Yoav Blum raises fascinating questions about destiny and free will in this fast-paced novel exploring otherworldly dimensions. In The Coincidence Makers, Blum has created a rich fantasy that focuses on trained and skilled secret agents who work--along with bureaucratic forces much greater than themselves--to orchestrate events that nudge ordinary people toward changing the course of their lives.

This smartly crafted novel focuses on three trainees--Guy, Eric and Emily--who have been rigorously educated on the intricacies of coincidences and the roles they, as Coincidence Makers (CMs), are expected to play in shaping human destiny. Eric is a showman who has been known to grandstand in creating very complex coincidences that have led to accidents, death and even murder. Emily is bright and highly sensitive, but tight-lipped in talking about past assignments. And Guy, while adept, is riddled with self-doubt and haunted by a past that broke his heart.

When the CMs are asked to put what they've learned into practice for a complicated assignment involving a former imaginary friend case, the CMs must reassess their roles in relation to humankind and how their efforts very often lead others--sometimes, even themselves--to find deeper meaning and purpose in life and in love.

Blum cleverly probes the cause and effect of life, while exploring the hearts, motivations and questioning nature of people. This makes his carefully constructed fictional universe all the more plausible and captivating--especially as the plot intensifies and unravels in surprising ways. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

In Caitlin Macy's novel Mrs., the roles of women are largely defined by their mates (Mrs.) and their children (Mom). They gather and gossip during school drop-off and pick-up at Manhattan's St. Timothy's. They eye each other's fashions, limos, nannies, husbands and children's behavior. Theirs is "a society that ran on Lycra and imported Labradoodles."

Philippa Lye appears at morning drop-off "nearly six feet tall... those cheekbones, unconciliatory in the extreme; the arrogant jutting triangle of a nose." She has a past and she drinks; her husband is an old-money investment banker. After a crippling miscarriage, Gwen Hogan has only one child and gave up a career as a Ph.D. chemist to raise her daughter. Her husband is a prosecutor for the U.S. Attorney who lives to send slippery billionaires to prison, but frequently wonders if he shouldn't go white-shoe private for the big bucks. Minnie Curtis ("shining hair of the darkest near-black brown and wonderfully white, perfect teeth... a little cheesy, the way she was made up, pink blush and glossy lips, but it worked") married up to an ambitious, sleazy hedge fund magnate--a bottom-feeder, a "benthic organism trying to transform himself into a top-level carnivore."

The plot, to the extent there is one, heats up when Gwen's husband's office launches an investigation implicating Philippa's and Minnie's husbands. Marriages and friendships are tested as Macy dexterously reveals the flesh and blood beneath her characters' branded fashions. Mrs. is a well-observed story of the precarious social network of today's wealthy--a strong addition to the large catalogue of fiction about those with privilege and pedigree. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

In Cluny, France, in the year 1142, Mother Heloise of the Prelate comes to collect the corpse of theologian Peter Abelard, a recently excommunicated priest and, secretly, her husband. She also takes his writings, planning to hold them in trust at her abbey against the day when the views that brought about his damnation find their place as the true interpretation of God's love.

In Manhattan in 1950, Father Michael Kavanagh ducks into the Cloisters, reconstructed buildings from French abbeys that house the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection of medieval art. Seeking solace after a startling encounter, he instead finds Rachel Vedette, a Jewish museum docent. As their acquaintance deepens, Rachel shares with Kavanagh her copy of Historia Calamitatum, Abelard's memoir of his affair with Heloise and eventual downfall, taken from the very same papers Heloise received in 1142. In it, Kavanagh sees a turning point in the history of the Church that led, centuries later, to the prejudices that brought on both the Holocaust and a personal tragedy perpetrated against his best friend in seminary.

Former priest James Carroll (Warburg in Rome) sets the bar high in a novel that shifts seamlessly between epic love story, the anatomy of a crisis of faith, family tragedy and trauma survival saga. While the separate parts initially seem tenuously connected, as the novel progresses they interlock to show the far-reaching impact of choosing one path over another as the moral right for a huge portion of the world population. Both moving and enlightening, The Cloister will engross readers of any--or no--faith. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads

Willy Vlautin's (The Free) works have explored the American underclass; he champions the poor, the marginalized and the forgotten with a grace and understated lyrical precision. His latest, Don't Skip Out on Me, a powerful and provocative story about identity, continues this approach.

Twenty-one-year-old Horace Hopper is a half-Paiute, half-Irish ranch hand from Tonopah, Nev., who yearns to be a champion boxer. Horace's elderly guardians, Mr. and Mrs. Reese, are sheep ranchers who have cared for Horace since he was 14 and have come to regard him as a son. However, Horace struggles with his parents' abandonment of him. He feels the only way he can reconcile this identity crisis is to leave the safety and comfort of the ranch and find his own way, despite the odds and the unconditional love the Reeses have shown.

The Nevada desert imprints loneliness on its inhabitants, and mentors disappoint. With a depth of feeling and immediacy, Vlautin conveys the struggle to live the dream, only to see it turn to despair when hopes do not live up to expectations. His characters are textured; their problems belong to the everyman. Readers can root for Horace's success, as well as for his reunion with the Reeses, while he learns his lessons through anger and pain. Vlautin's powerful story reverberates long after the book has been closed. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant

In Kelley Armstrong's This Fallen Prey, third in the Casey Duncan series (after A Darkness Absolute), the detective and the off-the-grid town of Rockton remain as fascinating as ever. Rockton, situated in the Canadian Yukon, is a sanctuary for people hiding from their pasts, but Casey and Eric Dalton--sheriff and Casey's lover--are told they must keep a serial killer there for six months, until further arrangements can be made for him. Refusal isn't an option because Rockton will receive $1 million for its trouble.

Oliver Brady arrives accompanied by stories of his sadistic murders, and Casey and Dalton, along with deputy sheriff Will Anders, scramble to build a facility secure enough to hold him. The trio also have to deal with residents who, fearing for their safety, develop a lynch-mob mentality, demanding crowd justice instead of shelter for the alleged murderer. But Brady maintains his innocence, and some in Rockton believe him. When people start dying, Casey races to determine the truth about Brady's guilt before she becomes a victim.

Some of the plot reveals aren't shocking, but Armstrong keeps readers guessing about Brady. She holds readers captive in her world with a sense of dread constantly lurking beyond the next tree in Rockton's surrounding woods. With residents who have mysterious and violent pasts, and uncivilized hostiles living in the wild, anything can happen. Rockton isn't safe at all, but the threat of sudden Lord of the Flies-like savagery is what makes This Fallen Prey captivating. --Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, blogger at Pop Culture Nerd

Lieutenant Danielle "Dan" Lewis must deal with a sinister serial killer, the disappearance of a young woman off a navy warship and criticism from the higher-ups over her unorthodox strategies in The Fear Within. J.S. Law (Tenacity) makes the ace investigator of the Royal Navy's Special Investigation Branch both authentic and almost superhuman, as she tries to juggle several spiraling investigations.

Nearly a decade earlier, Dan helped catch notorious predator Christopher Hamilton, who used his military position to murder dozens of women. She'd hoped to never speak to him again, but now body parts of some of his victims have been mailed to headquarters. Does this mean he had a partner, who's remained at large all this time? She reluctantly heads to prison to speak with Hamilton, at his request.

Meanwhile, Natasha Moore, 18, has gone missing from her ship, the Defiance. As Dan and her partner start to investigate the Defiance's crew, they begin to suspect something truly terrible is roiling beneath the apparently placid surface of the crew's personnel.

Fast-paced, shocking and full of twists and turns, The Fear Within is perfect for thriller-readers and NCIS-watchers alike, offering American readers an interesting glimpse into what's probably an unfamiliar world. Alternating between Natasha's early experiences aboard Defiance and Dan's present-day investigation, the staggered storylines ratchet the tension ever higher, keeping the reader guessing until the very last moments. --Jessica Howard, bookseller at Bookmans, Tucson, Ariz.

In The Art of Vanishing: A Memoir of Wanderlust, Laura Smith attempts to track the disappearance of Barbara Follett, an early 20th-century wunderkind author. While reading through Barbara's books and letters, Smith can't help but see the similarities between Barbara's thirst for adventure and her own. Smith loves her husband but has always wanted a nontraditional lifestyle. As she and her husband explore the boundaries of an open marriage and the inevitability of routine, Smith's desire to know what happened to Follett grows ravenous. She hopes to find answers to her questions about marriage and freedom, or at least kinship with a woman who shares her love of being untethered.

Smith's memoir approaches her taboo subject matter with directness and honesty. Her style, which is fluid and shockingly clear, hides nothing as she plunges into the depths of her own marriage. She tells her story alongside Follett's, drawing the comparisons deftly but with emotional nuance that skillfully avoids cliché. The memoir's most impressive feat is its ability to build momentum seamlessly between Smith's search for Follett and her experimental open marriage. The obsessive energy and tireless passion Smith brings to her story allows the book to feel both deeply personal and undeniably recognizable. Smith's memoir never suggests any easy answers to her questions about love and marriage, but rather stares bravely at the questions themselves. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor

Though it garnered scant attention at the time of its release, Van Morrison's 1968 album Astral Weeks gradually entered the pantheon of rock music's greatest works over the next half century. Taking as his starting point Morrison and his iconic disc, Boston musician and journalist Ryan H. Walsh paints a fine-grained and wide-ranging portrait of the album's gestation during the several months the Irish singer-songwriter lived in Cambridge, Mass., and of life in the city's counterculture during that raucous year.

In early 1968, Morrison moved to Cambridge to escape his ties to a New York City producer and record label with serious mob connections. The chapter in which Walsh describes the Astral Weeks recording process in that fall offers insight into the creative process of this mysterious work, and reveals how closely the final product was tied to Morrison's Boston area performances.

Walsh also devotes considerable attention to life in a commune known as the Fort Hill Community, in Boston's Roxbury neighborhood. The group, which bore some superficial resemblance to the Manson family (fortunately without its homicidal streak), was started by a folk musician named Mel Lyman. Walsh's re-creation of life in the Boston of 1968 is affectionate but exhaustive; there are moments when some readers may find their attention flagging. But he succeeds in rescuing the book from tedium at those times with lively anecdotes about the numerous colorful characters. As Walsh notes, the late '60s counterculture in New York and San Francisco is a well-known story. What happened in Boston, "has gone largely unremarked." Astral Weeks fills that void with gusto. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer

Soccer has historically taken a backseat to hockey in Lewiston, Maine. But the arrival of thousands of Somali refugees to this overwhelmingly white, struggling former mill town has tipped that balance dramatically. Under the leadership of longtime coach Mike McGraw, the Lewiston High Blue Devils have become a powerhouse. Journalist Amy Bass spent months following the team from practice to the locker room to the field and back again, and she tells their story with grit and grace in her first book, One Goal.

Bass captures the team members in vivid character sketches: Maulid, Maslah, Karim, Zak, Abdi H. and their families. She traces their migrations from Somalia to Maine, most of them via refugee camps and unthinkable trauma. But like the players themselves, Bass doesn't focus on the tragedy: she's more interested in the team's progress and the ways their bond is transforming the community of Lewiston. There's no way to minimize the challenges: language barriers, sharp cultural divides and outright racism are only some of the constant tests they face. But with the help of dedicated teachers, community workers and team supporters, the Blue Devils have become a force on and off the field. McGraw's legendary team speeches and his constant rallying cry of "TOGETHER!" are echoed by the players' version: "Pamoja ndugu!" which means "together brothers" in Swahili. Bass's account of the 2015 championship season crackles with excitement, and her narrative of teamwork and hard-won community provides a ray of hope in deeply divisive times. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams 

Bianca Stone (Someone Else's Wedding Vows) tours a lurid netherworld of souls--both lost and found--in her imaginative and incisive poetry collection The Möbius Strip Club of Grief.

Stone begins by saying, "The dead don't want your tips. They just/ want you to listen to their poems." The collection positions the reader as an observer in a swirl of voices: complaints, joys and revelations hidden in the living world but repressed no more. Stone occupies this liminal psychic space, this other dimension, which is brimming with secrets and regrets. To get in, she explains, one must show the bouncer a scar. Strippers, grandmothers, women of genius and a "great cosmic cow," among others, share the stage, all connected by their grief and mistreatment in life. In their purgatorial death, however, they're able to vindicate themselves.

