Mystery Play

 Mystery Play-Elizabeth Kostova

Ballatine Books

Release Date: October 13, 2026

Rating:  📚📚📚📚

Synopsis: When his mother passes away suddenly, Jay Turner finds himself at a crossroads. She was always secretive, raising him alone in Boston and staying single until her death. Returning to their brownstone to clear out her possessions, he finds two unusual objects: a partially burned scrap of newspaper bearing the name “Gael Brogan,” and a small antique volume bound in leather.

The sight of the volume is chilling. As a young scholar, his mother had been given the medieval book—one of a set commissioned by Vlad Tepes, otherwise known as Dracula, just before his death in 1477.  She'd always warned Jay of how dangerous it was, and had donated it to a museum before she died . . . yet here it sits before him.

Taking leave from his position as a history instructor at a boys’ boarding school, Jay sets out to learn more about Gael Brogan, a prominent nineteenth century actor whose last and most famous role was the Count himself in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. As Jay begins to dig deeper—helped by a mysterious woman named Rhiannon he meets along the way—he uncovers a frightening story of a young actress who fell under Brogan's sway long ago.  And before long, Jay and Rhiannon realize that something similarly implacable is also pursuing them.

____________________________________________________

What do you do when you know your family has a history fighting evil and you are trying to live a normal life? Jay Turner has pretty much ignored his family's legacy with Vlad Tepes and been protected from it by his mother, but when his mother dies and he begins to experience odd circumstances, he goes looking for answes. A historian himself, Jay wants to learn about his mother, and can't leave questions unanswered. But the answers take him down disturbing rabbit holes in search of the truth about Gilded Age actor Gael Brogan and his connections to Bram Stoker and Dracula. With the help of Rhiannon "Riley", and others, Jay searches for a truth his mother might have been near enough to have been killed for, and the bodies pile up along the dangerous path.

Mystery Play sends Jay and Riley through libraries and archives searching for Gael Brogan, one of the great Gilded Age actors. It alternates their story with letters and diary entries from Fern Quinn, an actress who worked with Brogan; and journal entries from Jay's mother in 1995 while she was in Italy. It took me a little while to get into Fern's entries, and even longer to get into Jay's mothers—it takes forever before you see why the mother's account is in there and when you do, personally I wasn't convinced. Without giving anything away, let's just say I that I didn't think it didn't added anything useful to the storyline. Fern's entries do, though it takes awhile. The closer she gets to Brogan the more we see of the dangerous man that Jay and Riley may be hunting and I was completely absorbed in finding out what happened to her.

There's a gothic element to Mystery Play. You find yourself wondering with each person Jay meets: are they friend or foe? Actually there to help or setting him up for disaster? And until the very end, there are a few characters that you aren't entirely sure of. Between being actors and (potential) immortals who can and will disguise themselves, you have to question everyone until very much proven otherwise. But that, as well as things like trying to figure out when exactly Brogan becomes an immortal (a vampire? he never tells us what term he'd prefer) is part of the fun for the reader. For someone like me, a historian and archvist by training, watching the characters search libraries and archives and have librarians saving the day is also pretty fun.

I read Kostova's The Historian when it first came out and I remember being captivated by it at the time. So when this book, a kind-of sequel, showed up, I wanted to read it. I didn't remember the first book in detail, but that ended up being fine—while I think there are a few Easter eggs for readers who remember the first book in detail, those who don't (or haven't read it) won't be lost reading this one on its own.

Not necessarily a book I'd recommend reading at night when you're alone in the house.

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

The Rush

 The Rush: Californai Gold, the Civil War, and the Making of the Modern World- Nathaniel Philbrick

Viking

Release Date: October 6, 2026

Rating: 📚📚📚📚

Synopsis: In January 1848, a carpenter spotted flecks of gold in a shallow stream at Sutter’s Mill in California—triggering the greatest voluntary migration in U.S. history and jolting a fragile republic already sliding toward crisis. In The Rush, Nathaniel Philbrick transforms the Gold Rush from a tale of sudden riches into the origin story of America’s modern capital consolidated at dizzying speed, democracy in thrall to private power, xenophobia weaponized in the name of liberty—and a stubborn belief in the American experiment that refuses to die. This is the story of a nation tearing at the seams—a republic tested by its own ideals.

From the feverish gold-mining camps of the Sierra Nevada mountains to the wharves and vigilance committees of San Francisco, Philbrick renders a combustible, all-world Chilean brothers reinventing themselves to outrun prejudice; Native communities navigating dispossession and violence; the merchant-showman Samuel Brannan, drawn into the center of early vigilantism; and the politicians vying for control of California’s future—the ambitious free-soil political boss David Broderick, who squared off against William Gwin, the Southern power broker intent on tilting the state toward slavery and the Confederacy. Not until a year after the outbreak of the Civil War, when President Lincoln signed legislation that would unite the nation east to west by building a transcontinental railroad, was California’s loyalty secured.

Philbrick follows the gold as it moves from riverbed to countinghouse to the halls of power, revealing how vigilantism hardened into law and how debates over slavery in the West tipped the balance in Washington. The result is a clear, human story of how a scramble for wealth reshaped ideas of freedom, labor, and belonging—and how California's rise helped push a fractured nation toward war.

_________________________________________________

If you're looking for a completely new take on California during and after the Gold Rush, Nathaniel Philbrick's The Rush: California Gold, the Civil War, and the Making of the Moder World is the place to go. This isn't a book about the hardships of traveling West and panning for gold (though it talks about that). This is a book about the people who arrived, full of gold fever, and what it did to them-and what they did in return.

I went in knowning a lot about the Gold Rush. So some of this book was familiar. How ships would arrive in port and every sailor would jump overboard to head for the hills and try their luck. How the real money was made by those selling necessary items to the miners. How San Francisco would regularly burn down because it was nothing more than rough wooden buildings because no one took the time to build anything else.

Philbrick goes into the people. The utter lawlessness of those who arrived, the entitelment of the Americans. The horrific killings of anyone they felt had wronged them in anyway-which eventually gave way to the attempted genocide of the indigenous population. Even after becoming a state, vigilante, mob rule had an alarming tendency to take hold. 

I had no idea how closely tied California was to the Southern politicians in the years before the CIvil War, or how close it came to becoming two separate states and supporting slavery. Philbrick did a good job making the connections between California and the road to war in the East Coast in ways I'd never heard before, but made perfect sense when he laid them out. 

The one place I thought he fell a bit was trying to make connections to the "making of the modern world." The idea that the 1849 gold rush was the first time a people and an area were so focued on speed and 'time is money' that this was all they thought about worked to an extent. That we can trace today's fast-paced world to this phenomenon I was less convinced by. Philbrick didn't seem to know how to end his book and the last chapter suffered as a result of this. It needed to end with the transcontinental railroad and a way to tie up the 'rush' mental phenomena if that was what he wanted to focus on, but it kind of petered out instead and seemed to forget about it's grand title and plan to connect the gold rush and today's fast-paced world—hence the final chapter. Personally, I think it would have been a stronger book without that.

Even so, The Rush is a well-researched, fast-paced, and fascinating book. A book that should be read by anyone interested in American history.

I received an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review