Also of interest...in alternative therapies

We Are the Light by Matthew Quick (Avid Reader, $28)

“Timely. Relevant. Ripped from the headlines,” said Karin Tanabe in The Washington Post. The latest novel from the author of The Silver Linings Playbook is all of that, because it touches down on a town devastated by a mass shooting inside the local movie theater. As the main character, whose wife was killed, writes unanswered letters to his Jungian psychoanalyst, a portrait of the town emerges. As in real life, grief here doesn’t obliterate humor, so “don’t feel guilty if your tears are mixed with laughter.”

White Horse by Erika T. Wurth (Flatiron, $28)

Kari James, the heroine of this electric novel, is “terrifically alive,” said Laura van den Berg in The New

York Times. We meet her in a Denver bar on a night that will thrust her into a wrenching confrontation with her past, particularly with why her Chickasaw-Apache mother abandoned her as a child. As

Kari begins seeing ghosts and uncovering dark history, author Erika Wurth “handles the suspense with an expert hand.” As I read, “I felt the terror creep off the page and across my skin.”

Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet (Biblioasis, $18)

The newest novel from 2016 Booker Prize finalist Graeme Macrae Burnet is “another work of fiendish fun,” said Malcolm Forbes in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Readers are presented with notebooks apparently written by a woman who went undercover as a patient of the psychotherapist she blames for her sister’s suicide. Her ruse proves her ruin, though, as Case Study becomes at once “a guessing game, a blackly comic study of a nervous breakdown, and a captivating portrait of an egomaniac.”

The Acrobat by Edward J. Delaney (Turtle Point, $18)

The Acrobat introduces us to a Cary Grant we’ve not known before, said Mark Athitakis in the Los Angeles Times. “Itchy to escape his gilded cage,” the 55-year-old screen star begins taking LSD under supervision, and the drug unleashes a barrage of memories. As the chapters “ping-pong across time,” showing Grant as vaudeville acrobat, a child, and more, he’s troubled that masks have defined him. “Perhaps one way we’re all like celebrities is that we all have masks, too.”