Mad River
By John Sandford (Putnam, $27.95)
Three teenagers with dead-end lives and chips on their shoulders—and guns—are on a crime spree. The first person they killed was a highway patrolman. The second was a woman during a robbery. As their crime spree cuts a swath through rural Minnesota, some of it captured on the killers’ cell phones and sent to a local television station, Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigator Virgil Flowers joins the growing army of cops trying to run them down. But even he doesn’t realize what’s about to happen next.
Sutton
By J.R. Moehringer (Hyperion, $27.99)
Blending vast research with vivid imagination, Pulitzer Prize-winner J.R. Moehringer brings Willie Sutton to life. Born in the squalid Irish slums of Brooklyn in the first year of the 20th century, Sutton came of age at a time when banks were out of control. He eventually became America’s most successful bank robber. Over three decades, Sutton became so good at breaking into banks, and such a master at breaking out of prisons, police called him one of the most dangerous men in New York, and the FBI put him on its first-ever Most Wanted List. Poignant, comic, fast-paced, and fact-studded, Sutton tells a story of economic pain that feels eerily modern, while unfolding a story of doomed love, which is forever timeless.
Father Francis
By Joanne Harris (Viking, $26.95)
Joanne Harris’ heroine from Chocolat is summoned back to Lansquenet, the beautiful French village in which eight years ago she opened a chocolate shop and first learned the meaning of home. But returning to one’s past can be a dangerous pursuit. Vianne, with her daughters, Anouk and Rosette, finds Lansquenet changed in unexpected ways: women veiled in black, the scent of spices and peppermint tea—and there, on the bank of the River Tannes, facing the church, a minaret. Most surprising of all, her old nemesis, Father Francis Reynaud, desperately needs her help. Can Vianne work her magic once again?
The Casual Vacancy
By J.K. Rowling (Little, Brown and Company, $35)
The small town of Pagford is left in shock when Barry Fairbrother dies in his early forties. While Pagford seems like an English idyll, with a cobbled market square and an ancient abbey, what lies behind the pretty facade is a town at war. The empty seat left by Barry on the parish council becomes the catalyst for the biggest war the town has yet seen. Who will triumph in an election fraught with passion, duplicity, and unexpected revelations? J.K. Rowling’s first novel for adults is the work of a storyteller like no other.
Live by Night
By Dennis Lehane (William Morrow, $27.99)
Dennis Lehane, the bestselling author of The Given Day sets this new novel in 1926, during Prohibition. Joe Coughlin, son of a Boston police officer, defies his strict upbringing by climbing a ladder of organized crime that takes him from Boston to Cuba, where he encounters a dangerous cast of characters who are all fighting for their piece of the American dream.
