Jamie Ford (Songs of Willow Frost) finds inspiration in lost history. For Love and Other Consolation Prizes, the spark came from newspaper articles about a baby raffled off at the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition of 1909. That startling event ignites into a grand, somewhat unconventional love story in the hands of this master.

Ernest Young is five when his destitute mother sends him to the United States. She hopes her son will have a better chance there than in China. His American life starts out fairly well as a charity student in a boarding school, but takes a sharp turn at 12 when he learns he's a raffle prize at the Seattle World's Fair. The woman possessing the winning ticket is a notorious madam at the Tenderloin, a high-class brothel, where Ernest becomes the houseboy and finds the first situation resembling a family--albeit unusual--that's he's ever experienced.

Ford alternates between 1962 when Seattle is preparing for a second World's Fair and half a century earlier, during Ernest's youth at the Tenderloin. As the second global exposition approaches, Ernest is trying to help Grace, his wife, whose memory has all but deteriorated. In flashbacks to their mutual life at the Tenderloin, Ernest rediscovers the woman he loves but knows, "Memories are narcotic.... Too much and they become dangerous. Too much and they'll stop your heart."

Tender and honest, Love and Other Consolation Prizes unearths compassion and humanity in an unusual corner of Seattle. Every reader will come away a little richer. --Jen Forbus, freelancer

Guy Bolton's debut noir mystery, The Pictures, is a hardboiled delight: a fascinating, twisted puzzler with well-developed characters. It's 1939, and Los Angeles police detective Jonathan Craine is a Hollywood studio "fixer"--covering up domestic abuses, back-alley abortions, illicit affairs and drunken car crashes that might tarnish the reputations of movie stars and executives employed by the city's biggest and most profitable industry: the movie studios. After months away from his post following the suicide of his actress wife (spun as a "dreadful accident"), Craine is immediately embroiled in two crimes that threaten the production of The Wizard of Oz.

Called to the scene of a young woman's brutal murder, Craine's kneejerk reaction is to downplay the savage violence at the scene and instead reframe the crime as a botched robbery. The following morning, MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer summons him to help cover up the suicide of Herbert Stanley, a producer and husband to one of the studio's biggest stars, Gale Goodwin. When Craine is paired with rookie detective Patrick O'Neill (who has his own issues as the son of a famous police officer), Craine begins to awaken from his grief and complacency. Instead of brushing aside inconsistencies in the two cases, the two detectives decide to investigate the seedy links between the deaths.

The Pictures is a compelling and dazzling debut for fans of Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy. Bolton's tightly paced mystery vividly re-creates 1930s Hollywood and is enriched with complicated, fascinating and flawed characters. --Kevin Howell, independent reviewer and marketing consultant

As the titular character in Rene Denfeld's The Child Finder, Naomi does exactly what her job description says: find missing children. Madison disappeared three years earlier, at the age of five, and her parents have approached Naomi. The family was in Oregon's Skookum National Forest to cut down a Christmas tree when the little girl walked away--and seemingly off the edge of the Earth. It's impossible for Madison to have survived in the wilds and frigid cold by herself...

The story alternates between Naomi's point of view and Madison's, although Madison has been calling herself the snow girl, after her favorite fairy tale. The child's living conditions--more like survival conditions--are disturbing, but her resilience is a marvel and Denfeld uses restraint in describing the most difficult scenes.

Besides Madison's case, and another one involving a mother incarcerated because she can't remember how her baby disappeared, Naomi must also confront mysteries in her past. She was found at the edge of the woods when she was nine and has no clear memories of what came before. Haunted by what she doesn't know, and believing her work is atonement for something, Naomi wonders why people have children when it means potentially opening themselves to so much pain. But while Child Finder is indeed gut-wrenching, its compassion goes a long way toward healing readers' aching hearts, showing that love is always a risk worth taking. --Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, blogger at Pop Culture Nerd

Deep in the forest near Washington's Puget Sound, goblins lurk in the tree canopy, ready to ensnare and enchant anyone foolish enough to follow one of their magical paths. At dusk in winter, Skye ventures into the woods and becomes cursed by the goblins, leaving her depressed and unable to speak about what happened to her. The only one who might understand is the local auto mechanic and chainsaw artist, Kit, who carries his own ancestral goblin curse. But Kit is afraid to speak up for fear of the ridicule he might receive from Skye's sister, Livy, who has cast her own type of spell on him. Entangled in magic with these three is Kit's cousin, Grady, who falls for Skye, thanks to the goblins' curse on her. Together, the foursome must defeat these ancient creatures or lose two of their own to the horrible beasts that have staked out territory among the local fae spirits.

Molly Ringle has loosely based her paranormal romance on Christina Rossetti's sensual poem "Goblin Market," and has created a vivid and enjoyable erotic romp through the world of magical beings. Human rules don't pertain to these tricksters, yet human feelings and emotions abound as Ringle's characters face some of their worst fears. Excellent descriptions of local settings, flora and fauna help place readers in the wintry world of the Pacific Northwest, where magic and love reside among the tall Douglas firs and waters of the sound. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer

Bill James is a savant of baseball statistics and probabilities. When he stumbled upon the unsolved 1912 axe killing of a Villasca, Iowa, family of eight, the lifelong Kansan began to comb newspaper archives for similar crimes in the southern Midwest. One unsolved grisly murder led to another until James put aside baseball to enlist his daughter's help to research every remotely similar case.

The Man from the Train is the story of their work mapping historical crimes and logging the key repeating elements of the murders. Working backward in time from 1912, they uncovered almost 100 killings that fit the pattern. They statistically categorized and tracked the incidents from Texas to Nova Scotia, convinced that the slaughters were the work of one man who traveled by local trains to and from the scenes. And they were confident that modern tools of forensics, coupled with the Internet's deep data, statistical analysis and their persistence would turn up the identity of the serial killer. Remarkably, they were right.

As one might expect from someone who has built a career out of replacing anecdotal baseball scripture with statistical analysis, James chronicles crime scene after crime scene with a methodical storytelling flair. As he ends an early chapter, "I will explain what I believe happened and why I believe that, and you can decide whether you agree or disagree. Perhaps, until then, you will be kind enough to suspend judgment? Appreciate it." As readers follow along with the authors' true-crime sleuthing, they're apt to become convinced. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

In preparation for writing Nomadland, journalist Jessica Bruder immersed herself in a new American subculture: the houseless. These "vandwellers" are individuals and families who for myriad reasons have ended up on wheels. Far from carefree RVers, these are folks for whom the American dream has been a con, and they make ends meet by doing itinerant work across the country.

The practice of giving up real estate for "wheel estate" has increased exponentially in recent years, following stock market crashes, the housing crisis and increasing economic risks faced by American families. Having to choose between food or electricity, health care or warm clothes, these nomads live in converted vans, campers, even Priuses. Many thrive while surviving day-to-day, but being a "workamper" is no easy ride.

Skewing older (many are in their 60s or 70s and have lost their retirement funds) and subject to "harsh migrant labor treatment," they are nevertheless sought-after workers due to their experience and reliability. Amazon has unsurprisingly taken advantage of this shadow economy, setting up company towns and recruiting its own "Camperforce," for whom long, difficult hours and low pay are the reward.

Joining them in Halen--a converted van (the subculture is strong with vehicle puns)--Bruder became intimately knowledgeable about this often heartwarming mobile community that blurs class lines. She writes with a steady and thoughtful hand about the frightening consequences when long-held social contracts are breached and upheaval becomes the new American normal, and exposes their underbelly with grace and heart. --Lauren O'Brien of Malcolm Avenue Review

Adapted from a series of lectures she gave in 2016, The Origin of Others showcases Toni Morrison's powerful discussion of race late in her career. Winner of countless awards, including the Nobel Prize, Morrison is firmly established as one of the greatest writers in American literature. Here she examines her own writing and that of others, in an attempt to explain her work in the face of the systemic racism that defines the United States.

Morrison begins The Origin of Others with a story about her childhood, when her great-grandmother commented on the color of Morrison's skin. "These children have been tampered with," the woman claims to Morrison's mother. "My great-grandmother was tar black, and my mother knew precisely what she meant: we, her children... were sullied, not pure." Using the idea of her own racial impurity as a stepping stone, Morrison discusses the false science used to support 19th-century racism, how the othering of blacks serves self-absolution by whites, and how her novels have tried to explore these concepts. While the lecture begins anecdotally, it is much less of a memoir than a treatise, carefully peeling back layers of history and social norms to show deep rot inside American society. It's fitting that the foreword is written by Ta-Nehisi Coates, who has brilliantly taken up the mantle of cultural critic that Morrison has epitomized for so many years. Having him as part of this project underscores Morrison's arguments: that racial concepts from earlier in history are appearing in new forms, and must still be attended to. --Noah Cruickshank, adult engagement manager, the Field Museum, Chicago, Ill.

Modern family farming is the subject of This Blessed Earth by Ted Genoways (The Chain). Genoways follows the Hammond family, who mostly tolerate him as they work long, hard days farming grain and raising beef cattle, struggle through intergenerational conflicts over daily operations and future plans, and sit with him telling stories of their lives and community.

Grain farming is a terrible yearly gamble with the weather and the markets. High crop yields were the traditional goal, but can now mean disastrously low prices for "commodity grains"--corn and soybeans. The Hammonds oppose the Keystone XL pipeline because it endangers the aquifer they count on for irrigation; it also cuts through their property, lowering their crop yields. This loses them the goodwill of their neighbor and landlord, and they forfeit even more acreage as a result. Between his scenes with the Hammond family, Genoways tells the history of U.S. agricultural policy, the drive to settle the West, government investments in extension programs, weather stations and subsidies, the role of Henry Ford in developing soybean farming, and how grain has been used as a political tool since the 1970s with little regard for those who grow it. Farmers have been running to stand still with only occasional success for a long time now. Genoways makes it clear that if Americans want our food production system to change, we will have to make broad new investments in our support of the people who grow it and modifications to the government policies that drive their working lives. --Sara Catterall

Eighteen-year-old Emika Chen is on her own in near-future New York, barely scraping out a living as a bounty hunter and about to be evicted for being late on rent. Like just about everyone else in the world, she wraps herself up in Warcross, an immersive video game that's like capture the flag with elaborate fantasy worlds and super powers. When Emika hacks into the opening ceremony of the annual championship tournament, she is spotted by Hideo Tanaka, the enigmatic genius who invented the technology, and is recruited for the bounty hunt of her life.

A former video game designer, author Marie Lu (Legend; The Young Elites) peppers the book with gamer culture, including a nod to World of Warcraft's infamous Leeroy Jenkins incident. Emika is a satisfying heroine: she's resourceful and tough with a strong sense of what's right mixed with the grim practicality of a life of poverty. The bright imagery and breakneck pace of the game world will draw readers in, but it's the book's gray areas that will keep them involved. Emika's late father is a touchstone--memories of him telling her that "every locked door has a key" keep her going more than once--but she's clear-eyed about his drinking and gambling addiction. And after chapters of nail-biting action, the book's climax serves up a wallop of a question: Is it possible to try so hard to do good that you end up doing harm? This book will eat your free time until you finish, but it's worth it. --Ali Davis, freelance writer and playwright