After three legal thrillers (the first memorably titled The Many Aspects of Mobile Home Living), veteran Virginia circuit court judge Martin Clark sets his fourth among the strip malls, tattoo joints, Ace Hardwares and gentleman farms of Martinsville, Va. The Jezebel Remedy centers on the marriage and legal practice of Joe and Lisa Stone--hardworking small-town lawyers who defend the defenseless and don't mind providing counsel to local outlaws and oddballs. "Petty Lettie" VanSandt is a prime example of the latter. A tattooed, animal-rescue, police-harassing, necromancer nutcase, she wastes Joe's hours with secret potion patent filings and lawsuits against perceived frauds like lightbulbs that don't last the promised year or a broken set of "clackers" (a 911 operator pictures Lettie "sitting there at her trailer with her gold tooth, wild-eyed, up to her neck in cats and dogs, probably juiced on meth, banging them balls together as fast as she can go until they shatter"). When Lettie offers one of her elixirs to a big pharma company and then suspiciously turns up dead in a meth cookhouse fire, Joe and Lisa find themselves in a complicated big-city case with their jobs and lives on the line.

Clark's legal bona fides provide plenty of courtroom and insider evidentiary drama, but his story also draws juice from moments of discord and reconciliation in Joe's and Lisa's 20-year marital and professional lives. Lisa's adulterous slip ("a needle full of passion... a two-day jolt over her for-as-long-as-I-live promise"), Joe's unbillable work wasted on Lettie, even the loss of their office-sharing dog, Brownie, provide a nice domestic balance to a plot full of crime-solving and legal maneuvering. With fiction talent like this, one wonders why Clark still sits on the bench. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Set on a Norwegian island 95 miles above the Arctic Circle, Rebecca Dinerstein's debut novel, The Sunlit Night, is the wistful story of two young people--one American, the other a Russian immigrant to the United States--thrust by misfortune into a romantic encounter in this most unlikely of places.

The novel pairs recent college graduate Frances, fleeing a failed relationship and her parents' crumbling marriage in New York to intern with an artist who paints only in the color yellow, and 17-year-old Yasha Gregoriov, whose first return visit to Moscow from his home in Brighton Beach in Brooklyn is shattered by the sudden death of his father. Determined to carry out his father's wish to be buried at the "top of the world," Yasha accompanies the body to the Viking Museum, a decidedly modest attraction where tourists come to celebrate events like the whale meat festival and to practice archery while picnicking on a boulder-strewn beach, where the elder Gregoriov is buried. "Yasha and I had both come a rather far and strange way, toward either an end or a height," Frances observes.

In her first novel, Rebecca Dinerstein has demonstrated a level of mastery that would be impressive even in a much more seasoned writer. The Sunlit Night is a funny, wise and tender story, a near perfect blend of disparate elements that's reflected in the ambiguous, yet vaguely hopeful, ending that provides the fitting conclusion to this unusual love story. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer

In The Household Spirit, Tod Wodicka (All Shall Be Well; and All Shall Be Well; and All Manner of Things Shall Be Well) writes again of Queens Falls, a remote community in upstate New York. The novel focuses on two adults--strangers, lost souls--who have long lived adjacent to each other in the only two houses for miles on a remote stretch of Route 29, "a twisted old country road" that serves as an auxiliary pass-through. Their houses were twins--"once identical, now fraternal"--built in the 1860s, when paper mills were the boon of the region.

In the house with original wood siding lives Howie Jeffries, a morbidly shy, divorced 50-year-old. Howie's wife left him 20 years before, and he has lost touch with his daughter, Harriet, a free-spirited young woman pursuing an art career in New York City. After two decades of living on his own, Howie still considers the residence "his family's house."

Emily Phane grew up in the aluminum-sided home adjacent to Howie's. Now 24 and struggling to cope with, and conceal, a debilitating condition that makes her too terrified to sleep, Emily is summoned home from college to care for the doting grandfather who raised her after he suffers a stroke.

Finely nuanced details and multi-layered dark comedy are Wodicka's strong suits. Howie's and Emily's alternating viewpoints reveal their vulnerabilities and enrich their well-drawn characterizations in a poignant, revelatory story of the liberating nature of truth and friendship. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

Peter Ferry (Travel Writing) crafts a wise and delicate novel of aging, love and autonomy in Old Heart.

Tom Johnson is 85. He has been widowed, and thereby freed from a troubled marriage. His adult children have begun pressuring him to sell the house in Illinois and move into a home, and the death of a son who had Down syndrome has given Tom the opportunity to pursue an old mystery. So Tom runs away, leaving no clues behind save a note for his family: "I am not coming back." He then travels to the Netherlands to track down a Dutch woman he knew during World War II, with whom he had "invented love."

The half-hidden narrator of Old Heart is Tom's granddaughter Nora, a graduate student who had just begun recording the story of Tom's return from the war and the beginning of his long-lived but unhappy marriage. When Tom makes his escape, Nora is the only one he takes into his confidence, and she relates parts of his story from her perspective. In other chapters, he chronicles his personal history in long letters to Nora.

Old Heart is earnest and occasionally sentimental, but also pensive and eventually enlightened. It is at once a romance, a meditation on the complications of end-of-life independence and the responsibilities of family, and a lovely personal history. In a slim, unassuming read, Ferry opens intriguing questions and introduces his reader to complex and deeply likable characters. The result is delightfully warm and universally appealing. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

Peter Watson (who wrote Gifts of War under the pen name Mackenzie Ford) entertains with Madeleine's War, a novel of World War II romance and intrigue starring fictional characters but with a historically accurate background.

Matthew fought on the ground in France with a secret British resistance unit until he suffered a severe injury. In his new role training fresh recruits, he meets Madeleine, a beautiful, talented French-Canadian woman determined to contribute to the war effort. Matthew's job is to train Madeleine for intelligence and sabotage before she parachutes behind enemy lines. Her superior officer, he is not supposed to fall in love with her, but the two nonetheless embark upon a passionate, short-lived affair, before she is sent to France and disappears.

Despite its title, Madeleine's War is told from Matthew's perspective, leaving the reader as in the dark as he is after Madeleine vanishes in Nazi territory. He is then left to track her down--out of both love and duty, which sometimes conflict. The plot then twists again as Matthew is given an uncomfortable mission of his own to carry out.

Watson's expertise as a historian lends credibility to the context of this story: in his afterword he states that the geography, training procedures, technologies and secrecy he portrays are all based on fact. Matthew and Madeleine and their colleagues are Watson's own creations, painted with a rosy, romantic glow but also exposed to the glaring realities of war. Romance fans and war buffs will be equally pleased with the result. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

When Georgia Ford looks out the bridal shop window and spots her fiancé, Ben, with another woman, she reacts instinctively: she jumps in her car and drives nine hours--in her wedding dress--to seek solace at her parents' northern California vineyard.

In Laura Dave's (The First Husband) fourth novel, Eight Hundred Grapes, Georgia and Ben's romantic woes are just the beginning of tumult. Georgia arrives at the Sonoma vineyard looking for comfort but finds her close-knit family in the throes of crises rivaling her own.

Her parents are "taking time apart"; her father's decision to sell the beloved but demanding Last Straw Vineyard is too late to save their marriage. Georgia's twin brothers love the same woman, and their triangle is torn by real and perceived alienations. While the family rallies to support Georgia, their advice varies on how to handle the shock of learning Ben has a daughter from a previous relationship and that he's friendly with her glamorous mother.

With the wedding date picked to coincide with the celebratory grape harvest, Georgia has to decide soon if she'll go through with the ceremony. As she weighs her options, she realizes that her threatened nuptials are perhaps not what's tugging hardest at her heart. Rather, it's the loss of the vineyard, so she fights the planned sale to the rival winery and its forthright (and handsome) CEO.

Decisions remain bottled until the end of this fast-paced novel, which holds surprises and satisfying conclusions for the family and the harvest both. Eight Hundred Grapes is a delightful read by itself but pairs perfectly with a good California wine. --Cheryl Krocker McKeon, manager, Book Passage, San Francisco

As part of its 70th anniversary celebration, the Mystery Writers of America has published an anthology of crime stories set in Manhattan, where the MWA national office is located. Manhattan Mayhem, edited by Mary Higgins Clark, boasts a handsome cover depicting a map of the island and the location of each story; inside are 17 contributions from authors including Lee Child, Thomas H. Cook, T. Jefferson Parker, S.J. Rozan and Clark herself.