As a poet, Stone writes mostly in free verse, though her lines, smooth and precise, occasionally rhyme. Her poetic images are exquisite. She takes the rawness of her subject matter and focuses it in sharp, erotically charged constructions. In "A Brief Topography of the MSCOG," the poet describes "the dungeons of the mind, the most defeated cells, wherein cruelty cums." There's something almost masochistic about these explorations of grief. Some of Stone's best poems have little to do with the conceit of the strip club and serve more as her personal reflections.

This collection showcases a talent who is bold, original and highly attuned to human suffering, though the collection is not without moments of humor. Stone's wild and ingenious exhibitionism exposes the psyche's innermost sensitivities--a literary strip club for the soul. --Scott Neuffer, writer, poet, editor of trampset

Sports fan Baptiste Paul joins forces with Jacqueline Alcántara, winner of the 2016 We Need Diverse Books Campaign Mentorship Award, for this lively picture book debut.

In a series of three panels, a boy in Saint Lucia dribbles a soccer ball up to two friends who are sitting outside and chatting. "Vini! Come! The field calls!" He moves around town, inviting one and all to come play futbol. The two children seen chatting in the first panel now stride across an open field carrying a handmade goal. "Bol. Ball. Soulye. Shoes. Goal. Goal." A cow grazes nearby. On the next spread, one brave child has begun shooing away the doe-eyed cows as more people arrive to play. The colors pop off the page--lush greens, vibrant reds and yellows, sparkling blue water in the background--as teams are chosen. "Ou. Ou. Ou. You. You. You. Friends versus friends. Annou ale! Let's go!"

A boisterous game begins, the figures' edges blurring with their speed. As the children yell to each other--"I'm open!" "Pass!" "Shoot!"--a small crowd gathers to watch. The next full-page spread depicts our original eager-to-play child in mid-stride, looking over his shoulder as the sky greys behind him: "Uh-oh."

The bold colors of Paul's native Saint Lucia dim as driving rain slants across the page. "Fini? Game over?"

"No way. Play on!"

Paul and Alcántara's picture book is full of joy and finishes with an author's note and a glossary of all the Creole words sprinkled throughout. The Field, with its concise and energetic text and dynamic illustrations, is irresistible, unfettered fun. --Siân Gaetano, children's and YA editor, Shelf Awareness

On May 30, 2014, at the elite St. Paul's prep school in Concord, N.H., 17-year-old Owen Labrie brought 15-year-old classmate Chessy Prout to the roof of one of the school's buildings as part of a "tradition" called the "Senior Salute." "The Senior Salute was a well-known ritual at St. Paul's, where sixth formers [seniors] tried to make out with as many younger girls as possible before graduation."

Chessy initially (and repeatedly) rejected the senior's invites. But when a male friend pushed her to accept--"Oh, he's a nice guy.... Don't be a bitch"--Chessy relented. "Truth be told," she writes in I Have the Right To, "I was flattered that one of the most popular boys thought I was special." Trusting her friend and thinking herself more than capable of handling "golden boy" and teacher's favorite Owen, Chessy agreed to meet him. That evening, Owen Labrie raped Chessy.

After days of disgust, depression, fear and confusion, Chessy told an adult at the school what had happened. What followed was a trial that pitted Chessy's family against the school and received national coverage that, because of her age, referred to Chessy only as a "15-year-old freshman." In August 2016, after Labrie was acquitted on three counts of felony sexual assault and convicted on three counts of misdemeanor sexual assault, Chessy broke her anonymity and came forward as the St. Paul's School assault survivor. I Have the Right To is now-19-year-old Chessy's direct and candid account of her life leading up to the assault, the assault itself and every painful step afterward. The memoir is both heartbreaking and hopeful, an honest and frank testimony; it is an important (if difficult) read that acts as both an eye-opener and a call to action. --Siân Gaetano, children's and YA editor, Shelf Awareness