Set in the emptiness of east Montana, Kim Zupan's debut novel, The Ploughmen, is the story of 77-year-old serial killer John Gload and Copper County Deputy Sheriff Valentine Millimaki. After a former accomplice ratted him out in a plea bargain, Gload is in jail awaiting trial. Recently hired, Val is stuck on third shift to guard Gload and try to coax him to divulge where he buried his many victims.

In the quiet hours they spend together, a bond gradually forms between the two men--at first based on their similar farming childhoods, but later intensified by the shared isolation of their lives and their frequent proximity to death. Struggling in his unraveling marriage, Val suffers exhausting insomnia. With his tracking dog, Tom, he takes daytime assignments to find missing persons while his wife works as an intensive care nurse. He and Tom eventually find the lost--at least their remains. Gload, on the other hand, kills to support himself, robbing his victims before scattering their bones.

As Val's life unwinds and he broods over its meagerness, he temporarily falls under the sway of Gload's fatherly camaraderie. But the false friendship doesn't take--Gload is still a killer and Val a lawman intent on seeing him put away for the rest of his life. Zupan counterpoises the beauty of Montana's mountain ranges and vast wheat fields with its harsh loneliness that can nurture violence and depression. His story of Val and Gload, "like two trains going different ways," is an insightful glimpse into the characters of two men confronting life and death alone and up close. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

As she did in her Man Booker Prize-shortlisted Fingersmith, an absorbing and richly satisfying historical novel, Sarah Waters (Tipping the Velvet) has crafted a period domestic drama that mines class differences, then added an illicit love affair between two women and, midway through, recast it as a twist on a murder mystery.

Frances Wray, unmarried and with a reputation for being outspoken, lives with her widowed mother in their large house near London in Champion Hill, a neighborhood of large gardens and leafy trees. Her father's death some years earlier left them in debt, and her two brothers were killed in the war. She's forced to take in lodgers: the boisterous young Barbers, whose gaudy belongings now crowd the rooms across the landing from Frances's serene, elegant bedroom. While Leonard leaves every day for his job as an insurance clerk, Frances strikes up a friendship with his wife, Lilian. As the unhappiness of the Barbers' marriage gradually becomes clear, the two women grow closer and Frances, regretting a love she gave up years earlier at her mother's insistence, pursues and wins Lilian. They are happy in their clandestine affair, until their lives are transformed by a murder and its aftermath, which threatens everything they hold dear.

Frances has a rich interior life, and Waters delivers plenty of emotional tension along with the murder drama. The result is a novel that defies categorization as either commercial or literary fiction. A reinvention of the English period drama, The Paying Guests should establish Waters as one of Britain's best contemporary storytellers. --Jeanette Zwart, freelance writer and reviewer

Shirl, the widowed matriarch of the FitzHenry family, has undergone brain surgery following a freak accident involving a ceiling fan. Amid the trauma, Mimi--Shirl's aspiring-screenwriter daughter--tracks down her long-lost sister, Mouse, a documentary filmmaker flitting around Africa, who hasn't been home in 16 years. Mouse soon arrives in Los Angeles with her longtime British beau and work partner, Tony Cheatham, whom Shirl and Mimi assume is Mouse's fiancé. Afraid to disappoint her infirm mother, Mouse runs with the marriage story, even though she and Tony have a sparring, contentious relationship. But as Mouse assimilates into life in L.A., the past is unearthed and old jealousies and sibling rivalries are soon resurrected.

Life becomes even more complicated when an old flame approaches Mouse and the two begin to film a behind-the-scenes documentary called Wedding March--a sort of reality show long before such programs became commonplace--that depicts the months leading up to Mouse's impending nuptials. Tony, oblivious, is soon swept up with the lure of Hollywood, and his screenplay, which offers intimate details of their relationship (without Mouse's knowledge), is suddenly green-lit. The couple's separate agendas, along with Mimi's romantic woes, cleverly build to a social satire of farcical proportions.

Karen Karbo's story is timeless, and her writing is seamless. She is a keen, wry observer of the hazards of Hollywood and marriage and the fraught relationships between lovers, mothers and daughters and sisters. Filled with sharp characterizations and laugh-out-loud scenes, The Diamond Lane (first published in 1991) proves that, in the right literary hands, the comedic absurdities of life never go out of style. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

Blending the stage illusions of a Las Vegas theater with otherworldly magic, Chrysler Szarlan builds tension from the start in her debut novel. "On the day I killed my husband, the scent of lilacs startled me awake," writes Vegas stage magician Revelation Dyer in an enchanted book. A rehearsed trick went horribly wrong in performance, and Reve suspects someone from her past tampered with their props, so she whisks her three daughters home to the abandoned New England village of her ancestors, Hawley Five Corners, where the Dyer women have long been known to be witches. Their attempts to return to a normal life, filled with horseback rides and schoolwork, are only marginally successful, as they can't help but dwell on the past. Reve's apprehension builds, despite defensive measures she takes to keep her girls safe from the presence of something she calls the Fetch.

Months pass as Reve delves more deeply into her family's history, examining the extraordinary gifts each Dyer woman naturally possesses; Reve's talent is the skill to disappear. She scrutinizes her own life and her relationships with old friends in the hopes she'll find clues to reveal the identity of the relentless pursuer. Using power she learns along the way, Reve struggles to protect her family against forces and secrets that threaten to take them, one by one. With a rapid pace and exquisite details that clearly set the scene and mood, Szarlan's novel is a great read for those who love fantasy and tales of witchcraft. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer

Erwin Chemerinsky (the dean of UC-Irvine's law school) is known to a generation of law students as the author of their constitutional law textbook, which carries them through an analysis of the function and powers of the U.S. Supreme Court. In The Case Against the Supreme Court, Chemerinsky marshals the list of "landmark" court cases, but takes a different tack. Arguing that the purpose of the Constitution and the Court is to protect fundamental individual rights against institutional power--whether governmental or business--Chemerinsky builds the case that the Supreme Court has failed in this task at some critical points in U.S. history.

Chemerinsky takes a topic-based approach, starting with the contentious category of race. He begins with Prigg v. Pennsylvania, the 1842 case that struck down Pennsylvania's law prohibiting the use of "force or violence" to capture escaping slaves. With a variety of famous examples, including the Dred Scot trial, Chemerinsky illustrates that the Court has deferred to institutional oppression at precisely the moments when individual rights needed the most affirmation.

To suggest repairs, Chemerinsky focuses on what he considers the exemplary work of the Warren Court from 1953 to 1969. He suggests that under Chief Justice Earl Warren, the court's approach to cases like Brown v. Board of Education and Miranda v. Arizona is a model for the protection of individual rights. Occasionally shocking and thoroughly argued, The Case Against the Supreme Court offers a readable introduction to constitutional law and a clear message about the importance of questioning the Court's "objectivity" when individual rights are at stake. --Dani Alexis Ryskamp, blogger at The Book Cricket

Eula Biss (Notes from No Man's Land) proposes that "immunity is a shared space--a garden we tend together." In On Immunity, she hopes to promote a balanced discussion on the merits and perils of vaccination and raises questions about social class and community responsibility.

On Immunity opens with Greek and Roman mythology (Achilles), German legend (Siegfried) and fairy tales (Rapunzel) to exemplify the long history of mothers who have attempted to "inoculate" their children against the dangers of the world. Biss then expertly weaves a historical account with contemporary fears and her own story. After giving birth to her son, Biss quickly realized the wisdom of historian Michael Willrich's observation: "Perceptions of risk--the intuitive judgments that people make about the hazards of their world--can be stubbornly resistant to the evidence of experts." Her first-person narrative provides an intimate--but still academic--discourse about the ramifications a decision to forgo vaccinations has not only on individual child in question, but on the "herd immunity" of the community at large.

Her discussion is even-handed, even when she reflects on her own fears as a new mother raising a son with allergies and chemical sensitivities. The issues surrounding class, privilege and conscience are thought-provoking and not easily dismissed by the heightened rhetoric and metaphorical language that often surrounds vaccination. Biss respectfully presents the broad spectrum of issues surrounding contemporary thoughts on inoculation, and while her own conclusions are evident, she invites a dialogue rather than presents a definitive proclamation. --Kristen Galles from Book Club Classics

Most people think of Aristotle as a philosopher, not a scientist. Evolutionary biologist Armand Marie Leroi (Mutants) argues that Aristotle not only was a man of science, too, but perhaps the first true scientist.

