Paperbacks new and noteworthy

A selection of summaries from The New York Times Book Review:

“While Justice Sleeps,” by Stacey Abrams. (Anchor, 480 pp., $17.) In this legal thriller, a young law clerk catches a whiff of a dangerous conspiracy in Washington after the Supreme Court justice she works for slips into a coma. “Those desirous of perils and surprises will encounter them in abundance,” wrote reviewer Richard North Patterson.

“We Own This City: A True Story of Crime, Cops, and Corruption,” by Justin Fenton. (Random House, 352 pp., $18.99.) A Baltimore-based investigative reporter traces the rise and fall of the city’s Gun Trace Task Force, a group of officers who spent years robbing drug dealers, selling narcotics, planting evidence and defrauding taxpayers. Reviewer Maurice Chammah wrote that Fenton “shows how, in our zeal to combat crime, we have allowed institutions to produce it.”

“Caul Baby,” by Morgan Jerkins. (Harper Perennial, 352 pp., $16.99.) This debut novel follows the women of a Harlem family that stays afloat by selling their “caul,” their magical, restorative skin, to the clientele in their gentrifying neighborhood. As reviewer Jamie Figueroa wrote, Jerkins excels in “conveying the life-giving and life-sustaining power of Black women’s bodies, and the blood relationships between them.”

“A World on the Wing: The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds,” by Scott Weidensaul. (Norton, 416 pp., $18.95.) A renowned naturalist breaks down the world of avian migration and details the fight to preserve global migratory patterns in the face of climate change. According to reviewer Christian Cooper, the success of Weidensaul’s account “rivals the astonishing feats of the birds he chronicles.”