David Guterson (Ed King; Snow Falling on Cedars) returns to the courtroom with The Final Case. His opening note outlines the real-life 2011 trial of parents in Skagit County, Wash., charged with the death of their adopted daughter from Ethiopia. The author "attended the trial, and conducted research and interviews in both the U.S. and Ethiopia, but--to be clear--this book is a work of fiction."

Guterson spotlights the tragedy, but in relying on an unnamed, first-person narrator who lacks direct connection to the victim, he creates a protective distance in converting fact into fiction. The narrator is a writer who has recently "quit": "I'm not interested anymore." For now, he serves as willing chauffeur for his criminal attorney father, Royal. At 84, Royal still goes to his office, never mind an empty caseload. After an unexpected call, the son ferries Royal to the Skagit County jail to meet Betsy Harvey, arrested with her husband, Delvin, for homicide. Betsy is 41, mother of seven children, conservative and fundamentalist Christian. Betsy and Delvin adopted Abeba Addisu from Ethiopia and molded her into Abigail Harvey; they're charged with having "abused the girl until she'd died in their yard." Abhorrence aside, Royal explains to his son, "They might have done the most evil things you can imagine... but if what they did doesn't conform to what they're charged with, then they're innocent." And so the journey begins to comprehend Abeba/Abigail's fate that final night.

With taut control, Guterson creates a superb courtroom drama filled with characters endowed with intricate histories that eschew snap judgments. He adroitly questions and condemns white savior entitlement, complicit abuse, repeated failures of the law and, undoubtedly, achieves justice. --Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon

In Her Hidden Genius, Marie Benedict once again illuminates a woman overlooked by history, as she did with the neglected brilliance of Hedy Lamarr in The Only Woman in the Room and Mileva Maric in The Other Einstein. Benedict's sixth novel presents an accessible story of physical chemist Rosalind Franklin's breakthrough DNA discoveries, as well as her bold presence in male-dominated mid-20th-century science.

Despite her family's pleas, Franklin leaves postwar London in 1947 for Paris--"a place where the Nazis... once governed," her father laments--to work as a researcher with X-ray crystallography. Her lifelong mantra guides her: "Focus on the science." Though her research is successful and Paris is "the only place" she ever "fit in," an awkward romance with a colleague prompts her return to London. She thrives in the King's College lab but endures misogyny and disrespect, addressed as "Miss Franklin" or the dismissive "Rosy" rather than "Doctor." More disturbing are the obvious appropriations of her work, groundbreaking photographic evidence of her helix theory, by fellow scientists seeking to claim the discovery of the structure of DNA. In fact, three of her peers won the 1962 Nobel Prize for DNA research; she was not acknowledged.

"I am a scientist, first and always," Franklin declares, but she was also a good friend, a loyal daughter and an enthusiastic hiker. Benedict (The Mystery of Mrs. Christie) presents a complex woman, while foreshadowing her fatal illness--suggesting her strong work ethic led to dangerous X-ray exposure. Her Hidden Genius is an overdue testimony to a fascinating scientist. --Cheryl McKeon, Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza, Albany, N.Y.

The Hummingbird by Sandro Veronesi (Quiet Chaos; The Force of the Past), translated from the Italian by Elena Pala, is a shape-shifting, multigenerational novel of family, love, loss, joy, change and pain.

When readers meet Marco Carrera, the year is 1999 and he is a 40-year-old ophthalmologist in Rome, about to meet destiny in the form of a psychoanalyst breaking his confidentiality oath. From here, chapters jump back and forth in time from 1960 to 2030. Readers meet the great love of Marco's life, visit his childhood, witness his marriage and divorce. When he is just a boy, Marco stops growing, remaining small and childlike well into his teenage years: his mother nicknames him "the hummingbird" for his stature, a moniker that will echo into his adulthood. He becomes a father and eventually a grandfather, so that four generations of his family flash kaleidoscopically across these pages; Marco is ever at the novel's center, however, even as he is accused of holding still through life's storms. "You can keep still as time flows around you, you can stop it flowing, sometimes you can turn back time, even--just like a hummingbird, you can fly backwards and retrieve lost time." The novel mimics this movement with its nearly stop-action chronology.

