Marcy S. Wood’s The Notorious Murder of Ellar Day is an ambitious work of historical fiction that combines romance, murder, racial violence, and the rough social politics of an 1880s Colorado mining town. Based on historical events, the novel begins with its ending: Ellar Day tells us from beyond the grave that she was murdered. Wood therefore makes the mystery not whether Ellar will die, but how a young woman with intelligence and considerable determination becomes trapped by circumstances that steadily eliminate her choices.
Meet Ameline and Landry, a couple of teens who have known each other virtually all their lives. To call these two High School sweethearts, though, would be to understate their relationship in Mark Meade’s Finders Keepers. Ameline and Landry may live in Panama City Beach, Florida, but theirs has not been an idyllic childhood. Landry’s father and Ameline’s mother have been dope heads and just all-around crummy parents since the kids were little. Their parents were constantly together in one drug haze or another, so Ameline and Landry pretty much grew up on their own, with help from a couple of well-meaning neighbors who did their best to help the kids out.
The corruption of the United States Supreme Court did not begin with luxury vacations, undisclosed gifts, or billionaires buying access to conservative justices. In FBI Snitches, Blackmail, and Obscene Ethics at the Supreme Court, attorney and civil libertarian Alex Charns documents an earlier scandal involving J. Edgar Hoover, Lyndon Johnson, and liberal Justice Abe Fortas. Drawing upon thousands of pages of FBI records, Charns reveals how Hoover cultivated informants inside the Court, concealed evidence of illegal surveillance, and acquired potentially devastating sexual allegations against a sitting justice.
