Douglas Kennedy (The Moment; Leaving the World) offers up a gritty tale of lost lives, betrayal and murder set in Paris's seedy underbelly. Readers looking for a cure for the common romance need look no further.

Fleeing a shattered marriage, an ill-fated affair and a brewing legal storm, disgraced film professor Harry Ricks takes refuge in Paris, but the City of Lights is no dream come true. Destitute, Harry barely manages to afford a tiny chambre de bonne alongside criminals and illegal immigrants. Financial need forces him to take a shady position as night watchman for illegal activities. Alone and embattled by suspicious neighbors, Harry spends his time dodging threats and trying to contact his angry daughter, until he meets Margit Kadar. Mature, intelligent and alluring, Margit stokes Harry's dormant passion into an inferno, and the two strike up a torrid affair. However, a catastrophic series of events soon makes Harry question whether Margit's mysterious demeanor hides a wounded heart or a sinister nature.

Kennedy's blunt depiction of Paris's immigré class provides a grainy backdrop to the layers of danger and manipulation Harry faces in his new dog-eat-dog reality. Kennedy creates an ever-expanding web of tension as Harry proves unable to escape calamity. Kennedy also explores the concept of communal guilt, as catastrophes are created by chains of events in which none of the participants are truly innocent. While the reader will by design vacillate between sympathy and contempt for Harry, the enigmatic Margit steals the show in this noir-style page-turner. --Jaclyn Fulwood, graduate assistant, University of Oklahoma Libraries

During her lifetime, Gina Berriault never knew champions like Oprah Winfrey or the Coen Brothers who could bring recognition and renown for her talents. Instead, she quietly went about her character studies, painting vivid still lifes in language neither too spare nor too florid, both gifting and disarming readers with the simple powers of acute observation.

The stories assembled in this posthumous collection bear witness to Berriault's philosophy: "Short stories and some short novels are close to poetry--with the fewest words they capture the essence of a situation, of a human being. It's like trying to pin down an eternal moment." Berriault's characters are determined, sometimes doggedly so, in the face of tragedy and despair. There is anxiety surrounding a critic's much anticipated arrival and departure ("A Dream of Fair Women"). An acquaintance struck up by a homeless visitor unravels a librarian's closely guarded universe of knowledge ("The Infinite Passion of Expectation"). A young girl, the outsider looking in, finds idyllic realization in the guise of palm trees, lawns and the possession of a piano, only to understand that her economic circumstances will never allow her to experience these "Stolen Pleasures." Berriault's characters are the faces we confront on a daily basis.

Despite her relative anonymity, Berriault's four novels and three story collections earned many grants and awards. Women in Their Beds, the last short story collection before her death in 1999, won the Rea Award and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. This current collection cements Berriault in the pantheon of the American greats. --Nancy Powell

The basic premise of this debut novel is pure genius: Dr. Jennifer White, a retired orthopedic surgeon, is suffering from dementia. Her neighbor and best friend, Amanda, has been found murdered, with four fingers surgically removed. Dr. White can't say if she is guilty or not because she can't remember. She is, of course, questioned repeatedly by police detectives, is always cooperative, but really doesn't have any information. Or does she?

Through fragments of narrative, writings in her notebook, moments of absolute lucidity and long periods when she can't even recall where she is, Dr. White leads the reader through the fractured landscape of her mind. There are frequent incursions from her children, Mark and Fiona, both with problems of their own. Dr. White is content living in her home with a caregiver, but Mark decides that the home should be sold and his mother moved to assisted living.

Her dementia worsens, but she still has periods of perfect clarity, when she can recall her friendship with Amanda, her husband's philandering and incidents from family life. She is questioned frequently by one of the detectives, a woman with more than a professional interest in the case. Breakthroughs sometimes loom, then vanish into thin air.

The secrets that Jennifer had with her husband, the friendship-cum-battlefield she had with Amanda, her grief at having to give up her profession, her difficult relations with both children--all form the poignant story of a woman who is losing everything. As her consciousness erodes, barriers fall and revelations are possible, but not the ones the reader expects. --Valerie Ryan

Army brats lived a unusual existence in the 1980s, the time supposedly "between the wars" of Vietnam and Iraq/Afghanistan--but actually an era with a war all its own, the Cold War. Before the current reality of repeated deployments and existential dread of same, the main challenge of soldiers' children during that time was to dutifully follow their uniformed parents to base after base and attempt to mature amidst such rootlessness. Constance Squires was just such a "brat" and has crafted a debut novel that deftly uses fiction to tell an engaging tale of transient youth that no doubt is very close to her own.

We meet Lucinda Collins in 1983, a 13-year-old girl just landed at a base in West Germany. She makes friends in a calculating way born of oft-moving necessity. A cute boy's dad set to transfer in two months? She cuts him loose to save later pain. At the same time, Lucinda is watching her parents' marriage crack. When a young private on the base shares his record collection with her, Lucinda develops a passion for music that will sustain her through the moves, the family drama and the early adulthood hardships born of her upbringing's particulars. References to music groups and artists like Echo and the Bunnymen, Nina Hagen and the Minutemen, along with vivid descriptions of the West German club scene, give the novel an authentic '80s feel.

Squires is no prose artisan, relying instead on pages-long dialogue of wise-ass banter between characters. But her tough heroine is likable and the epiphanies that bring Lucinda into adulthood, if not exactly profound, are satisfyingly real. --Cherie Ann Parker, freelance journalist and book critic

A "gap year" is time taken off after completion of secondary education and before beginning higher education. It's best when parents and child both agree on the time-honored practice, but that's not the case for the Lightsey family in Sarah Bird's latest novel. Cam Lightsey is busily buying extra pillows for daughter Aubrey to take to college, while Aubrey has no intention of going. (Cam's ex and Aubrey's father, Martin, has been absent for years, in a religious cult.)

Free-spirited Cam moved to the 'burbs so Aubrey could get a better education, but as a proud lactation consultant, she doesn't fit with the local ladies who lunch. Fortunately, her daughter has been the proverbial "good kid," grinding out top grades and staying out of trouble.

Unbeknownst to Cam, Aubrey has had it with her straight-edge ways. She is sick of being a band geek and waiting for "real life" to begin. On a stupefyingly hot day at band practice, Aubrey faints en route to get water and is revived by the quarterback hero--on whom she then vomits. He is Tyler Moldenhauer, and he's interested in her. Then, just as Aubrey believes "real life" is beginning, her long-lost father contacts her on Facebook and "real life" kicks into high gear.

Bird (The Boyfriend School) does a masterful job of telling us just enough about Tyler, Cam's worries, Aubrey's self-discovery and her father to keep us wondering. Martin, the wild card, returns; Aubrey disappears on the day she is supposed to leave for college, and through chapters narrated alternately by mother and daughter, the story of an unusual senior year unfolds. --Valerie Ryan

As the United States and its allies grapple with long-running conflicts overseas, it is not surprising that some authors have turned once more to the Great War and its effects not just on national psyches, but on individual ones as well. In the mystery genre, Anne Perry and Jacqueline Winspear have approached that war and its veterans with modern sensibilities and modern research capabilities. Now a British debut novelist, Elizabeth Speller, has added a polished puzzle of her own: The Return of Captain John Emmett.

Laurence Bartram is a veteran whose wartime horrors were compounded by the homefront deaths of his wife and newborn son. He's a bit adrift, so when an old school chum and fellow combatant's sister contacts him to ask if he might make some inquiries into her brother's apparent suicide--shellshocked Captain John Emmett appears to have shot himself after fleeing a countryside convalescent home--Bartram jumps at the chance of something to do.

Bartram begins asking questions of people who can be connected to Emmett, and while he does so with almost painfully good manners, his peregrinations have a somewhat Bertie Wooster-ish feel: he's stumbling in the dark, sometimes because information is deliberately withheld, more often due to the vagaries of the British class system's slow postwar dissolve. But even his bluff friend Charles Carfax's fascination with detective novels can't solve the real conundrum at the heart of this deceptively quaint book, which is all about how soldiers return and are--or aren't--reintegrated into society. --Bethanne Patrick, editor, Shelf Awareness

Steal the Show is the second novel featuring PI Willis Gidney, ex-cop, adoptee with a troubled background, jazz lover, aikido adept (which surprises villains, who sometimes deem him "chubby") and a cynical/romantic "man of honor" in the best Spenser tradition.

Kaufman juggles an impressive number of plots, never dropping one: Will Willis defeat the animus of Florence Walters, caseworker with the DC Adoptive Services, and be able to adopt his beloved Sarah, the infant he pulled from a burning house? Will he be able to keep his relationship with Lilly McClelland, in spite of personal and interpersonal stresses? Will he be able to divine the murky connections among Rush Gemelli (who blackmailed him into a job); his dad, Chuck Gemelli, head of the Motion Picture Alliance Council; ex-FBI agent Longstreet; Draper Kane, ex-Gemelli partner in an earlier venture? Will Gidney be able to protect Chuck and his new movie-to-theater transmitting software, unknown to all but Rush? Will he continue to outmaneuver attempts of various gangs to kill him?

Thomas Kaufman's Willis Gidney is a complex, likeable character with a keen wit: meeting actor Corbin Brooks at a favorite café, Brooks is "as inconspicuous as a jackhammer at a Bach recital." Willis is a completely original detective; his distinction comes from who he is, not what he does. Perhaps most interesting of all is that Kaufman has penned a truly postracial detective story, with effortless style and accomplishment. --Judith Hawkins-Tillirson, proprietress, Wyrdhoard Books, and blogger at Still Working for Books

Ted DiPaulo, a Toronto criminal defense attorney partial to high-profile cases, admits that "nothing would make him happier than running a murder trial he thought he could win." In this rousing courtroom thriller in the tradition of Scott Turow, Ted gets almost everything he loves most.

One sultry August morning, Samantha Wyler unexpectedly becomes Ted's client. On the eve of their divorce trial, Samantha's husband, Terrance, was stabbed to death in his kitchen. Samantha tells Ted that she had been in the house after the stabbing; she also confides that she was angry when she arrived at the house. Samantha had motive and opportunity to kill, but she claims that she didn't murder Terrance.

Given these and other damaging facts, Ted yields to pressure from opposing counsel Jennifer Raglan (whom he trained) and the judge to have his client plead guilty to lesser charges in order to avoid possible conviction of first-degree murder.

Robert Rotenberg, a Toronto trial attorney and author of Old City Hall, brings authority and authenticity to the strategies and negotiations that lead up to such a plea, deftly showing how they can be compromised. With a winningly sardonic style, Rotenberg poses the thorny questions of where justice lies and who ends up pursuing truth.

When Samantha Wyler nixes the guilty plea, her murder trial begins. Ted and Jennifer, old friends and colleagues, have to go head to head in the courtroom. As Ted notes about their shared psychologies, "There are the blues. There is the night. There's darkness. And then there's losing a case." Rotenberg piles on suspense about whether Samantha is a conniving killer or an innocent being strangled by a web of incriminating evidence. --John McFarland

We know some things to be true: Robert A. Heinlein recruited fellow science fiction writer Isaac Asimov to work in a research lab at the Philadelphia Navy Yard during the Second World War. There is a persistent rumor associated with the Navy Yard--the alleged disappearance and reappearance of the USS Eldridge in the "Philadelphia Experiment" of October 1943. Earlier that year, L. Ron Hubbard was relieved of his U.S. Navy command after a shooting incident in Mexican territorial waters, and was also involved with Jack Parsons, a pioneering member of the American space race program and one of the nation's highest-ranking occultists. And the publication of "Deadline," a short story written by Cleve Cartmill, led to a federal investigation into the possibility that science fiction writers were leaking atomic secrets to the enemy.

Paul Malmont (The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril) takes all these historical tidbits--along with some of the legends about Nikola Tesla--and bundles them into a rollicking novel in which pulp fiction writers become real-life adventurers. Sure, the story tweaks the historical record in a few places, but it's clear readers aren't meant to take all of this too seriously as the plot becomes increasingly baroque, with more than a few ingenious twists along the way.

