What Leaders Hear Before Anyone Speaks

John Guszak · Nonfiction

Most leadership advice starts with what you say. This book starts earlier — with what the room has already told you.

Read the Room is a field guide for operating leaders: the managers, directors, VPs, and founders who run the meeting, own the number, and carry the team. Drawing on more than three decades across the military, corrections, manufacturing, natural foods, e-commerce, and software, John Guszak argues that the signals that decide an outcome — the hesitation, the deference, the question nobody asks — are present long before the first word is spoken. Leaders who learn to hear them make better calls, faster, and do less damage getting there.

The book moves through three parts: reading what isn't said, the moves that work, and power, culture, and long-term practice. Each chapter pairs a real operating scene with named tools — thirty-nine in all — and every tool states when to use it, how to run it, and how it fails. The result is meant to be pulled off the shelf before a hard conversation, not read once cover to cover.

This is not a memoir and not a theory of leadership. It is a practical manual for the leader who has to walk into the room tomorrow morning.

• Paperback — $16.99 · Buy on Amazon
• Kindle — $9.99 · Buy on Amazon

E.V. Thrale · Crime fiction

The island is the house. It rises straight out of the black water with no shore beneath it, floor stacked on floor, hundreds of windows watching the boat come in — and at the very top, one warm band of gold where Ambrose Vane sits immobile and attended, a billionaire who named his private island after the mythic island of love and very badly wants you to know he knows what that means.

Elias Roan is twenty years a homicide detective and five years out of a life he told himself he left in grief and disgust. Vane's invitation is generous and vague: walk the gathering, think the ugly thoughts, see the fall before it falls. Because Vane's guests come to Cythera to want out loud — to be, for a little while, exactly as much as they are, with someone reliable holding the net.

Then a man dies in his own room, inside his own carefully negotiated scene, and everything about it is correct except that he is dead. Then another. The storm closes the crossing. The only boat belongs to Vane.

Roan has walked into a house where every death arrives dressed as a fantasy, where the safeties were removed by someone who read the intake files and knew precisely what each guest had asked for. And somewhere in the cold rooms below the waterline is a name he buried five years ago — Nadia Voss, the woman he loved, who he has spent every day since believing he killed by degrees, from a distance, without laying a hand on her.

He was wrong about that. He is about to find out how wrong, and what it will cost him to be right.

A locked-island noir about desire, consent, grief, and the kind of money that decides what did and did not happen.

Contains adult themes and situations.

• Paperback — 6 November 2026