Not long after Jordan Vance loses her job at a strip club for kicking someone who got handsy, a stranger tries to kill her in a grocery store parking lot. Enter professional killer Dennis, who intervenes with efficient brutality and saves her life. As he and Jordan drive to safety in her car—with the body of her recent assailant in the trunk—Dennis reveals that he’s been hired to protect her from Iranian general Qasim Vahidi, who wants to use her as leverage to keep her father, Michael, from revealing his crimes. This comes as news to Jordan, who thought both her parents were killed in a car accident years ago. It turns out that her dad was not merely an engineer, but also a consultant to foreign governments; the accident was an attempt by Gen. Vahidi’s operatives to silence Michael, who was a witness to some of the dictator’s horrific acts. Somehow Michael survived the accident, however, and he’s recently resurfaced. Now Dennis, a freelance operative for the British government, is on a mission to keep Jordan safe. Hotchkiss maintains a consistent pace, grabbing the reader from the opening brawl. Jordan, driven by revenge and a desperate need for freedom, appealingly refuses to be a passive victim and instead seizes the opportunity to form a lethal but lasting partnership with her protector. It’s satisfying to watch an underestimated protagonist get the better of heartless, misogynistic predators. Dennis initially inhabits the cliche of the stoic hit man: “This man had just killed another man in front of me, with the casual precision of someone dusting crumbs off their shirt.” As the story goes on, though, his heart of gold eventually overrides his professional demeanor. The romantic dynamic with Jordan is particularly refreshing in that she chooses not to hide behind Dennis; she’s a formidable character who uses his protective instincts to achieve her own violent ends.

With little narrative structure to constrain her, Woodward is free to wander her own thoughts and emotions, tracing the scars death leaves behind. This is a strange catalogue of things imagined amid painful feelings, all intertwined in a surprisingly bottled up package. Nominally a novel but in execution a keen synthesis of fact and fiction, the book takes the form of 36 micro essays and stories presented alphabetically by title, from “Afterlife” and “Birds in Art” through “Elton John,” “Insects,” “Rye Crackers,” and “Xyz.” Death hangs over what narrative there is, as in the title story, whose narrator admits to having troubling visions of her own demise. She’d lost her troubled sister, Vicky, who died from a degenerative illness three weeks earlier. The other narrative thread involves a U.S. Army experiment conducted over Minneapolis in 1950 that caked the city in cadmium to simulate a nuclear attack. Punctuated by tiny fictions and brief, unsettling reflections on her sister, the narrator also touches on the works of novelist John O’Hara, generational wreckage caused by Black Beauty, and the nature of romance in Shulamith Firestone’s Dialectic of Sex. In one essay, a poet ponders the nature of words, while another essay asks what it means to eat insects, and a third remarks on the casual sexism of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Not that the book isn’t funny from time to time: Sylvia Plath’s legacy is deemed “a fitting arc for a poet’s life: struggle, success, marriage, extinction.” In another note, the narrator drily comments, “This shows you how generally inappropriate my reactions are to the backbone of my society.” By the time she talks at any length about her sister—“I wasn’t going to feel sorry for her. I wasn’t sorry”—readers may not know whether to believe her or not.

Genevieve (Genna) Summerford, a young psychotherapist from a socially prominent family, and her beau, Simon Shaw, a captain in the Tammany political machine and the proprietor of a fledgling horse farm in upstate New York, are at an auction in the City, where Simon’s first yearling is up for bid. While they’re celebrating Fair Corner Farm’s first successful sale, Genna’s longtime friend, Bartie Matheson, learns that his oyster business–owning father, Edgar, has just died in an accidental fall down the stairs. Within several days of the funeral, Bartie and his brother, Ned, have their grief-stricken mother placed in a private sanitarium. When Genna, under the guise of a family medical consultant, visits their mother, she realizes that not only has May been misdiagnosed as a hysteric, but also that Edgar’s fatal plunge involves some serious questions. As she delves more deeply into the oyster industry on Long Island Sound, she discovers that the business is rife with rivalries, thievery, and unsavory machinations that could point to murder. Threaded throughout Overholt’s intriguing cozy mystery (part of the Dr. Genevieve Summerford Mysteries series) are Genna’s and Simon’s painful backstories and the ongoing challenges of their socially unconventional relationship. She’s of high breeding, while he’s a Catholic Irish immigrant who once worked as her father’s stable boy: “pedigree isn’t everything,” he pointedly remarks to a blue-blooded horse fancier. While low on dramatic tension, the novel firmly confronts the endemic mistreatment of female patients by the medical community and misogynistic attitudes toward female physicians. The most fascinating element is the author’s intricate depiction of the surprising complexities of the oyster industry on Long Island Sound. The novel is breezily narrated by Genna, whose voice reveals a woman who knows her own mind and is determined to stand up to family and societal constraints.

Michael Harrier is no stranger to violence: At just 8 years old, he witnessed his white supremacist father murder his mother, an incident that sparked a lifetime of guilt and self-harm. After honing his own violent tendencies hunting poachers on the plains of Africa as a teenager, the adult Michael resides in California and makes a living as an assassin-for-hire with one rule: he will only kill those he is “certain to see in Hell.” His violent but simple routine comes crashing down when he rescues Chensea Gray, a former runner for a gambling ring who knows too much. As Michael tries to help Chensea find a way out of her predicament, he must also complete the most unusual assignment of his career: murder a priest guilty of molestation and make it look like God’s divine judgment. All the while, a nosy detective gets closer to uncovering his violent deeds. Michael finds himself struggling with the rules he has made and quickly running out of time to make things right. Cary has crafted an absorbing thriller that piles on the twists and turns before arriving at a brutally shocking conclusion. Despite a brief scene where unnamed fighters are unfortunately referred to simply by their race (“Two men standing, the Asian and his bald sidekick”), the narrative voice maintains just the right amount of smoothness and snappiness to move things along. The real standout element is the character of Michael; haunted by his past, he is a morally gray character with a death wish—in other words, a delightfully complex protagonist whom readers will alternately love and loathe. The novel is both a nuanced and action-packed study of generational trauma and violence.

To commemorate 75 years of the publishing house Thames & Hudson, historian Nyburg contributes three essays chronicling its evolution from its founding in 1949 to the present. From the start, Austrian émigré Walter Neurath and his partner, Eva Feuchtwang, aimed to produce a “museum without walls”: beautiful and affordable illustrated books on arts and culture. They chose to name their company after two important rivers, in London and New York, nodding to their international aspirations. Their inaugural volume, published in 1950, was English Cathedrals. Early partnerships with the American publisher Abrams and the French publisher Fernand Hazan expanded their list, and more international alliances followed; the company eventually had offices around the world. Titles often were suggested by the many cultural figures who served as T&H’s eyes and ears. As their publication of art books grew—100 titles about Picasso alone—so did their reputation for the high quality of their reproductions. Nyburg discusses the many series they developed over the years: Man and Myth, edited by Joseph Campbell; The Past in the Present, edited by archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes; World of Art, edited by noted art historian Herbert Read; Art and Imagination; and the Library of European Civilization, among scores more on architecture, photography, biography, design, music, and fashion. After Neurath’s death in 1967, T&H was led by his son, Thomas, along with his daughter, Constance, and Feuchtwang; Thomas stepped down in 2005, leaving two daughters in key positions in a company that had expanded both in England and abroad. Alert to cultural and technological changes, T&H titles came to include topics as diverse as countercultural movements and chocolate. The visually stunning volume contains 2,000 illustrations, 1,800 in color.