Also of interest ... in ghouls and otherworldly creatures

Angelology

by Danielle Trussoni

(Viking, $28)

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Danielle Trussoni’s debut thriller is “so prettily written” that, at first, you overlook its clumsy architecture, said Janet Maslin in The New York Times. Trussoni’s scholarship-laden tale “follows the Da Vinci Code model as loftily as it can,” sending a young nun and a smitten art historian on a mad hunt for an ancient artifact that must be kept from falling into the hands of a tribe of half-breed angels. But as suspense builds, Trussoni increasingly resorts to shortcuts. Her abrupt ending suggests that a sequel is coming.

Still Life

by Melissa Milgrom

(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25)

Melissa Milgrom “uncovers a hidden world” in this absorbing tour of the fading art of taxidermy, said Ethan Gilsdorf in The Boston Globe. Cozying up to top practitioners in the field, Milgrom helps us see that taxidermy shouldn’t be dismissed as “merely weird and morbid.” The book closes, “fittingly,” with the author trying her hand at stuffing a squirrel. Yet she shares too few details about her own fascination with the subject and too many about “muskrats, coyotes, mallards, and perch.”

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

by Seth Grahame-Smith

(Grand Central, $22)

Last year, Seth Grahame-Smith added zombies to Pride and Prejudice and scored a surprise hit, said Lev Grossman in Time. This year, he’s back with a faux Lincoln study that casts Honest Abe as a secret lifelong vampire slayer. It’s more than a cheap trick: Grahame-Smith is “a lively, fluent writer with a sharp sense of tone and pace.” Once you recognize that he’s using vampirism as a metaphor for slavery, though, the allusion feels “too neat.” Neither blood trade “reveals anything in particular about the other.”

The Poisoner’s Handbook

by Deborah Blum

(Penguin, $26)

Fans of television’s CSI franchise will find plenty to enjoy in Deborah Blum’s “immensely entertaining study” of two Jazz Age New York doctors who helped pioneer forensic science, said Art Taylor in The Washington Post. Before the duo took control of the city’s medical examiner’s office, poisons were difficult to identify or trace. Blum occasionally writes too clinically, but also “understands and indulges our interest in serial killings, scandals, and schemes gone wrong.”