Strong, take-charge, wise-cracking women are the backbone of Arsenic and Adobo, Mia Manansala's fun firecracker of a first cozy mystery.

Lila Macapagal is a whip-smart, willful, 25-year-old Asian American. She retreats from Chicago to her hometown of Shady Palms, Ill., intent on recovering from the sting of a cheating beau, while tasked to save her Tita (Aunt) Rosie's failing Filipino restaurant. But when Derek Winter--Lila's first love, a self-important, self-proclaimed restaurant reviewer with a vindictive ax to grind--sets out to pan the eating establishment, all hell breaks loose. During one of Derek's reconnaissance meals, he has a confrontation with Lila, then face-plants right into one of her signature treats and drops dead. When poisoning is ruled the culprit, Lila becomes the prime suspect and matters escalate, forcing Lila to figure a way to exonerate herself and root out the real killer.

Family and Filipino culture--especially the sumptuous fusion food--are front and center in a madcap mystery populated with a strong supporting cast. This includes Lila's commanding grandmother Lola Flor, and the "Calendar Crew," Lila's meddling godmothers, April, Mae and June. This trio of outspoken women, all in their 50s, were friends of Lila's late mother. There's also Lila's best friend, Pakistani Muslim barista Adeena Awan, and her swoon-worthy, older brother, Amir, a lawyer.

Cozy mystery lovers--and foodies--will be licking their literary chops, eagerly awaiting the next installment in this winning, multicultural series that also offers a delectable blend of romcom and whodunnit elements. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

Anjali Enjeti (Southbound) tells the story of Partition through the lives of two families in her deeply emotional first novel, The Parted Earth. Deepa is happy with her life in New Delhi, going to school and helping out at her Hindu parents' medical clinic. But riots and hate fill the streets as mid-August 1947--the planned time for the formal division of British India into two countries--approaches. Amid the chaos, Deepa's Muslim boyfriend, Amir, flees to Lahore with his family, leaving behind only an origami note with a promise to return for Deepa.

Decades later, in Atlanta, Deepa's mixed-race granddaughter Shan is reeling from a miscarriage and a shattered marriage. Trying to piece together her family's story, she uncovers new information about the grandmother she's met only once. Enjeti moves between these two eras, deftly portraying Shan's inner conflict about her identity and the father who never told her why he moved back to India, as well as Deepa's suffering when her world is upended. With the help of a neighbor, Chandani, Shan makes discoveries about her roots that may lead to her own healing.

Enjeti does not spare her readers the bloody details of Partition: families torn apart, as well as vandalism, arson and other forms of violence. Her narrative urges readers to bear witness to this difficult episode of history. But, like her characters, Enjeti ultimately reaches for hope. The Parted Earth is a testament to the tremendous strength of the people of India and Pakistan who found the courage to begin again. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Night. A thunderstorm rages. An injured woman awakens to the sound of gunshots and footsteps racing toward her. She doesn't know where she is or how she got there, but gets up and starts to run. She blindly flees into a cemetery where voices begin to speak to her in the gripping supernatural mystery thriller The Whispering Dead.

Strange voices guide the woman to the door of Pastor Adage. She tells him her first name is Kiera and she's being chased, but can't remember anything else. The kindly pastor gets rid of her pursuers and hides Kiera in a cottage on church property until she can figure out her identity. Later that night Kiera is visited by the ghost of Emma Carthage. Instead of being fearful, Kiera discovers she can communicate with Emma's spirit. Mason, a medical student, and a quirky local named Zoe befriend Kiera. They explain the circumstances behind Emma's death at the hands of the wealthiest man in town. Helping Emma's ghost get revenge exposes Kiera to her pursuers, but the spirit will not rest. Kiera soon discovers Emma is just one of many ghosts seeking justice--and they all want help from Kiera.

Darcy Coates (The Haunting of Ashburn House; Craven Manor) adeptly sets up a quick-paced plot by sending an amnesia-suffering heroine crashing through the forest dodging bullets and branches. The immediately dangerous scenario creates a relentless, gnawing anxiety about what will befall Kiera next in the creepy, Dickensian-looking town of Blighty. There's nothing like a good ghost story to curl up with on a dark and stormy night. --Paul Dinh-McCrillis, freelance reviewer

A gothic tale of a mistreated wife intersects with the story of Jack the Ripper in the gripping debut People of Abandoned Character.

After spending her youth caring for her grandmother and then establishing herself as a nurse in London, Susannah marries a rich, handsome younger surgeon. It's more than the spinster had ever hoped for, but not long after they return from their honeymoon, he begins to become distant. With no support from her husband and with the domineering housekeeper uninterested in letting her take any role in the running of their home, Susannah distracts herself with the newspapers, especially once the first lurid account of a woman murdered in Whitechapel is published. Then she realizes that her husband has been out late or failed to come home every time a new victim was found, sometimes even coming home bloodied. Is her husband the murderer? And is there anyone to whom Susannah can turn with her suspicions?

Whitfield masterfully weaves the story of Jack the Ripper, as it enthralls the citizens of London, with classic gothic suspense elements about a new wife facing more than she expected in a household she cannot quite call her own. Although Rebecca will always come to mind whenever one encounters a secretive husband and a sinister housekeeper, Susannah is a more worldly narrator in spite of floundering in her changed circumstances. She has secrets, and readers will be eager to discover if they will break her or give her the strength to survive. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library

With his thrillers centered on cop Ari Thór Arason (Snowblind; Rupture) and detective Hulda Hermannsdóttir (The Darkness; The Island; The Mist), Ragnar Jónasson has proved himself to be a go-to author for Nordic noir. The Girl Who Died delivers Jónasson's usual sublime atmospheric puzzle but with bonus chills, courtesy of an apparently haunted house.

It's 1985, and 30-year-old substitute teacher Una is languishing in Reykjavík when she reads a seductive ad: "Teacher wanted at the edge of the world." She lands the winter-term-only job, which brings her to the remote village of Skálar, population 10 per the last census. The job includes accommodations in the home of Salka, a single woman on the local council, and Salka's seven-year-old daughter, one of the two kids Una will teach. The job is a cakewalk, although Una wishes the villagers weren't quite so obvious with their opinion of her as an interloper, and she could do without the intermittent confrontations with a ghostly presence at Salka's house. When tragedy strikes at the village Christmas concert, Una must deal with the obfuscating darkness of both Skálar in winter and its citizens.

The Girl Who Died is interwoven with passages recounting a notorious murder in Iceland that bears on the happenings in tucked-away Skálar. Not for the first time, Jónasson demonstrates a gift for capturing the particular loneliness that attends physical isolation. Of course, Una's alienation is exacerbated by the personal demons she's fighting, not all of which come from the bottle she keeps handy. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer

Andy Weir (The Martian; Artemis) has created a propulsive space adventure in Project Hail Mary. The story centers on Dr. Ryland Grace, a middle-school biology teacher, whose obscure paper about alien races comes to the attention of some important individuals when the sun starts rapidly fading. More than half of humanity is predicted to die, and the earth's ecology will be in shambles if scientists can't figure out why the sun has suddenly started losing heat.

The problem is: Ryland doesn't know this at first. He awakens from a coma, finds his shipmates dead and realizes to his horror that he's millions of miles away from Earth. He's struggling with amnesia, attempting to piece together what was happening on Earth before the Hail Mary launched, and why he is alone in this faraway galaxy. Luckily for the fate of humanity, Ryland is a quick study, good at piecing together bits of information and able to make some fairly wacky calculations to keep himself alive.

Fans of The Martian or John Scalzi's Interdependency trilogy are sure to love Project Hail Mary, as it mixes the pathos of the fate of humanity with the humor of Ryland's bumbling around his spaceship, and his frequent use of "gosh darn" and "oh fudge" (middle-school teacher habits are apparently very hard to break). Funny, poignant and full of interesting science, Project Hail Mary is a wild ride that is chock full of interstellar secrets. --Jessica Howard, bookseller at Bookmans, Tucson, Ariz.

Comics artist Alison Bechdel approaches the subject of exercise in The Secret to Superhuman Strength with the same insatiable curiosity, interdisciplinary rumination and candid humor as she did with the earlier subjects of her parents in Fun Home and Are You My Mother? "My bookish exterior perhaps belies it, but I'm a bit of an exercise freak," Bechdel reveals, before carefully unfurling her extensive history with fitness fads and physical vigor, quick to stipulate that coordinated sports fall roughly outside her interests.

This is both a study of Bechdel's individual history with maintaining her body, as well as an expansive, ambitious consideration of what it means to be embodied. At an early age, her interest was piqued by Jack LaLanne's televised exercise routines for women, although she was far more fascinated by his body than his instructions. "Housewives in the '60s did not want bulging biceps. But from Jack I learned that the body was something you could shape." As she grows into adulthood, tackling martial arts, cycling, skiing and so on, she also considers her place within generational shifts regarding gender, as well as philosophical movements flowing from the transcendentalists to the present day, in her search for an ever-elusive sense of balance between body and mind.

Grounding this incredible journey is Bechdel's distinctive artwork colored extensively by her partner, Holly Rae Taylor. The Secret to Superhuman Strength is far greater than the diverting lark it seems; it is a potent testament to the human condition. --Dave Wheeler, associate editor, Shelf Awareness

Julianna Margulies, a three-time Emmy-winning actress, proves herself equally skilled as a writer with this heartfelt, ingratiating and captivating memoir. A natural-born storyteller, Margulies spends the first half of Sunshine Girl spinning tales of growing up with her sisters as their divorced mother constantly uproots them with moves from New York to Paris, England and various states. Her eccentric and self-absorbed mother was constantly searching for herself. "My stability, I learned quickly, depended on my mother's happiness," she writes, "and her state of mind fluctuated with every boyfriend."

Margulies's people-pleasing skills kept everyone around her happy but she seldom nurtured herself. This trait continued with a neglectful and undermining boyfriend she stayed with for a decade. Until, she writes, "At thirty-five, I woke up. Finally admitting to myself that I could not keep living in this state of joylessness." Finally, putting herself first, she left her boyfriend and turned down a $27 million offer to stay with ER for two more years. Two years after moving to New York, she met her husband, had a son and started starring in The Good Wife. Balancing motherhood and a 60-hour-a-week work schedule is grueling and guilt-inducing. Her son's first two sentences were "Mama work" and "Mama tired."

Sunshine Girl is an ideal book club pick. Margulies's upbeat and humorous globetrotting tales of growing up in a quirky family mix well with her encouraging stories of pursuing an acting career and succeeding. This is the kind of introspective feel-good book that readers will want to share with friends. --Kevin Howell, independent reviewer and marketing consultant

Gwen Strauss's narrative nonfiction debut, The Nine: The True Story of a Band of Women Who Survived the Worst of Nazi Germany, reconstructs the daring escape of nine female resistance fighters in the grim final days of World War II. One of those resistance fighters was Hélène Podliasky, the author's great-aunt, who was considered the leader of the band of women. Chapters center on each woman in turn, using Strauss's research not only to trace their paths to resistance, capture and imprisonment in Germany's nightmarish labor camps, but to resurrect their characters and personalities. What results is an improbable story of escape and survival thanks in large part to the bonds forged among these courageous fighters.

The Nine begins with the women's escape from a death march overseen by the SS and the start of their long, dangerous journey across Germany toward the American lines. The women were in desperate condition after months of back-breaking labor in an offshoot of the infamous Ravensbrück concentration camp. Hungry and weak, they used their wits and language skills to cross the German countryside and procure food and shelter for themselves. In many cases, the nine were able to use the Germans' fondness for bureaucracy and official documents against them, though they had some harrowing close calls. Despite the seriousness of the subject matter, the women's journey sometimes has the air of an incredible adventure story, with them sardonically comparing their journey with a camping trip. The Nine is not only a gripping narrative, but a powerful tribute to women who should be remembered as heroes. --Hank Stephenson, the Sun magazine, manuscript reader

In Mergers and Acquisitions, Cate Doty's first book, she gives readers a compelling, often irreverent insider's tour of her years writing wedding announcements for the New York Times. Along the way, she muses on the social and political implications of the weddings she covered, shares a few juicy anecdotes (without naming names), and reflects on her journey from hapless girlfriend to contented singleton to (eventually) a woman who suspects she might have found lifelong love.

Doty begins her story with her early days on the Times wedding desk, fielding the ramped-up emotions of politicians and actors, consultants and celebrities, as she fact-checked the myriad details of high-profile relationships. Though she changes names and identifying details, the archetypes are recognizable: the self-important senator, the powerhouse event planner, the heiress, the lawyers. She turns a critical eye on the WASP-dominated, glitzy content of the Times wedding section, acknowledging its limits and self-importance while admitting that, for a wedding obsessive, this job was the most fun she could get paid to have. 

As Doty earns her stripes as a wedding reporter, she also embarks on a relationship with Michael, a colleague at the Times. Still cautious after a previous failed romance, Doty nevertheless begins to believe this guy might be "the one." With self-deprecating wit, wry humor and a keen eye for details both ridiculous and heartwarming, Mergers and Acquisitions is a snapshot of a particular era in both journalism and the wedding industry, as well as a thoughtful meditation on love itself. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Students celebrating Indigenous Peoples' Day explore 12 challenges currently facing Native nations in Traci Sorell and Frané Lessac's impassioned and informative follow-up to We Are Grateful: Otsaliheliga.

We Are Still Here!, for ages 7-10, is framed as a dozen first-person school reports written by fictional children who highlight ways in which Native communities have responded to devastation wrought by federal treaty-making. Each concept, spanning regions and with tribal specificity, fills a double-page spread. Historical scenes, such as "Assimilation" and "Allotment," evolve into modern themes including "Religious Freedom" and "Language Revival." Collectively, the reports showcase self-determination and the continuous agency of Native Nations despite efforts by the federal government to curtail sovereignty: "Despite the continued occupation of our homelands... and being mostly forgotten in US culture, Native Nations all say, 'We are still here!' "

Sorell (At the Mountain's Base), an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation, honors the vibrant contributions of many Native Nations with her careful research. Lessac (Under the Milky Way), in her signature gouache folk-art style, depicts culture and communities rooted in historical events and real locations, and features citizens with a wide range of skin tones and relationships. The presentation format of the text allows Sorell to introduce sophisticated concepts while leaving more complicated topics to her thorough backmatter. A timeline begins with the end of treaty-making in 1871, and additional material invites readers to delve more deeply. Native Nations have struggled and survived, and the successful reunion of this creative pair delivers an empowering affirmation of resilient communities. --Kit Ballenger, youth librarian, Help Your Shelf

Erin Bowman's enthralling post-apocalyptic thriller Dustborn is the story of Delta, a 17-year-old struggling to survive in the decaying wastelands of a desert planet.

After Delta's sister, Indie, dies while giving birth, Delta and her niece leave the far-away healer to return to the home settlement, Dead River. She finds "every hut... smoking" and all the members of her "pack" either murdered or captured. The raiders then reunite Delta with her family at Bedrock, an oasis settlement under the tyrannical rule of the General, where drugged workers toil in blissful ignorance. There, the General discovers Delta is a "map-bearer," a chosen member of her pack branded with a map that reveals the location of the Verdant, a "green paradise." He commands Delta to direct him to the Verdant but she can't read the map; the General orders her mother be killed and swears to kill another member of her group every three days. In order to escape Bedrock, overthrow the General and save the surviving members of her pack, Delta enlists the help of some unlikely allies.

Dustborn is a story told in first-person that emphasizes the enduring importance of community. Throughout the novel, Bowman (Vengeance Road; Taken) prompts readers to contemplate the most painful aspects of life, but Dustborn doesn't depress readers or inspire existential angst; instead, it continually reiterates the human need for friendship, love and connection. Ultimately, Bowman concludes that the secret to life is not hidden in some unreachable utopia--it is in the hearts and minds of those we love. The goal, Bowman writes, is "not just to survive a new dawn together, but to live. Truly live." --Cade Williams, freelance reviewer