Three Books I'm Reading Now, 3/1/26 Edition

The Books I'm Reading Now

I'm reading Tayari Jones's newest novel, Kin, about childhood friends and the diverging paths of two Southern women; I'm listening to Inside Man, the second book in the Head Cases mystery series about a special FBI unit solving complex mysteries; and I'm listening to memoirist Jennette McCurdy's debut fiction about an inappropriate obsession, Half His Age.

What are you reading, bookworms?

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01 Kin by Tayari Jones

Young Annie and Vernice were best friends in small-town Louisiana. Both grew up without mothers, but then their paths diverged.

Vernice headed to Spelman College, befriending powerful young women, fighting inequality, and finding her voice. Annie became fixated on her mother's absence, and her search for her place in the world led to adventure and bordered on self-destruction.

Tayari Jones is also the author of An American Marriage.

I received a prepublication edition of Kin courtesy of NetGalley and Knopf.

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02 Inside Man (Head Cases #2) by John McMahon

The initial installment of John McMahon's police procedural series introduced Gardner Camden, a genius, socially awkward leader, and the rest of his special team of FBI investigators who reinvent methods of finding their culprit. That first book was a smart, intriguing, and satisfying mystery.

In the second book in the Head Cases series, Camden is back on the job--with two enormous, strange, urgent, intersecting cases that it seems only the Patterns and Recognition (PAR) Unit can possibly unravel.

The story twists and turns through confidential informants, militias arming themselves with black-market guns, a serial killer, and missing women with something mysterious in common.

I'm reading Inside Man as a library audbiobook through Libby.

John McMahon is also the author of Head Cases. I heard about this series in a roundup of mystery novels recommended by national security agents.

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03 Half His Age by Jennette McCurdy

McCurdy's unique voice came through loud and clear in her personal, unflinching memoir I'm Glad My Mom Died.

The premise of her debut novel Half His Age made me cringe, but I had to find out how McCurdy's command of narrative nonfiction storytelling would translate into fiction.

Waldo is a seventeen-year-old senior working at Victoria's Secret after school, binge-buying cheap clothing online to fill the emotional void she often feels, and often sleeping alone in the trailer where she lives with her often-absent, man-crazy mother.

She becomes wildly, lustily fixated on her fortysomething, married creative writing teacher, and in Half His Age McCurdy offers a complicated story about an illegal, inappropriate, mystifying, all-encompassing obsession.

I'm listening to Half His Age, which is narrated by Jennette McCurdy, courtesy of Libro.fm and Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group.