A couple of recent titles I enjoyed:
L.A. 56 is a fast paced true crime police story that reads like a noir classic. Writer Joel Engel paints a dark picture of a sadistic rapist and racist’s cops that even James Ellroy can’t pen in his fiction. The year is 1956 and there have been a rash of rapes in predominately white areas in and around L.A. The victims are white, the perpetrator is black and to make matters worst he’s posing as a cop. White officers have made up their minds that a former black police officer is the culprit. But one good cop, Detective Galindo who worked the Black Dahlia murder case, is determined to get at the truth.
Most Wanted is the first person account of Massachusetts’s State Police Col. Thomas Foley who spent nearly twenty years of his career trying to capture the most wanted man in America. From the late 50’s through the early 1990’s Irish gangster Whitey Bulger was the most vicious and violent gangster in Boston history. He was feared by politicians, the Mafia and law enforcement alike. After more than a decade on the run Whitey Bulger was finally captured by the FBI. But Col. Foley knew the painful truth. The FBI may have captured him, but it was the FBI that gave him a license to kill and shielded him at every turn for years.
The Other Wes Moore
She never knew it, but she would lead doctors and scientist to discoveries that only Science Fiction writers of the 1950's could have imagined. Poor, uneducated and living in a segregated Baltimore a black woman, Henrietta Lacks, would die of cervical cancer in 1951.Without her or her family's knowledge samples of her tumor were taken. The cells would become known as the HeLa cells and they would change our world forever.
From looking around at the teen book sites it seems to me that publishers are sticking with two things. The coming of age theme(Secret Ingredient by Sarah Dessen) and the fantasy paranormal (Goddess from Harper and Renegade from Macmillan Tor) It looks as if most publishers are moving along a similar path.
The first blog I picked was Squeetus because it seemed pretty light and silly. However, as I read through Shannon Hale's earlier post I found some very serious and disturbing subject matter. The post about sexual assaults were touching and timely. They made me think about how cold and insensitive we can be as a nation... The early warnings to younger readers were thoughtful. 
