Javier Marías takes his novel's title, Thus Bad Begins, from Hamlet's words to his mother ("Thus bad begins and worse remains behind"), setting the story in Madrid in 1980, when Spain hovered on the verge of legalizing divorce.
 
Eduardo Muriel--a Spanish film director approaching his 50s, with an Errol Flynn moustache and an eye patch--needs a young personal assistant like 23-year-old Juan de Vere to keep him on his frenetic shooting schedule, which he traditionally dictates while lying supine on the floor. One day Muriel asks Juan what he would do if a lifelong friend were not as he had always believed him to be.

This question launches a plot involving spying, lying, trickery, manipulation, eavesdropping and secret motives that stretch back to the unspeakable crimes of the Spanish Civil War. The mystery surrounds a confounding scene of marital degradation that Juan secretly witnesses--one of sheer malice that Muriel inflicts on his adoring wife, Beatriz.

Marías embeds bristling humor and a wealth of parenthetical insights and wise observations within page-long sentences and extended paragraphs. He playfully manipulates these into a tantalizing plot, one that often slides laterally as it inches toward the next incident, every word or action considered in detail. Out of dozens of subplots that Marías teases, the ones that actually fuel the novel are well chosen and gripping. The secret behind the Muriels' miserable marriage is suitably horrific, and the 445-page novel's conclusion is graceful, fair and hugely satisfying. --Nick DiMartino, Nick's Picks, University Book Store, Seattle, Wash.

His Highness the Maharaja Sikander Singh, king of Rajpore, a small kingdom in northern India, is bored. The New Year's festivities put on by the English weren't enough to rouse Sikander, but the news that Major William Russell, in charge of the English forces in Rajpore, was found apparently poisoned on the first morning of 1909, does.

Russell, the English Resident, was a hard man, and the curious Sikander soon discovers that he was not alone in disliking him. Sikander and the Resident's servants felt the lash (sometimes quite literally) of his racism, but even the Resident's fellow Englishmen seem to have many motives to wish him dead. He thwarted ambitions, preyed on defenseless women and angered many important people.

It will take all of Sikander's cunning to solve the crime; his status as Maharaja allows him to go where other Indians are not permitted and to ask the questions that the English are too prim to pose.

Arjun Raj Gaind, an Indian comic book writer, has written a delightfully intriguing mystery as his first novel. A Very Pukka Murder captures the spirit of the British Raj--with its appalling racism and indolence--while still letting the legacy of Sikander's ancestors represent India's glorious past. Sikander knows that his penchant for crime solving isn't pukka (proper), but he can't stop himself, and the reader will cheer his indefatigable inquisitiveness on. Armchair travelers, mystery readers and history lovers are sure to enjoy this interesting twist on life in the British Empire. --Jessica Howard, blogger at Quirky Bookworm

The Spy Who Couldn't Spell is the dramatic nonfiction story of the pursuit, capture and conviction of United States spy Brian Patrick Regan. Based on his 2010 article in Wired, Yudhijit Bhattacharjee's first book is both an engaging thriller and a timely peek inside the machinations of the U.S.'s security bureaucracies. Regan was a master sergeant analyst with the semi-secret, multibillion-dollar-budgeted National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), where his high security clearance gave him access to the complete infrastructure of the U.S. satellite surveillance apparatus and to the top secret Intelink intranet database used by the country's intelligence agencies. In the late 1990s, he accumulated more than 20,000 pages of documents, CD-ROMs and videotapes with details of the entire U.S. air defense and surveillance systems, and then secreted them out of his restricted-access building in a gym bag with the intent to sell them to "Axis of Evil" countries--or whomever would pay. When a confidential informant intercepted a Regan packet on its way to the Libya consulate, FBI Special Agent Steve Carr was assigned what became the biggest case of his young career.

A longtime staff writer for Science, Bhattacharjee extensively researched court and other public documents, and conducted numerous interviews with Carr and Regan's colleagues and family. He tells a story that would make a kickass movie. Once Regan's stolen documents were recovered, Carr discovered that their potential damage to United States defense was worse than anyone imagined: "an intelligence disaster on an unparalleled scale, potentially undermining the U.S. military for decades." --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

David Wood was raised a Quaker, did civilian service during the Vietnam War, and became a war journalist after his first assignment to a war zone in 1977. He has been a war reporter for 30 years. In his first book, What Have We Done, Wood argues that we have failed to prepare our military troops adequately for the moral shocks and dissonance of war, not supported them during their service and neglected to care for them when they return.

"Moral injury" describes the emotional reactions that come with reflection after someone returns from war to safety. "Sorrow, remorse, grief, shame, bitterness and moral confusion--What is right?--signal moral injury, while flashbacks, loss of memory, fear, and a startle complex seem to characterize PTSD." Wood focuses on the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan because they were our first major conflicts fought entirely with an "all-volunteer" military, which "meant that those who chose to stay home mostly remained ignorant of who served and why." Rates of mental illness, suicide and violent crime among active troops and veterans have soared during these wars.

These matters are not a problem only for our military, however. "What is the accountability of those who engineered the wars? Of the politicians who pushed for and funded the fighting year after year? Of those of us who silently accepted the rationales for war, voted for those in power, and paid our taxes? ...Perhaps we are morally injured as well and, like so many combat veterans, are reluctant to peer into that darkness." What Have We Done offers readers the chance to do so. --Sara Catterall