An expansion of a short story published in the Missouri Review, Mira T. Lee's debut novel, Everything Here Is Beautiful, explores the relationship between two sisters, the eldest committed to protecting her spontaneous, joyful but mentally unstable sibling.

Miranda Bok remembers coming to the United States from China with her pregnant mother, starting over in a new country without Miranda's father, who died before he could join them. Her mother always expected Miranda to look after Lucia, her seven-years-younger sister. Now grown women, their mother's death a fresh wound, the sisters try to cope with adulthood, but Lucia struggles. First, she surprises Miranda by marrying Yonah, a one-armed, functionally illiterate Russian-Israeli Jew who seems too coarse and ignorant for her sister. Nevertheless, Miranda comes to appreciate Yonah's kindness and sense of family when they become partners in caring for Lucia after the resurgence of a mental illness that plagued her in college.

Following a failed hospitalization, Lucia leaves Yonah, who does not want children, to have a baby with Manny, a young Ecuadorian immigrant. In the years that follow, Miranda tries to maintain her own carefully orchestrated life with her husband in Switzerland, while keeping a watchful eye over Lucia through Manny. Spread across the world, the family struggles to find beauty amid the chaos wrought by Lucia's episodes of mental illness and impulsiveness, sometimes related, always difficult to separate.

Like Miriam Toews's All My Puny Sorrows, Everything Here Is Beautiful is filled with unexpected, fragile moments of beauty. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads

"Sandwiched between two policemen, the woman descends the gangplank of the ship." It's September 4, 1939--war has just been declared--and the boat is the Orontes. The British ship has docked in Sydney after five weeks at sea, which produced two corpses. From here, Dangerous Crossing rewinds to the day when Lily Shepherd, a young working-class Englishwoman from whose point of view the novel is told, boards the ship in Essex. Lily's intent, like that of other young British women on board, is to work as a maid in Australia, although she dares to dream of more than a life in service.

On the boat, the glittery Eliza and Max Campbell seek out her company. Why, Lily wonders, is this first-class couple fraternizing with her and the others in tourist class, including Edward Fletcher, whose hot-and-cold attitude toward her is puzzling? Also perplexing: when her new friend Maria Katz, an Austrian Jew, says that she's been assaulted on board, the ship's personnel don't believe her.

Dangerous Crossing has the trappings of an Agatha Christie mystery--somewhat heightened characterizations, preoccupation with social class, scrupulous attention to wardrobe--but Rachel Rhys (the pen name of the English suspense novelist Tammy Cohen) is especially beholden to Death on the Nile, with which this book shares its era, shipboard setting and breathtaking scenery. Christie would have steered clear of Dangerous Crossing's sexual content, but she would nonetheless have found this sumptuous, rewarding (and hopefully Masterpiece-bound) historical crime novel deadly. --Nell Beram, freelance writer and author

There is no clever title needed for multiple Edgar Award-winner and Mystery Writers of America Grand Master James Lee Burke's 21st crime novel featuring the brooding, recovering alcoholic Dave Robicheaux--his surname is title enough. A sheriff's detective in the Iberia Parish outside New Orleans, Robicheaux is getting long in the tooth, living spouseless with his personal devils and untangling brutal crimes in search of justice for the victims. 

Robicheaux is a beauty. It consummately reinforces Burke's Grand Master status. Rife with his usual cauldron of lowlifes, crooked pols, sleazy mobsters, hookers and dirty cops, it illustrates Burke's particular brand of bayou noir where sorting fact from fiction requires nearly everything in Robicheaux's tackle box. An investigation into a reported rape draws him down a murky crime trail. Although jammed up by a local banker calling in a loan, the detective's loyal friend Clete Purcel taps a few snitch markers and backs up his former drinking buddy where needed. Enforcers like mafia goons Tony Nine Ball, Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine do the dirty work for the old-money political wannabe and alleged rapist Jimmy Nightingale. And Robicheaux's got his own troubles trying to stay off the hooch while nursing his grief over the death of his third wife, Molly, in a reckless high-speed pickup truck crash. He wants revenge--the hard way, if not the legal way. If one hasn't tasted Burke yet, Robicheaux is a good place to take the first bite. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Janet Marsh and her business partners--daughter Tallie, plus their friends Christine and Summer--take on their second case as amateur sleuths in Molly MacRae's Scones and Scoundrels. After six months of running a bookshop-cum-tearoom in Inversgail, Scotland, Janet (an American transplant) and the others are settling into their new life. Yon Bonnie Books and its adjacent cafe, Cakes and Tales, are thriving, and the women are becoming part of a community. When Daphne Wood, an eccentric author and environmentalist, returns to her hometown as a visiting writer, Janet and Tallie plan a book signing. But despite the village's warm welcome, Daphne puts off nearly everyone with her rude and abrupt manner. And then the murders start happening.

MacRae brings back many of the characters she introduced in Plaid and Plagiarism, including odd-jobs man Rab; Danny, the barman/owner at Nev's, the neighborhood pub where one murder happens; Nepali grocer Basant; and two local policemen, who can't decide whether to be grateful or annoyed with Janet and her friends. A number of eccentric side plots (all, thankfully, much more charming than Daphne) provide depth and entertainment: Daphne's fondness for sword work, the mysterious whereabouts of local librarian Sharon, the unreliable memory of Christine's aging mother and a hint of romance for several characters. While there's never any doubt that Janet and her cohorts will solve the case, the process is highly enjoyable, helped along by copious amounts of tea (occasionally spiked with something stronger) and plenty of scones. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

David Andreas's debut novella, Angel of the Underground, will remind many horror fans of Stephen King's first published novel, Carrie. Although there are no supernatural elements like telekinesis in this new tale, there is a formidable and beleaguered teenage heroine in danger and a spectacularly gruesome bloodbath finale.

After three orphaned children are murdered in a New York Catholic group home, the remaining three children are sent off to separate foster homes for safety. Fifteen-year-old Robin Hills is sent to a Long Island residence owned by a lecherous obese man named Barry and his sullen wife, Lori. Also in the home are Barry's elderly father, invalid mother and two foster teen boys. Sullen and antagonistic Nathan is openly hostile toward Robin, but she befriends Dustin, who finds solace in watching horror movies ("They're therapeutic," he says. "They kill people so I don't have to."). When the sadistic murders continue, Robin realizes that there is no safe place, and she will have to rely on her wits to survive.

Andreas's tight and tense horror tale is a spellbinding and clever debut. He also has more on his mind than merely a straightforward thriller. His smart, sympathetic and engaging teen heroine grapples with the Catholic faith that has sustained her for so many years but now seems to have abandoned her. Proving good things come in small packages (the novel is just 165 pages), Angel of the Underground is a tight and thoughtful thriller, and a stellar introduction to a fresh new voice. --Kevin Howell, independent reviewer and marketing consultant

The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam by Max Boot (Invisible Armies) focuses on Edward Lansdale, the Air Force officer and legendary CIA operative said to be the inspiration for the protagonist in Graham Greene's The Quiet American. Boot dispels this belief, along with many others, rescuing Lansdale's image from those who would cast him as a clueless, bumbling power broker. Instead, Boot argues that Lansdale's diplomatic and counterterrorism ideas were simply ahead of his time, forming the basis for an enormously influential "hearts and minds" strategy that offered both a more ethical and more effective vision for achieving U.S. aims abroad than prevalent approaches.

As the subtitle suggests, Boot's book centers on Vietnam, where "Lansdalism" met with varying degrees of acceptance and success, and argues it could have gone differently if only the right people had listened to this personable former adman-turned-CIA-operative. For a real-life example of "the road not taken," Boot first takes us to the Philippines in the late '40s and early '50s, where Lansdale found a second homeland and his first tastes of success. Charged with helping to combat a Communist insurgency that threatened the Filipino postwar government, Lansdale started by befriending everyone in sight. He was also an immensely capable propagandist, promoting his favored candidate with catchy slogans and even a popular song. Lansdale was no peacenik, but his focus on community relations and minimizing civilian casualties were a far sight from the policies eventually adopted in Vietnam.

The Road Not Taken offers a portrait of Lansdale as well as a foreign policy alternative to the U.S.'s often heavy-handed, militarized approach. --Hank Stephenson, bookseller, Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill, N.C.

The Old English word "craeft" meant much more than the modern word "craft" usually does. Mental skill and virtue could be implied by it, and a sense of "power or skill in the context of knowledge, ability and a kind of learning." In Craeft, British archeologist and medieval historian Alexander Langlands (Henry Stephen's Book of the Farm) offers an entertaining and inspirational look at traditional skills that were part of ordinary English life for thousands of years, but were broadly abandoned with the advent of fossil fuels, mass production, plastics, pesticides and even cement. In the process, he says, we have literally lost touch with the world around us, and with the power and complex abilities of our own bodies.

Langlands performs many practical experiments on his rural English property, trying to replicate the results that field archeology and research pose in theory. His idealism and his love of the natural world and what we can learn to make of it are contagious. He deftly combines his hands-on experiences with historical knowledge in chapters on the skills of haymaking, pond making, pottery, dry stone wall building, spinning and weaving, tanning and leather work and more.

Most of these old skills produce less than modern methods, but they do so more reliably and cheaply, says Langlands, and often more beautifully as well. They were developed in circular (instead of growth) economies, grounded in the cultivation of finite local natural resources, and their resilience and sustainability deserves new attention. This is an illuminating book on the pleasures of traditional work, and how we can rediscover that tactile world of skillful creation. --Sara Catterall

"Turn on. Tune in. Drop out." That seductive invitation from former Harvard psychology researcher and psychedelic drug evangelist Timothy Leary struck terror into the hearts of parents of American teenagers and young adults in the 1960s and 1970s. And it enraged President Richard M. Nixon, who saw Leary as a subversive force, capable of galvanizing opposition to his administration's controversial policies, chief among them its refusal to bring about a promised end to the Vietnam War. Based on extensive archival research and personal interviews, Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis's The Most Dangerous Man in America is the entertaining story of the madcap 28-month globetrotting pursuit of Leary after his escape from a California minimum-security prison in September 1970.

Sentenced to a 10-year term for possession of two joints, Leary broke out with relative ease, aided by the revolutionaries known as the Weathermen. Relying on funds provided by another shadowy group, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, Leary and his wife, Rosemary, eventually made their way to Algiers. There they entered the disturbing and often terrifying orbit of Eldridge Cleaver and the Black Panthers, recognized by Algerian authorities as the official representatives of the United States, actively plotting to overthrow the country they called "Babylon."

Minutaglio and Davis (Dallas 1963) vividly recount the manic goings-on in Algiers, as Leary's desire to spread the gospel of LSD clashed with Cleaver's plans for violent revolution. The Most Dangerous Man in America is a vivid evocation of a raucous time in recent American history. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer

Graywolf's Art of series examines elements of literature through perceptive and meditative essays that shed light on the craft of writing. In the 14th volume in the series, The Art of Mystery, novelist Maud Casey (The Man Who Walked Away) reflects on mystery in fiction--sometimes wondrous, often disconcerting, always slippery.

Casey wisely observes that while the concern of mystery as a genre is about finding answers, "mystery, that elusive yet essential element of fiction, is about finding the questions." The search for questions takes us to what Casey calls the "Land of Un--uncertainty, unfathomability, unknowing," where the reader is kept off-kilter while exploring unfamiliar terrain. With striking insight, Casey looks at aspects of mystery in well-known works of literature: the mystery of looking vs. seeing in Sonny's Blues by James Baldwin; the mystery of imagery in Flannery O'Connor's Good Country People and in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home; and the mystery of the "antifactual" in the classic Henry James novella Turn of the Screw. Casey studies lesser-known works to explore mystery in character, including the "simultaneously beautiful and terrifying" novel The Vet's Daughter by Barbara Comyns, and considers the mystery of innocence in Skylark by Dezso Kosztolányi.

To deeply understand the art of mystery, Casey considers its role in other art forms, including the work of the photographer Vivian Maier, who has proved to be as elusive as her subjects. What these all have in common is their concern with searching, rather than finding--a fine distinction that Casey clearly articulates as the essence of the art of mystery. --Frank Brasile, selection librarian, writer, editor

Launching a bereavement support group for widowed fathers was a significant departure from the clinical work Drs. Rosenstein and Yopp normally conducted at the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of North Carolina. Their focus had been on offering psychological and psychiatric care and counseling to patients undergoing active cancer treatments. But after caring for several terminally ill women with young children, and hearing the women's concerns about their husbands, the doctors turned their focus toward the needs of often neglected, widowed fathers.

Their outreach, the Single Fathers Due to Cancer Program, initially brought together young widowed fathers for six sessions. The seven widowers openly shared their struggles through loss and grief, their challenges and setbacks, and the dynamic support offered by the group became remarkably beneficial. As a result, the program later expanded and continued to meet for four years.
 
The Group documents the personalities and experiences of the original seven widowers and illustrates how weekly meetings forged a bond among them, providing a positive channel as they adapted to catastrophic losses. Dilemmas particular to each father are highlighted through topics including survivor coping strategies, issues with children and child rearing, managing the home minus a maternal presence, post-traumatic growth and resilience, and the challenges of dating again. Rosenstein and Yopp demonstrate how the camaraderie of their innovative group bolstered and healed the men, encouraging them to find meaning and create new lives beyond unthinkable loss. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

Seventeen-year-old Alice and her mother, Ella, have always "lived like vagrants, staying with friends till [their] welcome wore through at the elbows, perching in precarious places, then moving on." As they move, bad luck follows. But when a mysterious message arrives at their temporary home in New York City, telling them that Alice's grandmother Althea Proserpine has died, Ella and Alice think their luck may have changed. Althea, hidden away for years at her estate, the Hazel Wood, was the reclusive author of a book of dark fairy tales. This book, Tales from the Hinterland, has a cult following of "deep fan[s]"--readers so involved that they make desperate efforts to find their way into the Hinterland, the supernatural world where the stories are set. Alas, Alice and Ella's bad luck is not destined to evaporate. Ella disappears, leaving Alice a message: "stay the hell away from the Hazel Wood." In spite of this message, Alice determines to track her mother down: "My situation hit me hard. Homeless. Unable to reach my mom. Being stalked by something I couldn't see the breadth of or understand." Reluctantly pairing up with a deep fan classmate named Finch who is obsessed with the theories surrounding Hinterland, Alice begins her long, tortuous journey to the truth about her own past.

Melissa Albert's debut novel is a contemporary fantasy that dwells in an atmospheric, intertwining world of terrifying circumstances; a breathtaking dive into the magic and importance of story in one's identity. "Story is the fabric of the Hinterland," one of the residents tells Alice. Another says, stories "create the energy that makes this world go. They keep our stars in place." If this is so, Albert's exquisite wordsmithing and story weaving have certainly kept the stars aloft for a new generation of readers. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor

In Caroline Stutson's lighthearted urban story, a father and daughter spend the day together, eating breakfast, visiting the park and finally snuggling down to sleep. Cheerful verses capture the rhythms of a young child's routine: "Hello,/ morning,/ yellow sun,/ yummy/ breakfast./ Day's begun." A small brown pooch accompanies the two on their outing, leaving a green-eyed cat to watch them from the fourth-floor apartment window: "Hello,/ sidewalk,/ many feet!/ Goodbye,/ black cat,/ city street."

Celia Krampien (Here to There and Me to You, written by Cheryl Keely; Shadow Warrior, written by Tanya Lloyd Kyi) uses a child's-eye perspective in many of her boldly colored pictures. The dad serves his daughter breakfast, but the reader sees only his outstretched arm, a bit of plaid shirt and jeans, and sock feet. The city street is full of legs, legs and more legs, along with wheelchair riders and hands in various shades of peach and brown gripping grocery bags, books and phones. The park is a peaceful green place, with ducklings "wobbling by" and swings for "swinging/ way up/ high!" Even when ominous clouds start rolling in and rain falls, it's all part of the fun of the day.

Stutson, who passed away in 2015, wrote many picture books, including Blue Corn Soup, Pirate Pup and Cowpokes. My Family Four Floors Up is a celebration of everyday wonders that expresses some of the same bright, simple joy found in Margaret Wise Brown's iconic Goodnight Moon. This posthumously published picture book will surely become a read-aloud favorite for city dwellers and country kids alike. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor

In 2015, sixth-grader Marley Dias's frustration with her school's all-white reading list went viral, catalyzing the #1000blackgirlbooks campaign. She's been an activist ever since, and in Marley Dias Gets It Done, she shares her personal story of "wokeness" in addition to guidance and inspiration for other budding activists. In 11 engaging and wide-ranging chapters, Dias gives practical advice on topics like attending protest marches and contacting elected officials, as well as describing her top five favorite hairstyles. "You may think we're too young to have any influence on or make a real difference in this so often messed-up world, but I'm proof we're not," Dias writes in the first chapter. By the final pages, readers will be convinced that they, too, can make a difference.

Dias's voice is buoyant and authentic; any reader who knows what it means to react to a question "hand-cupping-chin-contemplative-smiley-emoji style" will be instantly won over. Her enthusiasm makes her forthright discussion of topics like the 1965 Selma marches, protecting yourself online and the difference between charity and activism even more accessible. The book's clean layout, incorporating lots of pictures, pull quotes and sidebars, allows readers at any level to appreciate even a glance through the pages. Adults will also benefit from a few sidebars addressed to them, advising how they can empower the kids and teens in their lives. Fittingly, the final pages contain about 500 titles from Dias's original #1000blackgirlbooks campaign, giving readers who are inspired by Dias's contagious enthusiasm dozens of stories to explore next. --Stephanie Anderson, assistant director of selection, BookOps