Macedonia, W.Va., is the back end of nowhere. When Layla Beck's senator father forces her to take a job with the Federal Writers' Project, researching and writing a history of Macedonia, she quickly learns there's more to this sleepy little town than meets the eye. During the sweltering summer of 1938, Layla uncovers more than a few secrets--and learns a thing or two about truth and history.

In The Truth According to Us, Annie Barrows (author of the Ivy and Bean children's series and co-author of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society) creates a cast of lovably eccentric characters who charm Layla as much as they baffle her. The once-prominent, still-genteel Romeyn family, with whom Layla boards for the summer, prove particularly intriguing, especially Josephine "Jottie" Romeyn, a quiet, proud woman who spends her life caring for her wayward brother's daughters.

As the family hosiery mill deals with labor unrest and the Romeyn household bubbles with barely suppressed secrets, Layla interviews various Macedonians for her book. Her subjects, who include several leading town families and the local librarian, give wildly differing accounts of key figures and events in the town's history. Struggling to shape fact and legend into a coherent narrative, Layla learns that "history is the autobiography of the historian."

Barrows ends her story rather abruptly, and the epilogue doesn't answer all the questions raised by the book's final chapters. But this warmhearted Southern novel, full of charm and sass, still proves a satisfying read. Like Layla, readers will find themselves longing to spend more time in Macedonia. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Lisa Jewell (The Making of Us, The House We Grew Up In) is sure to appeal to fans of Liane Moriarty and Jojo Moyes. Just like Jewell's earlier novels, The Third Wife explores complicated family dynamics in a genuine way that is witty yet realistically nuanced.

Adrian Wolfe has been mourning the death of his third wife, Maya, for a year. Maya's death seemed to be a tragic accident--she stepped out in front of a bus--until a strange woman shows up asking weird questions, and then a series of poison pen e-mails surfaces. Suddenly Adrian is rethinking everything: Maya's death, his two divorces and the way he's raised his children.

A full cast of characters, including Adrian's ex-wives, his two grown children and three small children, give The Third Wife the momentum of an energetic household. One wife is a bit of a hippie, one a successful businesswoman. One child is an award-winning ice skater, one is unemployed, another wants to spend time only on the Internet. But Adrian loves them all, and thought they were all a big, slightly bizarre, but happy family. Could one of them have been involved in Maya's death?

The mystery of the accident, the noisy and entertaining children, Adrian's likable befuddlement and the apparently dark undercurrents moving through the Wolfe family combine to make The Third Wife an irresistible read. With questions about the nature of love, marriage and family, all within a lovely London setting, The Third Wife is practically perfect summer reading. --Jessica Howard, blogger at Quirky Bookworm

Against a background of ominous "sudden weather" and warnings to "shelter in place," the characters of Kate Walbert's The Sunken Cathedral play out their complicated lives in New York City's ever more expensive Chelsea neighborhood. At the center of Walbert's (A Short History of Women; Our Kind) story are lifelong friends and octogenarians Marie and Simone, haunted by nightmares of their escapes during the Nazi invasion of France. They manage on their own as best they can: their bodies are failing, their children are scattered about the world, their husbands are vivid memories, their storekeeper neighbors are replaced by pampered movie stars, and their big brownstones now broken up for rental income. In counterpoint to these old-school New Yorkers, Marie's tenants Elizabeth and Pete--and teen son, Ben, who has a "constellation of learning challenges formerly known as learning differences formerly known as learning disabilities"--struggle to live up to youthful dreams.

Walbert shapes the lives of these neighbors and friends in jewel-like vignettes, with more information in narrative footnotes. Set in the shadows of the hip High Line with "delivery boys and muscle boys and pretty women who work at magazines weaving in and out of the stalled traffic on CitiBikes" and square in perilous Flood Zone 1, Walbert's taut novel touches on all that is now at risk in the city--whether from a cascade of water or cascade of money. As one of the school's long-time administrators says over a martini in a soon-to-be-closed, smoke-free Chelsea tavern, "Maybe that's the problem now: everyone needs a cigarette." --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Dean Bakopoulos's fiction doesn't stray far from his home base--his first novel, Please Don't Come Back from the Moon took place in his childhood home state, Michigan, and his second, My American Unhappiness, was set in Madison, Wis., where he earned his MFA. Summerlong unfolds during an unusually hot and humid Iowa summer in the college town of Grinnell where Bakopolous now teaches. Grinnell is an off-the-track burg in a no-nonsense state in the flyover central Midwest ("you could get stuck behind a tractor... [and] everyone would just be calm, as if it was perfectly okay to obstruct the productivity of the world in order to grow corn"). Nothing much happens here, but people somehow can't quite leave.

