rare instances, one of which leads to the birth of Emmet. Aaron is now divorced from Rebecca, perhaps because of a female novelist who knew them both. Aaron feels abandoned by Rebecca. Most of Air follows Aaron’s attempts to stay connected to his son as they travel back to the island where the events on Water unfold. They are making the trip to attend a funeral.

The point of Air is that it is never too late for our emotional wounds to heal, provided we have the courage to begin the process. Air ends with a message of hope, the hope that damaged parents can raise an undamaged child, a child who — once old enough to understand — learns from his parents’ damage. The message infuses the novel with elements of a happy ending, at least for a few characters. As the female novelist explains, “In the end, the reader just wants everyone to survive and be happy.”

The Elements raises important questions. Are bad people born that way or is their behavior a product of their upbringing? The book offers no easy answers because there are none. Freya was damaged by her childhood, but she inflicts more than her share of damage before she’s in her mid-30s. Aaron had a traumatic experience but turned into a man who wants nothing more than to be a loving father. Why were their life outcomes different?

John Boyne is careful to give characters who do evil things some sort of consequence. This is presumably an attempt to give readers what they want — at least the opportunity to imagine a happy ending, even if he doesn’t write one for each character — despite the novel’s overall recognition that people who do evil things often live consequence-free lives. Sometimes they’re even rewarded for their bad conduct.

Some of the story is deeply disturbing. Sensitive readers might want to avoid The Elements. Yet the story’s disturbing nature is vital to its success. Each central character, good or evil or a mix of both, is struggling to make a life. At least one finds redemption. At least one rejects the concept. The complexity of life and the struggle to shape it give the novel its weight. The Elements can be an emotionally difficult read, but its refusal to turn away from ugliness ranks it among the most meaningful books I’ve read this year.

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