The heat is here, and so is a strong shelf of new books. A few worth your July, across genres.

Literary fiction

Cool Machine by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday, July 21) closes the Harlem trilogy that began with Harlem Shuffle and continued in Crook Manifesto, returning to furniture dealer and part-time fence Ray Carney in a 1980s New York being remade by finance and real estate, per its publisher. If you haven't read the first two, this is the summer to start.

Young adult

Heartstopper, Volume 6 by Alice Oseman (Scholastic, early July) brings the beloved LGBTQ+ graphic-novel series to a close, following Nick and Charlie as they face their futures. For readers who found the story through its streaming adaptation, the source material is worth every panel.

True crime

Catch the Devil by Pamela Colloff (Knopf, July 14) is a decade in the making from a celebrated investigative writer, tracing a serial con man who worked as a jailhouse informant in Florida — peddling fabricated confessions and helping send an innocent man toward death row. It is a book about how a single unreliable witness can break the justice system.

Science and security

Biological War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen (Dutton, July 28) comes from the Los Angeles–based investigative journalist behind Nuclear War: A Scenario, according to her publisher. Built on interviews with scientists and officials, it stress-tests what would happen if a weaponized pathogen were released — urgent, and very hard to put down.

California history

Tin Can Coast by Joseph Ogilvy (Bloomsbury, July 21) is the California book of the summer for anyone who has driven Highway 1 and wondered about the old canneries. It traces how the immensely productive waters off the coast sustained Indigenous peoples and drew wave after wave of fishers — before the canning industry plundered them, conservation efforts undercut from the start by racism and commercial pressure.

Memoir

Dad, Love, Me by Matthew Quick (Simon & Schuster, July 21), the debut memoir from the author of The Silver Linings Playbook, is written as a letter to his ailing, estranged father. Expect a controlled reckoning with inherited damage and the ambivalence of caretaking.

And one more

For nonfiction readers chasing the summer's bigger conversations, Barnes & Noble's July roundup is a useful guide to the rest of the month's releases. Two of this list's standouts — Jacobsen's biosecurity scenario and Ogilvy's coastal history — carry strong California threads, a reminder that some of the season's most ambitious books are rooted close to home.