The following are excerpts from AJC reviews of books by Atlanta authors appearing at the AJC Decatur Book Festival.

Joshilyn Jackson

Atlanta author Joshilyn Jackson’s latest, “Backseat Saints, “[is] a sizzling chunk of Southern Gothic with hardly a chapter that doesn’t feature a firearm, a beating, a desperate getaway or steamy sex (not necessarily in that order). But it’s not only the nail-biting, sinuous plot ... that gives the book, to quote one of its characters, “a hundred different kinds of pure, naked crazy.” It’s the way Jackson writes, like a woman whose hair is on fire, batting at the flames with one hand while scribbling like mad with the other. — Gina Webb

10 a.m. Saturday, First Baptist Decatur Sanctuary Stage

Melissa Fay Greene

“No Biking in the House Without a Helmet” is a sprawling, imperfect, courageous and joyful account of the adoption process, warts and all. ... The moral of her story? Just the opposite of the title’s warning. Don’t be afraid to break the rules, to “steer by the light of what makes us laugh, what makes us feel good” — especially if it means biking in the house, with or without a helmet. With deep compassion, sparkling humor and an unshakable faith in the power of the whoopee cushion, she leads the way.” — GW

The Families You Make panel, 3 p.m. Saturday, Decatur Presbyterian Sanctuary Stage

Tayari Jones

[In “Silver Sparrow”], narrator Dana Lynn Yarboro reveals that four months after her birth, on the day James finally agreed to make an honest woman out of her mother, Gwendolyn, he had already been married for 10 years. ... When a high school girlfriend of Dana’s finds out about her part-time father, she’s not shocked. “You’re an outside child?” she says. “That’s okay, a lot of people are.” A lot of those outside children inhabit, in one form or another, this memorable story of two African-American families, one legitimate and one “secret,” and the inevitable convergence of their separate worlds. — GW

Noon Sept. 4, Decatur Conference Center Stage (Ballroom B)

Jessica Handler

When Jessica Handler [author of “Invisible Sisters”] was 15, she began writing in countless spiral notebooks to document her feelings and observations about her parents and sisters — especially her sisters. The journals would forge a lifeline between the past and the present. Hers was no typical family: Handler’s younger sister Susie died of leukemia when Handler was 10. Sarah, the youngest, was diagnosed at 2 with Kostmann’s syndrome, and was not expected to live past childhood. In fact, Sarah would survive until Handler was in her early 30s. By then, their parents’ marriage had crashed and burned, her father had been institutionalized and Handler herself had a hefty drug habit. But at 15, “I don’t know this yet,” she writes. “I am writing messages and sending them away in bottles that will wash up on future shores, where I will find them when I am an adult.” — GW

Write Club competitive reading, 5 p.m. Saturday, Decatur High School. The Memory of All That panel, 3:45 p.m. Sept. 4, Decatur Conference Center Auditorium

William Starr

The whiskey quotient is meager, kilts are glimpsed but rarely and no monster is sighted during a brief sojourn by Loch Ness. Yet the title “Whisky, Kilts and the Loch Ness Monster” is quite winning, instantly setting the reader in Scotland for the full distance. ... [Author William] Starr is a distinctly offbeat character and a born entertainer. His interest in Samuel Johnson and James Boswell amounts to obsession. ... Starr’s engaging conceit was to retrace the Johnson-Boswell journey, committing three months for a task joyous in memory. — Larry Swindell

Searching Around Scotland (and Ireland too) panel, 
4:15 p.m. Saturday, Eddie’s Attic Stage

Karin Slaughter

[Karin Slaughter’s] “Fallen” is a gritty page-turner where the casual brutality of gangs and life on death row are rendered with chilling exactitude; its nail-biting climax will leave you paging back through the book for clues you missed. But like the best writers in the genre, Slaughter offers a deeper look at police work and crime, exploring the complicated forces and faces behind them that fall neither on the side of salvation nor damnation, but somewhere in between. — GW

5 p.m. Sept. 4, Decatur Presbyterian Sanctuary Stage