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The Spies of Warsaw

by Alan Furst (Random House, $25)

A suave French spy handler wins at love but struggles with a bigger game in the latest of Alan Furst’s tantalizing period thrillers, said Roger K. Miller in the Little Rock Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. In 1937 Warsaw, German secrets can be had but the bosses don’t always appreciate their significance. Furst deserves a Pulitzer for finding a way to capture “much of the political history” of pre–World War II Europe in remarkable espionage tales.

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Ghost

by Fred Burton (Random House, $26)

When a real-life spy shares his story, sticking to “well-worn formula” can

be a virtue, said June Thomas in Slate.com. In Fred Burton’s long career with the Diplomatic Security Service, he apparently didn’t miss any of the training in “studiously displayed stoicism.” Still, “he supplies just enough scoop on his role chasing terrorists to keep things interesting.”

The Pixar Touch

by David A. Price (Knopf, $28)

“Businesspeople and creative artists alike” could learn from reading David Price’s deeply reported history of Pixar Studios, said Paul Boutin in The Wall Street Journal. Conventional wisdom has it that Apple co-founder Steve Jobs gave the phenomenally successful animation house its magic dust. But a chief lesson of Price’s well-told tale is that “no one invents anything in isolation.”

How to Be Useful

by Megan Hustad (Houghton Mifflin, $20)

This “clever” book is the perfect career guide “for the comp-lit graduate seeking to make it big in Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Hollywood, or Capitol Hill,” said Daniel Gross in Newsweek. After surveying a century’s worth of business-advice literature, former book editor Megan Hustad passes on the true pearls, repurposing them with “telling anecdotes from the contemporary workplace.”

Black Flies

by Shannon Burke (Soft Skull, $15)

This “arresting” new novel about a rookie paramedic in Harlem serves as “shock treatment for the conscience,” said Liesl Schillinger in The New York Times. Author Shannon Burke worked the same streets as his protagonist, so he knows how easy it is to be hardened by the job into someone unrecognizable. The most vivid scenes in Black Flies are “mercilessly detailed,” and the novel “contains more reflections of lived experience than some memoirs.”