Editor’s Choice
Heat Lightning, by John Sandford, $26.95. Sandford follows up Virgil Flowers’ first time in the center spotlight (2007’s “Dark of the Moon”) with this captivating mystery. While investigating a brutal murder in suburban Minnesota, Flowers discovers that the killing is part of a series of murders of Vietnam veterans who all served together. Publishers Weekly
FICTION
Last of the Old Guard, by Louis Auchincloss, $25. This understated novel recounts the partnership between Ernest Saunders and Adrian Suydam, who founded a New York law firm in the early 1900s. The story, as told by Adrian, shows how their lives evolved in the social and economic landscape of elite New York society from the Gilded Age through World War II. Library Journal
By Chance, by Martin Corrick, $25. Corrick follows his promising debut (“The Navigation Log”) with another intricate novel where readers must work to detect the story within a sparse yet elegant narrative. This time the setting is contemporary England, the protagonist a man whose life passes quietly until an extraordinary event strikes. Publishers Weekly
NONFICTION
Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell, $27.99. In his latest book, New Yorker contributor Gladwell (2005’s “Blink”) casts his inquisitive eye on those who have risen meteorically to the top of their fields, analyzing developmental patterns and searching for a common thread. Kirkus
The End: Natural Disasters, Manmade Catastrophes, and the Future of Human Survival, by Marq De Villiers, $26.95. Without discounting the very real impact of climate change, de Villiers (“Windswept”) steps back from global-warming brinksmanship to suggest that, in fact, “we’ve been living in a little bubble of stability in a great sea of chaotic change” and that cataclysm is the universe’s normal condition. Publishers Weekly
Ziegfeld: The Man Who Invented Show Business, by Ethan Mordden, $32.95. A rich and entertaining biography of Broadway’s first auteur. Ever the witty and erudite raconteur, Mordden (2007’s “All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959”) transports readers to the time when Times Square was just an intersection of streets. Publishers Weekly
PAPERBACKS
Chasing the Flame: One Man’s Fight to Save the World, by Samantha Power, $17. Biography of the handsome Brazilian intellectual who served as the United Nations’ top troubleshooter from East Timor and Bosnia to Iraq, where he died in a terrorist car bombing. Pulitzer Prize-winner Power draws from more than 400 interviews to offer this detailed portrait of charismatic Sergio Vieira de Mello. Kirkus
The Debriefing, by Robert Littell, $14. This 1979 novel is a typical Littell espionage thriller. A defecting Russian is debriefed by Stone, a member of a secret arm of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. What Stone discovers during his investigation, however, is more than he bargained for. Library Journal
Sundown, Yellow Moon, by Larry Watson, $14. The unnamed, not entirely reliable narrator of this novel of obsession from Watson (“In a Dark Time”) aims his imaginative faculties at discovering, through fiction, the truth of an incident from his adolescence in Bismarck, N.D. Publishers Weekly
COMING UP
The Domino Men, by Jonathan Barnes, $24.95. The author of “The Somnambulist” returns with a story of Victorian England in which the Queen makes a Faustian bargain with a nefarious entity. A young clerk becomes involved with a secret war against the Windsors in which nothing is as it seems. (February)
