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Each week Entertainment Weekly reviews a small selection of popular new books. Titles available for the Kindle reviewed in the June 24th issue include:

A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion, by Ron Hansen. Scribner, 2011. Print length: 272 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "...a case that has inspired novels and films for decades." Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (5 reviews). Kindle edition $11.99. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"Based on a real case whose lurid details scandalized Americans in 1927 and sold millions of newspapers, acclaimed novelist Ron Hansen’s latest work is a tour de force of erotic tension and looming violence. Trapped in a loveless marriage, Ruth Snyder is a voluptuous, reckless, and altogether irresistible woman who wishes not only to escape her husband but that he die - and the sooner the better. No less miserable in his own tedious marriage is Judd Gray, a dapper corset-and-brassiere salesman who travels the Northeast peddling his wares. He meets Ruth in a Manhattan diner, and soon they are conducting a white-hot affair involving hotel rooms, secret letters, clandestine travels, and above all, Ruth’s increasing insistence that Judd kill her husband..." - Amazon.

Movie fans will remember that the Ruth Snyder story has been filmed numerous times over the years, first in 1944 (Double Indemnity starring Barbara Stanwyk and Fred MacMurray) and later in 1946 (The Postman Always Rings Twice, with Lana Turner and John Garfield). Postman was remade in 1981, featuring Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange and - also in 1981 - sizzled on the silver screen as Body Heat, with Kathleen Turner and William Hurt.

"There Are Things I Want You to Know" about Stieg Larsson and Me, by Eva Gabrielsson, with Marie-Francoise Colombani. Translated by Linda Coverdale. Seven Stories Press, 2011. Print length: 224 p. MEMOIR. EW's slant: "At some point while reading Stieg Larsson's mega-selling mystery The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, perhaps your mind wandered and you paused to ponder a heretofore unanswered question: How did the late author make his coffee? Well, wonder no more..." Amazon customer rating: 3 stars (1 review). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Eva Gabrielsson and Stieg Larsson shared everything, starting when they were both eighteen until his untimely death thirty-two years later at the age of fifty. In “There Are Things I Want You to Know” about Stieg Larsson and Me, Eva Gabrielsson accepts the daunting challenge of telling the story of their shared life steeped in love and sharpened in the struggle for justice and human rights. She chooses to tell it in short, spare, lyrical chapters, like snapshots, regaling Larsson’s readers with the inside account of how he wrote, why he wrote, who the sources were for Lisbeth and his other characters - graciously answering Stieg Larsson’s readers’ most pressing questions - and at the same time telling us the things we didn’t know we wanted to know - about love and loss, death, betrayal, and the mistreatment of women." - Amazon.

Daughters of the Revolution, by Carolyn Cooke. Knopf, 2011. Print length: 192 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "...exquisitely hewn sentences and fiercely original characters brilliantly capture a moment of social change..." Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (4 reviews). Kindle edition $12.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"It’s 1968. The prestigious but cash-strapped Goode School in the town of Cape Wilde is run by its aging, philandering headmaster, Goddard Byrd, known to both his friends and his enemies as God. With Cape Wilde engulfed by the social and political storms of integration, coeducation and the sexual revolution, God has confidently promised coeducation 'over my dead body.' And then, through a clerical error, the Goode School admits its first female student: Carole Faust, a brilliant, intractable fifteen-year-old black girl..." - from the hardcover edition.

Witches of East End, by Melissa de la Cruz. Hyperion, 2011. Print length: 288 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "De la Cruz balances the supernatural high-jinkery with unpredictable twists and a conclusion that nicely sets up book 2." Amazon customer rating: 3 1/2 stars (43 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"The three Beauchamp women - Joanna and her daughters Freya and Ingrid - live in North Hampton, out on the tip of Long Island. Their beautiful, mist-shrouded town seems almost stuck in time, and all three women lead seemingly quiet, uneventful existences. But they are harboring a mighty secret - they are powerful witches banned from using their magic. For centuries, all three women have been forced to suppress their abilities. But then Freya, who is about to get married to the wealthy and mysterious Bran Gardiner, finds that her increasingly complicated romantic life makes it more difficult than ever to hide her secret...this is a page-turning, deliciously fun, magical summer read fraught with love affairs, witchcraft, and an unforgettable battle between good and evil." - Amazon.

Untold Story, by Monica Ali. Scribner, 2011. Print length: 272 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "Noted British writer Monica Ali entertains the fantasy...with an empathetic energy that puts a literary gloss on a beach-read subject." Amazon customer rating: 3 stars (1 review). Kindle edition $11.99. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"When Princess Diana died in Paris’s Alma tunnel, she was thirty-seven years old. Had she lived, she would turn fifty on July 1, 2011. Who would the beloved icon be if she were alive today? What would she be doing? And where? One of the most versatile and bold writers of our time, Monica Ali has imagined a different fate for Diana in her spectacular new novel...Fast forward a decade after the (averted) Paris tragedy, and an Englishwoman named Lydia is living in a small, nondescript town somewhere in the American Midwest. She has a circle of friends: one owns a dress shop; one is a Realtor; another is a frenzied stay-at-home mom. Lydia volunteers at an animal shelter, and swims a lot. Her lover, who adores her, feels she won’t let him know her. Who is she? Untold Story is about the cost of celebrity, the meaning of identity, and the possibility - or impossibility - of reinventing a life." - Amazon.

Nothing Daunted: The Unexpected Education of Two Society Girls in the West, by Dorothy Wickenden. Scribner, 2011. Print length: 304 p. HISTORY. EW's slant: "Wickenden's talents for research, observation, description, and narrative flow turn this unfaded snapshot of these early-20th-century women in the West into something even more resonant - a brightly painted mural of American under construction a century ago..." Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (3 reviews). Kindle edition $12.99. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.

"In the summer of 1916, Dorothy Woodruff and Rosamond Underwood, close friends from childhood and graduates of Smith College, left home in Auburn, New York, for the wilds of northwestern Colorado. Bored by their society luncheons, charity work, and the effete young men who courted them, they learned that two teaching jobs were available in a remote mountaintop schoolhouse and applied - shocking their families and friends. They took the new railroad over the Continental Divide and made their way by spring wagon to the tiny settlement of Elkhead, where they lived with a family of homesteaders. They rode several miles to school each day on horseback, sometimes in blinding blizzards. The man who had lured them out west was Ferry Carpenter, a witty, idealistic, and occasionally outrageous young lawyer and cattle rancher. He had promised them the adventure of a lifetime and the most modern schoolhouse in Routt County; he hadn’t let on that the teachers would be considered dazzling prospective brides for the locals. In their buoyant letters home, the two women captured the voices and stories of the pioneer women, the children, and the other memorable people they got to know. Nearly a hundred years later, New Yorker executive editor Dorothy Wickenden - the granddaughter of Dorothy Woodruff - found the letters and began to reconstruct the women’s journey. Enhancing the story with interviews with descendants, research about these vanished communities, and trips to the region, Wickenden creates an exhilarating saga about two intrepid young women and the 'settling up' of the West. " - Amazon.
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Note to readers: The book prices quoted here are the Amazon.com prices in effect at the time of the blog posting. Please follow the links to the individual book to check the current price.