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In the most exciting Women’s Murder Club novel yet, Detective Lindsay Boxer spends every waking hour working to piece together clues in two area murders. One of the killers forces Lindsay to put her own life on the line–but will that be enough?

Those who enjoyed the 2009 film Sherlock Holmes starring Robert Downey Jr. may appreciate bestseller King’s heavy-on-action, light-on-deduction 10th novel featuring Mary Russell and her much older husband, Conan Doyle’s iconic detective. The plot picks up in the summer of 1924 right after the previous entry in the series, The Language of Bees. A religious fanatic, Rev. Thomas Brothers, who seeks to unleash psychic energies through human sacrifice, has shot Holmes’s artist son, Damian Adler, seriously wounding the young man. Holmes’s desperate quest for medical help to save his son’s life takes him to Holland, while Mary travels throughout Britain in an effort to keep Damian’s half-Chinese daughter, Estelle, safe from Brothers and his allies. Cliffhanging situations abound as both leads benefit from the convenient appearance of extremely helpful strangers.

The epic fourth novel of the Sword of Shadows fantasy series – In this powerful saga of redemption and renewal, J. V. Jones brings to vivid life the magnificent tapestry of a world at once desperately fighting for survival against supernatural monsters and rent by internecine warfare. The frozen land at the north of the world was once ruled by a legendary nation of superhuman warriors. But that age has passed, leaving ancient clans to struggle for dominance as supernatural forces beyond their control threaten their very existence. Amid the chaos of world-changing violence, unlikely heroes emerge. An unwanted warrior, a forsaken woman of power, the betrayed widow of a slain clan chief: these are the heroes rising to claim what has been taken from them and to reshape the world. In a sharply observed narrative that illuminates these riven lives, Jones has crafted a human drama full of the excitement, suspense, and sheer storytelling power that have made the Sword of Shadows a fantasy series that transcends genre to become a memorable tale of human striving and triumph that speaks to readers as have few others.

Sorrow, grief, and pain pervade Hambly’s outstanding ninth Benjamin January mystery (after 2004’s Dead Water), set in New Orleans during the summer of 1836. Trapped by poverty and the color of his skin, January, a free black who trained in France as a physician, goes undercover as a piano player in a high-class bordello to investigate possible embezzlement from the Faubourg Tremé Free Colored Militia and Burial Society. The discovery of a white man’s body in a coffin meant for one of the FTFCMBS’s members propels the justice-seeking January on a harrowing journey full of disturbing revelations to save a young English aristocrat from the gallows. Hambly’s sure hand with historical detail, her convincing characterizations, and her view of the slave trade that debased both blacks and their white masters raise this tale of violence, deceit, and humiliation to a must-read commentary on human frailty and redeeming human friendship.

Palahniuk’s rude sendup of name-dropping and the culture of celebrity worship revolves around the fate of Katherine Kenton, a much-married star of stage, screen, and television, living in obscurity and searching for a comeback vehicle. Her story is told by Mazie Coogan—her Thelma Ritterish, straight-shooting confidant and protector—whose warning system sounds when Miss Kathie meets Webster Carlton Westward III, who quickly seduces his way into her Manhattan townhouse. It’s soon revealed he’s working on a memoir about his affair with Miss Kathie, the last chapter of which ends with her anticipated death, the details of which keep changing. The affair coincides with Miss Kathie’s comeback in a bombastic Broadway extravaganza penned by Lillian Hellman (who receives inexplicably savage treatment). Throughout, Palahniuk drops names from the famous to the head-scratchingly obscure, peppers the narrative with neologisms supposedly coined by famous gossip columnists (ex-husbands are was-bands), and annoyingly styles the text so that nearly every name, brand name, and fabulous venue appears in bold. Unfortunately, this gossipy fantasia is a one-joke premise that, even at its modest length, wears out its welcome well before Miss Kathie’s final fade-out.

Even if the plot of Michaels’s latest (after The Scoop) was meant to be a farce, it remains unbelievably ludicrous. Lin Townsend, raised by a religious zealot, had a rough childhood and got pregnant when she was 17. Thrown out of her home, she raises her son, Will, poor and alone, and the letters she sends over the years to Nick Pemberton, Will’s father, are returned to sender. Lin eventually saves enough to send Will to NYU, but just before his freshman year, Lin runs into Nick, who is now married, wealthy, and has no clue who Lin is. And so Lin vows revenge: her plot is to “tie up” Nick’s money and to make him suffer like she did for all those years. Meanwhile, Nick discovers he has leukemia and decides to cut off his bitch of a wife, who has her own dastardly plans. None of it is especially believable, and the characters are either underdeveloped or maddeningly inconsistent. Additionally, Michaels’s prose is frequently slapdash (“It wasn’t possible, yet her common sense told her it was highly probable!”), but that’s unlikely to diminish the book’s commercial prospects.

Still reeling from the deaths of her fairy cousin, Claudine, and many others in 2009’s Dead and Gone, Sookie Stackhouse struggles with paranormal politics in her entertaining if slow-moving 10th outing. When Claudine’s triplet, Claude, appears at her doorstep, Sookie reluctantly allows him to move in. The government threatens two-natures with mandatory registration, and tensions run high in the local Were pack. Then Eric’s maker, a Roman named Appius Livius Ocella, arrives without warning, bringing along Alexei Romanov, whom he rescued from the Bolsheviks and turned into a vampire. Though the action often builds too slowly, the exploration of family in its many human and undead variations is intriguing, and Harris delivers her usual mix of eccentric characters and engaging subplots.

Mesmerizing prose and intricate plotting lift Turow’s superlative legal thriller, his best novel since his bestselling debut, Presumed Innocent, to which this is a sequel. In 2008, 22 years after the events of the earlier book, former lawyer Rusty Sabich, now a Kindle County, Ill., chief appellate judge, is again suspected of murdering a woman close to him. His wife, Barbara, has died in her bed of what appear to be natural causes, yet Rusty comes under scrutiny from his old nemesis, acting prosecuting attorney Tommy Molto, who unsuccessfully prosecuted him for killing his mistress decades earlier. Tommy’s chief deputy, Jim Brand, is suspicious because Rusty chose to keep Barbara’s death a secret, even from their son, Nat, for almost an entire day, which could have allowed traces of poison to disappear. Rusty’s candidacy for a higher court in an imminent election; his recent clandestine affair with his attractive law clerk, Anna Vostic; and a breach of judicial ethics complicate matters further. Once again, Turow displays an uncanny ability for making the passions and contradictions of his main characters accessible and understandable.

With exquisite sensitivity, Edgar-finalist Pickard (The Virgin of Small Plains) probes a smoldering cold case involving the Linders, a cattle ranching family that’s ruled the small, tight-knit community of Rose, Kans., for generations. One stormy night in 1986, someone shoots Hugh-Jay Linder dead, and Laurie, his discontented young wife, disappears. The authorities arrest Billy Crosby, a disgruntled ex-employee of High Rock Ranch with a drunk-driving record, in whose abandoned truck Laurie’s bloodied sundress is found. In 2009, Billy’s lawyer son, Collin, who’s certain of his dad’s innocence, secures Billy’s release from prison and a new trial. Father and son return to Rose, where 25-year-old Jody Linder, the victims’ daughter, works as a teacher. Collin’s pursuit of justice will force Jody and other members of her family, including her three uncles and her grandparents, to finally confront what really happened on that long ago fatal night and deal with the consequences.