Big If
Mark Costello
W. W. Norton
$24.95/$19.96

Meet Vi Asplund, a young Secret Service agent mourning her dead father. She goes home to New Hampshire to see her brother Jens, a computer genius poised to make a fortune on Big If, a viciously nihilistic computer game aimed at teenagers. Vi's America, as she sees it in the crowds, in her brother, and in her fellow agents, is affluent, anxious, and abuzz with vague fantasies of violence. Through a gallery of vivid characters -- heroic, ignoble, or desperate -- Mark Costello's hilarious novel limns the strategies, both sound and absurd, that we conjure to survive in daily life. A scary, funny novel -- a riff on recent history and the American obsession with assassination.

City of Bones
Michael Connelly
Little, Brown/AOL Time Warner
$25.95/$20.76

When the bones of a 12-year-old boy are found scattered in the Hollywood Hills, Harry Bosch is drawn into a case that brings up the darkest memories from his own haunted past. The bones have been buried for years, but the cold case doesn't deter Bosch. Unearthing hidden stories, he finds the child's identity and reconstructs his fractured life, determined that he not be forgotten. At the same time, a new love affair with a female cop begins to blossom for Bosch -- until a stunningly blown mission leaves Bosch in more trouble that ever before in his turbulent career. The investigation races to a shocking conclusion and leaves Bosch on the brink of an unimaginable decision -- one that will leave readers hungrily awaiting Michael Connelly's next masterpiece.

I Have Landed: the End of a Beginning in Natural History
Stephen Jay Gould
Harmony Books/Random House
$25.95/$20.76

"Gould, a self-described 'naturalist by profession and a humanist at heart,' has written some of the most edifying and masterful essays of our times. Valuing literary finesse and moral clarity as much as scientific and historical precision, and combining wit with an enduring sense of mission, Gould has written 300 sequential essays for Natural History magazine and parlayed them into 10 exemplary collections over the course of 25 demanding years. In this particularly compelling, far-ranging, and profoundly moving volume, Gould expresses his ongoing wonder over 'the continuity of etz chayim, the tree of earthly life' and parses 'the unity of creativity' that connects science and art... Because this volume is the last in this extraordinary series, Gould intended to make it his most personal by celebrating the centenary of his family's arrival in the U.S. To that end, he describes his most treasured book, an 1892 edition of Studies in English Grammar purchased by his then young Hungarian immigrant grandfather shortly after he arrived in New York, who inscribed the title page, 'I have landed. Sept. 11th 1901.' A joyful occasion was rendered catastrophic, yet, in the wake of September 11, 2001, Gould wrote four radiantly redemptive essays, in which he declares, 'Every spectacular incident of evil will be balanced by ten thousand acts of kindness.' Surely Gould's eloquence and intellectual generosity are among them." -- Booklist *Starred Review*

Three Junes
Julia Glass
Pantheon/Random House
$25.00/$20.00

Three Junes is a vividly textured symphonic novel set on both sides of the Atlantic during three fateful summers in the lives of a Scottish family. In June of 1989, Paul McLeod, the recently widowed patriarch, becomes infatuated with a young American artist while traveling through Greece and is compelled to relive the secret sorrows of his marriage. Six years later, Paul's death reunites his sons at Tealing, their idyllic childhood home, where Fenno, the eldest, faces a choice that puts him at the center of his family's future. Love in its limitless forms -- between husband and wife, between lovers, between people and animals, between parents and children -- is the force that moves these characters' lives, which collide again, in yet another June, over a Long Island dinner table. This time it is Fenno who meets and captivates Fern, the same woman who captivated his father in Greece ten years before. Elegantly detailed yet full of emotional suspense, often as comic as it is sad, Three Junes is a glorious triptych about how we learn to live, and live fully, beyond incurable grief and betrayals of the heart -- how family ties, both those we're born into and those we make, can offer us redemption and joy.

The World at Night
Alan Furst
Random House pb
$11.95/$9.56

Paris, 1940. The civilized, upper-class life of film producer Jean Casson is derailed by the German occupation of Paris, but Casson learns that with enough money, compromise, and connections, one need not deny oneself the pleasures of Parisian life. Somewhere inside Casson, though, is a stubborn romantic streak. When he's offered the chance to take part in an operation of the British secret service, this idealism gives him the courage to say yes. A simple mission, but it goes wrong, and Casson realizes he must gamble everything -- his career, the woman he loves, life itself. Here is a brilliant re-creation of France -- its spirit in the moment of defeat, its valor in the moment of rebirth. "[The World at Night] earns a comparison with the serious entertainments of Graham Greene and John le Carré.... Gripping, beautifully detailed...an absorbing glimpse into the moral maze of espionage." -- Los Angeles Times