A Permanent Member of the Family is the first story collection from Russell Banks since 2000's The Angel on the Roof. Each of these tales portrays people longing to connect with something, someone, anything--or, as in "Former Marine," to disconnect.

The eponymous story refers to a dog named Sarge, who is not part of the shared custody arrangement worked out between a couple in a divorce. The pair's three girls travel amicably the few blocks between houses; Sarge, however, is supposed to stay with Mom, but travels to Dad's house at will. One day, Dad accidentally runs over Sarge, changing the family's relationships irrevocably.

In "Snowbirds," Isabel prevails upon her husband to spend the winter in Miami Beach. Barely a month later, George drops dead on the tennis court. Isabel is a remarkably merry widow; her first act is to buy a convertible. Her best friend, Jane, flies to be at her side and, watching Isabel's new freedom, begins to question her attachment to her husband.

"Big Dog" starts with the great news that Erik, a writer, has won a MacArthur "genius" grant. The grantors ask him not to mention it to anyone until they have released the news to the press. When he and Ellen join friends for dinner, he tells them. Some of the fallout is predictable; Ellen's reaction is not.

Every story is thematically different; what unites them is Bank's deep insight into people and situations. Just as he masterfully depicts contemporary American life in his novels, especially Continental Drift, Banks's short fiction is relentlessly realistic, never cynical and always attentive to the human condition. --Valerie Ryan, Cannon Beach Book Company, Ore.

Sam Thompson's Communion Town, longlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize, collects 10 stories loosely linked by their glimpses of urban life and the darkness of their themes. Thompson excels at creating a convincing atmosphere that's different from story to story. A sense of dread looms over several, including the eponymous opener, where the horrifying details of a terrorist attack carried out in an underground station by a group called the Cynics are mostly hinted at. It's clearly not safe to walk the streets of Thompson's imagined city at night, when the serial killer known as the Flâneur of Glory Part is abroad in "The Good Slaughter."

Two standout stories feature distinctive detectives. In "Gallathea," Hal Moody, a hard-boiled P.I., is hired by a woman to search for herself. He tracks her throughout the city, his pursuit impeded at nearly every turn by a pair of thugs known as the Cherub boys. "The Significant City of Lazarus Glass" centers on the Sherlock Holmes-like Peregrine Fetch, whose pursuit of a former detective suspected of murdering other detectives in ingenious ways, isn't quite what it appears to be. But not all is mystery and chills in Thompson's city. The narrator of the elegiac "The Song of Serelight Fair" meets a beautiful woman while working as a rickshaw driver; their love affair inspires him to discover his talent as a songwriter.

There's a veiled quality to most of these stories, and at times their connective tissue feels more elusive than explicit. If you enjoy the work of decoding, there are pleasures awaiting you here. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer

Like a spider spinning a web, Donato Carrisi (The Whisperer) has intricately and stunningly crafted his sophomore thriller. The Lost Girls of Rome is a standalone novel featuring Sandra Vega, a widowed, 29-year-old forensic photographer convinced her husband was murdered after she discovers images he left in an antique camera.

In her search for answers, Vega follows these clues into the midst of a carefully kept, centuries-old Vatican secret: a group of priests, penitenzieri, who investigate the worst confessed sins of humans. One penitenziere has gone rogue, however, and is giving victims opportunities for revenge. Like her husband before her, Vega's discovery could lead straight to her death if the priest is not found and stopped.

"There is a place where the world of light meets the world of darkness," a penitenziere explains to Vega. "It is there that everything happens: in the land of shadows...." This is the atmosphere Carrisi has created for The Lost Girls of Rome, full of hidden terrors, optical illusions and flickers of hope. He expertly weaves various crimes together, making the plot complex but coherent and deceivingly strong. As he connects the various strands of his web, the final product is a striking work of art.

A few potential questions arise from weaker points in the plot, including an early inquiry into a prominent character, but the foundation of the story holds firm. Carrisi's web of words is enticingly beautiful and will seductively trap readers immediately upon entering. --Jen Forbus of Jen's Book Thoughts

New Orleans homicide detective Cliff St. James and his partner Honey Baybee are back for their third adventure in Ed Kovacs's Burnt Black. The two detectives arrive at a Tulane professor's house to find two naked corpses, presented on an altar in a ritualistic manner. Neither of them is the professor, who's not present--and whose teachings involve occult practices.

More corpses appear in the following days, with victims exhibiting terror at the moment of death but no obvious signs of murder. The case takes on a sinister edge as unexplainable incidents start happening to the detectives. St. James isn't sure if the evil he's fighting is even a sentient being, but he knows it leaves behind very real dead bodies.

The story moves at a brisk pace, and the case keeps readers guessing. Kovacs includes just enough of the supernatural to make it interesting without alienating people who aren't into such elements. There's an X-Files-y, Mulder-and-Scully vibe to St. James and Baybee; he thinks otherworldly forces are possible, while she refuses to believe. Kovacs presents both viewpoints well and leaves some things unexplained so readers can draw their own conclusions. The ending seems rushed, with St. James doing something that seems out of character, but otherwise it's a solid entry in the series. --Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, crime-fiction editor, The Edit Ninja

Mickey Haller is back at work in The Gods of Guilt, the fifth Lincoln Lawyer novel from Michael Connelly (also author of the Harry Bosch series). When Andre La Cosse requests Haller's representation on murder charges, Haller approaches it with weary cynicism about his client's probable guilt. But then he learns who referred La Cosse to him: the victim, a prostitute Haller represented for years, and whom he thought had left the game. It quickly becomes clear this case is bigger than it looks, involving the DEA and organized crime and stretching back nearly a decade, and that La Cosse may be that rare thing: innocent.

