The Big Town
Monte Schulz
Fantagraphics Books, $29.99 (360p)

In The Big Town, salesman Harry Hennesey’s hopes of success, both in his household and the world, have driven him to sell his home in an Illinois small town, ship his wife and kids to his mother in Texas, and take his chances in the big city, where he has an affair with a flapper half his age. Charles A. Follette, chairman of the board of the American Prometheus Corporation, comes to him with a slick proposition: find Follette’s missing niece, and the road to riches shall be his. Harry discovers a darker secret to the identity of the missing niece and what lies behind the urgency for her detection in a city where gangsters murder ordinary citizens and everyone seems to have a get-rich scheme as the Roaring ’20s come to a thunderous close. This is the third book, following This Side of Jordan and The Last Rose of Summer, in an exquisite historical trilogy about life in the Jazz Age.

The Drop
Michael Connelly
Little, Brown, $27.99 (400p)

Harry Bosch has been given three years before he must retire from the LAPD, and he wants cases more fiercely than ever. In one morning, he gets two.

DNA from a 1989 rape and murder matches a 29-year-old convicted rapist. Was he an eight-year-old killer or has something gone terribly wrong in the new Regional Crime Lab? The latter possibility could compromise all of the lab’s DNA cases currently in court.Then Bosch and his partner are called to a death scene fraught with internal politics. Councilman Irvin Irving’s son jumped or was pushed from a window at the Chateau Marmont. Irving, Bosch’s longtime nemesis, has demanded that Harry handle the investigation.

Relentlessly pursuing both cases, Bosch makes two chilling discoveries: a killer operating unknown in the city for as many as three decades, and a political conspiracy that goes back into the dark history of the police department.

Headstone
Ken Bruen
Mysterious Press, $24.00 (256p)

Acclaimed Irish crime writer Ken Bruen has won numerous awards for his hard-charging, dark thrillers, which have been translated into ten languages. In Headstone, an elderly priest is nearly beaten to death and a special-needs boy is brutally attacked. Evil has many guises and Jack Taylor has encountered most of them. But nothing before has ever truly terrified him until he confronts an evil coterie named Headstone, who have committed a series of random, insane, violent crimes in Galway, Ireland. Most would see a headstone as a marker of the dead, but this organization seems like it will act as a death knell to every aspect of Jack’s life. Jack’s usual allies, Ridge and Stewart, are also in the line of terror. An act of appalling violence alerts them to the sleeping horror, but this realization may be too late, as Headstone barrels along its deadly path right to the center of Jack’s life and the heart of Galway. A terrific read from a writer called “a Celtic Dashiell Hammett,” Headstone is an excellent addition to the Jack Taylor series (Philadelphia Inquirer)

The Best Bad Dream
Robert Ward
Mysterious Press, $24.00 (288p)

F.B.I. Agents Jack Harper and Oscar Hidalgo are burned out from too many cases so they schedule a two week vacation. Jack plans to hang out with his son, followed by some fishing in Baja. Then Jack gets a phone call from his snitch and on-again-off-again girlfriend, the sexy and unpredictable car thief, Michelle Wu. Michelle’s sister has been kidnapped. Terrified that she will be killed, Michelle begs Jack to come to Santa Fe at once. Jack owes Michelle big time–she once saved his life. Michelle is pretty sure a biker named Lucky Avila had something to do with Jennifer’s disappearance. She also admits she did business with Lucky, who might be angry at her. Jack goes out to see Lucky, hoping for a simple end to the case. He should have known better. Anything in which Michelle Wu is involved is bound to be complex, dark, and wild. Soon Jack is up to his neck with bikers, Mexican gangs, and a giant pet wild Razorback hog named Ole Big, who may offer a major clue to finding the missing girl. The Best Bad Dream is fast paced, tough, funny, hip, and filled with unexpected twists and turns.

Assume Nothing
Gar Anthony Haywood
Severn House, $28.95 (224p)

A volatile man gets pushed to the wall once too often. One night nine years ago, Joe Reddick of the West Palm Beach Police Department came home to find his wife and children slaughtered by an intruder. His fellow cops caught the perp, but Joe’s nightmares raged on, so he decided to make himself a new life in Los Angeles. Although Joe could escape West Palm, however, he couldn’t escape himself, and now Dana, his second wife, is about to divorce him and take their son Jake, 5, because she can’t trust his volcanic temper. That temper will be sorely tried after Joe’s car is sideswiped by a van whose driver, Andy Baumhower, is jittery because he’s been charged with getting rid of the corpse of Gillis Rainey, the squirrelly financial advisor Baumhower and his three associates in Class Act Productions–Perry Cross, Ben Clarke and Will Sinnott–had kidnapped in a futile attempt to get him to pay back the $100,000 he’d taken from them before they had to repay their even bigger debt to druglord Jorge Lizama, Jr. Reddick, who has no intention of losing a second family to violence, decides to take matters into his own hands, and by the time the curtain comes down, the cast will have been decimated, much to the gentle reader’s righteous satisfaction. An efficient noir actioner that’s also a sharp study of a hero who “wasn’t an evil man, just an astoundingly unfortunate one.” — Kirkus Reviews

Iranian Rappers and Persian Porn
Jamie Maslin
Skyhorse, $24.95 (288p)

Iran looms large in the psyche of modern America. For decades, it has been “the enemy,” its government taunting us and attacking our Western, secular lifestyle. That is largely the Iranian government, however, not the Iranian people. Here’s the proof. When Jamie Maslin decides to backpack the entire length of the Silk Road, he decides to travel first and plan later. Maslin finds himself suddenly plunged into a subversive, contradictory world of Iranian subculture, where he is embraced by locals who are more than happy to show him the true Iran as they see it—the one where unmarried men and women mingle in Western clothes at secret parties, where alcohol (the possession of which is punishable by hand-amputation) is readily available on the black market, where Christian churches are national heritage sites, and where he discovers the real meaning of friendship, nationality, and hospitality. This is a hilarious, charming, and astonishing account of one Westerner’s life-altering rambles across Iran that will leave you wondering what else you don’t know about Iran and its people.

Townie
Andre Dubus III
W.W. Norton, $25.95 (400p)

After their parents divorced in the 1970s, Andre Dubus III and his three siblings grew up with their exhausted working mother in a depressed Massachusetts mill town saturated with drugs and everyday violence. To protect himself and those he loved, Andre started pumping iron and learned to use his fists so well that he became the kind of man who could send others to the hospital with one punch, and did. Irresistibly drawn to stand up for the underdog, he was on a fast track to getting killed—or killing someone else. Nearby, his father, an eminent author, taught on a college campus and took the kids out on Sundays. The clash of worlds between town and gown, between the hard drinking, drugging, and fighting of “townies” and the ambitions of well-fed students debating books and ideas, couldn’t have been more stark or more difficult for a son to communicate to a father. Only by finally putting pen to paper himself did young Andre come into his own, discovering the power of empathy in channeling the stories of others—and ultimately bridging the rift between his father and himself. An unforgettable book, Townie is a riveting and profound meditation on physical violence and the failures and triumphs of love.

Everything Beautiful Began After
Simon Van Booy
Harper Perennial, $14.99 (416p)

Rebecca is young, lost, and beautiful. A gifted artist, she seeks solace and inspiration in the Mediterranean heat of Athens—trying to understand who she is and how she can love without fear.
George has come to Athens to learn ancient languages after growing up in New England boarding schools and Ivy League colleges. He has no close relationships with anyone and spends his days hunched over books or wandering the city in a drunken stupor.
Henry is in Athens to dig. An accomplished young archaeologist, he devotedly uncovers the city’s past as a way to escape his own, which holds a secret that not even his doting parents can talk about.
…And then, with a series of chance meetings, Rebecca, George, and Henry are suddenly in flight, their lives brighter and clearer than ever, as they fall headlong into a summer that will forever define them in the decades to come.

Feast Day of Fools
James Lee Burke
Simon & Schuster, $26.99 (448p)
ISBN 978-1451643114

Sheriff Hackberry Holland patrols a small Southwest Texas border town, feeding off of the deeds of evil men to keep his own demons at bay. When alcoholic ex-boxer Danny Boy Lorca—mocked among the locals for his “visions”—witnesses a man tortured to death in the desert, Hack hears the genuine fear in the broken man’s tale. Soon the desert reveals a multitude of criminals—including Hackberry’s nemesis, serial murderer Preacher Jack Collins (“one of Burke’s most inspired villains”—The New York Times). Presumed dead at the close of Rain Gods, Preacher Jack has reemerged with a calm, single-minded zeal for killing which is more terrifying than the muzzle flash of his signature machine gun. But this time he and Sheriff Holland share a common enemy. In his most allegorical novel to date, James Lee Burke cements his status as “a poet and sage” (Missoula Independent), illuminating timely issues—immigration, energy, religious freedom—with the rich atmosphere and devastatingly flawed, authentic characters that readers have come to celebrate during the five decades of his brilliant career.

The Devil
Ken Bruen
Minotaur Books, $24.99 (288p)
ISBN 978-0312646967

From Publishers Weekly
In Bruen’s atmospheric, metaphysically tinged eighth Jack Taylor novel, the Galway PI clashes with Satan himself–or so all the clues scream. Denied passage to America at the airport in Ireland, Jack decides Xanax isn’t enough and hits the bar for a Jameson, where he meets the mysterious Kurt, who tells him that “evil hones in on those closest to redemption.” Soon murder and suicide point to the involvement of a “Mr. K” and force Jack to revisit previous cases, including a session with a tinker fortune teller. Bruen’s usual tour of Galway shows Jack finding comfort in “that vanished Ireland where people stopped in the streets, blessing themselves and said the prayer.” In addition to drugs and booze, Jack starts smoking again and reflects, “The Sig was to hand. I was ready and be-jaysus, I was willing.” Lots of such delicious moments for the legion of fans dot this outing for the beleaguered detective–one character even suggests Jack read Sanctuary (2009), the previous novel in the series.