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Linked short stories offer a singular form of narration. Ideally each story can stand alone, but when read together, they overlap and intersect, continually offering new perspectives. Tracy Winn uses this form to explore the mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts, from the years after WWII to the present day in her new collection, Mrs. Somebody Somebody.

As the Hub Hosiery mill changes from workplace to abandoned site to renovated condos and shops, so the characters shift—from factory girls pining for love to the unhappy heirs of the once-prominent families to the sons and daughters of the new immigrants that continue to find their way to Lowell in the 21st century.

The title story takes place in Lowell in 1947. The mill is in full production and filled with women, many of them European immigrants. It tells the story of Stella Lewis—an attractive girl whose dream is to marry rich and become “Mrs. Somebody Somebody.” This is a scenario unlikely to be fulfilled on the factory floor, though she keeps her eye on the owner’s grandson, Dr. Charlie Burroughs. Stella becomes friends with Lucy, an enigmatic Southerner who wins the attentions of many of the workers after she jumps in the river to save a drowning baby. This story introduces many of the subjects that Winn continues to explore throughout the collection—immigration, chance meetings and the American home front during wartime.

The collection also follows the decline of the Burroughses, once one of Lowell’s most prestigious and wealthy families. “Blue Tango” outlines the unhappy relationship between Charlie and Delia after Charlie’s return from Korea. Charlie had signed up barely a year into their marriage, and Delia still feels angry and abandoned. She retaliates with a series of affairs—behavior that doesn’t stop even after he returns home. Their marriage never recovers from these unhappy beginnings, and their children suffer the consequences, quickly turning from the neglected babies of “The Glass Box” into the troubled teens of “Copper Leaves Waving.”

The final few stories take place in present-day Lowell. The mills, long abandoned, have been repurposed and the big houses of Belvidere Hill torn down and turned into sub-divisions. The Polish and Italian immigrants have been replaced by Mexicans and Brazilians whose children are fighting in the Iraq war. In Mrs. Somebody Somebody, Winn has created a masterful mosaic of a resilient American city changing over time, populated with characters you won’t soon forget.

In Cammie McGovern’s third novel, Neighborhood Watch, she probes the underbelly of a quiet, undistinguished neighborhood in a small Connecticut town—an unlikely setting for a brutal murder.

Twelve years earlier Betsy Treading, the “Librarian Murderess,” was convicted of bludgeoning her neighbor, Linda Sue—a social misfit in their cookie-cutter community—to death. Now Betsy has been released from prison, finally cleared by DNA testing, and she realizes that in order to erase any lingering suspicion about her guilt, she must find the real killer herself.

Gradually Betsy fleshes out the secrets and lies merely hinted at in her trial, uncovering hidden relationships and family rifts that eventually lead to a completely unanticipated conclusion. Her neighbors 12 years earlier formed a complex mishmash of personalities, including Marianne, who organized neighborhood watch parties where women could buy pastel-colored Taser guns; her husband Roland, who conducted clandestine cold fusion research in their basement; their daughter Trish, who became pregnant at 15 and found a sympathetic ear in Linda Sue; newly married Geoffrey, a celebrity writer accused of plagiarism; and Linda Sue herself, a loner who exhibited disdain for the whole neighborhood scene, and who became the object of Geoffrey’s wandering eye.

Injected into this intriguing murder mystery are a number of side plots which at times seem intrusive—Betsy’s five miscarriages, for instance, about which she constantly grieves, reliving all the sad details; her somnambulism, which caused her initially to believe in her own guilt; and her unlikely relationship with Leo, an inmate in the male prison adjacent to her own. But all in all, McGovern succeeds with her latest offering—as both biting social commentary and a literary page-turner.

Everything Lovely, Effortless, Safe may be Jenny Hollowell’s debut novel, but the precision and grace with which she tells the story of Birdie Baker, an aspiring actress in Los Angeles, makes Hollowell seem like a veteran.

When we first meet Birdie, she’s growing up in small-town Virginia, the only daughter of evangelical parents. On the outside, Birdie is following the path to a religious life, but for as long as she can remember, Birdie has dreamed of becoming someone else. At age 20, she marries a young elder brought home by her father, but two years later, she walks out on her pastor husband and her parents and hops on a bus to Los Angeles.

Now, nine years later, Birdie’s life in Hollywood isn’t exactly as she had hoped it would be. Her resume lists a handful of unmemorable roles in films and commercials, and her steadiest gig is as a body double for a spoiled, frivolous actress. Everyone in the industry tells Birdie that she’s got something—that she’s real. But Birdie has been pretending for so long that even she doesn’t know what’s real anymore. She’s trapped in a place somewhere between the life she abandoned and the life she desires, and the city of glitz and glam isn’t as magical as she had hoped.

Using detailed prose and short, anecdotal chapters, the author has created a psychological portrait of both an individual and a city. While Birdie is waging her own war against personal demons, Hollowell illustrates that Birdie is only one of the thousands of individuals who come to Hollywood with a dream and get torn apart trying to reach it. At once witty, comic and tragic, Everything Lovely, Effortless, Safe throws the reader into the unglamorous side of Tinseltown for an engrossing read on the obsessive nature of celebrity.