In the fiction area, look for Peter Blauner’s cops-and-killers tale “Slipping Into Darkness.” Rock biographer Christopher Sandford has always held that Paul McCartney was the talent in the Beatles. See why in his new “McCartney.” In paperbacks, look for the megaselling James Patterson’s “Honeymoon,” written with Howard Roughan. Coming in May is the disturbing “Tiger Force: A True Story of Men and War,” by Michael Sallah and Mitch Weiss.
FICTION
Slipping Into Darkness, by Peter Blauner, Little, Brown, 386 pages, $24.95|Twenty years ago, Detective Francis X. Laughlin sent a young man up for murder. Now another murder has taken place that has a baffling connection to the earlier crime.
The Night Journal, by Elizabeth Crook, Penguin, 464 pages, $24.95|Meg’s great-grandmother’s journals of living in the West in the 19th century have become famous, mostly because of the work of Meg’s historian grandmother. But the veracity of the journals is called into question.
Speak of the Devil, by Richard Hawke, Random House, 323 pages, $21.95|This debut novel features the wiseacre private dick Fritz Malone, who is hired to catch a killer and kidnapper in New York City.
NONFICTION
McCartney, by Christopher Sandford, Carroll & Graf, 430 pages, $26.95|Known in the band’s heyday as the “cute” Beatle, Paul McCartney has continued to play his music with uncanny success. This biography looks at McCartney’s public and private lives.
Second Drafts of History, by Lance Morrow, Basic Books, 323 pages, $26.95|This is a collection from Time magazine’s essayist. They cover events from the 1980s through the present and discuss such things as the fall of communism, AIDs and school shootings.
Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster, by Michael Eric Dyson, Basic Civitas, 258 pages, $23|Dyson not only tells what happened when the massive storm came ashore in Louisiana and Mississippi but posits that one of the lessons is that to be poor or black in today’s world is to be left behind.
PAPERBACK
Honeymoon, by James Patterson and Howard Roughan, Warner, 390 pages, $13.95|This thriller centers on Nora Sinclair and her attraction for men. The problem is that many of those attracted to her wind up in the morgue.
Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life, by Steve Fraser, Harper Perennial, 721 pages, $18.95 |Fraser uses politicians, novelists, moviemakers, ordinary citizens and more to show us how Americans have viewed “the street” for some 200 years.
White Ghost Girls, by Alice Greenway, Grove, 176 pages, $13 |The author’s debut novel is the story of two young American girls growing up in Hong Kong during the chaos of the Vietnam War.
COMING UP
Tiger Force: A Story of Men and War, by Michael Sallah and Mitch Weiss, Little, Brown, 416 pages, $25.95, May |The authors, two newspaper reporters, won a Pulitzer Prize at the Toledo Blade for this story of a unit in the Vietnam War that crossed the line from what is acceptable in war to the killing of innocents.
The Attack, by Yasmina Khadra, Doubleday, 208 pages, $18.95, May|The author of “The Swallows of Kabul” returns with the story of an Arab Israeli doctor whose wife apparently becomes a suicide bomber.
The Island, by Heather Graham, Mira, 384 pages, $21.95, March|Beth Anderson is vacationing with her brother and niece when she discovers a skull on the beach and remembers a retired couple who disappeared from the island a few months before.
