Reconstructing Amelia by Kimberly McCreight is a literary mystery wherein a mother struggles to understand the reason for her daughter’s death, and the complications of her life (available April 2, 2013).

When Kate Barron is summoned to her daughter’s school by Grace Hall’s unlikable dean of academics, her first emotion is annoyance. She is annoyed with her daughter Amelia. She is annoyed with Dean Pearl, who won’t tell her why Amelia is being suspended for three days, starting immediately. And Kate is really annoyed with one of her colleagues, who is much too eager to take over the client meeting she’s being forced to leave. When Kate arrives at the school twenty minutes later and sees the knot of firefighters and police mingling with the students and faculty in a courtyard, her annoyance intensifies. No one seems to know what’s going on. No one seems to know where Amelia is. No one seems to care that she needs to get back to her office. And then she sees the empty boot and her annoyance turns to something colder.

[A daughter’s death turns a mother’s life inside out...]

Nobody Walks by Dennis M. Walsh is the true story of a man who set out to find his brother’s killer (available February 12, 2013).

In the summer of 2003, a meth-addicted criminal named Christopher Walsh went missing. More than a week later, his body was discovered in a storage locker in Van Nuys, California. Walsh had been shot five times in the head and neck and then stuffed head-first into a trash can before being put in the storage locker. It was the kind of crime that happens every day in the seedier parts of Southern California and like most crimes of its nature, it originally went unsolved. It wasn’t that the detectives investigating the murder were uncaring or incompetent, but murder in the Southland is a rising tide as implacable and unstoppable as the ocean rising over the New Orleans levees in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

[But some cases aren’t destined to go cold...]

Snow White Must Die by Nele Neuhaus is the fourth in the  Oliver von Bodenstein and Pia Kirchhoff series (available January 15, 2013).

Secrets.

A small town holds many secrets.

When 30-year-old Tobias (Tobi) Sartorius returns to his small hometown after serving a ten-year prison term for double murder, those secrets start to fester and ooze.

Snow White Must Die by Nele Neuhaus is the fourth (and most successful) in Neuhaus’s series featuring German detectives Oliver von Bodenstein and Pia Kirchhoff and it is the first to be translated into English. (One of Neuhaus’s stand-alone novels will be published in English this summer.)

Bodenstein and Kirchoff get involved in the small town’s business when a skeleton belonging to one of the dead girls shows up in a tank on an abandoned military base about the same time someone pushes Tobi’s mother over a bridge and into busy traffic.

[So much death in a small town]

Seal Team 666 by Weston Ochse is a paranormal military thriller (available November 27, 2012).

It’s May 2, 2011, at Zero Dark Thirty and we’re with five men and a dog in a helicopter heading for a sleepy residential neighborhood in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

They are Seal Team 666 and their mission is to kill a man. But when they reach their objective they encounter a force field that brings the helicopter down just outside the walled compound.

Blowing a hole in the wall, the team powers through and into the house, killing the guards and the demon that emerges from a hallway.

They fight their way through to the room that holds their target—a tall man with a long gray-streaked beard.

And that’s when things start to get weird.

[Beware the guy who looks like a wizard...]

A Fatal Winter is the second in G.M. Malliet’s traditional mystery series about MI5 agent-turned-vicar Max Tudor (available October 16, 2012).

Oscar, Lord Footrustle, a wealthy old aristocrat living alone (the servants don’t count) invites his extended family to spend Christmas with him at Chedrow Castle, their crumbling ancestral home situated in the quaint English village of Nether Monkslip.

Among the relatives gathered are his fading actress daughter, her much-younger half-siblings (“the Twyns”), a resentful poor relation, and assorted cousins who can’t wait to get their hands on the castle’s furnishings and fittings and paintings, which include a suspected Reynolds and a minor Rembrandt.

What could possibly go wrong?

[What, indeed?]