EDITOR’S CHOICE
The Shadow Catcher by Marianne Wiggins, $25
Wiggins takes a magnificently Sebald-like approach to fictionalizing the life of photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis (1868-1952). Wiggins’ eighth novel is a heartfelt tour de force. | Publishers Weekly
FICTION
The Sleeping Doll by Jeffery Deaver, $26.95 | To stop a raving Charles Manson type named Daniel Pell, special agent Kathryn Dance (back from “The Cold Moon”) must find the little girl called the Sleeping Doll, who alone survived Pell’s slaughter of her family. | Library Journal
The Lost Constitution by William Martin, $24.95 | A rare, annotated draft of the U.S. Constitution is at the heart of Martin’s entertaining third novel to feature antiquarian book dealer Peter Fallon. This is a good mystery, a better examination of constitutional issues and a superb paean to New England, its people, natural beauty and resources. | Publishers Weekly
NONFICTION
The Last Days of the Incas by Kim MacQuarrie, $30 | With vivid and energetic prose, Emmy Award winner and author MacQuarrie (From the Andes to the Amazon) re-creates the 16th-century struggle for what would become modern-day Peru. | Publishers Weekly
Young J. Edgar: Hoover, the Red Scare, and the Assault on Civil Liberties by Kenneth D. Ackerman, $28.95 | Ackerman captures well the pathological character of the young Hoover and argues effectively that there is a cautionary tale in the corrosive effect of the denial of civil liberties and extralegal measures employed in the Red Scare raids. | Publishers Weekly
A Russian Diary: A Journalist’s Final Account of Life, Corruption, and Death in Putin’s Russia by Anna Politkovskaya, $25.95 | Anna Politkovskaya was shot in a contract killing in Moscow in the fall of 2006. Just before her death, Politkovskaya completed this record of life in Russia from the parliamentary elections of December 2003 to the grim summer of 2005, when the nation was still reeling from the horrors of the Beslan school siege.
PAPERBACKS
Resurrecting Langston Blue by Robert Greer, $17.95 | The massacre of Amerasian children by U.S. troops in Vietnam’s Song Ve Valley becomes the centerpiece in the investigation of the murder of a U.S. senatorial candidate in Denver author Robert Greer’s latest offering in the CJ Floyd series. | The Denver Post
Possible Side Effects by Augusten Burroughs, $14 | This collection of short pieces is a delightful, enjoyable and often humorous take on everything from the author’s Nicorette gum addiction to discovering what the tooth fairy really meant as a child. | Library Journal
Sky Bridge by Laura Pritchett, $15, | First-novelist Pritchett explores definitions of love and goodness in the same eastern Colorado hardscrabble landscape of her award-winning story collection (“Hell’s Bottom, Colorado,” 2001). | Kirkus
COMING UP
AUGUST
Beyond Reach by Karin Slaughter, $25 | Sara Linton, a medical examiner and pediatrician, is already fighting a malpractice suit when she learns that a friend of her police-chief husband is in serious need of her help.
