J.R. Ward (Dark Lover, Blood Kiss) continues the lavish Kentucky saga she began in The Bourbon Kings with The Angels' Share. The multimillionaire family behind the Bradford Bourbon Company has always lived in luxury at Easterly, their enormous estate. But suddenly the police are questioning the apparent suicide of William, the family patriarch and CEO of the company. His wife, Virginia Bradford Baldwine, is barely lucid after years of prescription drug abuse, and his eldest son is physically broken after being kidnapped and held for ransom, leaving his younger brother to pick up the pieces.

As Lane struggles to save the company and deal with the police, he discovers that his father had embezzled more than a hundred million dollars, and that the family is at risk of losing both the company and Easterly. With the help of his new fiancée, Lizzie, Lane will do everything in his power to save the Bradford legacy, even if it means creating new enemies.

The sprawling cast of characters--including two more siblings and many love interests and friends--keep the plot of The Angels' Share moving quickly. With a mix of sexy scenes, slimy bad guys, humorous one-liners and family drama, it is sure to appeal to both a wide audience and J.R. Ward's large fan base alike. Although it is the second novel in the Bourbon Kings saga, The Angels' Share can easily be read as a standalone. --Jessica Howard, blogger at Quirky Bookworm

In a philosophical debut, Tiffany McDaniel holds up a fable for the modern day about the nature of sin and the costs of intolerance.

In 1984, the first Apple computers hit the market and the AIDS crisis looms large over the United States when a scruffy black 13-year-old arrives at the Breathed, Ohio, home of Autopsy Bliss, a prosecuting attorney. The boy in tattered overalls claims to be Satan and asks for ice cream, and a heat wave of outlandish proportions follows. Fielding Bliss doesn't believe a boy his own age like Sal--the Satan/Lucifer conflation he uses as a given name--could really be the devil, yet Sal's world-weary advice does belie his youth. Although the Bliss family--Fielding, his homophobic teen brother Grand, his agoraphobic mother and his gentle father--takes Sal into their home and hearts, they cannot protect him from the trouble that follows wherever he innocently goes, from broken windows to a lost pregnancy. When the heat-maddened townspeople become suspicious of the strange boy, the Blisses attempt to survive the most turbulent summer of their lives.

McDaniel paints rural Breathed as a timeless, Rockwellian small town before demonstrating how quickly the prejudices bubbling below its surface lead its citizens to tear their home to pieces. While often charming, full of summertime nostalgia and folksy imagery, The Summer That Melted Everything swells with the darkness that lurks in the human heart. A promising newcomer, McDaniel will leave readers pondering the nature of good and evil. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads

The worst thing that could happen to Multiple Choice, a novel by Chilean author Alejandro Zambra (My Documents), is that:

(a) it's called "original," and the faint praise damns a great book to obscurity.
(b) it's called "genius," and the effusive praise damns a good book to obscurity.
(c) it becomes a bestseller, mostly due to the fact that it is thin and looks easy; readers take it home to find its contents challenging and melancholy; and they end up returning it, purchasing a thriller instead.
(d) readers love it, but no one can agree whether it is a story of a father wrestling with his father's legacy in the Pinochet regime, a story of lost love, a critique of bureaucratic homogenization, or a memoir.
(e) readers, unwilling to be challenged, call its form a schtick and tire of it by page four, never discovering what the author might say about how stories are created, where authority lies, the rhetoric of officialdom or what happens to the twins.
(f)  it is administered as an actual college entrance exam.
(g) all of the above
(h) c and f

Readers expecting easy answers beware: Multiple Choice offers none. It is a story of a man struggling with intractable problems in love, in family, in politics and in failing to learn from mistakes. As in life, there are only the choices presented, and they don't always make sense; some are patently absurd. That's the joy and zeal of it. This is a book for fans of Kafka and those who delight in mental yoga. --Zak Nelson, writer and editorial consultant

The brotherly bonds of love do not abide by society's biases in Kit de Waal's inspiring debut novel, My Name Is Leon. Nine-year-old Leon delights in the birth of his little brother, Jake. But his emotionally unstable mother, Carol, finds caring for another child daunting, especially after Jake's father makes it painfully clear to her that he has no intention of being a part of their family. As his mother falls apart, Leon assumes the role of primary caregiver for his beloved infant sibling.

The lack of food in their apartment forces him to turn to their neighbor for help. Instead of lending him money, she calls children's services and the two boys are whisked away, placed in the care of Maureen, a long-time foster mother. Life is good with Maureen, until a family adopts the fair-haired Jake without his dark-skinned big brother.

Leon's journey through this new existence is rife with emotional struggles no child should have to endure. His young brain--and heart--grapples with understanding a world that thinks it's perfectly acceptable to rob him of Jake. De Waal, with the help of a racially diverse group of gardeners Leon secretly befriends, cultivates the boy's story, allowing it to bloom brilliantly under these harsh conditions.

My Name Is Leon grows an entire garden of vibrant characters who, through shared experiences with societal racism, become the nurturing family Leon needs. Their arrangements may not be traditional, but the exquisite results prove that families can sprout in the most unlikely places. --Jen Forbus of Jen's Book Thoughts

A modern-day Latvian village comes to life, complete with the characters, closeness and ancient grudges endemic to small towns the world over, in this second novel from Gina Ochsner (The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight).

Born with a pair of fur-trimmed ears that grew to the size of soup bowls, Maris has always had the ability to hear the grass growing, the gossip moving through telephone wires and the murmurs of the dead in their plots, dug by his family, the local gravediggers. Now his mother, Inara, lies on her deathbed, telling him the stories of his family and neighbors, the secrets even his large ears have not heard. The stories underscore the tension between ethnic Latvians like their family and the Russians who moved to Latvia during Soviet times, or between the handful of Jewish households and the Protestant majority--although the feud Inara's father has with a Russian Jewish neighbor originates less in cultural disparity than competition for prime fishing spots. As new wounds open and old ones heal, the words of Maris's great-grandmother Velta weave in and out of the narrative, taken from old letters she wrote to his great-grandfather during his imprisonment in the Soviet gulag.

For readers who love historical fiction and magical realism, The Hidden Letters of Velta B. is a gift on par with Joanne Harris's Chocolat. Quirky, ethereal, hilarious and sorrowful, Ochsner's intimate portrait of a group of people who must survive with each other's help, whether they like it or not, perfectly highlights the connections between the everyday and the transcendental elements of being human. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads

In You Will Know Me, Katie and Eric Knox are just settling into parenthood when their rambunctious three-year-old, Devon, loses two toes to a lawn mower Eric carelessly leaves running. Determined to help Devon overcome this childhood trauma, they enroll her in a local gymnastics group. It quickly becomes clear that their ordinary family has an extraordinary athlete on its hands. They bring her to the famous Coach T and his BelStars gym. Teddy Belfour is a "silver-maned lion, the gymnast whisperer, the salto Svengali," and Devon joins his "fearsome BelStars girls whippeting around with faces grim as Soviets." Nothing in the Knox family will ever be the same.

Megan Abbott (The Fever) captures the devotion, sacrifice and obsession that comes to a family with a prodigy athlete. Devon gets better and better--and less social. Other girls envy and disparage her. While their bodies age into teen curves and their gossip turns to boys, Devon remains a focused gymnastics machine--until a handsome young construction worker comes to build an Olympic-rated foam pit under the gym's vault.

Ryan Beck has a rumored delinquent past, but the girls--and their moms--are smitten. When he is mysteriously killed by a hit-and-run driver, the curtains part and Abbott reveals the secrets, jealousies and outright malevolence under the surface of the Knox family and the BelStars boosters.

Abbott is working at the top of her craft, and You Will Know Me is a crime novel where the crime is only a catalyst for an accomplished exploration of ordinary people's unraveling when they become obsessed with the extraordinary among them. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Lo Blacklock, a travel journalist, gets a plum assignment covering the maiden voyage of a luxury cruise ship with only 10 cabins. She's put in cabin number nine and has a brief encounter on her first day with the guest in the one next door.

Late that night, Lo hears a scream and a huge splash, as if a body went overboard. She runs outside but sees nothing on the adjacent balcony--except a "smear of something dark and oily. A smear that looked a lot like blood." When the head of security arrives and goes next door with her, they find nothing out of the ordinary. In fact, they find nothing at all; the cabin is empty. The security officer informs Lo that the intended guest had backed out of the cruise at the last minute.

Lo takes it upon herself to investigate, but no one on the ship recognizes her description of the mystery woman, nor do they fully believe her account. Then she starts receiving threatening messages telling her to stop looking for the woman. Is she now in danger of being disappeared?

Following In a Dark, Dark Wood, Ruth Ware's The Woman in Cabin 10 is another psychological thriller with shades of Agatha Christie, featuring a confined location where one of the people gathered must be the murderer, however impossible that may seem. Suspension of disbelief is required for some plot revelations, and Lo is a maddening character who makes unwise choices, but Ware's propulsive prose keeps readers on the hook and refuses to let anyone off until all has been revealed. --Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, blogger at Pop Culture Nerd

On May 7, 1965, shots ring out in a Philadelphia bar, killing officer Stan Walczak and his partner, George Wildey (whose grandson Ben was introduced in Canary). Stan leaves behind a 12-year-old son named Jimmy.

In May 1995, Jimmy, now going by Jim, is a homicide detective. His father's alleged killer is released from prison, where the man was sent for another crime. In Jim's mind, the convict has never paid for what he did to Stan. Perhaps Jim will mete out his own form of justice.

Now in May 2015, the Walczak clan gathers for a ceremony on the 50th anniversary of the cop killings to honor the fallen officers with memorial plaques. Jim's daughter, Audrey, a forensics grad student, decides that for her school project she'll try to solve the murders of Grandpop Stan and his partner. She may not survive the attempt.

Duane Swierczynski's Revolver is the story of how tragedy tears the Walczak family apart and continues haunting it for half a century. Though the multigenerational saga encompasses many decades, reaching all the way back to 1933, Swierczynski's snappy dialogue, athletic pacing and cliffhanger chapter endings make this a tight read. It contains the author's characteristic sense of humor but is also affecting with precise prose--in a military cemetery, "you see a row of perfectly symmetrical white tablets, lined up in formation like they're still fighting a war even after death." To end the family's sad legacy, the surviving Walczaks realize they must focus not on what a revolver has done but on what redemption can do. --Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, blogger at Pop Culture Nerd

In this gleeful version of Little Red Riding Hood, set in Africa, "Little Red" is savanna-savvy, the grandmother is replaced by hip Auntie Rosie, and the traditional big bad wolf is a very hungry lion.

Auntie Rosie asks Little Red if she will bring her some "spot medicine" from the general store. Little Red and her goofy little goat happily oblige, though "It was a long way to Auntie Rosie's house./ Little Red walked under the giraffes,/ over the sleepy crocodiles,/ and past the chattering monkeys." When Little Red pauses to rest under a shade tree, the Very Hungry Lion appears on the scene and cooks up his "very naughty plan." Lion rushes off to dress up as Auntie Rosie, but he doesn't fool Little Red for a minute. Much to Lion's dismay, she goes off script: " 'Oh, Auntie!' cried Little Red. 'What tangled hair you have!' " She braids Lion's mane and decorates it with bows. She makes him brush his "gigantic, grimy teeth" and sport a pretty dress. When Lion finally yells "STOP!" Little Red tells the frustrated beast that all he had to do is ask, if he was hungry. He apologizes and they all share some doughnuts... but that doesn't mean he won't try to eat Little Red's father later.

English author-illustrator Alex T. Smith's (the Claude series) washes his over-the-top, kinetic spreads in warm, sunset hues. Preschoolers will giggle at the animals with coffee cups or sunglasses cavorting on the savannah, but the very hungry lion with his Groucho Marx eyebrows and ferocious appetite steals the show. --Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness