Weekend picks for book lovers

What should you read this weekend? Paste BN's picks for book lovers include three new mysteries, and a book that suggests Jackie Kennedy Onassis suffered from PTSD.

The Scent of Death by Andrew Taylor; HarperCollins, 480 pp.; fiction

Bad historical novelists almost always give themselves away with their dialogue first ("Blimey, old egg!"), and in good ones the reverse is true — we slide indiscernibly into the rhythms of an older mode of speech, until after a few pages, it seems as natural as our own.

That's the case in this skillful novel, which perfectly reproduces the loyalist experience of the American Revolution in the year 1778, when the British were beginning to panic about their chances of victory. Its amiable narrator is Edward Savill; he arrives from London to aid his countrymen, but is soon shanghaied into becoming both spy and detective to solve a murder wrongly pinned on a runaway slave.

Paste BN says *** out of four. "A note-perfect voyage into a different time."

The Killer Next Door by Alex Marwood; Penguin, 400 pp.; fiction

Seven tenants share a cheap London house, paying cash, each with a different reason to lie low — one of them because he's a serial killer, slowly mummifying women's corpses in his flat to give him companionship.

Paste BN says ***. "Watch out for Marwood … (she) creates three beautifully sympathetic female characters."

Last Winter, We Parted by Fuminori Nakamura; Soho Press, 224 pp.; fiction

The story of a writer visiting a photographer in prison, where he awaits execution for killing two women by a terrible method: setting them on fire. His sister, at large in the world, is equally frightening.

Paste BN says ***½. "An icy, outstanding thriller… reminiscent of Muriel Spark and Patricia Highsmith."

Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story by Barbara Leaming; St. Martin's Press, 368 pp.; non-fiction

Argues that the first lady suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after she witnessed the gory assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

Paste BN says ***. "Provocative."

Maeve's Times: In her Own Words: Selected Writing from The Irish Times by Maeve Binchy; Knopf, 400 pp.; non-fiction

The late, popular Irish novelist (Circle of Friends) also wrote for The Irish Times for 40 years; this collects her newspaper work.

Paste BN says ***. "Entertaining … the collection is a mixture of both the sanguine and the serious."

Contributing reviewers: Charles Finch, Roberta Bernstein, Mary Cadden