"For fifteen years I'd been waiting for a catastrophe greater than my birth. The quake gave it to me." In Carol Edgarian's riveting third novel (following Three Stages of Amazement), Vera narrates the story of the life she carves from the rubble of San Francisco's historic 1906 earthquake.

The San Andreas fault shifted just days after Vera's 15th birthday, but her life had never been stable. Her mother, Rose, the city's most notorious madam, paid a foster mother for Vera's care and scheduled only perfunctory visits. It seemed logical, in the pre-dawn hours after the quake hit, for Vera to flee her crumbled foster home and the approaching fires, and to lead her foster sister to Rose's Pacific Heights home, "five stories and a riot of gables and fancywork." Rose isn't there, but tenacious Vera becomes vital in a network of "fellow scrappers" living in and around "the gold house."

Among a strong-willed cast of real and fictional characters--including the legendary socialite Alma Spreckels and Mayor Eugene Schmitz--Vera forges an alliance with Tan, Rose's housekeeper and formerly Vera's nemesis, who must evade soldiers corralling Chinatown residents. Vera finds Rose in a makeshift hospital and brings her home; women who'd worked in the brothel move in, too, and Vera is soon managing a disparate community of 11. Poverty stalks the homeless camps; crime and graft--sometimes key to survival--are rampant. Edgarian's gritty yet hopeful historical novel doesn't gloss over the countless tragedies rising like the smoke and dust in the 500 devastated city blocks, but Vera personifies the pluck that revived San Francisco, her "temblor-riven paradise." --Cheryl McKeon, Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza, Albany, N.Y.

In The Twilight Zone, Nona Fernández (Space Invaders) uses her considerable empathetic power as a novelist to penetrate the darkest corners of Chile under Pinochet's dictatorship. Fernández blends historical facts and seemingly autobiographical details with what can only be imagined, reconstructing not only the inner lives of people tortured and "disappeared" by the regime's security apparatus, but that of one of the torturers. The chief figure in Fernández's book is the very real Andrés Antonio Valenzuela Morales, who in 1984 confessed shocking secrets that were eventually published under the headline "I TORTURED PEOPLE." Fernández uses Morales as a starting point to explore "the machinery of evil," a "parallel and invisible universe" of medieval torture and arbitrary executions.

The Twilight Zone sets out to answer questions that are unanswerable, questions separate from the thuggish reasoning behind Pinochet's reign of terror. Instead, many of the questions Fernández seeks to answer are about memory, collective trauma and denial. She refers to the world of interrogation cells and electric shocks as "the dark side," a "secret dimension" or "the Twilight Zone." Just as the television show depicted a secret world, "a universe unfolding outside the ordinary," so did Chileans occasionally catch glimpses of the grim secret world just under the surface of ordinary life.

Fernández musters her courage and empathetic imagination to stare into the Twilight Zone, to look deep into a secret world that many would prefer to ignore or forget. The Twilight Zone is a frank look into a nation's subconscious and the dark dreams that haunt victims and perpetrators alike. --Hank Stephenson, the Sun magazine, manuscript reader

In 1980s rural Maine, Indigenous 14-year-old Molly and her father live off the land along the Penobscot Bay that was stolen from their ancestors. An overseas conglomerate tries to open a factory that would bring jobs to the area but pollute the environment. Molly burns down the building, sends a statement to the press and escapes into the woods. Molly's statement gets published in the Lowering Days newspaper, sowing division within the community and a violent clash between families in this achingly beautiful and bittersweet family saga.

The first op-ed Falon Ames publishes, defending Molly's reasons for burning down the factory, brings death threats to the tiny newspaper's office. Falon is unapologetic about the uproar, causing financial troubles for her husband Arnaud's struggling boat-building business. Locals vilify Falon, until Lyman Creel, local fisherman and next-door neighbor to the Ames family, shoots at a starving Molly when he catches her tampering with his lobster traps, causing community anger to shift toward Lyman and his family. Lyman demands that Falon publish his version of events. When Falon refuses, Lyman's actions escalate tensions that lead to devastating results for stubborn, good people who can't help hurting each other over misperceptions of a shared and deeply wounding past.

Gregory Brown's protagonist-narrator, David "Almy" Ames, claims his mother, Falon, named her newspaper the Lowering Days after her great-grandfather's term for lowering a body into the earth at funerals. He also recalls her saying the name refers to boats being birthed into the sea. The author poetically blends the opposing concepts into an absorbing, elemental story of human existence. --Paul Dinh-McCrillis, freelance reviewer

All future explorers should look to stubborn, intelligent Veronica Speedwell for inspiration. In An Unexpected Peril, Deanna Raybourn's sixth adventure starring the Victorian lepidopterist, Veronica is at her old tricks again: unable to overlook a potential crime. Veronica is a newly minted member of the Curiosity Club, a London club for female thinkers. She and Revelstoke "Stoker" Templeton-Vane (her partner in both natural historical research and more personal matters) have been asked to combine their talents to create a memorial display to honor Alice Baker-Greene, a pioneering Alpinist, who recently died while hiking in Alpenwald. Veronica is convinced that Alice was actually murdered, but Stoker pleads with Veronica not to get involved.

When Princess Gisela of Alpenwald pays a visit to the Curiosity Club to see the display and declares firmly that Alice's death was an accident, Veronica is put on her mettle. Especially when Princess Gisela mysteriously vanishes, and the Alpenwald dignitaries ask for Veronica and Stoker's aid. Alpenwald has been caught up in the rising tension between France and Germany, and an important treaty is on the line.

Funny and insightful, An Unexpected Peril shows off Veronica at her majestic, slightly self-centered best. Unwilling to bow to the mores of the day, Veronica leads Stoker along on her many adventures, which will keep readers guessing until the very last page. Alpenwald may be a fictional kingdom, but Raybourn (A Murderous Relation; A Treacherous Curse) expertly weaves real-life European politics and mountain climbing strategies of the era into her work, creating a delectably entertaining mystery. --Jessica Howard, bookseller at Bookmans, Tucson, Ariz.

The economics and emotional effects of Prohibition on a rural area make for a rousing plot in The Stills, Jess Montgomery's third novel set in the stark Appalachian coal-mining Bronwyn County, Ohio. In cities, Prohibition breeds organized crime, but, in hardscrabble rural areas, the needs are more basic: earn money to feed a family, pay for a child's expensive medicines, escape soul-crushing poverty.

Sheriff Lily Ross is expected to enforce the Volstead Act, which, in 1927, is in its seventh year, yet "so filled with loopholes that it was flimsier than worn-out washrags." She sometimes ignores the stills in the county's "hills and hollers" unless "a moonshiner raises too much of a ruckus, or someone--usually a frustrated wife--complains." But things change when a 12-year-old boy, hired to protect a still, nearly dies from tainted moonshine. Meanwhile, Fiona Vogel returns to her hometown with her powerful husband, George, and his several violent henchmen. George plans to start a bootlegging operation selling toxic wood alcohol to force out competitors.

The Stills richly delves into class differences, religious obsession, greed and Prohibition's failures. Montgomery (The Hollows) forcefully shows Lily's struggles in an occupation unheard of for a woman during the 1920s while caring for her family on a modest salary. Lily, based on Maude Collins, Ohio's first female sheriff, inherited the job from her late husband, but has earned the community's respect. While Fiona seems, at first, to be superficially concerned with money and finery, she shows an inner strength and a savvy business acumen. Montgomery's strong storytelling shines in The Stills. --Oline H. Cogdill, freelance reviewer

In Act Your Age, Eve Brown, the sparkling conclusion to the Brown Sisters series (Get a Life, Chloe Brown; Take a Hint, Dani Brown), Talia Hibbert introduces the third Brown sister. Eve is the youngest, and feels the least accomplished. While both of her older sisters have successful careers, Eve has given up on every job she's ever tried. When her latest career endeavor, wedding planning, ruins the bride's day, her parents draw the line--it's time to pay rent and find a stable job. An impromptu drive takes her to the quaint British town of Skybriar, and one awkward interview and a car accident later, Eve has a job as the new chef at a bed and breakfast. The b&b's owner, Jacob Wayne, is unimpressed by Eve's constant singing and seemingly unorganized lifestyle but can't deny the friendliness and skill she brings to the job. As snarky Eve and grumpy Jacob work and bicker together at the b&b, their attraction grows.

Hibbert brings her signature humor and warmth to Eve's and Jacob's stories. Eve recognizes the privilege she has within her wealthy Black family, but still feels hurt because her parents seemingly don't believe in her. Jacob believes in Eve and allows her to find her way personally and professionally while working at his b&b. Jacob is also open about his autism and the ableism he has encountered in his career and home life, and Hibbert writes his darkest moments with hope and healing. --Amy Dittmeier, librarian

It's been more than 20 years since the publication of Jo Ann Beard's collection of personal essays, The Boys of My Youth, one that included the classic "The Fourth State of Matter," the terrifying account of a mass shooting at her University of Iowa workplace. In Festival Days, Beard returns with a set of nine diverse pieces that sometimes challenge the boundary between fiction and nonfiction but that are consistent in the intensity of their perception and their vivid prose.

Most prominent in this genre-bending category is "Cheri," the story of the title character's two-and-a-half-year battle with metastatic breast cancer. Beginning as a deeply reported piece of personal journalism, it shifts almost imperceptibly into the territory of the imagination, without sacrificing any of its integrity purely for emotional effect. "Werner," which describes the artist Werner Hoeflich's escape from a deadly fire at his Upper East Side apartment building in 1991, relies heavily on its subject's recollections of his near-death experience, but Beard's keen eye for novelistic detail subtly transforms pure fact into art.

"The Tomb of Wrestling," a short story that displays Beard's talent as a fiction writer, is no less intense. In it, an artist named Joan engages in a life and death struggle with a man who invades her upstate New York home.

On whichever side of the fact/fiction line, which for her is sometimes "permeable," Jo Ann Beard's stories fall, they undeniably resonate with the feeling of truth. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer

It was 2005 when Liza Rodman finally recognized the unidentifiable man from her recurring nightmares: Tony Costa, a local who often watched Liza and her sister during their summers in Provincetown, Mass. Liza's mother, a young divorcée, spent "most of her free time closing down the various bars and dance clubs with her own revolving door of suitors." She was cruel to Liza, who found solace hanging out with Tony, handyman at their motel and "one of the few kind and gentle adults in [her] life during those turbulent years." Rodman was 10 in 1969, when Tony disappeared. She never knew why, but was about to find out.

When asked what she remembered about Tony, Rodman's mother calmly replied, "I remember he turned out to be a serial killer." A shocked Rodman attempted to confirm they were speaking about the same man and her mother clarified: "Oh, for Christ's sake... don't be so dramatic. He wasn't your babysitter.... He was the handyman." Particularly telling of Rodman's sorrowful childhood: "Yeah, so what.... He didn't kill you, did he?"

A half century after Costa brutally killed several young women (when 1960s free love and ubiquitous runaways made "disappearing" someone seemingly easy), Rodman teams up with author friend Jennifer Jordan for The Babysitter. A haunting account--part memoir, part investigative journalism--of Rodman's childhood and its chilling connection with the Cape Cod Killer, The Babysitter is the astounding story of a vulnerable young girl and the consolation she found with a man who preyed on women. --Lauren O'Brien of Malcolm Avenue Review

Among books dedicated to encouraging children to explore the wonders of the world, Tereza Sediva's Mole in a Black & White Hole distinguishes itself with its bravura art. Also setting the title apart: there's probably no other picture book with the same theme in which the case for adventure is made by a turnip.

Mole lives under the ground, and he likes it that way: "It was dark and it was damp but it was his home." He has built-in company in the form of "a bright pink chandelier"--actually, a turnip that grows through Mole's ceiling. The turnip/chandelier's color--a rarity in Mole's black-and-white world--is enough to make him wonder "if there might be more out there if he looked." But Mole is scared to leave his home, so it's up to the turnip to convince him to peek outside. Mole is a hard sell, though. It's only when his pink friend goes missing, which creates a hole in Mole's ceiling, that he is forced literally to see the light.

Mole in a Black & White Hole succeeds as both a parable and an art object. The pictures in Czech author/illustrator Sediva's debut abound with mottled surfaces and clearly defined edges, calling to mind natty woodcuts. Nearly every page is a stunner, whether it shows Mole's color-deficient home or the color-decked glory of outdoor sights. Aqua, lime, mustard and reddish pink dominate the palette, and their interplay and overlap can transform even a garment hanging on a clothesline into something worthy of being framed. --Nell Beram, freelance writer and YA author