When Larry Brown died unexpectedly in 2004, he left behind the manuscript for his nearly completed sixth novel, “A Miracle of Catfish.” Set in Mississippi, it’s the story of a year in the life of four men and one little boy. You can check out half of the story of the so-called “Jesus cave” that is causing such consternation in “The Jesus Family Tomb: The Discovery, the Investigation, and the Evidence That Could Change History,” by Simcha Jocobovici and Charles Pellegrino. In paperbacks, look for Joanna Trollope’s “Second Honeymoon,” the story of a wife and husband trying to cope with an empty nest. Coming in May, look for a first novel from Cornelia Read, “A Field of Darkness,” in which a well-off woman learns that an old murder is linked to her family.
FICTION
A Miracle of Catfish, by Larry Brown, Algonquin, 454 pages, $24.95|Set in hard-scrabble Mississippi, this is the story of four beleaguered and sometimes dangerous men and a charming and vulnerable 10-year-old boy.
Water Like a Stone, by Deborah Crombie, Morrow, 407 pages, $24.95|Scotland Yard detectives Gemma James and Duncan Kincaid return to a case involving the corpse of a child walled into an abandoned farmhouse.
NONFICTION
The Jesus Family Tomb: The Discovery, the Investigation, and the Evidence That Could Change History, by Simcha Jacobovici and Charles Pellegrino, Harper San Francisco, 218 pages, $27.95| Here is the story of the investigation and analysis of limestone bone boxes and physical evidence found in a 2,000-year-old tomb that the authors claim could be the tomb of Jesus’ family.
Lone Star Lawmen: The Second Century, by Robert M. Utley, 400 pages, $30|Utley continues the story, begun with “Lone Star Justice,” of the men who were charged with bringing law and order to the American West.
PAPERBACKS
Second Honeymoon, by Joanna Trollope, Bloomsbury, 323 pages, $14.95|Edie is trying to deal with the empty nest, but things change when all the children, trying to come to terms with difficulties, return home.
Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled – and More Miserable Than Ever Before, by Jean M. Twenge, Free Press, 292 pages, $14|Twenge tells why people born in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s are so different from generations that came before.
COMING UP
A Field of Darkness, by Cornelia Read, Warner, 320 pages, $22.95, May|Maddie finds her life boring until she learns that a decades- old murder could be connected to her family.
Blood Makes the Grass Grow Green: A Year in the Desert With Team America, by Johnny Rico, Presidio, 336 pages, $13.95, April|A memoir of a year spent with the Army in Afghanistan by a military misfit.
Stormy Weather, by Paulette Jiles, William Morrow, 352 pages, $24.95, May|The author of “Enemy Women” returns with a tale of desperation set in the Texas oil fields during the Great Depression.
