The multi-aliased narrator of Katherine Faw's raunchy but cerebral Ultraluminous throws the heart-of-gold hooker cliché out the window. A high-end prostitute, she services only wealthy finance kingpins, one for each weekday--johns identified only by their habits and habitats, like the "junk-bond guy," the "art guy" and the "calf's brain guy." At home on the streets of her native New York City, she is freshly returned from a decade in Dubai, where she honed her trade while living with a bomb-making boyfriend she calls "the Sheikh." Faw's plot, such as it is, consists of snippets of the narrator's days and nights suggesting a pattern of sex, Duane Reade sushi, flirting with her branded heroin delivery guy, cherry bombs at a cop bar, galleries, mani-pedis, more sex, yoga, shopping at Time Warner Center and pierogis at a Polish diner. Beneath this circadian mosaic, however, is an inner life of ennui and resentment toward her clients. When she hooks up (for love) with a troubled "ex-Army Ranger guy" who has a closet full of guns, her path begins its turn toward what becomes an inevitable destructive conclusion.

Raised middle class in Wilkesboro, N.C., Faw was an outlaw kid with a taste for drugs and punk rock--which she worked to great effect in her spunky first novel, Young God, featuring a precocious 13-year-old Appalachian drug-dealing girl. Ultraluminous is equally daring with its balance of the crude and the lyrical, the routine with the kinky. It is a compact, piercing portrait of a woman taking charge of her unorthodox life. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Teddi Lerner fled Chance, Ohio, after the funeral of her best friend, Celia, six years ago. Although she has created a very successful career as a wedding photographer in San Francisco, Teddi is still lonely. She burned a lot of bridges the night she left Chance, and hasn't kept in touch with any of her family or friends, except for Celia's daughter, Shayna. But her father, Miles, is getting remarried, and Shayna, now 12, is begging Teddi to come back to Chance to photograph her dad's wedding.

Teddi absolutely does not want to; she hates to think of Miles married to anyone but Celia. But she can't tell Shay no, so she reluctantly heads back to Chance. And there, to her surprise, she will discover new truths about herself, Miles, Shay and many more residents of Chance.

Exploring friendship and how grief twists some people apart and brings others closer together, Left to Chance is a thoughtful, gently paced look at how dramatically loss can change people. Amy Sue Nathan (The Glass Wives) has created a pleasant cast of small-town characters, a believably moody and nuanced preteen in Shay and a confused yet likable heroine in Teddi. A little romantic, and a bit sad, Left to Chance is a perfectly heartwarming tale about finding oneself and returning home again. Fans of Lauren Willig and Kristin Harmel are sure to enjoy this quietly gratifying story and its quirky little town.--Jessica Howard, bookseller at Bookmans, Tucson

"I remember the gunshots made a wet sort of sound, phssh phssh phssh, and each time he hit her she screamed.... I just stood there and watched." That is quite an opening. The shock and tension could be difficult to sustain, but not for Christopher Yates (Black Chalk). The hits, metaphorical and physical, keep coming in this story of three young friends in 1982--Patrick, Matthew and Hannah--and what happens 26 years later.

When Patrick, known as Patch, was 12, he watched while Matthew repeatedly shot Hannah, who was tied to a tree. With the 49th and final BB shot through her eye, he declared her dead and left. But Patch realized that she was not dead and had not seen him, so he untied her and helped her down the hill.

In 2008, Hannah is a crime reporter in New York and married to Patch, who has lost his job in finance. As tough as Hannah is professionally, she relies on Patch to get her through her nightmares: "Don't let him hurt me.... You promise you won't let him hurt me?" He always comforts her, but doesn't promise--how can he, when he broke the promise 26 years ago? He's waited his whole life to make amends, to become the hero, but his life is now unwinding.

As for Matthew, he says, "Truth is seldom a lens, truth is a kaleidoscope, and I have my truth, too." Given three realities, Christopher Yates asks: What is truth? What is redemption? In the stunning Grist Mill Road, the answers are disorienting and surprising. --Marilyn Dahl

Jack Pellum is a former police detective in Michigan whose life was shattered when his wife, Olivia, was murdered 18 months earlier. Since then he's been posting flyers around town that ask whether anyone has seen a man in a crooked hat, a stranger Pellum spotted in his neighborhood shortly before his wife's death. The sighting happened at night, and that description is about all he has. Unsurprisingly, it hasn't yielded useful leads.

But after a local author commits suicide and leaves behind a cryptic note about a man in a crooked hat, someone contacts Pellum with new information. The caller claims not only to have seen the hatted man when his own mother was killed years earlier, but also to have files of other cases, dating back 20 years, in which witnesses reported seeing a similar man before someone died mysteriously. Pellum embarks on a mission to determine if the cases are related and finally to avenge his wife's death.

Though Pellum's search takes him a while, readers know right away who Harry Dolan's The Man in the Crooked Hat is--he's identified in the very first sentence. It's the mark of a confident author who believes he doesn't need to withhold the murderer's identity to engage his readers, and Dolan is right. The surprises lie in how Pellum catches up to the killer, the humane portrait of a man who's committed horrific acts, and in characters coming out the other side of grief to find they're still capable of hope. --Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, blogger at Pop Culture Nerd

For longtime foodie and New Yorker staff writer Jane Kramer, cooking and writing are inextricably linked: a good essay parallels a satisfying dish in both composition and process. "The cooking that helps my writing is slow cooking," Kramer writes in the titular essay of her collection The Reporter's Kitchen. "You take control of your ingredients so that whatever it is you're making doesn't run away with you." For mental clarity, Kramer believes, "there is nothing to equal a couscous steaming in its colander pot, with the smell of cumin and coriander rising with the steam."

This assortment of Kramer's incisive, vivid New Yorker pieces is a veritable buffet: chef profiles (of Claudia Roden, Yotam Ottolenghi and others), musings on restaurants and food history (including a review of Bee Wilson's Consider the Fork), notes on foraging for Norwegian sea-grass and personal essays about her culinary experiences. Readers may recognize themselves in Kramer's admission, "I love cookbooks. I am addicted to them," and share her delight in the piles of them on her bedside table and her study's floor. Kramer's appetite for every aspect of food and food writing--interviewing a chef, hunting down an exotic ingredient, trying an elaborate recipe or pulling off an American Thanksgiving dinner in Italy (in July!)--is contagious. "There is a strong connection between women who write and women who cook and love recipes," she notes. Fortunately for her readers, Kramer is both, and her essays (like many good meals) at once whet and satisfy. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Forty-odd years ago, Stevie Nicks, the "Fairy Godmother of Rock," seemed to emerge from nowhere with a song about an old Welsh witch, "Rhiannon." The song has since become a classic, one of the most popular songs Nicks ever recorded with the British band Fleetwood Mac. With reverent care, Stephen Davis (Hammer of the Gods, about Led Zeppelin) closely examines Nicks's formative years, the struggles of her early, ascendant career, and how her emotionally charged affiliation with Fleetwood Mac changed her life. Her music--popular songs that deal with memories, dreams, romance, regret and the passing of time--corresponds to important aspects of the singer-songwriter's life. With that in mind, Davis deconstructs the music to trace Nicks's childhood and musical roots. He analyzes her tumultuous relationship with guitarist Lindsey Buckingham, and her cocaine-infused heyday in Fleetwood Mac, complete with juicy dramas about romantic entanglements in the band and affairs she had with others, including rock stars Don Henley and Joe Walsh. Furthermore, Davis considers the forces that ultimately empowered Nicks to take the leap and launch a solo career.

Meticulously presented details are fortified by quotes from Nicks, her family and friends and other musical cohorts. Davis documents, in depth, the influences--good and bad, the mystical and magical--that shaped the rock legend. He details how personal experiences of love, heartbreak and loss directly contributed to her astounding success and longevity in the limelight. Fans of Fleetwood Mac and Stevie Nicks will find much to savor in this intimate, comprehensive biography. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

Darryl W. Bullock's David Bowie Made Me Gay is a comprehensive, illuminating and entertaining celebration of LGBT singers, composers, producers and musicians who created music over the last century. Bullock enhances these mini-biographies by placing them in context with historic advancements and setbacks in the quest for gay civil rights.

"Written histories have tended to straightwash the stories of the female pioneers of the blues," writes Bullock before correcting accounts of Bessie Smith, Gertrude 'Ma' Rainey and Billie Holiday in the 1920s and '30s. Bullock then profiles Noël Coward, Marlene Dietrich and Cole Porter. (Porter's 1941 song "Farming" is the first pop song to use the word "gay" to mean "homosexual.") The 1950s brings scandal sheets, arrests and lawsuits (amazingly, Liberace sued two newspapers who hinted he was gay and he won money from both publications).

Things loosen up in the 1960s when Little Richard, Lesley Gore and Dusty Springfield came out to the press. And while the Who's Pete Townshend and the Kinks' Dave Davies didn't come out until the '90s, they were both writing popular queer-themed songs in the 1960s. Bullock also covers multiple musicians in chapters on specific genres like women's music (Janis Ian, Joan Armatrading, Holly Near), country (Ty Herndon, Chely Wright and Drake Jensen) and disco (Village People, Sylvester, Divine, Jacques Morali). Bullock's sensational reference guide uncovers a lot of fascinating and unfamiliar queer history and shares it in an entertaining and breezy style. --Kevin Howell, independent reviewer and marketing consultant

Like most scientific disciplines, geology was founded largely by wealthy gentlemen. But according to Brenda Maddox's fascinating new history, Reading the Rocks: How Victorian Geologists Discovered the Secret of Life, 19th-century women and clergymen changed the field forever with their findings.

Among the highlights is the chapter on Mary Anning, a girl of "low social class and poverty" who made her first discovery in 1811, at the age of 12. She sold her fossils, Maddox writes, to keep her mother "out of the poorhouse." She died at the age of 47 from breast cancer and was subsequently all but forgotten until the 21st century, when the scientific community began to recognize her enormous contributions to the field.

Equally intriguing is the chapter on Reverend William Buckland, remembered as much for his "popular and humorous" lectures and outlandish parties as his scientific discoveries. "Hedgehog and crocodile," writes Maddox "were among the delicacies he fed his guests.... He even claimed to have eaten the heart of King Louis XVI." Each of these outsider scientists, Maddox argues, contributed not only to our understanding of Earth's past, but to the body of knowledge needed to formalize evolutionary theory, which, in the Victorian era, "was still unmentionable in polite scientific society."

The author of five celebrated biographies (including those of Elizabeth Taylor and W.B. Yeats), Maddox brings each scientist to life, in all their failure and glory. Reading the Rocks is an invaluable addition to the literature of the history of science. --Amy Brady, freelance writer and critic

For Corey, Lost Creek, Alaska, population 246, is home. Reachable only by tiny plane or a single road and "[s]urrounded by nothing for miles," the members of the community are kept company by only "each other and the deep blue of twilight."

Corey fit perfectly into the framework of Lost, where "unpredictability has never been good." Her best friend Kyra, though, made the people of Lost nervous. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder, Kyra had manic episodes in which she "could lose herself in the woods for days." Although Kyra mostly maintains herself through mania by painting, the people of Lost are convinced she's dangerous. At least, that's how it was seven months ago, when Corey left Lost to attend boarding school. The two best friends lost touch--Kyra sent letters, Corey didn't respond--and now Kyra is dead.

Corey flies back to Lost, desperate to find out what happened to her friend, assuming the worst. But things have changed. The town now speaks about Kyra with something akin to adoration. "Lost gave her purpose," Kyra's mother tells Corey. "It set her heart and mind alight." Corey, on the other hand, is being treated like an outsider and a traitor. She has only five days before her flight leaves to figure out what happened: Why is the town speaking about Kyra as though she were a prophet? Was it suicide--or murder? And how are fresh salmonberry flowers blooming in the middle of January?

The claustrophobic, dark setting--along with disembodied voices, cultish townspeople and whispers of the supernatural--gives Before I Let Go a foreboding and intensely creepy feel. Short chapters and temporal switches hurtle this subtly terrifying mystery along, leaving readers as disturbed and desperate for answers as the frightened protagonist. --Siân Gaetano, editor children's and YA, Shelf Awareness