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Recommended Recent Releases ...

Austin is fanatical about mystery and crime fiction – look no further than the creation of MysteryPeople late last year within Austin's venerated BookPeople for proof of this town's bloodlust. Spring saw a trio of releases from local crime scribes, including Janice Ham­rick's Death on Tour (Minotaur Books), which won the St. Martin's Minotaur/Mystery Writers of America First Crime Novel Competition (she reads at BookPeople this Sunday at noon). Susan Wittig Albert served up a fresh installment in her China Bayles series of "herbal mysteries" with Mourning Gloria (Berkley). And Darryl Wimberley put out his fifth Barrett Raines mystery, the hard-boiled Devil's Slew (Minotaur Books).

Switching genres, Night Shade Books published three Texas fantasy authors in recent months. Just don't call them escapist. Stina Leicht sets Of Blood and Honey (the first in her Fey and the Fallen series) during the Irish Troubles; Nebula Award finalist and College Station resident Martha Wells' The Cloud Roads is about warring clans; and Katy Staub­er – in a move sure to please this state's separatists – hinges her "post-ecological and post-economic collapse" novel Revolution World on a new Texas secession from the Union.

Let's stick with threes, shall we? On the memoir front, Nina Godiwalla chronicles her outsider-looking-in time in the trenches as a junior broker in Suits: A Woman on Wall Street (Atlas & Co.); Fred Burton follows up 2008's Ghost: Confessions of a Counterterrorism Expert with Chasing Shadows: A Special Agent's Lifelong Hunt To Bring a Cold War Assassin to Justice (Palgrave Macmillan); and UT baseball coach Augie Garrido puts his winning strategies to page (with a helping hand from foreword-writer Kevin Costner) in Life Is Yours To Win: Lessons Forged From the Purpose, Passion, and Magic of Base­ball (Touchstone).

Lastly, we'd be remiss if we didn't mention The Austin Chronicle Music Anthology (UT Press), edited by Austin Powell and Doug Freeman. Quite simply, it rocks.