Editor’s Choice
The Missing, by Tim Gautreaux, $25.95. Bayou shepherd of half-sunk souls, Gautreaux returns to the land of the lost and the lonely in his haunting third book (after “The Clearing”). Post-WWI Louisiana is a “root-buckled” and “magnolia- haunted” underworld for seedy, drunken mobs and twisted backwoods families. Floating through the chaos is Sam Simoneaux, who, “half dead” after the slaughter of his parents and the later loss of his 2-year-old son to fever, undertakes a quest to find a missing girl. Publishers Weekly
FICTION
The Long Fall, by Walter Mosley, $25.95. Mosley leaves behind the Los Angeles setting of his Easy Rawlins and Fearless Jones series to introduce Leonid McGill, a New York City private detective, who promises to be as complex and rewarding a character as Mosley’s ever produced. Publishers Weekly
NONFICTION
Midnight on the Line: The Secret Life of the U.S.-Mexico Border, by Tim Gaynor, $25.95. Gaynor, who covers the U.S.-Mexican border for Reuters, here recounts his experiences reporting on smuggling activity between the two countries. This clear and accessible story provides a detailed picture of the current state of this borderland. Library Journal
Confessions of a Mullah Warrior, by Masood Farivar, $25. Memoir about growing up in war-torn Afghanistan by an Afghan refugee who joined the jihad against the Soviets and later studied at Harvard. An eye-opening chronicle of cultural exchange. Kirkus
Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America, by Julia Angwin, $27. Angwin, an award-winning journalist for The Wall Street Journal, recounts the history of in this well-written, entertaining and drama-filled chronicle. Publishers Weekly
PAPERBACKS
Animal’s People, by Indra Sinha, $15. Take a feisty young cripple, connect him to one of the world’s worst industrial disasters, and you have Sinha’s extraordinary, incandescent second novel. The plight of the world’s powerless has seldom been conveyed more powerfully, while Animal is destined to be one of fiction’s immortals. Kirkus
Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, by Rick Perlstein, $9.95. Perlstein is a gifted writer and a talented storyteller. His sweeping narrative amounts to nothing less than a social history of modern conservatism. Chicago Tribune
The Reader, by Bernard Schlink, $13.96. When Michael Berg began attending the Nazi war trials as part of a college class, he never expected to find Hanna — an older woman who had seduced him when he was a teenager — as one of the accused. Publishers Weekly
COMING UP
Stone’s Fall, by Iain Pears, $28.95. Pears tells the story of John Stone, financier and arms dealer, a man so wealthy that in the years before World War I, he was able to manipulate markets, industries, and indeed entire countries and continents. (May)
