The Fervor by Alma Katsu (Putnam). Versatile, inventive Katsu here again ingeniously places her supernatural horror fiction within a historical event. Which is, in this case, one that has been well reported on by more conventional writers from varying viewpoints — and, though Katsu doesn’t belabor it, one that her family forbears might have dealt with in grim reality. No preaching goes on, here, mind you, this is simply a terrific historical horror novel. But the setting in place and time is the internment in concentration camps of whole families — whole neighborhoods! of Japanese Americans, American citizens, for some sort of imagined security reasons during World War II. (America’s many different, both offensive and stupid, ethnic paranoias are probably especially likely in a nation of immigrants — and are maybe even to be understood as, if not forgivable, at least understandable in such a polyglot population,) But not so fast! Here, in this place of concentration in the wild American northwest, there be also demons — Japanese demons. And they aren’t dangerous only to the guards.

Summer Love by Nancy Thayer (Ballantine). The Nantucket-dwelling and Nantucket-loving Thayer (she grew up in Kansas, though; did every islander there grow up that far from an ocean?) Thayer, I had almost arrived at saying, needs by now no more than an elbow, gently, in her readers’ ribs. I have a lot of admiration and real respect for this sort of storytelling, but I have to admit that I don’t read them anymore, beyond a worked-up suspicious inspection of pages here and there — and there, and there — to satisfy my sense that she hasn’t started ’phoning them in. I haven’t caught her at anything like that, though. She really seems to enjoy them as much as her readers do.

Hidden Pictures by Jason Rekulak (Flatiron). This well worked-out suspense novel is clever and creepy, but not quite horror, just ingenious and intricate suspense with deeply scary implications that may or may not be real. There are actual pictures, hand-drawn, that figure in — quite a few of them, and some of them especially unsettling. We get a very likable first-person narrator and, making the pictures from time to dramatic time, an also likable but undeniably strange little boy. And there are twists and turns that never stop coming.

The Last White Rose: A Novel of Elizabeth of York by Alison Weir (Ballantine). Deep, richly detailed and yet fast-moving biographical novel, part of a full series of such books by this author covering Tudor England and the six wives of Henry VIII (this Elizabeth was Henry’s mother, so this is just before that historical sequence). I have no expertise in that history, and it may be that little is known in this personal detail even to scholars, but both the story and the history here are certainly convincing, the writing is a wonderful combination of rich and free-flowing, and this is an enveloping and deeply satisfying read.