Noah Hawley's fourth novel, The Good Father, mingles psychodrama and political intrigue in a story that raises questions about the scope of parental responsibility. When an adult child's life takes a horribly wrong turn, how much is the parent at fault? Can a parent have too much blind faith in a child--and can that "blind faith" be a willful blindness to the parent's own failings?

Dr. Paul Allen's eldest son, Daniel--the child of his first marriage, which has been over for 13 years--dropped out of college months ago. Although his phone calls have been infrequent and his whereabouts uncertain since then, Paul wants to believe he's doing okay. But then a TV news report shows Daniel being captured by Secret Service agents after a presidential candidate is shot--and Daniel makes a full confession not long after. Paul can't believe that Daniel actually committed this act; his intense search for the truth begins to undermine his second family and his own sense of self.

Although Paul's efforts to comprehend the incomprehensible are what drive the story, the mysteries of The Good Father are psychological rather than plot-driven, as Hawley roots out emotional truths in a father's struggle for acceptance and a son's misdirected search for identity. At the same time, Hawley's background in TV crime drama (including Bones) contributes to well-paced storytelling that never gets bogged down in its complex emotional underpinnings. --Florinda Pendley Vasquez, blogger at The 3 R's Blog: Reading, 'Riting, and Randomness

Amara Lakhous, the author of Clash of Civilizations over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio, has written another Roman comedy, Divorce Islamic Style, with a similar cast of immigrant characters in a neighborhood of "the Italy of the future," crowded with illegal Africans and Arabs.

Christian Mazzari, a young Sicilian who speaks perfect Arabic, has been hired by the Italian secret service to pose as "a young Tunisian immigrant in search of his fortune." Terrorists have imported 50 kilos of the explosive Goma-2 Eco into Rome, and it's been traced to a neighborhood call center named Little Cairo. Christian has been given a new identity as Issa.

The story unfolds in alternating first-person narratives. Although Christian/Issa is charming, it's Muslim housewife Safia who steals the show. Her humorous candor is illuminating, as she defends a religion she believes in while struggling with its strictures on women. A few days before her wedding, her fiancé surprised her by asking her to wear the veil. When outraged Safia refused, his family threatened to ruin her reputation by saying she wasn't a virgin. To her own surprise, Safia comes to accept and ultimately defend the veil as her right. Watching the two narratives intersect is half the fun.

Amara Lakhous's frothy soap opera tap-dances its way over touchy prejudices to create an international commedia for the age of terrorism, laced with tributes to Federico Fellini, Vittorio De Sica, Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni--a heartwarming tale of immigrants in collision served up with Italian gusto. --Nick DiMartino, Nick's Picks, University Book Store, Seattle

Who is Constance Harding? She's a conservative Englishwoman obsessed with her pet parrot and fervently passionate about church bell choir. Constance signs her (clearly gay) son up for a heterosexual dating service and bakes her sullen teenage daughter fairy cakes in a failed attempt at bonding; she's also clueless to that fact that her housekeeper may be doing more than just her husband's laundry.

But in Ceri Radford's debut novel, A Surrey State of Affairs, we simply can't help but like this daffy character. With her unappreciative grown children and cad of a husband--who won't even accept her friendship on Facebook--you'll find yourself rooting for Constance to have a Bridget Jones-like pivotal moment of transformation. The kindhearted Constance, freshly baked shortbread in hand, marches through suburbia, trying to improve the lives of those around her. Her schemes are often misguided, however, causing you to spout Earl Grey out your nose.

Though Constance is a throwback to another time, she is modern in one respect--she's started a blog. The story is told through this device, making readers privy to the inner workings of Constance's mind, which lends Radford's tale a delightful confessional tone.

This may be chick lit for married women, but it's still the most hilarious book you will read all year. The clinging-to-tradition Constance could be your mother or your aunt but, honestly, in our attempts to adjust to a modern world that sometimes seems to be spinning out of control, there's a little bit of Constance in all of us. --Natalie Papailiou, author of blog MILF: Mother I'd Like to Friend

Private investigator Maisie Dobbs has come a long way from the gritty Lambeth streets of her childhood over the course of Jacqueline Winspear's previous eight novels. But when five former colleagues of her father's visit Maisie's office at the start of Elegy for Eddie, they bring her a case that hits close to home. Gentle Eddie Pettit, a little "slow" but a gifted handler of horses beloved by his neighbors, has been killed, and his friends believe it was no accident.

The case leads Maisie from the paper factory where Eddie died to the library of a press mogul whose newspapers may be reporting some facts and hiding others. London in 1933 is clinging to an uneasy peace, still bearing scars from the Great War. But Adolf Hitler has been named chancellor of Germany, and a politician named Winston Churchill is urging the nation to stay alert. As Maisie searches for Eddie's killer, she wonders who was manipulating this innocent man--and what sensitive information they were trying to hide.

Maisie never solves a case without also facing a personal issue; this time, she confronts the growing tension in her relationship with James Compton, whose family once employed her as a maid. Although class distinctions (and Maisie's fortunes) have shifted since the war, she struggles to balance her working-class roots with her more comfortable present and her desire to solve the problems of her loved ones.

Like its predecessors, Elegy for Eddie combines an intriguing mystery with richly detailed history, and a determined heroine seeking justice for her clients and peace for herself. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Retired FBI agent Gregor Demarkian is back with another deceptively tricky mystery in Blood in the Water, the 27th novel in Jane Haddam's series. Struggling with a recent loss in his personal life, we find Gregor ruminating on the irrationality of death and the inevitable progression of time when he is suddenly approached by the Pineville Station police department. Two bodies have been discovered in the elite, gated community of Waldorf Pines and an unexpected DNA result has left local forces completely at a loss. Gregor is forced to contend with small-town ineptitude, monstrous egos and upper-middle-class hypocrisy to get to the bottom of this case of not exactly mistaken identity.

Despite the fact that the plot hinges on a less than shocking twist, Haddam writes an engaging, plausible mystery. Her real strength, though, is in succinct and evocative character portraits. Haddam populates Waldorf Pines with the kind of narrow-minded, socially conscious but apparently harmless people we've all had as neighbors, but under the surface run seams of dangerous ignorance and violent egotism. Perhaps most disturbing is the neighborhood tyrant, Walter Dunbar, whose calm detachment and self-righteousness as he imagines grinding his wife's face beneath his heel when she irritates him is truly frightening. With such a varied cast of suspects, it's little wonder that the good men and women of the Pineville police force had to call in specialized help! All in all, Blood in the Water is a solid addition to a tried and tested series. --Judie Evans, librarian

Ashes to Dust is Yrsa Sigurdardottir's third thriller starting Icelandic lawyer Thóra Gudmundsdóttir. A busy single mother and recent grandmother, Thóra thought she had taken on a relatively simple new case: her client, Markús Magnússon, engaged her to help him stop excavations into his family's former home, which had been buried under a volcanic eruption along with most of the Westmann Islands 30 years ago, when Markús was just a teenager.

But it turns out that what Markús didn't want the archeologists to discover was a cardboard box containing a human head. A girl named Alda, whom Markús had had a crush on, asked him to hide the box for her the day before the eruption. To complicate the gruesome situation: the basement also contains three complete bodies, which Markús claims he had never seen before. The four dead men couldn't be Icelandic--the country's population is so small they would've been missed--so the search is on to find out who the victims were. As Thóra is learning the hard way, though, Iceland's small, insular society has a long memory and is good at keeping secrets.

As Thóra attempts to clear her client's name, she seeks out Alda--who turns up dead, an apparent suicide. Now no one can back up Markús's story, unless Thóra can convince the islanders to finally come clean about what happened just prior to that eruption three decades earlier. As Thóra's investigation continues, surprising truths emerge, and Ashes to Dust will keep you guessing until its last few pages. --Jessica Howard, blogger at Quirky Bookworm

Unlike some Jewish commentators who are highly critical of Israel's policies toward Palestinians in the West Bank, Peter Beinart, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, is a committed Zionist. He contends that nearly 45 years after it began, the occupation of the West Bank endangers the liberal Zionist vision that animated the formation of the Jewish state. For him, "Israel's legitimacy is bound up with its democratic character," a perspective antithetical to those who harbor a "dream in which Jewish ethics no longer hinder Jewish power."

Beinart makes a persuasive case that Zionism's future is at risk from two segments of American Jewry: Orthodox Jews tolerant of Israeli policies he considers antidemocratic, and other Jews whose connection to their heritage is so tenuous as to lead them to indifference. He urges "American Jews most committed to democratic values [to] remain Jews and pass Judaism on to their children." To that end, he argues for increased enrollment in Jewish parochial schools, even proposing support for something resembling tuition vouchers. That view is unlikely to garner much support among his liberal cohort, and his suggestion that those who want to ratchet up the pressure of the BDS (boycott, divest from and sanction) movement to reform Israel's policies refuse to purchase goods and services produced in the territories (which he prefers to call "nondemocratic Israel") is also bound to provoke harsh criticism.

Beinart's argument is passionate, but his tone is sorrowful, not belligerent. His perspective, he believes, offers the last, best hope for the preservation of a liberal democratic Israel that most American Jews can eagerly support. A critic as intelligent and thoughtful as this deserves a serious audience for his perspective. --Harvey Freedenberg

With thousands of versions of the Passover Haggadah in existence, it's fair to ask whether we need yet another one to narrate the familiar story of the Jewish people's exodus from Egypt. Even a cursory perusal of the striking New American Haggadah created by Jonathan Safran Foer and Nathan Englander provides an enthusiastic affirmative answer to that question.

As Foer puts it in his introduction, the Passover seder is not meant to be a dry recitation of distant historic events. Instead, the essence of the ritual is to make the ancient story come alive for the participants in a "radical act of empathy." To help achieve that goal, in addition to Englander's fresh translation of the traditional narrative, at key points in its text the New American Haggadah delivers concise, lively commentaries by journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, Jewish scholar Nathaniel Deutsch, philosopher/novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein and even Lemony Snicket.

Among the most distinctive features of the book is the striking design of Israeli artist Oded Ezer. The Hebrew calligraphy that graces the book subtly shifts throughout, a "graphic record of Jewish history" corresponding to the style prevalent at each era, noted in Mia Sara Bruch's timeline of more than 3,200 years of Jewish life running along the top margins of each page.

Foer and Englander's handsome work is unlikely to replace the proliferation of wine-stained Haggadot that will be thumbed lovingly when families gather around the Seder table. But it should find its way into many Jewish homes, there to become a cherished heirloom for generations to come. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer

"[Cats] know us better than we know them, and a lot of them have a sense of humor. They're exactly like us minus our useless mental power and thumbs." This wisdom from a friend of Bob Tarte sums up Kitty Cornered, which examines the feline aspects of the Tartes' Michigan household as it grew from one to six cats--some entering their lives via happenstance, others by design.

Tarte (Enslaved by Ducks; Fowl Weather) is a wry, engaging storyteller who profiles the idiosyncrasies of each cat and their ever-changing roles in the domestic hierarchy. This includes his efforts to woo Lucy, a rescued alpha cat and surly biter who lacks affection for both the Tartes and the rest of her cat mates, such as Moonbeam (aka "Moobie"), an aging snow-white cat suffering a tumor and vexed by an Elizabethan collar, and Frannie, a traumatized feral stray who plays an emotional tug-of-war with Bob's sympathies.

Beyond the heartwarming humorous stories of litter box mishaps, scuffles, sleep disturbances, food conundrums, cat carrier challenges, vet bills, damaged property and tattered psyches, profound insights emerge into the soul connection between domestic animals and the people who willingly share their lives--and love--with them. Tarte illustrates how cats are complicated creatures, "more intelligent than most people." The attentiveness (or lack thereof) of his four-legged family ultimately teaches Bob, a self-proclaimed anxious person, lessons about trust, patience, tenacity, socialization, resilience, contentment and even healing. -- Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

Be afraid, parents. Be very afraid. Whether you're currently suffering through your teen's angst-filled years, already made it through the war, or will one day be facing a time when your adorable toddler morphs into an obnoxious specimen of the teen persuasion, I've Had It Up to Here with Teenagers is a must-have. Teenagers might also get a kick out of Melinda Rainey Thompson's book, although according to her they would express their approval by rolling their eyes and pronouncing it "doesn't suck" before retreating to their iPhones.

Rainey Thompson, with her trademark Southern charm and saucy down-home lingo, takes a frank look at the moody, fridge-raiding prima donnas for whom she does mounds of laundry, chauffeurs around town and bakes endless pound cake. She leads by example, showing, not telling, her methods of taming these teenage beasts, and it's a mighty welcome wake-up call to indulgent parents who simply want to be their children's best friends instead of doing the hard work of being a parent.

It's clear that Rainey Thompson loves her teenage children fiercely. (After all, she devoted an entire book to them.) But she cares about them enough to commit to raising them up into loving, responsible adults--which means she's not always the most popular mom. Her exasperated children will thank her one day for teaching them how to dress appropriately and arrive home by curfew. We can thank her now because her tales of life with teens are horrifyingly uproarious. --Natalie Papailiou, author of blog MILF: Mother I'd Like to Friend

Devoted readers of McKay's Casson books (Saffy's Angel; Caddy Ever After) will welcome this installment, and newcomers will be swept up in the lives of this captivating English family. The novel looks back to Caddy Casson's 12th year, when many changes in her life (and those of her three best friends) challenged her sense of security.

Each of the four friends, who started primary school together, contributes something to their alliance. "Alison... hates everyone./ Ruby is clever./ Beth. Perfect./ Caddy, the bravest of the brave." Secondary school brings change into their lives and the dynamics of their friendship. Alison trades conformity for detention. Ruby's test results put her on an intellectual fast track that separates her from her peers. Beth grows too tall for her pony. More important to Caddy is the premature birth of a baby sister, which keeps her mother in the hospital and prompts her father to move home full-time from his flat in London. Saffy and Indigo add to the family chaos. They seem to know everything their parents don't want revealed and are totally willing to tell all to the world. McKay combines all these elements in an exciting plot sprinkled with lots of tears but also scenes of laugh-out-loud humor. The ending may be bittersweet, but it's also very satisfying.

McKay's warm, charming family story will please fans of the previous five books, and will attract a new generation to enjoy them. --Ellen Loughran, consulting librarian