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Life Sentences By Laura Lippman William Morrow / 352 pages / $24.99 Cassandra Fallows must determine whether Calliope Jenkins killed her infant son. Fallows, the hero of the latest stand-alone mystery from best-selling author Laura Lippman, is a middle-aged writer who grew up in Northwest Baltimore. Brimming with bright chatter, Lippman's engaging standalone novel evokes nostalgia for 1960s and '70s Baltimore as it traverses neighborhoods and landmarks like Bolton Hill, Mount Vernon and Silber's Bakery.

Merciless By Richard Montanari The Day Will Come By Judy Clemens Poisoned Pen Press / 234 pages / $24.95 Stella Crown is not your typical farming lass - not when she owns a Harley and goes to see rock music as often as she can. The latter interest forms the backbone of her fourth appearance, equal parts traditional mystery and nuanced portrayal of the power of love and friendship to elevate and destroy. Stella drives into Philadelphia to catch the appearance of the Tom Copper Band and spend time with her friends Lucy and Lenny, due to be married the following week.

The Squandering of America How the Failure of Our Politics Undermines Our Prosperity By Robert Kuttner Alfred A. Knopf / 352 pages / $26.95 Before Jeremiah was a bullfrog, he was a prophet. Walking through the streets with a wooden yoke around his neck, he warned the Jews of Jerusalem that if they did not mend their evil ways, the Babylonians would besiege and burn their city. "You will go to them," God told Jeremiah, "but they will not listen to you." Ordered to "pray no more for his people," the "broken-hearted prophet" died in exile.

WASHINGTON -- Four months after the congressional page scandal rocked Capitol Hill and helped dash Republican hopes for holding their majorities in Congress, the House voted unanimously yesterday to expand the board that oversees the teenage interns and require that it meet regularly. The House voted 416-0 to reorganize the board so that it has three congressional members from each party, one parent of a page and one former page. The board would be responsible for oversight of the roughly 70 pages - usually 16-year-olds who spend a year running errands for members of Congress and their staffs while attending school in the nation's capital.

Origin By Diana Abu-Jaber Norton / 388 pages / $24 The Broken Shore By Peter Temple Farrar, Straus & Giroux / 356 pages / $24 Temple's previous efforts -- especially the Jack Irish novels -- amply illustrate why he's one of the best reasons to be thankful to Australia. But The Broken Shore takes his work to a richer, darker place, taking the conventions of crime novels and expanding them to incorporate the idiosyncrasies and unique traits of Temple's native country. In Joe Cashin, Temple fashions a man scarred raw from his experiences as a homicide detective who takes refuge in the small Australian coast island of his birth to escape.

Because a Fire Was in My Head By Lynn Stegner University of Nebraska Press / 273 pages / $24.95 Lynn Stegner, who was twice nominated for the National Book Award, looks to Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, and Scarlet O'Hara for her portrayal of the manipulative, unscrupulous, but needy temptress, Kate Riley, heroine of the novel Because a Fire Was in My Head. Like her literary predecessors, Kate cannot function without a man in her life, and for the life of her, she cannot choose the right man. Either the men don't share Kate's sexual proclivities and therefore cannot keep her interest, or they're too much like Kate and can beat her at her own game.

CONVERSATIONS WITH WOODY ALLEN Eric Lax Knopf / 416 pages / $30 Compiled over 36 years of interviews, conversations and experiences one could only glean from gaining Allen's confidence and respect, Conversations is essential reading for aspiring filmmakers and those who wish to eventually put finger to keyboard in hopes of telling a story, but it is no less intriguing for simple cinephiles. Broken into eight sections - "The Idea," "Writing It," "Casting, Actors and Acting," "Shooting, Sets, Locations," "Directing," "Editing," "Scoring" and "The Career" - Conversations details not only the creative process but also the psychic burden of the divide between comedy and drama.

Surveillance Jonathan Raban Pantheon / 258 pages / $24 Cross Lincoln Steffens on the Russian Revolution ("I have seen the future and it works") with Pogo ("We have met the enemy and he is us"), and you pretty much come out at Jonathan Raban's new novel. "I have met the future and it's the enemy and it's us," in other words. This is the dystopian theme of Surveillance, a current that does not so much run beneath the fiction as flood it. The compass virtually pre-empts the ship, eclipsing such features of an ocean trip as sunlight on cobalt waves, storm clouds on black ones, salt air, flying fish, seasickness and the onboard affair.

Suffer the Little Children By Donna Leon The Last Enemy By Grace Brophy Soho Press / 342 pages / $23 Assisi is the setting of Grace Brophy's evocative debut, which introduces Commissario Alessandro Cenni to the sleuthing scene - and to the malevolent, secret-laden Casati family, wrapped so tightly within one another that any expectation the reader might have of motive or guilt seems to change with every page turn. Cenni meets the Casatis as a result of the murder of American expat Rita Minelli, her body splayed on the floor of the family cemetery vault almost in vague parody of a sexual assault.

Harriet Tubman By Beverly Lowry Random House / 432 pages / $32 In 1822, Harriet Tubman, nee Araminta Ross, was born into slavery on a Maryland plantation. She came into the world not simply as her parents' issue but as someone else's property. Along with her siblings, she and her parents were chattel, nothing more. Regularly, the Ross family was splintered by the harsh commerce of slavery. The child known as Minty was routinely beaten by despotic owners - punishment for transgressions that were often minor and more often imaginary.

We Who Are Alive and Remain: Untold Stories From the Band of Brothers by Marcus Brotherton (Berkley, $24.95, 320 pages) On D-Day, Easy Company parachuted into Normandy and the Germans in a series of uphill battles. Twenty members of Easy Company recall their victories and defeats. Easy Company Soldier by Sgt. Don Malarkey (with Bob Welch; St. Martin's, $14.95, 304 pages) The paratrooper recalls the battles he and his fellow soldiers fought after landing in Normandy. Iwo Jima: World War II Veterans Remember the Greatest Battle of the Pacific by Larry Smith (W.W.

The Man's Book By Thomas Fink Little, Brown / 240 pages / $23.99 This "essential guide for the modern man," on sale May 6, is a compendium of stuff we guys ought to know in order to be credible. Such as: how to get a serious workout at home; rules of popular drinking games; essential shirts for the closet; knife-sharpening and meat-carving skills; and how to quantify beauty in women. What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20 By Tina Seeling HarperOne / 208 pages / $22.99 True, it's written by a woman (a Stanford University professor, no less)

Becoming Billie Holiday Poems by Carol Boston Weatherford, art by Floyd Cooper Wordsong / 117 pages / $19.95 These brief, first-person poems tell the story of Eleanora Fagan, who grew up impoverished on Durham Street in a rough East Baltimore neighborhood, yet became a world-renowned jazz singer. With little education and no vocal training, Billie Holiday (she changed her name when she began singing) had an obsessive love for jazz, an excellent ear for rhythm and a voice that was almost able to float.

If I Stay By Gayle Forman Dutton / 208 pages / $16.99 / ages 14 and older Gayle Forman takes on one of the darkest subjects that crops up in the mind of any thoughtful teenager: What makes life worth living? What would the world look like without me? And the ever-popular: How would people behave at my funeral? Dark subjects are a dime a dozen in young-adult literature. The striking thing about If I Stay is that Forman explores all these midnight questions through a most unusual character: a good girl.

A Tolerable Anarchy: Rebels, Reactionaries, and the Making of America's Freedom By Jedediah Purdy Alfred A. Knopf / 294 pages / $23.95 Jebediah Purdy's book is loosely about pushing the boundaries of liberty and searching out the common good, in pursuit of what John Adams called "the sensations of freedom," often as revealed in presidential rhetoric. Tracking the speeches of various U.S. presidents, he laments that "the divorce of civic identity from government, which Nixon set in motion, is nearly complete in Bush's speeches," and that in this conceptual shift, government "is the thing that went away and cleared the space now filled by private virtue."

Life Sentences By Laura Lippman William Morrow / 352 pages / $24.99 Cassandra Fallows must determine whether Calliope Jenkins killed her infant son. Fallows, the hero of the latest stand-alone mystery from best-selling author Laura Lippman, is a middle-aged writer who grew up in Northwest Baltimore. Brimming with bright chatter, Lippman's engaging standalone novel evokes nostalgia for 1960s and '70s Baltimore as it traverses neighborhoods and landmarks like Bolton Hill, Mount Vernon and Silber's Bakery.

All Other Nights By Dara Horn W.W. Norton & Co. / 384 pages / $24.95 A ll Other Nights is such an apparent departure from Dara Horn's previous work that when I learned what Horn was writing, I thought she might not be able to bring it off. I should have known better. Unlike Horn's excellent first novel, In the Image, and her jaw-dropping The World to Come, All Other Nights starts in the territory of historical thrillers. Jacob Rappaport, the son of a German-Jewish New York merchant, escapes marriage to a business partner's mentally handicapped daughter by joining the Union Army, which ropes him into cloak-and-dagger work.

When Royals Wore Ruffles by Chesley McLaren and Pamela Jaber Schwartz & Wade / 40 pages / $16.99 / ages 5-9 When Royals Wore Ruffles offers a historical look at the vagaries, extremes and pure fun of fashion. It comes in the form of an ABC book. The letter I, for example, stands for "Illegal Intruder." This page tells of "The Wig Snatchers," who, attracted by the jewels set in elaborate wig coifs, "would sneak up behind a lady's coach, cut a hole in the back, snatch the wig - and off they'd run!"

Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object By Kathleen Rooney University of Arkansas Press / 200 pages / $22.50 Aside from the thrill (and chill) of getting naked, there's not much to nude modeling. And yet for Kathleen Rooney, this experience has become the basis of a compelling memoir that blends observation, personal revelation and scholarly inquiry. A poet, professor and author of four other books, Rooney supplemented her income for six years as a nude model. As we watch her pose, Rooney examines nude modeling from every angle: historical, sociological and biographical.

What Color Is Your Parachute? 2009 By Richard Nelson Bolles Ten Speed Press / 407 pages / $18.95 The popular What Color Is Your Parachute? series started as a self-published, self-help book in 1970 when its author used the word "parachute" to mean career transitions. The book transitioned into annual commercial editions in 1972 and soon became the bible for job hunters. According to business lore, the phrase "golden parachute" appeared a decade or more later as a play on the book's title.