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Find out more about the books below.
A family murder mystery. A family saga in a Brooklyn neighborhood. The found family of middle-aged fans of a 90s boy band.
It’s time to vote on Club Calvi’s next book!
Here are your choices:
“A Killer in the Family” by Amin Ahmad is about the secrets of a billionaire family in New York that may include someone who is linked to a serial murderer.
“Livonia Chow Mein” by Abigail Savitch-Lew brings Brownsville, Brooklyn to life through the stories of four generations of a family.
“American Fantasy” by Emma Straub is about second chances for middle-aged female fans aboard a cruise featuring a famous boy band from the 90s.
You can read excerpts, VOTE, and get the books below.
Voting closes Sunday, April 19 at 6 p.m.
The CBS New York Book Club focuses on books connected to the Tri-State Area in their plots and/or authors. The books may contain adult themes.
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“A Killer in the Family” by Amin Ahmad
Henry Holt and Company
From the publisher: It’s time for Ali, a good-natured Mumbai party-boy, to grow up. The first step to settling down is an arranged marriage to Maryam, the daughter of Abbas Khan, a New York real estate tycoon. She’s pretty, demure, and respectable—unlike her sister, Farhan, a sexy, rebellious divorcée.
After the wedding, Ali moves to New York and enjoys the privileges of being an honorary Khan: private helicopters, supertall skyscrapers, and a Gatsbyesque house in the Hamptons. But soon rumors begin to surface about Abbas Khan—accusations of corruption and hidden affairs—and Farhan hints that a violent secret underlies Abbas’s success. Though Ali’s wife insists the insinuations are unfounded, he can’t shake the feeling that there’s something he doesn’t know.
To uncover the truth, Ali launches his own investigation, which takes him deep into Abbas’s dealings and past. As he closes in on the truth, Ali must decide: Can he remain part of the Khan family, and pay the moral price demanded by unimaginable wealth and power?
Amin Ahmad lives in Durham, North Carolina.
“A Killer in the Family” by Amin Ahmad (ThriftBooks) $22
“Livonia Chow Mein” by Abigail Savitch-Lew
Simon & Schuster
From the publisher: In 1978, two tenements on Livonia Avenue in Brownsville burn to the ground, killing one resident and displacing dozens of others. It remains unclear who set the buildings ablaze, but the survivors are convinced the culprit is Mr. Wong.
Who exactly is Mr. Wong, and what allegedly drove him to this extraordinary act of violence, is the question that consumes this novel as it plunges into four generations of Wong family history. First is Koon Lai, an immigrant who runs a Chinese restaurant on Livonia Avenue; second, his son Richard, a man desperate for his own chance at the American Dream; and third, Jason, a poet who seeks his escape in the bohemian counterculture of the 1970s, but finds himself an unwitting participant in Brooklyn’s gentrification. In the 21st century, Jason’s daughter Sadie returns to Brownsville as a journalist, determined to unravel the mystery of what happened decades earlier on the night the buildings blazed.
Joining together the present and the past is the community organizer Lina Rodriguez Armstrong, who was also displaced by that fire and who has spent the intervening years fighting for the rights of Brownsville’s residents and organizing a Livonia Avenue community land trust.
Abigail Savitch-Lew lives in Brooklyn.
“Livonia Chow Mein” by Abigail Savitch-Lew (ThriftBooks) $22
“American Fantasy” by Emma Straub
Riverhead Books
From the publisher: When the American Fantasy cruise ship sets sail for a four-day themed voyage, aboard are all five members of a famous, nineties-era boy band and three thousand screaming women who have worshipped them since childhood.
Feeling slightly out of place amid this crowd is Annie, here on a lark to appease her sister. Yet when the lights come up and the idols of her youth begin to sing, something is unlocked. Call it memory. Call it nostalgia. Call it the chemical reaction of hormones, hope, and sexual reawakening. Between the slushy alcoholic drinks, the familiar music, and the throngs of middle-aged women acting like lovesick teenagers, Annie finally reconnects to a long-submerged part of herself. By the time she meets one of the band members—not just a celebrity but someone in need of a friend—she has accessed a new sense of possibility.
Emma Straub lives in Brooklyn.
“American Fantasy” by Emma Straub (ThriftBooks) $23
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Excerpt: “A Killer in the Family” by Amin Ahmad
PROLOGUE
Ali Azeem, June 2016
A full year passed after Farhan disappeared.
Then it was June again—hot, cloudless, perfect.
I convinced Maryam to open up the summer house in Southampton. She agreed, but during the drive from Manhattan, she hid behind her oversized sunglasses, and I could not tell if she was asleep or awake. I let her be. The last year had been brutal for the whole Khan family—raw anguish gave way to the feeling of being adrift in a vast, indifferent ocean—but Maryam had taken it the hardest: She barely ate. Gray streaks appeared in her thick black hair. We stopped having sex.
The family’s frantic attempts to locate Farhan had failed, but Maryam still refused to believe her elder sister was gone. Maryam had a practical, tidy mind, and Farhan’s sudden disappearance had unhinged her. Quiet Maryam and mercurial Farhan—eight years apart—had often squabbled, gone through periods of not talking, but without her sister as a foil, Maryam was diminished.
All the way to Southampton, Maryam did not say a word. Finally, we turned off the coastal road and drove down a long driveway paved with crisp white river gravel. We passed rolling lawns and gardeners on tall ladders pollarding an allée of birches. The house—an 1880s Queen Anne with a deep wraparound porch—smelled the same, of sun-warmed wood and furniture polish. Outside, the ocean glittered: green, lazy, redolent with brine.
The place spoke of earlier, happier times.
For days, Maryam lay by the pool, never removing those huge sunglasses. But then the magic of the house began to work: She went swimming in the ocean and grew tan. For dinner I barbecued—red snapper, new potatoes in their jackets, ears of sweet corn—and we ate out in the gazebo. Maryam’s eyes lost their tense, expectant look, and she even laughed once or twice. Fool that I was, I thought we’d been released from the jittery, frac-tured spell Farhan had cast over us.
Late one evening, I was washing dishes in the kitchen—it didn’t seem right to leave a stack of greasy plates for the housekeeper—while I sipped on a rich, tannic Barolo. Next door, from the living room, I barely registered the frenzied muttering of the television news—but then I heard Maryam gasp. I turned, and she was hold-ing on to the kitchen island for support and scrolling frantically through her phone one-handed.
“Kya? What is it? What?” But Maryam couldn’t talk. She passed me the phone and turned her face away.
It was a New York Post headline dated that day.
HUMAN HEART FOUND IN SALT PILE
A worker found a “bizarrely shaped rock” in a Staten Island salt pile early this morning—but the grisly artifact turned out to be a human heart, desiccated after prolonged burial in salt.
Workers are now combing through the remaining salt pile for other human remains, and a homicide investigation is underway. An NYPD spokesperson said, “This is a complex case. The Atlantic Salt Company purchases salt from Chile, Mexico, and Northern Ireland, and the heart could have orig-inated from any of these locations.”
There is intense speculation this is the work of the so-called Jackson Heights Serial Killer, active in the early 2000s in Queens. JHK murdered eight young Indian women and removed their hearts before relocating to Miami, Florida, and claiming three more lives. He was killed in a shoot-out with Miami-Dade County police officers.
At the time, Orlando Epps, the NYPD detective in charge of the case, told reporters, “This is a Pyrrhic victory. I believe the man killed in Florida is a ‘copycat’ killer—and that the real JHK is still at-large . . .”
I swiftly skimmed the rest. There wasn’t much, and it ended with an appeal. Phones would already be ringing in the concrete innards of One Police Plaza, and every crank in the New York City area would be busy pouring out their darkest fantasies. Nausea rose from the pit of my stomach.
“Baby, no.” I put down the phone and gathered Maryam in my arms. Her heart was pounding like a bird in a cage. “No, don’t even think it. He’s dead. They shot him in Florida. There have been no killings since then.”
“But . . .” She looked up at me, her eyes glazed with fear, and whispered the rest: “. . . a heart, Ali. That was his trophy. What if they got the wrong guy? What if he’s still out there? And Farhan . . . ?”
“No, no, no. Farhan made all that stuff up to get attention. She’ll turn up like a bad penny. Trust me. This is just a freak coincidence. That damn salt was shipped here from three other countries. Baby, listen . . .”
But Maryam was not listening. The fear that had been receding for the last month was back: in the narrowing of her eyes, the way she sucked in her lower lip; even her skin, tan and robust an hour ago, looked ashen.
What could I do? I gave Maryam a Valium and put her to bed upstairs. The sun was setting, and I started to lower the blinds, but Maryam insisted I leave them up.
Before she fell asleep, she opened her eyes with great effort and mumbled, “Where is Farhan? Where is my sister?”
I knew exactly where Farhan was, but I kept silent—though, believe me, I desperately wanted to speak. Maryam turned her back to me and soon drifted into a deep, drugged sleep. She always curled into the fetal position, and her slender runner’s body melted into the bedclothes. Even on good days, I couldn’t tell if she was still in bed.
We had been married just shy of two years. I knew all of Maryam’s bodily habits—her love of running early in the morning; her quick, cold showers; the way she frowned and twisted her hair around her finger as she worked through a stack of her medical case files—but I was never privy to her innermost thoughts. Farhan, on the other hand, showed every emotion on her wide face, was quick to anger and explode, then let it all go with a rueful shrug of her round, plump shoulders . . .
Adapted from A KILLER IN THE FAMILY by Amin Ahmad. Copyright (C) 2026 by Amin Ahmad. Published with permission of Henry Holt and Company, an imprint of Macmillan Publishing Group.
Excerpt: “Livonia Chow Mein” by Abigail Savitch-Lew
Dry summer morning, 1978. Smell of squirrel piss. Swallows chirping from a newspaper nest above a doorway. A long day ahead, on streets made into lapping rivers from the flow of unscrewed fire hydrants, below a blue sky with clouds like soapsuds. A day of chin-ups on the DON’T WALK signs.
Two boys walk home from the corner store. Cutoff jean shorts, white tees, secondhand Adidas. The older one bounces his Spalding off the brick walls; the younger one digs his fingers into the box of corn flakes for the plastic prize.
A voice calls to them from a parallel-parked car on Rockaway Avenue.
“Hey boys.”
Eyes twitch over. Hands close around the Spalding, crinkle-fold the cereal bag. The two boys look at each other and then take three snailish steps toward the open window of the Lincoln, the older with his arm flung horizontal like hazard tape across his brother’s chest.
“You want to make a hundred bucks?”
In the gloom of the car, a pale hand: between two fingers, a flicker of green.
Gummed like insects on a reptile tongue, the boys are pulled toward the unknown face: a pair of thin lips etched on a marble-smooth chin, the eyes blacked out by shades.
Lina Rodriguez Armstrong saw them: two boys, no more than seven and ten, wispier than dandelion seeds, flying under the moon. From the second-floor window of her tenement, she watched as they darted from roof to roof and then crawled down the side of an abandoned house, the older one shushing the younger one’s nervous cries.
It was three a.m., but Lina had been awake, cleaning up the spills and crumbs from the poster painting party. On the record player, Marvin Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up” hummed loud enough to keep her eyelids open and a beat in her bones, soft enough to let the neighbors sleep. She’d fed almost twenty folks that night, and the odors of acrylics and fish fry lingered in the room. Her place had to be the most delicious-smelling apartment in Brownsville, Brooklyn: almost every day her Freedom School churned out the crispiest fish fry and the tastiest asopao in the neighborhood, and long before the Freedom School there’d been a Chinese restaurant, the essence of sesame chicken forever baked into the walls.
Now alone, she should have been washing dishes and brushes, but instead she was leaning on her elbows and peering out the window, wondering to herself if these were Sharon’s boys—Sharon had been her classmate at Thomas Jefferson High—and then wondering what trouble they were up to, and if she should go after them, maybe entice them with leftovers from the Freedom Fridge.
That’s when she smelled the smoke.
It was faint at first, and she sniffed the muggy night air, wondering if it was coming from a barbecue. In the light of the streetlamps, she spotted the Livonia Avenue cat—the kids called her Miss Freedom and sometimes left her bowls of tuna. Miss Freedom was now fleeing down the avenue, her mottled body almost airborne. As the smell intensified, Lina crossed to the front door of her apartment, undid the lock, and yanked the sticky door open.
Hot black smoke socked her in the face; the staircase had become a glowing, spastic frenzy.
Lina cried out, stumbling backward. Then, sucking in her breath, she hurried across the hall to her neighbor’s door.
“Miss Brown!” she hollered. “There’s a fire! Miss Brown!”
Annetta Brown unlatched the door, the baby on her shoulder. After one look into the hallway, she pulled Lina inside.
“Get Debbie and Kim!”
The two girls were asleep by the open window, their bodies curled like oven-hot pretzels, the sheets tossed aside. “What happened?” they moaned as Lina jostled them, dragging them onto their feet. Together, they all made for the fire escape. It shivered under their weight like it might give out and send them crashing in a shower of metal down to the sidewalk below. The baby bawled, the women and girls tiptoed, and at last Lina and the Brown family reached the ground and ran across the street. Only then did they look behind them and gasp: flames had engulfed both 78 and 80 Livonia Avenue. Smoke gushed out the windows of the two tenements like streams of ghosts, gray bodies dissipating as they ascended, losing shape in the sky above the tenement roofs. Other neighbors ran out the doors with their arms over their heads.
“This is what you did, Lina,” Annetta cried, her face smeared with tears, her hair still in its bonnet. She took her children’s hands from Lina’s and pulled their quaking frames to her breast. “You done pushed that Mr. Wong!”
Lina looked at Annetta, looked at the girls, robbed of speech. All at once, her body became so heavy she had to sit on the curb. Annetta blamed her.
She realized then what it all meant: the two boys flying through the dark.
They’d lit the match.
Someone threw a towel over her shoulders. Another neighbor called the fire department. Flames ripped through the Freedom School banner, blasted the rusted Chinese restaurant sign, and licked the metal beams of the elevated rail. They lived on Livonia under the rumble of the 2 train, which came through every half hour at night, each car bombed front to back in bulbous lettering courtesy of local tagger NEVERFORGET68. Livonia itself was a street where every storefront was boarded up, or the glass shattered, the buildings stripped and the plumbing exposed, and all around them, for blocks on end, the neighborhood of Brownsville was disintegrating: the parks littered with needles; the abandoned tenements yielding to nature, with dogs breeding in living rooms and rats crawling in the walls. The massive pool at Betsy Head Park had been closed since the Saturday a teenager had drowned in the deep end…
Excerpted from LIVONIA CHOW MEIN by Abigail Savitch-Lew. Published April 2026 by Simon & Schuster. Copyright © 2026 by Abigail Savitch-Lew.
Excerpt: “American Fantasy” by Emma Straub
Annie felt like a small door somewhere inside her was creaking open on rusted hinges.
It was all there suddenly—her first kiss with George Bellingham in the middle school bus parking lot. The first time Jamie Johnson felt her up in his parents’ basement and how quickly he yanked his hand out of her shirt when his mother opened the door. When a boy had licked her neck at a party during the first week of college, a stranger! Her first orgasm, Jake Hutchison. Oh, she had loved him. Not him him—she’d hardly known him, really—but Jake had been so handsome, just the most handsome person she’d ever seen naked, and he’d done that for her. It was almost too much to bear, even then, like some sort of Make‑A‑Wish program, despite the fact that he’d quickly ditched her for a girl with pierced nipples. Annie thought about her first real boyfriend, Clarence Brown, who had been so kind to her, he’d made her a crossword puzzle from scratch, he’d written her songs on his ukulele. She tried to remember the reasons she’d broken up with Clarence—he was a hacky‑sacking hippie and lived in a co‑op on campus, he loved the Grateful Dead and smoked pot out of a tiny glass one‑hitter every night before he went to sleep. He had seemed too messy for her then, but maybe she could have used the messiness, incorporated it into her system. She could have married Clarence, and maybe she should have. She’d waited to get married, and look what good that had done. Annie didn’t want to think about her husband, and so she didn’t. He wasn’t anywhere near these memories. These were first—these were just for her. Boy Talk had been there too, though. Lurking in those early feelings, putting words to what she wanted to feel. Words she wanted someone to sing to her.
DJ Pancake was already deep in his set, and even before the Kenny Rogers, Annie had heard other songs that had game in the title: Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game,” Backstreet Boys’ “Quit Playing Games (With My Heart).” Talkers could be counted on to sing along to songs by other boy bands, it seemed, and for a second, Annie wondered whether these women were the type to go on other boy band cruises too, if they split their affection. Claudia had had a passing interest in One Direction when she was in middle school, and Annie had been delighted to relive the joy of having a favorite, of learning tiny facts about people you would never meet. Annie wondered if her predilection for Boy Talk had been living dormant in her body, the way chicken pox stayed quiet for decades and then bloomed into shingles. Annie didn’t feel like she was blooming, exactly, but she did feel the way she’d felt when she and Chris and Claudia were on vacation in France, several decades after her most recent French class, finding certain vocabulary words swimming back to her from some deep folds in her brain.
Maira tapped Annie on the arm and pointed. Above them, on the balcony, a thick‑bodied middle‑aged Black man in a baseball hat gave someone a fist bump and then walked down the stairs.
“That’s their manager, Bobby,” Maira said. “I could introduce you later. I have his email address too. BabyBobby@gmail.com, ha! Can you believe it?” She set her drink down and cupped her hands around her mouth. “Bobby! Bobby!” He looked over to where they were sitting and gave a point and a nod. Maira flushed with satisfaction. “Last year, I saw him at the airport afterward. He was so tired, he said.”
“I bet,” Annie said. She was already tired, and so grateful for her stool. Most women were standing, and Annie’s calves and feet hurt just looking at them.
The music cut off, and Shawn’s voice came through the speakers. “All right, all right. It’s game time!”
The Talkers roared.
Boy Talk appeared one at a time in the same spot on the balcony, each guy in turn blown up on the screen above his own head. Terrence was dressed in a giant yellow onesie—a Pokémon. Pikachu! Annie rescued its name from the depths. Annie remembered one staging of Puccini’s Turandot where the emperor had been lowered from the ceiling. This was like that, but furrier. Scotty came out next in a similar suit but bluish‑green. “Snorlax!” a younger Talker shouted from over Annie’s shoulder. Keith and Corey came out together, dressed in matching white pants and T‑shirts with giant red R’s on their chests, Keith in a purple wig and Corey in a pink one.
“Who are they?” Annie asked.
“They’re the bad guys!” Maira shouted. She knew everything and was willing to share her knowledge. Maira’s purple and blue streaks twinkled in the lights from the tiki bar, and Annie was glad that women her age had started dyeing their hair funky colors again instead of just coloring the grays, and she was about to say so when Annie real-ized that she was already drunk, and so she probably shouldn’t say everything that crossed her mind.
Keith moved into the center of the balcony, posing and laughing. Whose job was it to come up with their costumes? Shawn jumped in behind Keith and Corey dressed as a shirtless Ash Ketchum, a child. Shawn flexed, and at the foot of the stairs, two women dressed like sexy Ash Ketchums, their costumes even skimpier than Shawn’s, jumped up and down, and then Shawn rushed down the stairs to greet them and pulled them onto the small stage with him. DJ Pancake played Madonna’s “Like a Prayer,” and all three Ashes jumped up and down, mouthing the words. Shawn’s showmanship was unmatched. The boys at her high school who had had big personalities had always seemed too scary, too popular for her to have a crush on, but Shawn was far enough away that she could pretend.
Keith seemed to be enjoying his purple wig, which was long and fluffy like a guitar player in a different kind of ’80s band. Keith twirled the edges in his fingers and flipped the long part back and forth over his shoulder. He was laughing with Scotty and with Shawn. It was funny to think about them as adult men who had actual relationships with each other, relationships that existed in private and not printed on the side of a lunch box. Most of the guys had cups in their hand—the idea, according to Katherine, was that the guys were all somewhere on the tipsy‑to‑wasted continuum at these parties, but Annie didn’t buy it, not looking at them. They were working, and on these nights, their job was to look like they were having the best time they’d ever had so the women would think that they were having the best time they’d ever had. After all, it was what Shawn had promised them.
Keith turned toward Annie—toward her section—and waved. Without even meaning to, Annie waved back. She was surrounded by other people who were waving back, of course, everyone was waving and screaming, their hands in the air, but still, she was embarrassed. It felt like too much, like stalkerish behavior, even though they were literally all waving back, the entire audience, they could not leave unless they jumped off the ship and started to swim back toward Florida. Keith, of course, wasn’t actually paying attention to her. He was dancing goofily to Madonna, pointing his fingers in the air like a real middle‑aged dad. He had never been a good dancer—that was ammunition for sisterly arguments for years, that Shawn was a better dancer than Keith, and it was obviously still true. He was rocking his hips side to side, almost like bouncing a baby to sleep. Keith pointed kindly at a woman’s home-made sign and smiled. He seemed like a nice man. Annie took out her phone and snapped a few pictures for Katherine.
So often, the word nostalgia felt coated in bile—a nostalgia act. Annie understood and she didn’t. Nostalgia was for the Smurfs, for erasers that smelled like strawberries. Maybe that was what the cos-tumes were about, the goofy T‑shirts, but inside her head, which is where she heard the music, it had touched some lever so deep that it couldn’t be reversed, as much as she’d chosen to ignore it. Maybe that was nostalgia after all, that the music was a direct vein to her own childhood, the least complicated part of her life. What had the research shown? A shortcut to happiness. Music made plants grow faster; it made cows give more milk. They meant Mozart and Puccini, sure, but why couldn’t it also mean this?
Excerpted from American Fantasy by Emma Straub. Copyright © 2026 by Emma Straub. Excerpted by permission of Riverhead, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.