Editor’s Choice
The Signal, by Ron Carlson, $25.95. The dense Wind River Mountains of western Wyoming is where Carlson (“Five Skies”) sets his brooding latest, a tale of expired love and desperate measures. Carlson has produced a work of masterful fiction, combining the sad inevitability of a doomed relationship with sheer nail-biting suspense. Publishers Weekly
FICTION
The Fate of Katherine Carr, by Thomas H. Cook, $25. In the days when he was a travel writer, George Gates roamed the world. But he’s rarely ventured outside his hometown of Winthrop since the day his son Teddy, 8, vanished from the rainy bus stop from which his widowed father had promised to pick him up. Now something has sent Gates on a new kind of voyage. Kirkus
Exiles in the Garden, by Ward Just, $25. Few if any novelists have captured Washington politics with the astute insights of Just, who here casts his dispassionate eye on a man who comes to question whether one can achieve a well-lived life on the outskirts of political action. This intellectually rigorous narrative is absorbing, timely and very Washington. Publishers Weekly
NONFICTION
This Is for the Mara Salvatrucha: Inside the MS-13, America’s Most Violent Gang, by Samuel Logan, $24.99. Using all of the tools of a capable police investigation, Logan . . . connects the fortunes of Brenda Paz, a Honduran-American teenager, with the ultraviolent Mara Salvatrucha gang. Placing the reader in the midst of this story with harrowing detail, Logan writes of a young life wasted and an evil crime empire. Publishers Weekly
The Wild Marsh, by Rick Bass, $26. A fan’s notes on wilderness, log-cabin life, grizzly bears and other aspects of the American outback. Bass returns to the form of his early book, “Winter,” recording a year in the Yaak Valley of northwestern Montana, an uncommonly lush and marshy tract of forest that, at 1,800 feet, is the state’s lowest elevation. Kirkus
Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters, by Scott Rosenberg, $26. Salon co-founder Rosenberg offers an elegantly accessible history and defense of a now-ubiquitous Internet phenomenon — the blogosphere. Rosenberg suggests that blogging’s “outpouring of human expression” should “delight us.” Kirkus
PAPERBACKS
Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — And the Journey of a Generation, by Sheila Weller, $17. Half collective biography, half music-industry dish about three singer/songwriters who represented a generation of women on “a course of self-discovery, change, and unhappy confrontation with the limits of change.” Definitely a guilty pleasure, but still a solid contribution to the story of 20th-century popular music. Kirkus
Liberty: A Novel of Lake Wobegon, by Garrison Keillor, $15. Like Mark Twain, Keillor takes time to spell out details and, in so doing, convert the base metal of small-town tedium to the gold of comedy. The New York Times
The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal, by Sean Dixon, $15.95. With its unstoppable word flow, footnotes, classical shadowing and dual narrators, Dixon’s debut is an energetic, self-absorbed bag of tricks. Its preoccupation is a curious book group, the Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women’s Book Club, which aims to live out, as far as possible, the story of the book under consideration. Kirkus
COMING UP
Dexter by Design, by Jeff Lindsay, $25. Everyone’s favorite serial killer is back. Dexter Morgan, along with sister Deb and all the assorted weirdos from the Miami Police Department, are hot on the trail of a butcher. Dexter’s singular talents are brought to bear on the case. (September)
