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Based on The Count of Monte Cristo, Alfred Bester's saga The Stars My Destination will transport you off the couch and into a roiling world of futuristic teleportation. Author John Baxter says the book injects new life and energy into a classic tale.

Slaughter is a master of the thriller genre; her latest book, Broken, is full of twists and turns and technical details. In the latest installment of our "Thrilled to Death" series, Slaughter talks with NPR's Michele Norris about the stories that keep her in suspense.

George Orwell's dystopian vision offers such devastating political commentary that it's rarely described as a suspense novel. But author and former CIA operative Barry Eisler says the book simply proves just how powerful a thriller with a message can be.

It's hard to imagine that people used to die from things as small as a scratch on the knee — but that's what life was like before penicillin. Author Lauren Belfer's new novel, A Fierce Radiance, follows the intrigue as pharmaceutical companies race to mass-produce lifesaving drugs during World War II.

David Remnick has a nearly impossible task in his new biography of Barack Obama: writing "the most complete account yet" of the most famous man on the planet. The well-written and well-researched book may be ahead of its time; the events in it are so familiar right now that its scholarship may resonate better in 20 years.

During the summer of 1896, a 10-day heat wave killed nearly 1,500 people across New York City — many of them tenement-dwellers. In Hot Time in the Old Town, historian Ed Kohn describes the disaster — and how a little-known police commissioner named Theodore Roosevelt championed the efforts to help New Yorkers survive the heat.

Sebastian Mallaby's book is an expert primer on hedge funds — the "Ferraris of finance" — and a detailed portrait of Wall Street's daredevils. Reviewer Susan Jane Gilman says More Money Than God is illuminating ... and infuriating.

Three people are confirmed dead and more than 7,000 have been rescued in historic flooding in Louisiana. Amy Wold of The Advocate has an update.

Novelist Nicole Krauss artfully weaves disparate stories of love and loss into a devastating examination of the weight of memory on those left behind. Four narrators are connected by an antique desk separated from its original owner during the Holocaust.

In James' Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Archer is wise enough to understand that if you're not happy without a man, you certainly won't be happy with one. Writer Rhoda Janzen loves the book because it shows what a woman does once she acknowledges her own complicity in the life she has chosen.