This cover image released by Ballantine shows "The Spectacular" by Zoe Whittall. (Ballantine via AP)

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

“The Spectacular” by Zoe Whittall (Ballantine)

Zoe Whittall’s “The Spectacular” follows three generations of women as they navigate love, life, and motherhood.

It’s 1997 and Missy is a 22-year-old rock star who struggles with drug addiction. She is determined to party like the male members of her band, but she can think of nothing worse than getting pregnant while on tour -and she’ll do anything she can to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Carola is the mother who abandoned a young Missy to live at a yoga center, where she ends up embroiled in a sex scandal. And Ruth is Missy’s Turkish grandmother who wants nothing more than for Missy to become a mother and for her estranged daughter and granddaughter to reconcile.

The second half of the book jumps to 2013. Now divorced and aching for a child, we follow Missy as she attempts to get pregnant and find love, all while working to repair her relationship with Carola.

“The Spectacular” is an homage to womanhood, motherhood, sexuality and queerness as it chronicles the lives of three ferociously strong protagonists who are wildly different from one another. The first half is chock-full of action, drama, energy, and excitement. The characters are beautifully flawed and so alive as they all scramble through life searching for happiness.

In the second half, that energy dissipates a bit. Missy is older, no longer on tour, and is now desperate to have a baby, while at the same time working to repair her relationship with her own mother. Her navigation of love and fertility in her late 30s is an important story, but the shift feels a bit abrupt. Nevertheless, once you settle in to the time jump, it becomes a compelling exploration of what happens when we grow older and are still desperately searching for what we want.

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“Apples Never Fall,” by Liane Moriarty (Henry Holt and Company)

Who knew there were so many tennis metaphors for life? Australian novelist Liane Moriarty shares them all and probably creates a few of her own in “Apples Never Fall.”

Meet the Delaneys, who are sure to be an A-List ensemble cast in the years ahead: There’s Stan, stoic patriarch and erstwhile tennis coach, his wife, Joy, his doubles partner on the court and in life, who managed the family tennis academy for years and is now trying to “retire with grace” and longing for grandchildren. They have four adult children – Troy, Brooke, Logan and Amy – whose childhoods were dominated by the sport that paid all the family’s bills, but who now earn a living outside tennis.

The novel opens with the sibling quartet in a cafe, trying to figure out where their mother could be. She sent a cryptic text to them all and hasn’t been seen for days. She isn’t replying to messages or answering her phone. The narrative then jumps back and forth from the present to “September,” the month of Joy’s disappearance.

We’re quickly introduced to a mystery character, Savannah, who shows up at the Delaneys’ door one night with a “fresh, deep cut just beneath her right eyebrow.” Joy invites her in and mothers her to the point where she’s soon eating casserole and spending the night in Amy’s childhood bed.

We’re also treated to chapters from the perspective of Detective Senior Constable Christina Khoury and her partner, who at the request of two of the Delaney children are now investigating Joy as a “missing person.” Her interviews with all the key characters are intercut with flashbacks to September as the authorities try to piece together the puzzle.

Moriarty goes deep into each characters’ head as we learn all about their lives and relationships. Forgive the metaphor, but it’s irresistible – you feel like you’re reading a tennis match, turning your head left, right, left, right, as the story unspools. Morarity is very good at constructing plot, dribbling out details that resurface chapters later to create “aha” moments.

But what makes “Apples Never Fall” a real pleasure to read, and elevates it a little above Moriarty’s two most recent bestsellers and TV hits, “Big Little Lies” and “Nine Perfect Strangers,” are the insights into the complexity of family relationships. She’s created a character in Joy who feels real and relatable, whose inner monologue is filled with gems like, “You couldn’t share the truth of your marriage with your adult children. They didn’t really want to know, even if they thought they did.”

By the end of the novel, of course, we all know. It’s a trip well worth taking on the page, before it shows up on a streaming service near you.

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“Harlem Shuffle,” by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday)

Ray Carney is the kind of outlaw you want to root for because he’s kind, generous, loves his wife and family, and is “only slightly bent when it came to being crooked.” He’s the hard-working, upwardly aspirational anti-hero of “Harlem Shuffle,” Colson Whitehead’s loving homage to noir fiction and nostalgic look at the city that never sleeps in the late 1950s and early ’60s. The book is among this year’s finalists for the Kirkus Prize.

Unlike his last two books, “The Underground Railroad” and “The Nickel Boys,” which dealt with the serious social justice themes of slavery and Florida’s segregated juvenile justice system, “Harlem Shuffle” is a wildly entertaining romp. But as you might expect with this two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and MacArthur genius, Whitehead also delivers a devastating, historically grounded indictment of the separate and unequal lives of Blacks and whites in mid-20th century New York.

Like a lot of heist novels, the plot is twisty, with a large, at times bewildering cast of characters and a few storylines that border on the ridiculous. What ties it all is the utterly believable, complicated character of Carney, a furniture store owner and small-time fence desperately trying to claw his way into the middle class.

The plot is set in motion when Carney’s hapless cousin Freddie gets involved in a brazen plot to rob the historic Hotel Theresa, introducing Ray to an unsavory but colorful cast of killers, conmen and assorted ne’er-do-wells. Carney gets in deeper and deeper, largely out of loyalty to Freddie, who was like a brother to him growing up.

But it’s not as simple as that. Carney also has his own demons, primarily a massive chip on his shoulder and overweening thirst for revenge. It might be because his hoodlum dad abandoned him and his mother. Or because his in-laws look down on him because his skin color is darker than their beloved daughter’s. Or because of the daily indignities he faces as a Black man in America – or all three.

Part of the suspense – and what sets this novel apart from so many others in the hard-boiled crime genre – comes from wondering whether Ray’s better angels will prevail. In one of countless beautifully written, erudite passages, Whitehead takes us inside Ray’s head as he considers the relationship between fathers and sons, and the question of whether genetics is destiny. “Carney’s father was crooked, but that didn’t make him so. It simply meant that he knew how things worked in that particular line.”

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