Journalist Jeremy Gray of al.com takes readers back to 1920s Birmingham, when criminals with small axes attacked immigrant merchants and interracial couples, leaving dozens dead or injured over four years. Police were desperate to solve the case, one of the most curious and violent in Magic City history.

Detective Sarah Booth Delaney is back in the latest mystery by Mobile’s prolific author Carolyn Haines (this is the 18th book in the series). Set in the fictional Zinnia, Miss., in this book three sister witches are accused of a teenager’s disappearance. Are the sisters criminals, or victims?

Columnist and funny lady Kelly Kazek of al.com has filled her latest book, a memoir, with hilarious tales from her “weird news reporter” gig and from her stranger-than-fiction life with her hubby, Sweetums, a 6-foot-7 Bigfoot enthusiast. To order your own signed copy, email ke********@ke********.com.

The author of the classic “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” Zora Neale Hurston interviewed Cudjo Lewis, then 86 years old, in Plateau, or Africatown, just north of Mobile, in 1927, and again in 1931. Lewis was the last living person who had sailed from Africa to America aboard the Clotilda, the last known slave ship, 50 years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed. This book tells his incredible story in his own vernacular.

Read the latest on the search for the Clotilda here.

Social justice educator, author and activist Melanie S. Morrison tells the true tale of a tragic event in Birmingham — the brutal 1931 attack on three young white women in Birmingham that led to a reign of terror on the black community — and its aftermath. Morrison first heard the story from her father, who dated the younger sister of the sole survivor of the attack.

Gin Phillips, a native of Montgomery who now lives in Birmingham, set this thriller in a fictionalized version of Birmingham Zoo, where a young mother and her four-year-old son find themselves trapped for three hours. The New York Times Book Review named it “A Best Crime Novel of 2017.”

Read more about Phillips here.

Looking for a steamy romantic comedy? Angela Quarles is the pen name of Angela Trigg, who lives in Mobile, where she’s opening a bookstore in October. The third book in her “Stolen Moments” series, this one is set in Atlanta, where a hurricane has stranded tough girl Claire with Irish hottie Conor.

Read more about Trigg here.

Fans of “Gone Girl” will enjoy New York Times bestselling author Michelle Richmond’s latest, which Dean Koontz calls “a tense, twisting, quirky novel of growing dread.” In it, a newlywed couple join a mysterious group called The Pact, which is supposed to keep their marriage intact. Hmm. Richmond, a Mobile native, lives in northern California.

Read more about Richmond here.

A senior architectural historian for the Mobile Historic Development Commission and a member of the National Book Critics Circle, John Sledge, who lives in Fairhope, details Alabama’s contributions to the Civil War in his latest book. On its back cover, documentary filmmaker Ken Burns is quoted as saying, “I couldn’t stop reading it!”

Leslie Anne Tarabella, who lives in Fairhope and whose columns appear on al.com, focuses on Southern values in this compilation of her most popular musings on majorettes, motherhood, manners and more.

A review in The New York Times said that Daniel Wallace’s “Extraordinary Adventures” is “as refreshing and original as his earlier books,” which include “Big Fish” and “Ray in Reverse.” Wallace sets the story in his hometown of Birmingham, where painfully shy Edsel Bronfman has 79 days to find a date to accompany him to a beach vacation he won.