Three ambitious freshmen enter Harvard in the fall of 1993. By the time they graduate four years later, their lives have been forever changed by a classmate's murder and their involvement in a web that connects them to the man suspected of murdering her. Robin Kirman's first novel is a complex and sophisticated character study of three young people who must deal with a troubled past while navigating the perilous path into adulthood.

Georgia Calvin, Charlie Flournoy and Alice Kovac aren't the typical super-achievers who emerge from the tiny funnel that allows the anointed a place in Harvard. Each has had to overcome some form of serious family dysfunction to make it to Cambridge. Their futures, however, are altered irrevocably by their relationship with housemaster Rufus Storrow, a man two decades older who becomes a role model for Charlie and the focus of sexual intrigue that entangles Georgia and Alice.

Bradstreet Gate follows the three graduates over the decade after they leave school, a span that finds them confronting mental and physical illness, career success and setbacks, the first blossoming of family life and the search for love. Though readers learn of Julie Patel's murder, and of Rufus Storrow's suspect status, in the novel's prologue, Kirman is less interested in the whodunit element of her plot than she is in portraying how the crime alters the three students' view of themselves, of Storrow and of each other.

Robin Kirman's Bradstreet Gate is an assured first novel, one that showcases a promising talent with a command of all the tools necessary for delivering compelling stories in the future. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer

Two women in their 30s: Chloe is an almost-famous actor barely hanging on to her Hollywood career; Lois is a precocious junior professor with two book contracts. They share a past neither wants known. When they were 12, Lois and Chloe--then known as Carly May--were abducted and held in a hunting lodge in the Adirondacks for a summer before being rescued. This secret, the victimization they just want to forget, comes back to haunt them in Maggie Mitchell's first novel, Pretty Is.

The action alternates between the present lives of Lois and the reinvented Chloe/Carly May, and flashbacks to the summer they spent with a man they called Zed. They've stuck by their story that he never touched or hurt them, not that anyone seems to believe that. Now, Lois's latest project and a peculiarly disturbed student seem poised to intersect with Chloe's struggling acting career. The question becomes not what Zed did nearly 20 years ago, but what agency do the adult women have in their own lives?

Suspenseful, quick-paced and action-driven, Pretty Is also wisely invests in character development. Carly May may have been a beauty queen, but she was an intelligent child, too; Lois was a spelling-bee champion and confirmed bookworm as well as pretty, and those lists of spelling words still serve as a mental aid. Mitchell's greatest strength, however, is in the riveting, magnetic pull of her plot, as the stakes grow higher and Pretty Is rushes toward its finale. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

Witty, highly educated Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi is, at age 92, Pakistan's most revered living writer. His fourth novel, Mirages of the Mind, originally published in 1990 and the first to be translated into English, is more than 500 pages long, occasionally baffling, frequently culturally opaque and certainly not about plot. And yet it is profoundly good-humored, genuinely wise and often laugh-out-loud funny.

Mirages of the Mind is composed of five novellas, creating one long mosaic of hundreds of tiny stories, anecdotes and domestic comedies spanning some 70 years, centered on Mushtaq's dear friend Basharat and his many disasters. Basharat is a schoolteacher obsessed with horses and is constantly repairing his worthless car. One vignette leads to another in an associative spiral of digressions and narrators until it's hard to know exactly who's talking or where or why. What continues to draw the reader onward through this dense and frequently hilarious confusion is Yousufi's voice, loving and ironic at the same time, delighted with the process of storytelling itself. He alternates wisdom with humor, pathos and pratfalls.

Yousufi has opinions on the value of college education, the moral conduct of dogs, the joys of ailing and why Jewish prophets all rode donkeys. He brings to life a world where machine guns are taken to weddings and where poor women dye their dung-covered floors to look like carpets. His comical storytelling is deftly captured in this translation, providing a lighthearted (if unguided) plunge into one of the treasures of contemporary Pakistani culture. --Nick DiMartino, Nick's Picks, University Book Store, Seattle, Wash.

