Those of you who have followed best-selling author Linda Fairstein’s Alex Cooper novels can pick up the ninth in the series, “Bad Blood.” Those interested in the not-so-distant American history can take a look at Elizabeth Jacoway’s “Turn Away Thy Son,” a look at the efforts to desegregate Little Rock, Ark., schools in the late 1950s. If you ever wanted to know what constitutes happiness, you need look no further than Darrin M. McMahon’s “Happiness: A History,” a paperback that looks at 2,000 years of thought into just what happiness is. Gerald Seymour has garnered a reputation for taut, suspenseful thriller in his native England. In March, look for his newest effort, “Rat Run.”
FICTION
Bad Blood, by Linda Fairstein, Simon & Schuster, 416 pages, $26 | In the ninth Alexandra Cooper novel, the assistant DA is trying a man accused of killing his wife. A catastrophic explosion in a water tunnel is mysteriously tied into the case.
Hurricane Punch, by Tim Dorsey, HarperCollins 384 pages, $24.95 | Serial killer Serge A. Storms (“The Big Bamboo”) is back and traipsing across Florida in his Hummer and killing only those who truly deserve it.
White Lies, by Jayne Ann Krentz, Penguin, 384 pages, $24.95 | The master of the romance-suspense novel is back with a tale of a family of paranormals who take on the case of the murder of one of their own.
NONFICTION
Turn Away Thy Son: Little Rock, the Crisis That Shocked the Nation, by Elizabeth Jacoway, Simon & Schuster, 496 pages, $30 | A recounting of the year in which the schools in Little Rock, Ark., were desegregated.
Dragon Sea: A True Tale of Treasure, Archeology, and Greed Off the Coast of Vietnam, by Frank Pope, Harcourt, 341 pages, $25 | Pope takes a look at the fierce world of underwater recovery centering on the efforts to retrieve precious 15th-century porcelain from a sunken boat.
The Great Negro Plot: A Tale of Conspiracy and Murder in Eighteenth-Century New York, by Mat Johnson, Bloomsbury, 213 pages, $19.95 | The author refutes a 1744 book that attempted to justify the kangaroo trial that led to the jailing and deaths of black New Yorkers wrongly accused of planning a revolt in colonial New York.
PAPERBACKS
Happiness: A History, by Darrin M. McMahon, Grove, 544 pages, $15 | McMahon uses music, art, architecture and more over the past two milennia to determine just what makes us happy.
The Widow’s War, by Sally Gunning, HarperCollins, 320 pages, $13.95 | When Lyddie Berry finds herself widowed in pre-revolutionary America, she find that she not only has lost her husband, but also all her property legally goes to her nearest male relative.
Girls of Tender Age: A Memoir, by Mary-Ann Tirone Smith, Free Press, 285 pages, $14 | The novelist tells the bittersweet tale of growing up in the 1950s among the working class people of Hartford, Conn.
COMING UP
Rat Run, by Gerald Seymour, Overlook, 416 pages, $24.95, March | Humiliated during the Iraq War, intelligence officer Malachy Kitchen, to restore his honor and bring himself out of despair, takes on a network of drug dealers.
The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace, by Ali A. Allawi, Yale University Press, 400 pages, $28, April | The author, a senior advisor to the Prime Minister of Iraq, gives the first Iraqi perspective of the war and the struggles that have followed the invasion.
Sister Mine, by Tawni O’Dell, Shaye Areheart, 416 pages, $23, March | The author of “Back Roads and “Coal Run” is back with a story of two sisters, one thought long dead, who have to come to grip with a bucketful of family mysteries.
