Also of interest... the comforts and discomforts of family

The Other Mrs.

(Park Row, $27)

“Secrets abound” in the latest thrillermeets–family drama from the bestselling author of The Good Girl, said Oline Cogdill in the Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Sun-Sentinel. A troubled couple and their children move from Chicago to an island in Maine to attempt a fresh start, but trust among them is scarce even before a sullen niece joins the household and a murder puts the father’s fidelity in doubt. The Other Mrs. “moves at a brisk pace, with believable—and surprising—twists and a startling finale.”

Sharks in the Time of Saviors

The Mountains Sing

The story of Vietnam is so much bigger than most Americans know, said Diana Nelson Jones in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. This “gorgeous and vivid” novel by a Vietnamese poet follows a single family across several decades of 20th-century occupation and civil war, but “the story is buoyed by the family’s extraordinary resilience” and by the author’s craft. “The book is so devastating in places as to be unbearable, but then the flow of the writing and the story brings you onto a wave of hope.”

The Jetsetters

focuses on how much sexist abuse she has had to endure in the industry she still loves. The title is the demeaning nickname she was given by customers, some of whom groped her or insulted her for refusing to sit on their laps. One of her bosses raped her in a wine cellar and coerced her silence by threatening to share nude photos of her. When she wrote the book, James described the assault without flinching. “It didn’t really hit me,” she says, “until I was recording the audiobook and I had to read it and I was crying and running to the restroom to puke.”

The horror stories don’t end there, said Michael Kaplan in the New York Post. Once a group of wealthy wine collectors slipped a roofie into her glass to knock her out. “They did it for sport, as if they had no sense of my humanity,” she says. The memoir aims to draw attention to a toxic culture that James believes has not yet been erased by the #MeToo movement. But her own story does have a happy ending, in that she has married a fellow wine-world star and now works as the beverage director at Cote, another Michelin-starred Manhattan restaurant. “What healed me in the end was also the restorative properties of hospitality,” she says. “Good wine and good food and good people really can be restorative.”