6 hot paperbacks to read this summer

A real-life Sherlock Holmes story, an award-winning biography and four intriguing works of fiction — there’s something for everyone in this crop of new paperbacks.

“Give Me Your Hand” (Little, Brown; $16.99), the latest in Edgar Award winner Megan Abbott’s irresistible string of woman-centered crime thrillers, weaves a tale of three scientists, two of whom share a terrible secret. Taking place mostly in the sterile gleam of a research lab, this time-shifting page-turner about women in intellectual competition was acquired for a television adaptation even before its publication last year.

“Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous” by Chris Bonanos (Picador, $20) was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Biography of 2018, this book tells the story of Usher Fellig, an Eastern European immigrant who reinvented himself as Weegee, chronicler of Manhattan nightlife in the 1930s. “The book is a zesty read,” wrote Seattle Times reviewer Michael Upchurch, “steeped in the history of photography (Bonanos’ first book was “Instant: The Story of Polaroid”) while creating an indelible portrait of his subject.”

Margalit Fox, a former obituary writer for The New York Times, brings the “clarity, precision and devotion to historical context” she learned in that job to “Conan Doyle for the Defense” (Random House, $18), Seattle Times columnist Mary Ann Gwinn wrote last year. The book is a true-crime story in which Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, becomes enraged by a wrongful murder conviction. “If you are a Holmes devotee,” wrote Gwinn, “you will love watching his creator take apart a flimsy criminal case through reason and meticulous examination of the evidence.”

“My Year of Rest and Relaxation” by Ottessa Moshfegh (Penguin, $16). This novel, by the author of “Eileen,” follows a young Manhattan woman who vows to cope with grief by spending a year sleeping; it’s been optioned for film by Margot Robbie. “One of the most compelling protagonists modern fiction has offered in years: a loopy, quietly furious pillhead whose Ambien ramblings . . . somehow wend their way through sad and funny and strange toward something genuinely profound.”

“John Woman” (Grove Atlantic, $16) is the latest work from Walter Mosley, author of the popular Easy Rawlins detective series. It’s “a little bit crime story and also a meditation on history, identity, power and sex,” wrote Seattle Times reviewer Jerry Large. The main character is a history professor who has his own complicated history. “A novel by Walter Mosley always prods a reader to think beyond the mundane, in part because Mosley’s mind darts all over,” wrote Large, admiring the author’s way of taking old questions “and making them fresh again.”

FInally, there’s “All the Names They Used for God” (Random House, $17), the strange and wonderful debut of Anjali Sachdeva that was named one of the best books of 2018 by NPR. Sachdeva’s short stories, wrote Kirkus Reviews, are “so rich they read like dreams. . . . They are enormous stories, not in length but in ambition, each an entirely new, unsparing world. Beautiful, draining — and entirely unforgettable.”