The Expats
by Chris Pavone (Crown, $26)
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The Mark Inside
by Amy Reading (Knopf, $27)
This nonfiction work promises “the perfect swindle,” then deftly “delivers the goods,” said Doug Childers in the Richmond, Va., Times-Dispatch. When diminutive rancher J. Frank Norfleet showed up in Dallas in 1919, he seemed the perfect mark, and sure enough he was taken, for massive bucks, by con men who’d devised a sweet nine-act scheme. Even sweeter, though, was Norfleet’s revenge. Or was it? Maybe there’s a reason the story Norfleet later told “seems a little too good to be true.”
The Thief
by Fuminori Nakamura (Soho, $23)
This first Fuminori Nakamura novel to be translated into English “provides a great inroad into the world of popular Japanese crime fiction,” said Hugh Ryan in TheDailyBeast.com. Nakamura’s Tokyo is “not a city of bright lights” but a much bleaker, seamier place. The award-winning writer’s protagonist, a seasoned pickpocket, has an almost mystical connection to his work, at least until he gets in over his head when he’s hired for a robbery. The Thief is noir at its most probing and sublime.
American Sniper
by Chris Kyle (Morrow, $27)
Readers who value sensitivity in America’s warriors may want to pass on Chris Kyle’s memoir, said Tony Perry in the Los Angeles Times. After joining the Navy SEALs, the Texas native developed a taste for killing an enemy from a distance with a single shot, and his tours convinced him that his Iraqi enemies were “damned savages.” But this book makes room for his wife’s voice as well, and “much of its wallop” comes from watching the strife created by anger born on the battlefield.