The Hummingbird is clearly an intellectual exercise, but can also be read more simply as a story about a single, deceptively ordinary life. Packed with pathos, humor and tragedy, it ends with both a quiet goodbye and a crescendo, the only fitting end to such an unobtrusive but resounding life. --Julia Kastner, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

Emotionally damaged characters who deal with their problems through their compelling need to help others punctuate the impressive Desolation Canyon, the second novel by P.J. Tracy featuring Los Angeles Police detective Margaret Nolan and army veteran Sam Easton.

Margaret struggles to manage her guilt following a shooting in the line of duty, as well as her grief over the death of her brother, Max, a soldier killed in Afghanistan. Margaret's heartbreak is exacerbated by her mother's mourning, so deeply felt that she has distanced herself from her daughter and the rest of her family. Sam, whose scars include irreparable disfigurement to half his face, works through his PTSD by jogging in Desolation Canyon near Death Valley. Margaret and Sam intersect again when he tries to help Marielle, a young woman who has escaped the Children of the Desert compound with her daughter. Though the remote Children of the Desert bills itself as a spiritual retreat, it is a criminal enterprise run by the deceptively charming Father Paul. He is desperate to retrieve his wife, Marielle, and their daughter, whom he considers "stolen property."

As Margaret and Sam deal with their own troubles, the suspense builds in a novel that becomes both a psychological thriller and a gripping police procedural. Margaret and her fellow detectives investigate a body found at the Hotel Bel-Air, the murder of a divorced couple, the decades-old kidnapping of a child and the machinations of a former KGB boss.

Desolation Canyon's riveting, complex plot illustrates the wide-ranging talents of Tracy (Deep into the Dark), who--with her late mother, P.J. Lambrecht--wrote 10 lighter, award-winning novels in the Monkeewrench series. --Oline H. Cogdill, freelance reviewer 

Notes on an Execution by thriller writer Danya Kukafka (Girl in Snow) finds Ansel Packer on death row in a Texas prison, scheduled to die in 12 hours. While Ansel plots his escape with the help of a prison guard he believes he's charmed, the novel unfolds the story of Ansel's life through the eyes of the women who've loved, hated and hunted him. There's Lavender, his loving but imperfect mother; Hazel, his wife's twin sister, who can't look away even as she yearns to build her own life; and Saffy, his childhood foster sibling-turned-detective who knows something isn't right. As Ansel's final hour draws closer, these three women work to piece together the fragments of their own stories and the stories of the girls he killed.

Clever in its construction and heartrending in its insights, Notes on an Execution is a raw yet sensitive look at the kind of loss, violence and monstrosity that it is all too easy to oversimplify. While Ansel's present-day, second-person narration is what stitches these stories together, it is ultimately the entangled chorus of women who define the novel. The slow-burn tension of these multiple perspectives captures the resilience required in the face of inevitability, the determination to hope despite the lingering presence of rage and volatile hatred. Saffy's point of view, in particular, while being the most traditionally heroic, helps readers to see that there are no easy heroes or villains, even when one is wanted most. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor

Since Hara Wilson and Choi Yujun didn't quite get their happily-ever-after in Heart & Seoul, author Jen Frederick--a transracial Korean adoptee--returns with its addictive sequel, Seoulmates. In the first book, Korea-born, Iowa-raised adoptee Hara's loss of her estranged father prompted a two-week trip to Seoul searching for biological connection. As Seoulmates opens, Hara is installed in her birthmother Choi Wansu's lavish home, employed by Wansu's international conglomerate IF Group and still madly in love with Wansu's stepson, Yujun.

Hara's new life screams tabloid-ready: haters insist Wansu discarded her own fatherless baby to mother Yujun, the child of a rich widower she married for money and power, while Wansu's role as IF's CEO makes it easy for them to dismiss Hara as a mere nakhasan (nepotistic hire). And then there's that wee matter of stepsibling entanglement, which is not only taboo, but such a marriage is illegal in Korea. Beyond family dysfunction, Hara is also dealing with limited linguistic facility, stumbling through cultural hurdles, frustrated in an unsatisfying job and disregarded by snide co-workers. But then again, having two mothers isn't so bad, devoted Yujun remains stalwart, new friends prove true. Hara just needs to recognize which links will lead to the longed-for connections that brought her back to her birth country.

