Christina "Tiny" Schuyler, daughter of an aristocratic New York family, has built a seemingly flawless life for herself as the perfect Boston society wife. Groomed from childhood to marry well, Tiny has slipped smoothly into that role with Frank Hardcastle, scion of a Kennedy-esque political dynasty. But in the summer of 1966, as Frank begins his bid for a congressional seat, both his campaign and his marriage to Tiny will be rocked by long-hidden secrets.

Beatriz Williams (The Secret Life of Violet Grant) returns to the world of New England high society with her fourth novel, Tiny Little Thing. The narration alternates between 1966, as Frank's campaign gathers steam, and 1964, when a chance encounter threatens to upend Tiny's carefully constructed future. Williams deftly unravels her characters' actions and their consequences, building layers of dramatic tension through fraught family dinners and clandestine phone calls.

Tiny is an appealing narrator: the proper, respectable eldest daughter, caught between society's expectations and her own deeply buried desires. Frank's cousin Caspian, a decorated Vietnam War hero, throws a monkey wrench into Tiny's plans--as does her brash, beautiful sister, Pepper, who descends on the Hardcastle family compound on Cape Cod with news of her own.

Through elegant prose and diamond-edged dialogue, Williams evokes a glittering world of political ambition--and pulls back the curtain to reveal explosive secrets lurking beneath the Hardcastles' perfect facade. Tiny Little Thing is a deliciously scandalous and deeply moving story of one woman's quest to build a satisfying life. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Stephen Jarvis's impressive debut, Death and Mr. Pickwick, is an immersive experience that richly rewards its readers, filled with an array of characters. It's about an ages-old debate concerning who was the creator of the 19th-century serial novel The Pickwick Papers. Robert Seymour, the most prolific illustrator/cartoonist of his era and the first Pickwick illustrator, said that the character of Mr. Samuel Pickwick and his Sporting Club were his ideas. When the monthly installments of the story were published in book form, young Charles Dickens, who provided the text to complement the illustrations using his pen name, Boz, claimed in a note that he was the sole creator. By then, Seymour had committed suicide. As his novel runs its course, Jarvis argues for Seymour's claim of ownership.

Despite a winding and interwoven narrative, the tragedy of Seymour is always at the novel's core. Seymour has some career successes, then failure. When he finally creates a promising new caricature--Mr. Pickwick--his hopes are again thwarted by his publisher. He died before his 40th birthday.

Whether you accept his argument or not, Jarvis provides a fascinating history of the business of publishing and book illustration in the early 19th century: how prints were made, sold, marketed and who the most popular artists were. There might be too much detail for some readers, but for those who read on, it will be an education and a grand entertainment, a rich drama that unfolds at a leisurely pace, made all the more profound thanks to Jarvis's fertile imagination. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

As the title implies, nearly every piece in Rebecca Makkai's Music for Wartime involves a musician or survivor of conflict. But the title also suggests an underlying theme throughout the stories: the all-too-human attempt to make order and beauty out of chaos. Music, for all its flurry and improvisation, does just that.

The first collection from the author of The Borrower and The Hundred-Year House, Music for Wartime shares the quirks of Makkai's previous work, though nicely balances any twee-ness with weighty depictions of illness, death and betrayal. Most relationships in these stories are doomed, usually due to cruelty, and the ones that do survive seem to be founded on the strangest of bedrocks (the best example concerns a Hungarian couple--the husband, a Nazi sympathizer, saved his Jewish future wife from the death camps). Makkai can also be brutally funny, especially in creating outlandish characters who nonetheless feel as though they could exist in reality.

The quality of the pieces is a bit uneven. Here and there small turns of phrase seem overwritten, and a few of the stories rely too heavily on rhetoric ("Everything We Know About the Bomber," a series of facts about a terrorist, is the most egregious example). At worst, the pieces in Music for Wartime are solid, if not remarkable, but standouts "The Miracle Years of Little Fork" and "Good Saint Anthony Come Around" make this collection more than worth picking up. --Noah Cruickshank, marketing manager, Open Books, Chicago, Ill.

Spitfire private investigator Fina Ludlow returns for Ingrid Thoft's third hardboiled crime novel, Brutality. Instead of receiving a case from her family's legal practice, Fina brings this one to them. But what she peddles as a potential payout may turn into a major disaster.

