SOMEBODY'S GOTTA DO IT: Why Cursing at the News Won't Save the Nation, but Your Name on a Local Ballot Can by Adrienne Martini (Holt). Despising politicians is like hating cops: it's thumbsucking—keeping oneself comfortable, safe from frustrations, from cooperating with people you certainly won't always agree with; from failing, and, yeah—from accomplishing things. Adrienne Martini is a journalist and also a wife and mother and, for a couple of years, now, a member of the Otsego (NY) County Board, helping to manage a $150 million budget, contributing thought and arguments to real decisions about priorities for families like hers (and some distinctly different). This is, thanks to her varied talents, wit and guts among them, entertaining but also enlightening. You might scarcely notice at first, but it's also a handbook on how to do this, get this involved. Accomplish things (a few).

YOU ARE NOT ALONE by Greer Hendricks & Sarah Pekkanen (St. Martin's). This team is pretty much alone atop this category, which is psychological suspense, chiefly about—but by no means only for—women. This is their third (it took them all the way to their second to get to the top of bestseller lists). If you've read their first two, as the column recommended, you know the sort of thing I'm talking about. And it won't help you a bit in getting ahead of them in this one. That is, of course, the good news.

HANNAH'S WAR by Jan Eliasberg (Little, Brown). Complicated, both fast-moving and just moving WWII spy novel. Nerve-wringing suspense from the ominous opening scene, but what keeps us compulsively turning these pages is the intimacy of our relationships with these more or less real people. (The story is inspired by a real woman, a pioneering nuclear scientist and a Jew whom, in this book, at least, everybody respects but some don't quite trust, for really no more reason than that.)

FIREWATCHING by Russ Thomas (Putnam). First crime novel by an unmistakably serious talent, and featuring a grouchy, inwardly self-doubting but undaunted investigator on a provincial British police department, shrewdly placed in a diverse area of Britain—not urban, but not remote, either, providing a cast we're happy to anticipate as regulars. A tangling element in this case is that a suspect is a man our guy has had a one-night stand with. An early reviewer thought to compare the author to Ann Cleeves, which isn't far off, but I'd toss in a dash of Ian Rankin. Here's hoping we'll be following this investigator's career as long and as devotedly as we have that of Rankin's Inspector Rebus—and what a pleasure that it's a realistic hope.