A FEISTY HEROINE and a vividly depicted blue-collar Pittsburgh setting enliven this somewhat chaotic whodunnit.

NOBODY DOES URBAN soap-opera like Kimberla Lawson Roby, and she’s at her most gloriously melodramatic here!

HEARTFELT MEMOIR OF food, family, and love in exile (in Tehran, Santa Cruz, and Paris); yummy Persian recipes!

BIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL ABOUT H.G. Wells would probably have worked better as a biography than this queasy hybrid.

A POET’S MEMOIR of life with severe food allergies is more impressionistic than self-help, but insightful, wry.

A CORPSE AT A WEDDING launches the peppy plus-size paralegal Odelia Grey on her 6th juicy murder investigation.

NEAR-FUTURE DISASTER novel places its slacker protagonist in a world where civilization ends with a whimper.

NEWEST EDITH PIAF biography will delight fans of the French singer with the breadth and depth of its research.

PAMPERED RICH KIDS on an adventure game turned deadly find help from an intrepid shrink, EMT in tense thriller.

LIGHTHEARTED AND INFORMATIVE illustrated look at the physics of everyday life has laughs and facts aplenty. SOLID B

THE INSTANT PHYSICIST
W. W. Norton & Company
2010