Imagine you're an accomplished writer with a few somewhat successful novels to your credit. You're approached by a mysterious fan with a proposal to write a thriller for a large sum of money. The catch? The book will be read only by this person (and maybe his bodyguard) and never published; its existence will forever be a secret. You will never talk about it; you will not keep a copy. Do you agree?

That's the scenario novelist Conner Joyce lays out for Adam Langer early in The Salinger Contract. And, he adds, some pretty good authors had accepted the offer, including Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer and (hence the title) J.D. Salinger.

The Adam Langer who stars in The Salinger Contract is not the Adam Langer who wrote The Salinger Contract, though. While the real-life Langer has written several twisty, offbeat books (such as The Thieves of Manhattan), the novel's protagonist has just a single title to his credit. One of the fun things about The Salinger Contract is the way Langer mixes the real together with the not so real, the truth with lies. And it's hilarious, laugh-out-loud funny; like the Rolling Stones song, it's a gas gas gas. Langer captures the book publishing scene perfectly, from the big box stores to the avaricious editors. So how much of the story is real? This is all I'm allowed to say. Enjoy. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

The idea of home and the stress and strain of family underlies Who Asked You?, the eighth novel by author Terry McMillan (Waiting to Exhale). 

Set in an oppressed, largely African-American community in Los Angeles, the story revolves around Betty Jean, aka B.J., a hardworking, 60-year-old hotel maid, wife, mother and grandmother whose life is pulled in so many directions it's a wonder she isn't falling apart. B.J. serves as the primary caregiver for her retired husband who is struggling with Alzheimer's. Her three adult children have their own lives and problems: one son is a haughty, successful chiropractor who moved far away from the family and racks up marriages, while her other son is serving time in prison, vowing his innocence. And when her daughter, a supposedly recovered drug addict, shows up on B.J.'s doorstep one day and drops off her two young sons so she can take off with a new lover, B.J. is suddenly burdened with even more responsibility. B.J.'s vocal, strong-willed sisters, with their own family woes, add to the complications. Unlikely support arrives in the form of B.J.'s friend and neighbor and a young nurse taking care of B.J.'s husband.

As in McMillan's other novels, serious issues are rendered with wry humor. Quirky, original characters and unexpected jolts and surprises infuse the lively, engaging plot. The story is told via a multigenerational ensemble cast, which lends depth and authenticity to a mostly dialogue/monologue-driven narrative dealing with the intricacies of family life in the era of "hope and change." --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

Natalee Caple imaginatively reinvents the life of the notorious frontierswoman Calamity Jane with In Calamity's Wake. The novel, set in the late 1800s, opens with a deathbed scene between Miette and her adopted, gravely ill father, a clergyman, who makes his daughter promise that, upon his passing, she will go in search of her birth mother, Martha Jane Canary, aka Calamity Jane, who abandoned Miette when she was just a baby.

With great reluctance, Miette sets off to fulfill her father's wish. Miette's adventures during her long, arduous journey through the badlands of the American West test her in mind, body and soul. She encounters real and imagined dangers and a cast of historical characters who claim to know her mother and shed light, sometimes falsely, into the reputation of the woman known as Calamity Jane. Will Miette be able to track her mother down? If she does, can the breach of mother-daughter estrangement be reconciled?

This slender, inventive book is structured in compact chapters with alternating points of view that are ultimately braided together. Caple's approach enhances the overall suspense and appeal of the narrative whose unifying theme is loneliness. Miette's story is about a young woman's emotional coming-of-age and self-discovery, while the chapters on Calamity Jane's life, rendered via facts and shrouded mystery, flesh out a vivid portrait of the often misunderstood woman behind an American icon. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

Spring, 2001: It's like post-Silicon Alley and the dot-com boom, it's computers, files, the endemic "bleeding-edge technology." Websites are popping up everywhere. It's robots.txt, rogue bots, transition matrix and hacker stuff. And there's the New York landscape, the "lawless soundscape of the midnight street, breakage, screaming, vehicle exhaust"--always too close, "part of the deal."

As Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge begins, we meet Maxine Tarnow, a fraud investigator who has recently lost her license, but still is doing her own thing at her business, Tail'Em and Nail'Em, on New York City's Upper West Side.

