Bloomsbury USA

A joy for any serious cook.

Roberts’s wide-ranging historical research and storytelling skills should captivate New Yorkers and others. Larger photographs might have enhanced readers’ connection to these structures and their roles in the life of the city.

Confidently told, this second long-form work from Doyle (after Here Are the Young Men) alternates 11 vignettes with letters to an anonymous correspondent as the masterly narrative pacing brilliantly counterbalances lurid episodes and sometimes terror with devastating wit and epiphany. As ever, Doyle’s prose is compulsively readable, and his insights always credible and occasionally astonishing.

The precise wordplay and convoluted crime plot of this 1950s British blackish comedy will please fans and attract more readers to the series.