1. Presumed Guilty by Scott Turow (Grand Central)

“The bard of the litigious age” departs from Kindle County, the fictional place he has made famous, but revives his iconic protagonist lawyer Rusty Sabich, who was falsely convicted then exonerated of a crime. Now in paperback, the latest in Turow’s Presumed Innocent series of legal thrillers, Sabich is now a retiree seeking refuge in an idyllic region of the upper Midwest, with a distinctive social hierarchy complete with secrets and grudges. He has settled in with an elementary school principal, but his tranquility is interrupted after agreeing to represent her 22-year-old Black son charged with strangling his alluring, tempestuous girlfriend to death. The intricacy and psychological acuity of Turow’s social novel crystallize in the courtroom drama, which showcases the author of One L and Presumed Innocent at his best.

2. Whirlwind: My Life Reporting the News by Bill Kurtis (Plainspoken Books)

'Wait Wait...Don’t Tell Me!' It’s true! Kurtis and his sonorous voice may have stepped down from the NPR show with Peter Sagal, but that was a capstone to a storied career in broadcast journalism launched by his coverage of the destructive June 1966 tornado which cut a 22-mile- through his native Kansas. Before co-anchoring the CBS Morning News with Diane Sawyer, Kurtis had covered some of the biggest stories of the late 20th century, including the trials of the Chicago Seven and battles the 1968 Democratic National Convention. He recalls uncovering the dangers of Agent Orange and being the first U.S. TV journalist into Chernobyl after the nuclear disaster. Eschewing easy nostalgia, Kurtis writes of the “storm of life” that is only now coming into focus.

3. Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground by Zayd Ayers Dohrn (W. W. Norton)

When he was a child, his family lived on the run, with aliases and disguises. His parents were leaders of the infamous Weather Underground, and his mother was wanted by the FBI. In his hit podcast Mother Country Radicals, Dohrn vividly evokes those years on the run and in hiding underground. In his memoir, on the National Book Award long-list, Dohrn wrestles with his own childhood memories, his family’s emotionally complex dynamic and his parents’ legacy -- their idealism and commitment to social justice and the violence that undermined the movement.

4. Majestic Hills by Dawn Turner (Scribner)

“They stand nearly naked in their U-shaped driveway,” begins Turner’s alluring prologue which sets the stage for her suspenseful novel. The Blaques, an ER doctor and a lawyer, relocate from Chicago to Majestic Hills, an arcadian suburban subdivision, unaware that that their idyll abuts the Grand Vistas, a trailer park that once housed chicken processing plant workers and is now stricken with poverty, asthma and flooding. With nuance and an uncanny ear for dialogue, Turner, author of the memoir Three Girls from Bronzeville, deftly enriches her novel with a galaxy of neighbors in a world of simmering class and racial anxieties, building to a satisfying conclusion.

5. Concert Black by Michael O’Donnell (Blackstone)

O’Donnell’s propulsive novel is electrified by tension between a distinguished biographer and the subject she is pursuing, a world-famous conductor with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. The biographer tracks the alternately charming and evasive maestro, from his roots in postwar London across the continents into vividly evoked European and American concert halls The relationship between biographer and subject—each strong wills, and harboring secrets -- is a delicate balance, a gripping, high-powered literary chess match.