6 tales of mystery and mishap — all hitting book stores on April Fools’ Day

Don’t worry, you’ve come to a safe space.

To be clear, the same can’t be said for the rest of the internet, which every April Fools’ Day lards its usual mystery blend of fact, rumor and misinformation with, well, still more misinformation — this time in the service of what some allege to be humor.

But you’ve found sanctuary in the next few hundred words, promise. Here are six real books coming out this week, with dust jackets that reflect their real contents: mysteries and mishaps, often told with a sly smirk. Because something has to make sense in this crazy world, dang it.

Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritance, by Joe Dunthorne

The Welsh-born novelist seeks to unearth, and untangle, one particularly gnarled root of his family tree: his great-grandfather, a Jewish chemist who fled the Nazis in the mid-1930s. While true, this story of daring escape, passed down like a family heirloom, always obscured another, rather complicating detail: that same great-grandfather simultaneously was developing chemical weapons for the Nazi regime. Dunthorne’s attempt to understand this painful paradox interweaves memoir, archival research, travelogue and a fair bit of family therapy.

Flesh, by David Szalay

Spare and detached on the page, lush in resonance beyond it, Szalay’s new novel reads a bit like an immigrant bildungsroman flavored with Albert Camus. At the heart of it all is István, a Hungarian teen making his first stumbling steps into adulthood beset by trauma, flashes of violence and the more mundane misunderstandings that come to shape his life. It is the Hungary-based, British-raised novelist’s first book in seven years, and his second since being shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2016.

I See You’ve Called in Dead, by John Kenney

It doesn’t sound outlandish that a professional obituary writer would draft an obituary for himself at one time or another – perhaps even featuring a few flattering embellishments, why not? But problems arise when said writer – Bud Stanley, the ill-starred hero of Kenney’s comic novel – drunkenly publishes this whopper-laden exercise in wish fulfillment during his own lifetime. Opportunities arise too, though, and it’s not long before his own death turns his life on its head.

Rabbit Moon, by Jennifer Haigh

Separated for years by the centrifugal forces of divorce and estrangement, the Litvak family is yanked back together by tragedy: Daughter Lindsey, victim of a hit-and-run car collision, lies in a coma in a hospital in Shanghai, while the parents she left half a world away must reunite at her bedside, to piece together clues of the life she lived without them. It’s a portrait, told in time jumps, of a family fractured by nothing so much as their own profoundly human flaws.

The Usual Desire to Kill, by Camilla Barnes

A good rule of thumb: Any novel that so explicitly references homicide in its title is probably a murder mystery, or something to do with marriage. In this case, it’s the latter, and those violent urges belong primarily to the intransigent couple’s adult daughter, who has been unwillingly conscripted into the role of peacemaker. So don’t expect premeditated murder, exactly – but there may well be some dialogue sharp enough to draw blood in this tragicomic debut novel.

Vera Wong’s Guide to Snooping (On a Dead Man), by Jesse Q. Sutanto

She’s not Hercule Poirot, exactly, but Vera Wong is no rookie gumshoe either. In Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers, published in 2023, the 60-something teashop owner and meddling mother already demonstrated her sleuthing skills – and her utter inability to just mind her own business. Sutanto’s big-hearted follow up finds the meddlesome detective taking on a new case – the disappearance of a mysterious social media influencer – whether or not anyone actually asked for her help. Vera knows they need her, don’t worry.