There are more wounds than love in TV screenwriter (The Mentalist) Jordan Harper's first collection of stories. Love and Other Wounds packs a lot of violence, crime and broken dreams into its 15 short depictions of life on the ragged edges. Although some take place in Detroit, New York and Los Angeles, most are set in the bars and strip malls around Harper's hometown of Springfield, Mo.--"Queen City of the Ozarks." If this sort of "country noir" has become its own genre thanks to Daniel Woodrell, Larry Brown and Donald Ray Pollock, Harper brings his own skewed eye and ear to what he calls "that country-grit subculture." His stories are filled with biker and prison gangs, tweakers, drug deal "watchdogs," "cleaners" of Hollywood star indiscretions and teen gas station bandits. They live in "a faraway corner of the world, one of those places marked Here Be There Dragons on old maps," and to the "watchdog" known only as Geat, they are "just a bunch of trembling suckmouthed peckerwoods each scared of their own shadow."

Harper's stories are relentlessly violent, but he seasons the violence with compassion for his characters' fates. What love finds its way into Love and Other Wounds is just for a moment and often betrayed. Wounds, however, last forever. As one drug dealer notes, "Everybody's got their share of pain, even though it always feels like more than their share. Pain is part of the deal." And Harper won't let us forget it. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

One sign of a winning detective series is how much fun the author has with the creation. In the 11th Jack Taylor novel, Green Hell, Ken Bruen is having a shameless good time. The irascible, alcoholic, violent Taylor was booted from the Garda of Galway, Ireland, and has been taking the odd private investigation case ever since--and tossing back Jameson whiskey and Guinness Black wherever and whenever he can. A vigilante keen on vengeance, Taylor has no qualms about taking on crooked cops, malicious priests, ruthless tycoons or corrupt politicians. This time he's after a serial rapist professor of English literature and a spoiled rich kid dog-beater. Tagging along on these vendettas are a mysterious tatted and pierced local girl, Emerald McKee, and Brian Boru Kennedy, an American grad student who came to Galway to do a dissertation on Beckett but instead got sidetracked into writing a biography of Taylor--even though his disapproving girlfriend asks him why he thinks "a book about a broken-down Kojak in the west of Ireland is going to fly."

Bruen's novels are short on plot and long on character, but they give him a rousing platform to share his own eclectic taste in contemporary fiction, music, TV and movies. Green Hell hardly reaches 10 pages before he name-drops Tom Waits, Jim Crumley, James Gandolfini, Massive Attack and House of Cards. This is part of the allure of the Jack Taylor novels. As Kennedy writes in the notes for his biography: "I liked to quote Beckett. Jack quoted Joan Rivers." Go ahead--crack open Green Hell and have some fun. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Shane Kuhn shot onto the crime fiction scene last year with The Intern's Handbook (movie rights were snapped up), and now his assassin John Lago is back in Hostile Takeover with more explosive action.

At the end of Handbook, Lago had lost track of Alice, the person assigned to "exterminate" him. He not only finds her at the start of Takeover but, after a wee bit of gunfire, proposes to her. The two then stage a coup to take over HR, Inc., the company that places fake interns who are really assassins into the corporate world to kill their targets. As with many relationships, their partnership is heady at first, until they start fighting and turn on each other. As Lago says, "With normal couples, someone might get thrown out of the house after a fight. With us, someone is liable to get thrown out a window." Or worse.

The violence in Takeover is even more over the top than in Handbook, but done in the same satirical way. A boy named Sue is a fun new character who gives Lago tech support--make that hack support. The identity of the big baddie is predictable, and some of the scenes seem more like set pieces rather than action that helps move the story forward, but Kuhn's sharp-as-a-blade humor keeps readers, like the bullets, flying through pages. And despite the deadly doings, Hostile is quite romantic, for Lago is hopelessly smitten with Alice, just a boy standing in front of a girl, asking her not to kill him. --Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, blogger at Pop Culture Nerd

Gibraltarian lawyer Spike Sanguinetti, plagued by nightmares after the death of his lover, decides to visit his friend and law partner Peter Galliano, who is recuperating from a hit-and-run at his family's vacation home on Corfu. To Spike's surprise and initial discomfort, Peter has also invited Spike's former flame Jessica Navarro, who was recently promoted to detective sergeant in the Gibraltarian police.

For Spike and Jessica, Corfu loses its idyllic aura when the body of an Albanian man is found on the Hoffman estate, next door to Peter's house. When one of Peter's employees is arrested for the murder, he begs Spike to represent Latsis pro bono. Spike, unable to resist the plea of his injured friend, takes on Latsis's case, in spite of pressure from the wealthy Hoffman family to hurry matters along.

As Spike and Jessica dig into the events surrounding the murder of the Albanian, they discover that beneath the cheerful, quotidian Greek culture are family vendettas and political corruption. As the clues lead them across Corfu and into Albania, Spike and Jessica end up putting their own lives on the line in their quest for truth.

Dividing its time among several unusual mystery settings--Gibraltar, Corfu and Albania--Sleeping Dogs makes for a captivating Mediterranean read. In exploring the dark legacy of Albanian Communism, Corfu's turbulent history and Spike's own tortured memories, Thomas Mogford (Hollow Mountain) has created a deliciously atmospheric novel that belies its bright and sunny settings. --Jessica Howard, blogger at Quirky Bookworm

Can the arts survive under a totalitarian regime? That's the basic question addressed in Andy McSmith's revelatory Fear and the Muse Kept Watch, and his answer is yes--but they can also cost you your life. McSmith (No Such Thing as Society), senior reporter for the Independent, has done a masterful job of researching and describing what it was like for writers, musicians and filmmakers to create under one of the most oppressive regimes in history, the Soviet Union during the Stalinist era.

Joseph Stalin and his henchmen kept a watchful eye over what was being written and performed, and a careful artist could work to become a favorite of the dictator (Boris Pasternak, Maxim Gorky). But if the artist stepped out of line, it likely meant imprisonment or, in the cases of Isaac Babel and Osip Mandelstam, death. As McSmith notes, "it beggars belief that anything of any lasting value could be created." But art was created, and many of those works are masterpieces.

McSmith focuses on about a dozen intellectuals and shows how they lived and worked under the regime's persistent surveillance. Composer Dmitri Shostakovich had to reach an "accommodation with the regime or abandon his vocation" before going on to write his Fourth, Fifth and Seventh Symphonies. The poet Anna Akhmatova survived the regime's ire, even as her family suffered greatly, because she was so popular. McSmith feels that one of the reasons some artists were able to produce such great works under such trying conditions was that the Russian people, their audience, adored them so much--they had "an intense love for great art and accurate taste." --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

Scottish crime writer Val McDermid (The Skeleton Road) expands on her considerable experience with Forensics: What Bugs, Burns, Prints, DNA and More Tell Us About Crime. In it, she studies the fields encompassed by forensic science and the large role that such detailed evidence plays in the modern judicial system.

In writing fiction, McDermid routinely consults professionals in law enforcement and scientific experts; here, she delves into their worlds to examine the history and challenges of their work. Chapters focus on crime and fire scenes, entomology, pathology, toxicology, forensic psychology and anthropology, the courtrooms and legal systems of various countries and more. McDermid visits with experts in each of these fields, exploring their personal and professional experiences, which can include trauma as well as deeply stimulating and important work. She also covers specific criminal cases, ranging from serial killings and rape to common burglary, that illustrate the science in question, and offers impressions of her own.

McDermid is not a perfectly impartial judge of the professions she considers; the tone of Forensics is more admiring than journalistic. She provides a great service in reducing complex science to a narrative easily understood by laypersons, and thereby allows fans of television crime drama and detective novels a heightened appreciation of the genre. Details are often predictably graphic, but never gratuitously so, and should be well within the tolerances of murder-mystery buffs. Forensics is an easy-reading introduction to the science behind criminal detection and a fine companion to fiction like McDermid's. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

The Hirschfeld Century is a beautifully designed combination art book and biography of Al Hirschfeld (1903-2003) that not only showcases his innovative art but also illuminates his life with thoughtfully researched, fascinating text by curator and Hirschfeld authority David Leopold.

In a career that spanned nine decades (and nearly 10,000 drawings), Hirschfeld created art for movie posters, book jackets, album covers and U.S. postage stamps. But he was best known for the seven decades he created black-and-white caricatures in the New York Times, depicting Broadway shows and performers. The Hirschfeld Century reproduces more than 360 pieces, including some of his atypical paintings and experimental mixed-medium works in full color.

Leopold calls him "a man who remained enthusiastic about the theater his entire life, who genuinely looked forward to each opening," which is why the book's reproduced artwork still looks vital, emotional and alive on the page. It's fascinating to discover that Hirschfeld trained himself to draw initial sketches in the dark theater without looking, which he called "a collaboration of sight and hand, with no conscious thought at the controls."

