You'll Never Know, Book Three: Soldier's Heart. By C. Tyler
This summer the big literary names--your Kings, your Grishams, your Meyers--will mostly be silent. It's a good opportunity to get to know a crop of lesser-known but exceptionally smart and interesting writers that includes Gillian Flynn and Alan Furst, Tana French and Maria Semple. In case you're not already familiar with them, we've helpfully diagrammed their areas of overlap.
FICTION
Broken Harbor
by Tana French
Mick "Scorcher" Kennedy is the big man on the Dublin-police murder squad. And he's got a big case: a father and two kids dead in a seaside town and the mother clinging to life. It's a mess, and he's here to clean it up--except it just gets messier. The clues don't add up, and Kennedy's life isn't as neat as it looks either. He's spent some time in that seaside town, and he's done his best to forget all about it. (7/24)
FICTION
Mission to Paris
by Alan Furst
Europe in 1938 was crawling with dread at the chaos that was about to engulf it. But don't blame Fredric Stahl. He's just your average movie idol, in Paris to make a film for Paramount. But the Reich wants to co-opt Stahl to use his celebrity for its political ends. When he resists, he's swept into the dazzling world of international espionage, where unlike in the movies, the guns shoot real bullets. (6/12)
Unsolved Mysteries
Noir
We'll Always Have Paris
NONFICTION
You'll Never Know, Book Three: Soldier's Heart
by C. Tyler
Tyler's father served in World War II, but, she writes, "you would never know by looking at him." Over three volumes of comic-book memoir, Tyler has told her father's war story, bringing his buried memories back to life in pen and ink and watercolor while exploring how those experiences affected her and her daughter in turn. (7/17)
FICTION
Where'd You Go, Bernadette?
by Maria Semple
The heroine of this cracklingly smart family dramedy is Bernadette, a woman with a secret glamorous past who's starting to lose her mind after 20 years as a Seattle housewife. Meanwhile her precocious daughter is planning a family trip to Antarctica, and her computer-genius husband never comes home from his job at Microsoft. Something has to give. And it does. (8/14)
NONFICTION
Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child
by Bob Spitz
Child changed the way America cooks and eats, but first she had to change herself. Smart and imposingly tall, she moved to Paris with her husband when she was in her 30s, and only then did she discover her passion for French food. She enrolled in the Cordon Bleu, and the rest is history. Or in this case, a biography, one that may well be definitive. (8/7)
Secret Histories
Missing Persons
People on TV
NONFICTION
Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace
by Kate Summerscale