JAPANESE GOTHIC, by Kylie Lee Baker

In 2026, Lee Turner flees to the centuries-old wooden house his father has just purchased in Kagoshima Prefecture, in southern Japan. He’s pretty sure he killed his college roommate back in New York, but he can’t remember how, or why, or what he did with the body. In 1877, a samurai-in-training, Sen, is hiding with her family in the same house after her father’s disgraced return from the failed Satsuma Rebellion.

Both carry heavy baggage. Lee is grieving the unsolved disappearance of his mother, who vanished during a trip to Cambodia a few years earlier, a suspected victim of sex trafficking. Sen idolizes her father and the samurai way of life, but he’s cruel and cold, even as he prepares her for what they both expect will be her death at the hands of the imperial officers who pursue him.

All is not well in this house, sheltered behind sword ferns. In Sen’s time, edible plants and prey animals have disappeared from the surrounding forest, and her family’s food supplies are dwindling fast. Lee can’t figure out what’s scratching at the walls of the house, or what his father’s girlfriend isn’t telling him. And then there’s the closet door in Lee’s room, which opens onto a concrete wall, except when it doesn’t. Sometimes, instead, it opens into Sen’s room in 1877.

Why can Sen and Lee visit each other’s times through the closet door, and why is it only accessible at low tide? Why can’t Lee remember what he did with his roommate’s body? What really happened to his mother? Did Sen’s father actually return from the rebellion that killed his fellow samurai, or is something else wearing his face like a mask? What brought Sen and Lee together, and what keeps them connected?

“Japanese Gothic,” Kylie Lee Baker’s second novel for adults (following last year’s “Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng”) is polished and surprising both in plotting and in execution. I’ve come to regard interesting, intricate structure as something of an endangered species in contemporary fiction — too many books are content to splash in thematic puddles rather than delving into deeper waters. But Baker has shown herself to be an author with the confidence and dexterity to carry a variety of story lines and ideas without stumbling; “Japanese Gothic” displays an elegant layering of character motivations, psychologies and motifs.

With dual-timeline stories, it’s easy for one story to overwhelm the other, but Lee and Sen’s narratives are well-balanced, and a Japanese folk tale provides some connective tissue between the two protagonists. As for the central mystery, Baker refrains from telegraphing exactly what’s going on until the final pages, and the reveal is a satisfying one. If the middle section drags a little in its pacing, it’s hard to hold that against the novel’s overall effectiveness.

Where “Japanese Gothic” really shines is in its mirrored portraits of two melancholy, isolated young adults. It’s difficult to create a character as damaged as Lee without letting his trauma overwhelm everything else about him. Lee moves through his life in a dissociative state partially fueled by Benadryl and Ativan. He has no friends, and his relationship with his father is strained at best. He knows things he can’t readily access, and the worst parts of his life haunt him from around corners and behind closed doors, but he’s kind and tenderhearted, not to mention capable and cleareyed when properly motivated.

Sen, meanwhile, knows her gender will prevent her from ever being fully accepted as a samurai, but still struggles to become the kind of fighter her father will be proud of. But allegiance to him comes with a cost: Her mother and siblings are afraid of him, and by extension, increasingly afraid of her, and not without good reason. Though Sen knows she has to harden herself to become a true warrior, she can’t quite shed the last of her humanity, nor is she entirely sure she wants to: “But her soul clung to her hands like tree sap, her fear screaming bright across the horizon every morning, shocking the birds away from the trees. It was her shadow, and it would not leave her, no matter how fast she ran.”

In a samurai house, Lee’s father’s girlfriend tells him, the ceilings are low to prevent a katana from being raised overhead to deliver a killing blow. Even so, the house behind the sword ferns has seen its share of violence, past and present. As strange similarities echo across Sen and Lee’s timelines, the truth emerges, jagged and harsh, yet cathartic. What connects these two characters is something deeper than romance and more tragic than death.

Japanese Gothic | By Kylie Lee Baker | Hanover Square Press | 352 pp. | $30

THE ROLLING STONES: The Biography, by Bob Spitz

Last December, two days before Keith Richards’s 82nd birthday, it was reported that the Rolling Stones would be calling off a 2026 stadium tour they hadn’t yet officially confirmed. Richards, a source said, was suffering from arthritis that affected his playing too much to commit to the laborious grind of four or five months on the road.

Well, yes, a sane reader of this anecdote might be muttering to themselves. What is the reward of fame and old age if not the right to do absolutely nothing other than enjoy your grandchildren, your innumerable seaside villas, the burnishing of your legend?

Instead, half a century after a 31-year-old Mick Jagger famously said, “I’d rather be dead than sing ‘Satisfaction’ when I’m 45,” the band is set to release their 25th studio album sometime this year (for which they’ve already dropped a vinyl-only single). A previous tour, 20 dates across North America to support their last album, “Hackney Diamonds,” wrapped in the summer of 2024.

What is left to say about an act that’s made gathering no moss their signature move since 1962? The group’s improbable, near-mythical endurance in the face of addictions, defections, arrests and even death has become a dusty punchline: Ladies and gentlemen, the unkillable, are-they-still-thrillable Rolling Stones.

There’s a certain definite-article swagger, then, in Bob Spitz’s subtitling his new chronicle of the band “The Biography.” Short of Jagger’s apocryphal memoir — written and later abandoned in the early 1980s, per publishing-world legend — the Stones’ messy, extravagant peaks and valleys have been intimately if not exhaustively documented by journalists and music historians as well as the group’s own members (both longtime and provisional), assorted paramours, muses, sidemen and hangers-on for more than six decades.

As a biographer of record, though, Spitz has earned his bona fides. His past subjects constitute a sort of cultural Mount Rushmore — the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Ronald Reagan, Julia Child — documented in authoritative tomes the size of small ottomans. (He’s also been in the rock ’n’ roll trenches, having managed both Elton John and Bruce Springsteen in some capacity.)

His approach here is fond, voluble and diligent to a fault, a long and boisterous march whose outcomes — Can that indelible riff find its final form in the studio? Will this overdose be the one that ends it all? — are rarely in doubt, though many small revelations and corrections emerge along the way.

A set-piece prologue opens in 1961 at the suburban London train station where Jagger and Richards, acquaintances from grade school, first reconnected as teenagers over a near-obsessive love for Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters. (“Like two alcoholics, they gush, besotted, over a mutual craving: not simply music, but the blues.”)

It’s a short walk from schoolboy days to the fetid bed-sits and scruffy pubs where the pair joined forces with the impish and mercurial Brian Jones. A blond savant who proved both a relentlessly canny promoter and a restless multi-instrumentalist, Jones helped solidify the ineffable chemistry that transformed a shambolic R&B cover band into hitmakers, and then almost overnight into the young lords of Cool Britannia.

A faithful chronology of that creative evolution — Spitz is both forensic and poetic in his extensive recounting of the band’s musical output — follows, along with a running tally of personnel changes, romantic entanglements and chemical dependencies that would become as much a band hallmark as Jagger’s libidinous chicken-winged strut or Richards’s freewheeling five-string hooks.

Drug busts scatter like flower petals (from opium poppies, perhaps) across the page, along with intra-band fistfights, shameless cuckolding of one another with wives and girlfriends, and myriad court battles stemming from possession charges, paternity suits and shady management. Law enforcement, high-horsing politicians and other members of the morality police were frequently in hot pursuit.

The amount of pearl clutching incited by the supposed social menace the group once posed might seem a little overblown and comical now: Stand back, Satan, from those velvet pants! But the era-defining disaster at Altamont, the ill-starred 1969 California concert at which heavily inebriated Hells Angels, acting as freelance “security,” attacked concertgoers indiscriminately and fatally beat and stabbed a young Black man, hasn’t much softened with the passage of time.

Nor has the lonely, grubby death of Brian Jones at age 27 in a swimming pool (Spitz acknowledges but doesn’t overly linger on the possibility that it was murder and not misadventure). His unresolved exit wouldn’t be the band’s last, though it may have been the most reverberating.

Other incidents in the book are merely surreal: the appearance of Bob Dylan in a blue mohair suit at Jones’s hotel door in the middle of a Northeast blackout in 1965, bearing guitars and “excellent weed”; a passing mention of future Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as one of the drug buddies who “revived Keith’s appetite for coke and heroin” in the late 1970s; a young Harvey Weinstein, then a regional concert promoter, passing out Afro wigs to the band and crew during a raucous tour closer in Buffalo.

Jagger and Richards’s partnership provides the book’s central platonic love story and its enduring source of tension. Keith, the addled punk-rock pirate with an extensive weapons collection and an apparent substance-fueled death wish, grew increasingly alienated for a time from Mick, whose taste for disco beats and champagne socialites he found both dishonorable and deeply uncool.

The rest of the band mostly emerges via snapshot appraisals and anecdotes. Charlie Watts, the group’s elegant jazzbo drummer, quietly excused himself from the debauchery of a group sleepover at the Playboy Mansion (his kicks leaned more toward Savile Row suits and Arabian stallions), while the bassist Bill Wyman’s too-Nabokovian romance at age 48 with a 13-year-old schoolgirl spun the tabloids into a rightful frenzy. (Reader, he married her.)

Mick Taylor, Brian Jones’s gifted if unlucky successor, never quite gelled as a full-fledged member, though Ronnie Wood, “a cheeky, chappy, irreverent character,” seemed to possess the right mix of talent and affability to keep Richards on track, even at his most erratic. All of them wrangled with addiction at some point.

“The Rolling Stones” duly acknowledges if also sometimes soft-pedals the band’s uglier dips into misogyny (the 1978 album “Some Girls” was a particular nadir) and the uneasy interplay between race, culture and creative license. After spending some 600 pages on the early 1960s to the late 1980s, the author suddenly leapfrogs over several decades in the final chapter, as if he just realized that his car is double-parked.

Rock music, like American politics, has become something of a gerontocracy; a once-vital form now sclerotic with emeritus acts and blowzy boomer nostalgia, largely reserved for those wealthy enough to afford its prohibitive entry fees. But the book’s emotional epilogue, set at a 2024 tour stop in Los Angeles, feels appropriately celebratory and bittersweet, like an Irish wake without the body. For two hours onstage, the Stones keep rolling; the crowd is ecstatic and on their feet. You could call that satisfaction.

THE ROLLING STONES: The Biography | By Bob Spitz | Penguin Press | 690 pp. | $38

PROJECT MAVEN: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare, by Katrina Manson

Science-fiction authors have long fantasized about wars where machines aim the weapons and pull the triggers. In “Project Maven,” the Bloomberg News tech and national security reporter Katrina Manson claims the era of “killer robots” is here. The fusion of artificial intelligence and modern warfare raises, as she puts it, “the biggest moral and practical question there is: who — or what — gets to decide to take a human life? And who bears that cost?”

Yet that question has barely been mulled by the officers managing the new weapons or the politicians funding them. It’s a familiar syndrome in military history: New weapons technologies are perfected and rushed into the arsenal before their implications — for the future of not only war but humanity — are thought through.

How this happened with A.I. over the course of barely a decade, much of it secretly plotted by a handful of clever obsessives, is the story that Manson tells in “Project Maven,” which is also the name of the Pentagon’s main A.I. program.

The U.S. military hasn’t yet fired a weapon with no humans in the loop, but we are poised on the thin edge of that evolution. The Defense Department regulation on autonomous weapons requires only “appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force” — without specifying who defines “appropriate.” For many existing weapons, especially the latest drones, A.I. controls every stage from the launch up to the actual kill; it does so in a matter of seconds, and human troops trust the A.I. so fully that they pull the trigger, at the algorithm’s urging, with little hesitation.

Manson’s story — deeply researched and breezily written — begins when a Marine colonel named Drew Cukor was watching a 2017 documentary about an A.I. program that beat an 18-time Go champion in four out of five games. He realized that if A.I. was spreading everywhere, it would soon spread to the battlefield. Cukor knew China was adopting it. If the United States didn’t, he feared we might lose the next big war.

The Pentagon bureaucracy at the time had little interest in the subject; it barely had a presence in the cloud. The big arms manufacturers were still focused on Cold War-era weapons. Cukor, who had been a Mormon missionary in the 1980s, set out to change the world with what one Project Maven official describes as an “insurgency mentality.” He recruited a small team that “would come to regard itself as a scrappy and subversive cult,” Manson writes, exhausted yet inspired by its leader’s fanatical brilliance. A Project Maven contractor describes him as “a psychopath,” sometimes adding “in the best way.”

Cukor was not just a visionary but also, as a deputy defense secretary puts it, “a bureaucratic Ninja.” He scoped out, as an ideal contractor for A.I. weapons, a then-obscure software firm called Palantir (which is now the world’s most highly valued defense corporation). He ghost-drafted Project Maven’s list of requirements in a way that made Palantir seem uniquely suitable for the job. He schooled Palantir’s execs — whose “pernicious” tactics, Manson writes, had alienated the Army on a previous project — on how to pitch Pentagon insiders.

Finally, Cukor found and lobbied the two or three senior Pentagon officials who, once sold on the idea, could ram the project through the bureaucracy’s indifference or hostility.

Cukor kept his true purpose secret. He had sold Maven as strictly an intelligence-gathering system. However, he later admitted to Manson, his goal was “always” to develop an A.I. that could identify targets on the battlefield and calculate which weapons in the U.S. arsenal could most quickly destroy them — and eventually, it seems, take out the targets on their own.

Compressing the “kill chain” so completely was “precisely the thing that would most scare” the project’s skeptics, Manson writes. So Cukor never mentioned his true goal and, Manson reports, admonished his team not to talk about it either — until the program racked up successes, and then commanders and their troops found its possibilities irresistible.

The turning point of Maven’s fortunes came with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. President Joe Biden ruled against mobilizing U.S. troops (to avoid risking World War III), but, even before sending weapons, he gave the Ukrainians access to top-secret intelligence, and Maven was the main facilitator.

Almost immediately, a U.S. Army brigade, led by a Cukor enthusiast, set up an A.I. targeting system for the Ukrainians. Silicon Valley firms, including Palantir, sent technicians to tweak the database, making 60 refinements in the first few months.

In the end, Maven’s data stream let Ukrainian soldiers see and identify tens of thousands of targets — armored vehicles, missile launchers and various military facilities — and destroy hundreds of them a day, some inside Russian territory. To the extent Ukrainians beat back the much mightier Russian Army and mounted a counteroffensive, Maven played a major role.

A.I. targeting systems played a still bigger, if less publicized, role in Israel’s war in Gaza. After Hamas’s terrorist attack of Oct. 7, 2023, the Israel Defense Forces used A.I. to identify 15,000 targets — and proceeded to bomb many of them.

The results shined a harsh light on A.I. warfare’s “double-edged sword.” Some of the A.I. targets (10 percent of them, according to one estimate that Manson notes) were misidentified. The I.D.F. has said that it uses human analysts to cross-check the work of its machines, but even aside from any potential mistakes or ambiguities, A.I.-enabled weapons — which have been sold as a way to reduce civilian casualties — could make war more deadly. They give commanders “more targets, faster, and make it easier to strike them,” Manson writes. “It is hard to imagine this will lead to fewer strikes.”

The book was finished before this spring’s U.S.-Israeli airstrikes on Iran, which destroyed more than 13,000 targets, many of them at least in part civilian. Maybe the paperback edition will detail the extent to which Maven once again wreaked its awesomely efficient, and occasionally indiscriminate, powers in this theater too.

The dilemmas posed by A.I. weapons have triggered debates even among the technology’s creators. Google at first dropped out of Maven after its employees petitioned against doing any military work, but rejoined after the contracts grew lucrative and the cause — defending Ukraine — became appealing.

In February, Anthropic’s chief executive, Dario Amodei, publicly refused to work on completely autonomous weapons, but only because today’s A.I. systems “are simply not reliable enough” to support them. In his announcement, he touted “partially autonomous weapons,” like those used in Ukraine, as “vital to the defense of democracy” and allowed that fully autonomous ones “may prove critical” someday.

Even so, his critique, plus his refusal to work on domestic surveillance projects (which he said undermine “democratic values”), pushed the Trump administration into declaring Anthropic a “supply-chain risk,” which would bar it from all federal contracts. (President Trump has since begun to reconsider the prohibition.)

As with most spheres of life, it’s too late to ban A.I. from the battlefield, but Manson makes a case for continuing to challenge its use. Even Cukor — who retired from the military in 2021, never talked with any other reporters and only spoke with Manson after she begged him for nearly a year (and meanwhile interviewed his associates and critics) — is apprehensive about the revolution that he spawned. “We have all this tech,” he muses in the last of their many sessions. “Are we the best custodians of it?”

PROJECT MAVEN: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare | By Katrina Manson | Norton | 406 pp. | $31.99