In The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science, Leroi sets out to read Aristotle's writings from the viewpoint of a fellow biologist. He begins with the disclaimer that biologists make poor historians, then he proves himself wrong by setting Aristotle firmly in his historical and philosophical context-- taking a few digs at Plato's anti-empirical bias along the way.

Like Aristotle, Leroi moves between the big picture and tiny details, from Aristotle's theories about knowledge, form and soul to his empirical observations of dogfish embryos. Leroi describes Aristotle's process--a combination of direct observation, investigation of popular wisdom, skepticism and guesswork--and speculates about his sources for animals he had no personal knowledge of. He considers the things Aristotle got right (the elephant does not have a gall bladder) and the things he got wrong (elephants do, in fact, have knees.)

Leroi lightens the often technical discussions with anecdotes of his experiences walking in Aristotle's footsteps: talking with fisherman on the island of Lesbos where the philosopher lived and worked, dissecting a cuttlefish, reading Aristotle's description of the heart's structure in conjunction with a modern diagram. Planting itself firmly at the crossroads of biology, philosophy and history, The Lagoon is a challenging read but never dull. --Pamela Toler, blogging at History in the Margins

Harvard professor Stephen Pinker--psycholinguist, cognitive scientist and chair of the Usage Panel of The American Heritage Dictionary--offers a witty guide for people who "know how to write and want to write better." Distinguishing it from classics like The Elements of Style, Pinker argues that contemporary style guides "cannot just perpetuate the diktats of earlier manuals" and instead must "replace dogma about usage with reason and evidence."

In filling that gap, one of the book's most useful sections is a discussion of what Pinker calls "classic style," his recommended method of "showing the reader something in the world and engaging her in conversation." Using examples from the work of physicist Brian Greene, he illustrates how this technique helps a writer illuminate even the most technical subject matter in lucid prose.

Pinker devotes the final third of the book to an energetic debunking of myths (he prefers the Yiddish term bubbe meises, or "grandmothers' tales") that are the province of language purists. Whether addressing the prescriptivists' abhorrence of split infinitives or their condemnation of sentences that end with prepositions, Pinker painstakingly demonstrates that many of these so-called rules lack any claim to legitimacy as "proper" English. Unlike most of what precedes it, this section isn't intended to be read straight through, but instead serves as an invaluable reference when specific questions of grammar, word choice and punctuation arise.

With its wealth of helpful information and its lively, accessible approach, The Sense of Style is a worthy addition to even the most overburdened shelf of style manuals. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer

Award-winning British author Shirley Hughes teams up with daughter Clara Vulliamy for this first book in an appealing early chapter book series with retro flair.

Digby O'Day is a dapper dog. He has a best friend named Percy, a not-so-nice neighbor named Lou Ella, and a not-so-new but very clean red convertible that he loves. Digby also loves adventure, so when the ALL-DAY RACE from Didsworth to Dodsworth is announced, Digby and Percy decide to enter. Peril and excitement ensue--wrong turns, fender-benders, out of control roll-aways, runaway sheep, twisting shortcuts and breakdowns on the railroad tracks--as Digby and Percy try to beat Lou Ella and the other racers to claim the prize. In the end, Digby and Percy's kindnesses are rewarded, and Lou Ella gets her just deserts. With its beautiful duotone art, rigorously moral universe and just the right amount of thrills, this gentle series harkens back to an earlier time in children's books. Kids who love detail will pour over the illustrations, as well as the extra content--including a q&a with Digby, maps of Digby's world, car games, quizzes and more. The generous art-to-word ratio will give newly independent readers a sense of accomplishment at reading the book themselves, and the broad appeal of the characters and story will make it great for family read-alouds.

This is an old-fashioned story with oodles of charm, style and panache that feels like an instant classic. --Kristen McLean, former head of the Association of Booksellers for Children, founder and CEO of Bookigee