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1. The Quickie by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge. (Little, Brown, $27.99.) A police officer’s attempt to get back at her husband, whom she suspects of cheating on her, goes dangerously awry.

2. High Noon by Nora Roberts. (Putnam, $26.95.) A hostage negotiator must face down her unknown stalker.

3. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. [...]

1. Lone Survivor by Marcus Luttrell with Patrick Robinson. (Little, Brown, $24.99.) The only survivor of a Navy SEAL operation in northern Afghanistan describes the battle, his comrades and his courageous escape.

2. Quiet Strength by Tony Dungy with Nathan Whitaker. (Tyndale, $26.99.) A memoir by the first black coach to win a Super Bowl (he [...]

1. Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen. (Algonquin, $13.95.) A young man - and an elephant - save a Depression-era circus.

2. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. (Riverhead, $15.95 and $14.) An Afghan-American returns to Kabul to learn how a childhood friend has fared.

3. The Memory Keeper’s [...]

1. Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. (Penguin Books, $15.) A writer’s yearlong journey in search of self takes her to Italy, India and Indonesia.

2. The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. (Scribner, $14.) The author recalls a bizarre childhood during which she and her siblings were constantly moved.

3. Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. (Back Bay, $15.99.) [...]

There’s nothing like a fictional White House full of boring people to make you long for the days of Josh Lyman and C.J. Cregg.

Wonky staffers were eloquent on “The West Wing,” even when inadvertently inventing secret plans to fight inflation. Dialogue sparkled. Chemistry sizzled. But Kristin Gore [...]

It’s been a week and a day since the release of the fastest selling novel in history, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” and already many millions more people have read it than ever pick up the average novel.

Among the many remarkable qualities of J.K. Rowling’s brilliant and magical series, capped by [...]

One of the wonderful side effects of the poker boom is the many books it has spawned, most of them instructional. But if your interest is poker literature or the World Series of Poker, two are clear standouts among those now sitting on store bookshelves.
“The Biggest Game in Town” (Bloomsbury Publishing, 192 pp., $15.95) originated [...]

With “A Good and Happy Child,” Justin Evans has written a novel that will scare even the most hardened horror fans out of their skins. He also has delivered a book that is, for the most part, beautifully written and perfectly structured. The result is a literary thriller of the first order.

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One out of three American children who are adopted from abroad come from China. For the most part, these are baby girls who have been abandoned because of the Chinese government’s one-child policy and the deep-seated Chinese cultural tradition that the oldest son is to care for his parents in their old [...]

In December 2002, the British journalist Mick Brown was driven by Phil Spector’s chauffeur in Phil Spector’s white Rolls-Royce to Phil Spector’s gloomy castle in Alhambra, for a spooky interview with Phil Spector, who wore black silk pajamas and made a grand entrance to the strains of Handel.

Two [...]