Sweet lamb of Heaven

NOBODY: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, From Ferguson to Flint and Beyond, by Marc Lamont Hill. (Atria, $16.) Hill analyzes such high-profile deaths as Michael Brown's, Sandra Bland's and Trayvon Martin's to explore a system of negligence and indifference. The state has effectively abandoned those whom Hill calls "Nobodies": people marked as black, brown, immigrant, queer. LOSING IT, by Emma Rathbone. (Riverhead, $16.) Julia, the heroine of Rathbone's novel, is 26, professionally adrift and - most vexing of all - still a virgin. During previous opportunities, she always demurred, certain that a better one would come along, but now, "my virginity composed about 99 percent of my thought traffic." When she goes to live with her aunt, her quest to finally have a sexual encounter is complicated by a family member's revelation. THE WICKED BOY: An Infamous Murder in Victorian London, by Kate Summerscale. (Penguin, $17.) In 1895,13-year-old Robert Coombes and his younger brother were traipsing alone around East London. Days later, their mother was found dead, and Robert was sent to one of England's most infamous prisons. Summerscale reconstructs the case and its aftermath with forensic care. DARK MATTER, by Blake Crouch. (Broadway, $16.) After he is violently kidnapped, Jason, a married professor in Chicago, awakes as a different man entirely: His wife is not his wife, his child has not been born and he is working on a brilliant project. As Jason's various selves confront one another and he embarks on multiple paths, he must grapple with the question of which of his lives is real. Crouch draws on disparate influences in his thriller, which our reviewer, Andrew O'Hehir, called "alternate-universe science fiction bolstered by a smidgen of theoretical physics." UNFORBIDDEN PLEASURES, by Adam Phillips. (Picador, $16.) In a series of essays, Phillips, a British psychoanalyst, explores the meaning and the role of everyday indulgences in contemporary life. While others focus on the taboo, Phillips writes, "the seekers of unforbidden pleasures may know something about pleasure that has never occurred to the transgressive." SWEET LAMB OF HEAVEN, by Lydia Millet. (Norton, $15.95.) After her daughter, Lena, is born, Anna begins hearing streams of voices - both foreign and English, and not violent - a hallucination that resists diagnosis. When her marriage dissolves, she and Lena escape from Alaska, where they were living, to a hotel in Maine; but when her husband considers a political run, they must constantly evade his reach.

Immediately after giving birth to her daughter, Anna began hearing voices. She undergoes a flurry of expensive and inconclusive medical tests and then diagnoses herself with audible hallucinations. After years of coping, she begins to worry when the voices become unintelligible. At this point, she decides to leave her cheating politician husband in Alaska and escape to a low-budget seaside motel in Maine. Only after settling in does Anna discover that the six other residents also have hallucinations and are part of a support group run by the motel owner, who seemingly has psychic powers. Now Anna is torn between her husband, who wants her back in Alaska, and the motel owner, who has a strange hold over her. The story is adequate but becomes hampered by too much discussion about Anna's hallucinations and the motel's psychic connections. The author narrates the text, which is an unfortunate choice. The performance is rushed, monotonous, and sometimes incoherent. There is very little inflection or distinction among characters; overall, poorly done. VERDICT Fans of Laura Lippman and Fiona Barton with an interest in psychic phenomena may find Sweet Lamb of interest.-Nicole A. Cooke, GSLIS, Univ. of -Illinois at Urbana-Champaign © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.