As with any collection, there are standout stories and less successful efforts. The strongest ones include Ben H. Winters's "Trapped," a witty entry written in the format of a play about the murder on the set of a Chelsea production of the Broadway thriller Deathtrap; Cook's "Damage Control," which reveals a heartbreaking misunderstanding between a Hell's Kitchen resident and his former foster daughter; and Nancy Pickard's "Three Little Words," about the tragic consequences of an Upper West Side, terminally ill woman's attempts to tell only the truth in her remaining days. Child's and Rozan's stories feature their series characters Jack Reacher and Lydia Chin, respectively, though Chin is referenced only because her amateur-sleuth mother takes the focus.

Even when the stories are less satisfying, they're accompanied by pictures and maps of landmarks to aid readers in planning a trip to the city and exploring a metropolis that always seems to have more stories to tell. Fans can also learn some local history and perhaps wax nostalgic about bygone days. --Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, blogger at Pop Culture Nerd

Octogenarian character actress Mary Louise Wilson has a face that's more familiar than her name. "I'm not well known, I didn't have a glittering career studded with affairs and celebrities," she writes. What she is, however, is a survivor in a very tough profession, and a born storyteller with a deliciously acerbic sense of humor about everything, especially herself.

In her mid-50s, Wilson realized that she had to take control of her flagging career by writing (with Mark Hampton) and starring in Full Gallop, a one-woman show based on the life of Vogue magazine editor Diana Vreeland. The focus of My First Hundred Years in Show Business is Wilson's eight-year journey to bring Full Gallop to the stage. "If you never want to hear from somebody again, send them your play," Wilson writes.

Alternating with this long-gestating project are short, juicy chapters covering her film, TV and theater roles and her private life. Wilson has decades of great backstage anecdotes, starting with her Broadway debut in the 1963 flop Hot Spot starring Judy Holliday--who fired several directors and refused to speak to Wilson offstage. Wilson's behind-the-scenes stories are equally compelling: an accidental overdose, an African American cross-dressing boyfriend, a pre-legal abortion and a cocaine-addicted dentist who used Crazy Glue to fix her teeth.

Wilson won major theater awards in her sixth and seventh decade and has no interest in retiring. At age 82, she writes, "The need to perform doesn't die. It's like lust; it's like throwing a lit match on a pile of dry hay." --Kevin Howell, independent reviewer and marketing consultant

In Behind the Mask: A Life of Vita Sackville-West, British journalist and biographer Mark Dennison (The Last Princess) focuses on the complex individual behind the early-20th-century icon. This balanced life history reveals a famous writer, horticulturalist and gardener, baron's daughter, respectable Edwardian wife and mother, and passionate lover of men and women--most famously Virginia Woolf.

Vita Sackville-West was born in 1892, into aristocratic privilege. At age 21, Vita married the diplomat Harold Nicolson. Though they both vigorously pursued other--mostly same-sex--lovers, they remained a devoted couple until Vita's death in 1962. Dennison recounts the details of Vita's affairs with her childhood friend Rosamund Grosvenor, the novelist Violet Trefusis (née Keppel) and Virginia Woolf with objective restraint and a multitude of details. Vita's affair with Woolf seems to have been less emotionally intense but was important as a friendship with another writer, a point crucial to Dennison's argument that Sackville-West's literary legacy transcends her taboo-breaking sexual behavior. She twice won the Hawthornden Prize for poetry, published many widely praised novels and biographies, and later wrote an influential weekly garden column in the Observer, which, along with her care of her famous gardens at Sissinghurst, helped secure her place in history as a garden designer.

Dennison is a meticulous and respectful chronicler of Vita's life. Thoroughly researched, with liberal quoting from her diary, letters and books, his narrative retains an urgency colored by details worthy of the best British costume dramas, and reveals a complex, gifted, charismatic but conflicted woman whose many and wide-ranging accomplishments, long obscured by her sensational life, deserve recognition. --Jeanette Zwart, freelance writer and reviewer

Published in 1967, Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan was hugely popular. It's an episodic, zany, picaresque novella that begins in San Francisco and ends in rural Idaho. Allison Green (Half-Moon Scar) was four when it came out. Just as Brautigan's book celebrated a more pastoral America in retrospect, Green's delightfully whimsical memoir, The Ghosts Who Travel with Me, is an appealing look back to a time she wishes she had participated in. She travels with her partner, Arline, from Seattle to Boise, then up into the Sawtooth Mountains in pursuit of the ghosts of Brautigan and his America.

Structurally, her book mirrors Brautigan's. She, too, employs short, episodic chapters on a variety of topics: her parents' record collection, hamburger frying, her inner trout. Brautigan was the first lyrical writer she ever read, the "first writer more interested in sentences and words than story. I responded by shrugging into the pajamas of his style." Her memoir goes back and forth, to her youth and the experiences that were important to her when she was growing up, to her and Arline's current road-trip adventures, including fretting about possible encounters with the Aryan Nation members camped out in North Idaho."

Retracing Brautigan's route, they seek out the lakes and rivers he fished in. When Green finally finds an empty mountain campsite Brautigan used 47 years ago, she feels like a "pilgrim to an abandoned religious site." Her entertaining memoir is heartfelt, filled with an intimate and welcoming charm. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

Sophie Kinsella (Confessions of a Shopaholic) successfully translates her trademark humor into a warm and thoughtful YA novel dealing with mental illness.

Audrey has been traumatized as the victim of bullying and been taken out of school. The book opens months after her recovery has begun; she still has to wear sunglasses in her home because she can't make eye contact with anyone. Her brother Frank, an online gaming enthusiast, only seems to care for himself, and her baby brother, Felix, is her sole source of comfort. When Linus, one of Frank's gaming buddies, comes to the house, Audrey is at first terrified, but they slowly develop a friendship. Linus is incredibly patient with Audrey, and their friendship blooms into romance.

Often funny, but also sensitive and insightful, Kinsella wisely chooses not to examine the episodes of bullying, but focuses instead on the repercussions and Audrey's slow and painful recovery. The author is most successful when examining Audrey's interior monologue, and demonstrating the fear that paralyzes Audrey in every social circumstance. But she also has created likable and credible characters in Audrey's circle: from Frank, the typical gaming slacker who shows extraordinary sensitivity to his sister when she needs it most, to Audrey's credible and sensitive therapist, and her mom, the wacky neurotic obsessed with the Daily Mail, who has sacrificed much to help Audrey recover.

Kinsella proves that YA is a natural transition for her, and that she can handle weighty and complex themes. --Nan Shipley, literary scout

Lauren Saft's debut novel exposes the psychology of a codependent trio of friends at a wealthy all-girl school in suburban Philadelphia.

Readers get to know 16-year-old Alexandra Holbrook, Mollie Finn and Veronica Collins through their alternating first-person narratives. Alex and Mollie have been friends since kindergarten at Harwin. Veronica didn't arrive until fifth grade and still feels like the interloper. Alex is also "best friends" with Drew, who attends Harwin's brother school, Crawford. Secretly, Alex is in love with Drew; she is the only virgin of the three-way friendship. Mollie is obsessed with Sam, her football-star boyfriend and the most sought-after guy at Crawford. Veronica savors the attention she gets from guys, mainly because of her reputation for giving them what they want. The dynamics change swiftly and dramatically when Alex joins a band, and Drew and Veronica start dating. Then Veronica starts surreptitiously sleeping with Sam--betraying both Mollie and Drew.

Saft starts with surface impressions--the persona that each teen displays--then reveals their motives, their insecurities and their humanity. They keep so many secrets when all they really want is to be able to count on their friends' loyalty. When two of the friends gang up on the third to exact revenge, it nearly results in tragedy and serves as the wake-up call they need. Saft uses strong language and graphic sexual situations to convey living, breathing teens. This is a beachtime page-turner likely to grab some adult fans, too. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness