Like most of Carl Hiaasen’s books, this vintage piece features a cavalcade of freakshow-rejects rumbling and tumbling through the weird and wild Florida land/seascape. Less a mystery than a morality play, it entertains at every turn. If you like a little irony with your sarcasm, Hiaasen should be high on your reading list, and “Skin Tight” is one of his best.

I suppose if I had read this book when I bought it last summer, it might not have had the strange immediacy to current events (the death by radiation poisoning of Russian former spy Alexander Litvinenko) that made my skin crawl just a little. False comparisons to reality aside, this latest of Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko novels stands up as a moody thriller, dark and complex, strange and deeply satisfying in the end.

In Mohawk, Richard Russo makes his first pass at common themes: the life and death of small American towns, failed marriages, dysfunctional families, village idiots, and troubled teenagers. Neither as rich nor as deep as Nobody’s Fool or Empire Falls, Mohawk is worth reading for its tender intimations at the themes and relationships Russo explores in later fiction.