Editor’s Choice
The Midnight House, by Alex Berenson, $25.95. Superspy and serial country-saver John Wells (“The Silent Man”) seeks to uncover the truth about a string of murdered operatives from a top-secret unit. CIA head Vincent Duto, with whom Wells has repeatedly butted heads, wants them to look into a string of suspicious deaths. The victims are all veterans of Task Force 673, which operated out of a covert detention facility in Poland. Kirkus
FICTION
Bloodroot, by Amy Greene, $24.95. Greene’s debut shows three generations of an eastern Tennessee family struggling against abusive men and narrow middle-class values that try to destroy their unusually active spirits. Pitch-perfect voices tell a story loaded with lyric suffering and redemption — bound to be a huge hit. Kirkus The Privileges, by Jonathan Dee, $25. Gilded young go-getter creates, not always legally, a cocoon for his family in Dee’s (“Palladio,” “St. Famous”) mostly buoyant fifth novel about money, family and mortality. Adam and Cynthia Morey, Midwestern transplants in Manhattan, have beauty, brains, charm and a formidable determination to carve out a comfortable world for themselves. Dee follows their lives over 20-plus years. Kirkus
NONFICTION
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot, $26. Writing with a novelist’s artistry, a biologist’s expertise, and the zeal of an investigative reporter, Skloot tells a truly astonishing story of racism and poverty, science and conscience, spirituality and family driven by a galvanizing inquiry into the sanctity of the body and the very nature of the life force. Booklist
I Am Ozzy, by Ozzy Osbourne, with Chris Ayres, $26.99. The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography. An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested. Kirkus Libby Prison Breakout: The Daring Escape from the Notorious Civil War Prison, by Joseph Wheelan, $26.95. Former AP reporter and editor Wheelan fastidiously establishes the circumstances and conditions leading to the desperate actions of Union officers, held separately from enlisted men per conventions of the time, to break out of Libby Prison, a vast, former tobacco warehouse. Kirkus
PAPERBACK
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, by Wells Tower, $14. The stories in this outstanding debut collection explore the troubled relationships of men down on their luck, in failed marriages, estranged from family, caught in imbroglios between sons and their fathers and stepfathers, and even, in “Wild America,” the subtle and ferocious competition between teenage girls. Publishers Weekly
The Wettest County in the World, by Matt Bondurant, $15. Hard-living bootleggers and crooked lawmen wrestle for control of the moonshine business in a fictional re-creation of the hard past of a lawless county. Bondurant sends past-his-prime author Sherwood Anderson into the hollows of western Virginia in the mid-1930s. Kirkus
The Lute Player, by Norah Lofts, $16. Lofts returns with this rich historical fiction, focusing on the lute player and companion to Richard the Lionhearted, Blondel. Humanizing the legend of Richard without cheapening his legacy, Lofts also portrays the oppression inherent in the life of a privileged woman as easily as she dissects the horrors of war. Publishers Weekly
COMING UP
Deception, by Jonathan Kellerman, $28. Kellerman’s continuing hero Alex Delaware is hot on the case of a young woman subjected to all kinds of horrors at an exclusive Los Angeles school. (March)
