Mick Mulligan was fired from his job as a Disney animator when he refused to name names to the FBI. Now that his wife has left him and taken their toddler daughter, he’s hung out his shingle as a private eye. When Duke Rogowski, president of the United Taxi and Limousine Drivers, asks Mick to reopen the case of Harold Williams, a Black communist on death row for shooting his boss, cab company owner Irwin Johnson, Mick’s intrigued by the call. But he has questions of his own. What possible leads can there be that the police haven’t already investigated? Why did Duke wait a year after Williams’ conviction to make this move, only two weeks before his scheduled execution? And how can Mick tack between the wishes of Duke’s two vice presidents, self-identified communist Sol Rosen, who’s eager to see Williams exonerated, and mob boss Vincent Forlini, who’s firmly opposed to troubling the waters? The more deeply involved Mick gets with the richly detailed cast of interested parties—rabid anti-communists, communists and socialist organizers of every stripe, FBI informers, and three beautiful women: Duke’s wife, Cynthia; Johnson’s widow, Eva; and Elena DeMarco, the sister of Williams’ co-worker and friend—the more he realizes that the conflicts that led to Johnson’s murder are a lot more complicated than J. Edgar Hoover evidently assumes.

Narrator Paul Delamare knows he’s out of his depth from the moment he sets foot on Maldemer, the superyacht his friend Xéra de Sully, a former patisserie owner, has reserved for her post-wedding celebration. A struggling British food writer, Paul suddenly finds himself surrounded by the bride and groom’s high society friends and family who are anything but his kind of people. Paul’s discomfort only grows after he’s wrongfully suspected of stealing an expensive necklace from Xéra’s stateroom. His uneasiness turns to devastation when a cake he bakes to cheer Xéra up gets linked to her sudden death a day after the theft. Seeking justice, Paul makes several chilling discoveries that suggest not all is as it seems aboard the impossibly beautiful Maldemer. The yacht is way off course and heading toward a small volcanic island in the middle of the Atlantic. Worse still, non-British female deckhands he sees get abused by crew members live locked away at the bottom of the ship. Murrin’s deft handling of the many subplots layered into this well-crafted mystery is only part of what makes the story so readable. Quirky characters (like the ship’s eye-patch wearing chef, who inspires Paul to go back into the kitchen), unexpected twists (like Paul’s email correspondence with a tarot-reading friend whose cards reveal just how dangerous his sleuthing will become), and a small collection of mouthwatering recipes at the end of the book work together to create a unique novel that tantalizes as it entertains.

It’s March, but the heavy snow shows no signs of melting. Even worse, winter sometimes makes her mom so sad that Blessing has to stay with other families while she recovers in the hospital. Blessing has been skipping school to avoid her bullies, and one afternoon, while she’s hiding in Victoria Park, she meets an eccentric 627-year-old talking snowman named Albert Framlington. The new friends set out to fix “the broken weather,” so that spring can return to England and Albert and the other snowmen can follow their natural cycle of melting and reappearing in a wintry part of the world. This heartwarming and hopeful story moves at a brisk pace as Blessing and Albert race to complete their mission. Stephenson gently and honestly explores bullying, foster care, and seasonal affective disorder (the latter two aren’t explicitly named as such in the text) through the eyes of a child in accessible language that is ideal for readers who are gaining confidence in reading longer novels. Blessing works to stop the bullying and support her mother. In a nuanced depiction of foster care, her placement family is kind but no substitute for home. Brown’s charming spot illustrations show Blessing as a Black girl and Albert as stout, with angular stick eyebrows, bottle cap eyes, a potato nose, three jaunty leaves for hair, and a tattered scarf.

McLoof gathers 10 roughly 10-page stories that begin with a reference to an actual 2023 New York Times piece on Midland Park, New Jersey, a slow-paced, multigenerational “Forever Town” an hour from New York City. The narrator reads something ominous into that description and rewinds to 1994, when, at age 10, he attends his town’s Centennial carnival—an event too underfunded for real rides (“Carol Ann Mejury—our lunch lady—guessed people’s weights”), leaving only DIY attractions like a dunk tank, where his father sits until on-target balls land him in the water. More troubling is the narrator’s not unfounded sense that his parents’ marriage is faltering; his mother now sleeps in a sleeping bag on his bedroom floor. Smoking is ubiquitous—his older sister, Emily, his friends, his teachers, and nearly everyone else lights up throughout the book (his mom favors Pall Malls). Teen drinking, cocaine bumps, divorce, and a well-liked teacher who drinks before class sketch an environment of quiet dysfunction. Strong role models are all but missing. But the narrator’s love of film, inherited from both parents, runs through the collection, as do moments of unexpected poignancy, such as his mother’s disappointment when they skip watching the Academy Awards together for the first time; the decline of a local sporting-goods store whose owner refuses to embrace the internet in spite of his young staff offering to create a website for the shop; the surreal unfolding of 9/11; and the joys and embarrassments of early adulthood, from a first NYC apartment shared with a good friend to lounging in the grass with a crush (seemingly unwise during cicada season). Memories of small but telling transitions—like outgrowing a favorite suit—underscore the book’s wistful tone.

First, the book presents a tale set in 1952, featuring an alternate-universe version of the Phineas and Ferb cast (a recurring bit that will be familiar to longtime fans). The boys are still their inventive selves; Dr. Doofenshmirtz is “Doof of the Dark,” the local host of a schlocky monster-movie broadcast; and Candace is a cub reporter trying to get her big break. When toxic goo makes various creatures gigantic, the pair head to the studio to get help—only to find that Doof of the Dark isn’t the monster expert he plays on TV. He still teams up with them when a certain monotreme starts wrecking the city—and Candace is fired after missing out on reporting the story. In the second tale, set in the ordinary Phineas and Ferb fictional universe, the boys, left alone for the day, enlist the help of Isabella, Baljeet, and Buford to build a giant maze in their backyard. Doofenshmirtz invents an “elong-inate-inator,” hoping to finally become taller than his brother, Roger. This ray, of course, hits the backyard labyrinth, making it so enormous that even Candace sets aside her goal of getting her siblings in trouble. As the kids ride colossal grasshoppers through the maze, Doofenshmirtz and Perry the Platypus duke it out. Peterson, who penned several alternate-universe episodes of the show, and Pruett, another of the show’s writers, crafted these fine tales. As a result, they feature plenty of clever jokes, as when a man shouts, “Oh, no! My confetti!” while looking out his window at a tickertape parade. There are also appealing fourth-wall-busting hijinks, as when Doofenshmirtz hits the ground with a “KUH-KRUNCH” and exclaims, “That crunch was so hard, it was a ‘crunch’ with a ‘K!’” Artists Angelilli, Follini, and Papi ace the look of the show while conjuring some terrific action sequences; the fight between Perry and Doofenshmirtz, for instance, is both frenetic and funny.