New Book Roundups

Latin American Mysteries
Part detective story, part memoir, and part travelogue, Dead Man in Paradise recounts author J. B. MacKinnon's attempt to unravel the mystery of the murder of his uncle, an outspoken Catholic priest who was shot in 1965 outside the small Dominican Republic town where he had been living for four years. Sylvia Sellers-Garcia's notable debut novel When the Ground Turns in Its Sleep also deals with a mystery, involving a rural Guatemalan village where personal and political secrets surface after a newcomer from the U.S. arrives.

Japan Mon Amour
In Aiko Kitahara's The Budding Tree (translated from the Japanese by Ian MacDonald), six fictional stories of love (and not-love) play out in Edo-period Japan, each tale focused on an enterprising woman finding her independent way in a changing society. Love's mettle is tested against implacable centuries of Japanese tradition in John Burnham Schwartz's novel The Commoner, set in post-war Japan and inspired by the life of Empress Michiko, the first commoner to marry into the imperial family.

Holiday Gift Ideas
National Geographic photographer Michael Yamashita's handsome and anecdote-studded photo book The Great Wall: From Beginning to End would make a fine present for anyone heading to China for next year's Summer Olympics in Beijing. Chuck Fischer's extravagant pop-up book Christmas Around the World looks at Christmas traditions from Germany to Latin America and not only includes pop-ups that are wonders of paper engineering but also pullouts, information-packed booklets, and a stand-alone Santa's sleigh. They Called Me Mayer July is a hefty memoir illustrated with over 200 witty and sweet portraits of daily Jewish life in a small Polish town before 1934, by artist Mayer Kirshenblatt, who taught himself to paint at 73.