At one point in Dan Chaon's novel Ill Will, his protagonist, Dustin Tillman, alludes to a phenomenon known as scopaesthesia, "the prickle on the back of your neck when you sense that someone you can't see is looking at you." Whether or not there's a scientific basis for that sensation, you may well experience it as you read this murder mystery that's also a chilling investigation of the fallibility of memory and the damage inflicted by family secrets.

Chaon (You Remind Me of Me) relies on a nonlinear narrative. The story moves from the near present in Cleveland, Ohio, where Dustin works as a psychologist in private practice, back to a terrifying night in June 1983, when his parents, aunt and uncle are murdered in a small Nebraska town on the eve of a family vacation. Thirteen-year-old Dustin's testimony is instrumental in convicting his adopted older brother, Rusty, but after nearly 30 years in prison Rusty is freed by DNA evidence. His release coincides with the appearance in Dustin's office of Aqil Ozorowski, a suspended police officer who's convinced he's tracking a serial killer preying on inebriated male college students in the area.

Employing several narrative voices, Chaon faithfully carries out his responsibility to keep the mystery plots--who killed Dustin's family members and whether the contemporary serial killer is real or a creature conjured out of his patient's imagination--simmering in a pressure cooker of suspense and emotion. Complex and evocative, Ill Will successfully slips over the wall some would erect between literary fiction and the mystery genre. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer

Lane Roanoke is only 15 when her mother kills herself, and Lane must go live with relatives she never knew she had, in a small town in Kansas. Cousin Allegra is six months her junior, vibrant and mercurial, with the same dark hair and willowy frame as Lane; grandparents Lillian and Yates welcome her into their home as one of their own. There she sees a wall of pictures of the "Roanoke Girls," aunts and cousins and even Lane's own mother, preserved through time in aging photos hung in the big farmhouse. Allegra is quick to inform Lane about the dark side of the wall: all of the women are gone. "Roanoke girls never last long around here," she tells Lane. "In the end, we either run or we die."

This proves true for Lane, who stays only a short time at Roanoke before fleeing, leaving Allegra behind. Eleven years later, she's drawn back to the farm when her grandfather calls to tell her Allegra has gone missing. From this strange and twisted set-up, The Roanoke Girls shifts backward and forward in time, alternating between tales of Lane's teenage summer in Roanoke and her re-entry into her family's insular and disturbing world as an adult. As the story of the Roanokes unfolds, their many, many secrets are slowly revealed.

Though Amy Engel's novel is dark, it is not overly bleak. Its sense of humanity elevates The Roanoke Girls beyond mere mystery, mere suspense, mere story of dysfunction, morphing into a compelling story of psychological suspense that is relentless. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm

Set in the fictional North Carolina mountain town of Old Buckram, The Barrowfields is a stunning debut novel rich in character and place, steeped in literature and music, and fraught with family drama. Raised in an old mountaintop mansion by his eccentric book collector/unpublished writer/lawyer father and supportive but overwhelmed mother, Henry Aster Jr. narrates the story from his perspective as a new lawyer. He left Old Buckram for college in Connecticut and law school in Chapel Hill, but could never quite shake his father's influence.

Impressing his young son, Henry Sr. would glibly quote favorite passages from Poe, Wolfe, Camus, Styron and many others from his 10,000-volume library. So when he walked out on his family and never returned, Henry Jr. was devastated. Comfort comes hard to Henry, who consumes alcohol with abandon as his father did. Spinning his wheels as a lawyer with no particular alternative, he returns to the "moribund town of no earthly consequence in the persistent autumn of its bleak existence," to the abandoned Old Buckram mansion to confront the ghost of his father and seek relief from the "hateful bitterness inside me... from my inability to understand him and his indifference to my inability to understand him."

