Readers of Patrick Taylor's long-running Irish Country saga (A Dublin Student Doctor) have been entertained by the daily dramas of life in 1960s Ulster. An Irish Country Family, the 14th entry in the series, finds Dr. Barry Laverty and his wife, Sue, struggling to start a family as Barry continues to work in Dr. Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly's medical practice in the village of Ballybucklebo. Meanwhile, a local vote on the use of a certain property is causing strong feelings among the villagers, while religious and political unrest throughout Ireland is making everyone equally nervous. As always, the community comes together to support its own, with plenty of gentle humor along the way.

Taylor intersperses his main narrative, set in 1969, with extended flashbacks set six years earlier, when Barry was a medical student learning to deal with the grueling realities of life on the hospital floor and the struggles of his patients. He falls in love with a student nurse, Virginia; develops a friendship with a patient, a man fighting gangrene; and takes part in the annual student play at the hospital. In the later narrative, Barry and Fingal share their medical duties with several other young doctors, while Barry and Sue face possible infertility and Fingal (as always) has his finger in multiple local pies. Taylor's gentle, engaging narrative is peopled with familiar characters, but newcomers to Ballybucklebo will catch up quickly and enjoy the charm and warmth of the tightly knit community. Taylor's Ireland is always a pleasure to visit. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Crime writer Lawrence Block would have made a great schoolteacher: he gives amazing homework assignments.

For From Sea to Stormy Sea: Seventeen Stories Inspired by Great American Paintings, he selected 30 of his favorite paintings by American artists and invited 17 writers to pick one to use as a springboard for a short story; the chosen artworks are reproduced in full color before each tale. (Block took a similar approach with his previous anthologies In Sunlight or in Shadow: Stories Inspired by the Paintings of Edward Hopper and Alive in Shape and Color: Seventeen Paintings by Great Artists and the Stories They Inspired.) While most of From Sea to Stormy Sea's contributors would list "crime writer" as their day job, the resulting collection isn't strictly a crime anthology: there's some dystopian fare and a couple of rom-com-ish pieces. Still, many stories do hinge on a feat of delicious duplicity.

In Brendan DuBois's "Adrift off the Diamond Shoals," as a hurricane brews, a man awaits a con artist at a pub named for Winslow Homer's Diamond Shoal. In Jan Burke's "Superficial Injuries," Andy Warhol's Thirteen Most Wanted Men may shed light on the identity of a woman's father. In "Girl with an Ax," John Sandford imagines that the woman featured in Thomas Hart Benton's Hollywood lives into her 90s and changes the fate of her down-on-her-luck young neighbor. Even if not every piece in From Sea to Stormy Sea is a masterpiece, it's overall a remarkable gallery show. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer

Readers first meet a calculating William Abbey in a World War I army hospital, under the care of an unassuming nurse. Thirty-three years earlier, William watched the lynching of a Zulu boy in Natal but did nothing to stop it. When the boy died, his mother looked at William and cursed him, making him a truth-speaker: he is pursued always by the boy's shadow, and the closer it gets, the more he perceives and is compelled to speak the truth that he sees in the hearts of others. If the shadow catches him, the person he loves the most will die.

In The Pursuit of William Abbey, Claire North (The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August) combines a sprawling epic of colonial wrongdoing with a tense espionage thriller. Naturally, the British Empire has uses for a truth-speaker, and because William must keep out of the shadow's reach, governmental support that can get him onto a fast train whenever he may need it is invaluable. In his travels, William meets other truth-speakers, with whom he forms bonds that go beyond the governments and causes which they serve.

In rich, compelling prose, North weaves together the threads of imperial control, ideological conviction, love and the thrill of power. Readers will remain eager to the end for answers regarding what brought William to that hospital, and what the nurse to whom he tells his story will do when the time comes for him to execute his plan. The Pursuit of William Abbey is a lyrical and sometimes surreal approach to espionage and its thrills. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library

Tessa Arlen is critically acclaimed for her Lady Montfort historical mysteries, set during World War I (Death of a Dishonorable Gentleman was a finalist for the 2016 Agatha Award for Best First Novel). She turns her attention to World War II with Poppy Redfern and the Midnight Murders, the first in a projected series. History buffs will delight in this deep-dive into a charming English village in 1942 that has been torn apart more by murders of young women than by the war at its doorstep.

Poppy Redfern, the village air raid warden, is an aspiring author. Similar to the deep internal monologue of Jacqueline Winspear's beloved Maisie Dobbs, Poppy's thoughts become an internal dialogue with the main character of her novel as she investigates the strangling of local women who have been dating American servicemen. As Poppy's fiction becomes increasingly reflective of her present, the two stories begin to run parallel. This quick read sets up the relationships in Little Buffenden, and the Redfern family's role in the village, as their land has been turned into the American air force airfield. It also races to an exciting conclusion, for both Poppy's development as a writer and for the killer--who may make Poppy the next victim. With her steady companion, a Corgi named Bess (dog fans will rejoice that Bess emerges mostly unscathed from the heart-pounding climax) at her side, Poppy faces the reality that life in fiction and in fact is becoming increasingly complicated during these tumultuous times. --BrocheAroe Fabian, owner, River Dog Book Co., Beaver Dam, Wis.

Eva Leigh (Dare to Love a Duke) is known for historical romance novels that employ multiple tropes and lots of shenanigans, and My Fake Rake is no different. Leigh opens the first book in her Union of the Rakes series with a set-up straight from the 1985 teen comedy The Breakfast Club. Five young men are sent to the equivalent of early 1800s detention at Eton College and, though they are wildly different from one another, they forge a lifelong bond of friendship.

My Fake Rake follows the nerdy boy of the group, Sebastian, and his equally nerdy friend, Lady Grace. When Grace's ailing father asks her to marry, she sets out to convince the naturalist of her dreams that she isn't just a colleague, she's a marriage prospect. How better to attract one man's attention than with the attention of another, slightly scandalous, man?

Except that Sebastian isn't scandalous at all. He's the bookish son of an industrialist, a social group just beginning to be accepted at aristocratic gatherings. This means, however, that he's unknown in high society and therefore the perfect makeover candidate. While denying their longstanding mutual attraction, Sebastian and Grace enlist the help of another member of the Union of Rakes to turn Sebastian into a rake who will then pretend to be entranced by Grace. But what happens when all the pretending turns into something genuine?

With characters to cheer for and a plot that is funny and awkward, My Fake Rake is delightful escapist fiction with a big heart. --Suzanne Krohn, editor, Love in Panels

Seven years after the death of Whitney Houston (at the age of 48), her best friend and executive assistant Robyn Crawford addresses the rumors about their relationship. "We were friends. We were lovers. We were everything to each other," she writes in her loving, candid and eye-opening memoir. The two met in 1980, when Crawford was 19 and Houston was turning 17. "We never talked labels, like lesbian or gay," she writes. "We just lived our lives, and I hoped it could go on that way forever." Their sexual relationship ended in 1985 when Houston signed with a major recording label. However, they continued living together until Houston married singer Bobby Brown in 1992. Although Houston started cocaine at age 14, Crawford noticed Houston's drug consumption increase when Brown entered her life.

Crawford resigned from her creative director position on Whitney's team in 2000, frustrated by extra layers of interlopers and enablers (mostly family members) who isolated Houston from friends and fed her drug habits. Crawford is no fan of Brown ("Everything he put his hands on ended up in ruins") or Houston's homophobic mother, Cissy, who ignored her daughter's drug use. Once Crawford left, Houston was surrounded by greedy relatives mismanaging her money. This forced her into exhausting world tours, which encouraged her addictions and started wrecking her body and voice.

Likely no one was closer to Houston for three decades than Crawford. It's hard to imagine a more heartbreaking, compassionate or definitive biography of Whitney Houston than A Song for You. --Kevin Howell, independent reviewer and marketing consultant

Thomas Travisano, the preeminent Elizabeth Bishop scholar and founding president of the Elizabeth Bishop Society, offers in Love Unknown a definitive biography of the renowned 20th-century poet. The book draws on an incredible bounty of archival sources, including correspondence among fellow writers, letters to her psychoanalyst and reviews of her work as it was published. Bishop had a lonely, nomadic childhood, defined by the loss of both her parents, before her formative young adulthood at Vassar and an explosive career that continued to bloom after her death. As he tells her story, Travisano also incorporates the legacy of criticism and biography that had followed Bishop's life, allowing Love Unknown to be both a summary of Bishop's experiences and an investigation of how such experiences have been framed in the decades since.

Travisano fuses historical context, literary analysis and investigations of social influence to create both an exhaustive view of Bishop's life and a surprisingly intimate one. While the book chronologically reconstructs Bishop's life and development in documentary fashion, its tone and use of sources facilitate the process of defining someone else's life with tenderness. Wherever possible, Travisano refers back to Bishop's own words through her poetry, focusing in particular on "One Art" at the book's conclusion to tie together the disparate threads of Bishop's social, personal and literary lives. Ultimately, while Travisano does pull in other theorists, critics and biographers, he allows the facts to stand on their own, trusting that such a life will speak for itself, as "Elizabeth Bishop's life is a great story." --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor

The medieval era, or the Middle Ages--the period between 300 and 1500--has been maligned as a "world of generalised misery and ignorance," where people lived "in piteous squalor only to make war in the fretful darkness." From the dawn of the Enlightenment to Game of Thrones, the medieval era has been portrayed as a primitive time when people knew precious little about the world, especially how their own bodies worked. But that's not true--not entirely.

In Medieval Bodies, art historian Jack Hartnell looks at the role the body played during a largely misunderstood era. People of the time believed that the relationship between the four classical elements (fire, water, air and earth) and the body's humors (blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile) kept the body in balance, and treatments such as bloodletting and trepanning (drilling a hole into the skull) were early procedures to cure the sick. Despite these misguided medical procedures, others, such as plastic surgery and skin grafts--which we consider marvels of modern medicine--were popular for survivors of both syphilis and the battlefield. While the physical workings of the heart were little understood, metaphysical views of the mysterious organ as "a symbol for expressing the very lowest lows and highest highs of religious and romantic life" persist to this day.

Through revealing works of art, Hartnell illustrates how physical knowledge and spiritual beliefs influenced medieval thinking about the body. And with witty poems about flatulence and naughty games like hot cockles, the Middle Ages were not all doom and gloom. Hartnell's tour of the medieval body shows that the era was much more complex than we give it credit for. --Frank Brasile, librarian

What happens to the abundance of clothes, toys, books and appliances donated to Goodwill and other charitable organizations? While people may believe that their unwanted stuff will find new homes in the community, the reality is that drop-off is often the first stop in a global and mostly hidden multibillion-dollar industry.

"In 2015, Americans tossed out 24.1 billion pounds of furniture and furnishings," writes Adam Minter (Junkyard Planet). Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale dives into this marketplace of excess by exploring some of the socio-economic reasons for its existence: the KonMari decluttering craze, minimalist living trends and adult children with little interest in their parents' "brown furniture," as observed by professionals specializing in "home cleanouts" after a death or downsizing.

Manufacturers also play a critical role, with questionable product expiration dates, marketing gimmicks and lifespan claims. The phenomenon of "fast fashion"--trendy clothing produced rapidly and sold cheaply--has grown; younger generations reportedly wear an item only between one and six times before it is tossed away.

Armed with an investigative journalism background as a Bloomberg reporter, Minter interviews and observes dozens of buyers, sorters, cutters and shippers while tracking the journey of the approximately four million tons of used clothes exported around the world each year. Secondhand details an intricate and diverse network of operations spanning the United States, Canada, West Africa, India, Asia and many other points along the way. In an accessible and engaging style, this book unravels the complexities of a vast yet mostly hidden and often secretive enterprise of used clothes and goods. --Melissa Firman, writer at  melissafirman.com

British author Natasha Farrant's much lauded 2018 Children of Castle Rock arrives in the States with a new name, A Talent for Trouble, and a whole lot of adventure.

Eleven-year-old Alice is about to attend boarding school on a remote Scottish island. Alice, who loves writing about daring feats and fantastic exploits, has read extensively about boarding schools and is worried: "Even the sunnier ones involved violent sports or people getting murdered." Jesse, an athlete who loves orienteering, is not scared there will be violence--all three of his older brothers attended Stormy Loch and graduated unmaimed. But Jesse resents the restrictions his brothers' legacies place on him. His school experience is further soured by Fergus, a super-smart kid with a rebellious streak and a mean sense of humor. Acting out, though, is Fergus's way of trying to get his divorced parents' attention. After a disastrous first day, the three are forced to work together. Unsurprisingly, a close, loving friendship develops; surprisingly, the trio becoming a unit is the first step along a dangerous path.

Farrant's (After Iris) chatty, omniscient narrator brings readers close enough to the protagonists to understand their motivations and empathize with their struggles while leaving enough distance to build suspense and maintain mystery. The children's friendship is organic and dynamic, with each one learning and growing personally as their relationships develop. A Talent for Trouble, features children who are both reckless and brave as they forge their own paths in an adults' world. --Siân Gaetano, children's and YA editor, Shelf Awareness