This summer, two writers spin intrigue out of the lives of great authors. Matthew Pearl, author of The Dante Club, investigates the death of Edgar Allan Poe in The Poe Shadow ($25). Refusing to believe that the poet died in a drunken stupor, Baltimore lawyer Quentin Clark hires a detective, quite like the one Poe featured in his Dupin tales, to investigate. Though a bit longer than anything Poe ever wrote, Shadow is a likable tribute to the writer and his time period. In The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril ($24) by Paul Malmont, several pulp fiction authors get to share the stage. Walter Gibson (the Shadow), Lester Dent (Doc Savage), and L. Ron Hubbard (cowboy novels, before founding Scientology) investigate the death of Howard Lovecraft (creepy horror stories). Sometimes it's too didactic in its love for the pulp fiction medium (do we really need a monologue explaining that the genre takes its name from the cheap paper it's printed on?). But by animating these cult authors as hard-luck characters, Peril becomes a genuine page-turner.

PUZZLING FACTS

You'll probably never need to know that "Leonardo da Vinci spent 12 years painting the Mona Lisa's lips," but that's the fun of The Book of Useless Information($13) by Noel Botham & the Useless Information Society. Among the other factoids (true, as far as we can tell) offered up in the book: Actor Andy Garcia was born a conjoined twin. "Babe Ruth wore a cabbage leaf under his hat to keep his head cool. He changed it every two innings." And, "Sigmund Freud had a morbid fear of ferns."

The New Yorker Book of Cartoon Puzzles and Games ($18) is another amusing way to pass time. Sure, you can probably match the picture of the tortoise flying through outer space with the mystery title "Battlestar Galapagos." But the editors up the challenge level with word grids, missing items, and acrostics.

WRITERS ON THE STORM

Even as another hurricane season gets underway, the Louisiana Gulf Coast is still trying to get over the damage wreaked by Hurricane Katrina. One year removed from that catastrophe, several new books offer insight into Katrina's consequences, both human and political. Historian Douglas Brinkley uses newspaper accounts and personal experience (he was staying on the 15th floor of a New Orleans hotel when the storm struck) to re-create the week of Aug. 27, 2005, in The Great Deluge ($30). What results is a survey of the people Katrina affected, from 22-year-old bartender Kenny Borque, whose only preparation was to buy a life jacket for his dog, to Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, who has to deal with the statewide destruction and federal politics. In The Storm ($26), Louisiana State University Prof. Ivor van Heerden and writer Mike Bryan lay the fault primarily at the feet of government bureaucracy. But its detailed analysis of hurricane science and policy--including the potential threat fire ants pose to people stranded in trees because of floodwater--can be a bit overwhelming.

Other Katrina books due this summer include Breach of Faith (July, $26) by Times-Picayune Metro Editor Jed Horne, the global-warming focused The Ravaging Tide(August, $25) by journalist Mike Tidwell, and After the Storm: Black Intellectuals Explore the Meaning of Hurricane Katrina (August, $23). Though they aren't the usual beach reading, the Katrina books do take you on an unforgettable journey.