"The Upright Piano Player"
By David Abbott
David Abbott's quietly devastating debut novel, "The Upright Piano Player," centers on Henry Cage, a successful, respected business executive floundering a bit in the wake of his retirement.
We first meet Henry on his way to a funeral, in the aftermath of a shocking and gruesome accident. Abbott then backtracks five years, on the cusp of the new millennium, as Henry is adjusting to retired life.
The narrative jumps around among Henry and a number of other disparate characters - his ex, his son and daughter-in-law, his former business colleagues and the man who persists in stalking him - and the effect underscores the current of loss and sorrow running throughout the novel: Everyone is in his or her own protected, isolated sphere, both yearning for and fearful of reaching out.
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The story moves slowly and deliberately in delicate elegiac prose, gracefully constructed and wholly consuming.
"The Ranger"
By Ace Atkins
A fast-paced thriller set in a backwoods Mississippi hamlet beset with violence and corruption, "The Ranger" is the enticing first novel in a new series by Southern author Ace Atkins.
It features Quinn Colson as an Army Ranger back from Afghanistan and heading home on leave to sort out a favorite uncle's curious death, Colson's fractured family and the lost love of his youth.
He finds much more: a pregnant teenage girl on a road, a scheming developer plundering pristine land and a hair-raising, diabolical leader of a ragtag cult living in squalid trailers.
The novel arrives on the heels of the announcement that Atkins was selected by publisher G.P. Putnam's Sons to write the next book in the highly successful Spenser series of Robert B. Parker, the acclaimed Massachusetts crime writer who died last year.
"Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present"
By Jeff Madrick
There are two good reasons for taking a job in a bank or other private financial institution.
One: You can earn a decent living, or better, without getting too much dirt under your fingernails.
Two: You can use your talent for economics to help enterprising people in business, local government and nongovernment organizations to get loans so they can build schools, houses, roads, factories or cupcake shops that will provide jobs and otherwise benefit the community.
Trouble is, complains author Jeff Madrick in "Age of Greed," for almost half a century some extremely clever and occasionally unscrupulous people have concentrated so much on the first motive, they've forgotten the second.
"Wall Street professionals got fabulously rich," Madrick writes about the recession in an "Epilogue" after describing what happened in meticulous detail. He makes a good case - and financial news junkies will savor it. Some will call it partisan. Regrettably, a considerable number will find it hard to plow through.
"Olivia's Birds: Saving the Gulf"
By Olivia Bouler
If you don't realize right away that you are reading a special book when you pick up "Olivia's Birds: Saving the Gulf," a primer that seems like peeking into the journal of a heaven-sent sort of child, you surely realize it when, a few pages in, you read that ducks and waterfowl flap their wings very hard and never take a break, and, according to the author, "their way of flying looks like it hurts."
Or a few pages later, when the 11-year-old writing the book lets on that she was heartbroken when she first heard word of the Gulf oil spill back in April 2010, and her first thought was of the flocks and flocks of birds.
"I wanted to be their voice," she writes.
And so it is that Olivia Bouler, now a sixth-grader in Long Island, N.Y., wasted not a moment and wrote a letter to the Audubon Society, patrons and protectors of the world's winged flocks.
She offered this idea: "I am a decent drawer, and I was wondering if I could sell some bird paintings and give the profits to your organization."
That hand-scrawled letter landed on the desk of Audubon's Lynne Mecum, a senior conservation philanthropy officer, who called it "inspiring," and told Olivia to grab the sketch pad.
To date, she has brought in more than $200,000 for the rescue and recovery of thousands of oiled birds, migrating or nesting near the Gulf of Mexico. And this book, written and illustrated by the fledgling ornithologist (Sterling Publishing, $14.95), is the latest chapter in one little girl's campaign to teach us all that we can make a difference.
Michelle Wiener/For The Associated Press Kendal Weaver/For The Associated Press Carl Hartman/For The Associated Press Barbara Mahany/Chicago Tribune