While Seoulmates easily stands alone, continuing audiences will certainly be rewarded with deeper, multi-layered appreciation. Some readers might catch various discrepancies or notice occasional repetitions that could have been edited, but Frederick's accessible writing and savvy narrative twists encourage committed engagement. She nimbly targets anachronistic traditions, social clashes, homophobia--issues challenging cultures anywhere--to enhance a familiar genre. --Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon

It took her until she reached her 60s, but after decades spent as a square peg in a world of round holes, novelist Eileen Pollack (Breaking and Entering) seems to have found something resembling peace. Together, the 16 punchy and agile personal essays in Maybe It's Me: On Being the Wrong Kind of Woman loosely form an autobiography in which its subject takes a feminist look at the forces that forged her identity, or at least tried to.

Pollack was born in 1956, raised in a middle-class Orthodox Jewish household in the Catskills, and essentially batted aside every rule that came her way. "Hallucinations," a meditation on Pollack's retired dentist father's last days, includes a reflection on her decision to choose the writer's life over a stable career in the sciences. In "Pigeons," what begins as a look back at her behavior problems in elementary school becomes a consideration of whether she inadvertently contributed to a classmate's downfall. In fact, many of the essays in Maybe It's Me take this rewardingly unexpected three-point-turn approach to their subjects. "All of Us, We All Are Arameans," initially a travelogue-like piece about Pollack's solo trip to Israel when she was in her 50s, winds up casting her romantic life in stingingly sharp relief: "If I couldn't find a way to share my life with my Polish-Catholic boyfriend, how could I criticize the Israelis and Palestinians for not finding a way to surmount their differences and share their lives?" --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer

Film critic Dana Stevens's Camera Man takes on three substantial tasks and succeeds masterfully. She creates a compelling biography portraying Buster Keaton's volatile life, astutely assesses his films and puts both in the context of world events and innovations that were happening at the time. Keaton was successful in three different mediums at their creative peaks: first his 17 years as a juvenile slapstick prodigy in vaudeville, then silent films and finally TV during its experimental early years. But Keaton's successful career masked a troubled private life. "He was an atrociously terrible businessman, an indifferent celebrity, and, until late in his life, a dilatory husband and father at best," writes Stevens.

Keaton was an innovative filmmaker who exercised complete artistic control over his films. In his heyday, the 1920s, he produced, directed and starred in comedic masterpieces like The General, The Navigator and Sherlock Jr. Though he was somewhat overshadowed by Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, today critics regard him as one of the greatest comic filmmakers of all time. His directorial career was cut short by the advent of sound, by losing his independence after moving to MGM studios and by his alcoholism. He became sober within a few years but his return to MGM was as a script doctor and, later, supporting player.

Camera Man feels fresh in its research because Stevens is exceptionally adept at sifting through decades of myths to find the truth. Even Keaton's own 1960 as-told-to memoir is corrected. Camera Man crafts a compelling and surprisingly upbeat story of a beloved, troubled but resilient comedian. --Kevin Howell, independent reviewer and marketing consultant

Adrea Theodore unpacks the experience of being the only brown or Black student in a classroom in her sensitive picture book debut, A History of Me, dynamically illustrated by Erin K. Robinson (Brave. Black. First).

The first-person narrator--a combination of Theodore herself and her daughter--is "the only brown person in class." When discussing slavery, she can feel every set of eyes on her: "I wanted to slide out of my seat and onto the floor." The girl's discomfort leads to a conversation with her mother, who tells the girl about similar experiences she and other family members encountered growing up: the girl's great-grandmother attended school only through third grade; her mother wasn't allowed to attend nursing school. The girl becomes a woman with a daughter of her own who is the only brown person in her class. The woman uses this as an opportunity to provide perspective about their racial heritage: "just because no one ever mentions courage, strength, intelligence, or creativity, that doesn't mean it isn't there." Now the new student has the work and wisdom of her ancestors to bolster her--she knows she is "free to be anything."

Theodore, as a woman of color, a parent and a pediatrician, is well attuned to the detrimental impact that being educated in predominately white environments can have on young children. The author acknowledges the prejudice and exclusion that generations of their family have experienced, while also imparting an inspirational message through culturally affirming language. Robinson's evocative digital art features soft-focused portraits in the forefront with contemporary backgrounds, and creatively rendered, abstract historical scenes. Personal notes from the author and illustrator add emotional depth. --Rachel Werner, author and teaching artist at Hugo House, Lighthouse Writers Workshop and The Loft Literary Center