Ron Carlson's  (The Signal; Room Service) fourth novel, Return to Oakpine, is a lean, weathered and big-hearted tale. Back in the day, in Oakpine, Wyo., Jimmy Brand, Mason Kirby, Craig Ralston and Frank Gunderson bonded as members of a high school garage band whose graduation celebrations were overshadowed by the tragic death of Jimmy's brother. The four bandmates dispersed: Craig to serve in Vietnam, Mason and Frank (briefly) to college and Jimmy to New York. Craig and Frank came back and settled in Oakpine; Mason, caught up in his Denver legal career, visited rarely. For 30 years Jimmy remained in exile, visiting Oakpine only in his fiction. When Carlson's novel opens, in the fall of 1999, illness has forced Jimmy to move into his parents' garage at the same time Mason decides to spruce up and sell his childhood home.

Carlson shares his empathetic scope across generations, from the elderly Mrs. Brand to 17-year-old Larry Ralston and his friends. Among the characters who strive to live with grace and meaning are a philosophical football star who runs off excess energy on dark streets; an adult novelist shut out by his father because it's too late to say the "five or six sentences" that needed to be said 30 years ago; a "together" mom whose second-phase career as a museum coordinator is quickened with adulterous possibility. In Carlson's expert prose, the adults' midlife reckonings are revelations and the teenagers' discovery of adult agency are touching and raw.

Return to Oakpine is suffused with evocative landscapes and the practical yet lyrical details of work, whether a character is renovating a garage or editing a short story. --Holloway McCandless, blogger at Litagogo: A Guide to Free Literary Podcasts

For centuries, every medical student's rite of passage has been the gross anatomy dissection class. Cadaver dissection was even more important 150 years ago, when it was the only effective way for potential physicians to see how the body works. In the late 1850s, however, there was no consistent process to obtain those cadavers.

Matthew Guinn's debut novel, The Resurrectionist, is the story of Jacob Thacker, a recent graduate of the fictional University of South Carolina Medical School, and his discovery of the school's unsettling past--the story of a Senegalese slave named Nemo Johnston, who was purchased by the founding faculty members a few years before the outbreak of the Civil War.

Jacob, serving as the school's public relations director while he waits out a postponement of his medical license for Xanax abuse, launches a PR campaign to celebrate the renovation of the original Medical School building, but the first day of excavation uncovers a mass cache of human bones. Library archives reveal Nemo's role as the "resurrectionist" who digs up freshly buried slaves for the school's dissection classes.

Guinn's narrative alternates between the story of Jacob's personal ambitions and discomfort with his past and the story of Nemo, shunned by his fellow slaves and damned by their local preacher as "hell-spawn." The novel effectively raises questions of how the country can transcend its own racially difficult past--and learn from those who have come before, as physicians do, that "the dead are the key to the living." --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Alissa Nutting's mind-blowing debut, Tampa, is, like Nabokov's Lolita, a story of illicit sexual obsession and corrupted innocence; its narrator a highly literate adult who preys on early adolescents. But Tampa is a slimy, sticky inversion of the classic old-man-meets-young-girl scenario--and Celeste Price, the novel's unrepentant narrator, has more in common with American Psycho than Humbert Humbert.

A self-admitted "soulless pervert," Celeste is 26, smoking hot and married to a rich, handsome idiot. Her marriage, like her new job teaching eighth-grade English, is a brutally calculated cover for her sole passion: a voracious lust for 14-year-old boys.

Tampa is not a confession--the word implies contrition--but rather an unadulterated account of Celeste's seduction of one of her students. Jack Patrick, "a stretch-limbed version of a younger boy," is the perfect mark: sweet, wholesome and absently parented by a single father. The contrast between Jack's innocence and Celeste's predatory, salacious manipulation is both repulsive and mesmerizing. In a testament to Nutting's stunning talent, the sex--and there's a lot of it--is extremely explicit and yet undeniably artful.

The story takes on the swampy, close heat of the Tampa suburbs as Celeste recounts her increasingly depraved transgressions, and the collateral victims pile up. She isn't interested in gaining the reader's sympathy, so--unlike Humbert--there is no reason to think she's anything less than chillingly honest, even though she deceives everyone else.

