Convinced that the original investigation five years ago got it all wrong, New Zealander Drew Jamieson wants Police Scotland’s Historic Cases Unit to look more closely into the death of his brother, hotel manager Tom Jamieson, whose fatal tumble down Edinburgh’s Scotsman Steps was ruled an accident. Using a computer image search, Drew claims to have identified Tom’s killer as dodgy surgical instruments manufacturer Marcus Nicol. At the same time, a mudslide beneath the M73 motorway reveals the skeleton of freelance investigative journalist Sam Nimmo, who vanished more than 10 years ago after the death of Rachel Morrison, his pregnant fiancée. Assumed then to be her killer, Nimmo’s now revealed as another victim. The two cases couldn’t possibly have any connection—until an examination of Nimmo’s research just before his death reveals that he was working on an accusation of bribery at soccer games by professional gamblers and the rape of an anonymous guest shortly after a high-class party thrown by Lord Haig Striven-Douglass in support of Scottish independence. It turns out that Justified Sinners, the secretive monthly men’s book club Nimmo had joined months before his death, had lost two of its members, including Tom Jamieson, to untimely deaths. Calling on experts of every stripe to help identify and pursue new leads, Karen and her team labor to connect the dots as she waits anxiously to hear whether Rafiq, the Syrian refugee physician she’s come to love, can get a Canadian passport to travel to Scotland.

Being stuck at work on her birthday seems fitting for Nora Bird, whose special day has felt marked by death since the untimely demise of both her parents on the same day 18 years earlier, when she was 8. It’s all the more fitting because Nora’s work is quite literally the work of death. Like a modern spin on the Grim Reaper, Nora’s role involves the Secure Collection, Yielding, Transport, and Handling of Essences, suitably abbreviated to S.C.Y.T.H.E. Nora’s just trying to make the day go by when she gets her latest case: Charles Bird, set to die in a crash at 11:15 a.m. Charles Bird, as in Nora’s twin brother, Charlie. Though it goes against everything she signed up for in her job, Nora dashes over to Charlie to try to protect him from the inevitable, loading him and his newly acquired African gray parrot, Jessica, into the car to hit the road for anywhere-but-here. The only trouble is that neither is sure where to seek refuge, and things stall as they try a few dead-end options while S.C.Y.T.H.E. keeps tracking them down (but how?). Leaving the country seems the only option. Canada’s Virgo Bay, a place their father had old friends—or maybe family—might provide some sort of protection for Charlie while Nora figures out a plan. The path to Virgo Bay is more than a little confusing, but what the twins find there is worth every moment of trouble, and it may lead them to answers for questions they never knew they had about their parents.

Preszler, professor of practice at Cornell University and director of the Henry David Thoreau Foundation’s Planetary Solutions Initiative, opens with a paean to Christmas trees. Introduced by 19th-century German immigrants, they’ve become a symbol of peace and goodwill for the religious and unreligious alike. They’re also disappearing. Since realistic plastic models appeared in the 1980s, 75% of U.S. households have switched. Having absorbed this news, readers will proceed to learn that the first genuine bonanza discovered by 17th-century Europeans in North America was not gold or freedom but trees. Most will be surprised to read that pilgrim voyages to Massachusetts were financed by British timber merchants who expected to be paid back in their product. England’s forests had been logged past recovery, and the Royal Navy hated importing its masts from the Baltic. Of the miseries endured by these pious pioneers, cutting and hauling trees remained prominent. In fact, Preszler maintains that lumber was the nation’s largest industry for several centuries. “Timber framed the nation, both figuratively and literally, bankrolling America’s rapid expansion at devastating human cost.” There follows a painful account of the destruction of Eastern forests for construction as well as farming, followed by the massacre of Western pines and firs and 95% of sequoias. The author ends with another chapter on Christmas trees—the operation of a tree farm, a grueling hands-on enterprise to ensure production, after seven to 10 years, of a beautiful, fragrant, symmetrical product that keeps its needles until the New Year. Profits are slim, and most go to the retailer. An irony is that holiday evergreens, today mostly an agricultural product no less than apples, are portrayed as environmentally irresponsible, although artificial trees end up in landfills with their plastic spreading across continents and oceans and into our bodies.

If the unnamed narrator of Tokarczuk’s latest novel appears to bear certain similarities to Tokarczuk herself—an abiding interest in mushrooms and astrology, say—that’s neither here nor there. The novel is set in a remote Polish village close to the Czech border: so close to the border, in fact, that when a visiting German tourist suddenly dies, border guards from both countries take turns moving the man’s body back and forth to avoid dealing with the paperwork. As in the tour de force Flights (2018), Tokarczuk favors a storytelling style that more closely resembles a constellation—horizontal, spread-out, continually growing—over a single plotline. One chapter follows the life of a woman saint who was crucified by her father after suddenly growing a beard; others, the life of the monk who recorded the saint’s biography and couldn’t help feeling he’d been born into the wrong body. These chapters alternate with more mundane, domestic ones in which the narrator exchanges visits with her neighbor, Marta, or the other villagers go about their lives. And while at first there might appear to be little connection between the various narratives, gradually, and then more and more quickly, the connections accrue. One character is driven mad by the sudden realization that a planet he’d never known to exist had existed all along: “If you aren’t aware of something, does that mean it doesn’t exist?” he wonders. “If a person becomes aware of something, does that knowledge change him?” As a whole, the book is at once simpler and, at the same time, infinitely more complex than it at first appears.

One of Natalie Olsen’s two best friends died of cancer. Now she stands at the bedside of the other, Cara, who’s been left in a coma with little brain activity by a super-strong date-rape drug. Cara left a club with a stranger and was found unconscious at a bus stop. Another woman is in the hospital in the same condition, and the police are looking for answers. After Natalie, who knows more than she’s saying, saves a handsome, well-dressed man named Nick from being struck by a passing car on 34th Street, she’s rewarded with an offer of a short-term job she really needs. While having coffee with Nick, she spies a magazine cover with a picture of the man Cara left the club with. The good-looking redhead is Nick’s boss, Geoffrey Rosenberg, cryptocurrency king and CEO of IxResearch, and the job is cleaning at his stunning estate. The position will not only help Natalie financially but give her a chance to spy on Rosenberg, who may have put her friend in a coma. The estate staff are distinctly unfriendly, and there are cameras everywhere and very strict rules, especially about alcohol. Natalie is hired to help at a big party being thrown to celebrate the company’s going public. Despite being in danger every minute, Natalie continues to hunt for clues that will uncover the truth about what happened to Cara.