Editor’s Choice
Obedience, by Will Lavender, $24. A complex conspiracy involving the writing of a book drives Lavender’s compelling debut, a thriller that will strike some as a mix of John Fowles’ “The Magus” and Stephen King’s “The Shining.”
Publishers Weekly
FICTION
Lady Macbeth, by Susan Fraser King,$23.95. Historical-romance novelist King leaps into deeper historical waters with this captivating take on Lady Macbeth, who tells her side of the story with a forceful, uncompromising daring.
Publishers Weekly
Beautiful Children, by Charles Bock, $25. In the shadows cast by the bright lights of Las Vegas dwells a feral, unglamorous world of pawnshops, runaways, and sexual exploitation. Beautiful Children descends into this underworld one Saturday night, with the mysterious disappearance of Newell Ewing, an angry, comic book-loving preteen.
Barnes and Noble
NONFICTION
The Good Rat, by Jimmy Breslin, $24.95. Breslin, renowned journalist and author of The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, revisits a familiar wise-guy milieu in this collection of stories and anecdotes about the mob. His writing, like the Mafia itself, breezily transitions from humorous to horrifying as he regales the reader with loosely connected tales of mistaken identity, crooked cops, snitches and murder.
Publishers Weekly
Not the Girl Next Door: Joan Crawford, A Personal Biography, by Charlotte Chandler, $26. In this sympathetic biography, Chandler (“Ingrid: The Girl Who Walked Home Alone”) chronicles Crawford’s life-from a brutal Midwest childhood to her self-imposed exile in New York.
Publishers Weekly
Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq, by Michael Scheuer, $27. Scheuer, former CIA analyst and trenchant critic of U.S. terrorism policies (Imperial Hubris) develops his argument that America suffers from a collective insistence on sustaining Cold War paradigms in a fundamentally altered world.
Publishers Weekly
PAPERBACKS
The Shape of Snakes, by Minette Walters, $13.95. In 1978 London, with half the country on strike, a woman named Mad Annie dies in the street, unmourned by her scornful neighbors. Only the young Mrs. Ranelagh believes that it is really murder, and she spends 20 years trying to prove it.
Library Journal
Surveillance, by Jonathan Raban, $13.95. Raban (“Waxwings”) explores the current political climate in this clever, unsettling novel set in a near-future Seattle. When the end finally rolls in, readers will be stunned and, in some cases, outraged.
Publishers Weekly
The Double Bind, by Chris Bohjalian, $14.95. Psychological thriller, crime novel and “what-if” sequel to “The Great Gatsby” — with significant twists. Conflating literary lore, photographic analysis and meditations on homelessness and mental illness, Boh- jalian produces his best and most complex fiction yet.
Kirkus
COMING UP
Black Out, by Lisa Unger, $23. Annie Powers has a loving husband, a beautiful daughter and a comfortable Florida life. She also has a past as an emotionally broken lover and accomplice to a serial killer. (May)
Howling in Mesopotamia: An Iraqi-American Memoir, by Haider Ala Hamoudi, $24.95. Hamoudi writes about returning to Iraq after Saddam Hussein’s toppling to reveal the country’s unique culture. (April)
