This month's picks define eclectic, especially this one. Hagedorn offers an authentic look at NYC's West Village. It's the story of a failed female film maker and a notorious older writer of lesbian erotica, their chaotic lives, their traumatic pasts and the mystery of one man's drug death and another's disappearance.

Fans of Jacqueline Winspear and Charles Todd will enjoy this paperback original debut introducing Maggie Hope - secretary to the British Prime Minister in 1940 as the Blitz threatens London. This promises to be a great historical series.

This early novel from the master of rural noir is the Southern gothic coming-of-age tale of an observant obese teen, his drunken and sexually inappropriate mother, her latest abusive husband and a flashy new man in town.

An unemployed stay-at-home dad, whose marriage is on the skids, makes contact with a trip of like-wise stay-at-home dads, all living in Manhattan's Upper East Side and all of whom seem to have a heightened level of animal-like awareness. Starr, known for his hip hardboiled novels, takes a sudden turn to the supernatural but taps into something bigger than just the obvious. He takes the werewolf cliché and transforms it into a fascinating metaphor for masculinity in crisis. As his male characters become more emasculated by society at large, the beast within each of them seems to grow. It's a great concept and promises to be a terrific series.

This remarkable non-fiction book was nominated for the 2012 Edgar Best Fact Crime. It's the story of the NYPD in the late 1960's and early 1970's when it was at its most corrupt and overtly racist even as they dealt with the most radical period in modern American history. It's also the story of the civil rights movement giving birth to the militant Black Panthers and its aftermath. Focusing on three principals, and told like a police procedural, this is one absorbing read and refreshingly authentic.

Fans of dysfunctional family novels will love this one. It really takes the cake. Husband and wife avant garde performance artists who've used their children as props in their subversive work since they were babies. Needless to say the children are now real pieces of (art) work. Deliciously wicked and oddly touching.

A Dracula landlord, angered by his angry rent-striking tenants' complaints about their rat-infested apartments, decides that arson may be the answer to his problems and shut them up once and for all. Filled with corrupt Boston cops and fire fighters, this is one bleakly compelling world-view.

A California professor has strange dreams where he murders a woman named Marcia. He becomes convinced he is having visions of a past life only to eventually meet a still living "Marcia" who is convinced he is her dead husband brought back to life. A creepy psychic thriller, 1970's style, and happily back in print.