At the start of Knock Knock, a heart-pounding thriller by Ander Roslund (co-author of Box 21), young Stockholm police officer Ewert Grens responds to a residential noise complaint. A disheveled five-year-old girl answers the door and Grens discovers a macabre murder scene. The child witness is too young to explain what happened to her family, and the killers were too smart to leave behind any clues. The police place the girl in witness protection, and the murder eventually becomes a cold case. Seventeen years later, a break-in occurs at the house where the murder happened, but the new tenant reports nothing stolen. When Detective Superintendent Grens delves into police archives for the old case file, the folder is missing.

Across town, on the same day as the break-in, the son of businessman Piet Hoffman receives an odd toy in the mail. Upon closer inspection, Hoffman realizes it's a hand grenade. Then, a ringing burner phone arrives on his doorstep. A voice on the phone threatens to reveal his previous life as a police informant, which would result in the almost certain deaths of Hoffman and his family at the hands of the weapons cartels he once infiltrated. The voice says Hoffman's only out is to start a turf war between the cartels. Hoffman and Grens begin a deadly race to expose police corruption and save Hoffmann's family, as well as finally solve the cold-case murder.

Roslund's serpentine plot and visceral character development brings each cliffhanging chapter to a staggering revelation on how tasty a dish of cold, karmic revenge can be. From the first Knock Knock on the door of a murder scene to discovering the killers behind it, this novel is a breathless, suspenseful read. --Paul Dinh-McCrillis, freelance reviewer

Kwei Quartey continues his PI Emma Djan series (The Missing American) in Sleep Well, My Lady, an intriguing mystery that centers on the murder of a famous Ghanaian designer. Lady Araba, the mogul of her own fashion label, has had a tumultuous on-and-off affair with talk show host Augustus Seeza for several years. When her body is found in her bed the day before an important runway show, many people are immediately suspicious that Augustus, an alcoholic, was involved.

But Augustus has influential parents--a doctor and a judge--and when Lady Araba's driver signed a confession under duress, the largely ineffective Ghanaian police were content to let the driver go to prison, without ever testing the evidence from the scene for DNA.

A year after Araba's death, her aunt Dele comes to the private detective agency where Emma Djan works, seeking the truth about Araba's death. Dele is sure that the driver, who loyally served Araba for years, could not have been involved. As Emma and the other investigators at the agency start digging, they discover that nothing in Araba's life was as glamorous as it seemed. Araba had been hiding a dark secret since her childhood, and competitors in the cutthroat fashion industry could also have wanted her dead.

Vividly invoking the noisy world of Accra, Ghana, Quartey has created a delightful character in Emma Djan, and a satisfyingly twisty mystery in Sleep Well, My Lady. Fans of Andrea Camilleri or Colin Cotterill are sure to enjoy Quartey's talented writing. --Jessica Howard, bookseller at Bookmans, Tucson, Ariz.

Christina Britton (A Good Duke Is Hard to Find) proves she has mastered the craft of engaging Regency romance with Someday My Duke Will Come. The second in the Isle of Synne series, this novel (which is dreadfully shocking by Regency standards) can be enjoyed as a standalone, and features Lady Clara Ashford, a determined single woman in her early 30s.

Clara means to never marry. Fifteen years earlier, a rogue took advantage of her innocence, and since then a remorseful Clara has devoted her life to caring for her younger siblings. But when Quincy Nesbitt, a family friend, unexpectedly discovers that all three of his elder brothers have passed away, and he is now a duke, Clara finds herself pretending to be engaged to Quincy, in order to spare him the eager advances of matchmaking mamas--including his own predatory mother. To her surprise, Clara discovers she enjoys the pretense, and feels extremely conflicted at the thought of ending her fake engagement.

Charming and sweet, Someday My Duke Will Come is a lovely romance, sure to be appreciated by Regency readers. Quincy's and Clara's friends and relatives make for a quirky, opinionated backdrop to their romance, and the Isle of Synne is clearly a beautiful place to fall in love. Fans of Eloisa James and Sophie Jordan will enjoy Clara and Quincy's story and the vivid, amusing way in which Britton conjures upper-class Regency life. --Jessica Howard, bookseller at Bookmans, Tucson, Ariz.

Angie Hockman's first novel, Shipped, is a smart, crackling romantic comedy narrated by the driven and self-deprecating Henley Rose Evans. The 28-year-old shares her single life and one-bedroom Belltown, Seattle, apartment with a gray tabby. Henley had designs on seeing the whole world until "life happened," and adult bill-paying became her priority. A job at Seaquest Adventures--a boutique cruise ship line--seemed right up her alley and inspired her "big dreams for a shiny, successful career." After three years of hard work, while pursuing her MBA at night, she's on track to being named director of digital marketing.

But her smooth sail up the corporate ladder is stalled when a promotional marketing video Henley creates is co-opted and undermined by a "virtual" coworker: Graeme Crawford-Collins from Michigan. Graeme, with the company for only a year, is suddenly minted the new social media manager. Henley deems handsome Graeme "the bane of my professional existence... a sneaky, entitled user." This suspicion is further confirmed when Henley's video goes viral and their boss gives Graeme all the credit. In shock, neither Graeme nor Henley corrects the faux pas. This raises the stakes between the coworkers as they are suddenly forced to compete for the directorship position. A cruise to the Galápagos Islands pits them--and their individual creative visions for the company--against each other as part of the final selection process.

What ensues is a host of madcap, flirty adventures set in beautiful locales and featuring clever, breezy banter, sarcastic wit and an endearing supporting cast. Hockman offers readers a fun literary escape with undercurrents of deeper truths. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

The 1971 photo is famous: Gloria Steinem and Dorothy Pitman Hughes stare unsmilingly at the camera, suffering exactly no fools, while giving the Black Power salute. In With Her Fist Raised, Laura L. Lovett writes of the less famous of the two women, a take-charge force for change and a harbinger of the intersectional feminism to come.

Born in 1938, Hughes was raised in a sprawling, loving household in Charles Junction, Ga. Knowing that her horizons were limited in the South, Hughes moved to New York in 1958. She sang in nightclubs, augmented her earnings with domestic work and still managed to clock hours for the Congress of Racial Equality. It was at CORE that she had a feminist awakening: "I established funding contracts, opened up a store, organized a benefit at the Lincoln Center... yet I never received an ounce of credit for this work and my salary was a fraction of my male co-workers'."

Lovett, an associate professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, interviewed her subject for the book, and charts Hughes's decades of activism, which influenced her business ventures: she founded a community-oriented childcare center, briefly owned the Miss Black America pageant ("I had as many nationalities as I could get in that pageant") and ran a copy shop in Harlem. As Lovett puts it, "When a community need was identified, Dorothy sought to create a resource." With Her Fist Raised ends rather abruptly and is somewhat omissive (for one thing, there's no mention that Hughes's niece is the celebrated actress Gabourey Sidibe), but it's a vigorous, vivifying portrait nonetheless. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer

That Danielle Geller survived to write Dog Flowers seems miraculous. Her raw debut might need a content warning: abandonment, alcoholism, attempted suicide, domestic violence, parental incarcerations, family deaths--much of which is intrinsically linked to her enigmatic, missing mother. In bearing elegiac witness to aching losses, Geller finds surprising paths toward healing rewards.

Laureen "Tweety" Lee was homeless before dying alone of alcohol withdrawal at 49 in a Florida hospital. Geller, her eldest daughter, was the only family to visit; she died while Geller was on her return flight. Geller took home Laureen's suitcase filled with diaries, photos, letters, jewelry--the intimate leftovers from which Geller began to piece together her elusive parent. Born to the Tsi'naajinii of the Navajo Nation, Laureen fled at 19, married an abusive alcoholic and had two children she abandoned.

Geller was tossed between a violent father who was in and out of jail, an aging 17-years-sober grandmother and drug-addicted sister Eileen. Caught in cycles of familial manipulation as an adult, Geller moved through isolation and disappointing affairs. With Laureen's death, in confronting her troubled, truncated life, Geller gleans hard-won understanding as a daughter, a Native woman, her whole self.

Geller, who has a master's in library science, uses her archival training intriguingly to enhance her non-linear narrative, interrupting her writing with annotated photos and decades-old art, and inserting footnotes that reveal Laureen's journal entries, which often contradict Geller's memories. So many of Geller's own torments and misfortunes are inseparable from her mother's tragedy. Exposing that intertwined trauma onto the page enables Geller to begin her own recovery. --Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon

There's a reason that revelatory ideas seem to arrive when completing idle tasks like driving a car or taking a shower. In Laziness Does Not Exist, social psychologist Devon Price convincingly argues that people's brains work best when they step away from the constant barrage of notifications, unanswered e-mails and other obligations--in other words, when they allow themselves to be a little bit lazy. Doing this is harder than it sounds. In the United States, much of life is dictated by what Price calls the "laziness lie," which refers to the social, cultural and economic forces that compel people to work 70-hour weeks and otherwise overextend themselves in the relentless pursuit of "more" (or, in many cases, survival). Frequently this behavior proves unsustainable, causing people to become mentally and physically exhausted and ill.

