The Peripatetic Coffin, Ethan Rutherford's debut collection of short stories, is a keeper. His work creeps up on you when you're not looking, like the title story. The coffin in question is the Civil War-era submarine H. L. Hunley: 40 metallic feet long, with a four-foot beam and a cabin height of four feet, it is the Confederacy's secret savior. With a bomb attached to the bow, it will, with underwater stealth, destroy the Union ships blockading Charleston harbor. Narrated by Ward Lumpkin, who mans the second crank station, the tale is one of honor, courage and blind faith in a "contraption that has killed thirteen men, including its inventor, on test runs alone." Their night attack on the USS Housatonic succeeds, but the sub never makes it back to port. In the dark, as the water rises, Ward wonders if they were "but a spectacle of self-defeat."

In "A Mugging," a middle-aged couple is mugged at night. Charles is punched in the face; the first time ever. Quietly, painfully, Rutherford reveals the "unsettling" effects of the incident. "Summer Boys," about two inseparable fifth-graders, opens all nostalgic: the joys of youth, skateboarding, adventures. Then, as with "A Mugging," the story takes a turn down a dark corridor.

Add two other beautifully rendered nautical tales, a whimsical, absurdist story about a summer camp where campers die trying to retrieve a stolen mascot moose head, a powerful portrait about a son gone wrong and its devastating effect on the family and, to round things out, ruminations on lost love and a sick alpaca, and you've got a revelatory feast of storytelling. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

Gail Godwin (Evensong; A Mother and Two Daughters) has created another atmospheric novel of place, character and time in Flora, narrated by a woman in her 70s recounting the summer of 1945.

Helen is a precocious 10-year-old living in North Carolina with her beloved grandmother Nonie. Her mother died when she was three, and her father is working on a secret project in Oak Ridge, Tenn., allowing him to come home only occasionally. Then Nonie dies, Helen's best friend Brian comes down with polio and another friend moves away. These losses leave the child bereft and grieving, and then Helen's father invites his late wife's cousin to move in for the summer.

Flora is 22, a "simple-hearted girl," a chatterbox, is waiting for a teaching appointment for the next school year. Helen can barely stand Flora. To make matters worse, Helen's father is convinced Brian's polio is the sign of an epidemic, so he forbids them to go visiting, swimming or even into town. Mrs. Jones comes to clean and Finn delivers groceries.

In this hermetically sealed world, Helen develops a crush on Finn. Helen and Flora learn a great deal from each other and by summer's end might even have become friends--until Helen catches Flora and Finn in an embrace. She bolts from the house and sets in motion a series of events that ends in tragedy.

Having Helen tell her story so many years after the fact is a brilliant strategy on Godwin's part--the novel is filled with sadness and regret, but also illuminated by the wisdom and understanding that distance lends. --Valerie Ryan, Cannon Beach Book Company, Ore.

"I'm Jewish. I'm divorced. I have a son." Ava Lark lays out the facts when meeting prospective suitors, refusing to set herself up for disappointment and accepting her limited chances for happiness in 1950s suburban Boston. In Is This Tomorrow, Caroline Leavitt's 10th novel, Ava is working in a demeaning typing pool to provide a home for her and 11-year-old Lewis when a horrific incident changes the course of their lives.

Shunned by the neighbors, Ava and Lewis have two friends: Jimmy and Rose, the kids next door. The three children are all fatherless--Jimmy and Rose's dad died--and, with that common bond, develop a loyalty and reliance that is charming but foreboding. When Jimmy disappears, Lewis and Rose are despondent, fearful and wracked with guilt. Investigations and searches are fruitless. The community moves forward, but in alternating chapters beginning seven years after Jimmy vanishes, readers learn that as adults Lewis and Rose cannot escape the haunting loss.

Leavitt establishes three storylines in the last half of this well-drawn novel: Lewis, Rose and Ava live in different cities, yet share the trauma of their past. Will the mystery of Jimmy's disappearance be solved, or must they learn to cope without resolution?

There's redemption in Ava gaining acceptance as the 1960s unfold, but Leavitt spotlights the prejudice, McCarthyism, sexism and stultifying mores of the previous decade. And the details of Jimmy's fate surface in unexpected plot twists, impacting Ava, Lewis and Rose in surprising and dramatic ways. --Cheryl Krocker McKeon, bookseller, Book Passage, San Francisco

Tom Drury's 1994 debut novel, The End of Vandalism, captures the resolve of hapless Midwesterners with deadpan comic empathy. In Pacific, his fifth novel, Drury demonstrates that his dialogue-dominated style is equally suited to West Coast adolescent anomie. One of the great strengths of Drury's fiction is his ability to suggest the deep funny-sadness of life without sinking to ridicule or bathos. He celebrates quirkiness of speech and habit for its ability to particularize the individual beyond stereotype. Unexpected gestures connect characters and reveal wounds of the heart. There is no condescension or mockery toward anyone; even at their most self-deluded or mentally unstable, Drury invests his characters with a warm-blooded immediacy that demands respect.

It's a very leveling perspective, one in which the hopes and disappointments of a lifelong miscreant and a retired sheriff are given equal weight, and the privileged princesses of Los Angeles are no less deserving of understanding than a Midwestern boy who has been imported into a landscape that seems friendly yet offers him little connection.

It's rare to read a novel with so little cliché or convoluted prose, in which the dialogue is both believable and exceptional. Composed of forward-moving scenes, with very little exposition and zero banal musing, Pacific covers a lot of ground for such a lean novel: two very different American communities, a dozen well-developed characters, several career transitions, two noirish subplots and, most affectingly, one Midwestern teen's root shock when he gets plunked down in L.A. --Holloway McCandless, blogger at Litagogo: A Guide to Free Literary Podcasts

John Sandford's Silken Prey finds Minnesota law enforcer Lucas Davenport entangled in deadly political machinations, when the governor asks him to clear the name of a state senator caught with child pornography on his computer only days before the election. Lucas's investigation leads him to the disappearance of a political fixer known for his dirty tricks--no one has seen Bobby Tubbs since the day the porn was discovered, and he's soon presumed dead by Lucas and his colleagues at the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.

Lucas suspects Tubbs was working for the beautiful, young and rich Taryn Grant, the opposing candidate in the senate race, and planted the porn as a smear tactic. Trouble is, he has no proof, and Grant's bodyguards are a pair of former special ops guys--trained killers, they're proud to admit--prepared to eliminate anyone getting in the way of her ambition.

With Sandford's sharp, lean writing, new readers should have no problem jumping right in--even though this is the 23rd book in the Prey series. Davenport is a winning character, a smart investigator with a stable home life and dry sense of humor; his colleagues are amusing, too, each with a distinct personality--especially Virgil Flowers, the long-haired, cowboy-boot-wearing agent who has his own series of novels when not helping Davenport solve cases. Sandford's fans will also recognize two lead characters from yet another series playing integral roles in Silken Prey. It's like Sanford's All-Stars, assembled in one fast-paced, entertaining read. --Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, writer/editor blogging at Pop Culture Nerd

David Morrell takes a break from his typical thrillers with Murder as a Fine Art--a historical mystery set in 1854 London. The main character is Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859), an author and philosopher best remembered for Confessions of an Opium Eater, a memoir in which he detailed addictions that most Victorians considered unmentionable. When someone hacks five people to death, eerily echoing a decades-old crime described in his essay "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts," De Quincey becomes the prime suspect. After all, a man of education could never commit such a dreadful crime, conventional wisdom suggests, but a lower-class man couldn't have read the book.

With the help of his daughter, Emily, and the somewhat unwilling assistance of Detective Shawn Ryan, De Quincey sets out to prove his innocence and find the true murderer before it's too late. He wrote about two sets of vicious murders, you see, and he's convinced the killer means to strike again.

Morrell juxtaposes fascinating details of daily Victorian life with vivid descriptions of De Quincey's oddities, the viciousness of the crimes, the prejudices of the people investigating and the idiosyncrasies of Victorian culture. Written in a third-person omniscient style that may strike the modern reader as odd (but which was very popular during Victorian times), Morrell's novel is a throwback to the sensationalist literature of the period. Murder as a Fine Art is not to be missed. --Jessica Howard, blogger at Quirky Bookworm

Eric Fischl's iconic painting Bad Boy is a dim, dreamy scene of 20th-century suburban unease: a voluptuous naked woman luxuriates on a sun-slatted bed; she appears oblivious (or indifferent) to the young boy standing at the foot of the bed, staring at her--and reaching one hand into her open purse behind him.

The painting is about "desire, voyeurism, appropriateness, and boundaries," Fischl writes in his memoir, also titled Bad Boy. Like much of his work, Bad Boy explores the taboo, drawing attention to the contradiction between public appearances and private truths.

Fischl also suggests the painting is in some sense autobiographical, a depiction of the confusion and chaos underneath the shiny, idyllic surface of his suburban youth. Fischl grew up on Long Island in New York in the 1950s and '60s, the son of a latently creative, "ferociously" alcoholic mother and an ineffectual father. The "numbing disconnect" between his family's public and private lives, so traumatic for Fischl as a child, eventually became the force that drove his creativity.

Bad Boy chronicles Fischl's maturation into an extraordinarily successful artist, particularly as a narrative painter during a period in which the art world revered formalist abstraction and conceptual art. A part of the wildly innovative, excess-fueled downtown New York scene of the 1980s, Fischl rocketed to art stardom following the 1982 exhibition of Bad Boy--then struggled to stay true to his art as the art world became the art market.

Fischl's memoir is an engrossing account of that heady time, and he writes candidly, without apology, about himself. Bad Boy is worth a read, even for those uninterested in Fischl's work: his memoir, like his art, tells a good story. --Hannah Calkins

John Dunn opens the entertaining and humorous Loopers with Bill Murray's famous lines from Caddyshack about being "a looper, you know, a caddy, a looper, a jock," and carrying clubs for "the Dalai Lama himself." Dunn never looped for anyone as eminent, but he did pretty well. Growing up in Connecticut, he fell in love with golf, and the "ragtag, bohemian subculture" of caddying "became my ticket to Neverland."

He confesses he never made much (caddies at exclusive country clubs might top $40,000 a year), but he loved the freedom and the quick cash. And the travel: he's caddied at some of the world's greatest courses: Shinnecock Hills, Augusta National, Olympic Club (with its surprisingly Bad News Bears caddy yard), St. Andrews, Bandon Dunes, Sherwood and many others. All golfers will enjoy reading his accounts of walking these hallowed grounds.

Dunn's memoirs yield up great golf tidbits, including anecdotes about caddying for Bill Gates and Arnold Palmer at Augusta--where guests aren't allowed to tip their caddies. (Nevertheless, Dunn reports, three-time Masters champ Phil Mickelson "showers the caddies with hundreds" when he's there.) You'll also learn about Oregon's Bandon Dunes Resort, which has what Dunn says are the best caddy perks by far, and a course hailed by many "as the greatest... in the galaxy," luring players from around the world. For any golfer, Loopers is a delight. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

Geisel Award winner Josh Schneider (Tales for Very Picky Eaters) invents a hard-to-like heroine who will soon win over readers as she develops some perspective and a sense of empathy.

"It was Dana's birthday and she could do whatever she liked," the book begins. Dressed in her favorite birthday dress, Dana eats waffles, calls classmate Anthony an "ickaborse" and pinches him hard at the bus stop. At school, she eats two desserts, then eats Anthony's, too: "Dana liked dessert." She hosts a birthday party and opens her presents. When she gets ready for bed, she hears a knock on the door. Anthony has brought her a gift: a white elephant. Adults will immediately get the joke, but children soon will, too, as the burden of the pachyderm plays out. The other children pine for her pet. But, as Dana tells them, "Not everyone deserves an elephant." Youngsters will chuckle over Schneider's watercolor images of the animal depleting Dana's food, usurping her bed and flattening her bike in an attempt to ride it. Finally, Dana finds someone as deserving as she, to whom she can bequeath the elephant.

This humorous tale of comeuppance with its short chapters, repetition of phrases and brief chapters will hook newly independent readers and hold their rapt attention. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

Terra Elan McVoy (Pure; Being Friends with Boys) hits an emotional and heartbreaking punch with this tale of obsessive love.

Nikki can't imagine life without her boyfriend, Dee, though he hasn't earned a favorable report from her friends. From page one, it's clear she is completely engulfed in her feelings for him (and loves that he has a tattoo of her initials on his chest), and they lead Nikki down a path she'd never imagined for herself. After Dee involves Nikki in a murder, her first instinct is to protect him, especially when he assures her, "You don't have nothing to worry about. Nobody knows what happened. I made sure." Even so, it's not long until Nikki is in jail, where she worries about and continues loving Dee.

Taking on a deeper and darker story line than her previous works, McVoy spins a complicated web of young love and desperation. Readers may think it's easy to judge Nikki's thoughts, actions and feelings as she works through her obsession with Dee, but this reaction only serves as testament to how realistic and tightly written Criminal is. McVoy uses the full length of the novel to develop Nikki's revelations. The author strips down the dialogue and scene descriptions to the bare essentials, allowing readers to explore what infatuation can mean (and do) in the wrong situation. --Shanyn Day, blogger at Chick Loves Lit