With every new publishing season, I look forward to a new Rennie Airth mystery, but this is only his third in the last 10 years. The first novel, River of Darkness is set in rural England in the immediate aftermath of the Great War and John Madden, a man scarred by both war and the death of his wife and infant daughter, is sent to a Surrey village to investigate a series of gruesome murders. Five publishing years and ten in Madden's life later, it's 1932 and The Blood-Dimmed Tide returns us to the same Surrey village, where a brutal murder of a young girl brings Madden out of retirement. Part British police procedural, part literary landscaping, Airth's writing combines the psychological complexity of P.D. James and the brilliant sense of culture, history and character of Pat Barker. The Dead of Winter, set more than a decade later in 1944 post blitz London, is a time of V-2 bombs, Jewish refugees, thriving underworld crime, critical food shortages, houses destroyed and families separated, and Madden's connection to a young murdered Polish refugee brings him into a complex investigation of multiple murders. There is a thread than runs through these novels, but it's not murder. It's the lasting repercussions of war from the horrors of trench warfare to the London blitz, a society struggling with a profound sense of displacement and an unrecognizable world. -- Margaret Simpson

In this noteworthy first book, Lydia Peelle delivers eight seamless narratives that highlight the quiet strength and complexity of her characters while capturing the compelling spirit of the rural South. Living and breathing in these realistic landscapes are wandering carnies and coyotes, a disgruntled goat herder, a herpetologist, an amputee taxidermist, and a clairvoyant - people of all ages with a rare knowledge of their native wilderness and an understanding of life and death that is both practical and profound. It's hard not to grow fond of characters who are just as easily haunted by rumors of a prowling cougar or legends of a vengeful Thunderbird as they are devastated by the disappearance of a familiar landscape, a loyal animal, an old lover, or a limb. Faced with pushy real estate developers, new farm technology, or their own desire for change, these individuals must decide whether to remain rooted to the land or sever their ties with a chosen way of life. Exhibiting the wisdom of a skilled writer, Peelle's stories reveal themselves slowly and thoughtfully, exposing the desperation, dreams, loneliness and compassion that shape people's existence. -- Steffi Drewes

Paper is one of our oldest (and I believe best) technologies, which at its inception was designed for the transmission of knowledge through writing. Since then, we have used it for multiple other endeavors: kites, sculpture, clothing, art, even the elegantly utilitarian architecture of Shigeru Ban. Paper collects some of the most intriguing art to be made from this material and showcases each artist's work with 2-3 pages of full color photos. It surprises and inspires with its exquisite conflation of medium and message. Beneath the cover, we find an entire three dimensional pagoda carefully cut and folded up from its source sheet, life-size mythical environments, something that may be a feathery heart made from De Baudelaire au Surrealisme beneath a glass dome, and a recycled paper party dress. Divided into such sections as "cut-rip-tear," "paper art," "fashion," and "furniture," Paper will delight book lovers and designers, artists and other creatives. -- Trevor Calvert