THE POWER WORSHIPPERS: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism by Katherine Stewart (Bloomsbury). Hard to get into this without the cliché, “eye-opening.” We learn, here, from a committed deep researcher—years of devoted travel, interviews, reading—that this movement is a good deal more dedicated and scarily more ambitious than the rest of us have so far noticed. These are not conservative politicians who happen to share a certain fundamentalist-Protestant belief system—anti-cussing, anti-sex, “pro-life” (with their definition of which lives are sacred), patriarchist, all that. Bad enough, that, if it came to dominate all our lives. But these people want, and seriously mean to have, not just dominion over their own small nation within this one; they want an authoritarian American government, in their unshakable grasp—to protect not us, but their cast-iron selves. It's why—and the case is made carefully and calmly—it's why they tolerate and even pretend to like our obviously Godless current president. They like him doing his best to create a structureless, foundationless government for them to reshape. (Why would we need a Surgeon General, a Center for Disease Control? Regulations, our precious tax dollars spent on fiddling research—decisions made for us there in the Washington swamp?)

NEW WAVES by Kevin Nguyen (One World). Lovely first novel by yet another seriously gifted young American artist—very, very smart, but really must be introduced as something like lovely (which really is true of it) to make clear that we have a novel, here, with people to care for and real-world—not just tech-world, though it's set in several parts of that—pains and wonders and outrages and loves and laughs. It's not exactly serious fiction's job to allow you to feel at home for a while in a world you might never visit, but that can be an enriching and enjoyable side benefit.

LONG RANGE: A Joe Pickett Novel by C. J. Box (Putnam). No more than that needs to be said, surely, but I should alert you to the fact that it got to the bestseller list—high on it, already—before this notice got to you (this past Sunday).

THE EVIL MEN DO by John McMahon (Putnam). Yet another new crime novel series that's cause for celebrating. This is #2 of this series; I was suspicious of last year's THE GOOD DETECTIVE, and decided to wait and see. I'm wrong almost as often as right when I do that, and this was probably one of those wrong calls; we've got a terrific police procedural thriller, here. Great, complicated central character and fine surrounding cast, complex plotting and realization of place (southern, small city) and not a wasted scene or word.