Malmont's rich characterizations do much to obscure any questions of accuracy. It's because this re-creation of the literary and fan communities that emerged during the science fiction boom feels so accurate that all the other stuff seems, even if only for a few moments, utterly plausible... and remains entertaining even after disbelief returns. --Ron Hogan, founder of Beatrice.com

Blame our current obsession with numbers on 13th-century mathematician Leonardo Pisano, also known as Fibonacci. Leonardo authored the first general mathematics text, called Liber Abacci (The Book of Calculation), and introduced the European masses to a new way of doing math, using the universal 0 to 9 symbology developed by the Hindus and Arabs. It was a pivotal moment in history at a time when finger counting and Roman numerals were the norm, and accounting practices were more dubious than some of today's creative accounting.

Just as Leonardo brought modern arithmetic to Renaissance Italy, Stanford professor Keith Devlin brings the story of Leonardo back into sharp focus in this long-awaited tome. Devlin makes the genius (or foresight) of Leonardo easily understandable, as would behoove a fellow whose specializes in teaching and communicating mathematics in digestible chunks to general audiences. His 2007 Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization proves the point, as do his 28 books and role as the "Math Guy" on National Public Radio.

Leonardo's gift lay dormant for hundreds of years until Laurence Sigler translated Liber Abacci in 2002. Leonardo's place in history was now confirmed; his contributions extend beyond the mathematical sphere, forming the basis of modern banking and bookkeeping systems employed in business today.

For a brief instant Devlin lived and breathed Leonardo, a journey that still awes him. "Holding the manuscript in my hands was physical and visceral--knowledge through the body as opposed to knowledge of the mind," writes Devlin. "As I slowly turned the pages, Leonardo and his story suddenly became real." --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant

Emmy, the remarkable human girl with the ability to shrink as small as--and into the form of--a rat (first introduced in of Emmy and the Incredible Shrinking Rat) returns for a third high adventure. Raston, Emmy's rat companion, can turn people into rodents with his bite, while his sister, Sissy, gives the antidote with her kisses.

Miss Barmy, Emmy's former evil nanny who must now live out her life in the form of a rat, hatches a diabolical plan with her sidekick, Cheswick Vole. They dupe Emmy and her friends into staying with Emmy's frail, elderly aunts. The situation at the aunts' appears to be quite dire, and the children pitch in to help. Hoodwinking a bat family into capturing Sissy, Miss Barmy then forces her to make skin patches imbued with her kisses (which Jane requires to maintain her human form). One night while searching for Sissy, Emmy and her companions come upon a riverside tavern. They discover that the frowzy rat singing at the bar and nursing a ginger beer is actually Raston and Sissy's long-lost Ratmom, whose magical tears prove both irritating and useful with their fountain-of-youth–like powers.

The tug-of-war for Sissy involves acrobatic plot twists culminating in a madcap, harrowing train ride. When the baddies are trussed up, well, let's just say there are some loose ropes, err, loose ends that hint at more shape-shifter episodes to come. --Bette Wendell-Branco, bookseller emeritus and reviewer

In John Grandits's (The Travel Game) humorous look at a child's fears about riding the bus on the first day at a new school, Kyle gets advice from his older brother James on specific things to avoid in order to survive the day. As soon as he gets on the bus, the rule breaking begins. Kyle doesn't mean to break the rules, but he inadvertently does, with unexpected results. Fortunately, Kyle is able to think on his feet, and makes the best of the situation. In Kyle's Walter Mitty–esque imaginings, his fellow bus riders take on the characteristics of animals. Kyle feels "like a zebra at a lion party"; the big bully sitting next to him looks like a grizzly bear; and the girl who befriends him looks like a snake--adding to the comical unraveling of his ride to school. After breaking all the rules and surviving, Kyle learns that big brother James might not know everything after all.

The art is a knockout, with exaggerated faces, unusual perspectives and creative page layouts. The text and art play off each other to emphasize each of "The 10 Rules." Using acrylics, Michael Allen Austin (Martina the Beautiful Cockroach) creates a cartoon-like realism full of action and emotion. This is a pitch-perfect picture book for the school age set. --JoAnn Jonas, public librarian and blogger