These are among the new titles released by local writers, listed in alphabetical order by author names:
“A Tour to Die For: A Serial Killer Guide to San Francisco Mystery” by Michelle Chouinard
Minotaur Books, 336 pages, $31 hardcover, $18 paper, Sept. 23, 2025
Bay Area caffeine addict and mystery writer Michelle Chouinard is the author of nine books in the Detective Jo Fournier series as well as “The Serial Killer Guide to San Francisco,” about which Alicia Thompson, author of “Love in the Time of Serial Killers,” said: “I could practically feel the heavy San Francisco fog as I was reading…I was glued to the pages!” Chouinard, a Stanford University-educated developmental psychologist who was among the founding faculty members of University of California, Merced, is fascinated with amateur genealogy, baking, Halloween and the zombie apocalypse. In the new “A Tour to Die For,” the second title in her Serial Killer Guide to San Francisco series, Capri Sanzio, who leads guided tours with serial killer themes, finds herself at the center of a homicide investigation after a tourgoer claims to see a woman being attacked.
“St. James Park” by John Doll
Koehler Books, 334 pages, $28.95 hardcover, $19.95 paper, Aug. 19, 2025
San Jose native John Doll, now a semi-retired San Francisco resident, based his historical fiction novel “St. James Park” on stories about the Santa Clara Valley his Italian-American mother and grandmother told him, and on the largely forgotten 1933 kidnapping and murder of the son of department store owner in San Jose. A student of economic development with undergraduate and graduate degrees, Doll, a self-described “recovering bureaucrat,” worked on Bay Area revitalization projects throughout his career. “St. James Park,” his debut novel, is the first installment what he’s calling The San Jose Trilogy. A portrait of San Jose’s labor unrest, government corruption and anti-immigrant racism during the Great Depression, “St. James Park” describes the various investigations taken up by the FBI, a bootlegger and labor activist following the 1933 kidnapping of prominent department store heir. Clint Wilkins, a former fellow in the San Jose mayor’s office, calls the book “a genre-bending cinematic novel.”
“Negligent by Design: Anti-Blackness in American Medicine and How to Address It” by Dr. Vanessa Grubbs
North Atlantic Books, 192 pages, $20.95, Sept. 2, 2025
Oaklander Vanessa Grubbs, a North Carolina native, was a resident at Highland Hospital in Oakland and general medicine researcher at University of California, San Francisco before specializing in nephrology after donating a kidney to a man she later married, a story detailed in her memoir “Hundreds of Interlaced Fingers.” Later focusing on writing, addressing “microaggressions” she experienced on the job and racism endured by other Black physicians, she founded Black Doc Village, Inc., a nonprofit aimed at ending the disproportionate dismissal of Black resident physicians. In her new book, she describes how the medical industry systematically denies fair treatment to Black patients and offers solutions toward achieving equity. Dr. Uché Blackstock, author of “Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons With Racism in Medicine,” calls Grubbs’ book “a searing exposé of how medicine perpetuates harm under the guise of care” and “a powerful tool for change and a critical contribution to the conversation on racial justice in healthcare.”
“Please Fear Me” by Jennifer Love
Fairlight Books, 288 pages, $17.99, Sept. 13, 2025
Jennifer Love, a Bay Area native and Oakland resident, is a poet and author of the 2023 short story collection “Punch a Hole in the Sky to Let In the Light,” about which she says, “The characters populating these confessionals and fever dreams are at odds with the surrounding world. Their struggles and choices hold a funhouse mirror up to the socialization we’re subject to straight out of the womb, and the expectations we then hold each other to for the rest of our strange, sad days.” Her debut novel “Please FearMe” is about a 16-year-old (on the run from her criminal mother) who takes up performance art and joins a traveling circus, journeying through America’s underbelly. Ola Mustapha, author of “Other Names, Other Places,” calls the book “a poignant and atmospheric coming of age story,” adding, “Jennifer Love has produced the literary equivalent of the best kind of road movie.”
“World Pacific” by Peter Mann
Harper, 400 pages, $27.99, Aug. 19, 2025
Longtime San Francisco resident Peter Mann, a literature and history instructor at Stanford University who grew up in Kansas City, is particularly interested in 19th- and 20th-century happenings in Europe, especially the connections between politics and the absurd. He earned a doctorate in Modern European history before becoming a novelist and a cartoonist publishing a newsletter called “The Quixote Syndrome.” His 2022 debut novel “The Torqued Man” is a World War II-era spy novel about a closeted gay German, anti-Nazi translator, and an Irish socialist recruited to collaborate with the Nazis which, he says, “speaks to the predicament of both main characters in terms of their conflicted identities and convoluted allegiances.” Mann’s humorous new novel “World Pacific” describes the mysterious disappearance of boys’ adventure writer Dicky Halifax (modeled on the real-life Richard Halliburton) who vanishes in 1939 while trying to sail a Chinese junk from Hong Kong to San Francisco. The Minnesota Star Tribune called it “at once thrilling and comic” and “a rollicking ride.”
“Butterflies of the Bay Area and (Slightly) Beyond: An Illustrated Guide” by Liam O’Brien
Heyday, 352 pages, $50, Sept. 30, 2025
San Francisco author-illustrator Liam O’Brian, a former actor who appeared in “Les Misérables” on Broadway, decades ago became a nature expert with a fascination for butterflies, doing extensive surveys of the county of San Francisco and working toward preserving and restoring Bay Area species. The new comprehensive “Butterflies of the Bay Area” offers his insights, stories, some 700 hand-drawn illustrations of 135 local species, and tips for finding and identifying them. O’Brien says, “In this book, I’m aiming for something a little different from the classic field guide. Here is a book that celebrates realistic paintings, pithy anecdotes, conservation, and the downright joy these bugs have given me. Given all of us.”
“Talk to Your Boys: 16 Conversations to Help Tweens and Teens Grow into Confident, Caring Young Men” by Christopher Pepper and Joanna Schroeder
Workman Publishing Company, 320 pages, $28, Sept. 9, 2025
Christopher Pepper, an award-winning educator with a background in teaching, journalism, rape prevention and curriculum development, coordinates San Francisco Unified School District’s Young Men’s Health Project, in which middle and high school boys talk about relationships, emotions and healthy masculinity in small groups. An educator with SFUSD since 2002, he helped create innovative sex education curriculum being used in schools around the world and assisted in developing sexual harassment awareness training for classrooms. In his newsletter, Teen Health Today.com, he covers “how to talk to youth about mental health, substance use, nutrition, exercise, sleep, relationships and sexuality.” Pepper, with editor-media critic Joanna Schroeder, wrote the new guidebook “Talk to Your Boys,” which Eli Harwood, therapist and author of “Raising Securely Attached Kids,” called a “powerful, detailed and supportive book to help us raise confident, caring, and connected boys in a world that often compels them to abandon themselves.”
“Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy” by Mary Roach
W. W. Norton & Company, 288 pages, $28.99, Sept. 16, 2025
Popular, funny East Bay science writer Mary Roach is the author of eight New York Times bestsellers, including “Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers”; “Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal”; “Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law”; and “Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void.” The latest by the author (a contributor to publications from National Geographic and The New York Times Magazine to the Journal of Clinical Anatomy) is “Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy,” which considers far-reaching aspects of regenerative medicine, including gene-edited pig organs and “human skin slurry” that sprouts hair. The book covers how she travels to a Mongolian general hospital, a Palm Springs Amputee Coalition and the pig facility of a gene-editing company in China as well as sleeps inside an iron lung and undergoes a single hair follicle transplant. Actor Jason Alexander’s comment about the title and its author: “We are all replaceable to some degree or another … with the exception of Mary Roach. There is no one and nothing like her—singular, bizarre, dedicated, passionate, fascinating.”
“Unmasking Fear: How Fears Are Our Gateways to Freedom” by Guryan Tighe
Health Communications Inc., 224 pages, $16.95, Aug. 26, 2025
Bay Area leadership coach and facilitator Guryan Tighe, founder of a company called Fourage, has clients who call her a “fear technician.” Having worked as a communications strategist and currently the executive coach at Dominican University of California’s Institute for Leadership Studies in San Rafael, she believes people are more fulfilled and successful when they understand rather than try to overcome their fears. With the motto, “Fear is courage unrealized,” she offers concepts and exercises including 1) reframing your relationship with fear; 2) questioning your reality; 3) living and leading on purpose; 4) finding choice in your every day; and 5) creating shared agendas in her new book “Unmasking Fear: How Fears Are Our Gateways to Freedom.” Michael Krasny said, “Guryan Tighe’s revelatory work highlights how fear, though it can cripple, can also enlighten and be used as an ally and a tool to open doors to greater authenticity notwithstanding real and palpable terror.”
“Sea Change: Unlikely Allies and a Success Story of Oceanic Proportions” by James Workman and Amanda Leland
Torrey House Press, 336 pages, $32 hardcover, $21.95 paper, Sept. 30, 2025
San Francisco water consultant James Workman, a former Washington D.C. journalist for The New Republic, Washington Monthly, Utne Reader and other publications, established the report of the World Commission on Dams and spent two years filing dispatches on water scarcity in Africa. Today he works on global water issues with policymakers, businesses, aid agencies, development institutions and conservation organizations. His new book, co-authored with Amanda Leland, executive director of the Environmental Defense Fund, describes alliances between commercial fisheries and scientists that have resulted in a resurgence of fish populations, increased safety and security for fishermen, and a reduction in maritime fossil fuel usage; it’s told with a focus on Texas Gulf Coast commercial fishing legend Keith “Buddy” Guindon, who evolved from a “grim reaper of the aquatic world” into an advocate for sustainable fishing. Eric Pooley, author of “The Climate War,” said, “‘Sea Change’ tells us the greatest environmental success story that no one’s ever heard of.”