Jeffrey Siger's Andreas Kaldis series often depicts outrageous events that seem surprisingly plausible given the political morass that is modern Greece. The events in Santorini Caesars are no different. A young protestor is shot and killed by the police, and Athens is in an uproar--the death acting as the match to the tinder of immigration arguments and economic disasters that have plagued Greece in recent years.

Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis soon discovers that the killers may not have been police, but rather military professionals in disguise, especially considering that the victim was the daughter of a high-ranking Greek military official. Convinced that something nefarious is afoot, when Kaldis hears a rumor that a group of military officials who call themselves "the Caesars" are planning a secret meeting on the island of Santorini, he's sure that a coup is in the works. He and his team set to work eavesdropping on the Caesars, trying to figure out their connection to the dead girl, and to the future of Greece.

Jeffrey Siger (Devil of Delphi) has perfected a blend of humorous interludes and shocking political conspiracy. The situations that Kaldis and his team face are all too believable, and their race to save their country will keep readers on the edge of their seats, while chuckling at the antics of Kaldis's temperamental secretary. Part of a series not to be missed, Santorini Caesars is a very appealing mystery with a delightful setting. --Jessica Howard, blogger at Quirky Bookworm

Reminiscent of the novels of James Lee Burke or John Hart, Kevin Wolf's debut, The Homeplace, captures life in small-town Middle America. Chase Ford was the first Ford man to leave Comanche County, Colo., in four generations. His basketball talent took him all the way to the NBA--and then to rehab when both his career and marriage crashed and burned.

Back in Comanche County for the first time in 16 years, Chase is hoping to lay some old ghosts to rest. Unfortunately, his return seems to have triggered something dark in the tiny town of Brandon, where Chase's high school championship game is still proudly talked of. First, the new young basketball star, who is consistently compared to Chase, is found dead. Then Chase's former basketball coach is also found dead. And before long, two more people are missing. Can Chase help his old high school buddy, now a deputy with the sheriff's department, solve the crime before becoming a suspect?

While the motivations of the killer are a bit farfetched, Kevin Wolf believably portrays life in this obscure corner of Colorado, and the feelings of the people of Brandon, who are appalled at one death in their midst, let alone what appears to be a string of serial killings. With nuanced characters and an appealingly flawed hero, The Homeplace is an intriguing look at what can happen when someone returns to the scene of their youth after too long away. --Jessica Howard, blogger at Quirky Bookworm

The Worldwide Church of God taught that the Great Tribulation would begin in 1972 and end three years later in a river of fire from which only the Chosen Ones would be saved. Jerald Walker grew up with these teachings looming over his head. In 1975, at the predicted end of the world, he would be 11 years old. In The World in Flames, Walker relates his unusual upbringing in Chicago as the sixth child of blind African American parents, in the black wing of a church that preached segregation as well as fire and brimstone.

Except for a brief prologue and epilogue offering a glimpse of the adult Walker, the whole of this fantastical true story is told from a child's disarming perspective. Jerry is six when his memoir opens in 1970, and his days are filled with fear. Preoccupied with the coming events and concern for a friend who is not Chosen, he struggles to navigate family secrets, severe corporal punishment and a religion based on threats. As narrator, Jerry is matter-of-fact and innocent about the improbability of his home life. This narrative voice renders an incredible story accessible. Perhaps the most heartbreaking detail is Jerry's guileless devotion to his church.

Walker (Street Shadows) recounts his growth from wide-eyed child to hapless teen, and finally to skeptic, with immediacy and feeling and without offering judgments. His personal history verges on the absurd, but his telling of it is earnest and unadorned, never sensational. The World in Flames is a difficult story simply and gracefully told. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

Early in Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen's intimate, affectionate and engaging memoir of Nora Ephron, he reveals the problem with writing about her life and their 39-year friendship: "Nora wrote about everything. She not only chronicled her life, she consumed all the best material, leaving nothing but cinders for a biographer to sift through." Fans of the filmmaker (Sleepless in Seattle, When Harry Met Sally) and author (I Feel Bad About My Neck) need not worry; Cohen's She Made Me Laugh expands and enriches Ephron's familiar anecdotes by retelling them with a keen, questioning eye and adds new personal tales and insights.

The eldest daughter of two alcoholic Hollywood screenwriters, Ephron moved to New York City in the early 1960s to become a writer. Soon, she was writing for Esquire, Ms. and the New York Times. She turned her very public marital breakup (with second husband Carl Bernstein) into the comic revenge novel Heartburn. Calling Ephron "a deft literary pickpocket," Cohen recalls how everything in her life was fair game for an article, screenplay or blog post--except her six-year battle with leukemia. Outside of her immediate family, Cohen was one of the few people she trusted with her cancer secret. (His longtime companion, Mona Ackerman, was also battling cancer at the time and died two months after Ephron in 2012.)

Cohen's heartfelt tribute gives fans new insight into her work process, her successes and failures, her droll wit and enormous generosity, and her decision to keep her final illness out of public view. --Kevin Howell, independent reviewer and marketing consultant

Most people have hobbies, and Chuck Zukowski, part-time microchip engineer and volunteer sheriff's deputy, is no different. His hobby--turned near obsession--consists of collecting data and evidence on the possibility that aliens visit and inhabit the earth on a regular basis, earning him the nickname "the Mulder of El Paso."

For more than 20 years, Zukowski has collected information and conducted onsite investigations into mysterious sightings of lights in the night sky; hundreds of exsanguinated and bizarrely mutilated cattle and horses; natural geological disturbances; and pranks, hoaxes and mistaken identities. Ben Mezrich, author of The Accidental Billionaires, brings Zukoswki's story of UFOs and dead livestock into the mainstream, allowing readers a look at the incredible amount of evidence that exists to substantiate the idea that we are not alone in the universe.

Case by case--Roswell, Area 51, cattle ranches across the Southwest--Mezrich puts readers in Zukowski's shoes, sharing his excitement and adrenaline rushes, and the fears, frustration and anger that have accompanied the task of investigating events that most people don't believe happened. He includes Zukowski's dealings with the Mutual UFO Network, the Bigelow Aerospace company and its founder, a fellow UFO believer, and Zukowski and his sister's nerve-wracking encounters with government officials in black SUVs. Whether you believe in UFOs or not, Mezrich's professional and entertaining approach to a semi-taboo subject will have readers shaking their heads and checking the night sky for any unusual sights or sounds. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer

In 2016, white nativists are out in force in the United States, having seized control of a major political party; radical Islamists are influencing global politics and occupying significant swaths of North Africa and the Middle East; Britain is exiting the European Union; and tsarists are resurgent in Russia. In The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction, Mark Lilla traces the intellectual roots of these developments. Lilla argues that the revolutionary has been thoroughly analyzed, but that academia has all but ignored its opposite, the reactionary. Shipwrecked is a successful first step in rectifying this absence.

The revolutionary is optimistic, perhaps utopian, looking to rip apart the past to build a better future. The reactionary dreams of a golden-aged past and seeks to restore it, whether that is a 1950s United States or an Islamic caliphate from the 6th century. Lilla accurately notes this affinity, "from the radical nativist on the far right to radical Islamists--who despise the present and dream of stepping back in history to recover what they imagine was lost." Reactionaries are fixated on political nostalgia based upon myth. The world was never the way it is in their fantasies, any more than the world can be shaped into the utopia of the revolutionary. 

Shipwrecked is an important work. It is accessible, even for the non-scholarly reader, and critical in helping explicate the current global political environment. It also contains one of the most astute readings of Michel Houellebecq's Submission; for that alone it deserves consideration. --Evan M. Anderson, collection development librarian, Kirkendall Public Library, Ankeny, Iowa.

Allan J. Hamilton is a respected neurosurgeon who has spent more than 25 years "working inside the human brain with a scalpel," while also sharing his life with and training horses. Lead with Your Heart focuses on what horses have taught him--truths that have inspired Hamilton to apply what he's learned to the universal context of life in order to become a better person.

"The horse's greatest gift," says Hamilton (Zen Mind, Zen Horse) is teaching us how to "reestablish our unity with the world around us." Through grooming manes and picking hooves, Hamilton was motivated to look upon the lives of equines through a philosophical prism because "the simplest acts can engender the greatest insights." The nature of horses--animals who instinctively yearn for harmony, peace, kindness, leadership, kinship and trust--is an apt metaphor for the human condition. Through a series of clear and concise essays--some are only a paragraph in length--Hamilton conveys meticulous observations and axioms like "drop the reins," "circle for safety" and "horses don't lie, people do." Simple yet detailed examples and ideas, about teaching and learning, leading and following, searching for happiness and sampling different emotional energies, aim toward self-revelation and cultivating a more meaningful life. Quotes from Sartre, Whitman, Shakespeare and others--along with exquisite illustrations by Róbert Farkas--provide additional inspiration.

These reflective, insightful meditations will encourage readers--and not just horse lovers--to be mindful and vigilant about their responses and behaviors, while probing a higher consciousness. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

In The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting, Anne Trubek (A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses) explores the development of handwriting--physical and cultural--from clay tablets and cuneiform in ancient Mesopotamia to its role in the world of digital communication.

Trubek describes changes in the technology of handwriting. (Making a quill pen is more complicated than you may realize.) More importantly, she considers the political and social implications inherent in who learned to write, what they recorded and the scripts they used. She traces the relatively late rise of the notion that a person's handwriting is an unusual production, and ties the idea that handwriting is a reflection of personality to pseudosciences such as phrenology and eugenics.

Some of the most interesting sections arise from the recurring fear that innovations in writing technologies, such as the printing press and the typewriter that threatened to replace it, would prove detrimental to the intellectual abilities of future generations embracing them. Handwriting itself was the target of impassioned attacks by Socrates and his followers, who believed the written word would destroy not only the ability to remember but also the ability to think complex thoughts.

Trubek never loses sight of the fact that handwriting is a controversial subject today. Throughout her history, she offers amusing and insightful comparisons between past and present, preparing the reader for a final discussion of the future of handwriting. The result is a light-handed and thoughtful account of a complicated subject. --Pamela Toler, blogging at History in the Margins

Some time, somewhere, Little Town and Old Country are separated by borders and bombs. If Little Town is said to be filthy, broke and run by ragtag criminals, Old Country is conformist, rich and militaristic. Almost 15, cautious "Little Towner" Charlie Law stays relatively safe by making his own laws, above and beyond adhering to those imposed by the warring Regimes and Governments. His appealingly spirited personality and occasional snarky outbursts, however, hint at the rebel within.

Despite closed borders, an Old Country refugee family arrives in Little Town. Their son Pavel Duda--frightened yet foolhardy--quickly becomes Charlie's best friend. The boys ambitiously plan to turn a small backyard shed into a clubhouse, risking contact with the lawless "Big Man" who promises the needed furniture--and more. But at what cost? As school resumes, Pavel's awkwardness with the local "lingo" makes him an easy target among his less-than-welcoming classmates. Being Pavel's guide and protector is tough enough, but Charlie also needs to avoid both the threatening Little Town Rascals and Old Country troops. While navigating the dangers of school halls and deserted streets, he's desperately falling in first-love and trying to save his mother's life.

The Bombs That Brought Us Together--Scottish-born, Dublin-domiciled Brian Conaghan's timely follow-up to his Carnegie Medal-nominated When Mr. Dog Bites--is a nuanced examination of right and wrong, the unreliability of labels and the choices people are forced to make in uncertain times. He effectively showcases the indomitable power of humanity: even as bombs destroy, they can also bring out the best in those who survive and eventually thrive. --Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon

Ben Hatke's (Little Robot; Zita the Spacegirl trilogy) cinematic graphic novel Mighty Jack uproots and replants the Jack and the Beanstalk story and it grows into something mighty indeed.

It's finally summertime, but Jack's mom is about to start working two jobs, so it will be Jack's job to take care of his autistic little sister, Maddy, day and night. On their last summer day together, they drive to the flea market where Jack, terrifyingly, loses his sister while his mom is busy buying tools. He finds Maddy hanging out with a devilish-looking man with a latched wooden box full of seed packets: "Plant these seeds, and I promise you--freedom," he says. Maddy, who usually doesn't speak, pleads, "Buy the seeds, Jack. Buy all the seeds." Jack doesn't have enough cash, so he gives the guy his mother's car keys. "YOU DID WHAT?!?" his mom says, calling 911.

Obsessed, Maddy starts digging a garden right away. The seeds grow fast, and they grow weirdly. Creepy green hands reach up to the moon, and soon the kids have the most bizarre, dangerous, explosive, prehistoric-looking garden ever, including plants that hurl dirt clods and chase the siblings hungrily. When a sword-wielding neighborhood girl named Lilly joins ranks with them to fend off the violent garden, Jack gets all moony over her. As friendship blossoms, Maddy does, too, finding her voice in the belligerent, otherworldly garden. Told with sensitivity, illustrated with panache, this high-action series debut soars. --Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness