The best books of October 2020, according to Amazon's editors

A retired Chicago cop and recent divorcé just wants to lick his wounds in the peace and quiet of an Irish backwater. But being pulled into a local murder investigation opens his eyes to the fine line between picturesque and grotesque in this suspenseful standalone by Tana French.

In the vein of Lori Gottlieb's bestselling, "Maybe You Should Talk to Someone," Christie Tate's "Group" chronicles her unconventional, painful, but ultimately transformative experience in group therapy.

Drawing comparisons to Gillian Flynn's "Gone Girl" and Emma Donoghue's "Room," this nail-biting thriller begins with a young woman escaping her kidnapper with one of her children in tow. But while one nightmare has ended, another has just begun.

In this enthralling romantic adventure, a woman takes not wanting to be tied down to extremes, bargaining with the devil to avoid an arranged marriage. In exchange, she is cursed with being forgettable, until, after 300 years, she meets a man named Henry.

John Brown and Abraham Lincoln had different approaches to ending slavery: one violent, one political. This absorbing history explores Lincoln's deft touch, navigating the fallout when Brown was sent to the gallows, with some seeing him as a martyr, others a terrorist.

Harrow employs her historian chops and a formidable imagination to pen a spellbinding story, set in 1893, that finds three sisters making good trouble when they use their supernatural powers to support the suffragette movement.

Born with spina bifida, Riva Lehrer was raised to believe that she was something broken that needed to be fixed--a corrosive notion she is disabused of with the help of a group of artists, writers and performers. "Golem Girl" is her rousing memoir of reinvention.

Craig Wright distills the insight he's gained from his "Genius Course" at Yale in a fascinating examination of what made people like Einstein, Marie Curie, Beethoven and Steve Jobs tick. It's also a call to cultivate curiosity, and celebrate learning for learning's sake.

In tenuous times like these it can be difficult to see the forest for the trees. CNN's Fareed Zakaria offers an insightful, and oddly comforting read, as he looks ahead at life post-pandemic.

Continuing a popular series John Grisham started 31 years ago, Jake Brigance — the brilliant, compassionate lawyer from "A Time to Kill" — will do all he can to help a teenage boy accused of murdering a deputy in Clanton, Mississippi.

How would our lives be different if we made different choices? In this "Sliding Doors"-esqe novel, Nora Seed answers that question after she overdoses on antidepressants and ends up in an enchanted library that allows her to take roads she initially decided not to travel.

Iraq war veteran and author of the National Book Award-winning "Redeployment" returns with his first foray into fiction. Set in Colombia, "Missionaries" examines the complicated toll of modern warfare.