The unexpected death of her husband smashes Char Hawthorn's idyllic world into pieces, leaving her with myriad fragments, lacking the adhesive that once held them firmly together. Char and her stepdaughter, Allie, flounder as they try to find their way. Instead of handing Char a tube of super glue, however, Julie Lawson Timmer (Five Days Left) grinds the remnants of her protagonist's existence even further.

The prefix "step" meant nothing before Bradley's death. Char had taken on the role of mother completely, but now Allie's previously uninvolved biological mother wants custody and to move her daughter across the country. For her part, Allie is acting out, and Char struggles with her, too. Is Allie just a child mourning the loss of her father and needing space? Or is she crying out for a parent to enforce boundaries? What authority does Char have with Allie now? When the unlicensed 15-year-old steals her father's convertible and takes off with the 10-year-old girl she tutors, Char can no longer remain passive.

Untethered is a complex story about a nontraditional but often familiar family. It's about making choices in no-win situations. Readers may find themselves frustrated with Char's lack of action at times, but Timmer creates a legitimate, believable scenario for Char's paralysis. More importantly, Timmer handles the sensitive, emotionally charged nature of her plot with reverence and openness, avoiding harsh judgments. Untethered is a beautiful mosaic of love's many fragments, no matter how shattered. --Jen Forbus of Jen's Book Thoughts

In the early 2010s, Stephen King pulled off a magic trick. Not content to be the greatest horror writer of his generation (maybe ever), he decided to turn his considerable skills to the crime genre. With Mr. Mercedes and Finders Keepers, King introduced readers to retired Detective Bill Hodges, his assistant/partner, Holly, and Jerome, a young man who is often in the middle of the mysteries Hodges works to solve. Instead of resting on his laurels, King closes this trilogy by jettisoning realism entirely, thrusting his three heroes into a race against time against a deadly supernatural enemy.

Years after capturing the notorious Mercedes killer, Brady Hartsfield, Hodges gets a call from his old partner on the police force concerning a murder/homicide that seems eerily linked to Hartsfield's killing spree. Recently diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, Hodges enters a new cat-and-mouse game with Hartsfield, who has acquired powers beyond the scope of human ability in the wake of his defeat at the hands of Hodges, Holly and Jerome. Over the course of three days, King tracks the gumshoes as they put together the pieces of Hartsfield's new insidious plot and scramble to protect his would-be victims.

At this point in the series, King's characters are well established, and he uses the warm connections among them to create moments of mirth and pathos. End of Watch has the great lived-in quality of many long-running detective series. While it's best for those new to the series to begin with Mr. Mercedes, fans of King's work will find another rip-roaring thriller in the author's late-career renaissance. --Noah Cruickshank, marketing manager, Open Books, Chicago, Ill.

Marrow Island begins at the end: the opening pages introduce Lucie as she is being rescued from Marrow Island by a park ranger and her best friend--who may have tried to kill her. Reflecting on the story she later tells FBI agents, state police, the park ranger and her family, Lucie considers Marrow Island and the small eco-colony she encountered there: "Marrow Colony as cult. Marrow Colony as failed utopia. Build, destroy, repeat."

This becomes something of a theme throughout Marrow Island, as Alexis M. Smith (Glaciers) moves Lucie's story backward and forward through time to reveal the many ways she has rebuilt her life after destruction: the loss of her father in the May Day quake 20 years earlier, the loss of her childhood best friend, the loss of her job, and her harrowing experiences at Marrow Colony. But it is also the story of how nature itself builds, destroys and repeats: the changed landscape of the Pacific Northwest following that May Day quake, the chemical spills that swept across Marrow Island and destroyed its ecosystem, the wildfires that burn though Oregon years later.

Lucie's experiences drive the plot of Marrow Island, pressing ahead to an alarming and somewhat open-ended conclusion as it leaps about in time and place to reveal what happened at Marrow Colony. But tucked into this suspenseful plot are stunning and important reflections on nature and the environment, its awe-inspiring power and the many ways humanity both detracts from that power and willfully ignores it--and how that shapes our lives. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm

Emperor of the Eight Islands, the first volume of Lian Hearn's medieval Japanese fantasy series, set the scene for an epic battle between warring clans and the redemption of a fallen hero. Warrior and budding sorcerer Shikanoko betrays the people he swore to protect--the Autumn Princess (Akihime) and the Hidden Emperor (Yoshimori)--and forms a union with the conniving Prince Abbot to strengthen his influence on the Lotus throne, before being attacked by a pack of horses loyal to Akihime and Yoshimori.

Autumn Princess, Dragon Child begins with mountain sorcerer Shisoku and the pregnant Lady Tora finding and nursing the injured Shikanoko back to health. When Lady Tora dies after childbirth, Shikanoko, against Shisoku's advice, raises the not-quite-human quintuplet boys as his own, intending to use their powers in his quest for redemption. Meanwhile, the two warring clans plot to capture and use Yoshimori and Akihime to advance their own agendas. The finale leads to a deadly showdown between the powerful Prince Abbot and Shikanoko, who stands to lose all that is precious to him.

Hearn's narration jumps among many points of views in plot twists so thickly and intricately woven as to resemble an Asian soap opera, paving the way to its cliffhanging end. One hopes that the series' final two novels answer the many lingering questions Hearn leaves. Yet there is much to appreciate about Hearn's efforts: she nails the mythological details of her alternate reality, and she imbues this story with the same sort of spirituality that won her Tales of the Otori series high acclaim. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant

Charlie Windar and Nona Hall are back in Brenda Cooper's Spear of Light, the sequel to last year's Edge of Dark. Charlie, a conservationist ranger, and Nona, who hails from space station Diamond Deep, must protect the last human-owned "wild" planet, Lym, from the brewing battle between humans and the menacing machine-based life forms known as the Next.

The anti-Next terrorists, the Shining Revolution, are recklessly committed to destroying the Next wherever they are. Nayli and Vadim, lovers and co-leaders of the violent group, plan to attack the Next presence on Lym with a group of planet-based co-conspirators.

Nona returns to Lym as an ambassador from the space-faring humans of her station, while Charlie must negotiate the distrust of the people on Lym, who blame him for the Next taking up residence on their planet, rather than the machines' superior technology and utter focus on their mysterious goals.

Meanwhile, Yi, one of the Next created from a human being (called a soulbot), feels an allegiance to his former species. In search of the Next's origins, he leads a team of both machines and humans into long-forgotten caves and facilities far beneath the surface of Lym. There they find some answers, but mostly more questions.

Spear of Light continues the story of Lym and the Next, revealing (and teasing) just enough to keep readers engaged in plot, characters and larger themes of what it means to be a person, regardless of the path of creation. --Rob LeFebvre, freelance writer and editor

Many books have been written about Hemingway, but it seems there is still more to be learned. Lesley M.M. Blume's Everybody Behaves Badly zooms in on the creation of The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway's first novel and the one that firmly established his reputations, literary and otherwise. As her subtitle promises, Blume seeks the true story: in this case, the real men and women whose lives inspired Hemingway's fiction, which some claimed was not really fiction at all.

Everybody Behaves Badly is not a biography of Hemingway; it skips his childhood to open with his marriage to Hadley Richardson, and the couple's move to Paris in pursuit of cheap living and a storied expat community. Blume portrays a devilishly charismatic young writer, ambitious and confident, who easily collected mentors and admirers. She follows that young writer to Pamplona with a group of friends in 1925, and through the weeks after in which he wrote feverishly. Unflatteringly immortalized, one of the people Hemingway transformed into a character spoke of lives divided into B.S. and A.S.: before Sun, and after. Blume's study concludes as Hemingway's career expands, his first marriage ends and his second begins.

A biography of a novel, then, Everybody Behaves Badly is itself an engrossing and varied tale: raucous and dissipated, pitiable and serious. Blume's research offers new detail to a well-studied story, and her narrative style is as entertaining as the original. Obviously required for Hemingway fans, this engaging work of nonfiction will also please a broad audience. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

Few amenities have shifted the landscape of modern living to the degree that the Internet has. And though the web boasts manifold interests, generating numerous books about its technological development, user experience, business purposes, potential health hazards and the like, Virginia Heffernan, digital culture writer for the New York Times Magazine, is much more concerned with the Internet's dynamic as a collective work of art.

