"Electric Barracuda"

New from HarperCollins: Electric Barracuda by Tim Dorsey.

About the book, from the publisher:

Serge Storms, that loveable thermonuclear vigilante and one-stop-Florida-trivia-shop, has been leaving corpses strewn across the Sunshine State for more than a decade. The authorities—especially one tenacious state agent—have begun to notice the exponential body count, and send a police task force to track down Serge. Could his luck finally have run out?

Meanwhile, armed with his perpetually baked sidekick, Coleman, Serge decides to blitz the state and resurrect his Internet travel-advice website—which, of course, must be the finest and the final word on trekking the Sunshine State. To up the ante, Serge concocts a theme vacation for his cyberspace audience. And that theme? You, too, can experience Florida through the eyes of a fugitive.

Off they go blogging along a getaway route through the state's most remote bayous, back roads, and bars, where the number of cadavers begin stacking up like Serge's website hits. And in the middle of all his make-believe close brushes, Serge finally wises up to his pursuers and realizes that the manic gumball rally is genuinely on "in the tradition of the great American chase movie."

Clues and questions mount:

* Who are all the women being photographed naked in the swamp?

* What made Coleman draw on his face with magic markers?

* Where is the cruise-to-nowhere taking its drunk prisoners?

* When was the last time a Civil War reenactment involved a sports car?

But Serge also has some personal business to tidy up. His grandfather's old Miami Beach gang suddenly had their life savings wiped out, and there's a good bet it was no accident. Too much action for Serge to juggle? Not when it all dovetails nicely into his Secret Master Plan. And especially if it involves Serge's favorite new obsession: tracking Al Capone's little-known escapades in the Everglades.

So gas up the car, say good-bye to the relatives, and join Serge on the lam as he drives straight for the deepest bowels of Florida to unravel the final mysteries of Electric Barracuda.

Visit Tim Dorsey's website.

The Page 69 Test: Atomic Lobster.

"Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite"

New from Princeton University Press: Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind by Robert Kurzban.

About the book, from the publisher:

We're all hypocrites. Why? Hypocrisy is the natural state of the human mind.

Robert Kurzban shows us that the key to understanding our behavioral inconsistencies lies in understanding the mind's design. The human mind consists of many specialized units designed by the process of evolution by natural selection. While these modules sometimes work together seamlessly, they don't always, resulting in impossibly contradictory beliefs, vacillations between patience and impulsiveness, violations of our supposed moral principles, and overinflated views of ourselves.

This modular, evolutionary psychological view of the mind undermines deeply held intuitions about ourselves, as well as a range of scientific theories that require a "self" with consistent beliefs and preferences. Modularity suggests that there is no "I." Instead, each of us is a contentious "we"--a collection of discrete but interacting systems whose constant conflicts shape our interactions with one another and our experience of the world.

In clear language, full of wit and rich in examples, Kurzban explains the roots and implications of our inconsistent minds, and why it is perfectly natural to believe that everyone else is a hypocrite.

Visit the official website for Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite.

"Heart of the City"

New from Da Capo Press: Heart of the City: Nine Stories of Love and Serendipity on the Streets of New York by Ariel Sabar.

About the book, from the publisher:

“The couples in this book hail from across America and the world. Most don’t live in New York City. Some never did. What mattered to me was that they met there, in one of its iconic public places. Each of the nine stories begins just before that chance meeting—when they are strangers, oblivious to how, in moments, their lives will irrevocably change.”
—from the Introduction

The handsome Texas sailor who offers dinner to a runaway in Central Park. The Midwestern college girl who stops a cop in Times Square for restaurant advice. The Brooklyn man on a midnight subway who helps a weary tourist find her way to Chinatown. The Columbia University graduate student who encounters an unexpected object of beauty at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

A public place in the world’s greatest city. A chance meeting of strangers. A marriage. Heart of the City tells the remarkable true stories of nine ordinary couples—from the 1940s to the present—whose matchmaker was the City of New York.

Intrigued by the romance of his own parents, who met in Washington Square Park, award-winning author Ariel Sabar set off on a far-ranging search for other couples who married after first meeting in one of New York City’s iconic public spaces. Sabar conjures their big-city love stories in novel-like detail, drawing us into the hearts of strangers just as their lives are about to change forever.

In setting the stage for these surprising, funny, and moving tales, Sabar, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, takes us on a fascinating tour of the psychological research into the importance of place in how—and whether—people meet and fall in love.

Heart of the City is a paean to the physical city as matchmaker, a tribute to the power of chance, and an eloquent reminder of why we must care about the design of urban spaces.

Learn more about the author and his work at Ariel Sabar's website and blog.

Ariel Sabar covered the 2008 U.S. presidential campaigns for the Christian Science Monitor and is an award-winning former staff writer for the Baltimore Sun and the Providence (RI) Journal. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, The Washington Monthly, Mother Jones, Moment, Christianity Today and other publications.

The Page 99 Test: My Father’s Paradise.

"Alone Together"

New from Basic Books: Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other by Sherry Turkle.

About the book, from the publisher:

Consider Facebook — it's human contact, only easier to engage with and easier to avoid. Developing technology promises closeness. Sometimes it delivers, but much of our modern life leaves us less connected with people and more connected to simulations of them.

In Alone Together, MIT technology and society professor Sherry Turkle explores the power of our new tools and toys to dramatically alter our social lives. It's a nuanced exploration of what we are looking for — and sacrificing — in a world of electronic companions and social networking tools, and an argument that, despite the hand-waving of today's self-described prophets of the future, it will be the next generation who will chart the path between isolation and connectivity.

Visit Sherry Turkle's website.

"Other Eyes"

New from Forge Books: Other Eyes by Barbara D'Amato.

About the book, from the publisher:

Blue Eriksen is a famous forensic archaeologist based at Northwestern University. She and her team are traveling the globe, testing mummies to research the use of hallucinogens in the development of ancient religions. Armed with evidence from ancient peoples, Blue has become convinced that psilocybin--a hallucinogen derived from mushrooms--can prevent or cure drug addiction. She hopes to develop testing and treatment centers.

Leeuwarden Associates is the cover name for a deeply secret international organization that facilitates the production, delivery, and sale of illegal drugs worldwide, much as OPEC facilitates the sale of oil. Leeuwarden considers Blue a long-term threat and sends Felix Hacker--one of their enforcers--to kill her. Blue has no idea she's being stalked and prepares for a dig high in the Peruvian mountains...

Visit Barbara D'Amato's website.

"The KenKen Killings"

New from Minotaur/Thomas Dunne Books: The KenKen Killings: A Puzzle Lady Mystery by Parnell Hall.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Puzzle Lady just can’t stay out of trouble. When the late Chester T. Markowitz, a man she never met, leaves $10,000 to his beloved wife, Cora Felton, the Puzzle Lady can’t help cashing the check. Quicker than you can say legal proceedings, Cora’s least favorite ex-husband, Melvin, shows up in Bakerhaven with an attorney and a young bimbo, demanding that her alimony be terminated on the grounds she remarried.

When a key witness in the alimony hearing gets murdered, a KenKen puzzle is left at the scene of the crime. Is someone trying to tell Cora something? Before she can find out, she runs into more murders, more puzzles (both KenKen and crossword) and a murder weapon that seems to point to Melvin as the killer! At least it might have, if Cora hadn’t suppressed it.

Does the Puzzle Lady still have feelings for the scoundrel she once married? Don’t ask. She might kill you!

This twelfth in the Puzzle Lady series is sure to please fans, and make some new ones.

Learn more about the book at the author's website.

The Page 69 Test: Hitman.

"The Best Laid Plans"

New from Ballantine Books: The Best Laid Plans by Lynn Schnurnberger.

About the book, from the publisher:

From Lynn Schnurnberger, bestselling co-author of Mine Are Spectacular! and The Botox Diaries, comes a novel of big secrets, family ties, and a reminder that sometimes The Best Laid Plans can lead to delightful surprises.

Tru Newman is one of the Upper East Side “M&Ms”—the wealthy stay-at-home moms who are into personal Maintenance and Mothering. Having been raised by a beauty queen mother who constantly picked on her, Tru loves looking after her investment banker husband, Peter, and their twin teen daughters. But her perfect world spins off its axis the night Tru throws a charity benefit and discovers that Peter’s been out of work for three months. Even worse, the family’s been living on a house of cards—specifically, Visa and Amex—that’s about to collapse.

Suze Orman tells Tru to “Get a job!” But doing what? When Tru’s best friend, Sienna Post, loses her position as an anchor on the local nightly news, the two hatch a profitable if illegal plan: They’ll open an escort service with “working girls” all over the age of forty. Modeling themselves on Carla Bruni (“after she married the president of France, not before, when she was dating Mick Jagger”), their smart, sexy, seasoned escorts become a big hit with a roster of thirty-year-old clients.

If only Tru’s legit life could fall so easily into place: Her husband’s new job has him working side by side with a flirtatious neighbor, her fourteen-year-old twins are competing over a two-timing, Clearasil-using Casanova, and after suffering a heart attack in her bodybuilding class, Tru’s hypercritical mother moves in with her. Not to mention that the gossip columns get wind that Tru and Sienna’s “temp agency” isn’t on the up-and-up—and the DA is on their case.

But for the savvy and spirited Tru, these new obstacles bring unexpected benefits—from Geisha facials, to massage toys that are “better than chocolate,” to the realization that at midlife, she’s more comfortable than ever before in her own skin and more grateful for all that she has. By turns touching and laugh-out-loud funny, this is a must-read for every woman who knows it’s never too late to make a fresh start.

Visit Lynn Schnurnberger's website.

"Smoking Typewriters"

New from Oxford University Press: Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America by John McMillian.

About the book, from the publisher:

How did the New Left uprising of the 1960s happen? What caused millions of young people-many of them affluent and college educated-to suddenly decide that American society needed to be completely overhauled?

In Smoking Typewriters , historian John McMillian shows that one answer to these questions can be found in the emergence of a dynamic underground press in the 1960s. Following the lead of papers like the Los Angeles Free Press, the East Village Other, and the Berkeley Barb, young people across the country launched hundreds of mimeographed pamphlets and flyers, small press magazines, and underground newspapers. New, cheaper printing technologies democratized the publishing process and by the decade's end the combined circulation of underground papers stretched into the millions. Though not technically illegal, these papers were often genuinely subversive, and many of those who produced and sold them-on street-corners, at poetry readings, gallery openings, and coffeehouses-became targets of harassment from local and federal authorities. With writers who actively participated in the events they described, underground newspapers captured the zeitgeist of the '60s, speaking directly to their readers, and reflecting and magnifying the spirit of cultural and political protest. McMillian pays special attention to the ways underground newspapers fostered a sense of community and played a vital role in shaping the New Left's highly democratic "movement culture."

Deeply researched and eloquently written, Smoking Typewriters captures all the youthful idealism and vibrant tumult of the 1960s as it delivers a brilliant reappraisal of the origins and development of the New Left rebellion.

Visit John McMillian's website.

"J. D. Salinger: A Life"

New from Random House: J. D. Salinger: A Life by Kenneth Slawenski.

About the book, from the publisher:

One of the most popular and mysterious figures in American literary history, J. D. Salinger eluded fans and journalists for most of his life. Now comes a new biography that Peter Ackroyd in The Times of London calls “energetic and magnificently researched”—a book from which “a true picture of Salinger emerges.” Filled with new information and revelations—garnered from countless interviews, letters, and public records—J. D. Salinger presents an extraordinary life that spanned nearly the entire twentieth century.

Kenneth Slawenski explores Salinger’s privileged youth, long obscured by misrepresentation and rumor, revealing the brilliant, sarcastic, vulnerable son of a disapproving father and doting mother and his entrance into a social world where Gloria Vanderbilt dismissively referred to him as “a Jewish boy from New York.” Here too are accounts of Salinger’s first broken heart—Eugene O’Neill’s daughter, Oona, left him for the much older Charlie Chaplin—and the devastating World War II service (“a living hell”) of which he never spoke and which haunted him forever.

J. D. Salinger features all the dazzle of this author’s early writing successes, his dramatic encounters with luminaries from Ernest Hemingway to Laurence Olivier to Elia Kazan, his surprising office intrigues with famous New Yorker editors and writers, and the stunning triumph of The Catcher in the Rye, which would both make him world-famous and hasten his retreat into the hills of New Hampshire.

Whether it’s revealing the facts of his hasty, short-lived first marriage or his lifelong commitment to Eastern religion, which would dictate his attitudes toward sex, nutrition, solitude, and creativity, J. D. Salinger is this unique author’s unforgettable story in full—one that no lover of literature can afford to miss.

Visit the Dead Caulfields website.

"Cold Shot to the Heart"

New from Minotaur Books: Cold Shot to the Heart by Wallace Stroby.

About the book, from the publisher:

Crissa Stone is a career criminal. A complete pro, she never works too close to her New York City home, rarely signs on with the same crew, and never rushes a job. These are the rules that have kept her from getting caught, from doing time. They’re the rules her mentor and lover taught her, rules he didn’t follow as closely as he should’ve. Now he’s up for parole, and Crissa needs to come up with some real money real fast to help grease the wheels.

Word is that there’s an illegal card game set for less than a week from now. The take? As much as seven figures. Desperate, Crissa slaps a plan and a crew together.

It’s robbery, not murder. But when one of her crew loses his cool and they have to abandon the plan, she catches the attention of Eddie the Saint. A hit man recently released from prison, Eddie is no less of a pro than Crissa, and he could use the work, not to mention all that money.

One of the most talented writers working in crime fiction today, Wallace Stroby has written a tight, propulsive story that will hold readers captive until well after all the crooks have fled the scene.

Learn more about the author and his novels at the official Wallace Stroby website and The Heartbreak Blog.

The Page 69 Test: Gone 'til November.