Celeste keeps getting away with it for the same reason that you'll keep reading about her: she's abhorrent, but she's fascinating--and Nutting has announced herself as a writer who is as gifted as she is bold. --Hannah Calkins, blogger at Unpunished Vice

Some losses we never get over--and when a parent loses a child, the grief becomes all the more profound. In The Lemon Orchard, Luanne Rice explores this experience with creative compassion, telling the story of Julia Hughes, a mother whose 16-year-old daughter, Jenny, dies in a car crash that also claims the life of Julia's husband, a man whom she was in the process of divorcing. Five years after the deaths, Julia, a professor of cultural anthropology at Yale, is still unable to shake the loss. When a beloved aunt and uncle ask her to house sit their Malibu property and lemon orchard, Julia packs up with her dog and heads west.

The natural beauty of the Santa Monica Mountains intensifies Julia's memories of Jenny. When Roberto, the manager of the lemon orchard, takes an interest in Julia--and vice versa--the two bond through their shared pain of losing daughters. In Roberto's case, his daughter was lost and never found during their illegal immigration from Mexico to the United States. Julia and Roberto begin to fall in love, which inspires a renewed sense of purpose in Julia as she becomes determined to find answers about Roberto's daughter.

Alternating points of view lend intimacy to the romantic elements and suspense of the narrative. Rice has written a tender portrait of grief and loss that ultimately becomes a gateway to hope and healing, love and reinvention. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

A sure contender for best-titled novel of the season, Philippe Georget's Summertime All the Cats Are Bored takes place in and around the Mediterranean seaside resort of Perpignan. Half Catalan, half French, Perpignan is Languedoc at its most exotic.

The cats are not the only ones who are bored. Two detectives, Gilles Sebag and Jacques Molina, are consumed by dull routine. Nothing ever changes--until suddenly, a young Dutch woman is murdered and another one disappears. Sebag receives cryptic typed notes signed by groups known to have long-standing feuds with Holland, starting a cat-and-mouse game with the detectives. But are they a ruse? The case quickly involves the entire police department, including a hotshot from Paris, Cyril Lefèvre.

The two detectives also have lives outside of the police investigation: Molina's cranky ex-wife likes to play push-me, pull-you with the family; Sebag's wife is away on a cruise with girlfriends--at least, he hopes she is. With his two children also off to summer camp, Sebag concentrates all his efforts on his work. 

At first, Georget's story turns on whether or not three cases that the Department is working on are intertwined. Sebag holds one opinion; Lefèvre another. (Of course, Lefèvre treats the Perpignan constabulary like a bunch of hicks.) Sebag has moments of self-doubt, about both his career and home, but labors doggedly on through the blistering heat. In the end, his intuition and hard work pay off on the job--at home, however, lingering ambiguity remains. --Valerie Ryan, Cannon Beach Book Company, Ore.

Like The Hypnotist, the first title in Lars Kepler's Joona Linna series, The Fire Witness opens with a terrifying scene, then proceeds through several twisty plotlines before the heart-gripping conclusion.

Linna, detective inspector with Sweden's National Police, is summoned to a home for troubled girls where a double murder has occurred, both victims' heads bashed by a blunt instrument. The suspect, a resident named Vicky, is missing and later seen stealing a car with a small boy inside.

Despite the strong evidence pointing to Vicky, Linna is disturbed by certain details that don't add up. He consults a medium who claims to know information not publicly released. Linna's colleagues write Vicky off as dead and the case is closed, but he believes she's alive, maybe even innocent, and continues his pursuit. What he discovers are old wounds and terrible secrets that someone would kill to keep hidden.

After the second Linna novel, The Nightmare, took on political topics, this third installment returns to form with more personal stories. The husband-and-wife writing team behind "Lars Kepler" wreak much tragedy and suffering on their characters, but instead of asking for pity by depicting the girls as victims, the authors paint them as nasty and vicious, somehow making their murder more devastating: What horrors have they endured to turn out this way? Readers also get to see more of Linna's past and learn why the man is such a loner. Everything is revealed with a pervasive sense of creepiness, causing welcome chills during hot summer reading. --Elyse Dinh-McCrilllis, freelance writer and editor, blogging at Pop Culture Nerd

The Fame Thief is Timothy Hallinan's third novel starring Junior Bender, a professional burglar with a second calling as a crook's detective--because bad guys need their mysteries solved, too. Irwin Dressler, no less powerful a crime boss for his 93 years of age, hires Junior against his will for a strange 60-year-old case, the theft of a Hollywood actress's most valuable asset: her fame.

