It’s almost August, which for some of us means there’s only one more month to look awkward in flip-flops and a thick smear of sunblock while we lie on a hammock or a sandy towel, sweaty and heat-dazed and content, with an open box of ginger snaps and a pile of books at our side. Thrillers, probably. This week we recommend a bunch of good ones — from the latest Megan Abbott novel (“Give Me Your Hand,” about rival scientists with a long history) to a new take on Raymond Chandler and his classic detective Philip Marlowe (“Only to Sleep,” by Lawrence Osborne) to Flynn Berry’s tale of a daughter seeking answers and vengeance after a murder close to home (“A Double Life”).

And because midsummer nights’ screams needn’t be limited to fiction, we’ve thrown in the true-life story of Arthur Conan Doyle’s involvement in a turn-of-the-century murder case (as written by the former Times reporter Margalit Fox), along with Allie Rowbottom’s surprisingly dark family memoir of life as a Jell-O descendant. Bonus for Megan Abbott fans, just to bring things full circle: As Abbott did in her 2014 book “The Fever,” Rowbottom also offers a take on the mysterious twitching girls of Le Roy, N.Y. You might pair those books, like white wine and fish (or vodka and Jell-O), and ease out of summer that way, uneasily.

Gregory Cowles

Senior Editor, Books

CANDY, by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg. (Grove, $16.) This satire of Voltaire’s “Candide” and parody of smutty novels, first published (and banned) in France in 1958, is now available in a 60th anniversary edition. It follows the story of Candy Christian, a young woman of thrice-scrubbed innocence who possesses nuclear pheromonal impact and a “heart too big” to deprive men. “Every sentence in ‘Candy’ seems to have a little propeller on it,” our critic Dwight Garner writes. “This episodic novel still lives because its joints are loose. It’s that rare book that smacks of a tight deadline only in good ways. There was no time to overthink it, to gum up the works.”

JELL-O GIRLS: A Family History, by Allie Rowbottom. (Little, Brown, $28.) Rowbottom — a descendant of the Jell-O fortune — weaves together her family history and the story of the classic American dessert to produce a book that alternately surprises and mesmerizes. “Despite its title, this isn’t a bland tale that goes down easy; ‘Jell-O Girls’ is dark and astringent, a cutting rebuke to its delicate, candy-colored namesake,” our critic Jennifer Szalai writes. “It’s also the kind of project that could turn unwieldy and even unbearable in the wrong hands. But Rowbottom has the literary skills and the analytical cunning to pull it off. Like a novelist, she can imagine herself into the emotional lives of others, while connecting her story and theirs to a larger narrative of cultural upheaval.”