Emma Donoghue's Frog Music is a compelling, atmospheric literary crime novel. Animated by flawed but very human characters, it combines the suspense of her bestselling Room with elements of the historical fiction that launched her career.

Blanche is a high-priced dancer and whore in Gilded Age San Francisco. She is sitting near an open window with her new and only friend, the enigmatic cross-dresser Jenny Bonnet. Blanche bends over to untie her shoes just as a shotgun is fired, killing Jenny. Blanche is convinced the bullet was meant for her and means to find the killer--she suspects her former lover Arthur or his devoted minion, Ernest. They despise her for leaving Arthur without income, and they hate Jenny for shaming Blanche into retrieving her infant son from the baby farm where Arthur sent him after his birth. The novel cuts back and forth in time as Blanche works through the possibilities leading to the murder, tries to find her stolen son and evades her antagonists.

The result is a novel with plenty of action, rich in atmosphere and dense in historical detail. But it is, above all, a novel that belongs to its characters. One of the novel's many strengths is Blanche's gradual willingness to show her vulnerabilities alongside her growing self-respect and maternal commitment.

The essential facts of Frog Music are based on a real-life unsolved murder. Donoghue's meticulous research enhances her story with colorful slang, newspaper clippings and snippets of popular songs. But Donoghue's achievement is finally one of the imagination and rests on her ability to find the emotional heart of her characters. --Jeanette Zwart, freelance writer and reviewer

The title of Ted Thompson's debut novel, The Land of Steady Habits, is a retro nickname for Connecticut and also a description of Anders Hill's pre-retirement and pre-separation life: decades of train commuting to a Wall Street job that financed the family's "charming" Georgian Colonial, his sons' "impressive degrees" and his wife's "extravagant" empty-nester kitchen renovation. Anders, a southern runaway who blue-collared his way through Bowdoin and once dreamed of manning a fire tower, has run out of enthusiasm for the WASP dream.

At first, Anders revels in his escape from the steady life, but the exhilaration of freedom is soon dampened by aimlessness, and his situation becomes unpleasantly unsteady after he learns of a major flaw in his financial projections. His decision to resolve the dilemma by admitting his mistake to his wife comes undone when she gushes "that Anders may have been right all along, that the divorce was what was best for both of them." Still in denial that what he discarded is irretrievable, Anders attends a holiday party hosted by her friends and, shocked by something he sees there, makes an error of judgment that will reverberate through all of their lives.

The prose in The Land of Steady Habits is confident, impeccably tailored and underwritten with wise humor. Thompson uses inner monologue and flashback to contextualize character and he provides ample swaths of dialogue with young people to balance the old-dude rants. Although one late tragicomic scene almost tips into insensitivity, its tone, and the novel, are redeemed by Anders Hill's breathtaking honesty. --Holloway McCandless, blogger at Litagogo: A Guide to Free Literary Podcasts

Ward Just knows his way around a novel--18 of them now, including finalists for both a Pulitzer (An Unfinished Season) and a National Book Award (Echo House). American Romantic follows Harry Sanders, who works his way through government pay grades: a midlevel embassy diplomat in prewar Saigon; then ambassador assignments in a half dozen embassies around the world; and, finally, a comfortable retirement in the south of France. He has an intense love affair with Sieglinde, a German medical aide in Saigon; permanently scars his feet in a covert Vietnam intelligence-gathering mission; marries May, daughter of a hardscrabble Vermont family; and visits his politically well-connected centenarian father as often as he can.

In short, Harry is a career government servant, albeit one whose path touches the world's high and mighty as well as its weak and helpless. The disillusioned Sieglinde describes young Harry in his Vietnam role as an "American romantic... you love the war," while he more soberly sees himself as "a witness to events I didn't understand and would never understand." To May, who accompanied him in his 40-year career, "Harry was cheerful, an optimist, good-humored and determined to make the best of things."

The title of Just's extraordinary 1979 short story collection Honor, Power, Riches, Fame, and the Love of Women might as easily apply to his new novel. His work explores the fragile connections between the personal and the professional, the role of fate in affairs of State and the burden of living a meaningful life with some measure of personal contentment. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

In the 16th century, a young Italian man, apprentice to the apothecary at a monastery, became Catherine de Medici's personal perfumer. René le Florentin accompanied Catherine when she left her native country to marry a French prince, and spent the next four decades concocting fragrant potions to seduce and delight--and occasionally poisonous ones to rid the queen of her enemies. But René nursed a secret obsession: the quest for a formula to reanimate a person's dying breath, enabling them to live again in another's body.

In present-day France, Jac L'Etoile, perfumer and mythologist, is mourning the death of her brother, Robbie. As she struggles with her grief, Jac takes on one of Robbie's last assignments from a wealthy, eccentric client: She must attempt to mix René le Florentin's unusual formula, the creation of which consumed the Italian artisan. Isolated in a grand château, Jac reaches out to Griffin North, her former lover, to help her unravel the mystery of René's potion and its connection to the château.

M.J. Rose (Seduction, The Book of Lost Fragrances) continues her Reincarnationist series with a twisting plot filled with lush descriptions of French court life and the scents mixed by Jac and René. Jac's frequent hallucinations, in which she glimpses scenes from René's life, sometimes teeter on the edge of believability, but add an interesting paranormal element. The implications of reanimating a dying breath are never fully considered, but the quest makes for a sensual, entertaining tale that mixes perfume, history, passion and revenge. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Books are at the fore in By Its Cover, the 23rd installment of Donna Leon's Commissario Guido Brunetti series. Leon has attracted readers from all over the world with her Venetian setting, irresistible characters and in-depth exploration of politics, morality, graft and corruption. Art and literature have played an important part in many of those cases, but this time, all the focus is on books.

Brunetti is called when Dottoressa Fabbiani, chief librarian at Biblioteca Merula, discovers someone has stolen pages out of several rare books. The immediate suspect is an American professor who requested the volumes for his research. Unfortunately, he fled the library earlier in the day--and, after checking his documents and credentials, Brunetti discovers he is an impostor.

Unlike previous novels, no time is spent at leisurely lunches with Guido and his family, discussing the relative merits of artichokes or just how al dente the pasta is. This is serious business; suspects are thick on the ground, motives proliferate and then an ex-priest who spends his days at the library is brutally murdered. As the investigation continues, Brunetti asks himself who is really innocent and who guilty, examining all his preconceived assumptions of virtue and morality. Of course, he prevails in the end, drawing all the loose ends together, including the library's patron, a friend of his wife's wealthy family. --Valerie Ryan, Cannon Beach Book Company, Ore.

As a young boy following his Norwegian grandmother ("Mormor") and great-aunt Gunnvor around the kitchen, Paul Lowe never dreamed he would one day share their recipes with the world. But when he started a food and craft blog, Sweet Paul, he combined the Scandinavian cuisine of his childhood with the American food he had since grown to love. Lowe's blog has grown into a successful magazine, and Sweet Paul Eat & Make presents a collection of nourishing recipes and simple, rustic craft projects.

Lowe loves eggs in any form; the Morning and Brunch sections feature egg-based dishes along with several versions of pancakes and French toast. The Noon section offers fish tacos, kale Caesar salad and his signature feta and lemon dip. The Night section suggests richer fare such as Norwegian meatballs, boeuf bourguignon, several potato recipes and a host of delicious desserts, from an airy pavlova to a rich tiramisu.

Many of the craft projects involve repurposed kitchen items, such as a tart tin transformed into a mirror or a punch bowl turned pendant lamp. Lowe believes in simple, whimsical projects with only a few steps and materials, and he doesn't mind a bit of imperfection. Following his Mormor's motto, "perfection is boring," Lowe gives readers the tools and techniques to experiment and make the projects their own.

Sweet Paul Eat & Make offers a refreshing dose of realism balanced with charm for crafters and cooks overwhelmed by the world of Martha Stewart. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

In her 2012 memoir, Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots, Deborah Feldman chronicled her upbringing in the insular, fundamentalist Satmar sect of Orthodox Judaism and her flight from its practices with her young son. When she left her Brooklyn, N.Y., community behind at age 23, Feldman had a new life ahead of her--and very little idea how it would look or who she would be within it. In Exodus, she explores where the first few years of that journey have taken her, and the perspective she has acquired since it began.

While she no longer considers herself Orthodox--and some responses to her first book suggest that this disassociation is reciprocated--Feldman continues to identify as Jewish. However, in order to move forward, she decides she must also move backward. Much of Exodus tracks her travels through Europe as she follows the path of her grandmother, a survivor of the concentration camps, and grapples with the ways in which she herself could be called a survivor.

Exodus is a companion piece to Unorthodox, and while it's not necessary to read both memoirs in chronological order, those who have read one will likely want to read the other. Exodus has the feel of a coming-of-age story, tracing the protagonist's steps toward self-discovery. It meanders at times and feels somewhat unresolved in the end, leaving the reader with a sense that Feldman is still at the beginning of her self-reformation, still searching and sorting out. She's not yet 30, so that seems right. --Florinda Pendley Vasquez, blogger at The 3 R's Blog: Reading, 'Riting, and Randomness

Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting is the debut poetry collection by Kevin Powers, author of the National Book Award finalist The Yellow Birds. Most of the poems directly address the experience and aftermath of war. All reflect the effort to make sense of it. Some seem to question the value of trying to say anything at all: "I tell her I love her like not killing/ or ten minutes of sleep," Powers writes, in the title poem about the jarring contradiction of composing a love letter in the midst of battle. "I tell her how Pvt Bartle says, offhand,/ that war is just/ making little pieces of metal/ pass through each other."

Other poems are more abstract in their speculation about the atrocity of war. "Photographing the Suddenly Dead" begins with a long reflection on the idea of impermanence and the meaning of objects, until it becomes clear that its real subject is the speaker's guilt, triggered by the memory of a photograph of a young man killed in battle. Powers often uses beautiful lyrical language and aphoristic observations to get at deeper truths, as though his real subject is too dark, too immense, to approach head-on.

Much contemporary poetry celebrates a compressed intensity of line. These poems are looser, more accessible and more narrative in structure, using visceral images and vignettes to portray the worst that humanity can experience in a collection that will leave the reader changed. --Jeanette Zwart, freelance writer and reviewer

What if the only way to live in the future is to return to the past? Ann Brashares's (The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants) latest novel, The Here and Now, explores that tantalizing possibility.

In 17-year-old narrator Prenna James's time, near the end of the 21st century, climate change has turned the world into an overheated, damp wasteland. Food is scarce and plague runs rampant. Prenna is chosen to be one of the Travelers, a select group immune to the plague who will travel back to 2010 and work from there to avert disaster. Though she's been warned to avoid relationships with so-called "time natives," Prenna grows dangerously close to Ethan. The 12 rules governing Prenna and her people are meant to preserve time and its "natural sequence," but Prenna begins to wonder if perhaps the only way to save the future is to break the rules designed to protect it. Ethan and Prenna, after a surprising encounter with a homeless man they call Ben Kenobi, set out to defy time and change the future--no matter the consequences. Though Prenna and Ethan's romance is a central plot point, it never overwhelms Prenna's overriding mission to save the future.

Brashares imagines a horrifying trajectory: children too terrified to go outside, governments collapsing for lack of resources, mosquitoes carrying pandemic plagues. Skillfully weaving together time travel, planetary devastation, climate change, plague and young love, the author creates an engaging, adventurous tale. --Kyla Paterno, trade book buyer and blogger, Garfield Book Company at PLU