THE END OF THE DAY by Bill Clegg (Gallery/Scout Press). What a good season this is turning out to be for deeply intelligent, emotionally stirring fiction! This is a novel for serious readers, about people of unmistakable intelligence and (varying) sophistication and honest feelings. And without ever seeming to be showing off, ingeniously plotted, full of surprises that take a moment, but never fail, to make their emotional depth felt. It's the sort of thing that a very few Brits have given us, even less common among Americans, it seems to me. An early review describes the principal cast, accurately, but sounding like an elaborate joke: “A declining heiress who returns home for the first time in decades but can't remember why. Her former maid's daughter who runs a taxi company in Hawaii; her aunt, left with a baby whose parents have vanished.” But Clegg weaves these colorful threads into a seemingly inevitable, harmonious pattern. This lovely novel and its people add up to no joke, then, and no sort of stunt; just a more interesting bunch than your current friend list, or anyway mine, and a—well, really, thrillingly moving and satisfying read.

TO TELL YOU THE TRUTH by Gilly McMillan (Morrow). And another, but not exactly—another full-length novel, filled with smart and fully believable characters; but what's fairly described as “domestic suspense” in intent and in structure. Tense and tenser (as readers of this column, and her readers certainly, will know on sight of the author's name). This is her fourth, and (I think) not quite as long as the first three, but at the same level of both suspense and satisfaction.

NEXT TO LAST STAND by Craig Johnson (Viking). A Walt Longmire novel, so Wyoming, and a western, of sorts—but also a little change of pace (or time) for the author and his characters. In this book his daughter Cady, well known to us by now of course, is just 5. And much earlier events and people figure in, including a historically and artistically significant painting. We stay in (this book's) time present, but learn more than a little of Custer, and native Americans and their place in our shared history, all the while the present-day plot unfolds.

UNRESTRICTED ACCESS: NEW AND CLASSIC SHORT FICTION by James Rollins (Morrow). A change of a different pace: I swear, almost every one of these stories and novellas would have fit perfectly into one or another of his astonishingly, consistently, heart-racingly action-packed Sigma Force novels. Rollins wouldn't know how to write a dull . . . line, never mind scene. And wait! There's . . . collaborations! One with that very similar writer Steve Berry, so the same bang for your buck; and two—count 'em—with his co-author of vampire novels, Rebecca Cantrell. Settle in.