Maxine becomes involved in a fraud case dealing with start-ups like hwgaahwgh.com and hashslingrz.com ("it's not code for a cheap diner"). But then the Benford curve anomalies, the ghost vendors and the Gulf-ward flow of capital rear their ugly heads. You dig? She's soon plunged deep into a cast of crummy characters a mile wide--and a screaming is about to come across the sky.

Amid all this computer chit chat, Pynchon tells Maxine's story in his very own natural, slangy vernacular, oozing with pop-culture references--Tetris, Friends, Picnic, Johnny Mnemonic and "Borderline"--one after the other. All the computer stuff might not work for some readers, but for those brought up in Pynchon's world, it will be literary manna. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

The Shogun's Daughter, Laura Joh Rowland's 17th installment in the Sano Ichiro mystery series, opens in a city darkened by the grim, residual air of recent death. It is 1704, and Edo (modern-day Tokyo) has been devastated by an earthquake, with thousands dead. Amid the ruins, the shogun's only daughter falls victim to smallpox. As she takes her last, rattling breaths, her family braces themselves for a struggle between the shogun's two remaining heirs. Only the shogun can choose his successor, but those who qualify will conspire ruthlessly to win his favor and be named the next ruler of Japan.

At the heart of Rowland's series is the samurai Sano, a classic hero who embodies the ideals of his rank and tradition. Sano's sworn enemy, the chamberlain Yanagisawa, is the shogun's favorite adviser. After visiting an astrologer, Yanagisawa makes the convenient discovery that his illegitimate son is the son of the shogun. (Rowland has researched Japanese history deeply and prefaces the novel with a historical note explaining the possibility of Yanagisawa's scheme.)

That the shogun notoriously prefers men is one of many reasons Sano doubts the claim. As his investigations progress, Sano begins to question the true cause of the Shogun's daughter's death. While political enemies are obvious suspects, even supernatural forces are rumored to be at play in the struggle for power. Unraveling an intricate plot against the backdrop of a lost and richly beautiful Japan, The Shogun's Daughter injects the murder mystery with glamour. --Annie Atherton

Arnaldur Indridason's Black Skies starts with a small favor: Icelandic police inspector Sigurdur Óli's friend asks him to dissuade a blackmailing husband-and-wife team from releasing explicit sexual photos of his sister-in-law. When Óli arrives at the blackmailers' house, he finds the woman beaten unconscious and chases her attacker before losing the man.

Meanwhile, a vagrant named Andrés, whom Óli met on an earlier case, sends him a disturbing, mysterious package, and follows up with incoherent phone calls, as if wanting to confess something. Can Óli find Andrés and stop him from doing something horrific, catch the blackmailer's assailant and repair his shaky relationship with the woman he loves?

Sigurdur Óli has been a secondary character in Indridason's Inspector Erlendur series (starting with Jar City), but Black Skies puts him in the lead position. Óli is a dogged investigator, blunt and unyielding when it comes to despicable people, but not without compassion toward those who warrant sympathy.

Readers can jump into Black Skies without having read any books by Indridason, however; the fine writing here will probably motivate them to circle back to the Erlendur stories. Indridason's lean prose keeps the action moving forward, but manages to include social commentary on greed and reflections on how we're often betrayed by those closest to us--and how some forms of justice may not be just at all. --Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, crime-fiction editor, The Edit Ninja

Salvage the Bones, Jesmyn Ward's novel about a pregnant 15-year-old girl in an impoverished Mississippi bayou town in the days before Hurricane Katrina, won the 2011 National Book Award. In Men We Reaped, Ward turns to memoir to understand the seemingly unrelated recent deaths of her brother and four other young men from her close-knit community. The result is a vivid and searing look at the legacy of racism in the U.S. by a writer with exceptional narrative gifts.

Ward tells each man's story in chapters woven into her larger narrative. She cuts back and forth in time as she traces her parents' lives growing up in DeLisle, Miss., trying for a better life in California, then returning to dwindling choices and a fracturing family. We share her grief at the loss of these young men, and understand why she loved each of them: Rog, Demond, CJ, Ronald and, finally, her brother, Joshua, killed by a drunk driver.

