Book Title (Author): BRYANT AND MAY ON THE LOOSE (Christopher Fowler)

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Fowler's unique blend of the comic and the grotesque is on full display in his excellent seventh Peculiar Crimes Unit mystery (after 2008's The Victoria Vanishes). With the special police unit shut down, Arthur Bryant is feeling withdrawn and depressed while his partner, John May, is considering PI work. When a former team member stumbles on a beheaded corpse in the heart of London's King's Cross neighborhood, May artfully uses the discovery to gain the PCU another lease on life. He persuades the higherups that unsolved gang crimes in the area could threaten the economic benefit anticipated from the 2012 Olympics. Given one week to solve the case, without any official sanction or access to police resources, May pulls Bryant out of his doldrums and reassembles the unit. To May's dismay, his colleague is more interested in reports that a man wearing a stag's head has been seen in the area. The pacing, prose, planting of clues and characterizations are all top-notch. (more on Bryant & May on the Loose: A Peculiar Crimes Unit Mystery)

Book Title (Author): THE SCARECROW (Michael Connelly)

From Publishers Weekly
Reporter Jack McEvoy decides to go out with a bang, after he's laid off from the L.A. Times, in a nail-biting thriller that charts the demise of print journalism and shows why Connelly is one of today's top crime authors.

From Amazon.com 

Forced out of the Los Angeles Times amid the latest budget cuts, newspaperman Jack McEvoy decides to go out with a bang, using his final days at the paper to write the definitive murder story of his career.

He focuses on Alonzo Winslow, a 16-year-old drug dealer in jail after confessing to a brutal murder. But as he delves into the story, Jack realizes that Winslow's so-called confession is bogus. The kid might actually be innocent.

Jack is soon running with his biggest story since The Poet made his career years ago. He is tracking a killer who operates completely below police radar--and with perfect knowledge of any move against him. Including Jack's. (more on The Scarecrow)

From Publishers Weekly

Powell may well be his generation's best poet, one of the best now writing. His fourth book tells of love found and lost against the backdrop of disease and pop culture. (Publishers Weekly website).

Starred Review. This fourth collection from Powell (Cocktails) is simultaneously an accessible heartbreaker, a rare gem for connoisseurs, a genre-altering breakthrough and a long anticipated follow-up. The San Francisco–based poet has lived with, and written about, HIV for a decade, and his own illness remains a subject here; so does his celebration of gay eroticism, of love in the spirit and in the flesh. Democrac (Powell pointedly omits the Y) shows 21st-century queer anguish and outrage: does god discriminate, slashing some flags, it asks, while farther above the chapels pale heaven expires. Powell goes on to investigate many more sources of sadness and happiness, solidarity and discontent: Cancer inside a little sea takes on environmental degradation: child to come, what will you make of this scratched paradise. The unruly long lines of Powell's previous work here join more conventional-looking stanzaic lyrics; they join, too, two ultra-long poems, printed sideways, entitled Cinemascope and centerfold. This book will be remembered for years, for its serious feelings, their swerves, their tears, its jokes. A poem to a crab louse abuts a scene from the biblical binding of Isaac, and a poem in which the Twin Towers fall segues from bedroom to public space and then back: lips can say anything but first they say goodbye. (more on Chronic: Poems)