Through interviews with experts, researchers and a diverse array of worn-out overachievers, Price links the laziness lie to nearly every aspect of modern life, including social media, parenting, weight loss, housework, activism and even watching or reading the news. Price knows the dangers of doing too much firsthand--Price became dangerously ill after years of placing productivity and success ahead of their health. In their conversational and engaging first book, Price offers science-backed suggestions to help sever the link between productivity and self-worth, including taking a phone-free "digital Sabbath," practicing empathy and learning truly how to savor a moment. Most important of all, Price encourages viewing "laziness" for what it is: a sign that the mind and body need some time off. --Angela Lutz, freelance reviewer

"Why do we believe there is any such thing as 'pure craft'?" writes novelist Matthew Salesses. "When writers identify race and gender and sexuality, etc., as central concerns of writing, it isn't because they have nothing to say about pacing or space breaks. They are doing the hard work other writers avoid, in order to shed light on the nature of craft itself."

Salesses shows that one can teach the finer points of writing by using them to call attention to what is left unsaid: questions about one's positions and biases, acknowledging difference over valuing similarities, and the ability to read between the lines. In fact, in this text, Salesses suggests that many cardinal rules of fiction writing are shorthand for encoded cultural and historical patterns. He deftly challenges writers to examine problems of identity to strengthen their writing, rather than turn away from them.

While the author concentrates on the act of writing, there is much in this book to challenge readers to question more deeply how they read. Essentially, Craft in the Real World offers a reorientation of how to write well by being aware of the many layered expectations of who might be reading a book after it is written, because "craft tells us how to see the world," and Salesses is asking writers and workshop participants to be more aware of the many ways to see the world. He does this by offering concrete examples of new and different ways "the workshop" might be approached, and exercises to accompany such workshops.

Salesses (Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear) presents a timely, forceful examination of the notion of craft, and how the idea of neutrality, or "pure craft," as it exists in many writing workshops, can be deconstructed to challenge biases that have often made the publishing world inaccessible to people of various marginalized backgrounds. --Michelle Anya Anjirbag, freelance reviewer

Zeno Sworder's debut, This Small Blue Dot, a welcome-to-the-world picture book, is funny and serious, uplifting and humbling, visionary and earthy. And sometimes that's on just one page.

The book begins with a girl who looks and sounds about eight addressing a baby (an awfully cute stand-in for the reader): "Welcome to Earth./ There's a lot of strange stuff going on out there, but here are some of the things I've worked out so far." She proceeds to supply some facts and opinions, which are variously cosmic ("It turns out we're living on a small blue dot"), practical ("We only have this one, so we need to take care of it") and gustatory ("The best Indian dessert is a jalebi"). Her seemingly free-associated thoughts lead to a big finish: "Before us, there were our ancestors," the girl tells the baby. "You are the very newest in this long line of people.... What will you add to our story?"

At one point, the girl remarks that having a "wild imagination" lets people "create worlds with only a crayon and a piece of paper." For his part, Sworder uses both crayon and pencil to present the girl in a color-blasted orbit. She floats around in the galaxy, stands in a swirl of her favorite things ("Elephants and dung beetles! Pears and butterflies!") and dances while wearing the O in the word "POW" like a Hula-Hoop. She's depicted in black and white throughout This Small Blue Dot--as are, indeed, all the story's "real" elements--but readers may be too dazzled by her life-affirming good cheer to notice. --Nell Beram, freelance writer and YA author

A wide-eyed and determined child finds a peckish new friend at the park (much to her family's chagrin) in this playful beginning chapter book from Elana K. Arnold (Red Hood; What Riley Wore) and A.N. Kang (My Big Bad Monster).

A bicycle ride through the neighborhood with her father leads young Starla Jean to discover a chicken scritch-scratching among some trees. "If you can catch it, you can keep it!" her father declares cavalierly. The resolute Starla Jean surprises "the skinniest, ugliest chicken I had ever seen!"--not to mention her bewildered father--when she triumphantly carries home the captured feathered friend. With good-natured humor and copious BAWKing, Starla Jean and the skeptical subject of her admiration, dubbed Opal Egg, settle into family introductions and exploits that lay the scene for subsequent books in the series.

Cheery first-person text conveys Starla Jean's sprightly personality, her confiding tone peppered with dialogue that includes her parents and neighbors. Boisterous illustrations on each spread accompany minimal text on most pages, and page layouts and perspectives vary pleasingly throughout four well-paced chapters. Soft lines and the muted palette of the artwork are lightened further by substantial white space and generous margins, a thoughtful overall design that should suit emerging readers.

Versatile author Arnold capably expands her reach into yet another format, while Kang's work lends a comical exuberance to Starla Jean's steely resolve. "Starla Jean can do anything she puts her mind to," says a neighbor--it will be a treat to see what adventures Starla Jean and Opal Egg scratch up next. --Kit Ballenger, youth librarian, Help Your Shelf