The Eleventh Hour by Salman Rushdie

Published by Random House on November 4, 2025

The Eleventh Hour collects five stories, three of novella length and two that are shorter. The most entertaining novella in the collection is “The Musician of Kahani.” It is, in part, the story of a man who loses his way and the daughter who guides his return. The man finds false meaning in life when he abandons his family to join a cult leader’s community as a preparer and ladler of soup. The daughter is a musical prodigy who marries into wealth and develops a sort of superpower that allows her to project her music to her distant father’s ears. It is also the story of a mother whose “brilliant husband falls for a stupid fraud” and whose “brilliant daughter falls for a stupid playboy,” leaving her “alone in our home without the two people who were my whole world.” The story touches on familiar themes in fiction that focuses on India: the dominance of men, parental control of children throughout their lives, the disparity of wealth, the misplaced importance given to high social status (recast as “brand identity”). Satirical observations lighten the mood, but the reconciliation of a family, decent people who stray from their paths before reuniting, is moving.

“Late” tells the story of a gay British professor who achieved fame with the only novel he ever wrote — a classic work set in India. He lived a reclusive life in an “ivory tower of infirm old men” until he woke up one morning to discover that he had died. Only one person, a student from India studying the history of religion and its intersection with the state, can see his ghost. She volunteers to act as a guide to the professor’s rooms, left untouched as a tribute by the university that employed him. Contrary to his solitary nature, the professor is displeased that nobody ever visits his rooms, but he is also unhappy to discover that his spirit will disintegrate if he leaves the campus. He views death as “proof of the pointlessness of life,” particularly his own not-quite-death that has him dwelling in a literal fog (perhaps a soup made from the remains of other souls) as what’s left of him decays. Death focuses his mind on revenge against the College Provost, who gave him a choice between sexual freedom and a place at the College, but how can he pursue that goal without a body?

The theme of disappearance also animates “Oklahoma,” purportedly an unfinished manuscript that tells a story of ambiguous meaning, building on Kafka’s unfinished novel Amerika, a novel whose central character will never find peace, having been abandoned by his creator. The story includes an extended riff about Francisco Goya, told from his unhappy point of view. The writer-narrator has a writer uncle who, though presumed dead, has apparently continued writing. Or is the narrator carrying on his dead uncle’s work? By the time the story generates an “apparition, this sci-fi incarnation of beauty,” who “was not real, she was a phantom I had brought into being to express my need for love,” I lost interest. “Oklahoma” showcases Rushdie’s astonishing prose but, sad to say, its full meaning escaped me. My fault more than Rushdie’s, I’m sure.

The two short stories address the problem of aging — a problem that eventually vexes everyone who survives youth and middle age. The characters in “In the South,” though known as Senior and Junior, are both 81. Senior’s other friends have died, along with his “kindly” wife. He used a broker to find a new one, a woman with a wooden leg who is unkind, perhaps in response to his own unkindness. “Instead of unhappy solitude they found themselves trapped in unhappy togetherness.” Senior feels like a shadow: “The old move through the world of the young like shades, unseen, of no concern.” Particularly in the story’s last pages, Senior would rather be dead, but as he comes to understand: “Death and life were just adjacent verandas.”

The more interesting short story, “The Old Man in the Piazza,” makes the argument that soaring prose depends on conditions of dissent. In times of agreement, language is muted. Language is a character in the story, sitting in a corner of the piazza during a time when the word “no” was outlawed (although rejection was not, as an old man learned: “The old man was younger then, and his heart ached a lot, thanks to the repeated rejections of its sincerely offered emotions by young women with hair of different colors.”). It was forbidden to debunk even the most risible propositions: “the nocturnal metamorphosis of the immigrant population into drooling sex monsters, the benefits of raising the taxes paid by the poor.” Finally fed up, Language screams and the age of argumentation begins. What takes center stage is an outpouring of unattractive words, “not our language’s beautiful and justly celebrated poetry,” but “Go fuck yourself” and similar expressions.