Born in the Carolina Appalachians and now a litigator in Charlotte, Phillip Lewis knows the idiosyncrasies of small mountain towns. With clear echoes of Poe and Wolfe, The Barrowfields examines Henry's difficult relationship with his father--a frayed bond that he finally accepts with the understanding that Henry Sr. "was only a man, who... had dreams that exceeded him." Lewis has put Old Buckram firmly on the map. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Lindsey is 19 years old when she falls for charming Andrew Nash. Over the years of their marriage, Andrew becomes controlling, isolating Lindsey from those who love her, convincing her that she is the cause of his problems, making her doubt her own strength and threatening her with violence.

Eleven years later, Lindsey and her daughter, Sophie, are living a quiet and independent life in the small town. Andrew has been in jail, caught driving drunk after he hit--and killed--another woman and publicly threatened to kill Lindsey. She now feels relatively safe and has built a housecleaning business to support her small family.

But now Andrew's been released, and while cleaning a client's house, Lindsey finds a window left open and becomes distinctly aware of another presence in the residence with her. Her mind immediately goes to Andrew: "He's going to make me pay for every year he spent behind bars."

The shock of fear that this first encounter sends through Lindsey radiates off the page and lingers throughout the rest of Never Let You Go, the sixth novel from Chevy Stevens (That Night). Lindsey runs into Andrew in the bank parking lot; she finds her e-mails marked as read before she's seen them. The action is subtle and marks a new direction for Chevy Stevens, whose early works featured a dark and twisted kind of violence. But that's not to suggest that the more reserved terror of Never Let You Go is at all a disappointment; instead, the hooks that sink in from page one and dig ever deeper, through to a thrilling and unanticipated end, are all the more frightening for their invisibility. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm

Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota series, begun last year with Too Like the Lightning and continued now in Seven Surrenders, explores a future society where gender is assigned by behavior--not biological sex. Humans claim allegiance to one of seven ideological Hives, and no one alive has seen, let alone been a part of, war.

The first installment in the series took great pains to build the future society through the eyes of Mycroft Canner, a reformed serial killer who serves as a genius-level social and cultural attaché to global leaders for the duration of his sentence. Many mysteries posed in Lightning are resolved here, and to good effect.

But conflict is on the horizon, set in motion by a family intent on giving humanity release from political pressures that have been building in these years of peace. Though Canner has assassinated several of its members, he and his betters soon learn how wrong they've been in their work to forestall the devastating global war that looms ahead. The fate of Canner's miraculous young charge from the first novel also ties into the larger picture in a wholly unexpected way.

Palmer, a professor of history at the University of Chicago, fills every plot twist, paragraph and soliloquy with deep knowledge of classical and modern history. With deft skill, she also uses Seven Surrenders to set up the following volume with disastrous (yet fascinating) possibilities, giving readers much to look forward to. --Rob LeFebvre, freelance writer and editor

In 2012, former Air National Guard pilot and Purple Heart recipient Mary Jennings Hegar joined forces with the ACLU to challenge successfully the ban that kept American women out of ground combat units. In her memoir, Shoot Like a Girl: One Woman's Dramatic Fight in Afghanistan and on the Home Front, Hegar tells the story of the career that led her to that point.

Hegar's love for flying, her commitment to her job and her bonds with other servicepeople are vivid on every page. The incident for which she received the Purple Heart--when her helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan with wounded men aboard--is a gripping story, told with skill. But Hegar's focus is the institutional and individual sexism that she had to overcome at every stage of her career.

Writing in a matter-of-fact, conversational style, Hegar details acts of casual prejudice that will feel familiar to any woman who has worked in a male-dominated field. She also recounts more harrowing experiences that include hazing and one horrifying instance of sexual assault by an army doctor during an exam--made worse by fact that his superiors took immediate action to protect him from punishment. Hegar shares feelings of betrayal, isolation and anger. She admits to tears on more than one occasion. But her strongest response is a desire to prove that everyone who told her women shouldn't be military pilots was wrong.

Shoot Like a Girl will appeal to anyone who was ever told, "Girls can't do that." --Pamela Toler, blogging at History in the Margins

In 1970, Joan Didion traveled through the Deep South for a piece she was writing. "I had only some dim and unformed sense... which I could not explain coherently, that for some years the South and particularly the Gulf Coast had been for America what people were still saying California was."

South and West is culled from the notebooks she kept on that trip. Also included are 14 pages from a 1974 journal, when Didion returned to California to cover the Patty Hearst trial with the ulterior motive of writing about the state. Neither piece was ever completed.

Didion's style always seems effortless. In South and West, we see the effort. This is a study in the process of writing. Her prose, even in draft form, is remarkable. She constructs paragraphs with the precision of a journalist and the ear of a poet. Known for her restraint, Didion works into her prose a filigree that can be breathtaking, as in the first sentence: "In New Orleans in June the air is heavy with sex and death, not violent death but death by decay, overripeness, rotting, death by drowning, suffocation, fever of unknown etiology."

Didion offers her shrewd, deadpan observations of a decayed South (in a Biloxi motel, "the swimming pool is large and unkempt, and the water smells of fish"). It is not a kind portrayal, and indeed is an outsider's view of the South. This is writing by antithesis; it paints the West in negative. --Zak Nelson, writer and bookseller

Columnist Mark O'Connell takes a critical look at transhumanism, the belief that the human race can evolve beyond its current physical and mental limitations with the help of science and technology. Using futurist Ray Kurzweil's theories on the technological singularity--the merger of man with machine--as a launching point, O'Connell crisscrosses the United States in search of the philosophers, scientists, researchers, venture capitalists and opportunists attempting to arrest aging and create a "more efficient, more powerful, more useful" version of humanity.

In Scottsdale, Ariz., he investigates the feasibility of reanimating cryogenically frozen brains in new bodies, equating such efforts to a "Hail Mary pass into the end zone of the future." He questions Randal Koene's attempts to code human consciousness into machines, and finds hilarity in the awkward creations of cyborg technologists in Pomona, Calif., who hope to impress upon the Department of Defense the benefits of employing automatons in war. O'Connell even hits the campaign trail--in a Wanderlodge painted to look like an oversized coffin--with Zoltan Istvan, the transhumanist presidential candidate who wants to draw attention to the cause.

This reliance on technology to correct human limitations fails to impress naysayers like Elon Musk, who worries about the risks and ethics regarding superhuman-level artificial intelligence, and sees AI as "our greatest existential threat." O'Connell acknowledges and addresses their concerns, while also highlighting the similarities between transhumanism and Gnosticism--both believe in the redemption of humanity through the liberation of the body. The irony of transhumanism as a replacement for religion is not lost on O'Connell, whose insights are profound and introspective, but told with humor and healthy doses of skepticism and wonder. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant

In 19 laugh-out-loud stories, Marie-Louise Gay (Princess Pistachio; Stella and Sam series) takes a look at what goes through the incredible minds of children (and worms and cats...). The perfect first "chapter" (each chapter is a single two-page spread, often with panels and speech bubbles, à la graphic novels) sets the stage for the glorious stories to come. A girl begs to tell her impatient older brother what she sees when she closes her eyes. When he finally sighs and tells her to go ahead, she lets loose with a fantastical wordless scene of pink polka-dotted elephants, giant birds and trees made out of clocks. "Hurry up! We're late," says her brother, but the girl is blissfully oblivious. Subsequent chapters reveal the inside of a snail's shell when one snail comes calling on another: a cozy home with armchairs, pots of tea, throw rugs, bookshelves and pleasant conversation. In Zombie Mom, a pair of siblings discover the terrible truth: that mothers can see through ceilings when mischief is happening. And in What Do Trees Talk About?, readers are treated to a forest full of griping ("Yuck! My skin is so dry and white. It feels like paper!"), giggling ("[The bunnies are] tickling me again!"), gossiping ("Orange hair!! What next?") trees.

Gay is masterful in her ability to climb into the imaginary worlds of children. Part Calvin and Hobbes, part Far Side, Short Stories for Little Monsters is elevated to a higher plane by her lovely watercolor and collage cartoon-style illustrations. Every story is quirky, beautiful, funny and true. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor