After successfully fusing the detective genre with apocalyptic speculative fiction in his excellent Last Policeman trilogy, Ben H. Winters has created another masterly genre-bender with his novel Underground Airlines. Set in a United States where the Civil War never happened, it retains the noir-inflected detective protagonist (of a sort) and swaps out the doomsday backdrop for an impressively realized alternate history. In Winters's version of American history, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated soon after his election, and to avert war, the government passed a series of compromises allowing slavery to continue in slave-holding states. In the present day, the remaining slave states have been whittled down to the infamous Hard Four, which practice a perversely "modernized" form of industrial-scale slavery.

Victor, the protagonist, knows the horrors of the Hard Four from personal experience. After escaping them, he was captured by the U.S. Marshalls and forced to become a bounty hunter tracking down fellow escapees. Now embittered by the choices he's made to stay free, Victor is a consummate pessimist, frequently reiterating his fatalistic motto "everything happens." He is embarking yet again on the "devil's work," but as so often happens in noir, this case turns out to be far more complex than Victor would have ever predicted.

Underground Airlines is an undeniably entertaining novel. Winters doles out twists and turns at perfect intervals--his pacing is all-around excellent. The parallels with modern-day racism in the United States are difficult to miss. Ben Winters, in other words, makes no compromises with Underground Airlines. He has improbably created a novel that calls to mind Raymond Chandler and Ta-Nehisi Coates in equal measure. --Hank Stephenson, bookseller, Flyleaf Books

Christopher Hebert's epic saga begins tellingly with young college dropout Dobbs hitchhiking to Detroit from a Kansas truck stop where "no one would admit to being headed in his direction." This is 21st-century Detroit--hollowed out, burned down, boarded up--a city that "emptied faster than it could be filled." Angels of Detroit is the story of a ragtag group of young white activists trying to save the city with half-hearted street demonstrations, while living peacefully among those who stubbornly stayed in their emptied neighborhoods, attempting to rebuild them one step at a time.

Hebert (The Boiling Season) meticulously juggles a broad swath of urban characters in addition to the idealistic protestors, including Dobbs, reluctantly caught up in human trafficking through debt, and African American security guard Darius at HSI (the last multi-national manufacturer with a factory in the city). HSI top executive Ruth Hamilton is fighting her board to keep the local plant open. Hispanic woodworking craftsman Boni lives in his grandmother's old house, plotting to blow up abandoned buildings to call attention to urban blight. Cranky Constance, in her 70s, is trying to hold her family together and turn the empty lots around her into a cornucopia of vegetables. And Constance's precocious, wild great-granddaughter, Clementine, fearlessly navigates the city streets and alleys, picking up "treasures" and helping whoever needs it.

Ambitious, well-paced, observant--Angels of Detroit is a first-rate novel of flawed but admirable characters who want a brighter future in what one of them calls "the new Old West." --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Listen to Maya, the likable narrator of Jade Sharma's righteous first novel, Problems: "This is life: You walk down this path and people join you. Then they leave, and you're alone again, and you keep replacing them. Then these people leave too." Maya's got problems in spades. Her alcoholic husband leaves her. Her older lover breaks off their affair. Living on peach yogurt, cigarettes and fudge brownie ice cream, she works part time when she has to and fantasizes about life with a child: "Facebook with baby pictures, my hair in a baseball cap, complain about how tired I was." But mostly, she's a junkie--blissed out, strung out, turning Craigslist tricks for cash to score another bundle, trying to taper off with a recovering friend's Xanax and Suboxone, and knowing well that "this powder people snort or shoot... makes them feel good, but they end up turning into zombies, lying around, wasting their lives, getting older, and doing nothing."

An MFA graduate of New York's New School, Sharma knows the city with its home-delivery drug dealers and its impossible costs, where "you work fifty million hours a week just to sleep in a room where only a bed fits." She knows addiction: "You have to be tough to be a drug addict. You have to sit there a lot of the time and be sick." And she knows Maya, her voice by turns raunchy, clever, spunky, sage, funny and forlorn as she barrels through the vicissitudes of a life of addiction grasping for an escape hatch--such a fresh voice that we can't help but hope she finds one. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Paraíso is an atmospheric novel both realistic and rooted in fantasy, traveling from New York City to Baja, Mexico, and exploring the nuances of love in all its forms. Gordon Chaplin (Joyride) offers a cast of whimsical, imperfect, loveable characters that readers will not soon forget.

As children, they were almost preternaturally close. Their mother named them Peter and Wendy, perhaps an early sign of something odd in family undercurrents. As teenagers, they stole the family minivan and ran for Mexico, but they never made it, apprehended instead at the very point Huck Finn and Jim aimed for.

These episodes are visited in flashbacks, from a present in which Peter and Wendy have been estranged for a decade, over a mysterious family secret. Wendy has finally made it to the little Mexican town of Paraíso, on the Baja peninsula, where she finds herself at the intersection of love and peril. Peter fled New York City after the towers fell, seeking his lost sister. They circle one another as Paraíso nears its conclusion, joined by charismatic associates, friends and lovers. These include Wendy's best friend, who has been the siblings' go-between for years; a sinister half-Mexican auto mechanic; an artista from Mexico City; and a teenage girl Peter mentors at work. The momentum of this expertly paced noir fairy tale increases as it nears its denouement.

Gorgeous, vivid scenery and fascinating people enrich a story that is both eccentric and universal: how to love and how to handle betrayal. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

Hardly the first novel to tackle the paranoia of a regular guy caught in the snares of an omnipresent, prying state, Patrick Flanery's I Am No One is the most up-to-date. The world of I Am No One is the one we have today: Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, the Panama Papers, ubiquitous drone and CCTV surveillance, cyber-warfare and court injunctions to unlock private mobile phones.

Jeremy O'Keefe is a white, upper middle-class everyman: a divorced New York University history professor in his 50s with a daughter, Meredith, who owns a successful Chelsea gallery and is married to a wealthy media executive. Jeremy has a university apartment and lives a quiet life of take-out, teaching and old movies.

But he becomes increasingly paranoid when a series of unmarked boxes are left with his doorman. They contain detailed transcripts of a decade of his e-mails, web searches, phone calls, bank records, credit card statements and tax returns, and surveillance-like photos of his travels and gatherings with family, Oxford students and colleagues, and lovers. When he finally reveals his fears to his daughter, he pleads: "But I'm no one." She replies: "We are all no one until we do something to turn ourselves into someone... you can blink and end up in jail." 

Through Jeremy's blend of the real with the paranoid, I Am No One leads us into the labyrinth of surveillance we have come to accept. Flanery's finely crafted novel suggests that anonymity is from a time now gone. It's hard to be "no one" today. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Another One Goes Tonight is the 16th entry in Peter Lovesey's delightful Peter Diamond series, and the brilliance of the slightly cantankerous and overweight detective superintendent still shines strong.

Two cops, at the end of an exhaustingly long shift, end up crashing in their patrol car, killing one officer and putting the other in critical condition. Peter Diamond is assigned to investigate the accident (a different purview than his usual position in charge of the murder squad).

To the horror of the top brass, Diamond discovers a civilian, barely breathing, who had been lying undiscovered at the side of the road for hours after being hit by the police car. The detective's quick CPR efforts save the man's life, although he now languishes in a coma.

Diamond, discontent with investigating the car crash, can't help nosing a bit into the life of the civilian, and discovers, to his revulsion, that he may have saved the life of a serial killer. Without letting the higher-ups know, he and his team begin their own murder investigation.

Bringing the beautiful city of Bath and the political problems plaguing modern police departments vividly to life, Another One Goes Tonight is an irresistible entry in the Diamond series. The many subplots tie together nicely as Diamond keeps probing, with a final resolution that may surprise even those familiar with Lovesey's writing. And new readers are sure to love jumping right into such a wonderful series. --Jessica Howard, blogger at Quirky Bookworm

Modern election cycles are often attended by punditry about the health of the current political system. Few go so far as to reimagine the nation-state; however, that's exactly what Malka Older does in her debut novel, Infomocracy.

Fifty years in the future, the world has reorganized itself into a "micro-democracy," wherein groupings of 100,000 people ("centenals") elect their favorite brand of government. The most popular of these vie to become the Supermajority--a sinister power in the wrong hands. Orchestrating all of this is Information, a ubiquitous search engine that can fact-check politicians or synchronize global communications in the blink of an eye. The novel is set during an election cycle, and follows the actions of a handful of operatives from various governments (and Information itself) as they zip across continents, jockeying for influence. That everybody is completely dependent on Information is the weakness no one appears to recognize.

Infomocracy is a political thriller at its core. Older's satire is less pointed and zany than Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, and less dystopian than the cyberpunk of Sterling or Gibson. The emphasis is on the action--characterization, and sometimes plot, take a backseat--and that's okay. The pleasure of Infomocracy is in discovering Older's fully realized, fully believable world and watching the author, an expert on international aid and development as a Ph.D. candidate studying governance and disasters, address one what-if after another, faster than the reader can anticipate them. A sequel is already in the offing. How long before an HBO series? --Zak Nelson, writer and editorial consultant

Cynthia Ozick (Foreign Bodies) has been a brilliant and acclaimed central figure in U.S. literature for almost half a century. She begins Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, & Other Literary Essays with a manifesto on the importance of literary criticism for novelists and the general culture. Critics, she emphasizes, are key. Not so much reviewers--especially not Amazon reviewers, who "expose their insipidities to a mass audience" in a "fetid sea, where both praise and blame are leveled by tsunamis of incapacity." But a community of erudite, idiosyncratic, passionate critics can illuminate the links among books, set them in cultural and historical context, and goad the literary world toward excellence.

"A critic is nothing without an authoritative posture, or standard, or even prejudice, against which an opposing outlook or proposition can be tested." Ozick has many of her own, and forges ahead with them in this collection of forceful, witty, thoroughly argued essays. In "Novel or Nothing," she tells of the renowned critic Lionel Trilling's frustrated ambition to become a great novelist. Her review of the collected letters of Saul Bellow becomes a tribute to his career and the strength of his legacy.

Ozick has her tics; "contrapuntal" is one of them, and most readers are likely to find at least one or two words she uses obscure. She would probably tell you to look them up. No one is likely to agree with everything she has to say about American literature, nor should they: these essays challenge readers to form their own well-considered ideas. --Sara Catterall

Christopher Bram takes on the broad subject of what history has to offer literature--and vice versa--with The Art of History: Unlocking the Past in Fiction & Nonfiction.

Beginning with memories of a high school English teacher, Bram celebrates the interest and value of reading and writing history. His thesis is that history need not be written in dry, textbook form: in both fiction and nonfiction, a talent for storytelling and a keen eye for just the right details, in the right quantity, can render the near and distant past in enthralling fashion. "Details," he says, "are the raisins in the raisin bread." He examines works including Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, David McCullough's The Path Between the Seas and Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, and topics ranging through war, slavery in the United States, comedic perspectives and the blending of lines between fiction and nonfiction. An author in both disciplines, Bram does not claim objectivity: he is clear about his love for Toni Morrison's Beloved and his disregard for Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, among others.

Books in "The Art of" series inspect craft from a perspective seemingly for writers and critics, and Bram offers good advice: "In both fiction and nonfiction, writing well means knowing what to leave out." But The Art of History works for readers as well, as in an appendix of Bram's recommended reading. Exploration, appreciation and instruction combine in this slim, accessible study of literary history and historical literature. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

Former Entertainment Weekly writer Jennifer Keishin Armstrong follows her 2013 history of the beloved sitcom The Mary Tyler Moore Show (Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted) with a breezy and entertaining portrait of Seinfeld. The iconic show defined television comedy in the 1990s and beyond, and became an enduring and influential cultural touchstone.

Armstrong's "Seinfeldia" is a "special dimension of existence, somewhere between the show itself and real life," a place where the show's "characters, settings, jokes, and catchphrases continue to intrude on our daily reality twenty years later." Much of that durability, she suggests, flows from the porous boundaries of the typically trivial daily irritations Larry David, Jerry Seinfeld and their writers used as fodder for the show's comedy. Not to mention the 180 episodes of highly polished comedy they produced. Armstrong relies heavily on interviews with Seinfeld's writers--David and the show's stars did not participate--and those conversations reveal how remarkable it was that Seinfeld maintained such a high standard of originality and quality when the writing staff turned over almost annually.

Readers looking for scandal, intrigue or score settling won't find it in Seinfeldia. Armstrong's admiring account clearly is aimed at the show's vast fan base, old and new, that continues to revel in its "detached, sardonic outlook" as they fuel a syndicated afterlife that's generated $3 billion in revenue since the controversial 1998 network finale. Not bad for a sitcom that started with nothing more than, as Jerry Seinfeld once put it, "Two guys talking." --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer

It's not every day that a book touching on foster care, bullying, loss and cancer is as funny and heartwarming as it is gut-punching, but Paul Griffin (Adrift; Burning Blue) pulls it off in his thoroughly engaging middle-grade novel When Friendship Followed Me Home. The author doesn't play fair... there's an irresistible stray pup named Flip, a "freaky little banana" of a dog that wriggles his way into everyone's heart even though "his breath is not particularly fantastic."

Twelve-year-old Ben Coffin, though friendly and "not totally revolting," is not immune to being bullied at his Coney Island school, to the point where he's nervous about even carrying a book around. Ben has been in the foster care system, but finally, just two years ago, he was adopted by a 67-year-old woman named Tess who tells him "We're forever." Based on personal history, Ben is loathe to believe in the idea of "forever," and he's proved right again when he has to start over with Tess's sister Aunt Jeanie and her insecure, abusive boyfriend Leo, who is nowhere near ready to take care of anything, let alone a sensitive boy and his tiny dog.

When the pink-wigged cancer patient "Halley Like the Comet" streaks into Ben's life, colors blazing, he wishes even more that he could believe in "forever." The dynamic duo shares a mutual adoration of Jacqueline Woodson's Feathers (even though he's more of a Star Wars/sci-fi/comics guy) and they start writing a story--their own story--as an allegory called The Magic Box. Heartbreak comes from unexpected places, but so does love in this witty, ultimately hopeful two-hanky novel. --Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness

National Book Award winner Jeanne Birdsall (the Penderwicks series) joins forces with New Yorker cartoonist and illustrator Harry Bliss (Bailey; A Fine, Fine School; Diary of a Worm) in this entertaining exploration of sheep and sheep shenanigans. Gus, a creative and busy maker of mischief, lives with his family on a farm with 17 sheep and decides to write a report about his "pets" for Ms. Smolinski's class.

Gus's sheep report, handwritten on ruled lines, is fairly basic. For example, he points out that multiple sheep are still sheep, not sheeps. And, "A girl sheep is a ewe." (But, as illustrated, if you are hanging from a tree branch by the threads of your T-shirt and shout "Hey, Ewe," the ewe won't answer.) Gus also describes how "Sheep look silly with pajamas on their heads" (especially his little brother's favorite porpoise pajamas) and that "Sheep have wool instead of hair" (which can be shaved off their bodies to make a very nice fake beard).

Harry Bliss's expressive, slapstick, black India ink and watercolor illustrations expertly capture Gus's comical exploits, including his attempt to use a sheep as an umbrella and trading his little brother for a lamb. Gus clearly has a lot of time on his hands... and his brother and the poor sheep no doubt wish he had a little less. A fun, artful collaboration sure to inspire bleats of delight. (Spoiler: Ms. Smolinski gives his report a B+!) --Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness