In John Saul’s Faces of Fear, the prolific and popular novelist offers his 35th novel, this one again a story that will creep you out. This time, a 15-year-old girl who is more brainy than good looking is moved to Bel Air, California, by her mother who has just married a plastic surgeon. The surgeon believes the can make the teenager beautiful, and the mother agrees to let her be operated on…until she starts figuring out what he wants to make her daughter look like. If it’s what I think it is, it’s sort of a Vertigo kind of thing, if you know what I mean.

In nonfiction, author Simon Baatz takes a detailed look at a murder in Chicago during the Jazz Age that remains shocking. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were two rich kids living in Chicago who decided, because they were bored, to plan the perfect crime. They ended up killing 14-year-old Bobby Franks, mutilating the body. But Leopold accidentally left something behind which led police to arrest both boys. What followed was a titanic clash, as defense attorney Clarence Darrow (who wanted to abolish the death penalty) took the boys’ case, going up against tough prosecutor Robert Crowe. I’m not going to tell you what happens next, but it’s very interesting