For Your Desk

True Green at Work: 100 Ways You Can Make the Environment Your Business By Kim McKay and Jenny Bonnin

(National Geographic, $19.95)

Amid the proliferation of books telling Americans how to lessen their impact on the environment, this how-to guide stands out for its simplicity. The authors offer on each page a single small step for reducing workplace waste, whether it's to use ecoefficient lighting, print documents double-sided, keep indoor plants (to improve employee health and attitude) or expand carpool programs. Their 100 suggestions aren't necessarily revolutionary; however, breaking them down in this way might make them easier to institute.

For Your Nightstand

Friend of the Devil

By Peter Robinson (William Morrow, $24.95)

British-born Canadian resident Robinson is one of the most consistently interesting crime novelists working today. Friend of the Devil tells parallel stories that eventually converge. The first concerns a woman found in her wheelchair, staring out to sea with her throat slashed. The second tale is that of a 19-year-old girl who's raped and strangled near an English market square. Detective Inspector Annie Cabbot catches the former and more frustrating case, while the latter falls into Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks' lap. As the two cops negotiate the hazards and wounds of their own on-and-off romantic past, they follow clues that suggest these slayings are historically connected ? although there may still be more than one killer involved. Robinson hit his stride with In a Dry Season (1999) and hasn't lost it yet.

Sins of the Assassin

By Robert Ferrigno (Scribner, $24.95)

After penning eight edgy, noirish novels, Kirkland resident Ferrigno changed course drastically to write a futuristic political thriller called Prayers for the Assassin (2006), which imagined an America divided into Islamic and radical Christian halves. The success of Prayers convinced Ferrigno to pen a trilogy; Sins of the Assassin is the second installment. Again, we follow ex-fedayeen warrior Rakkim Epps, this time sent into the lawless southern Bible Belt to find a lost superweapon coveted by a Christianist warlord as well as a power-craving Islamic fanatic, who decides that Epps must fail in his mission ? and likely die in the process. Ferrigno possesses a cinematographer's eye for action, and a devilish-keen talent for suspense-making.

The Teapot Dome Scandal: How Big Oil Bought the Harding White House and Tried to Steal the Country

By Laton McCartney (Random House, $27)

Coming off the turmoil of World War I, Americans were hungry for what Ohio newspaper publisher-turned-U.S. President Warren G. Harding called "normalcy." Republican Harding brought them sex and political scandals instead. The most egregious of those found Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall leasing the nation's newly created petroleum reserves in California and Wyoming to a pair of American oil magnates without competitive bidding, in return for more than $400,000 worth of gifts. Harding might have thought himself lucky to die before the Teapot Dome affair burst into public view; his successor, Calvin Coolidge, was left to deal with the congressional investigations. McCartney sees in the Teapot Dome Scandal the roots of corruption that still makes headlines in Washington, D.C., today.

Charlatan: America's Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam

 By Pope Brock (Crown, $24.95)

Con artists are a staple of U.S. history, but even among that low lot, John R. Brinkley holds an exalted position. After obtaining a medical license on the strength of a degree from unaccredited schools, he promised during the 1920s to restore male virility by implanting goat glands in his patients at $750 a pop. He advertised his services in newspapers and built one of the first radio stations in Kansas to promote his dangerous procedure. All of this attracted the attention of Dr. Morris Fishbein, editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association and a debunker of bogus curatives, who made it his mission to bring Brinkley down ? a task made harder when Brinkley determined to run for governor of Kansas so he could have his way. Brock exploits the outlandishness of Brinkley's escapades to brilliant comic effect.