New titles to pick up this summer

■ “Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators” by Ronan Farrow (Little, Brown, $18.99, out June 30) and “She Said: Breaking the Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement” by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey (Penguin, $18, out June 30). These two books both comprise reporting that shared the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for public service. In its citation, the Pulitzer committee called the work of Farrow, Kantor and Twohey “explosive, impactful journalism that exposed powerful and wealthy sexual predators.”

■ “Lady in the Lake” by Laura Lippman (HarperCollins, $16.99). Lippman, author of numerous works of crime fiction, is good at noir; here, with a title that nods to Raymond Chandler, she employs more than a dozen narrators to tell the story of a woman found dead in a park fountain in 1960s Baltimore, and a bored young wifeturned-crime-journalist who’s determined to figure out what happened to her. I devoured this book when it came out last summer; it’s every bit as much a page turner as her previous noir, “Sunburn,” and that’s no small praise.

This time the threat comes from the Queen of the Hard Rock Trolls (Rachel Bloom), who aims to take over all the Troll kingdoms, each of which represent a different musical genre: Pop, Funk, Classical, Techno, Country and Rock. As Poppy and the gang witness the ravaged Symphonyville and later become imprisoned in Lonesome Flats (turns out a bunch of sad country-singing trolls aren’t wooed by the “rad medley” Poppy et al sing to cheer them up), Cooper (Ron Funches) embarks on a quest to find trolls that look like him, and is found to be royalty in the Funk kingdom (unsurprisingly

the most fun, out-ofthis-world Troll kingdom).

Eventually the threat becomes an existential one. What happens when one tribe wants total domination, destroying all other types of music? Is it better to have separate tribes in separate kingdoms, or does the Troll universe achieve harmony in coexistence?

It’s a nice, especially timely message for kids and parents, though a clunky one at times via the script, written by Jonathan Aibel, Glenn Berger, Maya Forbes, Wallace Wolodarsky and Elizabeth Tippet. We encounter subgenres

like K-pop, reggaeton, smooth jazz and yodeling via rogue characters, not quite knowing where they fit in (one character points out that Poppy’s kingdom map, which contains disco, is “outdated”). The Queen of the Hard Rock Trolls eventually reckons with the fact that forcing the homogeneity of hard rock on all the kingdoms makes it impossible to be unique. Branch’s seemingly unrequited love plotline takes a backseat to the tunes. But in the end, the music of the six strings makes the music of the spheres, and that’s something worth singing about.