Twenty years previously, Don and Claire Lowry came for jobs at the college, but then they had two children, Claire never got around to writing a second novel, and Don drifted into real estate as the recession put their own house into foreclosure. When two former college students come back to Grinnell, the young bisexual Amelia Benitez-Coors ("ABC") enchants Don, and the West Coast actor Charlie Gulliver arouses Claire's dormant libido. As the temperature ratchets into the high 90s, the sexual tension rises along with it. Don and Claire half-heartedly resist the tempting infidelity, but the sultry tank-top and flip-flop weather tests their upright Midwestern resolve. At one point Don tells Claire, "I live in a goddamn Bruce Springsteen song." But Bakopoulos skirts potential clichés with the empathy and good-natured common sense of his solid Midwest setting--no matter how hot and sultry its summer weather may be. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

S.J. Watson, author of the novel-turned-film Before I Go to Sleep, provides yet another twisty psychological thriller with Second Life, the story of an online relationship that curdles into something sinister. Bucking the trend of recent thrillers in the Gone Girl vein, Watson's protagonist Julia is a fairly reliable and likable narrator whose lonely, intense perspective provides a valuable anchor for the reader as events begin to teeter on the edge of believability.

Watson kicks off the narrative with the murder of Julia's estranged sister, Kate, in a Paris alleyway. The police have no leads, and when Julia discovers that Kate had frequented various hook-up websites, she decides to sign up and explore the unknown (to her) realms of online sex in an attempt to dig up clues about her sister's murder. To reveal much more about the plot would subtract from the book's page-turning pleasures, but suffice it to say that an intense online relationship quickly becomes more Fatal Attraction than A Room with a View.

Second Life dabbles in a fair amount of forbidden fruit-style eroticism, even playing up the illicitness of Internet relationships in a way that might seem dated to younger readers. However, Watson succeeds so admirably in delivering the perfect combination of titillation and fear that the novel begs to be consumed in one or two tense sittings. A highly entertaining book about escapism and voyeurism, Second Life is pure, fearful fun. --Hank Stephenson, bookseller, Flyleaf Books

Although it's April, there is still snow in the high mountains of Montana, so writer Max Gallagher decides to light a fire in the fireplace of his rented cabin. Unfortunately, there turns out to be a recently dead girl in the chimney: Cinderella Huntingdon, a teenage rodeo star who went missing five months previously.

In Crazy Mountain Kiss, Keith McCafferty (Dead Man's Fancy) reunites private investigator Sean Stranahan and Sheriff Martha Ettinger who work together (somewhat awkwardly, given their former romantic history) to investigate Cindy's disappearance and death, and where she could have been in the intervening months. Cindy's stepfather has tried to move on since she vanished, but her mother, Etta, a famous rodeo rider in her own right, has been engulfed by grief. Despite their different reactions, Cindy's friends and family appear to all be equally stymied as to why she would have been in hiding for five months, and how she ended up in the chimney.

Sure to appeal to fans of western mystery writers like Craig Johnson, Crazy Mountain Kiss brings oddball, isolated Montanan culture to life. McCafferty adds to the novel's rugged landscape a full set of quirky, outsized personalities and some slapstick humor, which offsets Cindy's sad story. And while it is fourth in the Sean Stranahan series, Crazy Mountain Kiss can easily be read as a standalone, since McCafferty nicely sums up pertinent information from earlier books. --Jessica Howard, blogger at Quirky Bookworm

Vaughn Entwistle struck literary pay dirt when he partnered Sherlock Holmes's creator with Oscar Wilde in The Revenant of Thraxton Hall, the first Paranormal Casebooks of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle mystery, in which Doyle is the detective and Wilde is his Watson. The dynamic duo has turned up again, this time in The Dead Assassin, and more good fun awaits.

London, 1895: Detective Blenkinsop requests Doyle's assistance one very foggy evening at the site of a "murder most 'orrible." Wilde accompanies him. They're told that Lord Howell, the prime minister's Secretary of War, has been found dead in his home, the front door completely smashed in, as was his bedroom door. His body was thrown against the wall with unimaginable force. But he fired off six shots from his revolver before expiring. Doyle, Wilde and Blenkinsop follow a trail of footprints down the street to discover a body in the dense fog outside, riddled with bullets. The detective recognizes him--Charlie Higginbotham, a murderer who was hung for his crime last week.

Entwistle injects the "Fog Committee," whose members included Lord Howell, as a sidelight. The committee is convinced that the recent, unusually dense fogs are "purely a function of the vagaries of the English climate," and any theories about London's excessive burning of coal in some way contributing to it is a "fantastical theory."

The Dead Assassin's paranormal aspects are lightly and intriguingly laid into the story. And even though Entwistle's portrait of Doyle isn't at the level of some other portrayals, this is a most entertaining pastiche pot-boiler with luscious Victorian atmosphere and ambiance. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

Brin-Jonathan Butler first traveled to Cuba as a teenager, hoping "to find a boxing trainer and to meet the guy from The Old Man and the Sea." He accomplished both goals and over the years that followed made repeated trips, seeking Cuban boxing, baseball and literary heroes, as well as the mysteries of the sequestered island. Eventually, Butler's fixation on Cuba inspired a forthcoming documentary, Split Decision, about Cuban athletes' difficult choices between staying and leaving. In The Domino Diaries, he confesses that the project was partly an excuse to stay, having become "homesick for a place [he] wasn't born to." His memoir further unravels the relationship he's formed with this nation.

His escapades make for fine writing and include a tryst with Fidel Castro's granddaughter and an interview with boxing legend Teófilo Stevenson that results in Butler's being banned from Cuba. The Domino Diaries is a memoir of boxing heroes and political strife, a study of Castro's legacies and Cuba's "Special Period" of economic crisis, and an ode to the grace, joy and sadness of Cuban culture; it is also the personal story of Butler's own traumas and his mother's escape from Hungarian communist rule. These threads necessitate some meandering, but the resulting musing tone Butler employs is elegiac and quite effective. Rather than an exhaustive survey of the large and thorny topic of Cuba's economy, politics and culture, Butler's memoir is a rambling exploration, appealingly written in a distinctive voice and peppered with wisdoms phrased with lovely wit. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

Husband-and-wife team Ted and Betsy Lewin, both Caldecott Honor artists, invites readers to step inside their notebooks and sketchbooks and travel with them to far-reaching destinations.

They organize their entries into five regions, rather than chronologically, and begin in Africa. Betsy Lewin opens each section with a map of the region, integrating some high points of their encounters. The appealing, inviting design of the volume resembles a scrapbook, with photos of villagers in Kalahari and Botswana, a lifelike watercolor of the "Saffron Man" (who sells the spice for $15 per ounce!) and (a decade later) photos of artifacts such as a donkey saddlebag and a tent peg from the famous Tuaregs, or "blue men" of Morocco. Lifestyle differences play up the contrasts and humor, such as "going to the bathroom in the bush" in Botswana or in a hole in the ground in Kanha National Park in India ("if you face the wrong way you miss"). Betsy Lewin includes a pen-and-ink of her fall from a boat, which broke her foot in Thailand (a surgeon set it perfectly). Four-legged creatures tie together their adventures in Europe: two horses (two decades apart) in Ireland; a bullfight in Nîmes, France; and a reindeer in Norway. The wildlife of South America--including the giant tortoise of Galapagos and the red-and-green macaws of Peru--are a highlight. The Lewins then bring it home to the wonders to be found in the United States.

Whether a read-aloud for the whole family or a resource for travel, this inviting volume will provide hours of enjoyment. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

Cynthia Lord (Half a Chance; Touch Blue) delivers another terrific summer read, populated by lovable characters who bring big themes such as culture, class and racism alive in a delicate and age-appropriate way.

Twelve-year-old Lily faces a long, boring summer in small-town Maine without her best friend, Hannah, who she has lost to boys and the Blueberry Queen Pageant. Fortunately, Lily meets Salma Santiago, the daughter of migrant workers in town to harvest blueberries. Salma helps catch Lily's runaway dog, Lucky, sparking a new friendship. Salma offers to assist Lily in painting Mason bee houses--blocks of wood, with holes drilled in for the tiny blue Mason bees--which she sells in order to raise money for Lucky's upcoming cataract surgery. In return, Lily helps Salma compete in the Blueberry Queen pageant. Salma has a good chance at winning, but her status as a migrant farmer and the fact that she's competing against Lily's former best friend complicate the situation.

Lord's beautiful writing uses colorful phrases, such as Lily thinking about her painted nails, "my ten fingers all ended in gold," or describing the taste of a blueberry as "a warm blue explosion, tasting of earth and sunshine." Wonderful metaphors and descriptions abound. A Handful of Stars will engage young readers with its genuine characters and charming story, while providing them with an opportunity to think about the social issues that all children face in order to grow up. --Andrea Vuleta, executive director of the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association