Dolores La Marr was a kid from Scranton, scarcely beginning to make it big in 1940s Tinseltown, when her association with that era's fashionable gangsters landed her in a nasty, full-color scandal. Strangely, no one but Dolly took the fall, and all these decades later, Dressler still wants to find out who set her up. Junior quickly learns that this mystery is not as dead as it seems, and that some dangers only increase with age.

The refreshingly unassuming Junior is a fun riff on the typical private investigator: his specialty--committing crimes, rather than solving them--brings him an unusual perspective. The elderly Dressler is a fabulous, deadpan wiseguy in "eye-agonizing" golf pants, backed up by two unusually domestic versions of the standard muscled goon. And Junior's own domestic concerns--a teenage daughter, her jokester boyfriend, an ex-wife and a randy new girlfriend--fill out the eccentric, likable cast. Fast-paced action and a building body count pair nicely with humor in this series, bound to keep the reader coming back for more. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

Matt Haig shifts his attention from vampires (The Radleys) to aliens in the sly and touching The Humans. Well, one alien: a Vonnadorian who's come to this "small, waterlogged planet in a very lonely corner of the universe" and taken over the body of a brilliant Cambridge mathematics professor, Andrew Martin. This alien, like Death in Meet Joe Black, is curious about having a human body better to understand, for good and bad, what it means to be human. He's also on a mission: to destroy evidence of the scientific "breakthrough" Martin's just made.

He teleports, naked, to a road at night and is promptly hit by a car. He's taken to a hospital, and after adjusting to the pain, sneaks away. Then, with his Gulliver-like ego in a Swiftian world, he proceeds to observe and critique, complain and mock. Humans have "middling intelligence" and are "prone to violence." Humans read books; Vonnadorians chew and eat them quickly. Human food is horrible; Vonnadorians drink only liquid nitrogen. Everything humans do, Vonnadorians do better.

Gradually, he comes to like some things about Earth--Emily Dickinson, Australian wine, dogs, crunchy peanut butter--and to love others, including Martin's wife and son. Haig invites us to join his alien's journey and observe him become Martin, adjusting and learning that humans aren't as inferior as he originally thought. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

High-powered attorney Ellen Branford accidentally falls through an old dock in Beacon, Maine, and is swept into a dangerous riptide. She impulsively plants a passionate kiss on the handsome stranger who rescues her. Thus begins The Irresistible Blueberry Bakeshop and Cafe, a pleasing debut novel by Mary Simses.

Ellen's kiss becomes big local news, which complicates what was supposed to be a quick visit to this sleepy little New England town to deliver a letter from her recently deceased grandmother to an old flame. Along the way, she encounters a cast of locals whose small-town ways seem foreign to her, but slowly become more endearing--especially as Ellen, whose wedding is just three months away, keeps crossing paths with her rescuer. Might that kiss have sparked feelings between the two strangers? While Ellen vows to focus on the objective of her visit, and as she learns more about the choices that shaped her grandmother's life, including her past connection to a nearby blueberry farm, stark parallels begin to emerge between their situations. Ellen's romantic dilemma soon leads her to question her place in the world.

Simses has crafted a wholesome love story, infused with the pull-and-tug of romance and elements of mystery and enhanced by humble, low-key themes and conflicts. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

Inspired by his acquisition of 19th-century cookbooks from a Sotheby's auction, food writer and BBC personality William Sitwell has amassed a wonderfully entertaining miscellany in A History of Food in 100 Recipes, complete with observations that blend the historical commentary of an Alton Brown with the gastronomic wisdom of a Jeffrey Steingarten.

Stillwell's anthology starts with bread recipes gleaned from Egyptian hieroglyphs and ends with the rise of modern celebrity chefs and the revival of ancient cooking methods, albeit with a modern twist. He cites the first formal mentions of foods we take for granted today, such as the desserts found in Genesis and the cheesecakes of the ancient Greeks. We learn of the formal references to pasta by Arabic cartographer Muhammad al-Idrisi before Italy claimed the dish as its own, as well as Renaissance-era cookbooks and party-planning guides. Catherine di Medici's introduction of Italian recipes and cooking methods to France gave birth to French gastronomy, while William Kitchener's early 19th-century standardized measurements and food-handling methods enabled others to tailor cookbooks for wide audiences.

Despite its compactness, A History of Food in 100 Recipes is a cleverly constructed, gastronomic and scholarly heavyweight, a compendium of international cooking techniques that have spurred many a modern chef to fame and fortune--and a treasure that any cook (or non-cook) would appreciate. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant

First novelist K.A. Barson channels the voice of a real girl grappling with real issues.

Narrator Ann Galardi, age 16, is a size 17. She feels like she doesn't belong either with her svelte mother, her mother's husband, Mike, and their four-year-old twins, or with her absent father and his family. Ann hasn't spoken with her older brother in more than a year, and her best friend moved to a new high school. So she takes comfort in food. But now her beloved Aunt Jackie is getting married, and Ann has two months to lose 45 pounds to get to her ideal weight. Luckily, she has an ally in her chain-smoking, funny and supportive grandmother.

Barson chronicles one teen's realistic struggle with weight and body image issues. Ann believes the joke is always on her, even when it's not. Her awakening to the truth--that people value her for who she is--happens gradually and credibly, over the book's span from June to August. And it takes an innocent pretend tea party hosted by Ann's four-year-old sister for the teen to see how her attitude toward food and herself have affected those she loves.

Teens who struggle with their weight will find a funny, smart companion in Barson's charming heroine, and those who overlook or judge a classmate like Ann may find themselves taking a moment to get to know him or her. All readers will cheer for this winning character. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

Amy Butler Greenfield (A Perfect Red) makes a smooth transition to young adult literature with this coming-of-age tale set in an alternate 17th-century Britain.

Fifteen-year-old narrator Lucy lives alone on an island with her aging guardian, Norrie, who's explained that Lucy lost her mother in a shipwreck eight years ago. Norrie has one rule: that Lucy never sing. But on Allhallows' Eve, when Lucy detects a song on the wind, and Norrie's convinced she hears Lucy humming, Norrie shuts Lucy in the house while she finishes up the night's preparations. A tree crashes through the window, bearing a letter written by Lucy's mother that suggests Norrie has not been honest with Lucy. So Lucy allows the song to possess her, begins to sing, and she's transported to England, to the private library of Lord Scargrave, who serves the king. There she discovers she's a Chantress, a line nearly extinct, and hunted by those in power.

Greenfield sets up an England in which the enchantments of King Arthur's day live on, through the songs of the Chantress. The author melds a British history absent a Civil War with the natural-born gifts over which Lucy has no control. The strong subtheme of what can happen when one tries to thwart her instinctive talents makes this an unusual storytelling approach to historical fantasy. The lyricism of the narrative appropriately evokes Lucy's gift of song. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

In her debut picture book, author and artist Emily Kate Moon gets the voice of her five-year-old heroine just right.

First, Joone introduces herself. She can count to 100 and wears only her orange dress. Next, she describes her Grandpa, who can count to 1,000. "He used to be a scientist," Joone explains, "Now he's just my grandpa." Moon depicts a warm household with quirky details. They live in a yurt with a curving bar for the kitchen, plenty of books, and an area rug and cozy chair by a wood-burning stove. She conveys Joone's energy with the girl's lean into the chess table and a kicked-out left leg. Joone's turtle, Dr. Chin, is always on hand, often at rest on her purple hat. No mention is made of parents; it's just Joone with Grandpa and Dr. Chin, and their daily routine. Their close relationship comes through in Joone's recounting of their exchanges, as when Grandpa takes pleasure in the multicolored feathers decorating Joone's treehouse ("Joone, I don't know where you find the energy," says he; "Grandpa, I don't know either!" she replies).

Moon's simple phrases reflect a childlike rhythm and sense of fairness. "If I'm good, I get dessert," the heroine says, in a twilight scene with evidence of a dinner al fresco. At bedtime, Joone reads him a story. "If he's good, I read him two." The deceptively simple artwork conveys myriad details about Joone's routine and her close relationship with Grandpa. Here's hoping for much more from this talented newcomer. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness