Come to Moscow. It will be fun. With these words Fin entices her gay half brother Darcy. One year older, Fin has always held an uneasy allure. It is February 1984, In Russia homosexuals are persecuted. His passport is confiscated. Inexplicable encounters with men and Fin’s odd behavior pull him in different directions as over the course of a week his life goes wildly out of control. Part cold war thriller, part family drama, STRAY DOG WINTER (Macadam Cage $24.00) by David Francis will get your heart pounding. ~ Marla Vandewater

When crime novelist Mickey Spillane died in 2006, he left behind five unfinished novels featuring his hardest of hard-boiled private eyes, Mike Hammer. He stipulated that they should go to his friend, fellow writer, and occasional collaborator Max Allan Collins. Collins is now completing and publishing those books in Spillane’s memory. The first came out this fall: The Goliath Bone (Harcourt, $23), which is, chronologically speaking, the last Hammer, bringing the aging New York City gumshoe’s career to a fitting (and fittingly violent) close. While Hammer stories are often timeless, this one is tied firmly to the post-September 11 world. It builds around the discovery, in Israel’s Valley of Elah, of an oversized thigh bone said to be have once belonged to Goliath, the legendary Philistine giant felled by a slingshot-wielding David. The two young people who found this artifact are now threatened in Manhattan by both al-Qaeda terrorists and Israeli extremists, so they turn to Hammer for protection. In short order, Hammer and his secretary turned fiancée, Velda Sterling, are mixing it up with international assassins, federal agents, archaeologists, Broadway showmen, and at least one retired cop who’s having a hard time staying out of trouble. The Goliath Bone doesn’t send Hammer in a new direction, or cause one to rethink Spillane’s series as a whole. It’s a solid capper to Hammer’s professional arc, though, and a valuable reminder of this series’ strengths — fast action, a fully realized protagonist, and mayhem not inconsistent with Hammer’s urban jungle milieu and the dangers of his assignments. — Jeff Pierce

Chilling is the only word for Richard Flanagan’s impeccably written The Unknown Terrorist (Grove $14.00). Gina Davies, known as “the Doll” at the Chairman’s Lounge where she is employed as a pole dancer is fixated on saving enough money to put a down payment on an apartment. She seeks to wipe out her westie trash roots by buying designer label everything. Mardi Gras Saturday night in Sydney, she goes out into the street and dances with a stranger who invites her back to his apartment. When she wakes up in the morning he is gone. Sipping coffee at the cafe next door, she watches black clad police descend on the neighborhood, surrounding the building she has just exited. Later, at home, she sees news of the police raid including what is referred to as security camera footage of the terrorist suspect in an attempted bombing, and his unknown female accomplice. It is her. For the next five days she is on the run as the security forces and media twist every aspect of her life to fit their needs for justification and self promotion. As her understanding of the way of the world and her place in it darken, so does her resolution as to what she must do. It is Australia, but it could be anywhere in the post 9/11 culture of fear. ~ Marla Vandewater

The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway (Knopf $25.95) is a rollicking adventure story set in a post-apocalyptic world. The unthinkable has occurred and people are struggling to keep life going as they once knew it. A surprising plot twist towards the end radically changes your understanding of what has happened. This book grabbed me by the lapels with its smart, funny and energetic writing by Our Hero. Warning: Don’t start this before bed. It is a page turner and a perfect read for a rainy day or a sunny vacation or any time you want to escape to a new world. ~Gretchen Echols

Jenny Shimada is a fugitive from justice living a quiet life in rural New York when she is found by a former associate and convinced to help some younger radicals on the run. Thrown together in an old farmhouse 30 miles from the nearest town, they negotiate resentment and distrust into tense workable relationships as months pass with no exit in sight. A surprise visit from the landlord pushes them into action with catastrophic results. Susan Choi’s fascinating and riveting novel American Woman (Harper $13.95) presents the psychological and emotional complexity of 1960′s radical action and life after going underground. Her clear and compassionate view of Jenny as she seeks to understand and reconcile her past with her current situation, keeps the reader fully engaged from beginning to end. ~ Marla Vandewater

A raging fire in the sugarcane fields of eastern Cuba opens Telex from Cuba by Rachel Kushner (Scribner $25.00). The time is 1958, shortly before the Americans were driven out by Castro’s revolution. Tropical Cuba in the 50′s seems to be an idyllic setting for young Everly Lederer and K.C. Stites who are coming of age in the gated American enclave in the company town of Preston. Far away in Havana a cabaret dancer’s work life is intertwined with Presidents Prio and Batista and a French agitator called La Maziere. She is sympathetic to Castro and he is running guns to the rebels in the hills and forming an attachment to the dancer. Growing up in eastern Washington, I was unclear about Cuba’s actual distance from US mainland and why it was so important to us. Although this story takes place before the Bay of Pigs, it helps to explain what led up to that fiasco. Told in deceptively low key prose this gripping tale reveals the secrets and prejudices of the Americans contrasted with the incredible poverty and brutal working conditions of the cane cutters and the Cuban people in general. I was fascinated with this story of Cuba. ~ Gretchen Echols

Lehane’s large-canvas historical yarn steers a twisted and intriguing course through a post-World War I America that’s preoccupied with racism, sports and fear of communist incursions, beset by disease and divided by class. In these pages, he tells of Luther Laurence, a young black man who falls in with the wrong crowd in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and flees both murder charges and a pregnant wife, landing in Boston and the employ of the Coughlin family. The Coughlins aren’t long off the boat from Ireland, but they’ve established themselves within the local police ranks. In addition to Laurence, Lehane focuses here on idealistic cop Danny Coughlin, the rising son of an influential police captain, who supplies the principal window through which we witness the misnamed “Spanish flu pandemic” of 1918; the Wilson administration’s campaign against radicals; and the notorious 1919 Boston Police Strike. There’s so much story in The Given Day, that the reader may have trouble keeping a handle on it all. But Lehane does an exceptional job of moving his plot along, whether with the romance between Danny Coughlin and a young Irish woman holding too many secrets; or the low-boil confrontation between Laurence and a powerful, conniving cop; or the rivalry between Boston’s mayor and Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge, who would eventually ride his much-inflated role in ending the police strike directly to the White House. And the author’s portrayal of baseball star Babe Ruth, who winds through this yarn like a lazy river, popping up periodically for comic relief or to assist in illuminating the era’s culture, is marvelous. – Jeff Pierce

In The Piano Teacher by Janice Y. K. Lee (Viking $25.95) two women love the same man in exotic Hong Kong before, during and ten years after WWII. The story relates difficult choices and their consequences as a result of loves, intrigues and betrayals. The setting gives some hints at the complex relationships between clashing cultures and ancient histories. This beguiling story is quietly related amidst the hot steamy backdrop of south-east Asia. I was mesmerized. ~Gretchen Echols

Crooked lawmen, political strivers, grafters and gamblers, low dives and criminal hijinks–Satan’s Circus (Three Rivers Press $15.95) has those attractions and more, all centered around the tale of the only police officer in U.S. history to be executed for murder. British writer Mike Dash’s record of the rise and fall of Charley Becker, a handsome, German-descended New York City cop, is a colorful, captivating lesson in dishonor among thieves. Despite being trusted by his superiors and given responsibility for taming vice in early 1900s Manhattan, Becker was living a double life as the head of a widespread extortion racket. He thought himself invulnerable. But the murder of a casino owner who’d threatened to expose Becker made this decorated cop a target of ambitious journalists and prosecutors. Turned on by fellow brigands, and despite his wife’s efforts to clear him of wrongdoing, Becker wound up paying with his life for Gotham’s rank corruption. ~ Jeff Pierce

The lives of Edward S. Curtis a photographer of western landscapes and American Indians, and the fictional character Marianne Wiggins, are intertwined in Wiggins’ newest novel The Shadow Catcher (Simon and Schuster $15.00). It begins with an intriguing scene: Wiggins is “pitching” her book on Edward Curtis to some Hollywood producers. They see a rugged, inventive American who was devoted to photographing his subjects. But Wiggins reveals that his photos were “set-ups” and he routinely endangered the welfare of his family in pursuit of his career. After the meeting Wiggins receives a call that her father is dying in a hospital in Las Vegas. The catch is that her father has been dead for years. Her search for the dying man’s identity reveals even more fascinating and contradictory details of Curtis’ life. There are times when the two stories don’t seem to mesh but the author deftly pulls them together for a very satisfying ending. I couldn’t put this one down. ~ Carol Santoro