New Fiction by Nick Dybek, Dan Barden and More Riverhead, $26.95. Photograph courtesy of Richard Mosse/Institute/Jack Shainman Gallery INFRA: Photographs by Richard Mosse With an essay by Adam Hochschild. Aperture/Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. $50. Using an infrared film originally developed for military reconnaissance - rendering green landscapes in vivid hues of lavender, crimson and pink - Mosse depicts the intractable conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Above, a hut in North Kivu Province. "I've always thought that people cherish their dreams," says Cal, the 14-year-old narrator of Dybek's first novel, "because, in them, they act but rarely have to decide how to act." The same luxury isn't an option for Cal, who will have to make profound decisions before the novel ends. His father, the captain of a crab boat in coastal Washington, spends much of the year in Alaska with the rest of the town's men, and Dybek writes gracefully about those left behind: "It seemed that the absence was ours somehow, not theirs, that we were the ones who were gone." When the owner of the fishing fleet upon which the small community depends for its livelihood dies, his son inherits the company and threatens to send its operations to Japan. Dybek brings serious talent to bear in depicting both the larger tableau and smaller set pieces, including a flashback in which the town's roughest resident goes on a disastrous boyhood hunting trip with his father. The novel loses its footing partway through, when the scope narrows and the dialogue grows stilted, but it finishes on a powerful note of moral murkiness that suits the gloomy, damp atmosphere of the Pacific Northwest. "The kitchen windows turned the deep green of a chalkboard," Dybek writes in a characteristically evocative early passage. The evening rain began, beading against the glass of the back door like sweat. WHEN THE NIGHT By Cristina Comencini. Translated by Marina Harss. Other Press, paper, $15.95. Manfred is a dour mountaineer who begrudgingly herds tourists around the Dolomites. His wife has left him, and taken their children with her. As a boy, Manfred was abandoned by his mother, who left his father for an American. This background, and a naturally crabbed personality, have combined to make him a thoroughgoing misogynist. Marina, who rents the apartment on the top floor of his house, has a 2-year-old son, Marco, and admits to herself that she may be unequipped for motherhood. Of a pediatrician, she reflects: "He advocates for the child, defends his interests. He doesn't trust me; I'm neurotic, and I don't do the best for his patient. When Manfred suspects she has intentionally harmed the boy, he becomes outspoken in his criticism. Marco will "be a man one day," he tells her, "and he has to begin to understand women, to know that they're not to be trusted." Marina overcomes her initial distaste for her landlord and later thinks of him as "the only man who is not afraid of me." That hardly seems reason for the yearning tone in a protracted sequence set 15 years later, when the two may cross paths again. By that time, it's hard to care whether they do. Manfred and Marina are unlikable. He verges on sociopathic at times. But that's not the problem. It's simply difficult to believe in Marina's obsessive feelings for him. Comencini's novel starts with the promising tone of a thriller in a remote region, but it ends as a strained psychosexual drama. Dial, $26. "I have a sixth sense for trouble," says Randy Chalmers, an alcoholic ex-cop and real estate developer in Southern California who's been on the wagon for eight years. Mostly, but not always, because I'm the one who causes it. Randy attributes his sobriety to his Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor, Terry, "a heart-stopped-on-the-operating-table-three-times dope fiend" who managed to stay clean for 15 years and guide numerous struggling addicts toward a better life. "There was no me outside of the me that A.A. had made," Randy says. So when Terry turns up dead of a heroin overdose in a Santa Ana motel room, Randy is more than suspicious. He's so in the mood to avenge his friend's death - figuring it must have involved funny business - that he starts roughing up shady characters before gathering all of the facts. Or any of the facts. Taken off the force after beating someone nearly to death, Randy is kinder since drying up, but not above saying things like this while inflicting pain on a perceived enemy: "When you wake up from your coma, we'll talk. While you're sleeping, I'm going to kill everyone you know. Barden peppers the novel with indoor marijuana farms, amateur pornographic film makers, crooked judges and other entertaining props. But the local color and the steady stream of hard-boiled aphorisms ("He reminded me of the tough guy in high school, which was to say not tough at all") are grounded by a reasonably serious study of male companionship, what it takes to fly straight and the ultimate inscrutability of other people. Translated by Alan Bance. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26. Told from the perspective of Hermann Funk, a young man whose parents were killed in the firebombing of Dresden, Beyer's third novel to be translated into English centers on the fictional zoologist Ludwig Kaltenburg. Hermann's father, a botanist, was a colleague of Kaltenburg's, and Hermann himself later studies with the renowned scientist (who is partly modeled on the Nobel laureate Konrad Lorenz). Beyer has done his research into the birds that dominate Kaltenburg's life, but his carefully arranged details and distinguished prose would be easier to savor if they served a more kinetic plot. He aims for subtlety, but lapses into tedium. Frequent references make it clear that Beyer has Proust on his mind, but the novel's sense of memory is more often imposed from the outside than convincingly conveyed from the internal perspective of the characters. There is foreshadowing throughout of Kaltenburg's possible history with the Nazi Party and late-life work in the softer sciences that will tarnish his reputation. "It wasn't until three decades later that I discovered the real cause of the break between Kaltenburg and my father," goes a typical ominous note. But all the revelations that are supposed to explode like bombs end up popping like BB guns. The result is lovely, but in a decidedly sleepy key. John Williams produces the Books section for NYTimes.com.