Lovers of high-action thrillers will be delighted to discover Angel Killer by Andrew Mayne, who has used his extensive experience as a professional illusionist as the basis for an unusual and highly entertaining detective story. Jessica Blackwood is an FBI agent who spends her time trying to keep her head down and do as much good as she can. Jessica was born into a family of magicians, and spent the first two decades of her life onstage working to perfect the family craft while dodging her mercurial grandfather's moods. She left the industry and cut off all ties with her family when an escape attempt went awry and nearly ended her life.

Now, Jessica is forced to acknowledge her unusual skills when a murderer known as the Warlock stages a series of ghoulish, impossible-seeming crimes. Jessica is able to reveal that what at first appears to be the work of an actual sorcerer is really just a devious and elaborate combination of illusions, much like those she used many years ago. As the FBI draws closer to the killer, however, Jessica begins to suspect that she herself may be in grave danger.

Angel Killer is tightly plotted and fast-paced, with a compelling protagonist, a ghastly villain and even a dashing and dangerous antihero in the form of Jessica's brilliant but deranged ex-boyfriend, Damian. By the end of the book, the Warlock's identity is revealed, but Mayne entices readers with the possibility of a future confrontation between Jessica and an even greater evil. --Emma Page, bookseller at Island Books in Mercer Island, Wash.

In a frighteningly plausible near future, climate change and overconsumption have led to a devastating drought; the crumbling cities of the desiccated West Coast are sealed off from the rest of the country, receiving meager help from the federal government. In once-green Portland, Ore., water is severely rationed, though some have found ways to hoard it or bypass the regulations.

One night, unemployed barista Renee Gorski helps hijack a government water truck headed to the wealthy neighborhoods and distributes the bounty to those in need. Her impulsive act, caught on camera, earns her the sobriquet Maid Marian and leads to more significant activism: she declares a single neighborhood to be a sovereign country, which secedes from the city and operates on utopian sharing ideals. With nods to various activist movements, including Occupy, the charismatic Marian builds her community one neighbor at a time, supported by her acolyte army, the Green Rangers. Marian finds it's not easy to keep her people fed, hydrated, happy and motivated, but she's driven to persevere--to the detriment of her relationship with her supportive boyfriend, Zach, who remains in Portland. As her legend spreads and her territory grows, Marian's idealism is compromised in the face of violent opposition from the City of Portland, led by struggling mayor Brandon Bartlett (who'd really rather play videogames than deal with the conflict) and the National Guard.

Sherwood Nation--Benjamin Parzybok's second novel, after Couch--is a fast-moving tale of ideas and action, lent credibility by current headlines and engaging characters. Parzybok's apocalyptic future is so realistic, readers may think twice before guzzling a big glass of ice water. --Robin Lenz, managing editor, Shelf Awareness

"We feel a frustration with the way politics are handled and the way politics are handled within the media.... The appeal of doing the show is that it's cathartic," says Jon Stewart about his stint hosting the hugely popular Daily Show, which has broken new ground in the world of comedy talk shows since he took the reins in 1999.

Biographer Lisa Rogak (who has also profiled Stephen Colbert, Shel Silverstein and Stephen King) highlights Stewart's bumpy rise to this catharsis. She touches on his family life, but Angry Optimist focuses primarily on Stewart's career in comedy, from the side jobs that supported him to his stand-up career, TV appearances, film roles, books and even Oscar-hosting duty.

Including both humorous and serious insights from colleagues, Rogak presents a detailed picture of the Comedy Central show, revealing exhausting writing schedules, dogs in the office, interns running around at top speed and people who aren't particularly enamored with the host. Giving voice to Stewart's naysayers allows Rogak to explore a broader view of the "high-functioning hermit," who is rarely seen in public outside of work.

As Rogak retells, Stewart learned a lesson early in his career: "This whole life is a journey. There is no such thing as made it." The future is uncertain, but Stewart has undoubtedly left his signature on the world of comedy. Rogak's astute illustration of just how he accomplished that--making humor about things that matter to him--is ideal not only for Stewart fans, but comedy fans everywhere. --Jen Forbus of Jen's Book Thoughts

NPR's Fresh Air book critic Maureen Corrigan (Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading) didn't like The Great Gatsby the first time she read it for school when she was a teenager. But after teaching and lecturing about it for decades, her enthusiasm and ardent passion for F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel infuse So We Read On (a title that spins off the novel's famous closing line).

Corrigan argues that "if there is such an animal [as the Great American Novel], then The Great Gatsby is it." She feels that many readers who encounter Gatsby for the first time in high school or even middle school are too young and inexperienced to appreciate it fully; many will unfortunately and unnecessarily form a dislike for a book that they might learn to love later in life. She also debunks a widespread interpretation of the novel as a grand, decadent celebration of materialistic American culture; it is, rather, an enormously subtle criticism of a class system that Fitzgerald felt had snubbed him.

In exploring these and other ideas, Corrigan undertakes a close reading of the text, examining language and punctuation and considering the context of the Roaring '20s, the Lost Generation, Fitzgerald's literary colleagues (including his "frenemy" Ernest Hemingway) and family (the famous or infamous Zelda). Despite her scholarly method, Corrigan's work remains resolutely accessible to the everyday reader. Indeed, those who haven't encountered Gatsby since high school are her intended audience. With humor and even the occasional pun, Corrigan offers the love of a classic novel to any and all. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

In his essay "How to Explore Like a Real Victorian Adventurer," Monte Reel writes of explorer Richard F. Burton, "He was an enthusiastic amateur in an era when the word wasn't a slur." That, perhaps, is the best encapsulation of Read Harder's ethos. In this compilation, culled from the last five years of the Believer magazine's pages, the disparate topics lend themselves to discovery; here, the reader is the amateur, and the pieces demand investigation and wonderment, no matter how far-flung their subject matter.

The word "disparate" isn't hyperbolic. Read Harder covers an anatomical and historical analysis of beavers, Nick Hornby's remembrance of the World's Weirdest Job (fetching purebred puppies and castle architectural plans for a Korean company's English headquarters), a dissection of the clothing store Hollister's sensory marketing (particularly with regard to stoners), and a glimpse at a man who purposely seeks snake bites to gain superhuman immunity. The collection's most winsome quality--a rare one, in contemporary reportage--is the sheer delight it offers through the act of consumption. Each discovery feels revelatory, and the writers' zeal is as contagious as their curiosity. Readers may not set out to know the psychological innuendos of V.C. Andrews's Flowers in the Attic, but Sara Gran and Megan Abbott's "Dark Family" could easily convince them to seek out the author's entire unsettling oeuvre.

Read Harder champions unabashed exploration. Together, reader and writer tumble down rabbit holes as strange as they are edifying, and it's a testament to the Believer's editors that the magazine encourages and produces such distinct and engaging work. --Linnie Greene, freelance writer and bookseller at Flyleaf Books

Raised as a Southern Baptist, Christian Wiman lost his religion early on, then wrote several fine books of poetry, became editor of Poetry magazine and learned he had a rare, incurable form of cancer. As he described in his popular memoir, My Bright Abyss, he returned to faith, to prayer. He felt his strong spiritual hunger fulfilled--and his cancer hasn't killed him yet.

In his fourth poetry collection, Once in the West, Wiman explores the "hard horizonless country" of his West Texas roots, his religion, his family and the joy of being alive. Here, he proves himself to be a writer who can show us the world poetically from a metaphysical, mystical, religious viewpoint. His poetry can sustain, lift up, support--it is sustenance for the soul. His is an intense, intimate poetry, employing surprising meter, rhyme and word juxtaposition to share ideas, opinions and memories.

In "Winterlude," he confesses to the reader his experience with cancer, the pain and the suffering. "Painlady leaning into pain as every day she does:/ this time it's mine, this time my spine's/ rivering new forms of formlessness:/ lava crawling creaturely through my jaw,/ one shoulder shot through with shineless light/ only the unliving could see by."

In an epigraph to "Self-Portrait, with Preacher, Pain, and Snow," Wiman quotes theologian Karl Barth. It does much to encapsulate Wiman's life and art: "We need to be ready and resolved simply to let the truth be told us and therefore to be apprehended by it." --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

The team behind And the Soldiers Sang delves deeply into another chapter of World War I with this beautiful, bittersweet tribute to the men nicknamed the Harlem Hellfighters by the Germans "for their tenacity."

These 2,000 men were as talented with their instruments--playing jazz, blues and ragtime, led by "Big Jim" Reese Europe--as they were skilled on the battlefield. The exquisitely designed book traces their journey from recruitment in April 1916 through to Big Jim's tragic death in May 1919, and portrays the mood in the United States as latecomer to the Great War, and segregation in America and how it followed the soldiers overseas. The men are assigned to menial labor in France, yet perform music for the privileged. In March 1918, they're finally sent to fight, portrayed in Gary Kelley's gorgeous re-imagining of Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People (1830), with a valiant woman holding the French flag high as the Harlem Hellfighters race into battle.

In February 1919, the men played on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, to salute an Allied victory. But the night before they were to perform for a celebration honoring the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, Big Jim died at the hands of his drummer. Kelley portrays a lone Hellfighter in uniform and black mourning armband, holding a trombone. Lewis writes, "In black armbands, the Hellfighters/ marched last, their hushed instruments/ at their sides." This powerful image of the Harlem Hellfighters, so recently seen as vital contributors to the Allied victory, made mute in their sadness, all too accurately mirrors the men's experiences throughout the Great War. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

Andrew Smith (Winger; Grasshopper Jungle) pens a phenomenal novel about life's many detours, told in the unforgettable voice of an epileptic teenager with heterochromatic eyes (one blue, one green) and a strange history.

When 16-year-old Finn Easton was seven, a dead horse being transported to a rendering plant fell "one hundred sideways miles" off a bridge and landed on Finn and his mother. The impact broke Finn's back and killed his mother. His epilepsy, which he may grow out of, is a "souvenir" of the accident, and if he does grow out of it, he suspects he may miss the way the seizures empty the words out of his head. Finn measures the world in miles instead of minutes, because he believes "distance is more important than time." His crush, Julia Bishop, just moved from Chicago to Finn's Southern California town. Julia loves Finn back, which makes it devastating for Finn when Julia must return to Chicago--the scene of a tragedy that makes Finn wish he "could push the world back all those miles with my bare hands and make it change direction," even if it means they'd never have met.

Finn questions whether or not he's the product of his father's bestselling cult-classic novel, in which the protagonist bears a striking resemblance to Finn. So he sets out on a road trip with his best friend to figure out the ending to his story. Hilarious and wise, this is an addictive and panoramic read about the intersecting--and divergent--paths that lie ahead. Breathtakingly good. --Adam Silvera, children's bookseller