THE PRICE YOU PAY, by Aidan Truhen. (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, $16.95.) When his elderly neighbor is killed, things start to go south for Jack Price, the slick cocaine dealer at the heart of this thriller. The book is “brilliant, a latticework of barbed jokes and subtle observations and inventive misbehaviors, a high-end thriller, relentlessly knowing, relentlessly brutal,” Charles Finch wrote in his review. “It reads like Martin Amis on mescaline.”

NO GOOD ALTERNATIVE: Volume 2 of Carbon Ideologies, by William T. Vollmann. (Penguin, $20.) The writer packs voice and passion into his examination of what we are doing to the earth, taking aim at coal, oil and natural gas and filling his book with interviews with people whose lives have been disrupted by those industries. Vollmann’s intended readers, he says, are those in the devastated future.

TELL THE MACHINE GOODNIGHT, by Katie Williams. (Riverhead, $16.) This novel imagines an invention called the Apricity, which offers individualized “contentment plans” that tell us how to be happy. The book centers on Pearl, who works for the company behind the invention, and her son, who’s recovering from an eating disorder and refuses the technology. Williams’s characters are complex and deeply human.

GIVE PEOPLE MONEY: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World, by Annie Lowrey. (Broadway, $16.) Lowrey, who writes about economic policy for The Atlantic, marshals considerable research in her argument for a universal basic income. Even $1,000 given each month to every American would eliminate poverty by the government’s current benchmark, she says, outlining a number of ways to redistribute the nation’s money to make it possible.