The untimely demise of a provocative young filmmaker consumes a museum copy editor in this sequel to Still Lives (2018). After spending the summer in Vermont recovering from a run-in with a murderer, Rocque Museum copy editor Maggie Richter is ready to tell her friends and colleagues in Los Angeles that she isn't coming back. Then her boss, Janis Rocque, emails with a tantalizing proposition. Several months ago, Brenae Brasil--a grad student at the prestigious Los Angeles Art College--shot herself. Janis claims she has inside knowledge that Brenae's death was "more complicated than it seemed" and is willing to handsomely compensate Maggie--a former journalist--if she'll investigate the school's culture and use discretion in publishing her findings. Maggie returns to California, where she learns that Brenae sent Janis a copy of an unreleased movie titled Lesson in Red, which shows Brenae having coerced sex with an unidentified man. According to authorities, the work is one of two deleted from Brenae's computer after she died but before her body was discovered. Determined to uncover the truth, Maggie infiltrates Brenae's social circle and, with the help of special agent Ray Hendricks, starts digging. This novel might occasionally lose readers unfamiliar with the plot and key players from Still Lives. The story feels overstuffed and the denouement relies too heavily on coincidence, but Hummel delivers a searing indictment of the artistic community's bias toward White men and the exploitations that follow. A thoughtful thriller that shines a light into the art world's dark corners. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Maggie never imagined that working at the cash-strapped Rocque Museum in Los Angeles would lead to peril and murder, as Hummel so shrewdly orchestrated in Still Lives (2018), a Reese Witherspoon Book Club Pick. Nor did this aspiring arts journalist expect to become embroiled in yet another complexly harrowing case involving a woman artist daring to challenge assumptions about gender and equality. Drawing even more deeply on her astute insights into the shadow side of the art world, Hummel exposes the toxic competition at a top art school, where promising and audacious video artist Brenae Brasil appears to have killed herself. Maggie--smart, witty, stubborn, and gutsy--finds herself playing an increasingly risky role in a dicey covert investigation complicated by a power play between her boss, Janis, and Hal, head of the graduate department and a renowned artist whose installations are created by his intimidated students. The cutthroat arts milieu, precisely and knowingly rendered, is magnetizing, while the intricately knotted plot and the characters' nuanced psychology are stoked by Hummel's evisceration of privilege, greed, exploitation, and criminality. Scathing, sexy, suspenseful, and righteous.

Early in Hummel's overly earnest sequel to 2018's Still Lives, budding journalist Maggie Richter returns to L.A., where her former employer, Janis Rocque, founder and chief donor of the Rocque Museum, has an assignment for her. A few months earlier, 22-year-old Brenae Brasil, a student at Los Angeles Art College and a rising star in the video-art world with "a talent for controversy," fatally shot herself in her studio. Janis tells Maggie that "something systemic is wrong" with the school, and it led to Brenae's suicide. Janis arranges for Maggie to go undercover at a gallery where an installation by the LAAC director, a conceptual artist, is being set up by four of his students. She's to report her findings to a private eye. Rather than present a mystery with moral underpinnings, the author uses Maggie's investigations to deliver a righteous message about vulnerable women and the commodification of contemporary art, and she tries too hard to connect everything with what happened in Still Lives. Those invested in Maggie from her first outing will best appreciate this follow-up. Agent: Gail Hochman, Brandt & Hochman Literary. (June)

In When Justice Sleeps, Abrams takes a break from her considerable political responsibilities to craft a legal thriller featuring Avery Keene, who clerks for Supreme Court Justice Wynn and takes over the background investigation of a key case when he falls into a coma. In Hairpin Bridge, Adams's No Exit follow-up, Lena Nguyen doesn't believe that estranged twin sister Cambry committed suicide; otherwise, she likely wouldn't have called 911 16 times before her death (100,000-copy first printing). In Hummel's Lesson in Red, follow-up to the Reese's Book Club x Hello Sunshine pick Still Lives, Maggie Richter faces another artworld mystery. In Edgar-nominated, New York Times best-selling author McCreight's Friends Like These, a bachelor party in the Catskills is a cover for a staged intervention to help one of the guests, but someone ends up dead (75,000-copy first printing). Abducted from her found-religion parents' isolated Arkansas homestead and returned unharmed yet still treated as damaged, teenage Sarabeth gladly makes her exit, but in International Thriller Writer Award winner McHugh's What's Done in Darkness, she gets called back five years later to help with a copycat crime. Following Mangin's nationally best-selling Tangerine, Palace of the Drowned stars flailing British novelist Frankie Croy, who is staying in a friend's vacant Venice palazzo in 1966 while struggling to regain her early writing promise and doesn't quite trust a fan who comes her way (200,000-copy first printing). Having had a huge international best seller with The Silent Patient, Michaelides aims for another winner in his Untitled new work (one-million-copy first printing). Following the New York Times best-selling, Reese Witherspoon-optioned Something in the Water, Steadman returns with The Disappearing Act, about a British actress who realizes that she's the only witness to the disappearance of a woman she auditioned with during Hollywood's harried pilot season.