Maureen Corrigan

The murder scene looked like something out of an Agatha Christie novel. That's the one thing that the multitudinous cast of witnesses, suspects and police detectives might agree on in We Keep the Dead Close, Becky Cooper's just published account of a murder at Harvard that took place in 1969 and remained unsolved until two years ago.

Jess Walter's sweeping new novel, which traces the adventures of two vagabond brothers, is set against the backdrop of the free speech demonstrations that erupted in Spokane, Wash., in 1909 and 1910.

Tana French's crime novel is a slow burn of a suspense story. It lulls readers into basking in the rough beauty of Western Ireland — before unspooling enough secrets and sins to fill an entire bog.

Leave the World Behind is atmospheric and prescient: Its rhythms of comedy alternating with shock and despair mimic so much of the rhythms of life right now. That's more than enough to make it a signature novel for this blasted year.

Acclaimed novelist Sue Miller's new book Monogamy is in part about how the dead can go on revealing themselves to the living. It's about a woman who discovers things about her husband after his death.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews the new memoir by celebrated southern pastry chef and writer Lisa Donovan whose essays in the magazine Food & Wine have won the James Beard award for food writing.

Alice Randall's new novel is a historical novel about the Black Bottom neighborhood of Detroit, once a thriving center of black-owned businesses and nightspots.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan remembers the veteran NYC newsman, who died Aug. 5, as "a tenement kid and high school drop out who never lost connection to where he came from."

Maureen Corrigan reviews two new books that could easily be overlooked, but shouldn't be.

Emma Donoghue's new novel "The Pull of the Stars," is set in a maternity ward in 1918 in Dublin, a city hollowed out by the flu, World War I and the 1916 Irish Uprising.