In Allen's wrap-up to the "Black Girls Must Die Exhausted" trilogy, Tabitha Walker balances new motherhood, new job possibilities, new friendship issues, and an ultimatum from boyfriend Marc about their relationship, and she's beginning to wonder if she really believes that Black Girls Must Have It All (75,000-copy paperback and 20,000-copy hardcover first printing). In Central Places, a debut from journalist Cai, Audrey Zhou left Hickory Grove, IL, for a big-deal job in Manhattan but is returning home to introduce star-worthy fiancé Ben to her hectoring parents and ignored friends; she also reconnects with laidback Kyle, the only person who ever understood her. DeFino moves from The Bar Harbor Retirement Home for Famous Writers (And Their Muses) to Varina Palladino's Jersey Italian Love Story, which features a widow whose mother and daughter conspire to get her dating again (50,000-copy first printing). In the New York Times best-selling Harper's Back in a Spell, puissant witch Nineve Blackmoore has been abandoned at the altar by her fiancée and ends up on an awkward and ultimately antagonistic first date with nonbinary townie Morty Gutierrez (angry that her family wants to buy out his pub); then Morty unexpectedly starts acquiring magical powers. In Lipman's genre-blending Ms. Demeanor, big-deal lawyer Jane Morgan loses both career and social life after a busybody neighbor reports her for having hot sex on the rooftop of her New York apartment building, then faces more trouble when the neighbor winds up poisoned and leaves a note implicating Jane (100,000-copy first printing). From Pen/Faulkner finalist Salesses, The Sense of Wonder stars Won Lee, the first Asian American in the NBA, whose seven-game winning streak wins him the moniker "The Wonder"—all witnessed by sportswriter Robert Sung and studio producer Carrie Kang, with whom Won launches a relationship (50,000-copy first printing). In debuter Shroff's The Bandit Queens, a young Indian woman named Geeta is suspected of killing her long-vanished husband, which proves beneficial—no one wants to cross her—and then uncomfortable as other women push her for advice on getting rid of their husbands. After surviving his car's plunge off a cliff in Normandy, Charles Vincent, Steel's latest protagonist, is nursed back to health by a kind woman he stumbles across in a nearby cabin and realizes that he could vanish from his unhappy life Without a Trace. In Zigman's Small World, Joyce invites sister Lydia to move into her Cambridge apartment (if only temporarily) when Lydia returns east from California, but the two divorcees find their relationship disrupted by memories of their deceased sister (60,000-copy first printing).

DEBUT In her poor Indian village, Geeta has joined a micro-loan group to help fund her business making wedding jewelry. She needs money since her husband, Ramesh, left her five years ago, making Geeta an outsider in her rural community. Most of the villagers, including Farah, one of the women in her micro-loan group, believe that Geeta killed Ramesh. Because Geeta has this rumored "experience" killing men, Farah asks Geeta to murder her abusive husband. Then Priety asks Geeta to do the same to her husband, and the requests keep rolling in. As Geeta did not actually murder Ramesh, this is all very much outside of her comfort zone, but she takes strength from the story of the Bandit Queen, a historical figure who avenged herself against the men who hurt her. Shroff's debut novel is at once immensely sad—women want Geeta to help them get revenge on rapists and even a husband who threw acid on his wife's face—but it has laugh-out-loud moments too, as the women learn to stand up to the men in their village, and Geeta forms a relationship with a good man and learns to make friends. VERDICT This is a deeply human book, with women surviving and overcoming in their culture while still remaining a part of it. Similar in feel to Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri.—Jennie Mills

In Shroff's acerbic debut, a woman helps other women escape their abusive marriages in their small village in India, often through murder. Geeta's unearned reputation for having killed her physically abusive husband, Ramesh (he's not dead, he just ran off), prompts women to approach her for help. It's a fortuitous development for Geeta, who's become socially isolated after a fight with her lifelong friend Saloni, who's part of the microloan group that funds Geeta's jewelry business. As well, Geeta admires the legendary Bandit Queen, who exacted revenge on those who'd wronged her, and agrees to help a local named Farah kill her husband (Farah's first attempt backfired because she mistook hair growth pills for sleeping pills). Geeta also connects with widower Karem, a bootlegger, though not before costing him his livelihood by putting a stop to Karem's biggest buyer, Bada-Bhai (Bada-Bhai was cutting the booze with methanol and testing it on dogs, and Geeta frees the dogs). After Geeta adopts Bada-Bhai's sickest dog, whom she names Bandit, she begins allowing others into her life, including Saloni, which helps after Ramesh resurfaces. Shroff deals sharply with misogyny and abuse, describing the misery inflicted as well as its consequences in unflinching detail, and is equally unsparing in her depictions of mean-girl culture in the village. Readers are in for a razor-stuffed treat. (Jan.)