The Browser: A quick look at recent releases

In "The Magician's Accomplice," author Michael Genelin brings us the third in his exceptional series of detective thrillers featuring police commander Jana Matinova. She heads a homicide unit in modern-day Slovakia. That may seem to be an unlikely setting for novels by an American writer, but Genelin, a former U.S. aid worker, paints an eye-opening portrait of Eastern Europe -- and the rest of Europe, for that matter. In this book, which is just out in paperback, Matinova is detailed to a European police agency in the Netherlands after the high-profile assassination of her fiancé, a prosecutor in Slovakia. Matinova uses her trademark deductive thinking to investigate a syndicate that is murdering people across the continent. She gets help from a kindly retired magician who knows more than he lets on. A recommended light read.

DAVID SHAFFER,

Business reporter and editor

Crozier paints the story of her poverty-stricken childhood with an alcoholic father with vivid honesty and grace. Whether she's describing lilacs, ants or hairpins, her words are poetry. Tales of selling cottonwood fluff to the neighborhood grocer or playing undertaker for birds and worms infuse the pages with wonder and charm. She doesn't shrink from the hardship of her family's life in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, but her tone is quiet and respectful, even as she recounts the pain of dancing with her drunken dad at her at her high school graduation. The gritty stuff isn't overbearing, and the memoir is a literary jewel.

HOLLY COLLIER WILLMARTH