A quiet dinner for two in an almost-empty restaurant in Carmel-by-the-Sea, Calif., provides the frame for this terrific standalone thriller from Steinhauer (The Cairo Affair). Henry Pelham has arrived from Europe for a meeting with his former lover and CIA colleague, Celia Favreau, now retired and a mother of two, ostensibly to wrap up the "Frankler case." That's the code name for an internal investigation into "the 2006 Vienna Airport disaster," in which a militant Muslim group took a commercial jet hostage-and was apparently "aided by a source within the U.S. embassy." What is portrayed as a fact-finding evening unfolds into something much more dramatic. Henry still carries a torch for Celia, but their respective memories, and the interrelationships in the Vienna CIA office where they worked, demonstrate how the personal and the professional are so often mixed. There's great narrative energy in the thrust and counterthrust of the dinner conversation, as well as in the re-creation of the Viennese events; Steinhauer is a very fine writer and an excellent observer of human nature, shrewd about the pleasures and perils of spying. 150,000-copy first printing. Agent: Stephanie Cabot, Gernert Company. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Starred Review. Celia and Henry, once an ardent couple in Vienna almost ready to live together, reunite years later for a "remember when" dinner in Carmel-by-the-Sea, CA. Both CIA agents at the time of their romance, the two had much in common besides their lusty appetites. Celia and Henry also had tricks up their sleeves that came in handy after the affair evaporated under the pressure of a horrific incident in which terrorists took over a passenger jet. Although the agents played different roles in the attempt to rescue the 172 hostages, everyone on board was killed. Discussing the incident at their sentimental supper, the couple pry into their suspicions that the rescue had been compromised, thus leading to shocking consequences. VERDICT This genre-bending spy novel takes Hitchcockian suspense to new heights. Over the course of a meal with flashbacks, the eternal questions of trust, loyalty, and authentic love are deftly dissected. Readers drawn to the story of a loving couple trapped in a terrible embrace will be thrilled to follow Henry and Celia's tortured pas de deux. [See Prepub Alert, 9/22/14; 150,000-copy first printing.]-Barbara Conaty, Falls Church, VA (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

EMPIRE OF COTTON: A Global History, by Sven Beckert. (Vintage, $17.95.) With gathering force in the 19th century, as plantations proliferated across the American South, the production of cotton has linked millions of people to the slave trade, fueled the Industrial Revolution and shaped the modern economy. Beckert illuminates this commodity's violent history in his study, one of the Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2015. ALL THE OLD KNIVES, by Olen Steinhauer. (Picador/Minotaur, $16.) Still brooding over a terrorist attack that occurred six years earlier, Henry Pelham, a Vienna-based C.I.A. operative, comes to California to visit a former agent (who is also a former lover). Both were working in Austria at the time of the attack, which some believe was executed with the help of someone inside the agency. Steinhauer presents all the action of this taut espionage thriller through their intimate dinner conversation. MY LIFE AS A FOREIGN COUNTRY, by Brian Turner. (Norton, $15.95.) Turner has written about his years in the Army, including deployments to Bosnia and Iraq, in two earlier poetry collections. In this lyrical and empathetic memoir, composed as a series of brief vignettes, he pairs his own wartime recollections with the imagined experiences of other veterans. THE GIRL WHO WAS SATURDAY NIGHT, by Heather O'Neill. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16.) Nouschka and Nicolas are the twin children of a French Canadian singer celebrated for his quirky lyrics and heralded as an emblem of Québécois identity but who is an inept father. O'Neill's novel unfolds in gritty, bohemian corners of Montreal as the twins meet an eager filmmaker making a documentary about their family and attempt to escape their fame. THE LAGOON: How Aristotle Invented Science, by Armand Marie Leroi. (Penguin, $18.) Before heading his own school in Athens, the philosopher, whose contributions to science are often overlooked, lived on Lesbos, off the coast of modern Turkey, and was enthralled by the natural world. In this travelogue cum history, Leroi returns to the Aegean island and shows that a great deal of modern zoology and biology can be traced to Aristotle's observations and writing on the subjects. TRIGGER WARNING: Short Fictions and Disturbances, by Neil Gaiman. (Morrow/HarperCollins, $16.99.) Drawing inspiration from a wide range of sources (including Sherlock Holmes and tweets from his fans), many of Gaiman's collected tales are "lovingly steeped in established fictional worlds while artfully nudging them into unexplored territory," our reviewer, Andrew O'Hehir, wrote. BETTER THAN BEFORE: What I Learned About Making and Breaking Habits - to Sleep More, Quit Sugar, Procrastinate Less, and Generally Build a Happier Life, by Gretchen Rubin. (Broadway, $16.) A greater awareness of habits - those powerful, unconscious behaviors that Rubin calls the "invisible architecture of daily life" - can change lives in profound ways.

*Starred Review* Henry Pelham flies to Carmel-by-the-Sea for dinner with Celia Favreau, an old flame and former colleague at the CIA station in Vienna. He's hoping to answer a nagging question about Flight 127, a hijacking that ended in the worst way possible on their watch possibly with help from a mole. To all appearances, Celia has completely left the world of espionage and reinvented herself as a wealthy, doting mom in an exclusive community. But when the narrative switches points of view, we learn that Celia has her own perspective, her own questions, and her own objective, too. Steinhauer was inspired by the BBC/Masterpiece dramatization of Christopher Reid's poem The Song of Lunch and wondered whether he could write a compelling spy story that takes place at a restaurant table. He could, indeed, and My Dinner with Andre this ain't. Readers hooked on the jolt of adrenaline that typically accompanies Steinhauer's intelligent thrillers needn't fear the highfalutin backstory: though this does essentially take place over the course of a single meal, it delivers intrigue, suspense, and a heart-stopping finale. In his acknowledgments, Steinhauer tells us he wrote it in one month. You'll devour it in one night. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Steinhauer's last book, The Cairo Affair (2014), had a six-figure printing and a six-figure promotional budget, too, but this one seems even more likely to broaden his audience.--Graff, Keir Copyright 2015 Booklist

Two American spiesone retired, one activedance around what really happened five years earlier during a mission gone horribly wrong. In this masterfully plotted and suspenseful stand-alone, Steinhauer (The Cairo Affair, 2014, etc.) pieces together the details of an event the CIA refers to only as Flughafen (after the German word for airport). Four Islamist extremists, members of the Aslim Taslam group, hijacked a plane at the Vienna airport, and, despite the presence of a low-level operative onboarda pure coincidencethe takeover ended in tragedy. Five years later, Agent Henry Pelham is conducting an internal investigation (code name "Frankler") into the role the CIA's Vienna office, where he was stationed at the time, played in the events of Flughafen. Complicating an already dicey situation is the fact that his main target is former flame Celia Harrison, who left the agency immediately after the Austrian debacle and moved to California, where she married an older man and had two children. Now Henry and Celia meet for dinner in Carmel-by-the-Sea, a town as innocuous as their conversation is serious. Steinhauer expertly shifts perspectives between the two spies in both their present and past lives, when Henry was a rough-and-tumble field agent and Celia wielded power behind a desk. It's an understatement to say that nothing is as it seems, but even readers well-versed in espionage fiction will be pleasantly surprised by Steinhauer's plot twists and double backs. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.