Mystery Girl
by David Gordon (New Harvest)
Some things are inexplicable. The human heart is one. Los Angeles is another. In his latest whodunit, Gordon (“The Serialist”) takes on both with an LA noir reminiscent of Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy. Recovering from both a failed marriage and a failed career as an experimental novelist, Sam Kornberg takes a job as an assistant to a private eye. In his first assignment, he must track a mystery woman through LaLa land psych wards and late-night jaunts to Mexico.
Nearer Home
by Joy Castro (Thomas Dunne Books)
Waiting for the new season of “Treme”? Castro’s second post-Katrina New Orleans crime novel may help you pass the time. As the story opens, Times-Picayune crime reporter Nola Cespedes — introduced in 2012’s “Hell or High Water” — is on her morning run and, this being the Big Easy, she stumbles over a dead body. Also in NoLa style, the body happens to belong to her former Tulane professor. Set during the city’s annual Jazz Fest, this novel strikes just the right note.
Pilgrim’s Wilderness
A True Story of Faith and Madness on the Alaska Frontier
by Tom Kizzia (Crown)
When Papa Pilgrim moved his wife and 15 children to the Alaska frontier town of McCarthy, in 2002, neighbors initially embraced him as the embodiment of the American homespun ideal. But within weeks, “Papa” was bulldozing a mountain road to his compound deep in the largest national park in the US, jeopardizing the town and the ecosystem. Eventually, Alaskans discovered that the Pilgrim patriarch was Robert Hale, the huckster son of a rich Texas family with connections to Hollywood and J. Edgar Hoover — but not before a crazed manhunt that brought the 49th state to its knees.
The Stench of Honolulu
A Tropical Adventure
by Jack Handey (Grand Central Publishing)
If Carl Hiaasen left Florida for Hawaii with Indiana Jones, and maybe dropped a little acid, the result might be something like this zany novel. “Deep Thoughts” scribe and former “SNL” writer Handey gives us a narrator nicknamed Slurps and his pal, Don, who are in search of the Golden Monkey, with a treasure map from their travel agent. Handey’s Hawaii is fulled with bums, prostitutes, dried gekkos (instead of beer nuts at local bars), pirates, pitchfork-wielding locals, Turtle People and plenty of LOL situations.
What You Want is in the Limo
On the Road with Led Zeppelin, Alice Cooper, and the Who in 1973, the Year the Sixties Died and the Modern Rock Star Was Born
by Michael Walker (Speigel & Grau)
For Walker (“Laurel Canyon”), 1973 is a turning point in popular music — the border between hippie-ethos ’60s rock ’n’ roll and conspicuous-consumption excess ’70s rock. “All of which makes it essential,” he writes, “to dust off the metaphorical coke mirror, rouse the groupie passed out in the Holiday Inn of the Mind, and make sense of this chaotic, hillarious, decadent . . . year in American popular culture.” This he does through the huge stadium and arena tours of the title bands.