“The Old Man in the Piazza” explodes the myth (less prevalent in the US than other nations) that aging inevitably bestows wisdom upon those who survive it. Language favors nuance over the simplistic certainties that pass for wisdom: “She cares only for words of many-layered beauty, for fineness of expression, for the subtlety of what is spoken and the resonance of what is better left unspoken, for the meanings between the words, and the illumination of those meanings that only her greatest disciples can provide.”

Readers expect insightful observations about society from Rushdie. Each entry in this volume delivers. Characters contemplate the tension between liberty and goodness (does the ideal of freedom include freedom to be bad?), between individualism and social norms, between definitions of morality that benefit the ruling class and those that are more objective. Rushdie illustrates the conflict that people raised in the conservative political climate feel when they experience the freedoms that are taken for granted in most of western Europe, including sexual freedom and the ability to make choices that are not restricted by family traditions. He explores generational change, contrasts the old and the young, and compares the fear of death to the fear of living.

Chattering characters explore questions of philosophy, sometimes by accident. Some of their theories border on lunacy (stars are just the sun shining through a colander that covers the city at night) but should rational people correct them or listen patiently? “Are mistaken notions harmful to the brain, to the community, to the health of the body politic, or are they simply errors to be tolerated as the product of simple minds?” That question gains currency when applied to climate change deniers and anti-vaxxers.

Religion, art, madness, war and evil, culture and religion, the language of poetry and prose, and the nature of reality are just a few of the topics Rushdie tackles. While the stories are uneven, I give Rushdie credit for trying to do something new in each one. As a writer who marries striking prose to intriguing ideas, Rushdie always gives readers something to enjoy as they try to get at his meaning.

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False Witness by Phillip Margolin

Published by Minotaur Books on November 11, 2025

Karen Wyatt was a respected criminal defense lawyer until she was convicted of a drug crime and sentenced to prison. Although the drugs were planted, a dealer testified that he sold them to Wyatt and a crime lab technician falsified a report that claimed her fingerprints were on the drugs.

Wyatt was set up in retaliation for proving that a biker charged with assaulting a cop during a raid on the biker gang clubhouse was actually the victim of the cop’s assault. A video showed that the cops who set up the raid were stealing drugs and cash from the bikers. The cops were also taking payoffs from a rival gang. They were more than a bit irked that Wyatt exposed their illegal actions.

The crooked crime lab tech is caught stealing cocaine and makes a deal that requires him to tell the truth about Wyatt. That fortuitous circumstance leads to Wyatt’s release from prison. Most of that backstory is told in flashbacks.

Having settled a civil rights claim for wrongful imprisonment, Wyatt has become a wealthy lawyer who can pick and choose her cases. She knows that a prosecutor in the DA’s office was in on the scheme that sent her to prison but she doesn’t know that person’s identity. People who might know the whole story, including the the cop who coerced the crime lab technician and the drug dealer who testified against Wyatt, are soon murdered. Wyatt’s attempt to find the truth about the scheme to send her to prison drives the plot.

A wealthy guy named Terrance Corgen is another murder victim. His body is discovered after someone reports his Jaguar missing. Police pull over Jack Blackburn while he’s driving the car. Blackburn claims Corgen’s chauffeur, Billy Kramer, met him in a bar and asked him to drive his girlfriend home in the Jaguar. Blackburn swears he never went inside the residence but the police found a glass with his fingerprints in the room where they found Corgen’s body. Blackburn seems to be on a path to a murder conviction. The story threads weave together when Wyatt agrees to represent Blackburn.

Two Portland homicide detectives, Chad Remington and Audrey Packer, investigate Corgen’s death. Another suspect is Thomas Horan, a Congressman who believes he was abducted by space aliens after expressing skepticism about alien visitors during UFO hearings. There is evidence that Horan may have been in Corgen’s home and his only alibi witnesses are space aliens. They won’t be coming to court.

Phillip Margolin ties these disparate storylines together in a way that is entertaining if implausible. The explanation for the alien abduction tested my willingness to accept unlikely plot developments. I also found it hard to believe that the sadistic leader of a motorcycle gang is also a Mensa member, but I suppose bright people can be sadistic. Motorcycle gang members are easy targets, but corruption within a legal system that depends on honest cops and prosecutors adds a bit of depth to the story.

The corrupt prosecutor’s identity requires Wyatt to discern the meaning of “Starlight,” the word uttered in a dying breath by another murder victim. Why did the dying man utter the word “Starlight” rather than simply naming the prosecutor? Because the novel wouldn’t have gone on for another fifty pages if he’d given a straightforward answer. When writers substitute “for the sake of the plot” in place of realistic actions, the story suffers. Even with that plot device, the corrupt DA’s identity is easy enough to guess.

Setting aside my reservations about plot elements that come across as forced, I appreciated the trial scenes and the effort Margolin made to give Wyatt a personality. False Witness isn’t among the best legal thrillers of recent vintage, but it is far from the worst.

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The Dagger in Vichy by Alastair Reynolds

Published by Subterranean Press on July 22, 2025

Alastair Reynolds writes some of science fiction’s most entertaining space operas. The Dagger in Vichy is not that. Promotional materials market the novella as a blend of fantasy and science fiction, but I don’t think it’s that either. Arthur C. Clarke’s familiar observation that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” is at work here. The novella is grounded in credible science, but much of the science has been lost as society has regressed to a state that approximates medieval times. I view The Dagger in Vichy as a blend of Arthurian fiction and science fiction, with lost science taking on the role of magic.

The story takes place in a future France. It is the thirty-second year in the reign of the nineteenth Imperator. The characters live in the aftermath of an apocalyptic event, but one that occurred hundreds of years earlier, so distant from the present that it no longer merits discussion.

A playwright and a group of actors are traveling in a horse-drawn wagon, performing at small venues, on guard against an ambush by plundering thieves. They have a particle-pistol and Bernard, an ex-soldier, carries a carbon-bladed dagger “with a nugget of depleted uranium lodged in the hilt.” Although some advanced technology has survived, most has been lost or exists as relics from the Twilight Centuries. Fortunately for humans in need of transportation, horses endure.

The playwright is Guillaume of Ghent. His best writing years are behind him and he knows it. He no longer has a cheery disposition. “The good humour and charity that once flowed out of him without ease had reduced, like his pissing, to a miserly trickle.”

The narrator is Rufus, a boy who is in service to Guillaume after being rescued from the gallows for stealing food. A few other players make up the troupe.

The traveling actors happen upon a dying Knight of the Imperial Guard who implores them to take a wooden box to the Imperator in Avignon. Bernard, ever loyal to the Imperator’s troops, swears he will make the delivery.

Of course, the knight warns them not to open the box. Of course, they do. The object in the box, at first seen only by Guillaume but heard by an eavesdropping Rufus, seems to have supernatural powers.

For reasons best discovered by the reader, Bernard and Guillaume become divided about the wisdom of taking the box to Avignon. The dissolving bond of two old friends and the desperate action one of them takes against the other gives the story its drama.

The true nature of the object in the box will slowly dawn upon most readers, perhaps more quickly than it dawned on me. I admire the craftsmanship with which Reynolds sets up the reveal. His vision of a future France is easily captured without excessive description, as he draws upon familiar images of traveling shows and mounted knights (albeit knights armed with particle weapons). The plot is clever and the resolution is satisfying.

Subterranean is marketing The Dagger in Vichy in a signed limited edition. If you’re not a collector, it’s also available as an ebook.

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The Widow by John Grisham

Published by Doubleday on  ‎ October 21, 2025

The Widow feels like a novel that John Grisham has written before. The protagonist is familiar — a small-town lawyer in Virginia who writes wills, files bankruptcies, and scrapes by on the limited fees that his working-class clients can pay. The lawyer is accused of a crime and hires a criminal defense attorney who takes his case to trial before the true criminal is unmasked. While much of the story is entertaining, it is also unremarkable — a common failing of Grisham’s work.

Eleanor Barnett, an 85-year-old widow, asks Simon Latch to prepare her will. She seems reluctant to give Simon any information, but claims that her first husband had accumulated stock in Coke and Walmart that is now worth millions. Her second husband, Harry Korsak, had two children from an earlier marriage but Eleanor refused to adopt them because they were troublemakers.

Eleanor reluctantly admits that another lawyer, Wally Thackerman, prepared a will for her, but she feels uncomfortable that the will created a trust that would inherit all her property. Naturally, Wally made himself the trustee. When Simon studies the will, he discovers that Wally also made himself the beneficiary of a bequest of nearly half a million dollars (supposedly as payment for past services). Of course, Wally buried that bequest in the will and neglected to mention it to Eleanor.

Simon isn’t quite as crooked as Wally, but he sees an opportunity. He drafts a similar will, minus the unethical bequest to himself. The will leaves Eleanor’s estate to a trust that Simon will administer. Simon includes a dozen uncontroversial charitable organizations as beneficiaries of the trust. Simon figures to earn some nice fees (at double his usually hourly rate) for administering the trust.

Simon doesn’t want his long-time secretary to realize that he’s acting unethically, so he types the will himself, has it witnessed when she’s out of the office, and tells her that he’s still working out the terms of a will with Eleanor. He also tells Eleanor that she shouldn’t tell Wally about the new will. In the meanwhile, Simon ingratiates himself to Eleanor, taking her to a variety of restaurants for lunch. Eleanor loves the attention and never offers to pay for lunch. Grisham creates interesting uncertainty about whether Eleanor actually has the wealth she claims.

Eleanor isn’t much of a driver, so it’s no surprise when she becomes a bit tipsy with her best friend (another elderly woman), crashes her car, and ends up in the hospital. When she dies from pneumonia, Simon figures his investment of time has paid off. His opinion changes when an anonymous caller tells the police that Eleanor’s death is suspicious. A police detective puts a halt to an impending cremation and, when an autopsy reveals that Eleanor was poisoned, Simon is arrested.

The reader knows from the start that Simon has been framed, but he sure looks like someone who killed his client. The secrecy surrounding his drafting of the will, the haste with which he called the mortuary to arrange the cremation, and the fact that he purchased the cookies that held the poison give the prosecution a reasonably strong case against him. It doesn't help that Harry's kids show up with a lawyer of their own, hoping to get the will set aside so they can inherit their stepmother's estate.

The last third of the novel delivers some of what I crave from legal thrillers: the theatrics, strategy, and dramatic “gotcha” moments of a criminal trial. Simon persuades a criminal lawyer to handle his case for a minimal fee. I was surprised the defense lawyer didn’t make more of the anonymous call — the only person who could know that Eleanor was poisoned is the killer — and was a bit shocked that the lawyer didn’t pursue what seems to be a crucial new piece of evidence that Simon’s law school girlfriend, now an FBI agent, uncovers during the trial. Apart from my reservations about improbable strategic decisions, I regard the trial scenes as the novel’s strength.

Grisham adds interest to Simon’s character by giving him a gambling problem and a failing marriage. While people tend to think of lawyers as wealthy, he makes clear that drafting wills and handling bankruptcies in a small town is not lucrative. Simon might be a broke gambler, but he cares about his children, so if he isn’t admirable, at least he isn’t evil.

The whodunit — the poisoner’s identity — comes out of left field. It isn’t an impossible solution but struck me as a failure of imagination. While the story is sufficiently engaging to earn a recommendation, The Widow nestles into the “good, not great” territory that more than half of Grisham’s novels occupy.

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The Dentist by Tim Sullivan

First published in Great Britain in 2020; published by Grove Atlantic on October 21, 2025

American crime novels featuring law enforcement protagonists too often depict the protagonists as tough guy action heroes. British crime novels featuring law enforcement protagonists tend to be more cerebral. George Cross isn’t an action hero (he bicycles to work and doesn’t carry a gun), but he’s a dogged detective. Substituting logic for fists, Cross fights his way to the crime’s solution by exercising his mind. British crime novels make readers smarter.

Cross is challenged by Asperger's syndrome, a condition that makes him socially awkward. He would prefer to avoid social interaction entirely because he finds it painful and pointless. Cross lives with his father, who indulges his need for consistency and doesn’t force him to make small talk.

Cross joined the police because he’s good at solving puzzles. He’s worked his way up to Detective Sergeant in the Major Crime Unit of the Avon and Somerset police. His current partner is DS Ottey, who has “become his apologist and translator with the rest of the world,” a role she does not relish. His superiors tolerate Cross because he is by far the best crime solver in the department.

Cross’ behavior will be amusing to readers but it’s infuriating to his professional colleagues, who regard him as rude. Some fellow officers might be jealous; others might be displeased with Cross’ obsession with order and procedure, an obsession that makes it difficult for them to cut corners.

Tim Sullivan walks a fine line here. Asperger’s is a condition that shouldn’t be mocked, but it does lend itself to comic moments (just as Adrian Monk’s OCD is fertile ground for sprouting laughter). Sullivan balances humor with sympathy for Cross’ plight. After all, Cross didn’t ask for Asperger’s. Trying to interpret social cues so he can behave “normally” is draining. The condition complicates his life, even if it contributes to the obsessive focus that makes him a good detective. A good HR department (the kind that would be condemned as pro-DEI in the US) has encouraged at least some departmental understanding of Cross’ challenges. Sullivan takes the time to humanize Cross, to show the reader how his coping mechanisms (including abrupt departures from social situations that overwhelm him) are misunderstood by those who have no use for empathy.

Because of his Asperger’s, Cross needs things to make sense. That’s the trait that makes him a dogged investigator. If something doesn’t make sense, he needs to understand why. “He followed a strict trail of logic when looking at a case, and couldn't let go when he uncovered a hole in that logic that couldn't be explained away.”

The story begins with the murder of a homeless man named Lenny. Cross and Ottey interview someone at a homeless shelter who last saw Lenny arguing with a man named Badger. They take Badger into custody for questioning, but Badger is intoxicated and doesn’t have a clear memory of his interaction with Lenny. He does recall punching Lenny and on the strength of that memory, confesses to Lenny’s murder.

Cross’ colleagues are satisfied to clear the case, but Cross is troubled because Badger doesn’t seem to know that Lenny was strangled. Cross “needed proof. He needed certainty. Above all, he had an indefatigable need to get it right, to have it in order. For the right person to be found and convicted.” In a tradition that is stronger with fictional police detectives than real ones, Cross continues to gather evidence, hoping to prove or disprove Badger’s guilt with reasonable certainty.

Lenny turns out to have been a dentist who disappeared years ago and was declared legally dead. Lenny was never the same after his mother, Hillary Carpenter, was murdered in her home. Lenny devoted himself to harassing the police, who seemed to be slow walking the investigation. A photo of footprints in Lenny’s backpack was evidence in the case, but why did he have it? For that matter, why did Lenny return home after being missing for so many years?

Cross decides he needs to solve Hillary’s murder, as it seems to be linked to Lenny’s murder. The only significant clue is a red Jaguar that sideswiped a parked car as it raced away from the neighborhood at the time the crime occurred. Cross becomes concerned that the police did too little to track down the car and identify the driver.

The Dentist will appeal to fans of police procedurals. Cross and Ottey interview countless car dealers after learning that a witness recalled that the Jaguar had a dealer’s plate. The detective who led the original investigation, now retired, seems to have been deliberately obstructing it, but why? And how does Hillary’s murder connect to Lenny’s?

A credible plot seems to point to the guilt of an obvious suspect, but a final twist may surprise readers (like me) who prematurely congratulate themselves for solving the crimes. The pace never lags, but this isn’t an action novel. Characterization — Cross’ quirkiness combined with secondary characters who find ways to cope with him — is well above average for a thriller. It makes George Cross a promising new protagonist for crime novel fans to follow.

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