Books: 773

“Sleep Well My Lady: An Emma Djan Investigation”
Kwei Quartey
Soho Crime
$16.95

Lady Araba, a dazzling fashion queen on the eve of her runway show, sprawls in bed, brutally murdered. Accra (Ghana) police imprison (and forget) her driver. Suspicious, an aunt begs Emma Djan to find the killer, a task involving unearthing the secrets of wealthy and warring sets of parents — the Lady’s and her ex’s, a former media personality now lost to alcohol and drugs. He’d shadowed Lady Araba, begging her to return. She’d waffled. Quartey tackles problems known far beyond Africa: child abuse, misogyny, wealth’s power to buy “justice,” and political and police corruption. Emma Djan, sole female in the Sowah detective agency, goes undercover, enduring flashes from her own traumatic past, to learn the truth while the penniless but convenient driver, hope fading, languishes in prison.

“Straight Acting: The Hidden Queer Lives of William Shakespeare”
Will Tosh
Seal Press
$32

Tosh leads with young Will’s student immersion in the Classics and all the queerness with which Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” Cicero’s “De Amicitia,” etc. are imbued, well before he had an inkling of the goings-on in London Town. He arrived there young, curious — married to Anne Hathaway. While boys in that era played women’s roles, Will’s characters threaded mazes where boys played girls playing boys, becoming enamored in skewed passions with quirky gender twists. No more than anyone does Tosh have proof in hand of Shakespeare’s deepest desires, but as a dramaturg of long standing and head of research at the Globe, he’s fully steeped in things Shakespeare, cunningly able to scatter bread crumbs along the path to lure the reader deeper into the forest on a merry chase.

“Turning to Stone: The Subtle Wisdom of Rocks”
Marcia Bjornerud
Flatiron Books
$28.99

After decades of geologic studies, Bjornerud champions rocks’ role in maintaining an orderly Earth. Her evidence? Translations of stones’ mute diaries in their varied foldings, joinings and layerings accrued through million-year-long pressures, melting, or ejected in flames. Whether igneous, sedimentary or metamorphic, each has a tale to tell; many have traveled far, ejected from the bowels of a volcano on another continent, a fragment slumbers on a sandy beach waiting for your next stroll. These are not isolated wanderings, and we’re slow learners. Plate tectonics and seafloor spreading weren’t accepted until the late 1960s when individual rocks were recognized as instruments, pieces fine-tuned to release water, store carbon dioxide and keep Earth viable. Are increased human activities endangering this primordial balance? Are we willing to pause and assess?

“Adventures in Volcanoland: What Volcanoes Tell Us About the World and Ourselves”
Tasmin Mather
Hanover Square Press
$32.99

Geochemist Mather offers a substantive read for lay readers concerning these fiery, explosive entities. Humanity has called them deities and/or destroyers, but a view from Deep Time (through billions of years, not human lifetimes) shows they’ve also been creators. Volcanoes’ eruptions pierced the encompassing global ocean, up-thrusting mountains, whose outpourings created lands, then continents to contain creatures bi-and multi-pedal. Mather focuses particularly on the gasses volcanoes emit — and they do, daily — examining how they help maintain our atmosphere and affect humanity. Volcanoes cause human devastation, but using a Deep-Time lens, one must acknowledge the eye-blink of humanity’s span against their eons of making their “plumbing” system underground, balancing aspects of handling water availability and carbon management above, functions that assure Earth’s continuing existence and that of its May-fly passengers.