magical mystery tour; The season's hottest reads combine the twists and turns of personal fate with edge-of-one's-chair suspense.

Byline: Megan O'grady

No summer reading list would be complete without a good whodunit. Set in France during World War I, Philippe Claudel's By a Slow River (Knopf) evokes, with Poe-like mastery, the fog of apprehension that seeps into a small town after the murder of a young girl. Inspired by a crime that shook New York City in the seventies, Karen Shepard's Don't I Know You? (William Morrow) unravels the mystery of a single mother's death obliquely, through the poignant gaze of the victim's twelve-year-old son and the layered relationships of unnervingly familiar characters. History itself is the puzzler in Triangle (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Katharine Weber's ingenious take on the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire: A feminist scholar interviews its last living survivor-whose account might not be entirely trustworthy.

Then there are the intrigues of the heart. For the once-famous Australian artist in Peter Carey's rollicking tall tale Theft: A Love Story (Knopf), a second chance arrives in the comely shape of an enigmatic young American woman-who may be a mastermind in the high-stakes world of art forgery. A misguided Boston 20-something moves to Chicago in pursuit of true love in The Man of My Dreams (Random House), Curtis Sittenfeld's wry follow-up to Prep. The search for something sweet leads an unhappily married New York pastry chef to accept a job cooking for a red-state governor in Julia Glass's The Whole World Over (Pantheon). Meanwhile, the carb-phobic materialist in