Aside from the vibrant illustrations (fully annotated with comments by the artist), this book is also a treasure trove of juicy theater lore. When Hirschfeld's daughter, Nina, was born in 1945, he started hiding her name in all his drawings. Beginning in 1960, he added a number after his signature to let fans know how many times "Nina" was hidden in each picture. This book is like looking over nearly a century's worth of artwork with the endearing artist kibitzing in the reader's ear. --Kevin Howell, independent reviewer and marketing consultant

Artist Brendan Wenzel (Some Bugs) goes to town with Ellen Jackson's (Cinder Edna) rhyming couplets about all kinds of babies.

"Babies can be smooth or hairy," writes Jackson, as Wenzel depicts a human baby alongside a kitten and wolf pup. A turn of the page continues the rhyme: "quail or whale or dromedary." The illustrations retain the animals' most prominent characteristics while also emphasizing their eyes. The book includes some scientifically accurate observations, such as natural instincts ("Beaver mamas/ chomp and gnaw,/ using teeth/ just like a saw"), and defense mechanisms ("Baby octopi squirt ink/ Baby skunks cause quite a stink"). But most pages are pure whimsy, such as a charming image of elephant calves tumbling against an adult elephant. Mayhem reigns on a double-page spread where "Puppies slobber,/ kittens spill./ Young gorillas can't sit still./ Mamas gobble, mamas cluck./ Barnyard babies run amok!" Readers can practically hear the open-mouthed hens, geese, roosters and turkeys as chicks scatter across both pages (one stares at the puppy; another seems to squawk at the gorilla).

Author and artist save the best for last: a stop-action series of images of a sloth demonstrates how "Babies muss and fuss and cry--/ but they grow up, by and by." Each iteration of the sloth depicts its slight maturation. "And what awaits them/ when they're grown?" With a turn of the page, the ending brings the life cycle full circle ("Beastly babies of their own"). --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

In School for Brides, Patrice Kindl returns to Lesser Hoo on the coast of Yorkshire, the setting for her Keeping the Castle, where finding a husband of suitable title and wealth remains a preoccupation for young women of a marriageable age.

The events here shift away from the narrator of the previous book, Althea, to the eight students (ages 12-19) of Winthrop Hopkins Female Academy. The pickings in this remote part of the world are slim (though Miss Asquith seems willing to settle for the school's "very handsome" footman) until an accident causes the esteemed Mr. Arbuthnot to break his leg on the grounds and remain at the school to recuperate. Luckily, his misfortune metamorphoses into the ladies' good fortune, as their recuperating guest attracts other eligible bachelors as visitors to the patient. The female members of this rather large cast begin to differentiate themselves from the get-go, as they reveal their ages and rank. The youngest, Miss Victor, is prone to crying. Miss Evans is the oldest, but Miss Crump is of the highest rank (the daughter of a viscount). Miss Asquith's father owns a distillery and must overcome the fact that her family is "intimately associated with gin," and Miss Franklin exhibits a propensity for science.

Readers catch onto the motives of the male visitors before the young women do; some have noble intentions, others do not. Working within the parameters of Jane Austen's era, Kindl exposes the frustrations of smart, curious women stuck in society's rigid structure while also playing up their wit. Another feather in the cap for Kindl. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

Leslie Patricelli's (Tickle) adorable toddler returns in a pitch-perfect introduction for first-time trick-or-treaters.

"Halloween is here!" says the diapered narrator, who may be a boy or a girl, with arms raised in celebration near a cornfield with pumpkins in evidence. The child teaches sizes while examining a pumpkin that's "too small," another that's "too big" and a third that's "just right." Next, Daddy cuts off the pumpkin's top, and "I clean the insides" (Patricelli shows the narrator emulating a jack-o'-lantern's grin, wearing the pumpkin top like a hat and scooping out the seeds by hand). Readers help the toddler choose an expression for the pumpkin ("How should we carve our jack-o'-lantern?") and then help select a costume ("What should I be?") from among a series of choices that speak to gender non-conformity: princess, pirate, cowboy and ballerina number among the eight possibilities. The cover foreshadows the narrator's final selection ("Boo! I'm a ghost!"), and Daddy dresses just like his toddler. At first, the small ghost is frightened of the other costumed children, but the treats in store soon help the narrator overcome any fears.

Patricelli varies the moods with backdrops that go from bright colors to muted blues and purples on Halloween night. She depicts the toddler's growing courage by showing the little ghost gradually working up to ringing the doorbell solo. The final spread shows all the things the narrator loves about Halloween. A treat. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness