The Good Thief Hannah Tinti (Dial Press, 9780385337465, $15.00) Richly imagined, gothically spooky, and replete with the ingenious storytelling ability of a born novelist, The Good Thief introduces one of the most appealing young heroes in contemporary fiction and ratifies Hannah Tinti as one of our most exciting new talents. Twelve year-old Ren is missing his left hand. How it was lost is a mystery that Ren has been trying to solve for his entire life, as well as who his parents are, and why he was abandoned as an infant at Saint Anthony’s Orphanage for boys. He longs for a family to call his own and is terrified of the day he will be sent alone into the world. But then a young man named Benjamin Nab appears, claiming to be Ren’s long-lost brother, and his convincing tale of how Ren lost his hand and his parents persuades the monks at the orphanage to release the boy and to give Ren some hope. But is Benjamin really who he says he is? Journeying through a New England of whaling towns and meadowed farmlands, Ren is introduced to a vibrant world of hardscrabble adventure filled with outrageous scam artists, grave robbers, and petty thieves. If he stays, Ren becomes one of them. If he goes, he’s lost once again. As Ren begins to find clues to his hidden parentage he comes to suspect that Benjamin not only holds the key to his future, but to his past as well. RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER JOE DRABYAK STAFF COMMENT: This lively Dickensian-style tale with a wonderful cast of characters stands as a very impressive fiction debut. – Joe Drabyak

Mudbound Hillary Jordan (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 9781565126770, $13.95) In Jordan's prize-winning debut, prejudice takes many forms, both subtle and brutal. It is 1946, and city-bred Laura McAllan is trying to raise her children on her husband's Mississippi Delta farm – a place she finds foreign and frightening. In the midst of the family's struggles, two young men return from the war to work the land. Jamie McAllan, Laura's brother-in-law, is everything her husband is not – charming, handsome, and haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eldest son of the black sharecroppers who live on the McAllan farm, has come home with the shine of a war hero. But no matter his bravery in defense of his country, he is still considered less than a man in the Jim Crow South. It is the unlikely friendship of these brothers-in-arms that drives this powerful novel to its inexorable conclusion. The men and women of each family relate their versions of events and we are drawn into their lives as they become players in a tragedy on the grandest scale. As Kingsolver says of Hillary Jordan, "Her characters walked straight out of 1940s Mississippi and into the part of my brain where sympathy and anger and love reside, leaving my heart racing. They are with me still." RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBERS JOE DRABYAK AND KATHY SIMONEAUX STAFF COMMENT: Mudbound is a story as dark and rich as the soil of the Mississippi delta. Debut novelist Hillary Jordan herein explores the inequities of race through the experiences of two families – one black and one white – as they toil upon the shared land of a Deep South farm in the days following the end of World War II. Heartfelt and haunting, this is a splendid work that transported me into that highly charged and deeply emotional terrain first traveled in a reading of To Kill a Mockingbird some 40 years ago. Simply stunning! – Joe Drabyak

Dear American Airlines Jonathan Miles ( Mariner Books, 9780547237909, $13.95) Sometimes the planes don’t fly on time. Bennie Ford, a fifty-three-year-old failed poet turned translator, is traveling to his estranged daughter’s wedding when his flight is canceled. Stuck with thousands of fuming passengers in the purgatory of O’Hare airport, he watches the clock tick and realizes that he will miss the ceremony. Frustrated, irate, and helpless, Bennie does the only thing he can: he starts to write a letter. But what begins as a hilariously excoriating demand for a refund soon becomes a lament for a life gone awry, for years misspent, talent wasted, and happiness lost. A man both sinned against and sinning, Bennie writes in a voice that is a marvel of lacerating wit, heart-on-sleeve emotion, and wide-ranging erudition, underlined by a consistent ground note of regret for the actions of a lifetime – and made all the more urgent by the fading hope that if he can just make it to the wedding, he might have a chance to do something right. A margarita blend of outrage, wicked humor, vulnerability, intelligence, and regret, Dear American Airlines gives new meaning to the term “airport novel” and announces the emergence of major new talent in American fiction. RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER JOE DRABYAK STAFF COMMENT: Estranged from his only daughter for some twenty years, Benjamin R. Ford is overjoyed when he receives an invitation to her West Coast nuptials. However, in transit to the happy event, American Airlines strands him in the purgatory of Chicago’s O’Hare. Vexed by this development, Ben spends his time composing a 200 page, ferocious letter of complaint to the air carrier. In the course of this missive readers come to learn of his life, loves, and – oddly enough – the world of translated literature. While Benjamin Ford might remain earthbound, author Jonathan Miles definitely soars in this frantic and funny debut! – Joe Drabyak

The Little Giant of Aberdeen County Tiffany Baker ( Grand Central Publishing, 9780446194228, $13.99) When Truly Plaice's mother was pregnant, the town of Aberdeen joined together in betting how record-breaking huge the baby boy would ultimately be. The girl who proved to be Truly paid the price of her enormity; her father blamed her for her mother's death in childbirth, and was totally ill equipped to raise either this giant child or her polar opposite sister Serena Jane, the epitome of feminine perfection. When he, too, relinquished his increasingly tenuous grip on life, Truly and Serena Jane are separated – Serena Jane to live a life of privilege as the future May Queen and Truly to live on the outskirts of town on the farm of the town sad-sack, the subject of constant abuse and humiliation at the hands of her peers. Serena Jane's beauty proves to be her greatest blessing and her biggest curse, for it makes her the obsession of classmate Bob Bob Morgan, the youngest in a line of Robert Morgans who have been doctors in Aberdeen for generations. Though they have long been the pillars of the community, the earliest Robert Morgan married the town witch, Tabitha Dyerson, and the location of her fabled shadow book – containing mysterious secrets for healing and darker powers – has been the subject of town gossip ever since. Bob Bob Morgan, one of Truly's biggest tormentors, does the unthinkable to claim the prize of Serena Jane, and changes the destiny of all Aberdeen from there on. When Serena Jane flees town and a loveless marriage to Bob Bob, it is Truly who must become the woman of a house that she did not choose and mother to her eight-year-old nephew Bobbie. Truly's brother-in-law is relentless and brutal; he criticizes her physique and the limitations of her health as a result, and degrades her more than any one human could bear. It is only when Truly finds her calling – the ability to heal illness with herbs and naturopathic techniques – hidden within the folds of Robert Morgan's family quilt, that she begins to regain control over her life and herself. Unearthed family secrets, however, will lead to the kind of betrayal that eventually break the Morgan family apart forever, but Truly's reckoning with her own demons allows for both an uprooting of Aberdeen County, and the possibility of love in unexpected places. RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER JOE DRABYAK STAFF COMMENT: This fiction debut will surely gets my vote as one of the best of 2009. The extremely large Truly Plaice will take up a big space in both your head and your heart. – Joe Drabyak

Lottery Patricia Wood (Berkley, 9780425222201, $14.00) Perry's IQ is only 76, but he's not stupid. His grandmother taught him everything he needs to know to survive: She taught him to write things down so he won't forget them. She taught him to play the lottery every week. And, most important, she taught him whom to trust. When Gram dies, Perry is left orphaned and bereft at the age of thirty-one. Then his weekly Washington State Lottery ticket wins him 12 million dollars, and he finds he has more family than he knows what to do with. Peopled with characters both wicked and heroic who leap off the pages, Lottery is a deeply satisfying, gorgeously rendered novel about trust, loyalty, and what distinguishes us as capable.

Free Food for Millionaires Min Jin Lee (Grand Central Publishing, 9780446699853, $13.99) Casey Han's four years at Princeton gave her many things, "But no job and a number of bad habits." Casey's parents, who live in Queens, are Korean immigrants working in a dry cleaner, desperately trying to hold on to their culture and their identity. Their daughter, on the other hand, has entered into rarified American society via scholarships. But after graduation, Casey sees the reality of having expensive habits without the means to sustain them. As she navigates Manhattan, we see her life and the lives around her, culminating in a portrait of New York City and its world of haves and have-nots. Free Food for Millionaires offers up a fresh exploration of the complex layers we inhabit both in society and within ourselves. Inspired by 19th century novels such as Vanity Fair and Middlemarch, Min Jin Lee examines maintaining one's identity within changing communities in what is her remarkably assured debut.

Then We Came to the End Joshua Ferris (Back Bay Books, 9780316016391, $13.99) No one knows us quite the same way as the men and women who sit beside us in department meetings and crowd the office refrigerator with their labeled yogurts. Every office is a family of sorts, and the ad agency Joshua Ferris brilliantly depicts in his debut novel is family at its strangest and best, coping with a business downturn in the time-honored way: through gossip, pranks, and increasingly frequent coffee breaks. With a demon's eye for the details that make life worth noticing, Joshua Ferris tells a true and funny story about survival in life's strangest environment – the one we pretend is normal five days a week.

The Marriage of True Minds Stephen Evans (Unbridled Books, 9781932961461, $14.95) Together as husband and wife, Nick Ward and Lena Grant ran a successful boutique law firm in Minneapolis, vanquishing all their legal foes side by side. When Nick’s charmingly erratic behavior finally became too much for Lena, the marriage and the partnership ended. But – like C. K. Dexter Haven and Tracy Lord – it seems that Lena and Nick just can’t quite separate. Lena works out fiercely, keeps her dates with the boring and conventional Preston Winter, and daily battles on against corporate greed. But Nick’s not doing so well. Still brilliant and devilishly clever, he is now also almost crazy. He is prone to fantasy and the big gesture, and he engages frantically in guerrilla activism for the sake of animals wild and domestic. Nick doesn’t make plans; he has visions. And eventually his antics put him back into Lena’s hands. While she tries to navigate the legal waters into which he’s thrown them, Nick veers out of her wake and into the midst of a strange set of companions, including Oscar, his psychiatric attendant and Action Comics collector; Ralph and Alice Wilson, the rebellious managers of the city animal shelter; and an aging Russian hound named Wolfram. Often laugh-out-loud funny, with bright wit and brilliant machine-gun dialogue, The Marriage of True Minds sweetly explores modern love, undying idealism, and one cracked partnership that can’t be sundered – from without or from within. If you like screwball comedies, like BRINGING UP BABY and HIS GIRL FRIDAY, then you'll love The Marriage of True Minds!

The Interpretation of Murder Jed Rubenfeld (Picador, 9780312427054, $14.00) In this ingenious, suspenseful historical thriller, Sigmund Freud is drawn into the mind of a sadistic killer who is savagely attacking Manhattan’s wealthiest heiresses Inspired by Sigmund Freud’s only visit to America, The Interpretation of Murder is an intricate tale of murder and the mind’s most dangerous mysteries. It unfurls on a sweltering August evening in 1909 as Freud disembarks from the steamship George Washington, accompanied by Carl Jung, his rival and protégé. Across town, in an opulent apartment high above the city, a stunning young woman is found dangling from a chandelier – whipped, mutilated, and strangled. The next day, a second beauty – a rebellious heiress who scorns both high society and her less adventurous parents – barely escapes the killer. Yet Nora Acton, suffering from hysteria, can recall nothing of her attack. Asked to help her, Dr. Stratham Younger, America’s most committed Freudian analyst, calls in his idol, the Master himself, to guide him through the challenges of analyzing this high-spirited young woman whose family past has been as complicated as his own. The Interpretation of Murder leads readers from the salons of Gramercy Park, through secret passages, to Chinatown – even far below the currents of the East River where laborers are building the Manhattan Bridge. As Freud fends off a mysterious conspiracy to destroy him, Younger is drawn into an equally thrilling adventure that takes him deep into the subterfuges of the human mind. Richly satisfying, elegantly crafted, The Interpretation of Murder marks the debut of a brilliant, spectacularly entertaining new storyteller.

The Spellman Files Lisa Lutz (Pocket Books, 9781416594178, $7.99) Meet Isabel "Izzy" Spellman, private investigator. This twenty-eight-year-old may have a checkered past littered with romantic mistakes, excessive drinking, and creative vandalism; she may be addicted to Get Smart reruns and prefer entering homes through windows rather than doors – but the upshot is she's good at her job as a licensed private investigator with her family's firm, Spellman Investigations. Invading people's privacy comes naturally to Izzy. In fact, it comes naturally to all the Spellmans. If only they could leave their work at the office. To be a Spellman is to snoop on a Spellman; tail a Spellman; dig up dirt on, blackmail, and wiretap a Spellman. Part Nancy Drew, part Dirty Harry, Izzy walks an indistinguishable line between Spellman family member and Spellman employee. Duties include: completing assignments from the bosses, aka Mom and Dad (preferably without scrutiny); appeasing her chronically perfect lawyer brother (often under duress); setting an example for her fourteen-year-old sister, Rae (who's become addicted to "recreational surveillance"); and tracking down her uncle (who randomly disappears on benders dubbed "Lost Weekends"). But when Izzy's parents hire Rae to follow her (for the purpose of ascertaining the identity of Izzy's new boyfriend), Izzy snaps and decides that the only way she will ever be normal is if she gets out of the family business. But there's a hitch: she must take one last job before they'll let her go – a fifteen-year-old, ice-cold missing person case. She accepts, only to experience a disappearance far closer to home, which becomes the most important case of her life. The Spellman Files is the first novel in a winning and hilarious new series featuring the Spellman family in all its lovable chaos. STAFF COMMENTS: If you dipped into the DNA of Amy and David Sedaris, added a dollop of Lucille Ball’s genetic material and retained cartoonist Charles Addams to supervise the blending, the resulting creation would very much resemble this funny debut. Lisa Lutz has given us a rollicking tale concerning a sweet but dysfunctional family of private detectives who use their considerable spy craft to keep tabs on each other. There’s a lot of parental meddling, mayhem and mirth in this spirited mystery. – Joe Drabyak

Finn Jon Clinch  (Random House, 9780812977141, $14.00) In this masterful debut by a major new voice in fiction, Jon Clinch takes us on a journey into the history and heart of one of American literature’s most brutal and mysterious figures: Huckleberry Finn’s father. The result is a deeply original tour de force that springs from Twain’s classic novel but takes on a fully realized life of its own. Finn sets a tragic figure loose in a landscape at once familiar and mythic. It begins and ends with a lifeless body – flayed and stripped of all identifying marks – drifting down the Mississippi. The circumstances of the murder, and the secret of the victim’s identity, shape Finn’s story as they will shape his life and his death. Along the way Clinch introduces a cast of unforgettable characters: Finn’s terrifying father, known only as the Judge; his sickly, sycophantic brother, Will; blind Bliss, a secretive moonshiner; the strong and quick-witted Mary, a stolen slave who becomes Finn’s mistress; and of course young Huck himself. In daring to re-create Huck for a new generation, Clinch gives us a living boy in all his human complexity – not an icon, not a myth, but a real child facing vast possibilities in a world alternately dangerous and bright. Finn is a novel about race; about paternity in its many guises; about the shame of a nation recapitulated by the shame of one absolutely unforgettable family. Above all, Finn reaches back into the darkest waters of America’s past to fashion something compelling, fearless, and new. STAFF COMMENTS: By revisiting a single, haunting, enigmatic scene in Twain’s American classic, Clinch ventures into the heart of one of the most brutal figures in American literature – Huckleberry Finn’s father. This is a literary debut that flows like the Mississippi River – powerful, rich, and loamy – with surprising eddies into the mind and imagination. This wondrous volume is a fitting companion to the original work and a natural for book club discussions. – Joe Drabyak

White Ghost Girls Alice Greenway (Black Cat, 9780802170187, $13.00) Summer 1967. The turmoil of the Maoist revolution is spilling over into Hong Kong and causing unrest as war rages in neighboring Vietnam. White Ghost Girls is the story of Frankie and Kate, two American sisters living in a foreign land in a chaotic time. With their war-photographer father off in Vietnam, Marianne, their beautiful but remote mother, keeps the family close by, frightened of losing her husband to a mistress or the addiction of war itself. Although bound by a closeness of living overseas, the sisters could not be more different—Frankie pulses with curiosity and risk, while Kate is all eyes and ears. Marianne spends her days painting watercolors of the lush surroundings, leaving the girls largely unsupervised, while their Chinese nanny, Ah Bing, does her best to look after them. One day in a village market, they decide to explore—with tragic results. Immersed in the heat and color of Hong Kong, a city shimmering between sea and sky, it is a world of fishermen, junks, and unexplained bodies floating up in the sea, of plotting rebels, temple gods, and ghosts. In Alice Greenway’s exquisite gem of a novel, two girls tumble into their teenage years against an extraordinary backdrop both sensuous and dangerous. This astonishing literary debut is a tale of sacrifice and solidarity that gleams with the kind of intense, complicated love that only exists between sisters.

The Highest Tide Jim Lynch (Bloomsbury, 9781582346298, $13.95) One moonlit night, thirteen-year-old Miles O’Malley, a speed-reading, Rachel Carson-obsessed insomniac out looking for tidal specimens in Puget Sound, discovers a giant squid stranded on the beach. As the first person to see a giant squid alive, he finds himself hailed as a prophet. But Miles is really just a kid on the verge of growing up, infatuated with the girl next door, worried that his bickering parents will divorce, and fearful that everything, even the bay he loves, is shifting away from him. As the sea continues to offer up discoveries from its mysterious depths, Miles struggles to deal with the difficulties that attend the equally mysterious process of growing up. “A poignant coming-of-age story and an enchanting primer on the life aquatic. The Highest Tide is as crisp and clean as a cool dip into the water, and just about as refreshing.—Entertainment Weekly

The Madonnas of Leningrad Debra Dean (Harper Perennial, 9780060825317, $13.95) Bit by bit, the ravages of age are eroding Marina's grip on the everyday. An elderly Russian woman now living in America, she cannot hold on to fresh memories – the details of her grown children's lives, the approaching wedding of her grandchild – yet her distant past is miraculously preserved in her mind's eye. Vivid images of her youth in war-torn Leningrad arise unbidden, carrying her back to the terrible fall of 1941, when she was a tour guide at the Hermitage Museum and the German army's approach signaled the beginning of what would be a long, torturous siege on the city. As the people braved starvation, bitter cold, and a relentless German onslaught, Marina joined other staff members in removing the museum's priceless masterpieces for safekeeping, leaving the frames hanging empty on the walls to symbolize the artworks' eventual return. As the Luftwaffe's bombs pounded the proud, stricken city, Marina built a personal Hermitage in her mind – a refuge that would stay buried deep within her, until she needed it once more. . . .

Rattled Debra Galant (Griffin, 9780312366582, $13.95) Set in the fictional subdivision of Galapagos Estates, Rattled is about what happens when soccer moms, animal rights activists, dishonest real estate developers and endangered species fight for ascendancy in the rapidly developing New Jersey suburbs. All Heather wants there is a nice house. Well, a nice house, upgraded amenities and the best possible teacher for her 8-year-old son Connor, the Marquis de Sade of the third grade. Enter a timber rattlesnake, and Heather’s world turns topsy-turvy. Rattled is the fictional debut of former New York Times Jersey columnist Debra Galant, now editor of Baristanet.com. If Rattled is the perfect read for fans of Carl Hiaasen, Tom Perrotta, and Janet Evanovich.