Editor’s Choice
In the Name of Honor, Richard North Patterson, $26. Patterson explores the concept of honor — and how men and women can sometimes embody and sometimes blacken this lofty concept — in this riveting legal thriller. This is superior genre fiction from a writer at the top of his game. Publishers Weekly
FICTION
The Search, by Nora Roberts, $26.95. A dog trainer and a wood craftsman dance around love and danger in the Pacific Northwest. A little slower-paced than the typical Roberts romantic mystery (“Black Hills,” etc.) but every bit as steamy. It may well add dog lovers to her legion of fans. Kirkus
What Is Left the Daughter, by Howard Norman, $25. Norman, best known for “The Bird Artist,” scores again with this gripping account of a family ripped apart by obsession and murder. It is extraordinary that a story that carries such a weight of sorrow is never depressing, but Norman the master craftsman pulls it off. Kirkus
NONFICTION
Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook, by Anthony Bourdain, $26.99. Bourdain’s prose at his wildest can sound like Hunter S. Thompson’s, yet he can produce much quieter work. You never quite know what’s going to happen in the next sentence, but you can be sure you’re in for a treat, a shock, a surprise . . . Anyone who starts the book is liable to lose all control and simply gobble it right up. Washington Post
Every Man In This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War, by Megan K. Stack, $26.95. Stack offers gripping accounts of the sorrows of war, especially of the traumas Afghan and Lebanese civilians endured under American and Israeli bombing, but she also writes evocatively of quieter pathologies: Libya’s jovially sinister totalitarian regime, corruption under Egypt’s quasi-dictatorship and lyric anti-Semitism at a Yemeni poetry slam. Publishers Weekly
Empire of the Southern Moon, by S.C. Gwynne, $27.50. Journalist Gwynne tracks one of the U.S.’s longest-running military conflicts in this gripping history of the war against the Comanche Indians on the high plains of Texas and Colorado . . . (T)he book combines rich historical detail with a keen sense of adventure and of the humanity of its protagonists. Publishers Weekly
PAPERBACK
The Quickening, by Michelle Hoover, $14.95. Hoover’s powerful debut tells the story of the intertwined fortunes of two early 20th-century Midwestern farm women. In this finely wrought and starkly atmospheric narrative, Hoover’s characters carry deep secrets, and their emotions are as intense as the acts of nature that shape their world. Publishers Weekly
The Fiddler in the Subway, by Gene Weingarten, $15.99. In even the slightest of the essays — seeing his daughter off to college, honoring the memory of his childhood baseball hero — his storytelling, keen observation and deft reporting startle and amaze. Whether profiling Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau or The Great Zucchini, a little-known children’s entertainer whose messy personal life belies his talent for beguiling preschoolers, Weingarten reliably delivers the goods. Kirkus
The First Counsel, by Brad Meltzer, $9.99. Meltzer’s third high-octane thriller (Dead Even, 1998, etc.) sinks a junior White House staffer in the world of woes that result when he accepts a date with the president’s daughter — accepts a date, because Nora Hartson is even more hard-charging than her father. She’s a determined, demented go-getter who knows and takes whatever she wants.
COMING UP
The Reversal, by Michael Connolly, $27.99. A defense attorney is recruited to turn prosecutor in the case of a brutal child murder. He agrees but only if he can use the services of LAPD Detective Harry Bosch. (October)
