2025 Releases: The Kosher Mafia & The Hive

Another pair of 2025 releases this week. I’ll probably do a couple more of these 2025 release posts this month and the big 2025 round up in a few weeks.

Title: Kosher Mafia
Credits: Author: David Hazan, Illustrated: Sami Kivelä, Colorist: Ellie Wright, Letterer: Simon Bowland
Availability: Print, digital, digital library services
Plot Summary: In Cleveland, Ohio, in 1936, Howard Berkowicz, the bookkeeper for the Jewish Mob finds himself on the wrong end of an enforcer’s gun when he tries to spur the Kosher Mafia into action against the rising tide of domestic Nazism in the German American Bund.
Review: Kosher Mafia opens with Ephraim Gold, a heavy, paying a visit to the house of Howard Berkowicz, a bookkeeper for the Jewish Mob in Cleveland. Gold is there ostensibly to implement Berkowicz’s euphemistic retirement plan. They wind up having a conversation instead. Berkowicz is worried about the rise of the Nazis and Hitler in Europe and thinks that American Jews, especially the organization he works for, should be doing more. Howard’s problem, for all the characters and even the reader at times, is that he’s sanctimonious about it. Ephraim calls him on it at the end of their conversation: “If I’m a criminal and a killer and a ganif…so is the man who makes sure I get paid.”

The two set off on the run from the Jewish Mob to try and do their part to expose a white supremacist group. I wanted more genre thrills from this and Howard Berkowicz isn’t a particularly compelling character. He’s right, duh we know that from a historical perspective, but Jewish gangsters vs. Nazis is too good of a hook. The book seems to know this. Near the end, it has Ephraim say:

“They say Meyer Lansky’s been putting together a group out in New York dedicated to stopping the Nazis in their tracks. Been thinking, after everything…that might be a good fit for a guy like me.”

Woulda been a good fit for a reader like me too. In our current moment, we are past waffling about the rise of the right and authoritarianism around the world and now we just want to see them fought. Still, it is a good book. I liked it just didn’t love it.

Title: The Hive
Writer(s): A.J. Lieberman
Artist(s): Mike Henderson
Availability: Print, digital, digital library services
Plot Summary: Mason Shaw is no one. A worker bee. All that changes when he crosses paths with a few stragglers trying to stay one step ahead of a queen with immense powers who is determined to control her hive no matter who she has to kill.
Review: We haven’t yet dug into the topic of cross-genre fiction but will at some point. Just know this, I like the idea of cross-genre/multi-genre fiction. I won’t get into a full discussion of the topic, we’ll save that for a later dedicated post. But you might want to know that The Hive is cross-genre fiction that is pretty firmly rooted in the crime fiction genre.

The Hive is a crime fiction story based on the idea that “everyone has an innate frequency” and that some people have a higher frequency that allows them to control others. The stronger the drone, the more people it can connect. These connected people are grouped into hives that are ruled by a queen. Basically, the story overlays bees and beehive terminology onto a story about gangs with something like mind control as the power currency.

This is the balance that The Hive tries to walk. It needs to introduce worldbuilding concepts to the reader without being overbearing (or, dog forbid, boring) but uses well known genre ideas as a framework to hang the concepts to make them more palatable and fun. So when protag Mason Shaw shows up, we know that he is the reader stand-in but also is the stranger coming to town. When opposing hives are introduced we understand it as competing gangs and turf wars.

The Hive manages to walk the line between exposition and fun genre story pretty well. It mainly opts to just toss the reader into the deep end. There are early stretches that might feel a little confusing but if you go back and re-read, the story opens up. If this first volume is a little front loaded with exposition and world-building, it starts to lean more into the story in the back half.

I don’t know how long The Hive is intended to run but it is a series. So, while a story arc is completed at the end of volume 1, a new threat is introduced as the hook for the next chunk of the story. I’m curious to see where it goes.