Apple was charged with colluding with publishers to fix e-book prices. At the root of the dispute lie two different ways that publishers can sell books to retailers.

First, there's the wholesale model, the way that book publishers have sold printed books to bookstores and other outlets for years. The publisher sets a cover price for a book, sells it to a retailer at a discount (typically 50 percent) and then the retailer can sell the book to consumers for whatever price it chooses.

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What many true crime aficionados would regard as the most important element of the crimes -- the identity of the perpetrator -- is the one piece of information Kolker, along with everybody else investigating the killings, cannot supply. Surely a few readers of "Lost Girls" will find this unsatisfying, but that will be their shortcoming, not Kolker's. The absence of the killer is the making of this book, a constraint that allows it to become extraordinary.

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"Hamlet" is the play that really brings out this urge, given that its title character is mysteriously inhibited from doing the thing that he regards as his greatest responsibility. Why doesn't the prince kill his uncle, when he believes (or does he?) that Claudius has killed his father? Why does he instead dither and rave and philosophize and brood and berate both his (innocent) girlfriend and his (culpable?) mother? How does he manage to kill someone else's father and engineer the deaths of two of his uncle's hirelings without getting around to the main event until the very last minute, when his own life is forfeit?

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And it was not just any fiction that did the trick, mind you, but "literary" fiction. What balm to the acolytes of that dwindling corner of the cultural landscape! Many of the novelists, would-be novelists and bookworms who posted the item to their Facebook pages went on with their day ever so slightly perked up. Chances are they did not notice that the cited study was produced by the same circle of Torontonian researchers whose work has prompted similar recent news items. All told, this bunch has announced that reading literature -- specifically fiction -- makes people more empathetic, less inclined toward "attachment avoidance," more socially adept and better able to change for the better in personality and temperament. Taken as a whole, they've touted the novel as a Swiss Army knife for matters of psychological hygiene.

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Gaiman's first novel for adults in eight years, "The Ocean at the End of the Lane," would seem to follow this pattern; most of the action, recounted in the first person, describes the experiences of a nameless 7-year-old boy. But "The Ocean at the End of the Lane" does feel different, and not only because of its framing device. The novel begins and ends with the narrator, now an adult, returning to the English village where he grew up, for a family funeral. (The deceased is never identified, but there are hints it is the man's father.) We learn that he's been married and separated, that he is a working artist, that he has grown children. When he looks back on the strange events of his childhood, it is through the mellowed and slightly melancholy lens of middle-age. What the story sacrifices of the sweet, glassy purity of a child's view, it compensates for with the complex sepia of maturity; it's the difference between a bright young white wine and a well-aged burgundy.

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In an impressively sleazy bit of reporting, writers Ben Jacobs and Avi Zenilman have decided that the most important thing about Avril Haines' career before she accepted a post as deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency is the fact that 20 years ago she was the "host of 'Erotica Night' at a Baltimore bookstore." In the intervening years, Haines has been deputy assistant to President Obama and legal adviser to the National Security Council, as well as serving as a key liaison between the White House and the CIA, but what Jacobs and Zenilman choose to lavish their attention on is a detailed description of a promotional evening Haines led at Adrian’s Book Cafe when she was in her early 20s, complete with sexy sample quotes from an Anne Rice novel read aloud at the event.

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Anyway, by now you probably already know that Rosemary, the narrator of Karen Joy Fowler's marvelous and justly celebrated new novel, "We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves," was raised, until the age of 5, with a chimpanzee "sister" named Fern. Rosemary begins her story in the middle, recalling the course of a few months in 1996 when she was as an undergraduate at the University of California at Davis. During this period, Rosemary made and lost a new friend; saw her brother, a fugitive from the law, for the first time in 10 years; was arrested twice and finally learned to face the truth about what happened to Fern. Fern's non-human nature isn't explicitly spelled out until a third of the way through the novel, but knowing about it in advance only makes the complexities of Rosemary's relationship to her feel richer from the very start.

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The ruling conflicts with an earlier finding by a court in the 5th District concerning the amount of leeway corrections officers may exercise in confiscating material. "Prison authorities had a legitimate penological interest in prohibiting inmates from possessing sexually explicit materials," Justice James Richman wrote, but in the case of "The Silver Crown" and the prisoner who wants to read it, they overstepped their powers and engaged in an "arbitrary and capricious application of the regulation." Richman declared that "The Silver Crown" does not meet the famous "three-pronged" standard by which American courts have determined obscenity since the Supreme Court of the United States' decision on Miller v. California in 1973. Specifically, he found that Madden's novel (the second installment in a series) is not a work that, "taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value."

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That's because, in the era before broadcast media, Leitzel was an aerialist and the headliner of the traveling Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Jensen's "Queen of the Air: A True Story of Love and Tragedy at the Circus," recounts not only her life, but that of the man who was, if briefly, her husband, Alfredo Codona, the greatest "flyer," or trapeze artist, of his day. It's a tale told in broad, bold swathes of primary color, like the gigantic posters that commemorate the big top's golden days, yet as with any good book, delight awaits in the details, as well.

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The deliberate pursuit of the Great American Novel has always been a peculiarly masculine endeavor. It is a book, in Mailer's words, designed to "seize the temper of the time and turn it." To attempt to write the Great American Novel is to surmise that you can speak on behalf of an entire, fractious nation. Plus, by all appearances, we're talking about a game of King of the Mountain: Only one winner allowed, and the competition is bruising. The photograph accompanying Mailer's piece showed him standing in a boxing ring, poised to deliver his punches.

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Among the relieved is John Sargent, CEO of Macmillan, who was interviewed onstage for the conference's plenary session. His cheerfulness was especially striking when you consider that three months ago, Sargent, the most outspoken of the major publishers sued by the Justice Department for allegedly fixing e-book prices in collusion with Apple, was forced to settle that suit with the DOJ for an undisclosed amount. (Penguin, the other most recent settler, had to fork over $75 million.)

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Take George Guidall's performance of Helene Wecker's new novel, "The Golem and the Jinni." The book is set among the immigrant communities of 1899 New York. Two creatures from folklore, a golem and a djinn (or genie, or jinni, as Wecker renders the word), find themselves living in the Jewish and Syrian quarters, respectively, trying to pass themselves off as human beings. The golem, designed by a master sorcerer to pass for a real woman, is at radically loose ends; the man she was created to serve dies in the Atlantic crossing. The jinni has been accidentally freed from a long imprisonment in a tin flask, but remains trapped in human form. The tinker who releases him, and an elderly rabbi who recognizes the golem for what she is, act as guides to the new world for the two central characters.

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That's how Paul Collins uses the famous real-life murder mystery at the center of "Duel With the Devil." This sensational crime took place in Manhattan in December, 1799, on the very brink of a new century (or not quite, if you're the sort of pedant who insists that the millennium didn't really turn until New Year's 1801 -- and yes, those people were around back then, too!). The body of a young Quaker woman, Elma Sands, was found at the bottom of a well in Lispenard Meadows, a swath of marshy, undeveloped land that separated New York City proper from Greenwich Village, approximately where the neighborhood of Soho stands today. The guy almost everyone liked for the killer was Levi Weeks, a carpenter who lived in the same boarding house as Sands, an establishment run by Sands' cousin, Catharine Ring, and her husband, Elias.

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Packer's inspiration, as he explains in the book's afternotes, was the "U.S.A." trilogy by John Dos Passos, three novels that use a third-person choral method to portray American life in the early 20th century. "The Unwinding," while nonfiction, is narrative rather than polemical or analytic. Each chapter is a story, or an installment in a story, about a person or place. Some of the subjects are famous (Newt Gingrich, Oprah Winfrey, Colin Powell, Alice Waters) because such people, Packer writes, now "occupy the personal place of household gods, and they offer themselves as answers to the riddle of how to live a good or better life." But the key figures, the ones whose trajectories arc through the entire book like ribs or rafters, are unknowns: an African-American factory worker turned organizer in Ohio, a disillusioned lawyer who drifts from public service to finance and back again, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist with extreme libertarian beliefs and a scion of North Carolina tobacco farmers trying to make it as an entrepreneur. In the book's most bravura chapters, the city of Tampa, Fla. serves as yet another character.

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The Southern Vampire Mysteries -- which began in 2001 with "Dead Until Dark," and continued through 13 novels with hard-to-keep-straight titles and a dozen or so short stories and novellas -- is comfort reading of superior quality, made even more endearing by the series' longtime audiobook narrator Johanna Parker. As the series title suggests, these books, while typically shelved in the romance section, are actually whodunits. In each volume some annoying minor character gets killed, and by the end the culprit has been nabbed: serviceable plots, these, but certainly not the source of the series' charm.

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"The Book of Woe" is an account of the compiling of the fifth edition of the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders." The DSM was first published in 1952, and in the years since it has been subject to epochal revisions in which the foundations of the mental health professions have been reconceived and revamped. The DSM-5, plans for which were begun as early as 1999, is set to be published this month. The process of assembling it has been anything but smooth, as "The Book of Woe" relates.

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It's the story of Colville and Francine, each around 30 years old and former childhood friends. Francine has married, and is expecting her first child in suburban Boise, Idaho. Colville lives in a trailer but turns up on Francine's doorstep when a news story about a neighbor's missing child mysteriously inspires him to seek her out.

What Colville and Francine share, and what Francine's apprehensive husband, Wells, can begin to fathom, is their past as members of a reclusive religious sect planning for the imminent end of the world. Francine's father helped build the underground compound where the sect expected to ride out a nuclear holocaust, and Colville's beloved younger brother was regarded as a chosen one, destined for some great mission. (Instead, he became a soldier and was killed in Afghanistan.) How exactly the sect fell apart is revealed gradually, and the novel's action culminates in striking passages describing a visit to the groups now-deserted subterranean shelter.

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