Booklists · Beyond Bestsellers: Notable New Fiction Titles (June 2009)

After her boyfriend is deployed to Iraq, 24-year-old Annie Harper explores her feelings of loss and loneliness, and her efforts to move forward with her life (which may include a new romance) through a draft of her memoirs. Critics call this feel-good read “funny, heartrending, and outstanding.”

FBI Special Agent Pendergast and NYPD Lieutenant D’Agosta are investigating the murder of New York Times reporter William Smithback. Initially, it appears to be a straightforward case: the eyewitnesses and security camera footage clearly identify the suspect. But the investigation takes a strange turn when it turns out that the suspect was declared dead nearly two weeks ago. And then the body vanishes from the morgue…Another compelling page turner from bestselling duo Child and Preston.

The mysteries of the afterlife are explained cleverly and plausibly in forty brief, thought-provoking vignettes, written by neuroscientist and novelist David Eagleman. Booklist sums it up: “dark humor, witty quips, and unsettling observations about the human psyche should engage a readership extending from New Age buffs to amateur philosophers.”

In 1909 London, industrialist and arms dealer John Stone tumbles from a window, leaving the disposition of his vast estate hanging on the identity of an illegitimate heir. Stone’s widow, the Lady Ravenscliff, engages a young crime reporter—the first the book’s trio of narrators—to locate the mysterious progeny in Pears’ literary and erudite novel of politics, finance, espionage, and roiling Victorian passions.

From the author of Child 44, comes this thriller set in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union, under Khrushchev's reforms. A prisoner released from the Gulag threatens security agent Leo Demidov in the matter of a case involving a dissident priest. This action-packed thriller is a chilling and atmospheric standout.

Ray and Manny have a good thing going: they’ve learned to rob small-time drug dealers by posing as DEA agents. But when they accidentally hook a big fish in the drug trade, they know that a violent payback isn’t far behind them. Ray, looking back on his criminal past, begins to question his abusive father’s assumption that he’s worthless and will never reform. A “quirky and engaging” (Booklist) story of redemption.

In the fictional Cincinnati Memorial Hospital, pain management specialist Cheryl Beth Wilson and homicide detective Will Border investigate the brutal murder of a female physician, which hints at the work of a known serial killer--the Mt. Adams slasher--who was executed. A taut mystery with great local flavor.

In the five impressionistic, poetic stories in Van Booy’s second collection, vividly described characters are enraptured by chance meetings with strangers, long lost friends, and acquaintances. Publisher’s Weekly says, “each of these stories has moments of sheer loveliness.”