Melissa DeWild l Editor, LJ Reviews

In SFF, Amal El-Mohtar follows up the viral bestseller This Is How You Lose the Time War (written with Max Gladstone) with her first solo novella, The River Has Roots (Tor.com), featuring a river full of grammar, magical willows, and the land of Faerie. Emily Tesh’s debut novel, Some Desperate Glory, is an LJ Best Book and a Hugo Award winner, and her latest, The Incandescent (Tor), is a sapphic dark-academia fantasy that sounds fantastic. The first two books in Beth Revis’s “Chaotic Orbits” series of space heist/romance novellas have been pure joy to read, and I cannot wait to see how Ada wraps up her long con in Last Chance To Save the World (DAW). In romance, Rachel Lynn Solomon’s What Happens in Amsterdam (Berkley) is a marriage-of-convenience story featuring a thirtysomething expat in the Netherlands who gets a second chance at love with the hot Dutch exchange student she had a crush on high school. Already earning a starred LJ review, Cara Bastone’s Promise Me Sunshine (Dial) offers so many tropes to love: grumpy/sunshine, found family, slow burn, enemies to lovers, and hurt/comfort. In horror, Stephen Graham Jones is always an author to anticipate as he skillfully crafts tales of terror that have heart. His latest is The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (Saga), about a Blackfeet vampire looking for justice. Another author at the top of her writing craft is Maggie Smith, who offers inspiration and guidance in Dear Writer: Pep Talks & Practical Advice for the Creative Life (Washington Square).

Liz French l Senior Editor, LJ Reviews

The trend of older protagonists solving crimes just keeps going, with Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club, Deanna Raybourn’s Killers of a Certain Age, Jesse Q. Sutanto’s Vera Wong, and many other modern-day Marples on the scene. Joining the elder-sleuth posse is Muriel Blossom, a peripheral character in Laura Lippman’s Tess Monaghan series, who now takes center stage in Murder Takes a Vacation (Morrow). Widowed Muriel encounters danger, art forgery, and mysterious, untrustworthy men on her dream river cruise through France. It’s not just humans on the case. Leonie Swann’s “Sheep Detectives” return in Big Bad Wool (Soho Crime; tr. from German by Amy Bojang), the follow-up to Three Bags Full. This time, the flock travels to France, where they team up with some local goats to catch a murderer of humans and beasts—could it be a werewolf? From fictional murder to real life: Pulitzer Prize winner Caroline Fraser’s true-crime thriller Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers (Penguin Pr.) investigates the alarming increase of serial killers in her home of the Pacific Northwest in the 1970s and ’80s. One theory: toxic fumes and environmental devastation in their hometowns may have warped the killers’ minds. Finally, Phaidon’s “Contemporary Artists” series spotlights Neo Rauch, who emerged from East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall and went on to win international acclaim. Essays and text from curators and fellow artists accompany 160 illustrations of his work—that’s one per page!

Sarah Hashimoto l Editor, LJ Reviews

This spring finds a range of titles addressing social and racial inequity, economic disparity, and the human costs of the housing crisis. New York magazine senior writer Sarah Jones’s Disposable: America’s Contempt for the Underclass (Avid Reader) discusses how the COVID pandemic intersected with systemic racism and income inequality to create a vulnerable underclass within American society, of hourly wage earners, older adults, and people with disabilities. Jones argues that with targeted changes to health care and public policy, a better future may be possible. Several books, including Jeff Hobbs’s Seeking Shelter: A Working Mother, Her Children, and a Story of Homelessness in America (Scribner), explore the root causes and effects of homelessness, intertwining discussions of social and economic policy with portraits of individuals and families seeking—but not finding—secure and stable living situations. Hobbs explores the housing crisis with in-depth portraits of Wendi, a social worker, and Evelyn, a working mother who doesn’t qualify for government aid and struggles to find safe housing and schools for her children. With There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America (Crown), journalist Brian Goldstone provides an account of a less-discussed facet of homelessness, interviewing people with full-time jobs who still cannot find reliable and affordable housing in their increasingly expensive cities. Journalist Kevin Fagan, the author of The Lost and the Found: A True Story of Homelessness, Found Family and Second Chances (Atria), also focuses on worsening conditions in affluent cities as he investigates the link between homelessness and addiction.

Sarah Wolberg l Associate Editor, LJ Reviews

This spring, Menno Schilthuizen will bring forth a manifesto for “a new dawn of natural history” that involves the work of amateur scientists as well as the pros and promises to be both funny and useful. Schilthuizen’s The Urban Naturalist: How To Make the City Your Scientific Playground (MIT), illustrated by Jono Nussbaum, shows readers how to become community scientists who observe nature in even the most urban of habitats, using any of the tools at their disposal, from the classic (butterfly nets, magnifying glasses) to the unexpected (a smartphone-turned-microscope). Find more natural history in biologist Jaap de Roode’s Doctors by Nature: How Ants, Apes, and Other Animals Heal Themselves (Princeton Univ.), which explains how animals use the items around them to treat and prevent illness. In the realm of human history, look for the new book by William Dalrymple, a key historian of India; The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World (Bloomsbury) explores India’s impact on art, religion, mythology, technology, astronomy, and mathematics from the Red Sea to the Pacific. For another examination of art and culture through a historical lens, see J. Hoberman’s Everything Is Now: Primal Happenings, Radical Music, Underground Movies, and the 1960s New York Avant-Garde (Verso); the former Village Voice film critic is perfectly positioned to write this history of New York City’s cultural life in the 1960s. Finally, Claudia Gray’s next Jane Austen–inspired mystery, The Rushworth Family Plot (Vintage), makes the London social season the setting of a murderous scheme.

Neal Wyatt l Reviews Director, LJ

The launch of a new season, filled with longer days and the sharp edge of green bulbs finally breaking through icy ground, always indicates that it’s time for a new gardening book. Page through Sweet Pea School: Growing & Arranging the Garden’s Most Romantic Blooms by Marryn Mathi (Chronicle), which offers advice on the needs of the charming Lathyrus odoratus and how to get the lushest blooms. On the fiction front, my shelf is filled with series titles, starting with Sally Smith’s debut mystery, A Case of Mice and Murder: The Trials of Gabriel Ward (Bloomsbury), a cozy historical that unfolds in such an amiable, companionable, delightful way that the plotting of the story is as much a pleasure as the deft characterization and intriguing setting—London’s Inner Temple. While Smith starts a series, Rebecca Thorne ends the “Tomes & Tea” run with book four, Alchemy and a Cup of Tea (Bramble). For the last time (although readers will undoubtedly hope for a return of some kind), Reyna and Kianthe solve the world’s problems with their deep emotional intelligence, abiding understanding, magic, friendship, and tea. Malka Older returns with book three in the inestimable “The Investigations of Mossa and Pleiti” SF/mystery/sapphic romance series, set on the rings of Jupiter; the first installment was an LJ Best Book. The new series entry is, like books one and two, wonderfully titled: The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses (Tor) sees scholar Pleiti launching her own inquiry even as she suffers from the isolation of Mossa. The Ashfire King (Orbit), book two in Chelsea Abdullah’s transporting and delightfully magical “Sandsea Trilogy,” picks up where LJ Best Book The Stardust Thief ends, separating comrades, introducing new magic, and advancing the story with wily plotting and rewarding levels of detail and description.