Mosley's 'Hanging & Burning' Leads the Week's Best Reviewed Books

Walter Mosley's Hanging & Burning has taken the top spot in this week's best reviewed books, earning a rare unanimous five rave reviews on Book Marks, Lit Hub's review aggregator. Lawrence Wright's Redemption, Lisa Hanawalt's I Can't Stop Thinking About Horses and Sex and Blake J. Harris's Emperor of Nothing: The Making of Larry David also feature in the weekly roundup.

What are critics praising in fiction?

Mosley's fourth King Oliver novel, published by Little Brown and Company, drew the strongest consensus of any title on the list. Reviewing for Booklist, Donna Seaman wrote that Mosley is "in the zone," and praised the novel for "choreographing match-point dialogue and down-to-the-wire showdowns, paying tribute to the transporting beauty of jazz, relishing the absurd, and exploring the interplay of family and crime."

Sam Riviere's Doppelgänger (Catapult) follows with two raves and two positive reviews. Matthew Janney, writing in The Financial Times, noted the risk baked into the project: "The danger with writing a book like Doppelgänger is that you end up perpetuating the very thing you're warning against." His verdict: "Riviere pulls it off; he has succeeded in making Doppelgänger undeniably singular."

The rest of the fiction list:

• Pol Guasch, Paradise Burns (FSG Originals) — 2 raves, 1 positive. Kirkus called it "one of the greatest, most perceptive novels about friendship to be published in recent years."
• Lisa Kleypas, Queen of Lombard Street (Avon Books) — 1 rave, 2 positive. Kirkus described it as "compelling historical fiction with as much romance as economics."
• Nuzo Onoh, The Turning of Sally-Mae (Titan Books) — 1 positive, 2 mixed, the weakest showing on either list.

Who dominates nonfiction?

Lindsey Fitzharris's Sleuth-Hound: The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmes (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) leads the nonfiction chart with two raves and four positive reviews. David Pitt, in Booklist, wrote that Fitzharris "rescues Bell from the periphery of the Holmes story and restores him to his rightful position as the inspiration and model for the great consulting detective."

Lawrence Wright's Redemption: Faith, Justice, and Sisterhood on Death Row (Knopf) collected three raves, one positive and one mixed. Kate Tuttle, reviewing in The Boston Globe, called it possibly "Wright's most personal work of journalism, a truly moving and thoughtful book that will challenge readers' assumptions about guilt, justice, and transformation."

Lisa Hanawalt's essay collection from Drawn and Quarterly earned three raves and one positive. Sam Thielman, in The New York Times Book Review, observed that her "jokey vignettes and colorful animal drawings belie a very serious narrative precision."

Zaina Arafat's Our Arab: On Longing, Belonging, and Hope (Little Brown) received two raves and one positive; Publishers Weekly called it "clarifying and powerful," saying it "probes at the wounded hearts of Palestinians in exile."

Blake J. Harris's Emperor of Nothing (Dey Street Books) closed the list with three positive and one mixed review. Julia M. Klein, in The Wall Street Journal, flagged a limitation: the book "doesn't entirely avoid hagiography" and "gives short shrift to Mr. David's romantic history."

What does the roundup change for readers?

For anyone building a reading list, the signals are clear: Mosley and Fitzharris carry the week's strongest critical consensus, while the mixed notices for Onoh and Harris suggest those titles divide reviewers. As aggregator tallies go, that spread is the useful part — the praise and the caveats both arrive before purchase.