Before Occupy Wall Street swept through New York City, the World Trade Organization riots of 1999 took control of downtown Seattle. A throng of activists swarmed the streets to protest the WTO convention, opposing free trade policies, motivated by anti-capitalist agendas, pressed by environmental concerns. Within this storm, Sunil Yapa composes a riveting fictional drama that walks the line between the radical will of the demonstrating people and the law enforcement designated to keep them in check.

This tension is most poignant between Victor, a young black man selling weed on the street, and Chief Bishop, the white policeman charged by the mayor to clear the road for the conference delegates--and Victor's estranged stepfather. The two haven't seen each other in three years, since Victor ran away from home.

When Officer Timothy Park, a loose cannon with a nasty scar on his face, swoops in to bust Victor for possession, he gets more than he bargained for when Kingfisher, a seasoned activist who isn't about to let the police take advantage of the situation, comes to the dealer's aid.

Yapa builds Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist upon a chorus of characters to craft a song that's just as much Nina Simone as it is Woody Guthrie. Beneath sharp political overtones, he reveals the beating heart of love as it is pushed and pulled to extremes by forces beyond its control. With ferocity on one side and regret on the flip, this excellent debut novel punches upward in the hope of a better tomorrow. --Dave Wheeler, associate editor, Shelf Awareness

Helen Klein Ross's intimate debut novel about a kidnapping, What Was Mine, makes determining right and wrong--justice and crime--a fuzzy shade of gray, nearly impossible to pinpoint and full of ambiguity.

The law has no doubt that Lucy Wakefield committed a felony when she carried Marilyn and Tom Featherstone's four-month-old daughter, Natalie, out of a New Jersey IKEA store and drove away with her. But 21 years later, when the truth is finally exposed and Natalie--aka Mia Wakefield--is a college senior preparing for law school, the ramifications aren't so cut and dried. They are overshadowed by the emotion of humanity, the intensity of memories and other forces that don't have much legal weight.

Ross explores those forces by telling the story from many characters' points of view, primarily those of Lucy, Marilyn and Natalie/Mia. The novel offers insights from several others, including Lucy's sister, Marilyn's second husband and their children, and Mia's Chinese nanny. As one character's rage sweeps the reader into its twisting storm, the next character chimes in to snatch empathy for herself. This emotional tornado illustrates how powerful and far-reaching the eye of the storm can be. It also highlights the psychological repercussions for which legal penalties can never compensate.

A powerful plot told with exactly the right approach, What Was Mine is capable of sparking plenty of discussion, whether it is over a water cooler, in a book club or simply in the reader's mind. --Jen Forbus of Jen's Book Thoughts

In Travelers Rest, Keith Lee Morris (Call It What You Want) strikes the perfect balance between the real and the fantastical, resulting in a novel whose mystery is as disquieting as it is mind-bending.

As the Addison family drives across Idaho, a fierce snowstorm forces them off the highway in search of a place to stay. They wind up at Travelers Rest, a beautiful but decrepit old hotel in the town of Good Night, with unfinished lobby renovations, a strange hotel manager and a remarkable absence of other guests. While Julia and her husband, Tonio, settle into their room with their precocious 10-year-old son, Dewey, Tonio's brother, Robbie, leaves the hotel to find a stiff drink at the bar across the street--his first since his most recent stint in rehab.

When Robbie fails to return, Tonio goes looking for him and finds himself lost in an endless alley of snow and cold. Julia wanders into Room 306, for which she is startled to find she has the key, and discovers a restful, lulling kind of peace there.

As each of the adults at once remember and forget that they should be looking after Dewey--who is left to his own devices in the crumbling old hotel in an eternal snow--the world of past and present, dream and waking merge into one. Morris excellently builds the slow-burning mystery of the hotel's past in a way that will leave readers lulled into the strangeness of Travelers Rest just as they are discomfited by the eeriness of it all. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm

In January 1961, an early army nuclear reactor west of Idaho Falls exploded, killing three operators in what is the only United States nuclear accident with immediate fatalities. Using this little-known piece of history for her first novel, Andria Williams builds a nuanced story of marriage, military life, fledgling nuclear technology and small-town habits. The Longest Night captures the details of an era when Soviet missiles were the country's greatest fear, and the stay-at-home mom/breadwinner dad family was society's norm.

Paul Collier joined the army at 16 and married the rambunctious San Diego beauty Nat at age 20. With two young daughters, they move to a nondescript ranch house in Idaho Falls where Paul begins a tour in the army's nuclear energy program. His assignment is to monitor and maintain an aging prototype reactor.

Balancing the stress of Paul's growing safety concerns and conflict with his commanding officer, Mitch, Williams describes the strains on Nat and the military wives left at home to shuffle preschoolers to playgrounds, keep house and gossip among themselves about the unpredictability of military life. They reluctantly accept their roles, knowing that "men were the providers and the doers and the protectors of everything."

Just as Nat becomes pregnant again, Paul's frustration boils over. He confronts Mitch about safety at the reactor, and in retaliation, Mitch redeploys him for six months to a defense reactor base in Greenland. With confident ease, Williams addresses the tensions of work and family, and brings The Longest Night to an uneasy conclusion. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Janice Y.K. Lee's second novel, The Expatriates, takes place in Hong Kong. It is the 2010s--a time that might be considered the American occupation of Hong Kong, when global U.S. companies post their future hotshots (almost exclusively men) to temporary assignments in this regional financial and trading hub. Expatriate professionals drag their families along and cluster together in tony Repulse Bay high-rises. In this fishbowl community, Lee focuses on three expat women who share citizenship and language but struggle individually with their secrets and insecurities.

Hilary comes to Hong Kong with her inherited California money and busy international lawyer husband, David. With her wealth, powerful spouse, attractive friends and servants, she has everything--except the child she desperately wants but can't conceive.

Bringing her three young children for the global exposure, Margaret follows her multinational business executive husband, Clarke. Because of his constant travel, Margaret is lonely and conflicted about raising children in such an insular world.

Mercy is the odd woman out--an expat living on the wrong side of Victoria Peak. She is a second-generation Korean American immigrant of the "Queens Koreans... struggling families, dry cleaners and deli owners and ministers," who impulsively heads to Hong Kong to start over.

These three women share similar but idiosyncratic concerns about motherhood, lovers, money and self-fulfillment. The men in Lee's expat Hong Kong are aloof breadwinners at best, cruel and indifferent cads at worst. At its core, The Expatriates is a novel about modern women--unflinching but empathetic in its observation of weakness and triumphant in its portrayal of quiet strength. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

At the start of Gregg Hurwitz's Orphan X, first of a new series, 12-year-old Evan Smoak (not his real name) is recruited for a deep-black U.S. government program that trains orphans to be assassins. Cut to the present, in which an adult Evan is a lone operator in Los Angeles. He's called the Nowhere Man, someone with incredible resources and a specific set of skills to help people in desperate situations. After he erases someone's problem, his payment takes the form of the client finding another candidate for Evan to help, but only one.

Evan's Spidey sense screams when he receives two calls, each caller claiming to have been referred by his last client. Which one can Evan trust? The stakes are literally life or death, and not just for the callers. If Evan makes the wrong decision, the fake client could lead to his demise, for he's learned that someone knows about his past as Orphan X and wants to terminate him.

Once the exposition is out of the way, the story takes off, with enough action to grab the attention of actor Bradley Cooper and Warner Bros.; movie rights have been snapped up for Cooper to produce and possibly star. Hurwitz (Don't Look Back) balances the deadly goings-on with scenes that take place at the building where Evan lives, showing ordinary citizens nagging Evan about HOA meetings and asking him to babysit. The dichotomy reveals a man who knows how to survive, but perhaps has never been given the chance truly to live. --Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, blogger at Pop Culture Nerd

Helen and Ellie are identical twins, "two peas in a pod." Helen is the older twin, the smart one, the one favored with special toys, clothes and shoes. Ellie is the more difficult child, whose hair never stays in place, whose clothes are often splattered with food, and who throws fits in school. One day, Helen invents a game where the two switch identities--and life is never the same for either of them. Despite Helen's protests and actions, suddenly her friends, toys and clothes are Ellie's and she is stuck being Ellie.

When Helen attempts to return to herself, her mother says, "'Oh Ellie... What have you done to your hair? And wearing Helen's clothes too. How many times do we have to go through with this? Yours is the left drawer and Helen's is on the right...."

