Stories by @rachani

Metropolis

"Berlin, 1928, the dying days of the Weimar Republic shortly before Hitler and the Nazis came to power. Bernie Gunther is a young detective working in Vice when he gets a summons from Weiss, Chief of Berlin's Criminal Police. He invites him to join KIA - Criminal Inspection A - the supervisory body for all homicide investigation. Bernie's first task is to investigate the Silesian Station killings - four prostitutes murdered in as many weeks. All of them hit over the head with a hammer and then scalped with a sharp knife." © 2025 Goodreads

God’s Country

"The unlikely narrator through this tale of misadventures is one Curt Marder: gambler, drinker, cheat, and would-be womanizer. It's 1871, and he's lost his farm, his wife, and his dog to a band of marauding hooligans. With nothing to live on but a desire to recover what is rightfully his, Marder is forced to enlist the help of the best tracker in the West: a black man named Bubba". ©Google Books

Enemy Women

"For the Colleys of southeastern Missouri the War Between the States is a plague that threatens devastation despite the family's avowed neutrality. For eighteen-year-old Adair Colley it is a nightmare at its most terrible when the Union Militia sets fire to her house, driving her brother into hiding and dragging her widowed father away, beaten and bloodied."--Back cover.

Perspective(s)

"Bursting with characters and historical color, Laurent Binet’s Perspective(s) is a whodunit like no other—a labyrinthine murder mystery that shows us Renaissance Florence as we’ve never seen it before. A pulse-quickening murder mystery set in Renaissance Florence by the renowned author of HHhH." © 2025 Macmillan Publishers

Network Effect: A Murderbot Novel (The Murderbot Diaries, 5)

"When Murderbot's human associates (not friends, never friends) are captured and another not-friend from its past requires urgent assistance, Murderbot must choose between inertia and drastic action. Drastic action it is, then." © Barnes & Noble "Network Effect is a 2020 science fiction fantasy novel written by Martha Wells. It is the fifth work in the Murderbot Diaries series and the first full-length novel. Network Effect won the 2021 Hugo Award for Best Novel, the 2020 Nebula Award for Best Novel, and the 2021 Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. " © Wikipedia

Clear

"1843. On a remote Scottish island, Ivar, the sole occupant, leads a life of quiet isolation until the day he finds a man unconscious on the beach below the cliffs. The newcomer is John Ferguson, an impoverished church minister sent to evict Ivar and turn the island into grazing land for sheep. Unaware of the stranger's intentions, Ivar takes him into his home," . RSL Ondaatje Prize (2025), Saltire Society Literary Award Nominee for Fiction Book of the Year (2024) © 2025 Goodreads

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

"A chilling historical horror novel set in the American west in 1912 following a Lutheran priest who transcribes the life of a vampire who haunts the fields of the Blackfeet reservation looking for justice." © 2025 Goodreads

Now We Shall Be Entirely Free

"By the Costa Award-winning author of PURE, a stunning historical novel with the grip of a thriller, written in richly evocative, luminous prose. One rain-swept February night in 1809, an unconscious man is carried into a house in Somerset. He is Captain John Lacroix, home from Britain's disastrous campaign against Napoleon's forces in Spain. Gradually Lacroix recovers his health, but not his peace of mind - he cannot talk about the war or face the memory of what happened in a village on the gruelling retreat to Corunna." © Goodreads

Golden Hill

The novel follows a mysterious British traveller named Mr Smith who arrives in New York City in 1746 and upends the lives of the merchant and political classes.

The Trees

"Set predominantly in the small town of Money, Mississippi, the novel follows a series of murders that seem to follow identical patterns." From Wikipedia

A Visit from the Goon Squad

A Visit from the Goon Squad is a 2011 Pulitzer Prize-winning work of fiction by American author Jennifer Egan. The book is a set of thirteen interrelated stories with a large set of characters all connected to Bennie Salazar, a record company executive, and his assistant, Sasha. (Wikipedia)

Why We Die.

"The road to hell is paved with all sorts of intentions, as Oxford private investigator Zoë Boehm discovers when a straightforward jewelry store robbery ..."

The Last Voice You Hear

When a woman dies beneath the wheels of a train and her newly acquired lover fails to turn up at the funeral, private investigator Zoe Boehm is hired to find him. And in attempting to unlock the secrets of a woman she's never met, in search of a man who might be anyone, Zoe, already struggling to come to terms with the violence in her past and the possible damage in her future, only finds more questions: where did Alan Talmadge come from ? Why does he appear to have no history ? How did he meet Caroline Daniels ? And has he killed before ?

Joe Country

If Spook Street is where spies live, Joe Country is where they go to die.

Caledonian Road

" • Finalist for the 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction • Named a Best Book of the Summer by The Times, The Guardian, The Observer, and Financial Times • Named a Best Book to Read in 2024 by The Independent and Harper’s Bazaar A biting portrait of British class, politics, and money told through five interconnected families and their rising—and declining—fortunes. Campbell Flynn, art historian, professor, and fêted fixture of the literati, always knew that when his life came crashing down, it would happen in public—yet he never imagined that a single year in London would expose so much." ©2024 Penguin Random House

London Rules

London Rules is the fifth book in the Slough House series by prize-winning British author, Mick Herron- " “A terrorist attack in Derbyshire kills 12, leading to a difficult manhunt with twists and turns in a strong plot combining espionage, bureaucracy and the power of a community’s response to a terrorist attack.” —The Gainesville Sun"

Kairos

"A young student in East Berlin falls in love with a much older writer in the run-up to the fall of the Berlin Wall" © 2024 npr

James

"Percival Everett's gleeful reboot of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn puts the enslaved Jim centre stage in a horrifying, painful and funny novel." © 2024 Guardian News & Media Limited

Night Watch

"A beautifully rendered novel set in West Virginia’s Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in the aftermath of the Civil War where a severely wounded Union veteran, a 12-year-old girl and her mother, long abused by a Confederate soldier, struggle to heal". LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN FICTION • A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR © 2024 The Pulitzer Prizes

Hamnet

Hamnet is a 2020 novel by Maggie O'Farrell. It is a fictional account of William Shakespeare's son, Hamnet, who died at age eleven in 1596, focusing on his parents' grief. (From Wikipedia)