THE DICTIONARY OF LOST WORDS by Pip Williams (Ballantine). A novel, even a historical romance (of a sort), and certainly not a dictionary. It is fond of words, and of the OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY. The making of that great historical reference work proceeds apace through this story, serving as something like its theme music, but the book cares as much (and you are welcome to care even more) about its heroine, who is as spunky as she is earnest, and as charming as she is (lightly, but convincingly) erudite. It's mostly a coming-of-age novel (I wasn't kidding about the romance, but we're a while getting to it) and also a war novel (World War I, and we're in England, of course), and always a lively and lovely, incidentally (but then rather explicitly, but always amusingly) feminist…hm-m…fable? No, that won't do: tale—parable—adventure—narrative…?

EVERY LAST FEAR by Alex Finlay (Minotaur). As twisty a crime novel as you've ever read, to the last page, and great fun on that account; but realistic and intense, and we get to know a complicated family really well, so more than fun. Very high energy, full of action, but not just clever, thoughtful; solid. A first novel, and we'll look forward to his next—but we won't expect it right away; he can't have written this one in only a few months.

YOU'LL THANK ME FOR THIS by Nina Siegal (Mulholland). The central characters in this ingenious thriller are an American woman (who has some secrets, we'll discover) and her 12-year-old daughter; but the setting is the Netherlands—where, they're assured, it's a common practice to place a little cluster of quite young kids in the middle of a great forest with just a few basic supplies, and, well, just put ‘em there, abandon them, to work out how to get back to camp. Which sounds to the girl like a fun adventure. Four kids, here, and the other three disappear quickly, and tension enters early and doesn't let up.

THE POSTSCRIPT MURDERS by Elly Griffiths (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). A new mystery by an author the column somehow overlooked until her most recent book, THE STRANGER DIARIES of 2019, won the Edgar Award. The police detective in that very complex one—a stand-alone, then, after mostly series novels—is back in this one, which is also smart and complex, but lighter, even a little comic. Very satisfying; the intelligence unmistakable and the characters made as knowable as those in THE STRANGER DIARIES, and—well, and this is clearly just a writer to be trusted with as much of your attention as she asks for.