In Doiron's compelling sequel to his debut, The Poacher's Son, troubled 25-year-old Mike Bowditch, a Maine game warden, is still coming to grips with the realization that his estranged father—now deceased—has become known as the state's most notorious murderer. Bowditch finds solace in his job, but when he investigates a car accident involving a deer on a remote stretch of road, the driver, 23-year-old Ashley Kim, from Cambridge, Mass., has disappeared. Later, in an empty house, he finds Kim's naked body, bound with sailor's rigging tape, with the word slut carved into her chest. As Bowditch becomes increasingly obsessed with finding the killer, he puts his already tenuous career in jeopardy as well as his equally tenuous relationship with his possibly pregnant girlfriend. Doiron complements this thriller's decidedly dark tone with introspective existential and spiritual musings and atmospheric imagery (houses in a fishing village "clung like barnacles" around a harbor). 15-city author tour. (June)

Reviewed on 04/11/2011 | Release date: 06/01/2011 | Details & Permalink

Man Booker International Prize–winner Kadare (Broken April) takes an ancient Albanian tale, "The Ballad of Constantine and Doruntine," as the starting point for this compelling if enigmatic novel set in medieval Albania. The deaths of the nine Vranaj brothers, all soldiers, many felled by a plague carried by their battlefield adversaries, have devastated a small Albanian community. Their mother's loss is only compounded by the absence at the time of her daughter, Doruntine, who was married three years earlier and moved far away from home. When Doruntine suddenly appears at her mother's door, claiming that one of her brothers, Kostandin, was her traveling companion, the news that Kostandin has been dead for years sends both mother and daughter to their deathbeds, leaving the local police captain to try to explain the inexplicable. Kadare excels at depicting the ever-expanding repercussions of what could have been a tragedy limited just to the Vranaj family. (June)

Reviewed on 04/11/2011 | Release date: 05/01/2011 | Details & Permalink

Liebman's second legal thriller featuring New Jersey criminal defense lawyer Salvatore "Junne" Salerno reads more like a series of sketches than a novel. Junne and his fellow ex-cop law partner, Mickie Mezzonatti, have developed a reputation for winning cases, despite their cutting of corners. For example, instead of doing their own legal research, they "borrow" from documents filed by others in court. Their longest standing client, Slippery Williams, a criminal recidivist, is facing a retrial for drug conspiracy and murder. Against the odds, given Williams's record, the pair persuade the judge to set bail, enabling Williams to run his narcotics business from home. Two other cases—an attorney facing indictment for bribing insurance adjusters; an electronics store owner up on tax evasion charges—dilute rather than enhance the main story line. Fans of the first book in the series, Death by Rodrigo, will best appreciate the scenes in which the closeted Junne struggles with his sexuality. (June)

Reviewed on 04/11/2011 | Release date: 06/01/2011 | Details & Permalink

In Fitzgerald's exciting sequel to The Dogs of Rome, a string of muggings targeting foreign visitors staying at Rome's tourist hotels turns deadly when a man's body is found in Trastevere, a picturesque medieval neighborhood on the Tiber's west bank. But this victim is no traveler—he's an art forger with a laundry list of enemies. Police Commissioner Alec Blume, an American expatriate who's lived in Rome for more than 20 years, and his team have barely begun investigating when the carabinieri take over. Alec calls on old friends for help as the carabinieri's crooked Colonel Farinelli tries to discredit him. The heroic if aloof Alec sees the same outsider qualities in Caterina Mattiola, a rookie inspector and single mother, whom he patiently shows the details of detective work and office politics. Intriguing touches such as the tools a forger has in the kitchen and a strong sense of Rome's environs enrich the intelligent plot. (June)

Reviewed on 04/11/2011 | Release date: 06/01/2011 | Details & Permalink

At the start of Dugoni's fourth legal thriller, the best yet in the series (after Bodily Harm), featuring Seattle attorney David Sloane, he attends his first public event since his wife's murder a year earlier, a benefit to promote legal aid services, where he literally runs into attorney Barclay Reid, an adversary from a previous case. Reid is also in mourning—for her college age daughter, Carly, who died of a heroin overdose. Reid mounts a charm offensive to persuade Sloane to represent her in a wrongful death suit against the Russian gangster, Filyp Vasiliev, who was behind the heroin sale that killed Carly and who has just beaten federal criminal charges after a judge tossed out crucial evidence at a pretrial hearing. The shooting death of Vasiliev in his Seattle home derails the developing romance between Sloane and Reid as well as the civil case. While many will anticipate the ending twist, Dugoni conveys the legalese in digestible form. (June)

Reviewed on 04/11/2011 | Release date: 06/01/2011 | Details & Permalink

Brashares revives the Traveling Pants sisterhood for a bittersweet victory lap that finds the sisters grown up and pretty much out of contact until Tibby, who now lives in Australia, proposes a reunion in Greece, where Lena has a family home and a lost love, Kostos. But what begins as a great idea turns tragic when Tibby drowns and letters she left behind hint it may not have been an accident. Brashares creates a sensitive panorama of grief in following how the friends react to loss: Carmen, now a television actress, throws herself into planning her expensive wedding, though she doesn't really connect with her icy fiancé. Bridget leaves her boyfriend to travel around California. Loner Lena reaches out to Kostos in a long-shot effort to rekindle what they had. And while each fears their friendship won't survive the distance between them or Tibby's death, they remain in one another's thoughts, even if they don't interact for most of the novel. Brashares freshens the well-worn tropes of chasing hopeless love and being honest with yourself with a prose that surprises despite its straightforward tone ("Effie wouldn't leave her alone. She would crawl into Lena's precious quiet like a tapeworm"). Series fans might be dismayed that the sisterhood's broken up, but Brashares proves that, even in death, this series has plenty of life left in it. (June)

Reviewed on 04/11/2011 | Release date: 06/01/2011 | Details & Permalink

Bestseller Finder's compulsively readable sequel to Vanished opens fast and never slows down. When 17-year-old Alexa Marcus, the spoiled daughter of Marshall Marcus, a wildly successful money manager, is kidnapped from a Boston club and buried alive in a coffin equipped with an air hose and a video camera (for Internet streaming, of course!), Marshall asks his old intelligence expert friend, Nick Heller, to find her. The search leads into an expanding world of "buried secrets," from Marshall's gold-digging trophy wife, Belinda, and his crumbling investment empire to allegations of government funding for covert operations and the Russian mafia. A number of characters from Vanished, like Dorothy Duval, Heller's "forensic data tech," and Diana Madigan, his FBI agent ex-girlfriend, lend support. Self-effacing, wry, and ridiculously competent, Heller makes a reasonably engaging protagonist, but this thriller's real star is the suspenseful, expertly paced plot. (June)

Reviewed on 04/11/2011 | Release date: 06/01/2011 | Details & Permalink

Leroy (Postcards from Berlin) continues to explore motherhood and marital infidelity, now in the context of the German occupation of the British Channel Islands during WWII. Vivienne de la Mare loves her young daughters Blanche and Millie, but not her marriage, so when her husband is called up to the front, for her it's almost a relief. Then the German army occupies her town, and Vivienne is increasingly torn between her sympathies for the POWs and her budding feelings for Gunther, a German officer who has moved in next door. She and Gunther begin an affair, but she remains committed to protecting and nurturing her daughters as they grow up in this tense, dangerous environment, with waning hope of their father's return. Leroy lovingly portrays the era and the isolated Guernsey landscape while simultaneously offering an unsparing view of the specific horrors of war. Colorful, rich descriptions, particularly regarding food, are more affecting than depictions of Vivienne and her love affair, which is almost entirely devoid of warmth or passion. More compelling are Vivienne's interactions with the preteen Millie, who becomes complicit in her mother's actions even as Vivienne tries to safeguard her innocence. (July)

Reviewed on 04/11/2011 | Release date: 06/01/2011 | Details & Permalink

War is hell, and so is Henry Bright's homecoming from the trenches of WWI in songwriter Ritter's appropriately lyrical debut. Bright is a half-shattered veteran whose ordeal in combat continues with the death of his young wife in childbirth. Spurred on by an angel who speaks to him through his livestock, Henry torches the cabin where his wife died, using the family Bible to spark the blaze. Soon, the angel tells Henry his infant son is the Future King of Heaven, a replacement for the one "who has soaked the world in blood." Henry's desolation is believably crushing, sometimes darkly funny, and rendered with a lyricist's delicacy: against the backdrop of the forest fire sparked by the cabin's blaze, Henry, the child, horse, and a goat make their way to town, dodging his wife's psychotic family, who blame him for her death. "The sky was too dark for afternoon, and where the sun should have hung there was now only an undulating black curtain of heat, which pulsed through the windowpanes upon his face like the throb of an open furnace." As the fire threatens Bright's friends and enemies, Ritter evokes war, violence and the fearful and numb responses to trauma, squaring them up in a hopeful, humble revelation. (July)

Reviewed on 04/11/2011 | Release date: 06/01/2011 | Details & Permalink

A failing summer camp forms the backdrop for Dalton's dark latest (after Heaven Lake), a layered consideration of what happens when intentions good and bad collide. Wyatt Huddy, a deformed but mentally intact young man, signs on as a short-notice replacement counselor at the Kindermann Forest Summer Camp in Ozarks country in 1996. To his and his fellow counselors' surprise, the camp's summer season begins by hosting a group of disabled adults from the state hospital. These campers bumble across the page as the central players are fleshed out—naïve Wyatt, who keeps being mistaken for a camper; a well-drawn single-mother nurse named Harriet; the reactionary camp owner; a charming but sociopathic lifeguard; and a suspicious program director. As one of the staffer's nefarious plans comes to light, at least one terrible act looms with far-reaching consequences explored in the novel's second part, set 15 years in the future. Though there is tearing suspense surrounding the novel's central crime, and intelligent insight into the characters who surround it, a sense of imbalance persists, as if the crime, world-shaking though it is for some, is not quite convincingly set up. Nonetheless, this is a sensitive novel, richer in character than in plot. (July)

Reviewed on 04/11/2011 | Release date: 07/01/2011 | Details & Permalink