Even though their own mother can't tell them apart, Helen never stops struggling to prove her true identity, making Ellie smirk and Helen cringe. She descends into a world of mental illness, behavioral issues, and eventually drugs and sex, while Ellie continues to be the golden child, favored by Mother, her friends and teachers. As the years pass, Helen even wonders if the switch really took place.

Morgan's debut psychological thriller is a stunning portrayal of what might happen when one's identity is stolen. The writing is succinct, spot on and moves at a rapid pace. Fans of Gillian Flynn's Sharp Objects will want to add Beside Myself to their reading list. Set aside time to read though, since you won't want to put this book down. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer

Mark Bowden is best known for books like Black Hawk Down, inspiration for the 2001 Ridley Scott film about the deaths of 18 American soldiers in Mogadishu, and Killing Pablo, about the hunt for Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar. But Bowden is also a prolific writer of shorter nonfiction pieces for magazines, including Vanity Fair and the Atlantic. In The Three Battles of Wanat: And Other True Stories, Atlantic Monthly Press collects the best of Bowden's articles about war, sports, politics, journalism and more.

The titular Three Battles of Wanat, originally published as "Echoes from a Distant Battlefield" in Vanity Fair, chronicles a 2008 battle in Afghanistan where 200 Taliban fighters attacked a precariously remote U.S. Army base. Nine U.S. soldiers died fending off the assault. This was the first, literal battle of Wanat. Two others followed: the father of a dead platoon leader's fight for justice against what he saw as negligence further up the chain of command, and a colonel's fight to clear his name after a damning reprimand.

In a series of personal profiles, Bowden paints fascinating portraits of figures as diverse as Kim Jong-un, hereditary leader of North Korea, and Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., hereditary leader of the New York Times. Of his enthralling sports pieces, "The Hardest Job in Football" stands out for Bowden's ability to capture the controlled chaos behind the scenes of live football broadcasts. Bowden brings engaging clarity and an eye for a good story to every subject. --Tobias Mutter, freelance reviewer

Mira Ptacin's Poor Your Soul is an unblinking and moving literary memoir of grief and love by a talented young writer coming to terms with the multiple losses in her life.

At 28, Mira has just moved to New York to begin an MFA program in writing at Sarah Lawrence College. With her first semester behind her, she goes on a blind date with Andrew; three months later, she discovers she is pregnant. Five months later, as the couple's wedding approaches, she and Andrew learn that the baby has severe abnormalities and has no chance of survival outside the womb.

Poor Your Soul is not only the story of the loss of a pregnancy and of motherhood; it's intertwined with that of Mira's mother, Maria, who left Communist Poland as a young woman, and her younger brother Jules, who was killed in a drunk-driving accident at age 14. It's above all Mira's story of being the daughter of immigrants, trying to find her own way, suffering through a wayward adolescence, and carrying the burdens of family heartache and her own pervasive feelings of guilt.

Ptacin's narrative is episodic, weaving back and forth between her present and her remembered past. There are many lovely moments, like the evening of Mira and Andrew's first date, yet Mira is not interested in an idealized self-presentation. Raw pain is not likable, and Ptacin brings her grief to life.

In the end, Mira's very personal journey through grief is also a universal one. Poor Your Soul is a beautifully written celebration of the love of family and the healing that comes after loss. --Jeanette Zwart, freelance writer and reviewer

Historian John Mack Faragher (A Great and Noble Scheme) has spent his career writing about frontiers in general and the American West specifically. In Eternity Street: Violence and Justice in Frontier Los Angeles, he considers the structure and culture of violence in frontier society, how violence reproduces and polices itself in an "honor culture," and the slow development of an official justice system in Los Angeles in the mid-19th century. The result is a fascinating look at how official justice competed with vigilantism as southern California moved from Mexican to U.S. control.

Drawing on a combination of official records, contemporary newspaper accounts, personal papers, memoirs and autobiographies, Faragher tells stories of murder, retaliation, domestic violence, racism and greed. At the same time, he never loses sight of the larger history of the region. He offers detailed accounts of individual conflicts, and then sets them within greater contexts of southern Californian conquest--first by Mexico and then the United States--the Texas rebellion, the American Civil War and the gold rush of 1848.

Faragher's Los Angeles is a frontier outpost with no white-hatted heroes and plenty of ethnic conflict. Native Americans newly freed from control of the missions, native angeleños, African American slaves and freedmen, North American adventurers, and the United States Army and Navy compete for resources, political control and women, with blades, guns and lances. (At one point, the Army and Navy came close to armed conflict with each other.) Eternity Street is an ugly story, beautifully told. --Pamela Toler, blogging at History in the Margins

Eddie S. Glaude Jr., a professor at Princeton University and author of multiple academic-leaning books about the African-American experience, aims for a more mainstream audience with Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul. This very of-the-moment book is spurred on by the recent spate of police killings of young black men and women, and by the Black Lives Matter movement that developed in response to the killings.

However, Democracy in Black is not a mere commentary on current events. Instead, it provides context for the recent violence and surging activism by examining what Glaude sees as the decay of African-American institutions, the steady erosion of black political power and the failure of black leaders, the persistence of the "Great Black Depression" and the insidious influence of the "value gap." The value gap is perhaps the most important concept in Glaude's book, and forms the basis of his argument that "no matter our stated principles or how much progress we think we've made, the belief that white people are valued more than others continues to hold the center of moral gravity in this country."

Glaude is unafraid to name names and criticize prominent figures within the black community, including but not limited to frequent attacks on President Obama. He also, refreshingly, has some ambitious, specific proposals for how to combat the problems he outlines. Glaude is simultaneously realistic about the state of Black America and idealistic about its future. It's a persuasive, exciting combination. --Hank Stephenson, bookseller, Flyleaf Books

Mary Hayes, a scrawny, bookish 12-year-old orphan from New York, is elated when someone finally chooses to adopt her. Anyone, anywhere, would be better than the grim Mrs. Boot at the Buffalo Asylum for Young Ladies. So when Mary sees the long-nosed, hunched old woman who wants to take her home, she is excited and not at all wary.

She should have been wary. The old woman--Madame Zolotaya--is a witch, and those familiar with Baba Yaga of Russian folklore will quickly recognize the similarities, the most frightening of which is that Madame Z eats children, simply because she finds them delicious. Mary is delighted to behold Madame Z's small, captivating home in the forest, and is shocked to discover that not only does she have her own sweet room, it's clear she's just meant to "Eat and play." At her luxurious leisure, Mary begins to explore the quirky nearby town of Iris that specializes in occult-based storefronts--"A town of con artists, fakes, and charlatans"--and even makes a charming, freckled magician friend named Jacob Kagan.

Edgar Award-winning Katherine Marsh (Jepp, Who Defied the Stars) builds the suspense like a pro--will Mary be eaten or will she win the powerful witch's heart? And, of course, what is that little door by the staircase? Along the way, readers will revel in brilliantly described fantastical elements, a house with giant chicken legs, a talking cat, a steady parade of mouthwatering Russian delicacies, and an interesting thread contrasting the "huckster magic" of Iris with "real magic," and a whole other kind of magic, which turns out to be love. --Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness

Learning the ABCs is especially appealing when an argyle-patterned "A" stands for apples, one of which has been pierced by a pair of arrows, and the other is a core being devoured by ants; and when "B" is made of brick, with a butterfly perched on its tiptop, a branch tapping its edges and a braid with blue ribbon swinging off the page. The magic of Kim Krans's wordless ABC Dream, aside from its exquisite illustrations, is in the stories untold. A reader might wonder, Is the hedgehog happy? What is that robin going to do with the ring it's inspecting in a rainstorm? Why do those beautiful tigers look so tired? By the time they get to the upside-down unicorn, readers have been inspired to create a thousand stories based on the spare pen-and-watercolor illustrations that accompany the letters of the alphabet.

Kids who enjoy Graeme Base's Animalia or Jean Marzollo's I Spy books will love the sly way Krans incorporates more objects and even actions into the scene than first appears--the lamb is leaning! The "Q" is quilted!--although this elegant picture book has none of the intentional clutter of either of those others. An answer key in the back will almost certainly reveal things readers didn't see on first viewing. With its intricate details, ample white space and bursting-out-of-the-page creatures, ABC Dream is a work of frameable art. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor