Fall Preview 2014: Part One

While kids contemplate going back to school––or have even returned already!––at Read Me Deadly, we're sifting through publishers' fall catalogs and prepublication reviews, trying to figure out what to read. Over the next two weeks, we'll be sharing our ideas about what looks good. Grab a pen and paper, because here we go.

Okay, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it fans, you've read Peter Heller's poetic The Dog Stars, in which a Cessna pilot, Hig, and his dog, Jasper, navigate Colorado nine years after a super flu has eliminated most of humankind. You've visited the world 2,000 years after a nuclear war in Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban and witnessed the deaths of 99.4% of Earth's population and the resulting fight of good versus evil in Stephen King's The Stand. You've traveled through the crushing bleakness of the post-apocalypse in Cormac McCarthy's The Road and puzzled over the mysterious Area X of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation; Authority; and Acceptance, to be released on September 2, 2014, by FSG Originals). Now, write this one down, because there's terrific buzz about Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven (Knopf, September 9, 2014).

The novel begins with famous actor Arthur Leander's onstage heart attack during a performance of King Lear. Watching the doomed efforts of paparazzo Jeevan Chaudhary to save him is child actress Kirsten Raymonde. As Chaudhary later walks home, the Georgia Flu begins its swath of global destruction. The novel then weaves in and out, flashing back to the lives of Leander and his associates and examining the harsh existence of survivors years after his death. Kirsten is a member of a traveling troupe of Shakespearean actors on their way to an old airport housing the Museum of Civilization and a small settlement. Leander's gift to Kirsten, a graphic novel by his first wife titled Station Eleven, guides the troupe through the Great Lakes region, where a religious cult headed by the violent Prophet holds sway. In a decimated world, there are still plenty of ties that bind us.

For a while, it seemed there was no escaping books involving writers' quests. We had no sooner read about a year spent cooking a Julia Child dish daily before we were vicariously living a year spent Biblically. I enjoy quests at second-hand, but I prefer reading about a genuine obsession, such as a birder's attempt to see every bird species on earth, or one with personal meaning, such as an elderly man's effort to drive his lawn tractor 240 miles (top speed, about 6 miles/hour) across Iowa and Wisconsin to see his estranged, dying brother. These sorts of expeditions are of more psychological interest than one undertaken strictly for writing a book about it.

In Martha Baillie's The Search for Heinrich Schlögel (Tin House, distributed by PGW, September 9, 2014), an unnamed narrator uses letters, journal entries, newspaper clippings, and maps to understand a surreal hike across Canada's remote Baffin Island by a 20-year-old German named Heinrich Schlögel. Inspired by his sister Inge's interest in the Inuktitut language and the diary of his hero, Samuel Hearne, a real-life 18th-century British explorer of the Canadian Arctic, Schlögel returns from what he thinks is a two-week trip to find that 30 years have elapsed, although he himself has not aged. After reading reviews that praise the beauty of Baillie's writing, and learning of her interest in the works of German writer W. G. Sebald (I loved Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, which involves a nameless narrator's walk through Norfolk, England, and the fascinating meditations about people and places the walk inspires), I quickly added this book to my list. It may not be for you if you dislike magical realism or best like linear stories with a definitive ending.

Maybe you remember the controversy over the ending of Irish writer Tana French's widely read 2007 book, In the Woods. Readers seemed to love or hate it. Like Patricia Cornwell's Postmortem, In the Woods won four crime-fiction awards for best first novel. It introduces the Dublin Murder Squad series, although it isn't necessary for enjoyment to read the books––a combination of psychological thriller and police procedural––in order. The fifth, The Secret Place, will be released by Penguin on September 2, 2014, and it is already receiving raves for French's meticulous plotting and stylish writing.

Its narrator is Dublin detective Stephen Moran, who works cold cases and dreams of joining the Murder Squad. His entrée comes when Holly Mackey, the teenage daughter of colleague Det. Frank Mackey, gives him a photo from a bulletin board for anonymous postings called "The Secret Place" at St. Kilda's School. In the photo is Chris Harper, a rich boy from a neighboring school, whose murder a year earlier remains unsolved. It's captioned "I know who killed him." French uses alternating chapters––and changes in timeline and point of view––to leap between the investigation of Murder Squad Detectives Moran and Antoinette Conway and four St. Kilda's girls in the school year up to Chris's murder and its aftermath.

All right, let's take a big hop from Ireland to Greece, where we find Jeffrey Siger's Andreas Kaldis. When we first meet Kaldis, in 2009's Murder in Mykonos, he is an Athens homicide detective. He is now the incorruptible (but realistic) head of Greece's Special Crimes Division. In 2012's Target: Tinos, Kaldis marries the wealthy and socially connected Lila Vardi, who is neither harebrained nor stuffy. Siger's characters age and their relationships change over time; it's enjoyable, but not necessary, to read these police procedurals in order of publication. This excellent series has a very strong sense of place: each book is set in a different part of Greece, and geography, history, culture, and current social issues are woven into the plot.

In the sixth book, Sons of Sparta (Poisoned Pen, October 7, 2014), Special Crimes Division Det. Yiannis Kouros is called out to the Mani from Athens by an uncle who once ran one of the region's crime syndicates. A land sale that will make the family rich is in the works until the uncle's death in a suspicious car accident calls the sale off. If Kouros successfully wraps up his investigation of the accident, it could avoid a family vendetta; however, his superior, Kaldis, working on a political corruption case in Athens, takes a sniff and smells fish. I'm looking forward to spending time with Siger's characters and inhaling a lesson about modern and ancient Greece.

I love satirical honeymoons set in fictional paradise. Of course, they turn into nothing like heaven, and we see how the newly married respond when fate deals their romantic expectations a below-the-belt hit. Writer Carl Hiaasen sends one Florida honeymooner fishing in the Keys, where he hooks a severed human arm (Bad Monkey). Another, Manhattan ad executive Max Lamb, seeking to inject some excitement into his Disney World honeymoon, grabs a camcorder and his new wife and drives into the path of an oncoming hurricane; this is by no means the end of the Lambs' perilous day (Stormy Weather).

Lydia Millet, whose 2009 short-story collection, Love in Infant Monkeys, creates eccentric pairings between animals and celebrities, has also written an upcoming satirical thriller, Mermaids in Paradise (W. W. Norton, November 3, 2014). It features successful young Americans Chip and Deborah, who travel from Los Angeles to honeymoon at a resort in the British Virgin Islands at Chip's suggestion. From the get-go, Deb, the narrator, is skeptical of this destination; however, when a marine researcher takes some snorkelers to a coral reef, and they discover live mermaids, Deb is transformed. The group's efforts to keep their discovery secret fail, and the resort hurries to profit from it. But the group has some ideas about how to protect these mythical creatures, which I hope are fully half-baked––and completely entertaining.

Few of us read crime fiction only because we're into the bludgeoning; stabbing; strangling; shooting; poisoning; electrocuting; rigging equipment (such as tampering with a car's brakes or wiring dynamite to the engine); pushing off a cliff, out a window, into an empty elevator shaft, in front of a vehicle or herd of stampeding elephants; crushing under a hydraulic press or in one of those diabolical rooms you've seen on TV where the maniac pushes a button and the walls close in on the victim, who already suffers from claustrophobia; drowning in the tub––if the murderer can figure out how to close the drain (I've been in hotel tubs in which I've had to ask my husband); feeding into a tree chipper or dismembering with a chainsaw or something not gas-powered, like a hacksaw or Swiss Army knife (I dream of receiving this one as a gift); leaving out in the elements to die of exposure, be eaten by wolves, or be beamed up to a passing flying saucer, experimented upon, and tidily vaporized by overly curious outer-space aliens, conscientious to a fault about not leaving evidence of their existence behind.... To cut to the chase, I read crime fiction because I like puzzles and the exploration of human nature and society in the framework afforded by the commission, investigation, and solution of a crime.

That said, I don't read much modern crime fiction that would qualify for the Mary Higgins Clark Award (see here). Sometimes, though, it's a pleasure to pick up a book and find little graphic violence and a smart, likable, and independent female protagonist. If there's a well-done romance, it's all gravy.

Hank Phillippi Ryan's Jane Ryland series begins with the Mary Higgins Clark Award-winning The Other Woman. Jane is a former TV investigative reporter, now employed by the Boston Register. In the upcoming third book, Truth Be Told (Forge, October 7, 2014), Jane is working on stories about foreclosures and banking financial services, when a murdered body drops onto her plate. Her investigation expands and becomes more dangerous. Readers will be pleased, because hunky Det. Jake Brogan of the Boston PD is handling a cold-case investigation that may tie in with Jane's stories, and he has eyes in his head to see Jane is no slacker in the beauty and brains departments. Author Ryan, a TV investigative reporter who has won more Emmys and journalism awards than you would believe, is a skillful writer, and she combines an examination of social issues and a sure touch with Jane and Jake's will-they-or-won't-they relationship. That sort of smoldering helped make early years of the TV series Moonlighting, with Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis, very popular. How often do you find that special longing sweetness in your crime fiction?

I've been a Denis Johnson fan for a long time. If you're interested in influential American novelists whose subject is America, you may have read Jesus' Son, a collection of hallucinatory short stories revolving around some rural addicts; Tree of Smoke, an epic featuring Skip Sands, a CIA officer in the 1960s mess of Vietnam; or Train Dreams, a 116-page gem about Robert Grainier, a working man in the changing early-1900s American West.

On November 4th, Johnson's literary thriller, The Laughing Monsters (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), will appear. Kirkus Reviews terms it a "taut, Conrad-by-way-of-Chandler tale about a spy who gets too close to the man he’s shadowing in Africa." The spy is NATO agent Roland Nair, a Scandinavian with a US passport, who returns to Africa to meet his old friend Michael Adriko and Michael's fiancée, Davidia, a college girl from Colorado, in Sierra Leone. Roland and Michael, who has worked as a soldier of fortune and as Roland's colleague in anti-terrorism, made a lot of money during Sierra Leone's civil war. Davidia, Michael, and Roland set off to visit Michael's family on the Congo-Uganda border, but all three may have a hidden agenda. They soon attract the interest of various espionage and law enforcement agencies, and their personal and professional loyalties undergo testing. A re-read of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness may be in order, and then I'm going to sit down with this one.

I enjoy Japanese writer Keigo Higashino's Detective Galileo books, which feature Manabu Yukawa, a brilliant physics professor with a knack for solving crime, and Tokyo police detective Kusanagi. The Devotion of Suspect X and Salvation of a Saint aren't so much whodunits as howdunits or whydunits or willtheygetawaywithits. The detective-suspect games of cat-and-mouse contain surprising twists, and the books explore the nature of guilt, anguish, loyalty, and human relationships.

When Malice (translated from the Japanese by Alexander O. Smith, with Elye Alexander) is published by Minotaur Books on November 7th, we'll get a look at another Higashino series. This one features Kyochiro Kaga, a police detective in the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department's First Investigative Division. It's the first English translation, and it sounds like fun. It seems that best-selling Japanese novelist Kunihiko Hidaka has been strangled in a locked room of his locked house. The two people who find him are his wife and his best friend, Osamu Nonoguchi; they both appear to have solid alibis. When Kaga investigates, he discovers Nonoguchi is an old colleague from his days of teaching school, and his investigation gains a personal element.

I used to hang out with a bunch of physicists, and at some point during dinner, we non-physicists inevitably started peppering the physicists with questions. What happens if I bore a straight tunnel all the way through the earth, and then drop a ball down the hole? Do I stay drier in the rain if I walk or run to the front door from my car? They'd debate the answers and scribble on paper napkins for illustrations. Of course, as the night went on, our questions would become more preposterous––and their answers more entertaining.

If you love science and like to consider hypotheticals, you'll be interested in Randall Munroe's 320-page What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, September 2, 2014). Munroe studied physics and then built robots at NASA before leaving to to draw comics on the internet full time. His xkcd.com is called "A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language," and it's an enjoyable and informative place to visit. You can see some questions and answers by clicking on "What If?". (Anyone who has ever struggled to answer a child's tough question about how the world works will be amused by questions that begin, "My six-year-old asked me....") Some question examples are as follows: "What if everyone only had one soulmate? How dangerous is it, really, in a pool in a thunderstorm? If we hooked turbines to people exercising in gyms, how much power could we produce? What if I took a swim in a spent-nuclear-fuel pool?" Munroe's answers are witty, well researched, and illustrated with cunningly drawn little stick figures, cartoons, diagrams, mathematical equations, etc. The book contains both new questions/answers and some of the most popular questions/answers from the xkcd website.  I definitely need to read this one.

That's it for today. I'll be back in a few days with more upcoming books. Tomorrow, Sister Mary will tell you about some great-looking fall books set during World War II and the Cold War.

