In the southern Maryland hamlet of Friendship, a young wife and mother is found brutally murdered, her head bashed in with a crude implement. The Farmer's Wife-by Carol Booker, author of the best-selling The Waterman's Widow-suspensefully describes both crime and punishment, recovering the narrative from contemporary newspaper accounts and other archival sources.

From the nerve-testing tension of suspicion, trial, conviction, redemption and retribution, readers get welcome breaks in interludes describing the tenor of the times. Slavery has forged allegiances in a nation still healing from Civil War. Even religious alliances have been affected. Nature shapes the spring of 1877 even more intimately, after perhaps the harshest winter in memory. Southern Maryland is still a practical frontier of frost-pitted roads, subsistence farming, indentured servitude, insecure jails, primitive forensics and not-infrequent lynching.

But lawyers are clever, and the wit-twisting back and forth of prosecution and defense leaves the outcome as uncertain for readers as it must have been for the avid trial-followers of a century and a half ago.

To wilderness guru John Muir, the forest was a temple, and he advised that we saunter through it with reverence. No hiking, thank you.

Walks Around Anne Arundel is a collection of newspaper columns inspired by sauntering through parks in and around Anne Arundel County with a good dog and a good friend or two.

In it, you'll make twofold discoveries. First, you'll visit nearby forests, Bayside beaches and riverside trails-all in a short drive from Annapolis and many nearly forgotten gems. While reading-and sauntering-along with a dog-loving poet and storyteller, author Jefferson Holland, you'll also learn about the natural history and cultural heritage of each site.

How to best preserve shoreline for creatures who pass between water and land? What tiny state park was once a very local airport? What were the hottest spots on the Bay for Black Marylanders-so appealing that Whites integrated them? In what parks was Annapolis water once purified? Where can your dog get in the water, and you get on the water?

Holland tells you all that-and much more.

A Schizophrenic, A Bomber and A Woodworker Walk into A Bar explores three lives of a character who has problems with authority. A memoir, it describes the evolution of self-determination, understanding and reconciliation.

In Part I, The Notorious Miller Twins, the mature narrator explores the genesis of his problems. The only son of a schizophrenic mother who is alternately too close and too distant, he revisits her family dynamic, introducing us to a clan whose tragicomic dysfunctions shape three generations. Despite his apparent escape into a family of his own, his fate remains entwined with hers, he becoming her savior and guardian while she denies he is her son and calls him by a made-up name.

In Part II, The Bethesda Bomber, the teen-age narrator chances into his fondest vision of heaven: a 1960s record store, Empire Music. Enthralled by rock and roll, pin-ball, like-minded friends and the increasing trust of the store owner, a successful entrepreneur with more authority resistance than his own, he drops out of high school. Broken trust and human idiosyncrasy cost him his place in heaven, and unprotected sex make him a husband and father at 18.

In Part III, Enterprise Woodworking & Design Company, expelled from his wife's family's business, he creates his own path, opening a creative and comprehensive woodworking business that grows, despite agonizing setbacks, enormously successful. His clients include not only D.C. notables of the 1980s and '90s but also an upstart computer company, Apple.

Yet 20 years in, he walks away from the balancing act, content to begin a fourth life.

The stories in Loaded for Bear are told through the voice of a male narrator. But he is a shape shifter, ranging in age from a boy to a retiree, and holding forth from each of the decades in between.

We encounter him, variously, as a city newspaper boy and as a country preteen; a Vietnam War draftee and a young father and groom-to-be; frightened son and a troubled veteran; a brother and bereaved lover; a divorced single father of adolescent girls, then grown daughters; a dutiful nephew and reluctant farmyard midwife; a colleague forced to interview a Palestinian immigrant for his Green Card certification. And once, apparently, as one of a circle of female cousins.

In each encounter, we find ourselves invited observers in alternative universes, as befuddled as the unwitting characters by the circumstances that enwrap them.