In this intriguing, if minutiae-heavy, account, novelist Cooke (The Ice Child as Elizabeth McGregor) retraces the circumstances surrounding the possible 1780 poisoning of 20-year-old Sir Theodosius Boughton, heir to a baronetcy in Warwickshire, England. Theodosius lived at the family’s home, Lawthorn Hall, with his widowed mother, Anna Maria; older sister, Theodosia; and her husband, John Donellan. The late Edward Broughton’s will, leaving his estate first to Theodosius, then Theodosia, made for chilly family relations. Theodosius’s health had recently declined, due to his various self-treatments with mercury for venereal disease (most likely syphilis). On August 30, he took a draught prescribed by the local apothecary, handed to him by his mother, who said it smelled of bitter almonds. Theodosius went into convulsions and died. Donellan allegedly then rinsed out the empty bottle, which strengthened the eventual court case charging him with poisoning his brother-in-law, despite inconclusive autopsy results, shaky witness testimony, and a weak motive. Cooke makes a strong case not necessarily for Donellan’s innocence but for a shoddy trial, though her conclusions come a bit late after the unnecessarily detailed account of Donellan’s trial. Agent: George Lucas, Inkwell Management. (Nov.)

Pulitzer Prize–winning naturalist and Harvard professor Wilson (On Human Nature) and acclaimed photographer and Duke University professor Harris (River of Traps) team up to convey the spirit of Mobile, Ala., through text and images. Wilson writes of his childhood in Mobile and recounts the complicated heritage of his hometown in a sprawling essay that weaves personal, social, economic, political, and natural history. Over the course of three centuries and under five successive flags, Mobile underwent many transformations—trading post, agricultural hub, shipbuilding powerhouse, industrial center—while maintaining a fierce sense of local identity rooted in tradition and ritual. Harris’s intimate pictures beautifully capture quotidian moments, offering a context for the diverse characters, lush landscapes, and events, traumatic and joyful, that define Mobile today: a high school football team marches arm-in-arm; a tiger swallowtail hesitates in a verdant meadow; a Civil War re-enactor poses with Confederate memorabilia; two outstretched arms, one black and one white, point toward the infinity of the Gulf of Mexico’s horizon. A hybrid document meant to be as much about “the meaning of place as it is about a place itself,” the book is a thoughtful meditation on community and storytelling that reminds us we will never understand ourselves until we know where we come from. Agent: Kneerim and Williams. (Oct.)

Satran (How Not to Act Old) has written another humor book destined to fill gift bags for relatives no one knows very well. With charts breaking down dog ownership behavior according to “Crazy About Your Dog” or “Just Crazy” and tidbits on doggie spa treatments, bottled water and alternative therapies for dogs, the real eye-poppers come from the “Dogs and Art Timeline,” the “Royal Dogs Timeline,” and the section, “Dogs and Money.” This exhaustive compilation of dog-related factoids, itself emblematic of the Internet age, offers its own relevance for just-in-love puppy owners and the “half of dog owners who consider their dogs to be equal members of the family.” A comparison between the merits of dogs versus kids might just be worth the price of admission, but overall, this is a glorified magazine about man’s (and woman’s) best friend. Illus. Agent: Melissa Flashman, Trident Media Group. (Oct.)

In this revised edition of her 2010 study of the mystery fiction of the British master Rendell, Leavy (To Blight with Plague) presents a convincing case that Rendell’s work is often knowingly inspired by the myths of ancient Greece. Specifically, Leavy asserts that Rendell (who also writes as Barbara Vine) alludes to the family dysfunction of the House of Atreus circa the Trojan War, and the House of Laius and the incestuous marriage of Oedipus. Leavy also demonstrates how Rendell affirms and denies the theories of Freud and Jung, as well as the nature/nurture argument concerning individual responsibility for murder. Leavy does some marvelous detective work showing the depth and richness of Rendell’s other allusions, citing sources as disparate as Wordsworth and The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady. An ideal reader of this book would be familiar with Rendell and the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripedes. Those versed in Rendell’s early novels in the Inspector Wexford series will be rewarded since Leavy concentrates on those rather than on books written during the past two decades. This is an illuminating journey that should make Rendell devotees appreciate her even more. (Sept.)

A nostalgic, witty, and always informative topographic retrospective of the sites pertinent to the American Revolution takes Vogue contributing editor and journalist Sullivan (The Thoreau You Don’t Know) to the action seen by the middle colonies especially—New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey. Years of reflective walks and “site-inspired epiphanies” inform Sullivan’s research, as he traced Washington’s army crossing the Delaware, marching to engage the British at the battles of Trenton and Princeton, and into the winter refuge at Morristown, in the Watchung Mountains. In the second part, Sullivan discourses by turns on the seasons of the revolution, not in any chronological fashion, e.g., spring 1789 marked the inauguration of the new president in a vastly changing downtown Manhattan, which Sullivan reached by his own personal inaugural barge from Elizabeth, N.J., to Wall Street; summer sounded the anniversary of the disastrous rout at the Battle of Brooklyn; autumn ushered a rueful time of remembrance for soldiers and prisoners; and winter brings to mind the appalling hard winter at Valley Forge endured by the army. As infatuated by later decades’ of monuments, statues, and artist’s renderings of the revolutionary landscape as he is by the actual history, Sullivan delights in deep digressions into personal moments of discovery, such as viewing Larry Rivers’s controversial Washington Crossing the Delaware at the Museum of Modern Art or coming upon the lists of evolving early Dutch and British markets published by butcher turned street historian Thomas F. DeVoe. Sullivan’s historic anecdotes form a loose-limbed, irreverent, surprising take on American history, most fun in the footnotes. Agent: Eric Simonoff. (Sept.)

In a grand homage to the hard-nosed tradition of Army football, Beech, an editor at Sports Illustrated, recounts a brilliant gridiron season in 1958 when the scandal-ridden Black Knights of Army proved as talented and resilient as any college varsity squad ever. “Red” Blaik, once a young promising coach at Dartmouth in the 1930s and a star end on the old Army football team, assumed control of the Knights football program in the 1950s and resurrected it from a 1951 costly cheating scandal, which ended the careers of 37 members of the varsity, including Blaik’s younger son, Bob, destined to be the starting quarterback. Beech walks the reader with great detail and engaging narrative through Blaik’s bold strategy of rebuilding the Knights with a new far-flanker scheme built on a pounding running game. Assisted by such capable coaching assistants as Sid Gillman and Vince Lombardi, the coach discovers “a more open game” to spare his teams from physical injury, relying on the humble Bill Carpenter as the gifted receiver and the bruising Pete Dawkins as the Heisman Trophy–winning running back to pull off an undefeated 1958 football season. In this memorable sports chronicle of a fabled Army football team at the birth of the space age and the NFL, Beech highlights a remarkable coach and his determined squad in a golden season of redemption and triumph. Agents: Adam Korn and Brian DeFiore. (Sept.)

Smith, editor-in-chief of Orange Coast magazine, serves as the “fly on the wall” during the highly competitive 2010 Federal Duck Stamp Contest in his new book, tracing its origins and its current popularity. The contest, originating with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1934 wildlife preservation law in the Great Depression, provides for “the sale of an obscure revenue stamp” bought by hunters and stamp collectors, generating more than $750 million in funds, with 98 cents of each dollar going to buy millions of acres of U.S. waterfowl habitat since its inception. With a low-key writing style supported by fine research, Smith takes the readers behind the scenes as five judges weigh the artistic and commercial quality of the 235 submissions in the only juried contest administered by the U.S. government. The Hautman brothers, Jim, Joe, and Bob, are the most fascinating of the artistic competitors, but the author paints many of the participants in a lively, entertaining manner while the contest runs its hectic course. Smith’s compelling story of a largely forgotten federal program will cast some timely light on the ongoing clash between rural hunters and urban conservationists on preserving the habitat of waterfowl. (Sept.)

Freelance journalist and professor (River Valley Community College, N.H.) Craig combines an investigator’s eye with academic research to present a disturbing account of the U.S.’s relationship with Cuba. He traveled there “because there’s a Cuban bay that’s been a U.S. naval base since 1898..... because my stepson is standing guard behind a machine gun... in Iraq... [and] because patriotism has begun to feel like grief.” Craig details Cuba’s history from its time as a Spanish colony through his trip in 2005 that is the genesis of his account. He maintains objectivity through that factual presentation, even though his personal politics are never far from the surface. Craig admires the Cubans, and his observations of the differences and nuances between our languages and cultures informs his presentation. There is, however, no empathy for the Communist regime or for U.S. policy, “where we ditched our republican ideals for the charms of empire,” with what is known to us as the Spanish-American War. In the end, Craig’s is a persuasive condemnation of U.S. foreign policy. Agent: Wendy Strothman. (Aug.)

A friendship between two journalists covering the Philippines Revolution of 1986 deepens into a passionate, far-flung love affair in this serenely capable work by Lopez Torregrosa (The Noise of Infinite Longing). The two women were first colleagues at a Manhattan newspaper office: the Puerto Rico–born author was an editor at the New York Times, a refugee from a “dead relationship” in the suburbs who moved to her friend Tim’s house in a “seedy” neighborhood of the city; while Elizabeth (then known as Blake) was the newbie reporter in the office, sharp, diffident, a loner, and separating from her husband. A position for South Asia correspondent opened up, and Elizabeth took it, just as the presidential election campaign of Ferdinand Marcos and Corazon Aquino heated up. Tentatively the two writers grew closer over correspondence; the author arrived for a four-week vacation in Manila, sealing her resolve to leave her job at the newspaper, move to Manila to be with Elizabeth, and try to write a book, as Elizabeth has encouraged her. Indeed, over seven years amid tumultuous travels, journalistic assignments, and housekeeping from New York to Tokyo, their relationship charged their writerly ambition with passionate purpose, yet the long separations eventually took a lonely toll. Moreover, as Lopez Torregrosa fashions in her oblique and beautiful fashion, the two women could never really acknowledge their love publicly, underscoring a sad truth to this memorable work. Agent: Kathy Robbins. (Aug.)

While working as an investigative reporter for the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle, Rosenfeld sued the FBI four times over the past 30 years to obtain confidential records under the Freedom of Information Act regarding the agency’s covert campus activities at UC-Berkeley during the 1960s. Eventually compelling the FBI to release more than 250,000 pages from their files, he painstakingly recreates the dramatic—and unsettling—history of how J. Edgar Hoover worked closely with then California governor Ronald Reagan to undermine student dissent, arrest and expel members of Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement, and fire the University of California’s liberal president, Clark Kerr. Rosenfeld’s vivid narrative focuses on three men: Kerr, who played a key role in guaranteeing all Californians access to higher education; Mario Savio, the charismatic student activist who led the Free Speech movement; and the ambitious Reagan, who was a more active FBI informer in his Hollywood days than previously known. By tracing the FBI’s involvement with these figures, Rosenfeld reveals how the agency’s counterintelligence program took tactics originally developed for use against foreign adversaries during the cold war and turned them on domestic groups whose politics the agency considered “un-American.” Rosenfeld also draws on court transcripts, newspaper archives, oral histories, historical works, and hundreds of interviews. The result is narrative nonfiction at its best. Agent: Alice Martell, Martell Agency. (Aug.)