Bereft mother Bobbi Barone hires Fina to find the person who assaulted her daughter, Liz, leaving her for dead. The pool of suspects is large: Liz is pursuing a lawsuit against her college alma mater, and it's no secret that she and her boss do not get along.

As Fina scratches the surface of Liz's life, even more creepy-crawlies emerge as potential assailants, leaving her with a full can of worms to investigate. Somewhere in that mix is a deadly snake, and when Fina pokes too close, she finds herself--and her family--in danger as well.

Brutality's plot contains excesses that slow the story's pace, but Thoft (Loyalty) still keeps the suspense high and her readers engaged. This is in large part due to her fantastically quirky protagonist. Seeing more layers of Fina's complexity peeled away in each novel is as entertaining as figuring out whodunit. Thoft continues to play up Fina's humorously oddball characteristics, like coveting a vending machine in Costco as "the answer to all my prayers." She also demonstrates her P.I.'s passionate side through Fina's relationships with family and friends.

Mixing the traditional P.I. novel with her own secret ingredient--Fina Ludlow--Thoft once again creates an explosively fun read for any crime fan. --Jen Forbus of Jen's Book Thoughts

In the near future, China leads a sneak attack on the United States from orbit, cyberspace, air, land and sea. Chinese astronauts use lasers to disable American satellites, hackers undermine everything that uses microchips, anti-ship missiles decimate the Pacific Fleet, and conventional forces overrun the Hawaiian Islands, all in one masterful blow. A blinded United States is cowed back to continental borders, unable to retaliate or even sneak submarines into a Chinese-delineated zone of control stretching across the Pacific.

U.S. Navy officer Jamie Simmons narrowly survives the invasion of Oahu, becoming the only captain to escape the "kill box" of Pearl Harbor. Back home in San Francisco, Simmons is given command of the USS Zumwalt, the largest ship in the navy's mothballed Ghost Fleet. Jamie, his estranged sailor father and a Chinese-American scientist prepare the Zumwalt with a novel weapon that, along with other out-of-the-box efforts, might restore American power in the Pacific. Meanwhile, on occupied Oahu, the ironically named North Shore Mujahideen and a femme fatale serial killer make life difficult for the invaders.

Ghost Fleet, the first novel by P.W. Singer (Wired for War; Cybersecurity and Cyberwar) and August Cole (a former defense industry reporter for the Wall Street Journal) is a chillingly plausible vision of future warfare in the thrilling style of Tom Clancy. Ghost Fleet is heavy on science, with more than 370 cited sources, and its few sagging subplots are more than buoyed by an explosive finale. --Tobias Mutter, freelance reviewer

Sarah Hepola, the personal essays editor at Salon, begins her courageous and very funny memoir in the middle of a sexual encounter in Paris while on a magazine assignment. She does not remember who the man is and recalls only returning to her hotel the previous evening after a night out with a friend. She's woken up after another blackout, beginning another day of trying to fill in the blank spaces where pivotal scenes should be.

Hepola grew up in Dallas, the painfully self-conscious child of non-conformist parents who could leave the same can of beer untouched in the refrigerator for days. She had her first beer at six and was hooked. Hepola is unambiguous about the costs of alcoholism. Friends drift away. Her health and self-esteem suffer in predictable ways. But Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget is anything but mundane: Hepola is a wonderful writer who can convey wrenching candor and wit in the same breath. "There's a certain brokenness that cannot be fixed by all the downward dogs and raw juice in the world," she writes when a friend offers yoga schedules and healthy food.

Hepola looks at contemporary culture's ubiquitous promotion of drinking, the reward for a long day or a vital symbol of celebration or an essential social lubricant. Her questions are provocative and important, and they add heft to a narrative already brimming with insight, humor and courage. This stunning memoir will resonate with readers struggling to understand their demons, and it marks the arrival of a very talented writer. --Jeanette Zwart, freelance writer and reviewer

Jessica Fechtor blends the story of her near-fatal brain aneurysm with recipes as if it's a natural combination. And for someone with her optimism and modesty, it is.

"When I tell people that I am writing the story of a bloodied and broken brain--and oh, by the way, there will be recipes, too--I get some strange looks," she writes of her memoir, Stir: My Broken Brain and the Meals that Brought Me Home.

In 2008, Jessica, an ambitious doctoral student in Jewish literature, a marathon runner and wife, toppled from a treadmill. Thus began two years of surgeries, first for the aneurysm and then for complications. She lost her sense of smell and depth perception, and spent months in a protective helmet, followed by plastic surgery to rebuild her skull.

Typical of Jessica's sunny attitude, she refers to this time simply as "her illness." Thoughts of food were a comfort. "Food is the keeper of our memories, connecting us with our pasts and with our people." And her people rallied for her: Aunt Leslie's post-surgery chicken soup, raspberries her family harvested "braving mud, and thorns and each other." Early in her recovery she resumed baking her traditional Friday night challah bread.

Luckily for her Sweet Amandine blog followers, her husband, Eli, noted just before her final surgery that cooking made Jessica happiest. "My kitchen wasn't the route back to the person I had been. It was something better: the route to who I would become." Good food, a new career and a healthy family combine for the happiest of endings. --Cheryl Krocker McKeon, manager, Book Passage, San Francisco

Nancy Goldstone (The Maid and the Queen) has made a career of telling the sometimes forgotten and always dramatic stories of powerful women in medieval Europe. In The Rival Queens: Catherine de'Medici, Her Daughter Marguerite de Valois, and the Betrayal That Ignited a Kingdom, Goldstone turns her attention to Renaissance France and its role in the growing struggle between Catholics and Protestants across Europe.

The betrayal to which the title refers is the infamous St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in 1572, in which thousands of French Huguenots were killed when they gathered in Paris to attend the unwilling Marguerite's wedding to her Protestant cousin Henry of Navarre. In fact, the massacre is the most extreme of the betrayals--personal and political alike--that Goldstone describes.

Goldstone overturns the prevailing historical view of Catherine as an able, if Machiavellian, ruler and Marguerite as a sensual dilettante. Instead, she shows Catherine manipulating her children in order to maintain her power in France. Marguerite stands in counterpoint to her, growing into a woman of courage and integrity. Goldstone makes a compelling case for both portrayals, using first-hand accounts from the period, including Marguerite's memoir.

Firmly rooted in history, The Rival Queens combines the pageantry and passion of a Philippa Gregory novel with the Byzantine plot and violence of A Game of Thrones. It is a story of domestic rivalry taken to the level of "scheming and conspiracy, treason and treachery." Religion is its battlefield; sex, tale bearing and the withholding of maternal love its primary weapons. --Pamela Toler, blogging at History in the Margins

"When intelligence operates in the service of greed and hatred, we become dangerous to ourselves, to others, and to the planet. But if that intelligence serves the aims of compassion, the good we can do together has countless opportunities." This quotation from the Dalai Lama underlies his long-time friend Daniel Goleman's powerfully inspirational guide to the Buddhist monk's dream for the future of the world.
 
Goleman (Emotional Intelligence) explores the work the Dalai Lama has done and continues to do in an effort to promote compassion, especially his partnerships within the scientific world. Touching on elements such as religion, education and economics, Goleman outlines the Nobel Peace Prize winner's concept of "genuine compassion." Then through philosophy, anecdotes and data, he illustrates its potential to revolutionize the world.

The greatest strength A Force for Good elicits in galvanizing readers to this movement is its focus on the individual. The Dalai Lama believes, "Everyone can find a context where they make a difference. The human community is nothing but individuals combined." Therefore, the book works to show how personal changes can trigger butterfly effects.

Both the Dalai Lama and Daniel Goleman know those making strides today may never reap the rewards of their efforts. Change is slow and the road is long, but it has to start somewhere. A Force for Good offers readers a map to a better tomorrow, detailing obstacles and offering resources. It also includes encouragement and enthusiasm necessary to ignite a crusade for positivity. A Force for Good is a life-altering journey available to every reader. --Jen Forbus of Jen's Book Thoughts

Rinker Buck, a self-decribed "divorced boozehound with a bad driving record and emerging symptoms of low self-esteem," decided he needed to do something epic to change. A long-time history buff, he spent one winter thoroughly researching the Oregon Trail, the 2,100-mile route used by more than 400,000 pioneers to travel from the Missouri River to the Pacific coast. While some parts of the trail have been paved over with highways or lost to development, much of the old, rutted wagon trail still exists, mapped and marked, and is accessible to anyone searching for it. Fueled by lyrical descriptions of the countryside in the many trail journals he read and by the wonderful memories of a wagon trip he had taken as a child, Buck bought a wagon and team of three mules to cross the prairie, hills and rivers, just like those seeking a new life in the 1800s. He and his brother, Nick, spent several months making the ambitious journey, enduring hardships, encountering generous and helpful people and experiencing the same richness of nature that trail riders of yesteryear had written about.

