Novelist Ariel Lawhon (Flight of Dreams) features bold female characters who have a knack for bending the truth. In her fourth novel, Code Name Hélène, Lawhon turns her attention to Nancy Grace Augusta Wake, a scrappy Australian runaway who became a nurse and a journalist (under her own name) and then a spy with Britain's SOE (under several aliases) during World War II. Moving between Nancy's exploits in France toward the end of the war and several other periods in her life, Lawhon spins a captivating narrative of a woman who would stop at nothing to defeat the Nazis and who was as comfortable handling a revolver as her signature red Elizabeth Arden lipstick.

Lawhon's narrative begins in the winter of 1944, as Nancy (hungover but determined) jumps out of a plane into occupied France. She sweeps readers into Nancy's wry, fast-talking, first-person account of her adventures, taking readers deep into the French countryside with Nancy and her compatriots, and then flipping back to Paris, where Nancy meets her future husband, Henri Fiocca. Their love will sustain them throughout the war, as both (especially Nancy) face increasing hardship and danger.

While Nancy cuts a vivid, stylish figure through the novel's pages, her supporting cast is also compelling. Their feats of daring and gritty survival tactics are drawn largely from accounts by Nancy and others, but Lawhon's elegant plotting makes them shine. Bold, confident, dryly witty and driven by a strong sense of justice, Nancy (no matter which name she uses) is a fascinating character. Lawhon's gripping narrative gives "Hélène" her due. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Henry Farrell's life is teetering toward a happy new start when a headless corpse is found off Red Pine Road. Although a bear has feasted on the body, it's clear the missing head was purposefully detached by something other than wildlife. In The Bramble and the Rose, third in Tom Bouman's Edgar-winning rural noir series (Dry Bones in the Valley), Henry is caught up in multiple homicides on the eve of his wedding.

Sole employee of the Wild Thyme, Pa., police department, Henry helps with the necessary tracking of the bear while also questioning neighboring landowners, trying to identify the body, investigating a string of convenience store robberies and coping with the stress of his and Julie's family in town for their impending nuptials. When someone from his past reappears with supposed information about the murdered man, and when his nephew goes missing, Henry's personal life is pulled into the mix, forcing him to leave his home and his family to clear his name of a second killing.

Bouman's writing is fluid, balanced and infused with a sense of place that makes Henry's mission all the more daunting. Bouman has a talent for "small town" writing--the secrets, character, quirky denizens and demanding landscape of Wild Thyme are seamless parts of the story but don't overtake it. The many intertwining plot arcs, both personal and professional, are compelling and always under control. Even with Henry on the run and loose ends fraying, Bouman ties the knots on another terrific mystery. --Lauren O'Brien of Malcolm Avenue Review

Summertime in Millers Kill, N.Y.: An unidentified young woman is found dead in the middle of a rural road, barefoot, wearing a party dress, without a mark on her. When police chief Russ Van Alstyne arrives on the scene, he's taken back to 1972, when he was the prime suspect in a case that eerily resembled this one. In their ninth adventure, Hid from Our Eyes, Russ and his wife, Episcopal priest Clare Fergusson, struggle to balance the murder cases past and present with new parenthood, a pending town referendum on dissolving the police force, and other personal and professional challenges.

Julia Spencer-Fleming (Through the Evil Days) brings back her series' ensemble cast of smart, complex, compassionate characters, including Clare's ministry colleagues and Russ's fellow cops. The story centers on Russ and Clare, but past police chief Jack Liddle and current officer Hadley Knox (among others) play vital supporting roles. As Clare juggles vestry meetings, a new church intern and her fears about failing as a mother, Russ is frustrated by the lack of clues in his case and worried about his department's future. The eventual solution to the case reaches back to 1952, when a third young woman was found dead, and the repercussions of both the investigation and the referendum results will reverberate well into the future. Satisfyingly twisty, with a plot that tests both Russ and Clare's detective skills and their characters, Hid from Our Eyes is a worthy entry in Spencer-Fleming's stellar series. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Anthropocene Rag is a strange and wonderful book. In the late 21st century, the United States is awash in trillions of feral nanomachines called the Boom. These robots remake the world at whim, coldly indifferent to human life. Many are obsessed with American history and folktales. The Donner Party tragedy replays on a loop in the Sierra Nevadas, dinosaurs roam the Louisiana bayou, Mark Twain plies the Mississippi on a steamboat, Henry Ford oversees bustling factories in ruined Detroit--all rendered by tiny machines. Any humans caught in the way are liable to have their atoms "borrowed." Between these capricious reconstructions and general environmental disaster, the United States has fragmented into disparate enclaves separated by anarchic countryside. And somewhere in the Rockies, the scientist responsible for the Boom holds dominion over a semi-mythical place called Monument City.

Prospector Ed, an AI emerging into sentience, travels the country at the behest of a more powerful intelligence in Monument City. Ed delivers Golden Tickets to six lucky recipients, each invited to Monument City for reasons unknown. Anthropocene Rag by Alex Irvine (A Scattering of Jades) follows Prospector Ed's Willy Wonka-ish distribution of the these Golden Tickets and their bearers' perilous trips across an ever-shifting country: a scavenger in flooded Miami steals his twin brother's ticket, a pious New York mailman living next to a talking playground makes one of Prospector Ed's deliveries himself, a shapeshifting actress leaves a troupe run by a buffalo, and a purchased orphan escapes certain doom. The intertwining stories of this eclectic cast are a hallucinatory voyage into America's fraught past and damaged future. --Tobias Mutter, freelance reviewer

Prolific romance writer Melinda Curtis (the Mountain Monroes and the Kissing Test series) begins a lively rom-com series filled with a large cast of eccentric characters, zany humor and a slew of clever plot twists.

In Can't Hurry Love, Lola Williams is a 29-year-old who gave up a career in New York City doing hair and make-up for high-powered Broadway celebrities in order to marry Randy and relocate to his small hometown of Sunshine, Colo. After only a year of marriage, Randy is killed in a car accident. Lola struggles as a young widow in a town where everyone knows everyone else's business--except for Lola, who, when she goes through her husband's belongings, discovers Randy was keeping secrets. Was he cheating on her?

Upset and angered by a string of unsettling revelations, she sets some of Randy's things aflame in a bonfire that draws the Sunshine Valley Widows Club and also Sheriff Drew Taylor, a divorcé and devoted father who's sworn off women. Sheriff Taylor and the group of local widows come to the emotionally wounded Lola's rescue: women of all ages, personalities and quirks; do-good fundraisers, gossips and self-professed matchmakers with tales to tell. Lola then becomes determined to solve the mystery of Randy. While on her quest, she starts to build a new life, suddenly finding herself enmeshed in the fabric of busybody small-town living, while also opening her heart again to love, however reluctantly.

Curtis weaves laugh-out-loud comic scenes with heartfelt emotions, delivering an endearing, wholesome romance. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

On her mantel, Esther Safran Foer keeps a collection of glass jars filled with dirt and pieces of rubble. These artifacts serve as a tangible reminder of her ancestors' lives in their remote Ukrainian shtetls of Kolki and Trochenbrod, before they were all killed during the Holocaust. Esther's parents, Ethel and Louis Safran, were the only survivors from their large extended families.  

Safran Foer's poignant memoir I Want You to Know We're Still Here chronicles her quest to collect the fragments of her personal history and learn the reasons for her parents' silences about their past: "I had grown up surrounded by ghosts--haunted by relatives that were rarely talked about and by the stories that no one would share." When the Germans invaded Kolki in July 1941, 21-year old Ethel Bronstein grabbed her coat and fled without saying goodbye to her mother--a split-second, regrettable decision that she would carry throughout her life.

Esther was named for her two murdered grandmothers, and her earliest memories are of being in a displaced persons camp in Germany with her parents. The family emigrated to Washington, D.C., in 1949. But how her father survived the war would remain a mystery until Esther's mother reveals that a Trochenbrod family had hidden him, and that he once had another wife and daughter.

Through Safran Foer's photographs, scant recollections, connections with experts from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and her travels to Kolki and Trochenbrod, I Want You to Know We're Still Here explores how to remember loved ones when all that is known is a name--and sometimes not even that. --Melissa Firman, writer at melissafirman.com

When novelist Erica Bauermeister and her family agreed to search for a new house, one that would bring them closer, they didn't picture the dilapidated Victorian on the Olympic Peninsula, northwest of their Seattle home. But Bauermeister, an acknowledged "champion of underdogs," and her husband were smitten. "It's not your fault," she whispered to the trash-filled house after their first visit revealed its myriad flaws. "We'll take care of you."

House Lessons: Renovating a Life is a family memoir, a primer of architectural theories and a study of how people relate to their spaces. Fans of her four novels know Bauermeister has a keen appreciation of the senses--savoring food in The School of Essential Ingredients, the art of fragrance in The Scent Keeper. She demonstrates that same respect for the renovation. "I wanted to understand our house and what it had to teach me." She chronicles the monumental tasks with humor: her young son's glee at handling a power tool, her teenage daughter's sledgehammer skills, and battling mold, various creatures and tenacious Pacific Northwest ivy.

"The big asbestos-covered marriage counselor" could satisfy Bauermeister's need to solidify her marriage, she thinks, and the renovation does confirm their complementary strengths and support, as she balances family life in Seattle with her role as "project manager" a drive and a ferry ride away.

As adeptly as she describes in layperson's language the physics of building a new foundation under a house suspended in air, Bauermeister condenses her family's two-decade journey from their discovery of the neglected, mossy house to the last sentence of this ultimately joyous memoir. --Cheryl McKeon, bookseller, Market Block Books, Troy, N.Y.

Eva Holland's debut, Nerve: Adventures in the Science of Fear, begins with a dramatic scene: the author paralyzed near the end of an ice climbing outing, preferring to remain in place and freeze to death than to take the one step that would bring her to safety. It's a vivid opening to a fascinating book, one that combines self-help with self-examination as Holland investigates the subject of fear in the hope of overcoming her own.

Nerve traces Holland's attempt to understand and wrestle with three broad categories of fears: phobias (in her case, a fear of falling from an unprotected height), post-traumatic stress (the byproduct of four automobile accidents) and fear of death and loss, triggered by the sudden death of her 60-year-old mother following a stroke in July 2015.

Holland leads readers on some interesting excursions into current research on the sources of fear, along with some of its antidotes. But Holland's real goal is to bring science to bear in an effort to overcome her own terrors. A correspondent for Outside magazine, she lives in the town of Whitehorse, in Canada's Yukon Territory. She pursues an active life outdoors, where her acrophobia was often crippling. Much of the enjoyment of Nerve involves rooting for Holland as she attempts to wrestle her own fears to the ground, and to report on the outcome of that effort would spoil that pleasure. It's enough to say that by the end of this account, her relationship to fear has changed, something that may well happen to the readers of her engaging book. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer

Nadia Sammurtok and Lenny Lishchenko swaddle their readers in the cozy ambience of an amautik in this gentle, comforting picture book. The infant narrator uses understandable comparisons to detail the pouch in the back of their mother's parka, inviting the audience to share in their contentment as pre-readers learn about this intimate bond-building element of child rearing in Inuit culture.  

Warm and secure, soft and calm, the amautik provides an inviting transition between womb and independence. The baby explains, "The protection of the hood around me is like my own tiny iglu. I love peeking out from inside my anaana's amautik." The child-carrier gives its occupant a view of the world from the comforting safety of parental closeness. Inuit educator and writer Summurtok's descriptions are vivid and charming, the amautik presented so invitingly that young readers may request one of their own. Accompanied by Lenny Lishchenko's bold, bright illustrations, the story will wash its audience in calm and peacefulness. The strong texture and line of the rising sun, a page full of cottongrass or a spread depicting a rolling wave spark the senses and depict "the traditional Inuit lifestyle" with a welcoming intimacy. And the overall playfulness of the art seems designed to tickle the imagination of young and old alike.

In My Anaana's Amautik is a sweet peek into the Inuit baby pouch, complete with a small glossary defining the Inuktitut words used. Adults and the little ones to whom they are reading can bond within the glow of this cultural gem as it hugs them in an atmosphere of love. --Jen Forbus, freelancer

Frances Hardinge is a seemingly inexhaustible source of bizarre, creepy and utterly original books for young adults. In Deeplight, she gives a nod to Lovecraftian horror in her own brilliant and eccentric way.

The gods ruled the Myriad, a 1,000-mile-long chain of islands, for centuries: "Now and then, one would rise from the Undersea" and devour schooners, smash ports or destroy entire islands. The Glass Cardinal, with his "translucent tendrils"; the Red Forlorn, like a "cloud of blood in the water"; Dolor, who kicked "with dozens of human legs"--all unknowable and terrifying. "Then, without warning, the gods turned on each other." It has been 30 years since the Cataclysm, and 14-year-old orphan Hark ekes out a living through vaguely criminal means. A born storyteller, Hark grifts the occasional mainland tourist and sells counterfeit godware (magical pieces of the dead gods); when coerced, he helps best friend Jelt complete the more expressly criminal jobs Jelt prefers. When a smuggler enlists their services, Hark is caught and auctioned off as cheap labor. Surprisingly, a doctor of "practical theophysics" buys him and brings him to live among the old priests "whose minds broke when the gods died." But the doctor has a secret, Jelt is furious Hark left him, and the priests are hiding something that could destroy all of the Myriad.

Hardinge (The Lie Tree; A Face Like Glass) is matchless, and the enchanting, chilling and wholly uncommon novels she writes are truly remarkable. While Deeplight takes a moment to ramp up, once Hark's adventure begins, it doesn't slow. Hardinge's characters are sympathetic and genuine, and her terrors massive and unknowable, creating exactly the kind of reading experience her fans expect: extraordinary. --Siân Gaetano, children's and YA editor, Shelf Awareness