Hot Summer Reads 2013 (Part 2)

Here are Georgette Spelvin and Della Streetwise with more summer reading suggestions. You didn't think we were finished stuffing your beach bags and stacking books by your patio chair on Friday, did you?

In hot weather, a brain can get cranky and finicky. A good reading choice will either soothe a crabby psyche or say yah boo sucks to this nonsense and jump-start a heat-exhausted mind with something unusually thought-provoking or exciting. The latter choice is akin to eating very spicy food when you're already sweating.

Combining these approaches works well when you're stuck inside a sweltering house, and there's no air conditioning. Stand in front of an open refrigerator while holding an action thriller or police procedural in one hand; grasp and quickly fan the fridge door with your other hand.

Alternatively, cool yourself by stepping into the bone-rattling cold of a western Ukrainian winter with Dan Smith's taut, disturbing thriller, The Child Thief, published on June 1 by Pegasus Crime. It's sorta what you'd get if you popped David Benioff's City of Thieves, Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male, Tom Rob Smith's Child 44, and the Brothers Grimm into the blender and served it all over ice.

It's December 1930 when the book begins, and Stalin's authorities, accompanied by soldiers, are fanning across Ukraine. The villagers of Vyriv are very afraid. That's why the sight of a staggering stranger, hauling a sled, menaces hunters Luka Mikhailovich Sidorov and his 17-year-old twin sons, Viktor and Petro.

Despite his sons' misgivings, Luka, our narrator, insists they carry the near-dead stranger back to Vyriv. Once there, the sled's mysterious and horrifying cargo upsets the already nervous villagers. In the ensuing melee, Luka's young niece Dariya disappears. Promising his daughter he'll bring Dariya back, Luka sets out the next morning with Viktor, Petro, and Dariya's father, following man-sized tracks in the snow. As the men brave deadly cold, they hunt the child thief ahead of them and worry about the village awaiting discovery behind them. This worry remains when the tables are turned, the hunted becomes the hunter, and they run into Stalin's men. You cannot help but root for Luka, his loyal sons, and comrades. Their humanity is inextinguishable, even in the cruel icebox of Stalin's Ukraine.

This book contains brutality against adults and some gruesome elements involving children. Despite these issues, I'm glad I read it. Smith has crafted a beautifully poetic and hugely tense thriller, populated by unforgettable characters, in The Child Thief.

After leaving the unrelenting Ukrainian winter, I was ready for another book, albeit something much lighter. I gulped when I read the Robert Louis Stevenson quotation in the preface: "Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences." But 20 pages in, I was saying aloud, "Thanks, Hank, I needed this." Hank is Hank Phillippi Ryan, and her multiple-award-winning career in investigative reporting and experience with political campaigns are put to use in The Other Woman, published in 2012 by Tor. It's coming out in paperback tomorrow, July 2nd, perfect timing for tucking into a beach or airline carry-on bag.

It's one of those books that lets you relax while the point of view shifts from one character to the next, and you only gradually see where everyone fits into the plot. Ryan skillfully ties together a political campaign, a series of deaths, and personal betrayals through the investigations of her two main characters, investigative reporter Jane Ryland and Boston PD Detective Jake Brogan.

The sweetness of Jake and Jane's near-romance, the All-hands-on-deck! approach to the political and personal shenanigans, and writer Ryan's spin-the-bottle pointers to an "other woman" made me smile as I sat in the shade, sipping a vodka collins. This is the first in a new series, with the next, The Wrong Girl, due on September 10th.

A quick note before we move to books I hope to read. I loved Ghostman, Roger Hobbs's incredibly original and gritty debut (Knopf, February 2013), featuring fixer Jack Delton, who has 48 hours in which to clean up a botched Atlantic City casino heist. I'll tell you more about this book soon.

I like Tom Piccirilli's noir, in which he contrasts and compares ideas about right and wrong, honor, and redemption in law -breaking and -abiding folks. (Don't you love the incongruity of a professional killer in Pulp Fiction, who insists that a colleague say "please" and complains about someone who has purposefully scratched his car?)

Last year, I read Piccirilli's series first, The Last Kind Words (discussed here). It introduces a memorable clan of grifters, the Rands, whose traditions include stealing and giving their children names of dog breeds. Until the events described in this book, they had prided themselves on never crossing a line to commit crimes of violence. In the second of the series, The Last Whisper in the Dark (Bantam, due July 9), Collie Rand is dead, and his brother Terrier ("Terry"), is deeply unhappy and attempting to go straight.

A couple of debut novels involving life after death are intriguing me:

The first is Ofir Touché Gafla's debut, The World of the End, translated from the Hebrew by Mitch Ginsburg, and published last week by Tor. Publishers Weekly calls it "part romance, part mystery, and part science fantasy." Its protagonist is Ben Mendelssohn, an epilogist whom writers hire to compose suitable endings to their books. When he loses his beloved wife, Marian, in "an aeronautical event," Ben decides the right ending to their life together requires him to join her in the Other World. It's a very elaborate and confusing place, which forces Ben to hire an afterlife investigator, the Mad Hop, to help him find Marian.

The second book, The Returned (Harlequin MIRA, due August 27), by poet Jason Mott, generated tremendous buzz at the recent Book Expo America and has received rave reviews from the four major review sources.

The tale involves people ("the Returned") who suddenly, without explanation, reappear on earth after death; they are the same age at which they died. The practical issues alone are mind-boggling, but I'm interested in the more poignant issues of mixed feelings resulting from these reappearances, and what people will decide to do about them.

I'm also excited about reading books by two authors whose previous books I loved:

The Way the Crow Flies (HarperCollins, 2003) is by Canadian writer Ann-Marie MacDonald, who also wrote Fall on Your Knees. It's a story about the destructive nature of secrets.

Members of the McCarthy family of Ontario, Canada, are happy until 1962, when Jack, a member of the RCAF, takes on the top-secret job of protecting a Soviet defector, a scientist en route to the U.S. to work for the space program. The highly moral Jack discovers that the scientist is an ex-Nazi. Meanwhile, the 8-year-old Madeleine keeps secret the molestation by a teacher at her school. Their secrets create a moral dilemma with devastating consequences when one of Madeleine's friends is murdered.

I've been looking forward to Marisha Pessl's next book since 2006, when I read her debut murder mystery, Specialty Topics in Calamity Physics.

On August 20, Pessl's Night Film will be published by Random House. It involves New York reporter Scott McGrath's investigation of the apparent suicide of Ashley Cordova, daughter of notorious "night film" director, Stanislas Cordova. Assisting McGrath are Holmesian "irregulars" Nora and Hopper.

Pessl uses crime as a springboard to tackle larger social issues, and her writing is very creative. Night Film should be very fun.


My family travels a lot on weekends during the summer. Road trips mean cramped space, so my husband and I share more books than usual. Traditional mysteries stay home. Satire, sci-fi, police procedurals and nonfiction go. Before I tell you about books back on my shelves, I'll show you what I'm taking and tell you why.

I knew Martin Clark's The Many Aspects of Mobile Home Living (Alfred A. Knopf, 2000) was a go when I read the first page and came to this:

On the morning that Evers got his first glimpse of the albino mystery, he'd been walking into the sun, scraping down the sidewalk, burping up squalls of alcohol and two-in-the-morning microwave lasagna. He had just passed by a can of garbage spilled in an alley when he thought he heard someone say his name. Evers was dizzy, the sun was sharp and combative, and he was trying hard to get to his office, so he didn't stop moving right away.

"Judge Wheeling? Sir?"

That's North Carolina Judge Evers Wheeling's introduction to car saleswoman Ruth Esther, who offers him a bribe if he'll find her brother not guilty. Of course, Evers does and then he joins a motley gang on what sounds like a trip down the rabbit's hole to Utah, on the trail of a fortune hidden by Esther's father.

Author Clark is a circuit court judge in Virginia. His legal expertise, combined with eccentric characters and vivid writing, make this black comic caper a book I can't wait to read.

My husband and I are both fans of nautical historical fiction. The Aubrey–Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian. C. S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower Saga. James McGee's Rapscallion: A Regency Crime Thriller (Pegasus Crime, May 15), set onboard a floating prison, is irresistible.

Napoleon is at war with England in this third Matthew Hawkwood book. At the request of London's Home Secretary, Bow Street Runner Hawkwood disguises himself as an American captured fighting for the French and goes undercover to discover how prisoners of war are escaping from the Rapacious.

No matter how sticky and uncomfortable we are in the car, we must compare favorably to those poor souls imprisoned in "gut-wrenching conditions." And this series is of the rip-roaring adventure variety. Perfect for summer.

Who didn't love the movie In Bruges? There's no way I'll miss Pieter Aspe's English-language debut, The Square of Revenge, published last month by Pegasus Crime. World-weary Bruges DI Pieter Van In pairs with gorgeous prosecutor Hannelore Martens to investigate an unusual jewelry store robbery. The gems weren't taken, but dumped into a tank of aqua regis, an acid so strong the gold melted. The criminals left behind a letter containing a cryptic clue. Strangely, Ludovic Degroof, store proprietor, seems more interested in covering up the crime than having it solved.

I'm always pleased to find a European crime series newly translated into English. Especially one like this, with an interesting protagonist. A lighthearted Belgian mystery, full of banter. What could be better?

Benjamin Black's Holy Orders: A Quirke Novel won't be released by Holt until August 20th but that will be in time for an end of summer trip over Labor Day.

After playing a supporting role to Inspector Hackett in last year's Vengeance, Dublin pathologist Quirke returns with a case that's personal. The dead body of Jimmy Minor, a friend of Quirke's daughter Phoebe, is found floating in a canal. Hackett and Quirke must discover what story journalist Minor was working on at the time of his death.

I suspect this isn't the best book for people unfamiliar with Black's series to begin reading. Christine Falls introduces the laconic and heavy-drinking Quirke. I like this series for its moody atmosphere, 1950s Dublin setting and the beauty of Black's prose. Black is the pen name of Booker Award winner John Banville.

I love Jo Nesbø's Harry Hole and dread the day the series ends. At least I didn't have to worry about that when I opened The Redeemer (translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett), sixth in the nine-book series and re-released in the United States by Knopf in May.

The unreported rape of an unidentified girl by an unidentified boy at a Salvation Army summer camp begins a book in which the lines between right and wrong are blurred and guilt is a matter of degrees. There isn't a character who isn't looking for a form of redemption, including Nesbø's deeply flawed protagonist.

It's Christmas time in Oslo 12 years later, and Harry is investigating a drug-related death when Salvation Army volunteer Robert Karlsen is shot on the street. The Croatian hit man almost immediately realizes he's killed the wrong man, but by then Harry is on the case. Luckily for Harry, a snowstorm prevents the killer from leaving town, but he's as determined to make good on his mistake as Harry is to hunt him down. Nesbø goes into the killer's history and head to such an extent we can empathize with him. And Harry is Harry. What more does one need to say?

This is one of Nesbø's most richly detailed and intricately plotted books and not the best place to begin. I'd suggest beginning with The Redbreast or Nemesis.

Unlike my good friend Georgette, I feel cooler when I share my beach blanket with characters in a hot or humid setting. Hot. Humid. Mississippi.

When Ace Atkins' The Broken Places (Putnam, May 30) begins, Esau and Bones are breaking out of Parchman Prison, bound for a small town in northeast Mississippi. Already in residence is their old comrade-in-crime, Jericho native Jamey Dixon, pardoned after being convicted of killing his wife. Claiming he found Jesus at Parchman, Jamey is preaching out of a barn and romancing Caddy Colson, sister of former Army Ranger and current sheriff Quinn Colson.

Jericho is already dynamite awaiting detonation when the escaped cons arrive to accuse Jamey of cheating them out of the loot from an armored car robbery. Locals, who've never trusted Jamey, are talking vengeance. It's a perfect trifecta of trouble for Quinn when a tornado blows into town.

Ace Atkins fans already know the pleasures of reading his atmospheric Deep South books. High-wire tension, syrupy-drawling dialogue, characters you can smell and scenery you can clearly see. Quinn is an appealing character, much like Lee Child's Jack Reacher. This is the third book in the series and it's as good as the first two. No need to begin with the first, The Ranger.

We wish we could go on forever, telling you about books we'd like to put under your noses, but we need to stop somewhere. You might want one of these for your next summer read (publication date in parentheses).

Jussi Adler-Olsen: A Conspiracy of Faith (June 5) (translated from the Danish)

Lauren Beukes: The Shining Girls (June 4)

Jim Crace: Harvest (February 13)

A. S. A. Harrison: The Silent Wife (June 25)

Stephen King: Joyland (June 4)

Rachel Kushner: The Flamethrowers (April 2)

Elizabeth Silver: The Execution of Noa P. Singleton (June 11)

Carsten Stroud: The Homecoming (July 16)