Ward ultimately sees these deaths not as random, but as the consequence of racism so ingrained it is almost unremarkable, though its expression is not. When options become nonexistent, depression, recklessness and the abuse of drugs and alcohol can seem reasonable responses; when there is no margin for error, any risk is magnified.

Men We Reaped is a stunning look at racism, the people it marginalizes and how we are all implicated. It is loving and raw, full of grief and anger, personal and objective, shocking and inevitable. Ward stands alongside writers like Edwige Danticat, Alice Walker and Maya Angelou as a gifted chronicler of the crucible of an inequitable culture. --Jeanette Zwart, freelance writer and reviewer

Oil and Honey centers partly on climate change, a subject on which Bill McKibben (The End of Nature) is expert, but it is also a deeply personal book. Having entered into a land-share agreement with his friend Kirk Webster, a beekeeper, McKibben finds his home and Webster's apiaries exerting a gravitational pull just as his political activism takes him far and wide. These two sides of his life--personal and political, local and global, analog and digital--are the focus of this combination memoir and call to action.

The subtitle refers to McKibben's journey from writer to activist, by way of 350.org and the Keystone Pipeline--a trip he did not intend but found obligatory. Activist though he may be, McKibben remains a fine writer, evocative, articulate, clever and humble in examining his mistakes. In piercing prose, he unites his longstanding status as an authority on climate change with his novicehood in the world of beekeeping. He muses on the small-scale and private implications of our changing world, which lead him to work with his family and Kirk's bees in his beloved local community in Vermont, and on the necessity for global action to combat the continuing quest for fossil fuels.

Oil and Honey travels the world but always cycles back, like the seasons, to McKibben's Vermont home, likening global systems to beehives in a manner both profound and lyrical--and important. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia 

Australian adventurer Tim Cope's On The Trail of Genghis Khan tells the story of a 6,000-mile trek on horseback across the Eurasian steppes, from Mongolia to Hungary. His plan was to retrace the westward expansion of the early 13th-century Mongols as they created the largest land empire in history under the leadership of Genghis Khan. Cope hoped not only to understand the lives of the Mongols and the nomadic peoples who preceded them, but to look for traces of nomadic heritage. He expected the trip to take 18 months--instead, it took more than three years.

The narrative alternates between epic scope and day-to-day bumbling. With limited facility with the Mongolian language and even less ability as a horseman, Cope seems to be ironically named in the beginning chapters. His horses were stolen six days into his trek. He struggled with his gear, ran low on food, made dangerous choices and was regularly saved by the kindness of strangers.

Cope's experiences would be interesting enough in themselves, but he interweaves it with both the history of Genghis Khan's armed horsemen and accounts of their modern descendants, including modern Mongolian nomads who live in traditional felt tents with televisions powered by car batteries, cattle herders struggling to survive in post-soviet Kazakhstan and Hungarian horsemen who have romanticized their nomadic past.

On The Trail of Genghis Khan will appeal to anyone interested in adventure or nomads--past or present. --Pamela Toler, blogging at History in the Margins

Mary Jo Salter can move easily within the formal confines of meter and rhyme without losing her taste for the colloquial--or even a contemporary near rhyme of Gogol and Google. She can also break structure with equal aplomb, as in "Unbroken Music," a moving tribute to poet Amy Clampitt that mixes snippets from Clampitt's poems and journals into a reflective meditation on a visit to Italy. But Salter's uncanny sense of the sounds of poetry is always present--just listen to this description of bas-relief Egyptian tomb servants:

"A woman of stone grinding grain,
as she would have, on a quern of stone.
A woman winnowing grain in a pan.
Another on her knees, kneading.
A brewer mashing a vat of beer,
a butcher slitting the throat
of a heifer for the hereafter."

Salter's career of distinguished teaching and writing doesn't detract from her playful whimsy. Among its more serious poems, Nothing by Design scatters several light verses, like the "meditation upon 'The Waste Land' " called "T.S. Lightweight and Ezra Profound":

"Give Ezra his due credit
for that amazing edit.
Still, T.S. is the one who said it."

...or "Edna St. Vincent, M.F.A.," which describes Millay as "the worst/ sometimes-excellent poet in history."

This is the rare poetry collection that might be described as a "page turner." Nothing by Design strings together seemingly disparate poems with more design than the title implies. As Salter says in "Crusoe's Footprint": "No man is an island; we're more like the Florida Keys." --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

When a father goes out to buy milk, he takes an inordinately long time. He returns with an explanation for his absence involving green globby aliens, pirates and dinosaurs. Is he telling the truth? Or is it a made-up adventure?

Young readers will savor the hunt for evidence to support their views in Neil Gaiman's latest middle-grade novel, which taps into themes of his previous works (Coraline; The Graveyard Book)--traveling to worlds with other beings and the threat of being held captive there. When the father returns with the milk, he has a story by way of explanation for the long delay. He heard a noise ("thummthumm") coming from a silver disc hovering above, and was sucked up into it. "Fortunately," said the father, "I had put the milk into my coat pocket." On board, green "globby" beings demand that the father hand over "ownership of the whole planet" so they can "remodel it." Instead, the father leaps out a door marked "emergency exit," despite a warning from his captors that he would let in "the space-time continuum." Throughout, Skottie Young's pen-and-ink drawings emphasize events and supplement the narrative.

Gaiman plays with the time loop in ways that will delight both science fiction enthusiasts and those who enjoy farfetched humor (at one point, the father borrows the milk from himself). Ever protective of the milk, the father's one goal is to return to his children and give them a good breakfast. His heroic efforts to thwart his enemies are all in service of that mission. And at story's end, he has the milk to prove it. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

In this fun + silly = filly (as world-wise mice Bert and Gert might put it) debut of the Three-Ring Rascals series, the Klise sisters introduce readers to Sir Sidney's Circus.

Kindly Sir Sidney and his friendly circus animals are like family: Leo the Lion and Elsa the Elephant are best friends, and the Famous Flying Banana Brothers, the circus acrobats, dazzle crowds all over America. But Sir Sidney needs a little break from running the show. Enter Barnabas Brambles, certified Lion Tamer from the University of Piccadilly Circus. Sir Sidney and Barnabas strike a deal: Barnabas can have all the profits from one week of running the circus, and Sir Sidney will get his much needed break. Little does the circusmaster know that Barnabas is a fraud who's only out to make money. He tries to add extra shows, sell Leo and Elsa to the zoo, and get rid of Bert and Gert!

Much silliness and humor meet each crazy plan, and in the end Barnabas realizes the mistakes he has made. The wonderful line drawings, cartoon illustrations, and diagrams that appear on every page skillfully tell much of this story. M. Sarah Klise incorporates site gags, rhymes, jokes, word plays and even math problems in her illustrations. This already popular author-illustrator team (the 43 Old Cemetery Road series) creates a whole new cast of interesting characters that we hope to see again and again. This fanciful and entertaining new series will certainly appeal to newly independent readers. --JoAnn Jonas, children's librarian, freelance reviewer

In Rose, the start of a promising new series, English author Holly Webb spins together a shrewd and resourceful main character, a comfortingly familiar plot and writing that shines all the brighter for its simplicity. The results will delight fans of fantasy, historical fiction and girls with gumption. This would make a particularly enjoyable mother-daughter read-aloud.

Practical and hard-headed enough to loathe the signs that she has magical abilities (she can make pictures appear on smooth surfaces), Rose is thrilled when the opportunity arises for her to leave the only home she has ever known: St. Bridget's Home for Abandoned Girls. Her new life as a maid in the house of "Mr. Aloysius Fountain, the famous alchemist" suits her beautifully--until an evil sorceress threatens to destroy the happy home.

Webb draws on the British tradition of rich language and understated emotions (think Kenneth Grahame, Frances Hodgson Burnett and C.S. Lewis) and treats magic with a refreshingly light touch. Readers will immediately recognize that the heroine is special, but the setting is so deceptively mundane that readers may not realize Rose lives in a magical world until 25 pages in, when Rose off-handedly refers to "well-to-do households [that] usually held only one or two spells, and perhaps an unbreakable dinner service."

Webb does not reinvent the wheel, but succeeds in creating a book as satisfying and familiar as a cup of hot cocoa. --Allie Jane Bruce, children's librarian, Bank Street College of Education