Adrian Miller, tired of being tormented at school, hangs himself while home alone. But there's a witness to his act--someone watching via videocam on his computer. Not just watching but encouraging him to do it, apparently so she could muster the courage to do the same.

One of Adrian's classmates is especially upset about his suicide, and she happens to be the daughter of Kirk Stevens, special agent with Minnesota's Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, whose partner on a joint FBI-BCA task force is FBI agent Carla Windermere. The girl pleads with her dad to investigate Adrian's death and make someone pay.

Stevens and Windermere aren't sure a crime has been committed--until they realize that they have an online predator on their hands, someone who targets vulnerable teens on suicide message boards and talks them right over the edge. And it looks like the perp has hooks in two more victims who are ready to jump. Can the agents find the kids in time to save them?

It's clear early on in Owen Laukkanen's The Watcher in the Wall that this fifth outing is a departure in the Stevens and Windermere series. Yes, it has the previous novels' high-octane action and thriller-fast pace, but the descriptions of the teens' inner lives feel raw and personal. As it turns out, it is--the author's note at the end reveals intimate knowledge of the subject matter, and offers hope to those struggling with depression. Watcher is a moving reminder for sufferers that they have a different kind of watchers in their lives--loved ones who can provide support and let them know they're not alone. --Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, blogger at Pop Culture Nerd

Propulsive, entertaining and slightly psychotic, Cambodia Noir is an enticing blend of politics, drugs and mayhem. This ambitious first thriller from Nick Seeley, a journalist who spent a decade in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, is not for the faint of heart.

As the story begins, nearly vagrant newspaper photographer Will Keller is living in a drug- and drink-induced haze in Phnom Penh when a strange woman approaches him, asking him to help find her missing sister, June.

Will is surprised to learn that June was an intern at the same newspaper he works for, but given the pervasive lawlessness throughout Cambodia, and the rather staggering amount of drugs most of the newspaper staff are ingesting, no one noticed anything unusual about June being missing for a few weeks.

Complicating matters is a recent record-breaking drug bust, in which many high-ranking military officials were arrested. The parliamentary government is in a standoff, and June may have gotten tangled up in news stories that were well beyond her purview. With only June's inchoate journal as guide, Keller sets out to trace her whereabouts.

Cambodia Noir is a fast-paced, surreal journey through an out-of-control nation. Will must outsmart corrupt officials, scared co-workers, murderous thugs and his own hallucinations in order to get to the truth of June's disappearance. And given the violent, dizzying nature of Will's trip, readers are sure to be glad that they're visiting this setting merely via novel. --Jessica Howard, blogger at Quirky Bookworm

M.J. Carter's first novel, The Strangler Vine, was set in colonial India. In her second, The Infidel Stain, her heroes--Jeremiah Blake and Captain William Avery--have left the army and returned to Victorian England. Blake, a working-class jack-of-all-trades has reinvented himself as a private investigator, easily mingling on the mean London streets. Avery, however, is struggling to adapt to the life of a gentleman in Devon, so he eagerly answers Blake's call for assistance in an investigation.

Blake is being employed by Lord Allington, who uses his fame and fortune to aid London's most destitute. Allington has learned of the gruesome murders of several printers, to which the police have turned a blind eye in spite of the clear similarities among the mutilated bodies. As Avery assists Blake with his investigation, the two men are quickly drawn into the seamy underbelly of the printing world, uncovering ties to pornography and sedition. Avery's naïve, genteel worldview is especially disrupted by the shocking secrets they begin to uncover.

Meticulously researched and quickly paced, The Infidel Stain is sure to appeal to fans of mystery and historical fiction. With clear explanations of the political problems plaguing England in the 1840s, sad stories of social injustice and a host of unforgettable and funny characters, including reporters, beggars and shop-owners, Carter's novel is both informative and entertaining. Reading it is a bit like time traveling to the noisy, dirty London of Victoria's early years on the throne. --Jessica Howard, blogger at Quirky Bookworm

Lee Smith's intimate Southern charm has graced her work for the 45 years she's been publishing novels and stories. In her first memoir, Dimestore, Smith looks back on her life, beginning with her Appalachian upbringing. She was born in the isolated mining town of Grundy, Va., and intentionally raised to leave her small-town way of life, which has since vanished. Through 15 candid and entertaining essays, Smith recaptures and embraces the life she left behind, aspects both good and bad, and paints an evocative, well-rounded portrait of times and people gone by. Her parents and the love they shared were strong influences, as was her father's dime store. Smith's task of tending to the dolls in the store provided fertile ground to cultivate her early imagination. There, she became a perceptive observer of people--their quirks, foibles and motivations--forming a firm foundation for a lifetime of telling stories.

Smith (Guests on Earth) probes her heart and soul, recounting rich details of real-life characters; leaving the nest and making a life beyond Grundy; her college years, learning her craft and her own teaching experiences; her favorite books; and the genesis of many of her stories. The challenges and stigmas of depression and mental illness, which have pervaded generations of Smith's family, are threads woven throughout. Ultimately, the grip of reading, writing and storytelling--which have sustained and inspired Smith through it all--will captivate her fans and draw many new ones. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

"[C]ommunities living with guns at their epicentres often lay far removed from other communities with guns. Gun lobbyists never got shot at, American hunters don't meet Salvadoran gangland killers. Gun makers focused on the minutiae of a barrel's width, while doctors frantically focused on stemming the blood from the imprecise holes caused by a bullet's spin," explains British investigative journalist Iain Overton as he brings together the results of his global study of the firearm "from its metallic cradle to its blood-tinged grave."

The Way of the Gun is the culmination of Overton's extraordinary efforts to understand humanity's relationship with weapons. The former head of a gun club, Overton traveled around the world--including war-torn areas like Palestine and ganglands like El Salvador--to examine the gun as an instrument of pain, power, pleasure and profit, with a special emphasis on the world's largest manufacturing country, the United States.

Steeped in research, data and first-hand observations, The Way of the Gun provides a window into this deadly sphere. Overton's efforts to touch every aspect of the gun--from creation, to use, even lobbying--and his desire to understand the viewpoints opposite his own make this a compelling and comprehensive analysis. Meanwhile, Overton's perspective from outside the U.S. political divide offers readers a glimpse of how one country's ideology can profoundly affect all other countries.

Persuasive and graceful, The Way of the Gun peers down the dark barrel in a search for hope. If readers peer back, that hope might be just be possible. --Jen Forbus of Jen's Book Thoughts

In Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space, Janna Levin, a celebrated astrophysicist who has written both fiction (A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines) and nonfiction (How the Universe Got Its Spots), recounts the epic scientific quest to detect gravitational waves. At the time of writing, Levin's major protagonists and interviewees--including physicists Kip Thorne, Rainer Weiss and Ronald Drever--couldn't be sure that the search for gravitational waves wouldn't turn out to be a horribly expensive wild goose chase. Levin chronicles the enormous amount of brainpower, hard work and luck that went into the successful creation of the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) and its recent detection of the ripples in space-time that Einstein predicted a century ago.

Levin is adept at writing with clarity and even lyricism about conceptually difficult topics. She refers to gravitational waves as "a sonic record of the history of the universe, a soundtrack to match the silent movie." Quasars are a "luminous jet propelled millions of light-years out, a cosmological signal we saw from Earth for the first time in the 1960s and didn't know what the hell could possibly do that." Apart from her clever descriptions, Levin excels at explaining and dramatizing the interpersonal conflict at the heart of just about any large-scale cooperative endeavor. Levin is careful to see both sides of every squabble, and judicious in giving credit to the troubled, fractious scientists who contributed to what might prove to be one of the greatest discoveries of the last century. --Hank Stephenson, bookseller, Flyleaf Books

In this very funny British adventure by debut author Julian Clary, two African hyenas steal the passports of two English tourists (who are eaten by crocodiles while on safari) and decide to begin a new life in human society.

Thus, two English-speaking hyenas (they learned it at the nearby tourist camp), come to be Fred and Amelia Bold. "Amelia" has always fancied living in England, with its cooler weather and custom of "lining up" vs. "fighting and diving in for scraps of meat." So they stand up on their hind legs, put on safari clothes, tuck in their tails, laugh less and prepare to fake it. They pull it off: "It is true to say that people in Teddington considered them to be an unusual couple. But no one jumped to the conclusion that they were a pair of hyenas." What follows is a fabulous send-up of human society--undiggable gardens, having to pay for everything ("What a nuisance!") and "things called 'jobs.' " The new Fred and Amelia do get jobs, and after what Amelia thinks is a "moldy burger" stomachache, she gives birth to twins: "And the Bolds laughed and laughed with joy." It's an ongoing struggle--and a goldmine of humor--not to blow their cover in suburban England, especially under the ever-watchful eye of their suspicious neighbor Mr. McNumpty.

Middle-graders will revel in the low-brow silliness, with delightful illustrations of the joyful, sharp-toothed hyena family by British artist David Roberts. The Bolds is not pure frivolity, it's also a celebration of ingenuity, tolerance, untiring good humor and big hyena hearts. --Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness

Twelve-year-old Cedar Lee of Iron Creek, Utah, knows she shouldn't call people names, partly because she's Chinese American and has been on the receiving end of that, but mostly because she had a special-needs brother who never quite meshed with the world. But that doesn't keep her from spotting a happy-looking boy cyclist wearing a ruffly blouse and feathered hat and thinking: "Nerd-on-a-Bike."

Cedar is curious about the boy, fortunately, because following him leads her to Summerlost, a local Shakespeare festival... which explains the boy's costume and proves to be an excellent distraction for a girl who is mourning the deaths of her father and brother. She learns that "Nerd-on-a-Bike" is actually a charming, good-hearted boy named Leo Bishop who's obsessed with the legendary late actress Lisette Chamberlain. Leo ropes Cedar into his money-making venture as a tour guide for Lisette's superfans, and while he shares his big dreams with Cedar, he helps her realize she has big dreams, too. With a particularly clean and engaging style, Ally Condie (the Matched trilogy, Atlantia) does a splendid job of balancing Cedar's grief and her need to move on.

Threads of mystery wind through the story as well, giving Summerlost a dreamy, haunting quality. As Leo and Cedar try to unravel questions surrounding Lisette's premature death, Cedar wonders if the gifts that keep appearing on her window sill are from Lisette's ghost. Or maybe from Leo? What matters in the end is that Cedar starts to glimpse a fascinating world beyond her heartbreak and finds a true-blue soulmate in Leo. --Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness