Also of interest ... in girl troubles

The Likeness

by Tana French (Viking, $25)

Detective Cassie Maddox impersonates a grad student to solve a young woman’s murder in Tana French’s follow-up to last year’s In the Woods, said Sarah Weinman in Newsday. Five hundred pages afford Maddox plenty of time to develop an intriguing circle of friends, and readers plenty of time to enjoy French’s “wry humor” and beautiful phrasing. This arresting author makes her contrived plot “wholly believable” and builds her second award-worthy whodunit “toward epic-tragedy proportions.”

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Real World

by Natsuo Kirino (Knopf, $24)

The latest “morbidly fascinating” novel from the author of Out follows four teenage girls in Japan as they come to idolize a bright loner who has murdered his mother, said Joel Rice in the Nashville Tennessean. If the story’s brutality “seems staged, a pretext for meandering exposition,” that doesn’t ruin Real World. The “sinister plot” provides Kirino with myriad occasions to skewer the mores of middle-class Japanese adults and to deliver the “acute psychosexual portraiture at which she so excels.”

What Was Lost

by Catherine O’Flynn (Holt, $14)

Catherine O’Flynn’s compelling debut was an award-winner in her native England, said Kate Ward in Entertainment Weekly. In the U.S., it’s being marketed as if it were a “thriller-esque” mystery about a girl detective who goes missing in 1984 Birmingham. At heart, though, the book is a “subtle” and clever study of two forlorn British mall employees who take up the girl’s case two decades after her disappearance. “What was lost” refers to childhood but also to urban change.

The Three of Us

by Julia Blackburn (Pantheon, $26)

Julia Blackburn’s “bleakly funny” new memoir conjures the “most narcissistic, drunkenly bombastic” married couple since Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” said Elaina Richardson in O magazine. Unfortunately for Blackburn, these people were her artist parents. Though she was only 12 when they split, in 1961, a fierce sexual rivalry with her mother almost immediately filled the vacuum. Built with the help of “copious journals and letters,” The Three of Us is a “stunning book,” a portrait of a generation as well as a family.