Also of interest...in ripped-from-the-headlines fiction

Cartwheel

by Jennifer duBois (Random House, $26)

It’s quite a feat to elevate the Amanda Knox case “from the realm of scuttlebutt” to “that of art,” said Jenny Shank in The Dallas Morning News. Like Knox, the central figure in Jennifer duBois’s fictionalized version of that roommate-murder drama is a “loopy, privileged, distracted young woman”: She invites suspicion when she turns a cartwheel while waiting alone in a police interrogation room. But duBois also gets us into the minds of the prosecutor and an old boyfriend, and makes her sad story a rich study of character.

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A Guide for the Perplexed

by Dara Horn (Norton, $26)

Dara Horn’s fourth novel “exists in its own universe,” said Jami Attenberg in The New York Times. The author of 2006’s The World to Come interweaves an episode in the life of the philosopher Maimonides with a fictional story about two sisters traveling in post-revolutionary Egypt. When Josie, a tech entrepreneur, is kidnapped in Cairo by extremists, the pages fly, but too often a reader is forced to cut away to a world of ideas, “perhaps too many ideas.”

Rivers

by Michael Farris Smith (Simon and Schuster, $25)

Michael Farris Smith couldn’t have known that the antagonist in this “wonderfully cinematic” first novel would end up reminding readers of Cleveland kidnapper Ariel Castro, said Mary Doria Russell in The Washington Post. But the creepy survivalist who has locked up a group of women in Smith’s story lives in a hurricane-battered stretch of the Gulf Coast that’s been permanently evacuated, and, like every other character here, he’s “rounded and real.” Smith rushes the story’s ending, but the rest is gripping, cliché-free suspense.

Two Boys Kissing

by David Levithan (Knopf, $17)

David Levithan has created “an unexpected nail-biter,” said Meredith Goldstein in The Boston Globe. In this young adult novel, two teenage boys react to a Tyler Clementi–like suicide by attempting to stage the world’s longest recorded kiss, and “you’ll find yourself gasping” when it appears that they’ll pass out before reaching their goal. Trusting the narration to a Greek chorus of deceased AIDS victims might sound heavy-handed, but the story “kicks you in the gut from page 1.”