With her keen focus set in turn on the web's design, text, images, video and music, Heffernan sketches a compelling narrative for that fickle network so many people have grown to depend on, from its creaky days of dial-up and command lines to the sleek information superhighway and app suburbs of Web 2.0. But what most fascinates her is what users have done with it. YouTube, once feared to be the harbinger of Hollywood's doom, serves as an ideal platform for professional music videos and amateur "fail" memes alike. The quality of iPhone photos has spawned monumentally popular apps like Instagram and Snapchat, making image-based networking the prominent paradigm and the text-centric Blackberry a relic of a recent past.

With magical advancements, there come unavoidable losses: the digitization of music cannot capture the full nuance of all sounds; rapid-fire instant messaging diminishes our need for phone calls. "Magic and loss, however, have always coexisted in aesthetic experience," Heffernan concludes. "Maybe they are aesthetic experience." Rather than pit "highbrow" analog against "lowbrow" digital, Magic & Loss suggests that art in the digital era is contiguous to artistic developments of the past. After all, a work of art has always needed its negative space. --Dave Wheeler, associate editor, Shelf Awareness

Celebrated conservationist Terry Tempest Williams (Refuge; When Women Were Birds) commemorates the centennial of the U.S. National Park Service with The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America's National Parks. In 12 chapters, she explores 12 parks, their histories and futures. Ecology forms a natural overarching theme, but Williams's topics are variously personal, global and political. The places she visits range from Alaska to Maine to south Texas, while her subjects span broadly, including biodiversity and water shortages; suicide and hopelessness; continuing unrest in U.S. relations with Native Americans; climate change; political prisoners from around the globe; and the legacy of the Civil War. Her writing is poetic, passionate and unexpected.

In each chapter, Williams describes a visit to a specific national park, and then investigates the place and her experience there, sometimes directly through narrative storytelling and sometimes metaphorically. She begins with Grand Teton National Park, where her family has often returned over the decades and generations. The history of that park's founding and the establishment of the Parks System melds with her family story: "Our national parks are memory palaces where our personal histories reside." In her journeys, Williams finds beauty and distress over the future, and opines, "We continue to evolve and transform who we are in relationship to where we are."

By turns sad, despairing and hopeful, even thrilled in the presence of natural beauty, The Hour of Land is emotive, intelligent and well traveled. Williams celebrates the Park Service's centennial with a remarkable collection of wisdom and scintillating lines. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

Jonathan Balcombe (The Exultant Ark) is an animal behavior scientist and an animal rights advocate. In his fifth book, What a Fish Knows, he proposes that "fishes are individual beings whose lives have... value to themselves quite apart from any utilitarian value they might have to us.... The profound implication is that this would qualify them for inclusion in our circle for moral concern." To persuade the reader of this, he offers an enjoyable, surprising and sometimes gruesome exploration of the world of fish, written with clarity and humor and grounded in many scientific studies. He presents a spectacular variety of fish physiology, biology and behavior, and challenges myths about their level of awareness, their memories and their sensitivity to pain. Their documented curiosity, playfulness, learning ability and emotional responsiveness are likely to surprise many readers. Wrasse use rocks to smash shellfish, archerfish learn from each other how to hunt insects by shooting water at them, tigerfish chase low-flying swallows and snatch them out of the air.

Humans kill billions and possibly trillions of fish every year, mostly through our fishing industries, more than enough to make an end-to-end line reaching to the sun and back. Balcombe ends with an appeal to include the fishes in our "moral community." Readers may not share all of his interpretations and conclusions, but the breadth and depth of his research and his enthusiastic storytelling may permanently alter how they look at a pet goldfish or a can of sardines. --Sara Catterall

Dan Flores (The Natural West) examines an iconic North American original in Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History. This small, clever, charismatic predator originally roamed the interior West, enjoying a mutual tolerance with the people who lived there. Some Native American tribes built creation myths around the coyote, "America's universal deity." After European colonization, coyotes became the enemy of ranchers and herders--undeservedly, as scientists would eventually show, as their prey is more bite-sized. Decades of extermination efforts only encouraged the diminutive canine, however, whose range now extends from Alaska and Canada into Central America, from coast to coast. Coyotes now live in every major city in the United States, which surprises many but, Flores argues, shouldn't: they were there first.

Styled as a biography, Coyote America follows its protagonist through history, geography, human perceptions and millions of years of American canid evolution, with detailed accounts of governmental policies regarding predators. Flores sees the coyote as an avatar for humankind. Like us, the coyote is highly flexible, can be social or solitary, and adapts well to changing environments. Coyote mythology, well documented in other books, plays a minor role here, although Wile E. makes an appearance.

Flores has a tendency to use nine words where two would do, but his slight long-windedness is well offset by the endless fascinations of his subject. Nature lovers, students of U.S. natural resource policy and those charmed by the native American "song-dog" will be engrossed. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

In the suspenseful, action-packed debut of the Witch's Child trilogy, Canadian author Catherine Egan (the Last Days of Tian Di series) spins out a dark and deep, pseudo-Dickensian world of magic and crime.

Sixteen-year-old Julia and her younger brother, Benedek, a brilliant, disabled inventor, make their way in the employ of Esme, an organized crime leader with a soft spot for talented, downtrodden youths. Most recently, Esme has embedded Julia as a maid in a well-to-do household to ferret out the secrets of its inhabitants, including a heretical professor and an aristocrat from whose room unearthly howls occasionally issue. Julia's gift of invisibility--inherited from her mother who was drowned as a witch--makes her the perfect spy, but the secrets she finds have shocking implications. Caught in a whirlwind of old world legends and politics as shadowy forces in the country of Frayne vie for a weapon of limitless power, Julia must make a terrible choice that will leave her wondering if the belief that all witches are evil applies to her as well.

Julia's complexities fascinate: she's a prickly, evasive liar who places her own interests first, but she's also a loyal sister, a teenager whose heart falters when she sees her lover with his arm around a prettier girl, and a personality in flux who's still fleshing out her own moral code. Teens will appreciate this fantasy/heist drama hybrid for its suspense, but Julia's personality and her world teetering on the brink of uprising may prove the biggest draws for the trilogy. --Jaclyn Fulwood, lead librarian at Del City Public Library, Okla.

No worries, vegetarians. Animals Are Delicious is not a pro-carnivore manifesto. It is, however, a reflection of who's eating who, the food chain in action, in three alluring board books--Sky, Forest and Ocean. Each book identifies hungry animals that (mostly) eat other animals, stretches out accordion-style into a reversible six-foot-long book, and fits snugly into a colorful case.

The first volume, Sky, begins: "High in the sky, everyone is hungry." The woolly apple aphid eats the elm's green leaves, "but someone else is hungry...." Turn the page: "A ladybug! The spotted ladybug eats the woolly apple aphid, but someone else is hungry...." "A swallow! The barn swallow eats the spotted ladybug, but someone else is hungry...." This fun, repetitive, interactive format makes these books excellent read-aloud prospects, and, lest the squeamish are fearful, actual animal-gobbling is never shown. Cleverly, each book ends with a jaunty cumulative sentence, such as in Forest: "CHOMP! The bobcat eats the fox, who ate the skunk, who ate the shrew," etc.

The animals, all handmade figurines, float, fly or creep in crisp, colorful photographs of three-dimensional scenes mostly made of paper. The figurines are sometimes suspended with visible white strings for the flight or swimming scenes (in Ocean). The artwork is bright, cheerful, and somehow intrinsically comical... just as pointing out that these animals are just plain hungry softens the brutality of crunching on a creature that was alive just minutes ago.

Each book's flip side lists additional delicacies each animal likes to eat. (The great horned owl's "menu," for instance, features rabbits, geese and raccoons.) Is it time for a snack? --Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness