Valley of the Shadow

Peters, Ralph/ Skoch, George (Get this book)
Those who enjoy Bruce Catton's and Shelby Foote's Civil War histories will find a fictional equal in Peters' retelling of the 1864 Shenandoah Valley campaign.Combining character study, strategy, and battle scenes, Peters focuses on the great, small, and those in history's shadows, like U.S. Gen. Emory Upton, "an enigma, a hardened Christian, mean as a Turk…a brilliant, intolerant merciless young man." Famous names also appear: Union Army Gen. Philip Sheridan, all pugnacious Irish temper; tobacco-chewing Confederate Gen. Jubal Early, "a spitting, crook-back man and harsh-mouthed as a heathen"; and future president Rutherford Hayes, who learned "War made it hard to credit a merciful God." A superlative novel. --Kirkus

The Turner House

Flournoy, Angela (Get this book)
A complicated portrait of the modern American family emerges in Flournoy's debut novel. For the 13 Turner siblings, the house on Detroit's East Side isn't just their childhood home. It's also the crux of memories of their dead father and a link among 13 very different adults. But the house has built up debt, their ill mother, Viola, lives elsewhere, and a question hangs—what to do with the Yarrow Street house? Flournoy's writing is precise and sharp, and despite several loose ends—Troy doesn't experience significant emotiona l change by the book's end, and the house's fate remains unclear—the novel draws readers to the Turner family almost magnetically. A talent to watch.--Kirkus

The Lady from Zagreb

Kerr, Philip (Get this book)
Bestseller Kerr’s superlative 10th novel featuring former homicide cop Bernie Gunther finds Bernie, now an officer in the SD, at an international police conference in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee in the summer of 1942. Heinrich Heckholz, an attorney, wants Bernie to use his access at Wannsee to gather evidence that a charitable foundation is involved in fraud. Kerr combines a murder mystery that Raymond Chandler could have devised with a searing look at the inhumanity of the Nazis and their allies, presented from a unique perspective. (Publisher's Weekly)

God Help the Child

Toni Morrison (Get this book)
Brutality, racism and lies are relieved by moments of connection in Morrison's latest.A little girl is born with skin so black her mother will not touch her. Desperate for approval, to just once have her mother take her hand, she tells a lie that puts an innocent schoolteacher in jail for decades. Later, the ebony-skinned girl will change her name to Bride, wear only white, become a cosmetics entrepreneur, drive a Jaguar. Her lover, a man named Booker, also bears a deep scar on his soul—his older brother was abducted, tortured and murdered by a pedophilic serial killer. This is a skinny, fast-moving novel filled with tragic incidents, most sketched in a few haunting sentences. A chilling oracle and a lively storyteller, Nobel winner Morrison continues the work she began 45 years ago with The Bluest Eye. --Kirkus