Fiction Reviews: Week of 5/21/2007

The troubles specific to triangular relationships are explored with depth and substance in Hegi's complex and affecting latest. Annie, Jake and Mason-friends practically from the womb-have developed a fraught dynamic sharply affected by competitiveness, attraction and jealousy. The book's opening trauma-Mason's suicide-serves as a springboard for Hegi to delve into the friends' tangled past: Mason and Annie get married the same night Annie's father and very pregnant mother die in a car wreck. The baby, Opal, survives, and the three friends raise her. But festering attractions-Mason to Jake; Jake to Annie-lead Mason to cross a line, Annie to want out of the marriage and Jake to fail to act at a pivotal moment. Woven into the mix is the post-WWII story of Annie's immigrant mother, Lotte, and her friend Mechthild, who came to America from Germany to work as au pairs and pretended to be Dutch to avoid persecution. Though a bumper crop of tragedy weighs heavily on this controlled and articulate novel, Hegi (Sacred Time) is an accomplished storyteller; she inhabits different characters and blends the past with the present to tell a rich story of love, death, loyalty and survival. (Oct.)

In 1987, Manhattan-reared hothouse flower Julian Wainwright matriculates at the alternative Graymont College for the express purposes of attending Professor Stephen Chesterfield's exclusive fiction writing workshop. As Chesterfield dryly infuses his writing wisdom, Julian befriends the cocky, aloof, lesser-born Carter Heinz when they are the only two to whom Chesterfield gives the nod. Carter soon meets Pilar in the cafeteria; Julian meets Mia in the laundry room. Carter's simmering class resentment of Julian surfaces. Senior year finds the two couples living next door to one another and plotting their futures. Henkin (Swimming Across the Hudson) subsequently follows the lovers for the next 15 years through countless college towns, family dramas, failed literary projects and the dot-com boom. Many scenes are too long, and never get below the surface of the cast, particularly wannabe-litterateur Julian. But for a book called Matrimony, Henkin offers surprisingly little about Julian and Mia's marriage, so when big confrontations do arrive, they quickly slide into melodrama. By then, lines like "But I don't want to get my M.F.A. Can't you understand that? I've already been in enough writing workshops" will have cleared the classroom. (Oct.)

Agrandmother's family turns against her in Mailman's uneven debut historical about witch trials in 16th-century Germany. The people of Tierkinddorf, on the brink of starvation following years of bad weather and poor crops, suspect a witch has cast a spell on them. Under the guidance of a visiting friar, the townspeople burn at the stake a local healer. When their luck does not improve, attention turns to the healer's longtime friend, Güde Müller, the novel's narrator and a widow who lives with her son, Jost; her daughter-in-law, Irmeltrud; and their two children. Güde has been recently tormented with visions of witches and of the devil disguised as her late husband, and is uncertain whether the apparitions are real. When Jost and the other village men strike out on a hunting expedition, Irmeltrud begins, in her husband's absence, a campaign to finger Güde as a witch. Mailman creates an intense atmosphere of hunger, fear and claustrophobic paranoia, though the secondary cast is flat and Güde's mental state doesn't always allow for lucid narration. Fans of supernatural fiction will want to give this a look. (Sept.)

Unspecified cataclysm threatens in this unconventional debut spy fable from poet Ball. As mysterious suicides are staged daily on the White House lawn, James Sim, a loner and professional mnemonist (someone who can memorize large amounts of data), comes upon a man stabbed in a park. The man's dying words cast light on garbled notes left by the White House suicides that threaten something very big and very bad in seven days' time. Following the dead man's clues (over seven days in as many chapters), Sim cracks ciphers, explores hidden passages of a fictional, labyrinth-like "verisylum" and struggles to find a straight answer about Samedi, the figure seemingly at the center of the matter. The suicides continue, and the only good advice comes from female pickpocket Grieve, who goes by false names, spies on Sim and falls for him. There are flashbacks to conversations with Sim's childhood imaginary friend (an invisible red owl named Ansilon) and a detailed, history of the fictional 18th-century inventor of the verisylum. Ball writes scenes that read like prose poetry and cultivates a Beckett-like alienated digression rather than standard plot mechanics. The results are highly imaginative but hard going. (Sept.)

The wealthy housewives of New Falls, N.Y., solve a murder in Drake's cheeky debut. When Vincent DeLano is found dead, his ex-wife, Kitty, is standing over him with a smoking gun. She claims she's innocent, and her cause becomes the novel's linchpin. Leading the charge is Dana Fulton, but the other women, mostly Wall Street wives, would prefer to keep their distance from the case. Caroline Meacham, preoccupied with her busy social calendar, limits her involvement to covering an attorney retainer. Bridget Haynes, a French trophy wife, struggles to hide a secret past and a current illness from her naïve husband, Randall. Lauren Halliday, who has a secret of her own (it involves Vincent), is forced to face the truth about her marriage to her older husband, Bob. When the ladies finally come clean to one another about their secrets, Dana pieces together the clues she needs to confront the killer, who offers little resistance when the jig is up. Though some extraneous subplots feel contrived (the romantic involvement of Dana's son, a late-book murder), the novel remains as delightfully campy as an episode of Desperate Housewives. (Sept.)

In Eidus's confident fifth book, it's 1965, and 10-year-old cutie-pie Emma Rosen is navigating the rough seas of preadolescence and her temperamental Jewish family in a lower-middle-income Bronx housing project. Her often violent father, Leo, a self-righteous atheist who craves attention, dreamed of being a great novelist but instead owns a candy store; his casual flirtation with a sultry Jamaican widow threatens to blossom into a full-blown affair. Annette, Emma's migraine-plagued doormat of a mother, can barely remember her younger, prettier, idealistic self as she slaves away in the kitchen, the butt of Leo's tantrums. Emma, a budding poet who prays to the Virgin Mary, inspires intense animosity in her 13-year-old sister, May, which burns with the same red-hot intensity as May's infatuation for a classmate with princely blond good looks and manners very different from the Rosens. An old-fashioned coming-of-age tale, the book soon grows dark with crisis. Eidus (Faithful Rebecca) illuminates the inner lives of young girls on the cusp of womanhood and demonstrates abundant compassion for her often prickly characters. (Sept.)

This penetratingly observed novel is less about the great man of its title than the women Oscar Feldman, fictional 20th-century New York figurative painter (and an infamous seducer of models as well as a neglectful father), leaned on and left behind: Abigail, his wife of more than four decades; Teddy, his mistress of nearly as many years; and Maxine, his sister, an abstract artist who has achieved her own lesser measure of fame. Five years after Feldman's death, as the women begin sketching their versions of him for a pair of admiring young biographers working on very different accounts of his life, long-buried resentments corrode their protectiveness, setting the stage for secrets to be spilled and bonds to be tested. Christensen (The Epicure's Lament) tells the story with striking compassion and grace, and her characters are fully alive and frankly sexual creatures. Distraction intrudes when real-world details are wrong (the A-train, for instance, doesn't run through the Bronx), and the novel's bookends-an obituary and a book review, both ostensibly from the New York Times-are less than convincing as artifacts. In all, however, this is an eloquent story posing questions to which there are no simple answers: what is love? what is family? what is art? (Aug.)

The sprawling ninth novel from South African Hope (Kruger's Alp, etc.) pursues a son's adoring, adversarial relationship with his legendary mother and with South Africa as it changes over his lifetime. Alexander, born in 1944, returns to postapartheid Johannesburg to distribute the effects of his mother, Kathleen Healey, formerly a devil-may-care Karen Blixen-era big-game hunter. Alexander isn't sure who among the motley "uncles" who floated through his mother's life is his father, and readers see a lot of Kathleen's laissez-faire parenting as young Alexander, in retrospect, is subject to it. As the novel flashes back and forth in time, there's also Koosie, a mixed-race orphan boy taken under Kathleen's wing who later gets swept up in the black power movement. (Alexander becomes an itinerant air-conditioner salesman.) Kathleen, dying of cancer, makes a last-ditch attempt to marry a much younger Cuban refugee of Castro's regime and help spirit him to safety. Later, we meet Cindy, a "Coloured" woman now playing the rich "Jo'burg dolly-bird," who worked with Kathleen at a shelter for handicapped kids and is overwhelmed by Kathleen's personality. Hope allows Kathleen to come through clearly, and individual episodes are suffused with Alexander's lifelong ambivalence. His portraits are skillful, but the novel doesn't fully jell. (Aug.)

Dalby's sequel to Waltzing at the Piggly Wiggly revisits the offbeat Mississippi Delta town of Second Creek, where mayor Floyce Hammontree, once the "new blood" the town needed and now a corrupt manipulator, is outraged that Choppy Dunbar, the "seventyish" former owner of the local Piggly Wiggly and a novice to "the down and dirty business of local politics," is running against him in the upcoming mayoral race. Working to help Mr. Choppy's campaign are newlyweds Powell and Laurie Hampton and the Nitwitts (wealthy widows with social standing and influence). Although charming and energetic, this polite band of earnest do-gooders faces a formidable battle against the slick Floyce, who still has some favors to call in. Meanwhile, Mr. Choppy's long-lost love reappears at a critical moment, and he is determined to keep her. On election night, unusually stormy weather delays the announcement of the winner, which should be no surprise. Dalby brings the story neatly together, but the novel's pacing suffers from the drawn-out and overly cute conversations, which turn the characters into caricatures. Dalby lays on thick the cartoonish Southern quirkiness. (Aug.)

Tudish returns to the rural Pennsylvania depicted in her debut story collection, Tenney's Landing, in this restrained novel about a woman reconnecting with her past. The story follows Virginia Rownd, who is grappling with her mother's death and her father Nathan's quick remarriage. Six months after the wedding, Nathan is injured in a tractor accident, and Virginia is called upon to pitch in on the family farm for the summer. A reluctant Virginia drags her 13-year old son, Randall, along and leaves husband Rob in suburban Maryland. On the farm, she hays and milks the cows while attempting to get along with her recalcitrant new stepmother, Lydia. In addition, Virginia reconnects with the townspeople, most notably her ex-boyfriend West Moffat, and friend Hennis "Henny" Eastman, now in a wheelchair. An additional story line involves Irene, a troubled girl from a broken home whom Randall befriends and Virginia attempts to save, with mixed results. Tudish portrays a realistic world, yet Virginia's abrupt transformation, brought on when her father contemplates selling the farm, is at odds with the novel's unhurried pace. Readers who enjoyed the story collection will appreciate this return journey. (Aug.)

According to Lourie's fictional account, the informant who turned Anne Frank and her family in to the Nazis was a mere adolescent, motivated more by a desire to feed his dying father, who was subsisting on tulip bulbs, than by an obsessive hatred for Jews or by an unalloyed greed. When the brother he hasn't seen for 60 years visits from America, self-pitying Joop confesses his terrible boyhood secret, which he claims prevented him from marrying, cultivating friendships or leading a normal life, and relives the war years. Events include Joop's brief play at sabotage (discovered by a Dutch Nazi uncle and reported to Joop's father, who savagely beats him); Joop surviving diphtheria (he's blamed when a similarly infected sibling dies); and Joop's parents' unhappy marriage and casual anti-Semitism, which cast shadows over his ordinary activities. Lourie's rendering of Anne Frank's fictional betrayer as a callous, misguided youth is stark and deftly written. (Aug.)

In Burke's meticulously textured 16th Dave Robicheaux novel (after 2006's Pegasus Descending), Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath provide the backdrop for an account of sin and redemption in New Orleans. When Detective Robicheaux's department is assigned to investigate the shooting of two looters in a wealthy neighborhood, he learns that they had ransacked the home of New Orleans's most powerful mobster. Now he must locate the surviving looter before others do, and in the process he learns the fate of a priest who disappeared in the ill-fated Ninth Ward trying to rescue his trapped parishioners. Burke creates dense, rich prose that draws the reader into a web of greed and violence. Each of his characters feels the hands of both grace and of perdition, and the final outcome of their struggle is never quite certain. Burke showcases all that was both right and wrong in our response to this national disaster, proving along the way that nobody captures the spirit of Gulf Coast Louisiana better. (July)

Britain's ongoing involvement in Northern Ireland threatens the budding romance between Londoners Alice, a physical therapist, and Joseph, a decorator and house painter, in Seiffert's psychologically acute, relentlessly grim second novel (following the Booker shortlisted The Dark Room). Almost a decade has passed since Joseph, then a soldier, killed a suspected IRA terrorist at a military checkpoint. The incident haunts him, sometimes makes him violent and prevents him from forming serious attachments. Alice resents that Joseph is essentially shutting her out of his life. Her frustration is compounded by the birth father who's rejected her, and by the recent death of her maternal grandmother. Alice tenuously cares for her grandfather, David, whose emotional remoteness may be linked to his stint with the RAF in 1950s Kenya. When Joseph good-naturedly offers to do some free decorating at David's house, an easy rapport develops between the two reticent men, until things go wrong. Although the characters' politics are simplistic, Seiffert masterfully chronicles the trajectory, and the causes, of Alice and Joseph's damaged relationship. Her beautifully understated, pointed exploration of the emotional toll of guerrilla war shines with clarity and vision. (July)

In the overly precious third novel from Train Go Sorry author Hager Cohen, Beatrice "Bebe" Fisher-Hart is the almost 20-year-old only child of two coolly articulate Boston therapists. Bebe's parents duly swallow their mortification and allow her to remain at home, all expenses paid, when she decides to defer college to have a serious go at acting, like her estranged maternal grandmother, Margaret Fourcey. A retired theater actress with a legendary reputation, Margaret lives just across the Charles River, but Bebe hardly sees her and knows little about her life or her estrangement from the family. When Bebe finds out her revered father may have been professionally inappropriate, she lashes out in disillusion and anger, and takes refuge with Margaret. Her paternalistic relationship with theater director Hale Rubin, a 50-ish member of her grandmother's "salon," deepens. Hale is an idealized character, tailor-made to fill the gap left by Bebe's father's fall from grace, and Bebe, while more-or-less sanguinely tempered, is just this side of annoyingly narcissistic. Bebe's struggles are believable, but the hothouse atmosphere makes the stakes feel small, and Bebe herself something less than likable. (July)

Bestseller Silva's superlative seventh novel to feature Gabriel Allon, "the legendary but wayward son of Israeli Intelligence," puts Silva squarely atop the spy thriller heap. When Solomon Rosner, a professor in Amsterdam who's also a secret Israeli asset, is assassinated for his strident reports and articles detailing the dangers of militant Islam within the Netherlands, Gabriel gets the job to clean out the professor's files. In Amsterdam, the Israeli agent and his old partner, Eli Lavon, unearth a plot that leads to the kidnapping by Islamic extremists of the daughter of the U.S. ambassador in London. While most intelligence agencies consider Gabriel persona non grata because of his unorthodox methods and the trail of bodies he leaves in his wake, he once again proves invaluable as he and his stalwart team hunt down some of Israel's-and the world's-most violent enemies. While you don't have to have read the earlier books in the series (The Messenger, etc.), knowing the history of the returning characters adds depth and color to the overall story. (July)

In this sly Washington satire, the second novel from Playboy managing editor Malanowski (Mr. Stupid Goes to Washington), a scheming U.S. vice president sets out to "dethrone" the president. After four years in the Senate, Godwin Pope, a rich and handsome Princeton grad, decides to run for president against the incumbent, Jack Mahone, a slick, folksy former Louisiana governor who crushes him in a primary debate. In a surprise move, Jack asks Godwin to be his running mate and Godwin accepts. Soon after their victory, Godwin becomes bored and covets the top job for himself. Enter Irene Kim, a comely trade mission rep (spy?!) from China, who Godwin suspects could snare Jack in a sex scandal of impeachment proportions. The flirtatious fly in the ointment is Newsbreak journalist Maggie Newbold, a disgraced Pulitzer Prize winner struggling to expose-or embrace-Godwin, a brilliant manipulator who presents a delicious paradoxical choice to Maggie at novel's end. Malanowski's portrait of a master political double-dealer is as entertaining as it is scary. (July)

Two young men heading in opposite directions find their destinies linked by violence in Davidson's dripping-with-testosterone debut novel (following story collection Rust and Bone). After he gets beat up at a bar, Paul Harris questions his coddled, trouble-free life and embraces obsessive workout routines and steroids before finding boxing, the perfect outlet for his newfound rage. Meanwhile, 16-year-old Rob Tully is a boxing star in training on the path to a Golden Gloves tournament. Paul seeks to embrace his new self through the grandeur and punishment of boxing, while Rob struggles to find himself by escaping from that very same world. Their paths cross when Paul fights Rob's uncle in an underground match, and odds-on loser Paul wins, at a big price. Davidson's writing is terse, coarse and fluid in descriptions of exposed viscera, splattered blood and broken bones. There's an unmistakable Palahniuk influence at work. (July)

In Christopher's magical fifth novel, a sympathetic history teacher takes an interest in quiet, studious Xeno Atlas, who has developed a burning interest in real and imaginary animals. "I first heard of the Caravan Bestiary when I was fifteen years old, and it changed the course of my life," Xeno declares. The young man undertakes a quest to find the ancient manuscript, which describes animals left off Noah's Ark (including the "Catoblepas," a white bird with divining powers) and was assumed lost many years ago. The search entails an around-the-world journey, wherein Xeno learns the answers to long-standing family mysteries, uncovers a wealth of lost knowledge and finds true love with his best friend's sister, the lovely Lena Moretti. Christopher (A Trip to the Stars) also saddles his protagonist with a dead mother; a mysterious, perpetually grieving, peripatetic father; a shape-shifting shamanistic grandmother; and a lonely, troubled childhood. His evocative prose yields a narrative loaded with fascinating arcana and intriguing characters. (July)

In her second Det. Insp. Anna Travis novel (after 2004's Above Suspicion), British author La Plante, best known for TV's Prime Suspect featuring DCI Jane Tennison, transports the unsolved Black Dahlia murder to present-day London with disappointing results. When a young woman is found butchered in a field, Anna unexpectedly ends up sharing the case with her former lover, DCI James Langton. As they learn the full extent of the murderer's depravity, letters begin arriving at the police station and local paper, echoing those from the infamous Black Dahlia killer, active more than 50 years ago in Los Angeles. The self-named Red Dahlia Avenger mocks Anna and Langton as they hit one dead end after another. Anna lacks Tennison's tough vulnerability and floats through the story without much emotional investment. Procedural minutiae bog down this novel, which, despite the lurid subject matter, never manages to shock the reader. (July)

Stahl's 1995 memoir, Permanent Midnight (detailing his life as a drug-addicted TV writer), and three novels (I, Fatty the most recent), have won him a fan base that shares his glee for the comically deviant, but even his most ardent supporters will be disappointed with this hodgepodge of thin sketches and riffs. Several pieces trade in little more than shock value. "Bunker Buster," for instance, details a homosexual tryst with Dick Cheney in the backroom of a Wyoming gun shop. Readers will also meet a hirsute midget with a vegetable fetish, a religiously devout hooker whose creative interpretation of her virginity pledge allows her to work as a prostitute, and a woman who takes her cocaine in an unorthodox manner. These characteristically perverse entries are incongruously offset with more conventional but promising fare: an account of a straitlaced dentist spontaneously running off with a teenaged girl hints at a desire to go beyond the merely eccentric, while the handful of pieces about boyhood are deeply felt, if too slight to satisfy. The book is less a collection of fully conceived stories than a repository for half-baked ideas. (July)

Nothing is as it seems in this stunning tale of illicit sex, murder and betrayal from Edgar-winner Ellis (Line of Vision). The brutal murders of six young women by Terry Burgos, a Mansbury College janitor, in June 1989 seems self-evident. After all, Burgos confessed, and then-assistant county attorney Paul Riley found enough evidence, including the song lyrics that inspired the murders, to get Burgos the death penalty. In June 2005, Riley's in private practice working for the father of one of the six victims, Cassie Bentley, when someone begins duplicating those murders. Odd notes come to Riley in the mail from a disturbed man who may be a copycat killer. To complicate matters, Riley had, under pressure from Cassie's prominent family, not charged Burgos with her murder in 1989. This fact comes back to haunt him when detectives find links between Cassie and the current murders. Juggling multiple viewpoints, Ellis keeps perfect control of his labyrinthine plot as it builds to a satisfying twist ending. Author tour. (July)

What makes a teen yearn to be a porn star diva? Porn star Hunter answers that question with the full-frontal portrait of Simone Young, a young New Yorker who decides to gain control of her life through selling her body. Simone's introduced to "the life" by Carmen, a former classmate turned prostitute who persuades Simone to get her freak on. Not content with being a hooker, Simone works at a hip-hop club, moves on to a massage parlor, becomes a stripper and, eventually, a porn superstar in L.A. By age 21, she retires, deciding the adult entertainment industry, numerous affairs and substance abuse will never fulfill her. Hunter and Valentine's depiction of Simone's descent into a brittle, hedonistic world leaves little to the imagination, and Simone's transformation in the resolution remains moving if out of left field. Illus. with photos of Hunter. (July)

Polly Birdswell has been sober for four years and deems herself fit to regain custody of seven-year-old Monroe, whom she left as a baby, but her ex-husband disagrees. In addition to fighting for Monroe, Polly also wants the Maine island-home of childhood vacations and the sacred ground where her brother died-that her hard-drinking stepfather wants to sell. Polly's obsession with the island becomes as tiresome as the uninspired prose. Though novels of abandoned daughters may abound, stories from the mother's perspective are less common; unfortunately, the issue is hardly explored and what could have been provocative falls flat. Polly is repeatedly asked how she could have given up Monroe, but Enders fails to grasp the opportunity to give an insightful answer. Efforts to signify the island as a place of healing and salvation are heartfelt, but dull characters mired in a plodding plot defeat a promising concept. (July)

In this globe-spanning, intrigue-filled thriller from veteran bestseller Adler (Hotel Riviera), an American antiques dealer working in Paris, 38-year-old Precious "Preshy" Rafferty, is drawn into a scheme that also ensnares a cousin she's never met in person, Shanghai antique dealer Lily Song. Lily owns a fabulous, superexpensive necklace that Lily's business associate, Mary-Lou Chen, is out to steal. It's the job of Mary-Lou's paramour, American businessman Bennett Yuan, to find a buyer. As the suspense builds, Lily and Preshy must travel to Venice to meet and, among other things, protect the fortune Preshy is due to inherit from her Aunt Grizelda. Adler remains as adept as ever at making her various locales come to life and doesn't disappoint in keeping the mystery surrounding the necklace, and the two cousins, swirling. (July)

Dean, author of the popular A-List young adult series, graduates to big-girl chick lit with this hip remix of Cinderella, The Ugly Duckling and The Simple Life. Megan Smith, unable to cut it in New York's cutthroat world of magazine publishing, snatches a lucrative offer to transform two pampered and scholastically challenged 17-year-old twins into scholars. Sage and Rose Baker, known mostly for majoring in "ennui and partying," are heiresses to an $84 million fortune, but the money isn't theirs until they pass the SATs. Their grandmother, the fortune's overseer, pays Megan $1,500 a week to get the "Fabulous Baker Twins" up to snuff, and an additional $75,000 if they are accepted at Duke, their late parents' alma mater. But the transformation works both ways, as Megan learns she'll have to earn the twins' respect before they accept her tutelage. Megan, meanwhile, secretly intends to segue her time with the high-profile twins into a writing career. Things work out for everyone, but not in an expected fashion. Dean's writing is swift and the book is consistently funny, though her twin terrors aren't as nasty as they could be. Regardless, this is a great one to take to the beach. (July)

After the triumph of The Rainaldi Quartet (2006), British author Adam delivers a routine thriller focusing on the continuing Chinese oppression of Tibet. Journalist Maggie Walsh, having barely survived being caught in the middle of a firefight in Colombia, happens on the story of a lifetime when she manages to infiltrate the Himalayan inner sanctum of the Dalai Lama and learns, to her astonishment, that the beloved spiritual leader has died. Maggie tags along as the search begins for the baby in whom he has been reincarnated. When word of the quest reaches the political leadership in Beijing, the dreaded Public Security Bureau frantically launches a massive military operation to thwart it. Numerous hairbreadth escapes and the predictable growing attraction between Maggie and one of the monks seeking the new Dalai Lama will have some readers eagerly turning pages, but others will find this outing strictly by the numbers. (July)

Evans, a meteorologist for New York's WABC-TV, and novelist Jameson (Big Trouble) pit a posse of diverse weatherfolk against Simone, a storm of unheard-of magnitude that's headed straight for Manhattan in this slow-building thriller. As it turns out, Simone isn't a natural phenomenon but the product of semimad scientist Carter Thompson, who's learned over the years to create hurricanes and move them in whatever direction he chooses. There are so many characters that it's hard to keep track of their diverse agendas, and there's a frustrating wait as the authors meticulously lay their fictional and scientific groundwork. Meteorologist Kate Sherman and CIA weatherman Jake Baxter have a secret, navy-built device to battle Simone-but it must be deployed from inside the storm. Some readers may feel Simone doesn't live up to her billing, but weather nerds should have a good time from beginning to end. (July)

Written circa 1973, this "trunk novel," as Bachman's double (aka Stephen King) refers to it in his self-deprecating foreword, lacks the drama and intensity of Carrie and the horror opuses that followed it. Still, this fifth Bachman book (after 1996's The Regulators) shows King fine-tuning his skill at making memorable characters out of simple salt-of-the-earth types. Clayton "Blaze" Blaisdell has fallen into a life of delinquency ever since his father's brutal abuse rendered him feebleminded. King alternates chapters recounting Blaze's past mistreatment at a series of Maine orphanages and foster homes with Blaze's current plans to follow through on a kidnapping scheme plotted by his recently murdered partner in crime, George Rackley. Blaze talks to George as though he's still there, and the conversations give the tale tension, with Blaze coming across as a pitiable and surprisingly sympathetic contrast to prickly George. Despite its predictability, this diverting soft-boiled crime novel reflects influences ranging from John Steinbeck to James M. Cain. Also included is a previously uncollected story, "Memory," the seed of King's forthcoming novel Duma Key. (June)

In his 19th collection, Bell warns, "I am up late in wartime," seeing "war's imprint with all of us who now/ die of the earth." As grimly demotic as ever-but perhaps increasingly attuned to current events-Bell (Rampant) continues to display his familiar virtues: his poems project a consistent voice, direct, laconic, and unsusceptible to illusion. He is also, now, "old, terribly aware that I am now old," and interested in the poetry of old age, when "Each person gets worse/ in her own way." The ongoing sequence The Book of the Dead Man (on which Bell has worked for over a decade) continues with its sad invocations and flat free verse, one sentence per line. What sets the new poems apart from those of the 1990s also brings them close to some poets of the 1960s: they speak out directly, angrily and almost despairingly against the current administration and the war in Iraq. There are "too many body bags to bury in the mind." Unlike many poets of protest, though, Bell ties his antiwar sentiment to an awareness that, even in peacetime, we all must die: "We need to think of what might grow in the field/ from our ashes, from the rot of our remains." (July)

As much a work of conceptual art, docudrama, theoretical investigation and political critique as it is a book of poetry, PW editor Scharf's third collection uses Freytag's pyramid of dramatic analysis (exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and denouement) as the framework for his five-part exploration of the sociopolitical climate circa 2002 to 2003. The five sections take multiple forms: a short play; a list of years that hover menacingly above the names of corresponding countries; a 20-page list, in alphabetical order, of corporations, organizations, nations, acronyms, and individuals; short verse poems ("you have to have/ a place to physically put the past/ to move it"); an extended essay ("Since it's predicated on finitude, capitalism couldn't work if people didn't die"); and responses to a sign held outside of the Metropolitan Museum of Art that attempted to call attention to the role of imperialism in the acquisition of art ("I'm in a bourgeois panic and have no response"). This is not a book concerned with the sublime, expressive subjectivity or even the making of beautiful poems, but a tour de force coupling of humor and terror, an expansive and necessary indictment of the pervasive encroachment of narcissistic rock-stardom into all realms of American culture, and an argument for "[p]oetry as a struggle/ for psychological liberty." (May)

The latest from Australia's most eminent living poet may be his best since 1999's Fredy Neptune. Perennially rumored for the Nobel shortlist, Murray pursues in off-rhymed stanzas and confident verse-paragraphs his signature mix of subjects: rural Australia and the dignity of rural labor; his own Scottish-Australian farming heritage and Catholic faith; the bounty and diversity of nature; the hypocrisy, cruelty and self-destructive overconfidence of cosmopolitan, secular civilization. Murray's vivid world includes unparalleled descriptions of flora and fauna-"dolphins, like 3D surfboards/ born in the ocean"-and quips about social class, housing, transport, belief and doubt, with some insights no one else could have: "Whatever the great religions offer/ it is afterlife their people want." His lines, as always, are mouthfuls, sometimes awkward, sometimes winning in their sheer force. Though he can be unfair to his political targets-satirizing "gentrifical force" (i.e., gentrification, bourgeois tastes, hipness) as if it were a horseman of the apocalypse-the emotion is genuine and carries with it not only a defense of "working people's farms," of "beautiful innocents" and unpretentious families, but a very modern understanding of the ways in which our modern lifestyles have put our planet at risk. (June)

Federico García Lorca famously described duende in relation to flamenco music, but understood it as the dark wellspring for any artistic endeavor. As interpreted by Smith in her Laughlin Award-winning second collection, duende is the unforgiving place where the soul confronts emotion, acknowledges death and finds poetry. Smith writes from various unconsoled spaces, where "[k]nowledge is regret" and "[e]ach word is a wish." About the view from a failing marriage, Smith says: "I liked best/ When there was nothing/ That I could/ Or could not see." These 30 poems are roving, alluding to diverse countries and political situations, often shifting perspectives and locations abruptly between sections. Identity and history are often sources of pain, and Smith adopts various marginalized personas (Flores Woman, Persephone, John Dall, Ugandan girls sold into wifedom) unhinged by displacement. Identity politics bleed into personal lyric, where the poet admits, "I am not/ What you intend me to be." Writing in the voice of a Ugandan girl, Smith says, "Somewhere in every life there is a line./ One side to the other and you are gone./ Not disappeared but undone." Although the site of undoing may well be the source of duende, the poet's lyric brilliance and political impulses never falter under the considerable weight of her subject matter. (June)

Stobb's well-titled debut begins smart and ends tender: it starts with crisply layered bits of scenes, many from the rural or industrial Midwest, then moves through sometimes melancholy, sometimes delighted reflections on the poet's young daughter and on his anxious middle age. Landscapes compel in Stobb's writing whether their components, encountered in real life, would delight or appall. Here is an inventively stereoscopic view of a gravelly rural trail, with "Twelve thousand version of twelve dozen ivy blossoms/ in the compound eye"; there are rusted-out "northern resorts/ where men in fishnet hats drink coffee." Filmic quick cuts (and metaphors from film and music) suggest the techniques of August Kleinzahler (who selected the book for the National Poetry Series); luminous descriptions call to mind the early Robert Hass. Yet Stobb turns his attention ultimately from things back to the people who live amid them. Midway through the volume, we find Stobb "hoping our nostalgia and middle-aged foreboding/ would give way to an elegance that had always been east of us." Stobb's best poems-at the start and the end of the volume-include not only observation and tenderness but jazzy dissonance: "I don't know my mangles// from my obtuse angles.... These are words for things." (June)

Troubled young men and boys scarred by their gritty surroundings animate this careful sophomore effort from Hoch (A Parade of Hands), much of it focused on the city and the blue-collar suburbs of Philadelphia, where the poet grew up. The well-handled 22-part central poem, "Bobby Almand," takes its name and subject from a gruesome murder case: the titular boy becomes both hoodlum and victim, a sacrificial representative for the tough teens who run through the rest of the book-"Like wild dogs, we were raised/ in packs, by packs." A wry lyric opens "Stoned, I go into a gas station"; an ode about playground basketball evokes "The air-guitar/ player, the air-baller, half-court rim-clanger... talking trash, snatching loose balls" to eclipse or evade their grim, marginal lives. Hoch's weighty, short lines suggest Linda Gregerson's, but his moods (and occasionally his allusions) instead conjure American singer-songwriters-doomed and sensitive Elliott Smith, blue-collar laureate Bruce Springsteen, whose Jersey shore territory crops up here too. Neither Hoch's scenes nor his moods seem terribly original-and yet he makes them memorable even so: "a...boyhood// shotgun cocked against your head." (June)

Nearly every poem in Klink's sophomore collection has at its emotional center a pastoral bewilderment born of the tension between the physical world and the metaphysical split between self and other. Klick's rampant use of nature imagery-of light, wind and snow accentuating fields, paths, fir trees and waterways, and of the numerous animal inhabitants therein ("Around the lake, the air/ filled with moths, light as pencil outlines")-gives way to a tone that is meditative, aphoristic, at times cold, creating an external foil for the interior conflict between the speaker and the addressee ("single star streaking in cracked silence/ above our argument"). Klink (They Are Sleeping) is at her best weaving together multiple narrative threads-ones that hint or gesture toward larger stories-in order to ground her poems in the natural world; at times, her extended descriptions progress with an overly distant feel. However, perhaps this is the point: one is never sure of each poem's central concern ("Perhaps there are two seas,/ one below the surface and one above"), and when the disparate elements come together ("an animal crosses the wide field/ in you"), one is left, quite satisfyingly, in what this poet calls a "silence clean of every concept." (June)

The 40 poems in this strong, Juniper Prize-winning debut are obsessed with, and at the same time refuse to acknowledge, dislocation-from history, literature, love, place, yearning and speech itself-with a barrage of verbal explosives. Reimagining such figures as Pol Pot, Mayakovsky, García Márquez and Joseph Cornell, and traveling between places as far-flung as Long Island, Vietnam and West Des Moines, Dumanis, coeditor of the controversial poetry anthology Legitimate Dangers, restlessly submerges the reader in his perceptions. He buries the soon-to-be-buried in the tumbling inventory of "Today, on the Obituary Channel" ("The self-proclaimed Sultan of Cockfighting / Heir to the throne of Qatar/ Later an interview with his betrothed/ Now stay tuned for a tour of the Providence morgue"). The book is also lush with political conflict and eros: "Swore I knew nothing of/ the Schlieffen Plan, the Bay of Pigs... as she turned to me and ran/ her satin hands over my eyelids, toward my lips./ Knowing the war would never end, we kissed," In rare moments, sonic tics and play overshadow the matter of the poems, but mostly Dumanis overwhelms with intelligence and emotion. He is certainly a poet to watch. (May)

Magi's full-length debut follows in a recent tradition of investigative cross-cultural autobiography, incorporating images, philosophical and personal reflections, indirectly related texts from artistic peers and, most notably, imaginative reconstructions of her ancestors' lives under foreign occupation. Magi's choice of thread as central metaphor-strings that bind two lives, two pages or two cultures together-is born out by her crisp, spare writing and the primary visual motif: decayed and torn, often artistically written-over pages of historical transcripts. But Magi's Estonia-a country that has changed hands several times since the 16th century, and only surfaced from Soviet rule in 1991-is a nation whose identity cannot easily be healed: "Dear Grandmother: You fed yourself hard candies from a personal dictionary that snapped shut while slipping folded up twenty dollar bills into my palms. [...] Did you prefer Swedish to Estonian or English to Swedish?" Magi deftly weaves together translations of poetry, travelogue and cultural reconstruction. The book is saturated with the quest for lost memory; a cellphone in contemporary Estonia seems anachronistic, and reproduced pages of documentation about her relatives' activities against Communist rule, leading to the Singing Revolution, make for fascinating reading in themselves (when in English). This is a confident, careful and unpretentious first volume. (May)

Named for a WWII airbase in the South Atlantic used by the U.S., journalist Eliza Griswold's poetic debut tracks round-trip missions through disaster, both personal and national, from the aftermath of a crumbled marriage to the minefields of the Middle East. Five sections alternate between home and away, exchanging familiar landscapes for foreign battlefields and finding displacement and disappointment in both. An award-winning foreign correspondent, Griswold writes terse poems that unfortunately too often bear the uncomfortable and worn trope of the observer. Other cultures are pressed into the singsong of iambic rhythms and hard rhymes: "The prostitutes in Kabul tap their feet/ beneath their faded burqas in the heat./ For bread or fifteen cents, they'll take a man to bed-/ their husbands dead, their seven kids unfed." In the collection's strongest pieces, the speaker turns her unsparing eye on the rubble of her own relationships, as in "October," when she softly admits, "I mourn you sometimes/ in places you would have been." Though the speaker travels great distances in these poems, the imagination does not; while investigating the complex ruins of war and love, Griswold attempts to snap each poem shut with a summation or moral, often to diminutive effect. (May)

To the fluid imaginings, brilliantly slippery language and maternal obsessions of three previous books, Szporluk (The Wind, Master Cherry, the Wind) now adds enticing elements of narrative: these one- and two-page lyrical works comprise an original story, or myth, about Anoton, the child of a primordial god, who struggles with his divine parents, whose head becomes an island, and who gives birth to talking animals and quarreling adults. "You were two people,/ the sun and the moon," Szporluk says; her entities absorb and refract more familiar tales (Adam and Eve, Don Giovanni, Joan of Arc), splitting and blurring personalities in order to reach deeper truths about the feelings we never entirely understand and about parent-child connections. Szporluk's readers discover why "The sea is the greatest mother," and why "we still come back to her rim." The story of Anoton vanishes near the end, and the book becomes simply a collection of (striking) lyrics; until then, his legend, such as it is, provides a thread to connect, and an excuse to elaborate on, Szporluk's supremely quotable conceits, her images and aphorisms about creation myths and procreation, babies and language, planets and bodies and love, in which "The newborn's a reborn; every// beloved is the same." (May)

The title of Ruefle's 10th collection of poetry is evocative of a divine pronouncement upon creation, yet the statement's past tense suggests an ominous future awaits. It is this beginning and end, in all its myriad tellings, that Ruefle interrogates, crafting parables/poems, remaking the world and reckoning with a coming apocalypse. The poems are unsparing in their indictments: "only a human being could hammer another one/ to a board," she remarks in "Gathered on a Friday in the Hour of Jupiter" as a crowd assembles on a bright day, surrounded by sunflowers, to watch an execution. In "Speak, Zero," she sharply observes: "From finches we take feathers for our hats/ From us they take hair for their nests," suggesting the vast divide between humanity and nature, between the necessary and the frivolous. These poems grapple with despair and cruelty in a voice that is devotional, obsessive and quirky, as if the right words might offer a spell for salvation. As she writes in "Quick Note About the Think Source," "Fortunately for us,/ the world is not that complicated:/ eventually, words like torpor and muddle/ came into being, and then torpid, muddled/ accounts of the universe took over the populace." (May)

Phillips is a scholar and translator of classical Greek and a writer of syntactically complex, desire-drenched love poems that subtly, and beautifully, reinvent classical tropes and forms. Phillips has published eight books of his own poetry: this selection pares down a rapidly expanding oeuvre to its sharp essentials. Phillips's first three books, published by Graywolf, show him working out his relation to the tradition-from "the Famous Black Poet" to Yeats ("I recognized/ something more/ than swan") to Sappho ("My tongue still remembers")-and to AIDS and its aftermath: "I watched as each boat fell to flame:/ Vincent and Matthew and, last, what bore your name." Pastoral (2000) finds Phillips confidently making the tercet into a representation of the lover's body, a practice that has culminated in four subsequent books rapidly published in the '00s-including The Tether and The Rest of Love-that contain extraordinary and strange examples of Phillips's trademark writing about the bonds and bounds of sex and couplehood: "-Singing inside the mirror,/ to no one, to// itself, the body folding, and/ unfolding, as if map/ then shroud, its song." (May)

Texas author Hunsicker's strong third Lee Henry Oswald contemporary hard-boiled mystery, like its two predecessors, Still River and The Next Time You Die, does for Dallas what Loren Estleman's Amos Walker novels have done for Detroit. Lee Henry "Hank" Oswald (whose deliberately distracting name is the series' only false note, doing nothing to build either character or plot) has retired from the PI trade, and is passing the time and paying the bills by working as a bartender at a chain restaurant when Mike Baxter, a colleague from the first Gulf War, calls in a marker, hoping the gumshoe can track down his daughter before he dies. That request places Oswald in the path of Iranian doctor Anita Nazari, who hires him to find the person behind a campaign of psychological terror that soon escalates to violence. Hunsicker has a flair for turning phrases, and his broken, wounded characters could have stepped straight from the pages of Cornell Woolrich's despairing stories. (Aug.)

The deftly plotted seventh Cork O'Connor novel represents a return to top form for Anthony-winner Krueger after 2006's disappointing Copper River. Henry Meloux asks Cork, who's now working as a part-time PI in his hometown of Aurora, Minn., to find a son the aged Ojibwe healer has never met from a relationship with a white woman, Maria Lima, "seventy-three winters" earlier. Armed with just two clues, a location in Canada and a gold watch with a picture of Maria, O'Connor soon finds the son, a retired mining entrepreneur, but arranging a meeting between son and father proves to be a challenging and surprisingly dangerous task. The book's middle third focuses on Meloux's past: how he became a guide for white men looking for gold in Canada, how he met and fell in love with one of their daughters, and the events that separated the young lovers. Despite the preponderance of back story, the action builds to a violent and satisfying denouement. (July)

Set in London in 1930, this merry first in a new cozy series from Agatha-winner Bowen introduces a delightful heroine-Lady Victoria Georgiana Charlotte Eugenie. Thirty-fourth in line for the English throne, Georgie has been educated to curtsey, host lavish fetes and marry well. When her brother cuts off her pitiful allowance, Georgie leaves the family home in Scotland for London, determined to become a liberated woman. Lasting only a few hours as a saleswoman in Harrods, Georgie starts a maid service, but she turns detective after finding a drowned man in her bathtub. When her brother is accused of the murder, she must try to clear him and the family name. Quirky characters like her lovable grandfather; her estranged, oft-wed mother; and an incorrigible, sexy Irishman add to the fun. Georgie's madcap antics are certain to leave the reader eager for the next installment. Bowen is also the author of the Molly Murphy (In Dublin's Fair City, etc.) and the Constable Evans (Evanly Bodies, etc.) series. (July)

At the start of Thomas's well-crafted fourth Barker and Llewelyn mystery to feature a London detective duo clearly modeled on Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson (after 2006's The Limehouse Text), a distraught guardsman, Major DeVere, consults Cyrus Barker, a smugly intellectual private enquiry agent, and his young apprentice, ex-con Thomas Llewelyn. The major's 12-year-old daughter has disappeared, and DeVere fears she has fallen victim to white slavers, though the sleuths suspect a serial killer may be at work. The plot thickens when Barker receives a taunting letter in rhyme signed "Mr. Miacca," a child-eating bogeyman from a bedtime story. Scotland Yard hampers the investigation in a possible coverup of some upper-class depravities. The taut plotting, interesting variations on familiar themes and incorporation of some of the political issues of the day elevate the series above most pastiches, though veteran mystery readers won't be too surprised at the killer's identity. (July)

At the start of Smiley's diverting third Tucker Sinclair mystery (after 2005's Cover Your Assets), the self-employed Los Angeles business consultant is sorting out the financial problems of her friend PI Charley Tate when distraught and disheveled Eve Lawson walks into Tate's office with complaints of being followed. When Lawson disappears, her boyfriend is killed and Tate is run off the road, Tucker turns detective. She retraces Lawson's erratic recent history, interviewing family members and former boyfriends, but something doesn't add up. At the center of the mystery is a small piece of property, owned by Lawson, that stands in the way of a major luxury development. That the murder occurred in the jurisdiction of LAPD detective Joe Deegan, Tucker's boyfriend, creates a conflict of interest. Meanwhile, Tucker is fighting her aunt for ownership of the cozy beach house she inherited from her grandmother. Satisfied fans will enjoy the forays and foibles of this charming heroine. (July)

First published in 1978, this delightful mystery from French crime writer Magnan (The Murdered House) brings to life the quirky, earthy peasant culture of the Provence region. One November evening, Roseline, an enormous, truffle-sniffing pig, escapes from her owner, Alyre Morelon, leading him into the woods, where an unseen figure injures the sow and then runs off. When Superintendent Laviolette arrives from Marseille to investigate the disappearance of five young people, Alyre demands his assistance in identifying Roseline's attacker. The overall humorous tone contrasts with a number of grisly incidents, including the discovery of a body in a freezer and a throat-slitting. The author treats village politics as well as the quarrels and liaisons of his marvelous characters with sly wit and compassion. Beautifully translated, this one should win Magnan new U.S. readers. (July)

In Fallon's intricately plotted final novel in the Wolfblade trilogy (after Wolfblade and Warrior), Marla Wolfblade's wily offspring take top billing. Marla has taught her large brood the cutthroat tactics it takes to keep and wield power. Now that they have reached adulthood, Marla has loosened her grip like a falconer unleashing a bird for the kill. At 25 years old, Damin Wolfblade, who has always known he would one day be Warlord of Krakendar Province, is anxious to take up his position as Warlord and heir to the Throne of Hythria. First, however, he must repel an invasion force from Fardohnya that's three times the size of any force he can muster, and he must tackle the politically turbulent problem of keeping the Warlord positions of Hythria's provinces filled with Wolfblade allies. With cold-blooded maneuverings that include murder, torture and thievery on an awe-inspiring scale, Fallon has brought this segment of the Hythrun Chronicles to a close with a grand flourish. (Aug.)

At the start of Smith's superb, offbeat contemporary fantasy, 11-year-old Mark has moved to Brighton, a decaying English resort town, with his sickly mother and her new husband, David. Mark hates David, hates his parents' divorce and hates Brighton, where he has no friends and little to do. Then the old lady who lives in the tiny apartment beneath David's recently purchased townhouse takes him on a tour of the old servants' quarters. When Mark sneaks into the quarters on his own, he begins to see the long-dead servants at their jobs and realizes that something is seriously wrong. As this secret downstairs world becomes more and more disordered, Mark discovers that its problems are somehow related to his mother's advancing illness. If he can help the servants, he may just be able to save her life. IHG Award-winner Smith (Spares) portrays a child's irrational anger with devastating accuracy, and Mark's visits to the surreal and intensely symbolic world of the servants are powerfully depicted. (July)

In Banks's sexy ninth Vampire Huntress novel (after The Wicked), the first seal has been broken and Armageddon has begun. Lilith and her husband, the Unnamed One, are caught unawares while awaiting the birth of their angel-hybrid heir. Installed as Vampire Council chairwoman, Lilith calls on vampires, witches and warlocks (including Machiavelli, Jezebel, Genghis Khan and Medusa) to combat the forces of the Covenant, the Guardians, the Neterus and both Neteru Councils. She attacks her enemies Damali and Carlos Rivera where it hurts the most: their libidos. Soon the battle involves a Valkyrie, the Ark of the Covenant and bootleg music downloads. This "end of days" scenario is a wild amalgam of Christianity, vampire lore, world myth, functional morality, street philosophy and hot sex. Three double-page line drawings by Eric Battle perfectly illustrate Banks's over-the-top supernatural characters and scenes. As long as neither the world nor the series is ending, fans couldn't ask for more. (July)

Addressing such wide-ranging topics as absolution, kindness and cruelty, Bear mixes classic and modern supernatural archetypes to craft a beautiful tale whose reach exceeds its grasp. Seven years after the antifairy Promethean Society was nearly destroyed (as chronicled in Blood and Iron), Fae, devils and humans begin further duels for power and their immortal souls. Seeking vengeance, Christopher Marlowe leaves Lucifer's household and challenges the Promethean Mage Jane Andraste to a duel. Meanwhile, Lucifer enrages Satan by requesting an audience with God, and Àine, the queen of the Unseelie Court, tries to unseat Jane's granddaughter, Elaine, as Faerie Queen. These battles occur simultaneously, straining the reader's ability to keep track of each character's multiple machinations. In fact, so many fabulous characters appear (Morgan le Fey, Fionnghuala, the archangel Michael, etc.) that the book desperately needs a complete list of its dramatis personae and their multiple aliases to give the reader a fighting chance to fully enjoy this idiosyncratic fantasy. (July)

The pleasantly suspenseful third fantastical mystery (after The Demon and the City) in Williams's Det. Insp. Chen series throws Chen and his demon partner, Zhu Irzh, into the heart of a deadly political storm. While investigating a chorus girl's disappearance, the duo are called on to escort a diplomatic envoy from Heaven, the Celestial Miss Mi Li Qi, on a fact-finding mission to Hell. Neither detective is happy about this task, particularly Zhu Irzh, as the trip coincides with his mother's birthday and he dreads seeing his family. Meanwhile, the strange birth of a boy to newlywed ghosts sets off a scramble between the forces of Hell and Heaven. Someone tries to assassinate Zhu Irzh's mum, and Miss Qi goes missing as cosmic forces collide with cataclysmic results. Though Chen and Zhu Irzh are mostly along for the ride, the other colorful characters and imaginative settings extrapolated from ancient Chinese mythology make for a unique story that fans and new readers will enjoy. (July)

If the essence of the horror tale is a confrontation with the alien, then what better way to express it than in stories that chronicle the unsettling experiences of characters traveling in unfamiliar lands. Anthologist supreme Jones (The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror) mixes 20 stories old and new by some of horror's best and brightest, and the result is a travelogue of terror whose contents span the globe. In Basil Copper's elegant "The Cave," a vacationer's walking tour in Austria leads him to a monster of legend. D. Lynn Smith's eerie "Charnel House" tells of an English woman whose quest for "spiritual revelation" in Egypt plunges her into occult mysteries. Ramsey Campbell mixes humor and horror in "Seeing the World," wherein a man's neighbors bring something terrible back from their vacation in Italy. These and stories by Dennis Etchison, Glen Hirshberg, Clive Barker and others so effectively convey their themes that readers are advised not to bring this book with them on vacation. (July)

Ancient Mesopotamian civilizations clash in Allen's promising debut. Uruk, a thief and warrior from the jungles of Africa, and Ander, a slave escaped from the brutal Niphilim people, cross paths in the megalopolis of Kan-Puram, where Uruk has gone seeking a friendlier place to ply his trade and where Ander has gone to rally opposition to the coming Niphilim onslaught. The "fantasy" label is perhaps misapplied; Uruk and Ander fight their battles-brutal enough for an Erikson set piece-with mundane weapons, brawn and brains, and only the wholly fictional Niphilim society prevents it from being legitimate historical fiction. No part of the story involves any significant supernatural element. Yet despite the lack of wizardry, gods or strange beasts, something in Allen's writing raises the mundane to the level of the fantastic, and the feel of magic crackles through the pages, even if it's nowhere to be found in the words. (July)

Full of fascinating characters and beautifully detailed settings, Tepper's complex and multifaceted far-future SF novel follows the many selves of Mars colonist Margaret Bain on a mission to save the human race from annihilation. Long ago, hairless bipeds earned the eternal hatred of the foul-tempered Quaatar after some prehumans stowed away on a Quaatar survey ship. Now humankind is at the brink of self-destruction through overpopulation and ecological collapse. The farsighted Gentherans have taken up the human cause within the Interstellar Trade Organization, but as Earthgov struggles to conform to ISTO's enforced sterilization laws while trading excess children for offworld water, the Quaatar continue plotting to destroy humanity. Only Margaret, a secret organization called the Third Order of the Siblinghood and the truth behind an old Gentheran folktale can stop the genocide and give humanity a future. As always, Locus Award-winner Tepper (The Companions) wields grand science fiction themes with skill, vision and a twist of black humor. (June)

The fast-paced third military SF novel in Huff's Confederation series (after Valor's Choice and The Better Part of Valor) examines how an interplanetary confederation might unite several distinctive species into an effective military organization despite widely differing physiologies, customs and mores. Marine Gunnery Sgt. Torin Kerr, recovering from injuries suffered in a first contact situation, accompanies a recruit platoon into the Crucible, a training planet where they apply their lessons in a realistic live-fire exercise against robotic drones. While the exercise is underway, the drones begin acting aggressively, without regard to fail-safes or their programming. Has the platoon come under attack by the mysterious Others, or is this related to the alien escape pod that everybody has forgotten exists except for Torin, her lover and an obnoxious reporter? The intriguing and well-designed aliens and intricate plotting keep the reader guessing. (June)

Picking up the threads left loose at the end of Earth Logic (2004), Marks's third Elemental Logic tale weaves three story lines through her tapestry of a war-torn world whose elemental forces are dangerously out of balance. Clement, reluctant general of the Sainnite army occupying Shaftal, has made peace with Karis, the Shaftali G'deon, and now seeks to suppress insurrection in her ranks and legitimize the leadership role thrust upon her. Meanwhile, Clement's lover Seth pursues an assassin who nearly murdered Karis. In the story's most fantastic subplot, fire witch Zanja na'Tarwein must discover why a rogue water elemental has transported her some 200 years back in time. Marks plays the fantasy of her unfolding epic more subtly here than in previous volumes, and the resulting depiction of intransigent cultures in conflict, rich with insight into human nature and motives, will resonate for modern readers. (June)

Aleas, the pen name for Hard Case Crime founder Charles Ardai, solidifies his reputation as one of the finer modern hard-boiled writers with his second John Blake novel (following 2004's Little Girl Lost). Blake, a young but already deeply scarred detective, has given up PI work-his last case cost him the life of his lover, and almost that of a dear friend, so Blake has taken a sedate job as an administrative assistant at Columbia University, where he's enrolled in a creative writing class. When a classmate and confidant, Dorothy Burke, dies in her bathtub, the police take one look at the plastic bag over her head and the copy of Final Exit nearby, and declare it a suicide. Dorothy's mother has other ideas and ropes Blake back into his old trade to pursue her suspicions that Dorothy was murdered. Before she died, Dorothy let Blake in on her secret life as a prostitute-information the police don't have-and he pursues that lead deep into New York City's violent underworld. Throughout, Aleas effortlessly channels the spirit of the pulps with crisp prose and an unrelentingly grim plot line, and his powerful conclusion will drop jaws. (July)

Armstrong deviates from her popular Women of the Otherworld series to introduce a new protagonist, Nadia Stafford, a cop-turned-hit-woman, saddled in her first adventure with a killer vs. killer mission. After being retired from a Canadian police force for shooting a suspect dead, Nadia becomes a hit woman-temporarily, that is, while she waits for her lakeside lodge to take off-targeting smalltime career criminals for clients who are often their direct competitors. Now, she's teaming up with her mentor, Jack, to apprehend a hit man-turned-serial killer known as the Helter Skelter killer. As Nadia pursues the case deeper into the dangerous world of assassins and spies, she finds reason to suspect just about everybody in Armstrong's fine cast of shifty, complex characters. The sexual tension between Jack and Nadia is entirely believable, adding a compelling, organic layer to the suspense. Armstrong's expert plotting never falters, and she's able to keep ramping up the intensity throughout more than 500 pages-no easy feat-making this a top-notch entertainment sure to seduce fans of tough heroines. (July)

Faced with a fading Broadway career and a rebellious 15-year-old daughter, single mom Meg Addams decides to move from New York to her hometown 50 miles away. Against the advice of her gay best friend Geoffrey, she drags her protesting teenager, Cosette, to Glenhaven Park, N.Y., where shockingly high real estate prices leave her with only one option: a haunted house. Fortunately, the real estate comes with not just a ghost but also a hunky next-door neighbor from Meg's past: widower Sam Rooney, for whom she suffered an unrequited high school crush. Thrown together by their kids (he's a high school teacher as well as a soccer coach), their mutual attraction and things that go bump in the night, the pair are soon waging a futile battle against their romantic instincts. Rita Award-winning author Markham (If Only in My Dreams), a pseudonym for Wendi Corsi Staub (Don't Scream), provides a fast-moving, ultralight take on single parenthood, suburban sex and keeping up with the soccer moms that should please chick lit fans; anyone seeking depth should look elsewhere. (July)

In Hartley's newest, disgraced English teacher Thomas Knight confronts a church conspiracy of silence surrounding the death of his brother, Father Edward Knight, while on a research trip in the Philippines. Looking to make sense of it all, Thomas's search leads him from Italy to Japan to the site of his brother's death, all the while narrowly escaping agents of unknown origin who seem hellbent on stopping him. With the distinction between friends and enemies becoming more fluid all the time, Knight falls in with his ex-wife at the State Department, a priestly colleague of his brother's and a murderous biologist to discover a secret that threatens, yes, the very foundations of Christianity. Not only is Hartley's novel well paced, with enough twists and turns to keep most thriller fans satisfied, he avoids the missteps of most attempts to cash in on the Da Vinci Code zeitgeist by focusing on the faithful rather than freewheeling conspiracies; his is a welcome take that considers thoughtfully, if at times clumsily, issues of belief and doubt. Though the action occasionally snags on some repetitive character details, this slam-bang title is a very fun, surprisingly satisfying read. (July)

Unexpectedly, this quasi-autobiographical meditation on fantasy and reality succeeds in being as hilarious as it is heartbreaking. Like Kuper, his alter ego Kurtz is a cartoonist who divides his time between mainstream and independent work while also struggling to be a good husband, father and friend in an unsupportive world. He talks directly to the reader as he describes his goals when he was younger (getting laid, getting high, etc.), how he botched his chances or suffered when he did get what he wanted and how he accepted those successes and failures and then moved on. The story is typical, but Kuper's art shifts from realistic to surreal as the mood changes, and this is where the book really takes off. He plays with a comics reader's head, as when Kurtz's new-daddy desperation convinces him that he's not just a cartoonist but a cartoon so that he slips into a Crumb parody panel, "Keep on Parentin'." Kurtz/Kuper does go on developing as a human being, through 9/11 and the despair of being a serious observer in Bush's America, into a surprisingly but satisfyingly hopeful conclusion. This is a very smart, mature work by an artist at the top of his form. (July)

Even as the Flight anthologies grow larger-this volume has about 80 pages on its immediate predecessor-there is still so much good material it never feels like too much. Many of the stories are silent and depend on the cartoonist's ability to tell fluid and accessible narratives by pacing their stories with extreme delicacy. Fortunately most of the cartoonists meet this demand, notably the opening "Castaway" by Michel Gagne as well as "N" by Phil Craven. The stories that do feature dialogue have an inviting, warm feeling to them, an appreciated effect considering how many stories here there are to read. "To Grandma's" by Clio Chang has the most fun with the power of childhood dreams and fantasies. "The Forever Box" by Sarah Mensinga takes childhood as a major theme, as do many of the selections; its mix of imagination and humanity is a great example of what the Flight books work so well. As the reader nears the end, after so many varied stories, a comic like "Twenty-Four Hours" by Andrea Offerman bursts out with wild images never seen before. Flight Volume 4 is good to the last drop. (July)

This nonfiction graphic novel gives the history of three early 20th-century magicians and the invention of the standard levitation trick. It's claimed that "Entranced Fakir," or "The Levitation of the Princess of Karnak" came from India, but in reality it was stolen from European magician John Neville Maskelyne by American Harry Kellar, who took it back to the States. Years later, it was passed on to Howard Thurston, who had "the voice and bearing of a preacher with the manner of a carnival barker." (Kellar notes that the two professions are "not so different.") The art is lively with nice Georgian and Jazz Age touches, especially in face shots that resemble old, hypnotic-eyed daguerreotypes of mesmerists in frock coats. It's all good fun, but the story never finds its heart, only touching on the obsessive control the great traveling magicians must have had, and their life on the road. The hard economics they faced comes through splendidly, however. To perform, they had to look like gentlemen. To survive, they had to act like cutthroat rogues. The story contains two revelations: one is the diagram explaining the trick. The other is the revelation that even when audience members are quietly shown how it works, they don't tell.(July)

Proving that there are some wells that never run dry, DC presents another take on the institution known as the Justice League of America. Scripted with a high emphasis on character development by novelist Meltzer (Identity Crisis), the story has the feeling of a fresh start, even if its climax falls somewhat flat. It starts as Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman are bickering over who should join the JLA, with some hurt feelings to follow. The main arc is an affecting one, following the efforts of the Red Tornado-who's starting to get annoyed with having died so many times-to get back into his android body, or failing that, a mortal one so that he can be reunited with his beloved Kathy and adopted son. This ties in with scattered skirmishes between a JLA squad and a mob of evil Tornado clones. The series starts off stiffly, piling in a lot of exposition between cutting back to the JLA leaders' membership quarrels and crowding the story with a league of minor characters It's best seen as a competent new kickoff for the series rather than a stand-alone graphic novel. (June)

After undergoing a car accident, middle school student Hiro Hayorami sees visions of a beautiful girl dressed in gothic Lolita clothing; suddenly, Hiro is awake in the hospital morgue with only hazy memories that feel like a dream. But now he's in the servitude of the beautiful Hime (which means "princess" in Japanese) who saved him from the brink of death. He's hunted by enemies-Hime's siblings and a legion of werewolves, demons, monsters and vampires-but empowered with the ability of resurrection. Bound to her by blood, Hiro accepts his servitude in the underworld and a world of evil forces, chainsaw battles and mysteries left undiscovered. Fans of campy, over-the-top horror stories should enjoy Mitsunaga's vivid cast of monsters and demons, including the chainsaw-toting Hime. The character designs are far more solid than many in the gothic Lolita genre, but still sporting intricate costumes and suitably apathetic demeanors. (May)