At stake for the Lincoln Lawyer: not only his client's freedom, but also his relationship with his daughter, who has stopped speaking to him because of the results of an earlier case. The murdered prostitute, an old friend, plays an important role as well; Haller thought he'd saved her, only to find that he may have contributed to her death.

The Gods of Guilt is a gripping courtroom drama with strengths that Connelly's fans will recognize: fully-wrought, likable characters, absorbing action, sympathetic relationships and the exploration of right and wrong and the gray areas in between. The title refers to Haller's understanding of jury members: that they are gods sitting in judgment of guilt and innocence. These gods of guilt also sit in judgment of Haller's own choices, and The Gods of Guilt reflects Connelly's sensitive handling of morality and consequences. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

Something More Than Night is a big, bold fantasy novel that mixes medieval cosmology, noir and trippy, complex ideas on memory, death and (the absence of) God into a highly readable whole.

The main character in Ian Tregellis's novel is an angel named Bayliss who's obsessed with noir, particularly Raymond Chander's fictional private eye Phillip Marlowe. There's been a cover-up in the murder of the angel Gabriel, and the Jericho Trumpet has gone missing... which could spell the end of the world. Molly is an innocent human drawn into the plot; some of the book's most poignant scenes concern Molly relinquishing her human identity and memories after her death to assume the role of angel.

Tregillis has an understated, graceful style, weaving grand cosmology, myth and a hardboiled gumshoe plot into a story full of narrative tension, gripping characters and imaginative set pieces that recalls Roger Zelazny or Neil Gaiman. The grandiosity and epic feel to his view of heaven and the angelic choirs is perfectly juxtaposed with the tough guy poses and noir obsessions of Bayliss--and even as the novel tosses out one idea after another, they never muck up the narrative's flow. Tregillis is a wonderful up-and-coming voice in the fantasy field who deserves wide readership. --Donald Powell, freelance writer

As we learn from the autobiographical impressions of his first 12 years in Report from the Interior, Paul Auster, best known for the epistemological noir New York Trilogy, grew up in South Orange, N.J., as a pretty normal kid, "obedient and well-behaved... [but] by no means a saintly child." This is not, however, your typical memoir. Auster tells his story in the second person and makes little effort to elaborate historical facts and instead writes from his "interior," focusing on moments that made an impact on his intellectual life: his parents' divorce; recognizing that he was Jewish and what that meant; the extraordinary impressions left by three rather diverse movies: The War of the Worlds, The Incredible Shrinking Man and I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. Nearly a third of the memoir is devoted to detailed discussion of how these B-movie stories fueled Auster's life-long sense that an individual's identity can be upended by forces beyond his control.

Auster digresses from his adolescent years to when his first wife, the novelist and translator Lydia Davis, sends hundreds of pages of their correspondence for him to vet before she donates her papers to a library. He annotates these letters--his real first preserved writing--with the older, second-person narrator's memories of the same times. To put a final trademark Auster question mark to it all, he brings Report from the Interior to a close with an album of archival photos and cinema stills. This new, somewhat odd Auster memoir adds another piece to the jigsaw puzzle of one of our greatest writers. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Mapping is a basic instinct, argues Jerry Brotton: humans and animals use mapping procedures to locate themselves in space. Map-making, on the other hand--using graphic techniques to share spatial information--is an act of human imagination. It is never objective; the map is not the territory. And maps of the world are more subjective than most, embodying the worldview of the cultures that produce them. In A History of the World in Twelve Maps, Brotton, a British history professor, looks at world maps and the people who created them--and what they tell us about the time and place in which they were made. In the process, he tells the reader a great deal about how we view the world today.

Beginning with Ptolemy's Geography and ending with the virtual maps of Google Earth, Brotton considers maps and geographical theory from Islamic Sicily and 15th-century China as well as the more familiar worlds of medieval England and Renaissance Europe. He looks at different approaches to shared questions: how a map is oriented (north is not the universal answer), what scale to use, where the viewer stands in relation to the map and how to project a round earth on a flat surface. Along the way, he considers politics, religion, cosmology, mathematics, imperialism, scientific knowledge and artistic license. Each map is distinct; all have features in common.

A History of the World in Twelve Maps is global history in the most literal sense: 12 variations on a universal theme. --Pamela Toler, blogging at History in the Margins

The artwork from newcomer Rosy Lamb is the main attraction in this story of a solo fish who finds love.

Saturated oil paintings capture Paul the goldfish's gloom as he goes around in circles in his fish bowl--big and small circles, to the left and to the right, from top to bottom and bottom to top. The dominant colors are gray, and Paul's movements listless. Once Bernadette enters the fish bowl, however, the colors lighten up. Paul and Bernadette make eye contact, and they investigate the sights outside their bowl together. The paintings become a graceful dance between the pair, as breakfast-bright colors and well-synchronized choreography convey Paul and Bernadette's enjoyment of each other.

Children will enjoy knowing more than Bernadette does, as she introduces Paul--in a series of paintings that show the views outside their fishbowl--to a boat (it's a banana), a "forest with trees of every color" (a floral bouquet) and funniest of all, an elephant feeding her babies (a teapot filling teacups). Some connections make more sense than others (a clock mistaken for a cactus may raise readers' eyebrows), but the bond between Paul and Bernadette is never in doubt. This may well be as popular as a Valentine gift between grownups as it will be a guessing game for young readers. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness