Fiction: Publishers Weekly Fiction Reviews, 6/19/2006
by Staff -- Publishers Weekly, 6/19/2006
[Signature] Reviewed by Neil Gaiman Almost 10 years before his The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen took many of the figures of Victorian popular fiction on a remarkable romp, Alan Moore, in collaboration with underground artist Melinda Gebbie, began Lost Girls, with a similar, although less fantastical, conceit: that the three women whose adventures in girlhood may have inspired respectively, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Peter Pan and Wendy and the Wizard of Oz, meet in a Swiss hotel shortly before the first World War. Wendy, Dorothy and Alice, three very different women—one jaded and old; one trapped in a frigid adulthood; the last a spunky but innocent young American good-time girl—provide each other with the liberation they need, while also providing very different (and, for this is a pornography, very sexual) versions of the stories we associate with them. We go with the girls, in memory, to the incidents that became the Rabbit Hole, Oz and Neverland. As a formal exercise in pure comics, Lost Girls is as good as anything Moore has written. (One of my favorite moments: a husband and wife trapped in a frozen, loveless, sexless relationship, conduct a stiff conversation, laced with unconscious puns and wordplay, moving into positions that cause their shadows to appear to copulate wildly, finding the physical passion that the people are denied.) In addition to being a master-class in comics technique, Lost Girls is also an education in Edwardian smut—Gebbie and Moore pastiche the pornography of the period, taking in everything from The Oyster to the Venus and Tannhauser period work of Aubrey Beardsley Melinda Gebbie was a strange and inspired choice as collaborator for Moore. She draws real people, with none of the exaggerated bodies usual to superhero or porno comics. Gebbie's people, drawn for the most part in gentle crayons, have human bodies,. Lost Girls is a bittersweet, beautiful, exhaustive, problematic, occasionally exhausting work. It succeeded for me wonderfully as a true graphic novel. If it failed for me, it was as smut. The book, at least in large black-and-white photocopy form, was not a one-handed read. It was too heady and strange to appreciate or to experience on a visceral level. (Your mileage may vary; porn is, after all, personal.) Top Shelf has chosen to package it elegantly and expensively, presenting it to the world not as pornography, but as erotica. It is one of the tropes of pure pornography that events are without consequence. No babies, no STDs, no trauma, no memories best left unexamined. Lost Girls parts company from pure porn in precisely that place: it's all about consequences, not to mention war, music, love, lust, repression and memory. (Aug.) Neil Gaiman is the author of the bestsellers Anansi Boys and American Gods. Films based on his books Stardust and Coraline are due in 2007and 2008, respectively. In 1975, racial tension still runs high at Genna Meade's mostly white Schuyler College in Pennsylvania. Her outcast black roommate, Minette Swift, is a D.C. preacher's daughter; Genna is descended from the college's founder. Minette misses home desperately; Genna, in contrast, avoids her "hippie" mother's phone calls while yearning for a visit from her absentee father, activist lawyer Maximilian Meade. Despite their differences, the girls muster an effortful friendship, due to the near-fetishization of black culture that Genna's parents have inculcated in her. When racist incidents begin to plague Minette, Genna tries to protect her, but Minette lapses into an antisocial, dangerous depression. Meanwhile, Genna has her own problems—she's gradually piecing together clues to a mystery whose solution may lie far too close to home for comfort. Eventually, Minette's downward spiral prompts a shocking epiphany for Genna that will alter the course of her family's life. Oates bravely grapples with the fallout of the Civil Rights movement, the early '70s backlash against Summer of Love optimism, and the well-intentioned but ultimately condescending antiracist piety of privileged white liberals, but this anecdotal novel feels slight compared to her best work. (Oct.) The paths of three characters converge to illustrate, perhaps too patly, the conflicts of contemporary Turkey. Raped by her uncle, the sheikh, 15-year-old villager Meryem has shamed her family. To save the family name, Cemal, the sheikh's son, a soldier home from his tour fighting Kurds in the Gabar Mountains, is ordered by his father to take Meryem to Istanbul and to murder her. When Cemal and Meryem reach Istanbul, they are shocked by the cosmopolitan city, full of women wearing low-cut blouses and children who disobey their parents. Cemal falters at the moment of decision and, instead of murdering Meryem, travels with her to the seaside, where they encounter Irfan, a successful Istanbul professor who, plagued by insomnia and anxiety, has fled his cushy life to set sail in the Aegean Sea. Irfan offers them jobs on his boat and forges a tenuous mentorship with Meryem, but Cemal, whose psychological torment is richly captured early in the book, is soon reduced to a glowering presence. Livaneli, a former exile who was elected to Turkey's Parliament in 2002, takes great pains to reveal his country's complex culture, but the result often reads like a cautionary fable. Readers should prepare themselves for heavy-handed allegory. (Oct.) Originally published in Turkey in 1999 to wide acclaim, this screwball love story is Shafak's third novel. (Her fifth, The Saint of Incipient Insanities, was published here in 2004.) Loosely organized around a neurotic obese woman and a feisty dwarf, it teems with parallel plots and digressions, freely leaping from modern apartment living in Istanbul to a 19th-century Turkish freak show and fur hunts in 17th-century Siberia. Shafak's prose (ably translated by Freely) follows a humorous, idiosyncratic course, seizing on arresting visual details, such as "a house the color of salted green almonds" and dispensing oddly charming aphorisms: "Love is a corset." (She adds: "In order to understand the value of this you have to be exceedingly fat.") At one moment, a faceless newborn's features are etched on by an anxious aunt; at another, a shipwrecked Russian sailor surprises a shaman in flagrante delicto with an oversized sable. The early parts of the novel can feel maddeningly unfocused for a book about the power of the stare. Later pages home in on an unexpected emotional trauma, and the atmosphere of fantastical levity clears to reveal an urgent, human pain. Shafak probes the many ironies of appearance and perception with entertaining and affecting results. (Oct.) Lara McCauley, hopeful but, as she notes, "no longer naïve" at 29, follows her war correspondent husband, Mac, to Beirut in 1983, when fault lines of international terrorism (then in its embryonic stages) ran through the city just as surely as the Green Line that separated Lebanon's warring factions. Lara, curious and loving, has little in common with seasoned journalist Mac, who has revealed himself over the years of their relationship as a selfish, possessive and abusive bully. When Mac begins an affair with his Lebanese translator, Lara finds a friend in another outsider: the mysterious Thomas Warkowski, a freelance journalist who's rumored to be a spy, and thought to be gay. With her marriage unraveling, and the city's mounting body count dismissed internationally as "Beirut-bang-bang," Lara beds Thomas with far-reaching and catastrophic consequences. Setting the story against the backdrop of a society cruelly tearing itself apart (and punctuating it with the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks at Beirut International Airport), debut novelist Robertson draws a powerful story out of Lara's first-person narration. The author solidly dramatizes the ironies and ambiguities, moral and otherwise, of Lara's desperate encounters. (Oct.) This debut collection of 19 very short stories combines keenly observed real situations with fantastic and at times surreal touches. Conley veers from neighbors politely fencing verbally over the rope they each intend to hang themselves with, to four guys going to a bar in the company of a talking dog, and over to the dream of an unhappily married painter. Through all of the shenanigans, Conley stays focused on the emotional truths that run through even the shaggiest of his shaggy (or talking) dog stories. Highlights include "Good Faith" (featuring "the usual people... Grant and Yellow and myself"), "Checking" (where a birdbath delicately evokes a brother's drowning) and the touching dinner table exchanges of "A Country Called Roughage." Lovely small perceptions of character balance the funhouse quality of stories, in which women literally fly away and Bellini's Norma is held to be "the greatest opera for the lost." Some of the stories read as mere absurdist sketches or roughed-out concepts, but they come off as earnest experimentation rather than cloying whimsy. The easy intimacy Conley wrests from bewildering situations is marvelous. (Oct.) Following the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Known World (2003), Jones offers a complex, sometimes somber collection of 14 short stories, four of which have appeared in the New Yorker. As in his previous collection of short fiction, Lost in the City (1992), Jones centers his storytelling on his native Washington, D.C. Here, though, Jones broadens his chronological scope to encompass virtually the entire 20th century and a wide range of experiences and African-American perspectives, from a man who has kept the secret of his adultery for 45 years, to another whose most difficult task on leaving prison for murder is having dinner with his brother's family. Often, Jones presents characters who have been away from the South long enough to mourn the loss of values and connections they traded for the too-often failed promise of urban success, but he also portrays the nation's capital as a place of potential redemption, where small curses and small miracles intertwine, and where shifting communities and connections can literally save one's life. Each of its denizens comes through with his own particular ways and means for survival, often dependent on chance, and rendered with unsentimental sympathy and force: "Caesar flipped the quarter. The girl's heart paused. The man's heart paused. The coin reached its apex and then it fell." (Sept.) Lehane (Mystic River) hints in the first of these five richly vernacular (and, save one, previously published) stories and one play that "a small town is a hard place to keep a secret." In "Running Out of Dog," two Vietnam vets return to their hometown of Eden, S.C., and become tragically entangled with the wife of a man whose rich family kept him out of the war. Class resentment similarly erupts in "Gone Down to Corpus," set in back-water Texas, 1970, as a group of high school football players breaks into the house of rich kid Lyle, who fumbled the big pass at the last game. They drunkenly wreck the house and are shocked by the appearance of Lyle's younger sister, Lurlene, who is eager to join the party. The collection's centerpiece is "Until Gwen," which has also been adapted by Lehane into a two-act play, Coronado. Transcribed, the play revolves around the edgy reunion of a hustler father and his son, Bobby, newly released after four years in prison. It quickly becomes apparent that Bobby's father has retrieved him only to find out where the heist loot is hidden, and Bobby, in turn, needs to know what happened to his girlfriend, Gwen. Powerfully envisioned lives, recounted unflinchingly. (Sept.) A master at capturing Irish-Catholic American suburban life, particularly in That Night (1987) and the National Book Award–winning Charming Billy (1998), McDermott returns for this sixth novel with the Keane family of Long Island, who get swept up in the wake of the Vietnam War. When John and Mary Keane marry shortly after WWII, she's on the verge of spinsterhood, and he's a vet haunted by the death of a young private in his platoon. Jacob, their first-born, is given the dead soldier's name, an omen that will haunt the family when Jacob is killed in Vietnam (hauntingly underplayed by McDermott). In vignette-like chapters, some of which are stunning set pieces, McDermott probes the remaining family's inner lives. Catholic faith and Irish heritage anchor John and Mary's feelings, but their children experience their generation's doubt, rebellion and loss of innocence: next eldest Michael, who had always dominated Jacob, drowns his guilt and regret in sex and drugs; Anne quits college and moves to London with a lover; Clare, a high school senior, gets pregnant. The story of '60s and '70s suburbia has been told before, and McDermott has little to say about the Vietnam War itself. But she flawlessly encapsulates an era in the private moments of one family's life. (Sept.) Set at the dawn of modern psychiatry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, British author Faulks's vast, elegant novel follows two "mad-doctors," Thomas Midwinter and his close friend Jacques Rebière, as they struggle to contribute something great to the emerging discipline. A chance meeting in 1880 leads to a lifelong partnership that lasts through journeys around the Continent and across the Atlantic. The pair vow to unlock the secrets of consciousness, and the novel traces their experiences in the hellish asylums of the day and their diverging approaches to the field. As Jacques grows interested in the Viennese school of psychoanalysis and talk therapy, Thomas focuses on the neurological and evolutionary mechanisms that lead to psychosis. Faulks (Birdsong) shines in his dramatization of Thomas's lectures, presaging contemporary arguments about chemical imbalances. While his characters attempt to discover what makes us human, Faulks also meticulously depicts grief, longing, nostalgia and melancholy through a portrait of Thomas's sister, Sonia. Faulks marries extensive research with a satisfying narrative arc to create a novel that is compelling as both history and literature. (Sept.) Fitch follows her bestselling debut, White Oleander, by revisiting the insidious effects of a powerful, narcissistic mother on an only child. Michael Faraday is a Harvard dropout who paints in the L.A. art world of 1981; his suicide happens a few pages in, and sets the stage for a Fitch's masterful shifts in time and perspective. Josie Tyrell, an artist's model and denizen of the punk rock, had an intense relationship with Michael, but never managed to free him from his mother, renowned concert pianist Meredith Loewy, who moves in a bleak, loveless world of wealth and privilege. Yet their very different loves for Michael bring about a surprising alliance between the imperious Meredith and Josie, a white trash escapee whose inborn grace, style and sense of self sustain her—along with art, music and alcohol. The two find unexpected comfort in each other's shared loss, allowing Fitch to contrast the inner and outer resources of women whose lives couldn't be more different, and to flash back deeply into their histories. Fitch excels at painting a negative personality with sure-handed depth and fairness, and her prose penetrates the inner lives of the two with immediacy and bite. In Josie, she has created an indomitable young woman whose pluck and growing self-awareness beautifully offset Meredith's emptiness. Their relationship transforms a big cliché—the artist's suicide—into a page-turning psychodrama. (Sept.) A lyrical, earnest second novel from Haines (after In My Sister's Country) portrays two women whose love for the same man challenges their lifelong friendship. Set at a Southern California beach house, the action erupts when Jane, having inherited the house from her recently deceased grandmother Franny, decides to leave her husband, Mike, and two daughters in the care of her best friend from childhood, Mattie, now a fine-arts appraiser in Chicago. The women attended the same Boston university, where Mattie first fell for Mike, before the more glamorous and determined Jane swept him away and married him. Presently in their mid-30s, the women essentially trade places over the course of several weeks, as Jane takes off to pick up men and have adventures, leaving Mattie to make sense of Franny's extensive estate of artworks, assuage the fears of Jane and Mike's two young daughters and fall in love with Mike all over again. Jane's self-absorption is beyond the pale, and Mattie's skittish neediness is touching, in this spacey, sexy summer read. (Sept.) In a novel as fragmented and verdant as memory itself, Argentine author Steimberg (Call Me Magdalena) creates a troubled Argentine writer, a widow in her late 50s who seeks comfort and recovery at a convalescent spa in the lush Brazilian rain forest. In scraps of tortured writing, dreams and unbidden recollections, Cecilia examines her relationships with three men: her deceased second husband, Dardo; Federico, the violent drug-addicted son she has cut out of her life; and Steve, a biologist from Los Angeles with whom she falls in love. She reveals her past with both self-recrimination and self-justification, especially the brutal scenes with Federico. Cecilia believes that true healing—of the cancers that kill husbands, of the addictions that destroy sons and of the guilt that torment mothers—would require recoding DNA, rewriting history and, finally, erasing memory itself. She can't undo the past, any more than she can escape herself. The question this reflective novel finally poses is whether Cecilia is strong enough to risk the possibility of a future with a man who is, ultimately, as imperfect and mortal as she is. (Sept.) Kelly's introspective, wistful lament on the passage of time and its disappointments for three 40-something women, best friends since college, is telescoped into a weekend and set in a ramshackle cottage on the coast of North Carolina. Awaiting the arrival of their husbands, their friend Ian and a hurricane, preppy Shotsie (Charlotte), earthy Bess and forceful Claire reminisce about "the portion of [their] lives when things were attainable, available, alterable—unlike the present." They dissect their flawed spouses—Shotsie's husband, Eric, is a white-collar criminal; Bess's husband, Laurence, is an alcoholic; and Claire's husband, Wes is neurotic and intermittently employed—while awaiting the arrival of Ian, a Peter Pan of a man whom they all continue to idealize as the one who got away. As for plot, the women go shopping for bathing suits, argue with spouses once they arrive, eat shellfish and watch the weather, which doesn't turn ugly until long after everyone is out of its way. Kelly's commentary (How Close We Came) on aging, lost youth and the necessity of soldiering on makes for a nostalgic, uneventful novel. (Sept.) Dugan the dwarf runs a profitable freak show (sympathetically dubbed the Cabinet of Wonders) during the tail-end of the traveling carnival's pre-Depression golden era in Dodd's debut. Mistreated in the freak show he belonged to as a child, a grownup Dugan acts at once as a father and employer to his brood of Wonders: Molly and Faye, a pubescent pair of Siamese twins, have a doubly difficult adolescence; Saffron, the Wolf Girl of India, leaves Dugan's love unrequited; and fat lady Baby Beatrice seeks the love her carousing husband, Jimmy, never gave her. As the show tours the country, Dugan struggles to maintain control over his menagerie, who begin to bristle under his authority. Dodd has a tendency toward overripe prose, particularly when describing her oddball characters ("[A]nd yet she ran on, her accreted rolls of flesh joggling under the powder pink ruffles of her costume, her strawberry blonde ringlets wilting, plastering themselves against the cherry flush of her baby-smooth forehead and cheeks"), and the smattering of first-person chapters from a grumpy hermaphrodite's point of view obfuscate the narrative, which consists of run-ins with rubes (freak-show attendees), the unraveling of Dugan's show and, most poignantly, the Wonders' search for a certain, separate dignity. (Sept.) Serious chick-lit? It can work, as seen in this faith-filled novel that revolves around breast cancer. Single gal Natalie Moore is just 27 when she is diagnosed with the disease. Walker's humor leavens the panic and the illness's accompanying indignities, such as a painful mammogram ("Now I knew how it felt to be a hamburger patty on a George Foreman grill"). Cancer's emotional and spiritual ramifications also drive the plot line—getting dropped like a hot potato by a boyfriend, dating woes, avoidance by friends, leaving her church. Boob puns proliferate, especially at a "Boob Voyage" party thrown by friends before Natalie's double mastectomy. Amidst the ugliness of chemo, hair loss and upchucking at the thought of chocolate is a chance for Natalie to make new friends, establish priorities, loosen some overly close family ties and develop empathy. And yes—have reconstructive surgery that increases her original A cup size. Romance waits in the wings, of course, and readers won't have to guess too hard to know Natalie's Mr. Right. There are a few faux pas, including an odd dream sequence and a plug for what appears to be Walker's own nonfiction book, Thanks for the Mammogram!. Those diagnosed with breast cancer, survivors and their women friends will find this an enjoyable and encouraging read. (Sept. 5) Georgia Ella Bishop's life screams "wasted potential." The daughter of a great jazz pianist and a famous news correspondent, she has what it takes to combine her mother's talent and her father's celebrity into one extraordinary life. Her alcoholism, however, thwarts these ambitions even before she can imagine them, and by the time she reaches her mid-30s, all of her chances seem to be used up. When Georgia moves from Baltimore to Lexington, Ky., to make one last attempt to straighten out her life, her social justice–obsessed uncle, her fashion-obsessed cousin and her loving but estranged husband are there to help. Samson, author of the Christy Award–winning Songbird and several other faith-based novels, pulls few punches in this sobering yet sanguine account of God's patience, mercy and eternal optimism in the face of human folly. Samson's writing is characteristically crisp and vibrant—cutting quickly to the heart of her characters and their crises with prose that is emotionally resonant but rarely sentimental. Readers may find events in Georgia's life, particularly her astoundingly bad choices and the surprising consequences she experiences, hard to believe. Still, despite the extremes to which Georgia goes, in Samson's capable hands she becomes an everywoman in whom readers are likely to see at least a glimpse of themselves. (Sept. 19) Bestseller Silva continues to warrant comparisons to John le Carré, as shown by his latest thriller starring Israeli art restorer and spymaster Gabriel Allon. Ahmed bin Shafiq, a former chief of a clandestine Saudi intelligence unit, targets the Vatican for attack, in particular Pope Paul VII and his top aide, Monsignor Luigi Donati, who both appeared in Silva's previous novel, Prince of Fire. Shafiq, who now heads his own terrorist network, is allied with a militant Islamic Saudi businessman known as Zizi, a true believer committed to the destruction of all infidels. Gabriel's challenge is to infiltrate Zizi's organization, a task he assigns to a beautiful American art expert, Sarah Bancroft. Gabriel promises he'll protect her, but plans go awry, and by the end Sarah faces torture and death. While Sarah's fate is never in doubt, the way Silva resolves his plot will keep readers right where he wants them: on the edges of their seats. Author tour. (Aug.) Pelecanos (Drama City) delivers a dignified, character-driven epic that succeeds as both literary novel and page-turner. In 1985, the body of a 14-year-old girl turns up in a Washington, D.C., park, the latest in a series of murders by a killer the media dub "The Night Gardener." T.C. Cook, the aging detective on the case, works with a quiet, almost monomaniacal, focus. Also involved are two young uniformed cops, Gus Ramone, who's diligent, conscientious and unimpressed by heroics, and Dan "Doc" Holiday, an adrenaline junkie who's decidedly less straight. Fast forward 20 years. Detective Ramone, now married with kids of his own, investigates the murder of one of his teenage son's friends. The homicide closely resembles the earlier unsolved Night Gardener murders. Holiday, now an alcoholic chauffeur and bodyguard, follows the case on his own and tracks down Cook, long retired but still obsessed with the original murders. While the three work together toward a suspenseful ending, Pelecanos emphasizes the fallacy of "solving" a murder and explores the ripple effects of violent crime on society. (Aug.) Blachman's side-achingly funny debut, derived from his popular blog of the title, is written in the candid, sanctimonious voice of Anonymous Lawyer, an ill-humored, ill-tempered hiring partner at a prestigious New York firm. Anonymous Lawyer is an 18-year man whose compulsion to blog is almost as strong as his desire for the firm's chairmanship. When he's not facing off with his nemesis, The Jerk, in the race for the chair, he takes solace in degrading his summer interns and hapless associates for his quickly developing cult of readers (who e-mail with guesses at his identity). The dirt Anonymous Lawyer dishes is crude, and grounded in his own snobbery and narcissism: his female victims include The One Who's Never Getting Married, The One Who Missed Her Kid's Funeral and The Bombshell (at the annual office charity auction, a date with her went to Lives With His Mom for $6,000). Predictably, potential unmasking makes things sticky for the potential chairman, in what is pretty much the book's single plot point. Written in the rapidly dating blog-form and about as subtle as a punch to the kidneys, the dead-on exaggerations of Blachman, a recent Harvard Law grad, are nonetheless more than enough to propel this debut. (Aug.) With his frenetic fifth Shane Scully novel, bestseller Cannell (Cold Hit) dishes out the action in forklift-sized servings. Casting aside the rules like never before, LAPD detective Scully conducts his own seek-and-destroy mission after his wife, fellow cop Alexa, is found shot in the head. As Alexa clings to life, Scully's efforts to track down her attacker lead him into the violent, vengeful world of rap music, lorded over by two of its most feared executives, Lou Maluga and his wife, Stacy, known in the trade as "the white sister." Without pause to sleep or eat, Scully fights and claws his way along, burning friends, violating laws, using his charm as well as his fists before coming face to face with his enemy in Las Vegas. Cannell's hard-boiled, if at times over-rehearsed prose is well suited to his subject matter, though some readers may have trouble with his hero's tendency to suddenly shift character from tough guy to touchy-feely 21st-century man. (Aug.) No one does steamy suspense like Brown (Chill Factor), as shown by this expert mix of spicy romance and sharply crafted crime drama. Det. Sgt. Duncan Hatcher, a sexy Savannah homicide cop, falls hard for Elise Laird, a dishy damsel-in-distress, the moment he spots her at a police awards dinner. Too bad she's married to Judge Cato Laird, who consistently subverts Hatcher's efforts to bring local drug lord Robert Savich to justice. When Hatcher and his feisty partner, Det. DeeDee Bowen, are called to the Laird home after Elise supposedly shoots an intruder in self-defense, the desperate trophy wife confides to Hatcher that she believes her husband, a secret Savich crony, intended her to be the intruder's victim. Later, as the uncertain Hatcher grapples with his desires, Elise vanishes, leaving behind another dead body. Tight plotting, a hot love story with some nice twists and a credible ending help make this a stand-out thriller. (Aug.) Vining adeptly blends crime and the supernatural in his second noir outing, just as he did in his well-received debut, The Quick (2004). PI Jimmy Miles, who's a "Sailor" (i.e., a human who has died but lives again with another's face), leaves his usual L.A. turf for San Francisco, where he's been hired to tail a woman bent on self-destruction who may be the victim of a cult that has encouraged a rash of suicides. Moving between the normal world and the hidden underculture of the Sailors, Miles works frantically to stave off further tragedy. While later plot developments fall short of the pulse-pounding opening, which will remind genre fans of some of Frank Robinson's best work (The Power; Waiting), the author has created a neat alternate universe and successfully taps into big-city nihilism and despair. (Aug.) With more than her usual panache, Balogh returns to Regency England (Simply Unforgettable) for a satisfying adult love story. Twenty-nine-year-old beauty Anne Jewell is an independent woman: an unwed mother who has found contentment, if not happiness, in her life as a teacher at a girls' school. Sydnam Butler, an aristocrat who lost his eye and right arm in the Peninsula Wars, has achieved a similar peace as the reclusive steward for the Duke of Bewcastle. Through her son's father, Anne is related to the Bewcastle family, which includes her friend Joshua Moore, Marquess of Hallmere, who wants to acknowledge her and her nine-year-old son, David, as kin, despite her stubborn independence. Joshua invites Anne and David to spend the summer at the Bewcastle estate in Wales, where she meets Sydnam. The kindly Bewcastle clan have matchmaking in mind, but with scars both surface and deep, will Anne and Sydnam be able to open up to each other? And if so, can they hope for any real happiness? The maturity of the novel's protagonists—who grow from their difficulties and triumphs—distinguishes this romance for the genre. (Aug.) Dog antics and a dead mother's strange legacy drive Michaels's latest (Hey, Good Looking), a repetitive story peopled with caricatures. Thirty-four-year-old Olivia Lowell was reared by her father, Dennis, who told her that her mother, Allison, died in childbirth. Content with her job as a dog photographer and a ho-hum relationship with an accountant, Olivia nearly comes unhinged when she learns that her mother recently passed away—and willed her a mail-order empire as well. But a letter from Allison, written 10 months before her death, reveals that she started her successful business with money stolen from a bank. Allison requests that Olivia return her share of the money, then find her partners-in-crime and make them do the same. With the help of the romantic interest, Jeff Bannerman, a lawyer who's handler to a pesky Yorkshire terrier named Cecil, Olivia sets about resentfully fulfilling her mom's last wishes. The book's final third deals largely with the threat of having Cecil taken away, a plot twist that feels like an afterthought, as does the truth that's revealed about the robbery and its aftermath. This novel may provide escapism for dog lovers, but pat lessons and slipshod plotting will disappoint others. (Aug. 29) In June of 1845, a group of immigrant Americans—called the San Patricio's, or St. Patrick's, Battalion—deserted Gen. Zachary Taylor's army and fought on the opposite side in the Mexican-American war, under the leadership of the elusive, charismatic James Riley. Thom (Panther in the Sky) has taken this forgotten incident from an almost forgotten war and turned it into a stirring tale that does everything that smart historical fiction ought to do: illuminating the past while throwing new light on the present. The story of this motley band of mostly Irish and German Catholics, driven to rebellion by the endemic racism and capricious cruelty of their officers, is told from two points of view. Augustin Juvero, a Mexican soldier speaking years later, provides essential context, but most of the novel is taken up by the journal (complete with vivid pencil drawings) of Paddy Quinn, a camp boy. Guerillas, gangs of rancheros that kill Americans on sight, torture, border disputation—all are portrayed with brutal and unsentimental simplicity in Quinn's voice. Not only a striking (and often horrific) account of pre–Civil War army life, Quinn's narrative beautifully conveys the boy's coming of age against a backdrop of eerily familiar war and rebellion. (Aug.) Quirky life in a Cornish seaside town is interrupted by a cruel siren in this fourth novel by Brit Denby, an Orange Prize finalist for Billie Morgan. When Astra Sharp's mother is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, she drops out of university and moves home to Polwenna, a beach town far off the beaten path, to become caretaker for her family, including her little sister Git, twin siblings Lance and Gwen, and her dentist father. Fast forward to Astra's 27th year, when this quiet life is interrupted by the arrival of her best friend Con's younger sister, Angel, a woman "who looked as near to an orchid as a human being could." Angel sows a classic kind of discord—men long for her and women feel inadequate around her—and in her presence the thin social fabric of the town soon falls apart. In particular, Astra's surfer-boy crush, Luke, and her brother, Lance, become infatuated with Angel, even as Astra yearns for romance and her family is desperate for cohesion. Denby has a knack for the odd description and captures the local rapid-fire dialect. Astra is gabby and ruminative, but the plot, like her reasoning, often seems to go in circles. (Aug.) Harrowing health problems and a dramatic murder trial collide in this convoluted novel that idealizes pregnancy and romantic love in equal measure. Caroline, forced to grow up too quickly and to mother her younger sister after their alcoholic parents' divorce, has difficulty conceiving a child of her own now that she's in her 30s. When her last-ditch in-vitro fertilization attempt finally appears to succeed, Caroline chronicles her pregnancy in letters to her unborn daughter. In the meantime, Caroline's husband, Jeffrey, a Seattle area prosecutor, has his own preoccupation as he attempts to convict a famous ex-football player for the murder of his fiancée and their unborn son (the parallels to the Laci Peterson case are made explicit). Desperate to carry the baby to term, Caroline puts her own life on the line when preeclampsia threatens both her and her unborn child. Blow-by-blows of Jeffrey's legal doings threaten to derail the plot, as do Caroline's treacly journal entries (on the blastula: "Each cell accepted its destiny, and went about its task. Joyfully). Haul out the tissues for this genuine tearjerker, which makes up in sentimentality what it lacks in genuine drama. (Aug.) Thirty-year-old Londoner Izobel Brannigan is uninspired by both her middling job at public relations firm PR O'create and her snoozer of a boyfriend, George, but things take a turn for the mysterious when she Googles herself and finds someone has set up a Web site under izobelbrannigan.com. Initially, the site is blank, but it is soon filled with bio clips, recent photographs and glowing testimonials, but nothing that reveals its creator's identity. Izobel and a girlfriend theorize the "stalkie" culprit may be a former boyfriend, but neither woman has the technological expertise to investigate this premise. Enter PR O'create's IT consultant, Ivan Jaffy, who works the tech front while Izobel questions—to no avail—her likeliest exes about their possible involvement. As Ivan teaches Izobel about HTML coding, she discovers he has a seductive artistic side hidden behind his geekery. But could he, with his Web-savvy, be the flattering cyber-stalker? Though Hopkinson's novel is charmingly British ("those spods and boffins had made a mint"), the dilemmas Izobel faces in this techie romp are universal and will certainly resonate with U.S. readers. (Aug. 21) It's 1816, and actress and playwright Annabelle Foster loves (and desires) handsome Murray D'Abernon, 13th Marquis of Darley, who goes by the name of Duff and reciprocates her feelings. Belle's widowed mother dotes on Duff, and Duff's stately but swinging parents venerate Belle, who has single-handedly reversed the (what we would now call) post-traumatic stress disorder that laid him low following the Battle of Waterloo. But society says they mustn't marry, and she says they mustn't even go to bed, although she is subject to "throbbing between the legs" and his buckskin breeches frequently show "turgid veins inflated and pulsing." Belle's had it, though, after a soul-sickening season with the despicable Walingame, who says she has "no rights" and dares call darling Duff a "fucking cunthound." Men! No woman alive could pass up the chance to hang with Duff; she accepts his wager that he won't proposition her for two months. He, of course, is confident that she'll make the necessary moves. Johnson frequently crafts one-sentence paragraphs, sometimes as many as five in a row, but no construction can introduce suspense into her turgid tale. The sprinklings of period language seem pasted-on. Characters are heavenly or vile. But for those who like their social history liberally sauced with lubricity: yum. (Aug.) Forster (Whatever It Takes; If You Walked in My Shoes) continues her soft-focus chronicle of the Thank the Lord boardinghouse's residents, this time setting a 35-year-old small-town virgin and a high-powered New Yorker on paths to self-discovery. Sara Jolene Tilman, burdened with an ox-sized case of low self-esteem, resolves to finally live life on her own terms after her controlling mother dies. Eager to utilize her new freedom, she moves into Thank the Lord. Meanwhile, Richard Peterson, the by-the-bootstraps executive director of "one of the largest and most prestigious nongovernmental organizations," is suffering a broken heart after learning an old flame is getting married. Burned out from years of globe trotting, womanizing and maintaining his lofty position, Richard heads to Maryland and the boardinghouse. As Jolene looks for love in casual affairs that quickly turn disastrous, Richard tries celibacy and begins funding local community-improvement initiatives. Unfortunately, the characters learn their obvious lessons in dreadfully slow fashions, and Forster's passive prose does little to enliven Jolene's endless self-pitying. But the characters' earnestness will appeal to readers looking for a light pick-me-up. (Aug.) Mystery Set in the prairie town of Boynton, Okla., in the spring of 1913, Casey's nostalgic, folksy second novel to feature Alafair Tucker (after 2005's The Old Buzzard Had It Coming) finds the full-time mother of 11 and part-time sleuth worried about one of her grown daughters, Alice. Alice is sweet on barber Walter Kelley, an attractive widower whom the determined and discerning Alafair mistrusts; Walter is just too popular with the ladies. Since Alice is set on having Walter, Alafair seeks distraction by investigating the unsolved murder of Louise Kelley, Walter's late wife, whose stabbed body surfaced in a creek bordering the Tucker farm eight months earlier. Dialogue rich with Midwestern speech patterns and a consistent, unobtrusive narrative voice lift this smalltown historical, which should particularly appeal to Margaret Maron fans. An appendix of down-home recipes is a bonus. (Sept.) British author Harper's excellent second historical whodunit, set in 11th-century Asia Minor during the Crusades, shows that his fine debut, Mosaic of Shadows (2005), was no fluke. As the First Crusaders are stuck in an interminable siege of Turk-held Antioch, Demetrios Askiates, a Greek assigned as scribe to the Byzantine emperor's representative, must once again play detective. The discovery of a Norman knight with his throat slit and bearing unusual markings on his corpse threatens the shaky alliance among the varied European armies of the First Crusade. Amid battles and political intrigues, Demetrios desperately pursues the few clues he has, even as the late Norman knight's companions, who may have joined him in promoting a new heretical sect, also turn up dead. Like Steven Saylor, the master of the ancient Roman historical, Harper effortlessly draws the reader into an unfamiliar time, bringing alive the characters and their motivations. (Aug.) In Winspear's winning fourth historical to star British psychologist and PI Maisie Dobbs (after 2005's Pardonable Lies), Georgiana Bassington-Hope, a pioneering female war reporter who was a classmate of Maisie's at Girton College (Cambridge), asks Maisie to investigate the death of her twin brother, Nicholas Bassington-Hope, a WWI veteran and artist. The police have ruled Nick's fall from a scaffold at a Mayfair gallery before his masterpiece could be unveiled an accident, but Georgiana suspects foul play. As Maisie delves into the art world and the dead man's unusual family, the author provides an insightful look at class divisions and dangerous political undercurrents of homegrown fascism in early 1930s Britain. Some might wish that the whodunit side of the story was more developed, but fans of quality period fiction will be well satisfied. (Aug.) In Edgar-finalist Bowen's delightful 10th novel to feature her Det. Constable Evan Evans (after 2004's Evan's Gate), the serene North Wales village of Llanfair is again roiled by intrigue and murder. Evan's worries begin when his schoolteacher wife, Bronwen, introduces him to Jamila, a London-born teenager of Pakistani descent who pleads for their help after she learns that her radical Muslim brother has persuaded their parents to take her back to Pakistan to be married. Evan has also been assigned to a new task force just as a wave of homicides spreads through the district—three men murdered, all in the same manner with the same elusive weapon. Yet the team is stumped to find a connection among any of the victims. Meanwhile, Jamila vanishes and Bronwen and Evan fear the worst. Bowen sparkles in this cleverly concocted puzzler. (Aug.) At the start of Bloom's twisting, turning sophomore effort (after 2005's See Isabelle Run), Ginny Lavoie, a New York City policewoman under investigation for corruption, receives a distraught phone call from her childhood friend Sonya who lives in Ginny's hometown in western Massachusetts. Sonya's teenage son has been found beaten to death, and she wants Ginny to help sort out what happened—the local authorities are strangely eager to close the case. Back in the depressed, postindustrial town she left years ago, Ginny is compelled to confront a past she has long tried to leave behind. Though some of Bloom's supporting characters strain credibility, she reveals enough of Ginny's interior musings to lend the lead character considerable depth. An excellent sense of place serves the story well, and bits of regional humor further enliven the action. (Aug.) British veteran Keating's less than riveting sixth Det. Supt. Harriet Martens procedural (after 2005's A Detective at Death's Door) opens, literally, with a bang, but the plot remains tepid and the characters' mostly stoic response to personal tragedy feels bloodless. Martens and her husband are stunned when they learn that their twin sons, both constables for the Birchester police, have fallen victim to a terrorist's bomb—one is killed, the other is in critical condition. The super's boss, deciding that work will help her cope, gives Martens a sensitive solo assignment—to probe the theft of a genetically modified herbicide that could decimate Europe's agricultural crops. The fairly straightforward search for the thief will leave Keating's many fans hoping for a return to form in his next book. (Aug.) Meet Nik Kane, the charming star of a new series by Anchorage Daily News columnist Doogan. Kane, a 55-year-old ex-cop who's also an ex-con, not to mention an ex-husband, heads to the Alaskan interior to do some detective work for a remote religious community called Rejoice. One of Rejoice's leaders, Thomas Wright, has hired Kane to track down his teenage daughter, Faith. Maybe Faith ran away, or maybe she was abducted. Kane—only periodically distracted from his detecting by his attraction to a woman he meets at Rejoice—quickly learns that Faith wasn't representative of her conservative religious community. A budding feminist with Ivy League ambitions, she also had a sideline income, $500 a week, deposited in a pseudonymous bank account. While Doogan telegraphs the solution to the riddle of Faith's disappearance, engaging, lucid prose more than compensates. (Aug.) An all-too-competitive game of "eXtreme croquet" set in an obstacle-ridden cow and sheep pasture in Caerphilly, Va., leads to murder in Agatha-winner Andrews's goofy seventh Meg Langslow mystery (after 2005's Owls Well That Ends Well). When Meg chases an errant shot into a gully, she discovers the fresh corpse of a woman with her head bashed in. The victim appears to have been done in with a croquet mallet—or was it a sledgehammer? Meg starts with a long list of suspects involved in a local campaign against developers who hope to transform the bucolic pasture area into an outlet mall. When the body is identified as Lindsay Tyler, a beautiful, manipulative former history professor with a checkered career and erstwhile romantic ties to Meg's fiancé, Michael, the connections and motives multiply, bogging down the action. Still, the author's sense of fun and a lively, charming cast will please most cozy fans. (Aug.) SF/Fantasy/Horror Readers who crave the fantasy equivalent of a summer movie will welcome Frost's debut, which introduces Tess Noncoiré, a widowed writer who has joined the Goddess-worshiping Sisterhood of the Celestial Blade Warriors, sworn to protect the dimensional portal between humanity and demonkind. Thanks to her magical bond with the wisecracking, cigar-smoking imp Scrap, who changes form to become her Celestial Blade, Tess fights evil—even in the middle of a busy schedule of appearances at science fiction conventions and bookstores to flog her bestselling fantasy novels based on the Sisterhood. When Tess saves a Native American girl from an apparent hellhound attack, she's drawn into a complex plot to open the portal between Earth and the demon realms. Despite an intriguingly dark setup, the novel falters on stereotyped characters and awkward plotting, with Tess spending as much time detailing the charms of SF fandom as she does making herself a target for evil. (Sept.) This colossal scrapbook of scarce, offbeat fiction, poetry and nonfiction from SF veteran Farmer offers fans a smorgasbord of his hard—and impossible—to find work from fanzines and other small publications, spanning the 1940s to the 1990s. Amassed by Mike Croteau, who runs the official Philip José Farmer Web site, and edited by Paul Spiteri, who provides brief introductions for each piece, this collection is especially valuable for its insights into the author's writing methods. For fun, Farmer reinterpreted the adventures of pulp hero Doc Savage, Oz characters, Sherlock Holmes and Tarzan. His canine detective, Ralph von Wau Wau, in "A Scarletin Study," somehow blended Holmes, Sam Spade and, typically, puns. Farmer also reprised vampire, werewolf and Frankenstein stories. About the sale of his first story, "The Lovers" (which won a Hugo in 1952), Farmer says in the autobiographical "Maps and Spasms" that he thought he "had the world by the tail. But, as it turned out, there was a tiger at the other end." Fortunately for generations of SF readers, he persisted. (Aug.) After a detour with the Viscount of Adrilankha trilogy (Sethra Lavode, etc.), Brust returns to sometime assassin and popular protagonist Vlad Taltos in the 10th installment of his famously disordered series. Beginning where Issola (2001) left off, this novel follows Vlad simultaneously through a complicated scheme to disrupt the political maneuvering of a shady association known as the Left Hand of the Jhereg and an exquisite dinner at the renowned restaurant Valabar's. (Each chapter, like a course in a literary feast, opens with descriptions of the fare at Valabar's.) Brust brings the grimy streets of Adrilankha to life in swift, vivid strokes and keeps the narrative skipping with wisecracking conversations amongVlad, his companion Loiosh and friends old and new. Though the in-jokes fly thick and fast and the line between familiar and recycled sometimes blurs, new readers won't notice and fans will be too happy at the prospect of another Taltos book to mind. (Aug.) Unicorn girl Khorii of the Linyaari had a horn-full of curing to do in McCaffrey and Scarborough's first chronicle of the Acorna's Children series, First Warning (2005), about a deadly plague sweeping the universe. In this spirited second installment, the gifted young healer, her adopted android brother, Elviiz ("named for an ancient Terran king"), and human survivors of the planet Paloduro struggle to devise a vaccine. Khorii makes the connection between the plague and the new threat of devouring, wraithlike aliens. Meanwhile, Khorii's quarantined parents, Aari and Acorna, learn Khorii has a twin, Arriin, whose embroyo had been stolen from them long ago by the Ancestral Friends. As an adult, Arriin escapes via a stolen time-travel device. The twins' reunion, along with the punishment of the criminal Marl Fidd, is a highlight of this episode in the exploits of Khorii and her crew. Fantasy fans of all ages—but particularly girls 12 and up—should go for this one. (Aug.) Stealth, cunning and killer instinct have ensured the survival of the flock of this gonzo eco-thriller's title, a population of prehistoric, predatory, highly intelligent giant proto-birds who've roamed for thousands of years in the trackless savanna of what's now a government military reservation in central Florida. Smith's entertaining debut kicks into high gear when the birds get caught between conflicting environmental and business interests. Vance Holcomb, a billionaire rogue environmentalist, is trying to protect the lurking creatures, while the Berg Brothers, a Disney-style entertainment conglomerate, crave the land as residential real estate. When a right-wing militia is hired to destroy the flock, a naïve young Fish and Wildlife officer and his girlfriend find themselves caught in the resulting melee. Smith maps out a complex living environment that makes the flock's continued existence almost believable and depicts human characters who match the killer birds in adaptability. If the book's conclusion feels a bit cynically anticlimactic, it still shows that humans are the deadliest predators of all. (Aug.) Hodge (Lies and Ugliness) gives the serial killer a makeover with a daub of metaphysical murk in this intelligent but talky tale of horror. What begins as a tale about an Internet stalker targeting members of a near-death-experience chat group morphs quickly into a farfetched account of a nasty Gnostic avatar that harvests the souls of those who have tasted the afterlife. There's no easy way for the complex principles of Gnosticism to emerge naturally through the actions of the characters, so Hodge provides the reader with a tutorial plopped in chunky blocks of exposition throughout the text. This story has more cerebral ambitions than most supernatural fiction, and they are realized entirely at the expense of any thrills. (Aug.) Mass Market Despite a cover featuring a modern pair of designer heels, this far-fetched romantic intrigue feels like a Regency awkwardly dressed in contemporary clothes. You have your arrogant rake, playboy Italian count and indicted jewel thief Roberto Bartolini; the woman who can tame him, his gorgeous attorney Brandi Michaels; and a gaggle of high-society supporting characters among the Chicago elite. Throw in a steamy, melodramatic early encounter between Roberto and Brandi, a world-renowned diamond called the Romanov Blaze, a Chicago crime ring and a silly court ruling that places Roberto in Brandi's custody, and you have a romance with an identity crisis. There are moments of suspense and flashes of sensuality (buried beneath groaners like "I only want to take you to the brink of pleasurable insanity"), but the story doesn't hang together. The protagonists rarely transcend their stock roles, and the chaotic plot is oddly predictable. Dodd, who cut her teeth on historicals, has penned memorable contemporaries (see Close to You), but this tale is much like cubic zirconia—sparkle and flash but little else. (Aug.) In the sixth Emma Fielding adventure (after More Bitter Than Death), things are looking up for the archeologist heroine: she has the job she's always wanted, a tenured professorship at a reputable college, the respect of her peers and, most importantly, the love and support of her husband, Brian. Fortunately for readers, this idyllic period in Emma's life doesn't last long. When a series of "pranks" begins to escalate around her—starting with an ominous postcard bearing only the message "soon," followed by strange, generous gifts to her parents in Emma's name, and turning quickly to arson and murder—Emma struggles to pin down the culprit, succumbing to marriage-straining paranoia and fear. Emma is convinced that a former colleague, Tony Markham, is responsible, a theory that would make sense—Tony, a psychopathic murderer, had tried to kill Emma four years previous—were he not already dead. With plenty of twists, a well-developed supporting cast and just enough recap to bring readers new to the series up to date without sacrificing momentum, Cameron has crafted a fine suspense thriller. (Aug.) The second installment in Adair's paranormal romantic suspense series featuring the Edge brothers (after Edge of Danger), members of the secret counterterrorism organization T-FLAC, is hot, taut, globe-spanning fun. Caleb Edge's latest assignment is to follow Heather Shaw, whose father is well known for his terrorist ties. Before long, the two are drawn together, culminating in frenzied love-making against Caleb's hotel room door. Months later, when Caleb learns that Heather is expecting his child, he offers her a sincere marriage proposal—without giving up or giving away his secret hunt for her father. Their sexually charged wedded bliss takes a turn, however, when Heather learns about Caleb's mission—as well as his wizardry skills. Before they can resolve their trust issues, however, Heather is abducted, and Caleb must employ all of his paranormal talents to rescue her, even though the love between them may still prove unsalvageable—especially considering the centuries-old curse on the Edge family. Written with a pulse-quickening attention to sensual detail and a playful sense of humor, Adair expertly combines a tight plot and graphic romance with magical flourishes and exotic locales. (Aug.) The first entry in Halliday's Housewives Fantasy Club series is a satisfying romance that follows an odd-couple marriage. Besides their stubborn streak, Zada and Rick Clark have nothing in common outside of the bedroom—he likes things clean and healthy, while she prefers her mess and her fries supersized—and great sex isn't enough to keep their marriage together. Yet getting a divorce isn't so easy either: unable to agree on who wins the house and the dog, Zada and Rick are ordered by an ornery judge to resolve their property dispute within 90 days. Rick gleefully moves back home, and resumes his strict routine—instilled in him by his drill sergeant father—hoping to drive Zada out. Zada, of course, has her own plans for making Rick flee, and what begins as a high-stakes game of Survivor soon becomes an emotionally sticky battle in which sex is the ultimate weapon. Before the fight is over, Zada and Rick learn a lot about marriage and maturity, while catching their friends and neighbors in the crossfire. By setting her story post–"I do," Halliday provides a fresh, if not particularly complicated, romance, and introduces warm, funny characters that should serve well in future housewife fantasies. (Aug.) Comics In The Rabbi's Cat, Sfar showed a knack for slightly tweaked and jokey mystical fables, a talent he updates with a harsher edge in this first volume of a new series about a band of itinerant Klezmer musicians. While Cat reflected its drowsy, lugubrious North African setting, this tale is darker, edged with a tragic, Eastern European jocularity, a mix of the fantastic and cruel. In Sfar's expressive art, bright splotches of color overflow his wildly looping drawing. In the violent opening, Noah (nicknamed "The Baron of My Backside") narrowly escapes the massacre of his bandmates by rival musicians. Later in the book, after extracting some revenge, he puts a new band together with the misfits who roam through the intervening pages. They include a pair of former yeshiva students exiled for theft; the baron's voluptuous love interest, Chava; and Tshokola, a less than truthful gypsy on the run from Cossacks. Much of the book has the feel of a goofy, somewhat twisted vaudeville routine, with Sfar's characters meeting under bad circumstances and making light of it via some bad jokes. Deeply suffused with Jewish religious and ethnic identity, the book is profane, messy, jagged and wildly enthusiastic, much like klezmer itself. (Sept.) Horror-manga legend Umezu (Orochi: Blood, Baptism of Blood) can create a sense of dread with just the sheer volume of black ink he puts on the page—white space is at a premium, shading is aggressive, and the result is an ominous atmosphere that affects the reader before the story even begins. Classroom, originally published in 1972,tells the story of sixth-grader Sho, who has a bitter fight with his mother before leaving for school one morning; later that day, his entire school vanishes in a violent earthquake, transported to a mysterious desert. When a girl falls to her death, teachers and students begin to panic. Nerves continue to unravel when the school's inadequate food supply is discovered. Umezu makes powerful use of two-page spreads, devoting many of them to single, large shots—the school building against the desert backdrop, the massive sound effect that accompanies the earthquake, an extreme close-up of a teacher with a head wound—the result is extremely disturbing. This first volume solves few of the plot's puzzles, ending just as the kids are veering into Lord of the Flies territory. This is a great rediscovery of a classic title, echoes of which can be seen in modern horror manga like Dragon Head. (Aug.) The year is 2054, and the Central Georgia Metropolis is held in a grip of fear by a series of crimes committed by the mysterious lightning-wielding techno-terrorist dubbed Steeplejack. His attacks stem from an agenda that seeks to disconnect humanity from its dependence on "surrogates," androids that the consumer can link with and allow to carry out the user's life, acting as a full-time stand-in. For investigating detective Harvey Greer, Steeplejack's anti-surrogate rampage unearths possible connections to a fanatical prophet. Years earlier, this prophet incited riots while preaching a gospel of returning society to a time when people actually lived their lives instead of merely experiencing them, a point of view that Greer is slowly coming to agree with. Basically a straight police procedural laced with science-fiction trappings, Venditti's script offers a convincing future in which mankind doesn't realize that the virtual reality of the surrogates is potentially worse than any narcotic. This quietly bleak scenario is capably illustrated by Weldele in a straightforward style reminiscent of film storyboards. As a change of pace from typical superheroic fare, this volume comes heartily recommended. (July) When was the last time you were truly shocked by a comic? Take a look at this collection and you could be. Editor and bad boy cartoonist Head has created an anthology that seeks to recapture the spirit of the underground comics movement. The stories range from the outrageous—like Head's own lurid, over-packed, ultra-violent noir pastiche "Mindless Thrills!"—to the surreal, like Max Anderson's wordless tale "Car Boy." Other tales are subtly melancholy—"Family Circus" by Carol Swain—or the just plain strange—a retelling of the story of Faust in the style of Jim Davis (R. Sikoryak's "Mephistofield"). The only thread connecting the divergent styles of storytelling and art is the unlikelihood that any of these stories would be published by the mainstream comics industry. Although the story approaches vary so greatly that readers might be confused, this collection manages to capture the anarchic outsider spirit of good subversive cartooning. (June) In this yaoi manga, two male classmates, good friends, inspire each other to be more than they would be separately. As they come to depend on each other, they find themselves falling in love. The figures have verve, looking as grumpy and apathetic and enthusiastic and pleased with themselves as teenagers can. Their eyes are especially alive, which contributes greatly to giving the reader a sense of their personalities. As the two face important life decisions—such as where to go to college or whether to move in together—they ponder just how much they mean to each other. The various chapters stand alone, with some involving other characters in the same situation. They're reminiscent of poems or songs written to the object of one's affection. One weaves together the high jump, a secret meeting place, the desire to fly and an early end to the relationship imposed from outside. Another deals with the problems of loving an angel. The characters are more well-rounded than is typical of yaoi, with complex interior lives that revolve around more than just their compulsions for each other, making for a realistic portrayal of young love. (June) Self, the provocative British raconteur who used the Tibetan Book of the Dead to map London (How the Dead Live, 2000) is taking another literary shot across his home city's bow. In his gleaming new puzzlebook, Self creates a dystopian future London, ruled by a cynosure of priests, lawyers and the monarchy. He invents Arpee, the musical language they speak that is based on a sacred text—The Book of Dave—which also serves, satirically, as the society's moral and legal foundation. And who is this deity named Dave? An embittered London cabbie from the distant past—the year 2000. As the book opens, the kingdom of Ingerland is ruled by the elite and ruthless PCO. (Self is riffing on the Public Carriage Office, London's transit authority.) People live according to The Book of Dave, which was recovered after a great flood wiped out London in the MadeinChina era. Flashing back more than 500 years, cabbie Dave Rudman types out his idiosyncratic, misogynist, bile-tinged fantasies while in a fit of antidepressant-induced psychosis and battling over the custody of his child, Carl. His screed becomes both a blueprint for a harsh childrearing climate (mummies and daddies living apart, with the kids splitting time between them) and a full-blown cosmology. As Self moves between eras, he divides the book between Dave's story and the story of the great Flying (slang in the future for "heresy"). The latter involves the appearance of the Geezer (prophet) on the island of Ham (Hampshire) in 508 A.D. (after the "purported discovery of the Book of Dave"), who claims to have found a second Book of Dave annulling the "tiresome strictures" of the first. He is imprisoned by the PCO and mangled beyond recognition, but, 14 years later, his son, Carl Dévúsh, travels from Ham to New London, determined to create a less cruel world that responds to the "mummyself" within. Self's invention of a future language (including dialect Mokni, which combines cabby slang, cockney and the Esperanto of graffiti—and, yes, a dictionary is provided) is wickedly brilliant, with surprising moments of childlike purity punctuating the lexicon's crude surface (a "fuckoffgaff" is a "lawyerly place," while "wooly" means sheep). Self is endlessly talented, and in crossbreeding a fantasy novel with a scorching satire of contemporary mores, he's created a beautiful monster of the future that feeds on the neurotic present—and its parents. (Nov.)
Lost Girls
Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie. Top Shelf (www.topshelfcomix.com), $75 (264p) ISBN 1-891830-74-0
Black Girl/White Girl
Joyce Carol Oates. Ecco, $25.95 (288p) ISBN 0-06-112564-4
O.Z. Livaneli, trans. from the Turkish by Cigdem Aksoy Fromm. St. Martin's, $23.95 (288p) ISBN 0-312-36053-3
Elif Shafak; trans. from the Turkish by Brendan Freely. Marion Boyars, $14.95 paper (270p) ISBN 0-714-53121-9
Margaret Lowrie Robertson. Tatra (Midpoint Trade, dist.), $24 (280p) ISBN 0-977-61420-4
Tim Conley. Insomniac (Consortium, dist.), $16.95 paper (176p) ISBN 1-897178-13-1
All Aunt Hagar's Children: Stories
Edward P. Jones. Amistad, $25.95 (320p) ISBN 0-06-055756-7
Dennis Lehane. Morrow, $24.95 (224p) ISBN 0-06-113967-X
After This
Alice McDermott. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24 (288p) ISBN 0-374-16809-1
Sebastian Faulks. Random, $25.95 (576p) ISBN 0-375-50226-2
Paint It Black
Janet Fitch. Little, Brown, $24.99 (352p) ISBN 0-316-18274-5
Lise Haines. Unbridled Books, $23.95 (256p) ISBN 1-932961-27-5
Alicia Steimberg, trans. from the Spanish by Andrea G. Labinger. Univ. of Nebraska, $20 (152p) ISBN 0-8032-9329-1
Susan Kelly. Pegasus, $21 (192p) ISBN 1-933648-08-2
Renee Dodd. Toby, $24.95 (300p) ISBN 1-59264-164-4
Laura Jensen Walker. WestBow, $14.99 paper (320p) ISBN 1-5955-4067-9
Lisa Samson. WaterBrook, $13.99 paper (288p) ISBN 1-57856-886-2
Daniel Silva. Putnam, $25.95 (352p) ISBN 0-399-15335-7
The Night Gardener
George Pelecanos. Little, Brown, $24.95 (384p) ISBN 0-316-15650-7
Jeremy Blachman. Holt, $25 (320p) ISBN 0-8050-7981-5
Stephen J. Cannell. St. Martin's, $24.95 (352p) ISBN 0-312-34731-6
Ricochet
Sandra Brown. Simon & Schuster, $25.95 (400p) ISBN 0-7432-8933-1
Dan Vining. Berkley Prime Crime, $23.95 (320p) ISBN 0-425-20943-1
Mary Balogh. Delacorte, $22 (320p) ISBN 0-385-33883-X
Fern Michaels. Kensington, $24 (320p) ISBN 0-7582-1630-0
Saint Patrick's Battalion
James Alexander Thom. Ballantine, $24.95 (336p) ISBN 0-345-44556-2
Joolz Denby. Serpent's Tail, $14.95 paper (288p) ISBN 1-85242-905-4
Katherine Stone. Mira, $21.95 (320p) ISBN 0-7783-2331-5
Christina Hopkinson. Warner/5 Spot, $12.95 (288p) ISBN 0-446-69716-8
Susan Johnson. Kensington/Brava, $15 paper (320p) ISBN 0-7582-0939-8
Gwynne Forster. Kensington/Dafina, $14 paper (288p) ISBN 1-7582-1308-5
Donis Casey. Poisoned Pen, $24.95 (242p) ISBN 1-59058-309-4
Knights of the Cross: A Novel of the Crusades
Tom Harper. St. Martin's Minotaur/ Dunne, $24.95 (384p) ISBN 0-312-33870-8
Jacqueline Winspear. Holt, $24 (336p) ISBN 0-8050-7898-3
Rhys Bowen. St. Martin's Minotaur, $23.95 (256p) ISBN 0-312-34942-4
Elizabeth Bloom. Mysterious, $24.95 (304p) ISBN 0-89296-786-2
H.R.F. Keating. St. Martin's Minotaur/Dunne, $24.95 (256p) ISBN 0-312-34988-2
Mike Doogan. Putnam, $24.95 (304p) ISBN 0-399-15371-3
Donna Andrews. St. Martin's Minotaur/Dunne, $23.95 (288p) ISBN 0-312-32940-7
P.R. Frost. DAW, $23.95 (352p) ISBN 0-7564-0389-8
Pearls from Peoria
Philip José Farmer. Subterranean (www.subterraneanpress.com), $45 (778p) ISBN 1-59606-059-X
Steven Brust. Tor, $24.95 (288p) ISBN 0-765-30148-2
Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough. Eos, $24.95 (304p) ISBN 0-06-052540-1
James Robert Smith. Five Star, $25.95 (349p) ISBN 1-59414-377-3
Brian Hodge. Earthling (www.earthlingpub.com), $40 (148p) ISBN 0-9766339-7-3
Christina Dodd. Signet, $7.99 (400p) ISBN 0-451-21912-0
Dana Cameron. Avon, $6.99 (304p) ISBN 0-06-055467-3
Edge of Fear
Cherry Adair. Ballantine, $6.99 (328p) ISBN 0-345-48521-1
Candy Halliday. Warner Forever, $6.50 (336p) ISBN 0-446-61751-2
Joann Sfar. First Second, $16.95 paper (144p) ISBN 1-59643-198-9
The Drifting Classroom: Vol. 1
Kazuo Umezu. Viz Media, $9.99 paper (186p) ISBN 1-4215-0722-6
Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele. Top Shelf (www.topshelfcomix.com),$19.95 paper (208p) ISBN 1-891830-87-2
Edited by Glenn Head. Fantagraphics, $19.95 paper (136p) ISBN 1-56097-728-0
Sumomo Yumeka. Digital Manga (www.dmpbooks.com), $12.95 paper (176p) ISBN 1-56970-926-2
The Book of Dave
Will Self. Bloomsbury, $24.95 (512p) ISBN 1-59691-123-9
