In an Indonesian hideaway, John Harper awaits the hit squad that his employers at the Institute of International Economics will inevitably send to eliminate him as a risk following a disastrous confidentiality breach. The institute ostensibly offers corporate risk assessment in areas of unrest, but the Dutch firm's true role is a murkier mix of corporate security and espionage with deniability for foreign governments. Harper's first mission in Indonesia was in 1965, when the Communist PKI's failed coup sparked mass executions of alleged leftists. In 1998, amid the instability of Suharto's collapsing regime, Harper seems resigned to his fate until he meets fellow expat Rita, and their affair forces him to reconcile his instrumental role in the 1965 massacres. Through Harper, Doughty creates a jarringly realistic backdrop of Indonesia's violent past, sharply contrasting the menacing atmosphere with a growing romance and Harper's memories of a vulnerable childhood in 1950s Los Angeles. A tense, contemplative literary thriller and worthy follow-up to Doughty's critically acclaimed Apple Tree Yard (2013).--Tran, Christine Copyright 2016 Booklist

Alone in a remote Balinese hut, the man now known as John Harper tries to prepare himself for the men he is certain are coming to kill him. He is both terrified and resigned, convinced he has become a liability to his firm and that the sins of his past are about to catch up with him. Though ostensibly a financial analyst for a Dutch security contractor, Harper is, and has been, a black ops agent for the Institute since 1964. Born in a Japanese internment camp on Sulawesi to a half-Dutch, half-Indonesian father and a Dutch mother, Harper has the right skin tone and language skills to blend in. Now, years later, Harper remorsefully remembers his role in Jakarta's Communist purge as well as his culpability in the death of his younger brother. A chance encounter with a middle-aged American teacher with her own ghosts gives Harper hope to begin again. Verdict Doughty (Apple Tree Yard) takes a page from John le Carré, crafting a riveting, psychological, morally ambiguous tale. Harper's backstory is richly detailed, and his budding relationship with Rita is convincing. Finally, the role of mercenaries in world affairs adds a new perspective to the spy novel genre. [See Prepub Alert, 3/21/16.]-Christine Perkins, Whatcom Cty. Lib. Syst., Bellingham, WA © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

SUBSTITUTE: Going to School With a Thousand Kids, by Nicholson Baker. (Blue Rider Press, $20.) Baker, a novelist, joined the corps of substitute teachers in a public school district in Maine. With each day of teaching a chapter, he offers modest policy proposals (less homework) and an ear attuned to the mundane rhythms of a school, resulting in what our reviewer, Garret Keizer, said "may be the most revealing depiction of the contemporary American classroom that we have to date." TO THE BRIGHT EDGE OF THE WORLD, by Eowyn Ivey. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $16.99.) It's 1885 and Col. Henry T. Allen is leading an expedition into Alaska's uncharted, sublime wilderness. As our reviewer, Amy Greene, put it, "We often count on our artists to see the wild beauty our civilized eyes no longer can, to remind us, as Ivey does in her remarkable new book." MUSLIM GIRL: A Coming of Age, by Amani Al-Khatahtbeh. (Simon & Schuster, $15.) Growing up in New Jersey, the author was 9 years old at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and recounts in her memoir the racism and Islamophobia she and her family subsequently experienced: "It was like a curtain had been pulled back on my family, casting them into the spotlight, and revealing to them a world that seemed to have always been festering behind a thin veil." BLACK WATER, by Louise Doughty. (Picador, $16.) Hidden away in a Balinese town, John Harper, a contractor for a faceless European corporation, is waiting to be murdered. When he falls in love with Rita, a local woman, more of his story comes to light. Doughty's excellent thriller examines how early childhood traumas - and a personal history that echoes Indonesia's - help to explain how Harper became an instrument of Western economic and political power. A SQUARE MEAL: A Culinary History of the Great Depression, by Jane Ziegelman and Andrew Coe. (Harper, $15.99.) This evocative cultural history investigates how the experience of widespread hunger - roughly a quarter of Americans were undernourished - affects the United States' relationship to food today, including taste preferences and understanding of nutrition. LUCKY BOY, by Shanthi Sekaram. (Putnam, $16.) At 18, Soli made the journey from Mexico to Northern California as an undocumented immigrant; once she gives birth to her son, Ignacio, motherhood gives her life an organizing principle. But when she faces deportation, Soli and Ignacio's lives intersect with that of a wealthy Indian-American woman - who desperately wants a child - at a critical juncture.

John Harper, the 54-year-old hero of this grim novel from British author Doughty (Apple Tree Yard), remembers being a young man in Jakarta in 1965, providing information and covert work for corporations and various governments. Still haunted by the brutal actions he committed for a Dutch private-intelligence operation, Harper has returned to Jakarta in 1998, convinced that he will be slaughtered as were so many others decades earlier. He cautiously enters an affair with a local woman named Rita, worried that she could be killed because of their association. The ambitious plot moves awkwardly from the Cold War in Europe to the Civil Rights struggle in California and back to Indonesia. Yet the different elements never fully connect, the dense prose reading more like a newspaper investigation than fiction. Although tormented by his immoral choices, Harper elicits little sympathy from the reader, except during flashbacks to his childhood in L.A. Agent: Anthony Harwood, Anthony Harwood Ltd. (U.K.). (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.