High profile for the Crenshaw area this week, with the council debate and now Sunday's review by Jonathan Kirsch of Southland: A Novel. He enjoys the murder mystery by Nina Revoyr set in the district's Japanese American community. Her heroine is Jackie Ishida, a UCLA student whose rocky lesbian relationships provide one of the many narrative threads. "The plot line of Southland is the stuff of a James Ellroy or a Walter Mosley novel, but it is elaborately intertwined with strands of urban history, family memoir and personal confession," Kirsch writes in his L.A. Times Westword column.

Also in the LAT Book Review: Herbert Gold on the sumptuous new collection of Edward Weston photographs, some of which are on display at the Huntington Library until Oct. 5. ..Hillary Clinton jumps to the top of the best-seller list, and Eric Jerome Dickey returns to the fiction list at #10 with The Other Woman, about an L.A. TV producer who "tries to piece her life back together after a mystery man tells her of her husband's affair."

Elsewhere: David Kipen in the S.F. Chronicle reviews a new book on California archaeology.