Buck includes excerpts written by pioneers and an ample history of the Oregon Trail and how the vast migration changed the country, adding his own keen observations about nature, people and himself along the way. Humorous, entertaining and highly informative, Buck's impressive adventure will be of interest to history enthusiasts, those who love mules and armchair adventurers who only dare to dream of such an undertaking. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer

Valynne E. Maetani's engrossing debut novel begins with a mystery that won't release its hold on readers until the finish.

Claire Takata was not quite seven years old when her father died 10 years ago. She loves Dad, the stepfather who raised and adopted her and her two brothers. But when a mysterious letter falls out of her late father's journal (which she secreted away from the garage while her mother was disposing of his belongings), it raises questions. For one thing, Claire's biological father and adopted stepfather knew each other. Why would they keep that secret?

Claire confides her findings to her younger brother, Avery, and her older brother, Parker, and their tightly knit group of male friends, plus Claire's best friend, Forrest. As Claire uncovers layers of the puzzle surrounding her father's death, her own life teeters into dangerous territory. Claire is accused of cheating, someone breaks into her locker and her bedroom and plants four eyeballs in her backpack, and a black SUV starts tailing her. Could these events be connected with Claire's request for an autopsy report on her father? The report reveals something else: the tattoos on his body point to Claire's father's involvement in the yakuza, the Japanese mafia.

Tucking in nuggets of Japanese culture and superstition, Maetani builds suspense and intrigue, while also examining the deep bonds of family and loyalty--plus a touch of romance. She is a writer on the rise. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

Bruce Coville (My Teacher Is an Alien) once again proves his talent for entertaining middle-grade readers with this hilarious account of Angus Cairns, a short-fused yet well-intentioned brownie who must leave Scotland for the U.S. due to an age-old family curse.

With just a hint of archaic language to show his ancient roots, Angus makes readers privy to his innermost thoughts through his journal entries. He begins in late September, as Sarah McGonagall, to whom he's bound, is dying. The next "youngest female of age" is 11-year-old Alexandra ("Alex") Carhart, who lives in Connecticut. Coville intersperses letters--from the vet for the Carharts' cat, from Alex's teacher, and from the teacher of Alex's younger sister, Destiny--all of which portend trouble for poor Angus. The brownie believes that Bubbles the cat would be better served by a name such as Lucifer or Bloodclaw Reddifang, and Alex detests Angus's efforts at cleaning up her slovenly room. Gradually, human and brownie come to a truce. That is, until the curse Angus carries with him begins to manifest itself among the males in Alex's household. As Angus puts it, "I wanted to do as I ought, and keep their house trim and fair. Instead I have brought shame and ruin upon them."

Can Angus relieve the household of the curse? Can he accomplish what he was sent to do? Readers will madly turn pages to see how things turn out, as Coville entertains with witty turns of phrase and clever twists of plot. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

Charming pen-and-ink and watercolor images of a thriving cast of curious bear cubs make this abecedary a pleasure to share with preschoolers.

The ursine characters kick things off by holding up a banner displaying the 26 multicolored letters in upper case ("Alphabet from A to Z"), then Susan B. Katz launches into an alphabetical list that gives newcomers to day care the lay of the land. "Crayons for coloring, in my hand" spotlight a desk where two friends draw, and "Dump trucks, playing in the sand" highlight a busy sandbox. Some of the letters center on daily activities (E is for "Eating snack around the rug"; J leads into "Jumping rope across the map," which is painted on the blacktop), while others hint at more abstract enterprises (such as I for "Imagination, thinking cap..."). All of the letters help to reassure first-time visitors to daycare or preschool: "Kitchen during free-choice hour,/ Letter blocks that build a tower!" Katz's rhyme scheme never falters, while Munsinger pictures happy cubs as "Friends who share a hello hug" and plenty of fun things to keep them busy, such as glue sticks for art projects and hats in the dress-up area, paper puppets and play dough.

Children will happily pick out their favorite characters in multiple scenes, right up until the cubs help each other in "zipping up our big backpacks" to head home on the yellow school bus. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness