“New Orleans shimmies,” Sussler writes at the outset of her strangely haunting debut: “formed from a swamp into a Creole capital, it’s all sweat and longing, the sweet smell of decay and wild, wild wails.” This is a novel full of longing—and wild wails, for that matter—though not so full of straightforward plot. Here’s what we’re given: Daryl Monroe, our intrepid hero, returns to his backwoods Louisiana home after his mother dies and he’s disinherited by his wealthy father. Turns out Daryl has a plan to set up an illegal smuggling operation to undermine his father, an operation that draws on the talents of his former childhood friend Michael Duvet. Duvet, meanwhile, absolutely does not, in any way, have any resentments about the different opportunities the two boys grew up with or the ways they each put those opportunities to use. But that’s all neither here nor there: The heart of the novel is in Sussler’s narrative voice, which favors a uniquely lyrical style. For the most part, this is a welcome approach: No one else writes like Sussler, the editor-in-chief of BOMB Magazine. But there are parts—and they seem to come more and more often as the novel progresses—where even the simplest, most literal meaning is sacrificed to something more florid. As a reader, you might prefer a time-out to untangle the basics of a given scene: Who else is sitting in the car right now, you might wonder. What day is it? A bit more restraint on Sussler’s part would have served her well.

A little over three years after he returned in triumph from his epic exploration of the North American West with William Clark, Meriwether Lewis was found dead in October 1809 of gunshot wounds at a small inn along the historic Natchez Trace in Tennessee. Ever since, historians have debated how he died, with most opting for the official explanation that Lewis, in a state of “mental derangement,” died by suicide—while others insist he was murdered. Turnbow joins the fray with a lucid account of the events leading up to Lewis’ death, which he calls “one of the most intriguing and enduring mysteries in American history.” The author devotes much of this volume to Lewis’ activities as a “point man, agent, or spy” for Thomas Jefferson. He became particularly useful to the president, per Turnbow, as a source of information about James Wilkinson, a rogue U.S. Army general whom he replaced as governor of the Upper Louisiana Territory in 1807 and who had not given up on his own plans “to control the West.” After Lewis set off from St. Louis in September 1809 to defend himself in Washington against critics of his administration, the author asserts that Wilkinson “could have anticipated that Lewis would fight him for his own influence and survival.” Another possible enemy of Lewis’ was a “land cabal” in Tennessee that included future president Andrew Jackson (“More than a few could see Lewis as a threat to their interests”). Meticulously researched and documented, the book may prove heavy going for those who are not aficionados of the history of the early American Republic. Turnbow doesn’t explicitly state where he stands in the historic debate, but he does appear to be siding with the “murderists,” noting, for example, that Clark “never wrote that he believed Lewis committed suicide.”

If you keep upping your protagonist’s powers throughout a series, then you must balance the scales by increasing the number and strength of their enemies—as well as seriously messing with their personal life. Over the course of the Dresden Files, Harry Dresden, Chicago PI and now one of the most powerful wizards in the world, thought his first love was dead (she wasn’t), sacrificed his half-vampire girlfriend on an altar to save their child, lost another girlfriend when they learned she’d been mind-controlled into their relationship, bound himself into servitude as the Fae Queen Mab’s Winter Knight, and, for the length of an entire book, thought he himself was dead (he wasn’t). But nothing has hit quite as hard as the death of Karrin Murphy, the former police lieutenant who was his quasi-partner, friend, and, after a slow burn across many books, lover. Chicago is in a terrible state following a battle with Ethniu the Titan and her Fomor army, and Harry is doing his best to confront the monsters, dark magic, and anti-supernatural prejudice running wild amid the slowly rebuilding city. He’s also trying to save his half brother Thomas from two different death sentences, train a new apprentice, and juggle a relationship with Thomas’s half sister Lara, the dangerously seductive vampire Queen Mab is forcing him to marry. But he’s doing all this while nearly crushed by grief that threatens his judgment and disturbs his control over his magical powers. Butcher really makes you feel the dark, depressive state Harry exists in as well as the effect it’s having on his friends. Despite all that happens in it, this book is a pause as well as a setup for the series’ planned conclusion, an epic conflict with the eldritch creatures known as “the Outsiders.” It’s a tough, redemptive pause that could be a real drag, but thankfully, it’s not, because Butcher shows balance, too: Even as the crises pile up, so do the help and goodwill from unexpected sources.

Reminiscent of Langston Hughes’ The Negro Speaks of Rivers, illustrated by E.B. Lewis (2009), this elegantly wrought, first-person telling is both human and natural history. Lines from Negro spirituals that sing of rivers, like “Wade in the Water,” appear between Weatherford’s stanzas in a scriptlike font. The Alabama describes its size (“318 miles long, fifty to 200 yards wide, / and from three to forty feet deep”) and notes that its Choctaw name means “Thicket Clearers.” It also recalls enslaved Africans hiding in its waters as they sought freedom and the Cherokee people who passed its banks on the Trail of Tears. Throughout, Collier’s signature collage illustrations add richness, depth, hope, and light to the river’s weighty story. Weatherford never flinches from the horrors of oppression: victims of lynching thrown into the river, civil rights protesters beaten as they made their way across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965. But Collier’s paintings emphasize Black and Native Americans’ determination to survive and triumph. The inclusion of blue spheres—a motif that pops up in many of the illustrator’s works—suggests that the downtrodden, like air bubbles, will rise. Weatherford’s extensive historical timeline will give budding historians much to consider and research further.

Davies’ long-running series delightfully inverts Arthur Conan Doyle’s focus as Sherlock Holmes plays supporting character to a successful investigation by his observant landlady, Mrs. Hudson, that largely passes beneath his notice. Taking the Watson role of sidekick and narrator is scrappy teenage maid Flotsam, whose voice combines period formality, youthful snark, and as much insight into her mentor as the faithful doctor had into Holmes. The victim in Mrs. Hudson’s eighth case is arms dealer Charles Belladonna, whose death is originally ruled accidental. The plot is thickened by the inheritance of the title. The beneficiary is son Paul, left on the industrialist’s doorstep as an infant more than 20 years ago, current location unknown. Holmes and Watson are far from insignificant characters. Their highbrow conjectures on the case play drolly against Mrs. Hudson’s more conversationally delivered deductions. Holmesians will take pleasure in the many references to characters and places from the original stories as Davies expands rather than contradicts Doyle’s world. Although the labyrinthine course of the plot can be confusing, the tale is kept afloat by the delicious character portraits of numerous people of interest, whose juicy names—Mrs. Beer, Old Rudge, Mr. Rumbelow—often sound more like Dickens than Doyle. A handful of characters are based on real people whose histories are unpacked in a concluding historical note.