Fiction Reviews: Week of 6/25/2007

Victorian fascination with forbidden sex and science inspires this first novel from Starling, who died last year in Essex, England, at 34. In 1859, arthritic hands and an impatient moneylender force Peter Damage to allow his wife, Dora, to enter the family trade, bookbinding. With assistance from apprentice Jack Tapster and German finisher Sven, Dora masters the art while looking after her invalid husband and their five-year-old epileptic daughter, Lucinda. Business thrives, and then Damage's major clients—dashing Sir Jocelyn Knightley; his crusading abolitionist wife, Lady Sylvia; and their distinguished circle of friends—hire Dora to bind pornographic texts (including Fanny Hill, The Satyricon and very low-end material). Dora can only guess at their other illicit activities, having no great romantic expectations for herself until the arrival of Din Nelson, an American slave seeking refuge in London. Starling thus sets up a tale of two cities, contrasting wealthy aristocratic London indulging in secret obsessions with London's working poor struggling through hard times. Not every choice Starling makes works, but she creates secondary characters with Dickensian flair, evokes Victorian pornography without being pornographic and viscerally captures the craft of bookbinding. Starling's heroine is a woman of great energy and courage. (Oct.)

Winner of Canada's Giller Prize, Lam puts all the sex, and death and sleep deprivation crucial to any hospital drama in his debut story collection about doctors in the making. Thankfully Lam, an emergency room physician, looks beyond blood and guts to examine the conflicted hearts and minds of the four medical students sleepwalking their way through the required tests, dissections and all-night emergency room shifts. The stories trace an almost endless stretch of education and service that puts their stamina and skills to the test: Fitz (short for Fitzgerald) has a not-so-secret drinking problem, the fallout from which that lands him an unexpected job; Ming, the main cast's only woman, has a cold scientist's outlook that both aids and hinders her; Sri's heart breaks for anything that comes near his scalpel—be it a tattooed cadaver or a rambling psychotic; and dispassionate Chen struggles, like Sri, to balance compassion with his desire to succeed. The stories' quiet strength lies not in the doctors' education but in Lam's portrayal of the flawed humans behind the surgical masks. This collection made a big splash in Canada, and, as Weinstein Books' first title, is poised to do the same in the U.S. (Sept.)

A young woman from rural China learns how to comprehend “love” and “heartbreak” in English in this quirky, touching novel. Zhuang, or “Z” to tongue-tied foreigners, arrives in London at age 23 after being dispatched by her parents to get an education. Her immersion and painful education are laid bare to readers, who witness Z's vocabulary, grammar and understanding blossom throughout her diarylike account, sped along by an intense romance with a man met at the cinema. Her consuming love begins promisingly, but her failure to interpret her lover's lifestyle as a hippie drifter (who's 20 years her senior) alerts readers to potential trouble in paradise, even while such a notion remains beyond Z's not-yet-jaded imagination. The novel overflows with gentle jokes about culture shock and language barriers including Z's inability to understand why Brits bother talking about the weather when it's obvious—but there are deeper observations beneath the humor. Z's comically earnest exploration of a sex shop illuminates the pathos of Western seediness, and her encounters with men reveal both the exploitative and meaningful sides of romance. Z's unique, evolving voice fits perfectly for a heroine whose naïveté is matched by a willingness to relay the truth. (Sept.)

While 30-something Londoner Tessa King questions her no-strings-attached lifestyle, she also witnesses her friends' difficulties in marriage and parenthood while playing godmother to their broods. Nick and Francesca battle to keep their sullen teenager out of serious trouble; Billy, a single mom, can't break ties to her now remarried ex-; Helen and Neil, fairy tale parents to twin boys, are hiding something; successful Claudia and Al struggle to conceive; and Ben and Sasha have no plans to have children. But Ben also happens to be Tessa's best friend, and perhaps the love of her life. When tragedy eventually strikes the group, bonds are tested, and Tessa is forced to re-examine what she thinks will really make her happy. A painful look into the fears, doubts and desires that make and break marriages, this debut novel from Londoner Adams is notches up from the usual chick and mom lit fare. (Sept.)

A heady, slippery dramedy-lite of modern love and urban manners, ex-lawyer Delson's debut puts native New Yorker Maynard Gogarty, a not quite talented composer/filmmaker, in the path of hardworking Californian Jennica Green, who arrives in New York to be “illustrious.” Shifting back and forth over the period 2000–2002, this cleverly pieced together story draws on 35 first-person narrators—including friends, family, a macaw, dead ancestors and an emergency brake on the train—to chronicle Maynard and Jennica's shifting roles as potential spouses, schemers, arrestees and exes. Their relationship comes to a head, natch, in the aftermath of 9/11, as the lovers' families meet for the first time. It's gimmicky, but the surprising ways each narrator connects with Maynard and Jennica make for small delights, and the interplay among the voices works often enough. Maynard's blistering riffs on how grief is coopted postcatastrophe end up giving insight into his character, and Delson's prose shimmers when describing the magic and romance of falling in love in New York. (Sept.)

In his latest novella, Abani renders the inner voice of mute 15-year-old My Luck, the boy leader of a platoon of mine sweepers in an unnamed war-torn African country. When he was 12, the then volunteer rebel had his vocal cords severed (the rest of his team received the same treatment), “so that we wouldn't scare each other with our death screams.” At the opening of the novella, My Luck awakens after an explosion to find that he has been separated from his unit. During his journey to find his platoon, he reflects on the events of his violent life. Abani is unafraid to evoke My Luck's dark side, and though My Luck's experience with killing is “a singular joy that is perhaps rivaled only by an orgasm,” his stock-taking also touches on guilt at witnessing his mother's murder, ambivalence about his imam father and tenderness for Ijeoma, a girl in his platoon killed by a mine. Initially, the present-tense narration is at odds with My Luck's inclination toward memory and reflection, but the story becomes more immersive and dreamlike (and, strangely, lucid) over the course of My Luck's quest. Abani finds in his narrator a seed of hope amid the bleak, nihilistic terrain. (Sept.)

Best known for the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, bestseller Smith shows he's just as adept at exploring mysteries of the heart in his fourth book to feature Edinburgh philosopher-sleuth Isabel Dalhousie (after The Right Attitude to Rain). Isabel has recently become a mother, but she has an ambiguous relationship with her son's father, Jamie, whose attempts to formalize their connection have been unsuccessful. Their ties are further strained by Jamie's ex-girlfriend, Cat, who not only still harbors strong feelings for him but is Isabel's niece. Isabel must also deal with petty academic politics aimed at depriving her of her position as editor of the Review of Applied Ethics. Smith throws in a mystery subplot—did an obscure but talented Scottish painter drown, commit suicide or fall victim to foul play?—but the resolution of that plot thread is more noteworthy for its insights into Isabel's humanistic and optimistic philosophy than for any surprise twists. Once again, Smith displays his skill at illustrating subtle nuances of human nature. (Aug.)

In Shaffer's delightful third novel, lifelong New Yorker Katharine “Katie” Harder works listlessly as a script writer on the same show that made her deceased mother, Rosalind Harder, a soap opera legend. Miranda “Randa” Jennings is an obsessive Hollywood business manager determined to make childhood better for her 11-year-old daughter, Susie, than her actor father made it for her. When each learns she has inherited a mysterious property, high-strung Miranda and second-guessing Katie both head to sleepy Massonville, Ga., to discover that they are mutual beneficiaries of a falling-apart theater known as the Venable opera house. Despite their skepticism, both become intrigued with the stories the theater holds and wonder if they are in fact related, especially when they hear how the Venable family “always named their children after characters in Shakespeare's plays”—as both women are. Shaffer (The Three Miss Margarets) then rolls back to the beginning of the Venable dynasty, and Randa and Katie struggle with a potential sale to a ruthless developer. While some plot points, including an abrupt, too-tidy ending, are as worn as the opera house floor, Randa and Katie's self-discoveries are sweet, fast-paced and full of heart. (Aug.)

Colorful, exotic birds enrapture the protagonists of this lyrical early 20th-century love story about the life of bird lover, artist and mapmaker Diego Clemente. As soon as Diego, the adoptive son of a Spanish bookseller, first comes across John James Audubon's hand-colored Birds of America, he is smitten with ornithology. When the opportunity to travel to the Yucatán to work with American scientist and author Edward Nelson presents itself, Diego promptly signs up and, once in Mexico, falls in love with his free-spirited, bird-enthusiast female counterpart, Sophia Duarte. Despite Sophia's meddlesome relatives and bumbling would-be suitor, Sophia and Diego bond. With revolutionary rumblings in the background, things come to a tense head when a workers' uprising threatens two of the world's only remaining passenger pigeons, which are being held by a greedy local plantation owner. The book comes to a tragic close that still manages to hold out a glimmer of hope. Rich descriptions of Seville and Mexico aid in creating a believable tale of romance and revolution. (Aug.)

Harvey's debut delivers a fast-paced thrill ride through Chicago's seedy underbelly, where the lines between cops and criminals become dangerously blurred. When his old partner asks for help with an old rape case, Michael Kelly, former Chicago detective turned PI, finds himself in the middle of a massive coverup with links to a notorious serial killer on death row. With the help of his childhood friend, DNA analyst Nicole Andrews, feisty and sexy TV reporter Diane Lindsay and a handful of cops he hopes he can trust, Kelly must solve the original rape case while staying alive as the men who killed to keep a secret set their sights on him. Harvey, the cocreator and executive producer of A&E's Cold Case Files, spins a twisted story that masterfully combines the sardonic wit of Chandler with the gritty violence of Lehane's Kenzie and Gennaro series. Bringing Chicago to life so skillfully that the reader can almost hear the El train in the distance, Harvey is poised to take the crime-writing world by storm. (Aug.)

At the start of British author Goddard's well-crafted new thriller, Harry Barnett, the almost too unprepossessing hero of Into the Blue and Out of the Sun, returns to his hometown of Swindon, where he gets unexpectedly swept into a reunion of RAF servicemen with whom he had participated in a three-month research project 50 years earlier. Clever nicknames and brief characterizations help the reader keep track of the 14 members of the group, some of whom have died in the intervening years. After returning to the Scottish castle where the experiment took place, Harry's compatriots start (a bit predictably) dropping like flies, and suspicions grow about the true nature of the long-ago project, ostensibly only an exercise in gauging the effect of intensified academic pressure. Barnett, reunited with his dodgy pal Barry “Fission” Chipchase, is caught in the middle, and soon the two find themselves the primary suspects in the murders. Smooth prose and pitch-perfect pacing make this otherwise conventional story entertaining and absorbing. (Aug.)

Dieckmann, born in 1957, makes her U.S. book debut with this novel of prison camp survival: like Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, it tracks its protagonist through routinized torture intended to crush the prisoner's psyche. Rashid Bakhrani, a 20-year-old German born of an Indian Muslim parent, is caught by raiding soldiers in an anti-American demonstration in Peshawar. He is flown “home”—to the U.S. prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Bored and scared by turns, Rashid still hopes he can explain his arrest is a mistake before being drawn into the interrogation process, where he is subject to beatings, sensory disorientation and humiliation. Rashid's American captors have created a complete and fictitious profile for him: to them, Rashid is not a curious tourist but a jihadist connected to a Hamburg cell with plans to attack Americans. Rashid soon tells his captors what they want to hear, and then begins to take on his fictitious identity. Dieckmann makes no authorial comments about Rashid's ordeal: she simply seals the reader, like Rashid, in the camp's claustrophobic horror. Unlike Solzhenitsyn's novel, there is no sense of a great ideological chasms being opened up, but Dieckmann's close focus pays off, like a blow to the head. (Aug.)

Carter follows her plucky New York journalist's memoir Nothing to Fall Back On and first novel The Orange Blossom Special with another sweet story of self-reinvention. Delores Walker, 17, leaves her troubled home in the Bronx of 1973 to become a mermaid at Weeki Wachee Springs in Tampa, Fla. There, in a series of fortuitous events, ugly duckling Delores becomes the star of the show, a local hero, the most popular girl in town (although she remains unfailingly nice) and the catalyst for an unlikely family reunion. Carter jumps from head to head without providing much insight into her characters, including the slimily manipulative and ambitious TV producer, Alan Sommers, and the gentle circus giant, T. Rex, who's little more than a vehicle for folksy wisdom. But Carter is less interested in character development than in storytelling, which she does with aplomb, as Delores faces fame-related conflicts, and resort owner Thelma Foote has wisdom to spare. The results are sensationalist, predictable and satisfying. (Aug.)

The words “gothic” and “macabre” rather than “mystery” and “suspense” might better describe the 10 beautifully told stories in this superb collection from the prolific Oates (The Female of the Species). In the startling opening tale, “Hi! Howya Doin!,” an overly friendly jogger encounters someone with a less rosy outlook on life. In the horrifying “Valentine, July Heat Wave,” an estranged wife finds a very unpleasant surprise in the home she once shared with her academic husband. In the haunting “Feral,” a near-death experience transforms a much-loved only child into something wild and unknowable. The title story concerns a horrific exhibit in the home of an aging coroner in upstate New York (whose behavior is even more troubling). The book's best story, “The Man Who Fought Roland LaStarza,” about an aging boxer in a bout that will make or end his career, happens to be the least gruesome. Powerful narratives, a singular imagination and exquisite prose make this a collection to relish. (Aug.)

Golemon's second thriller fails to deliver on the promise of his first, Event (2006), which introduced the exploits of a supersecret U.S. government agency, the Event Group. The author, a former U.S. Army Special Ops member, draws the reader in with an intriguing prologue: in 1534, explorer Francisco Pizarro and his men, in their search for El Dorado, encounter a vicious creature determined to guard the legendary treasure trove; in 1876, at Custer's last stand, Capt. Myles Keogh takes to his death “a secret from hundreds of years in the past.” In the present day, the intrepid men and women of the Event Group follow the trail of Pizarro's expedition in an effort both to find the lost Incan gold Pizarro was seeking and to rescue the U.S. president's daughter, who has disappeared while on the same quest. A shortage of well-developed characters and plausible scientific speculation, however, makes this a less satisfying adventure than its predecessor. (Aug.)

The seven deadly sins help propel this provocative, sex-fueled thriller from bestseller Brown (Ricochet). Foster Speakman, an eccentric Texas paraplegic millionaire, offers $500,000 to Griff Burkett, a disgraced former NFL quarterback fresh out of prison after serving a five-year sentence for racketeering, to impregnate Foster's wife, Laura. Foster insists the child be conceived naturally (“The way God intended”). Broke with no prospects, Griff takes the job. Meanwhile, Stanley Rodarte, the crooked detective behind Griff's arrest, is bent on pinning an unsolved murder on him and takes to terrorizing Griff and those close to him in the hopes of nailing him when he self-destructs. After Griff's stint as stud takes a bad turn, the ex-footballer must track down the one man who can secure his freedom. The tension builds as lust, greed, pride, wrath and envy threaten to undo everyone in this tightly told tale of modern temptation. (Aug.)

Russian exile Bunin (1870–1953), who won the Nobel Prize in 1933, becomes stunningly accessible in this beautiful new translation. Bunin, who fled to France in 1920, gives aching, lyrical glimpses into the vanished past of aristocratic Russia, replete with country estates, artsy Moscow life and the rapidly changing social structure that followed the serfs' emancipation in 1861. Spanning 44 years of Bunin's creative work, the stories include “The Scent of Apples,” written in 1900, wherein, who had previously written poetry, begins translating his lyrical visions into prose, as well as work from his middle years such as “Sukhodol,” written against the backdrop of WWI and the later losses suffered against the Bolsheviks by the White Army, which Bunin supported. Many of Bunin's post-1920 stories, such as “Ida,” “Sunstroke” and “The Elagin Affair,” explore the lives of Russian and European sophisticates, focusing on their love affairs and their concern with elegant and refined living. His last stories, for instance “In Paris” and “One Familiar Street,” explore the alienation of those who cannot forget the worlds they've lost. Though there are murders and love-suicides, plot is really not the focus of these stories, which are marked by an emotional intensity in remembrance that recalls Proust. (Aug.)

The reader stays perpetually ahead of the irritatingly slow detectives in Swedish crime writer Edwardson's third Erik Winter police procedural to be translated into English (after 2006's Never End). DCI Erik Winter and his team are baffled by a rash of beatings in Gothenburg that have nearly killed several young men, who are linked only by the distinctive mark left by the attacker's mysterious weapon. Meanwhile, nursery school children begin to report being lured to the car of a strange “mister,” who gives them candy. The police brush off these incidents until one boy is found badly beaten in the woods. Soon Winter is thrown into a race to save a kidnapped boy from the clutches of a monster. Readers will connect the dots faster than Winter, whose investigation is jarringly interrupted by scenes from the abductor's point-of-view. The denouement leaves too many loose ends, making for an uninspired take on the tired topic of child abductions. (Aug.)

London's luscious latest (after Material Girl) provides prime escapist material that's perfect for anyone who reads tabloids in supermarket check-out lines to see who's breaking up or hooking up. Audrey Larue's a talented Texas songbird who becomes a supernova stuck with a controlling boyfriend, “second-rate musician” Lucas Bonner, a greedy entourage and a needy white trash family. After meeting extreme outdoorsman/stuntman (and military vet) Jack Price, Audrey and Lucas hire him to oversee security for her summer concert tour. He's got eyes for Audrey (as does she, quietly, for him), and the love triangle that develops is eclipsed in drama only by a creepy, vampire-fetishist stalker who's making death threats against Audrey. This is a great one to throw in the beach bag. (Aug.)

The prolific Morrison launches her new series with a harsh, explicit look at the Las Vegas sex industry. Strong-willed Lace St. Thomas is the madam at Immaculate Perception, a high-end escort service run by the nefarious, mysterious Valentino. Lace, who's been through the sex industry wringer, wants to get her favorite girl, Sunny, out of the business, but a case of mistaken identity leads to a confrontation between Valentino and Sunny (Valentino had slept with Summer, Sunny's twin sister) that ends fatally for Sunny. From there, a convoluted plot mushrooms: Summer instinctively knows something has happened to Sunny, and she, along with Lace, become involved in Det. Sapphire Bleu's vendetta to take down Valentino. (Sapphire and Sunny were best friends.) Valentino, in turn, plots to kill Lace, and Lace's abusive mother tracks down Lace to demand she return home and donate marrow to aid in her sister's cancer treatment. The final confrontation between Lace, Summer and Valentino sends Lace off on a new life to be chronicled in future installments. The plot's unwieldy and the characters aren't especially striking, but Morrison certainly knows her way around the bedroom. (Aug.)

Chilson makes a promising fiction debut with these stories about Americans and Africans who come to realize the gulf between their cultures isn't as large as it might seem (he has written a travelogue set in West Africa). In the novella “Tea with Soldiers,” Carter, an ex-pat teaching in Niger, mourns the disappearance of a friend and colleague and tries to reconcile himself to his powerlessness in the face of the absurdity of death—particularly that of one of his malnourished students who succumbs to malaria. The title story features a botanist's reminiscences about his dead sister, a Peace Corps worker whose work, as the narrator describes, was akin to plants that “live where other plants cannot, breathing nutrients into torn-up soil so others might grow.” Other stories portray the violence that plagues parts of Africa and explore the challenges of understanding and interpreting carnage. In “Freelancing” a journalist reflects on a photographer colleague who once asked a woman keening over a dead body to move so he could have a better angle for his shot. This affecting collection moves well beyond jaded ex-pat cliché and expertly balances the political and emotional realities of troubled people in troubled places. (Aug. 9)

The prolific Forster (Blues from Down Deep; When You Dance with the Devil; etc.) delivers a simplistic story of love and parenthood. Susan Pettiford, a 34-year-old interior designer, moves back to hometown Woodmore, N.C., from New York City after she inherits her aunt's house. Early on, Susan gets a hysterectomy, leaving her to feel doomed to spinsterhood even though there are sparks aplenty between her and hunky architect Lucas Hamilton. Susan won't “let him get too close” because she can't give him a family, and she fills her spiritual void with a tutoring gig, where she becomes very close with two heart-of-gold orphans. Susan's friend and neighbor, graphic designer Cassandra Hairston-Shepherd, meanwhile, isn't ready to start a family, which rankles her husband enough that he threatens to leave her. Lucas has fatherhood issues, too, and they come to a head when his long-absent father reappears on the scene. Everything works out neatly and sweetly, but some readers may have trouble with the book's underlying philosophy about women's roles and motherhood. (Aug.)

Ex-cop Ric Alvarado, after receiving word that Florida mobster Gordon Burns may be working with international terrorists, manages to gain access to Burns's inner circle in prolific bestseller Brockmann's enjoyable 11th Troubleshooters thriller (after 2006's Into the Storm). Alvarado's feat brings him to the attention of Jules Cassidy, a maverick FBI agent and counterterrorism expert derided by fellow agents for being gay. The message of tolerance and the personal issues—Cassidy's relationship with closeted Hollywood leading man Robin Chadwick; Alvarado's crush on his attractive assistant, Annie Dugan; Cassidy's determined struggle for acceptance and recognition—at times interfere with the terrorist plot in the mix of undercover police work and romance, but romantic suspense fans should be well satisfied. (Aug.)

Set in the 1860s and '70s, Maltman's superb debut evokes a Midwest lacerated by clashes between European and Native American, slaveowner and abolitionist, killer and healer, nature and culture. Asa Senger, a lonely 14-year-old boy, is at first wary when his father's sister, Hazel, arrives at his parents' Minnesota home after a long stay in a faraway asylum, but he comes to cherish the mysterious Hazel's warmth and company. Through her stories, Asa learns of his family's bitter past: the lore and dreams of their German forebears, their place in the bitter divide over slavery and, most complex of all, the bond between Hazel and the Dakotan warrior Wanikiya that deepens despite the violence between their peoples. Maltman excels at giving even his most harrowing scenes an understated realism and at painting characters who are richly, sometimes disturbingly, human. The novel sustains its tension right to the moment it ends with an adult Asa at peace with his own complicated heritage—a tentative redemption that, the book's events as well as our own world's disorders suggest, is the best for which the human heart can hope. (Aug.)

The title, epigraphs and style of this fictionalized memoir pay tribute to Jack Kerouac, a surprising muse for a story about a young man's Mormon conversion and two-year stint as a white-shirted Latter-day Saint missionary. At tale's beginning, Kit West, a long-haired, pot-smoking, philosophy-reading 16-year-old from the Colorado mountains, is smitten with Annie Hawk, who has run away from her Mormon parents. An LSD experiment convinces Kit that the Book of Mormon is true, and Annie finds religion. Then the young lovers break up and Kit heads to Colombia, where he knocks on doors, makes converts, conducts baptisms, deals with bullies, misses Annie and suffers the ravages of relentless tapeworms. Newell, for many years a media relations officer for the Latter-Day Saints, never criticizes his church's teachings, and some miraculous episodes strain credulity. Still, memoir readers as well as Mormons looking for a somewhat edgy affirmation of their faith will appreciate the lusty, brawling but tenacious missionaries and the tender love story in this sprawling coming-of-age tale. (Aug.)

Blood, lust and loyalty are at the heart of this latest pulp offering from Noire. At 18, Lamont Mason, aka “Hood,” rises up in the hierarchy of the Brownsville, Brooklyn, drug trade, despite a tough childhood where he and his younger brother, Moo, are cast off (at 11 and four, respectively) by their crack-addicted mother. Hood forges a new “family” with the corrupt barber Fat Daddy and his gorgeous, full-of-future-plans daughter, Egypt, as well as with a fellow dealer, Dreko, whom Hood sees as a brother, despite Dreko's own mother thinking he's a “twisted demon.” When allegiances start to falter, big deals go down and the lure of the drugs he sells begin taking over the lives of those close to him, Hood, while constantly inventing rhymes that keep him sane, has to decide who he can afford to love if he wants to survive. Behind Noire's hyperrealistic graphic violence and raunchy sex are interwoven stories, a strong plot and carefully drawn characters with classic motivations. Noire is Dickens for the age of dojah, donuts and dawgs. (Aug.)

Middleton reprises his eponymous cowboy hero in a western adventure with more narrow escapes than a movie serial. Jack “Diamondback” McCall now calls Spirit Feather, an Anasazi village in Arizona Territory, home. But he still loves a challenge, and when the village chief asks him to find a tribal relic—a golden hawk—hidden in a cave beneath the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon, Diamondback readily agrees. Accompanied by best friend and partner Dakota Dan Smith and Fawn, his Native American girlfriend, McCall sets off on the arduous 12-day ride. McCall recovers the icon along with an “ancient leather scroll” that contains a map of the Mexican coastline near Vera Cruz and shows a legendary lost island rumored to be home to a temple adorned with a golden sun. Intrigued, the intrepid adventurers set off on a new mission that pits them against pirates, federales and a stormy sea. Fans of western fiction who appreciate an old-fashioned hero and nonstop action will enjoy riding along with Diamondback McCall. (Aug.)

The only novel by America's eventual apostle of freedom and spontaneity first appeared in a broadsheet form in 1842, cost 12 1/2 cents and sold 20,000 copies. It's been out of print for 40 years, and it's easy to see why: less a novel than a prohibition tract in fiction, its clichéd-even-then story is that of an innocent from Whitman's native Long Island and his corruption by the music halls and taverns of New York City. It ends with the hero sagely advising “that every young man should marry as soon as possible, and have a home of his own.” It turns out the author of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” wrote a novel that's not only hysterically antiurban but riven with the anti-Irish “nativism” that stains so much mid-Victorian American discourse. Despite that, this well-introduced volume is a useful, if hardly enjoyable, edition for literary and historical study. (Aug.)

An airy, evanescent tone and long, drifting sentences that blend memory with the present characterize Ronk's eighth book, selected by C.D. Wright for the National Poetry Series. Ronk (In a Landscape of Having to Repeat) masterfully operates at the intersection of meditative investigation and day-to-day domesticity. In these poems, “all is determined/ by the most complex of interdependencies.” In fact, this work is as much about the intricacies of the artist's role, about doubt and uncertainty, as it is about whatever subject matter the poems take up. Ronk is able to create haunting and arresting images within this milieu: “There are never enough pages to describe/ the expanse of a valley where a low-lying cloud/ rims the view and blankets out everything one might see.” Ronk often works in conversation with other artists; this book shares its title with one by W.G. Sebald, and many of the poems appropriate phrases from his writing. These short, stunning lyrics should solidify Ronk's place as an original and important contemporary American voice. (Sept.)

Accompanying Kennedy's forthcoming selected (serious) poems, this agreeably cantankerous, occasionally laugh-out-loud-funny volume gathers brief parodies, barbed rhymes, naughty couplets and other assorted not-so-serious verse, dating (despite the title) from 1956 to the present. Kennedy serves up, among other poems, 46 limericks, 19 clerihews, assorted off-color jokes, rewritten popular songs from the pre-rock era (“Suburban lawns with moles,/ Things full of holes/ Remind me of you”) and “Mary Had a Little Lamb” rewritten in the style of Sylvia Plath. Kennedy (The Lords of Misrule) also offers “ghastly brats” (poems too grisly for, but otherwise suited to, his three collections of children's verse) and a portrait of Sigmund Freud as Santa Claus. The volume seems less substantial than most collections of light verse (perhaps because Kennedy's greatest wits have been relegated to a companion volume); some of the jokes about sex and drink sound dated. Yet this lighter side of Kennedy should please fans of John Updike's verse or of the line of mid-century upscale rhyming—from Cole Porter to the New Yorker—to which most of these poems belong. (Sept.)

From the blood-soaked cover image of a Snow White–like figure to the final poem (“You Cut Open”), there is both violence and humor in the 42 lyrics of Marvin's second book. In her often amped-up sonics (“standing neck-deep in a pit, whisky-pitched, ether-lit”), her formal skill and her penchant for anger-filled poems on the love/hate of self and beloved, Marvin (World's Tallest Disaster) suggests a postmodern Plath. But the smirk on the speaker's face—she is both deadly serious and deadly funny—points these poems past melodrama. “Dear less-than-a-man,” writes Marvin, “I think with my blood.” Often the humor comes when the absurdity of the actual world is mixed with that of the speaker's world (“my unsubsidized loan heart”). Marvin also manages a more intimate voice: “I would be the worm to your rain soaked side/ walk.” Such tenderness is welcome among so much grief, but so is the ambivalence of Marvin's elegy detailing a lover's autopsy. Readers who can believe “all love/ should be loud enough to scare off the neighbors” will swoon for this work. (Aug.)

The principles of physics, the lives of physicists (especially Albert Einstein) and the dilemmas of classic comic book heroes provide Van Jordan (M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A) with the structure and occasions for his often delightful, always clear and occasionally profound third volume. The second and longest of its three sections follows Einstein's biography from early adulthood and first marriage (to the mathematician Mileva Maric, the mother of his children) through infidelities, emigration, fame, travels in America and Einstein's latter-day campaigns against nuclear weapons and racial injustice. Terms from physics make easy (at times, too easy) metaphors for more human concerns: “promise me/ you'll never cease being/ the elegant equation,” Einstein asks Maric; decades afterwards, Paul Robeson muses, during his meeting with the great thinker, “My voice/ is as dangerous as any atom splitting/ open.” The best poems here leave famous thinkers and performers behind—the set of short poems about the superhero called the Atom, for example, who maintained a secret identity as a lovelorn physicist and whose powers let him shrink down to nuclear size: “It was as if no one had seen me// until I mastered the science// of shrinking my body.” (July)

Esteemed in Brazil both as a poet and the translator of English and American writings from Lord Byron to Jack Kerouac, Britto deserves a firm hearing in the States: on the deft evidence of Novey's translations, the author is consistently thoughtful, humble and observant, both about the great themes of love and knowledge and about the rooms and cityscapes he depicts. Britto's long sentences and short lines carry more than a hint of Elizabeth Bishop: in “Scherzo,” “enormous uncomfortable clouds/ rolled past the window/ like lazy pachyderms/ and sprawled out, unfettered.” He wonders, often, whether he can portray any truth beyond the merely personal; the tactful, self-suspicious poem “Snake Charmer” seeks “a slender, venomous truth.” In the more recent poems, his humility extends to self-abnegation: “no silence is ever enough.” Yet he can also display virtuoso technique. Novey removes the rhymes from his many sonnets, but preserves the repetitions in a sestina, and keeps, too, the wild range of styles that differentiate the segments of his “Nine Variations on a Theme of Jim Morrison.” This brief book makes an ideal starting point for what should be an international reputation. (July)

In her latest collection, the prolific Howe continues her career-long pursuit of moral clarity and spiritual insight: “What is a poet but a person/ Who lives on the ground/ Who laughs and listens// Without pretension of knowing/ Anything, driven by the lyric's/ Quest for rest that never/ (God willing) will be found?” Diaristic and plainspoken, these seven sequences are welcoming and immediately likable, especially “The Days,” which finds Howe at her most apothegmatic (“A seed can be stamped on/ And still want to live”) and declamatory (“This is such an old story, listen./ The poor are hard-working/ And the rich get more through talking”). Firm-voiced passages like these provide refreshing disruption from occasional flatness, a hazard due in large part to Howe's frequent preference here for relatively brief, simple sentences, most of which avoid syntactic complication and many of which are broken into short, lilting, end-stopped lines. But if this simplicity of structure grows fatiguing, it also gives the poems a humble, balladlike character well-suited to Howe's down-to-earth metaphysics: “So pray to the toilet, flush./ Pray to the floor, stay clean./...To the cow and the hen, thank you/ For all you have given/ To us workers of the world.” (July)

In her first collection available to English-language readers, rising Mexican poet Laura Solórzano explores the risks and obstacles of communication through startling juxtapositions of images, dizzying word play and a masterful command of direct language. As the literal translation of the Spanish title suggests, Solórzano journeys into the “wolf's mouth,” where communication is risky and difficult. Written in the first person, these poems make demands of their addressees and engage in complex verbal stunts: “Serve yourself when you sense or say lilies in the city./ Lilies I've fixed to you, fireflies of lacteal lips.” Body parts, including lips, cornea, tongue, molar and tendon, appear throughout and often perform the impossible (“to oppress the melody in the musician's molar”). The tightly constructed 12-part sequence that opens the book deals with food, tasting and cooking: “dough lifts the debt,” fornication continues “until the saucepan shatters” and nibbles have motives. These layered, playful and sorrowful poems reward repeated readings. (July)

Spahr's latest is a fascinating poetic memoir along the lines of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, charting the personal and political transformation that is at the root of books like Spahr's tender, blistering This Connection of Everyone with Lungs (2005). A prose work in nine parts (plus bibliographical afterword), the book covers the years 1997–2001, when Spahr's primary relationship expanded to include a third partner (forming what she, with wry, Stein-like splendor, refers to as a “they”); she entered the academic job market (with complicated results); and the excesses of the Clinton-Bush era transformed into the nightmare of 9/11. As the book unfolds, the three partners struggle to define their relationship to each other and, more awkwardly, to other people. Spahr's university job “on an island in the Pacific” enmeshes the three in the island's fraught race politics; they're on sabbatical in Brooklyn when 9/11 happens. Spahr, who has written about Stein, adapts Stein's repetitive, pronominally elusive style, but where Stein gossips and drops names, Spahr fugues and protects the innocent. That approach piques the desire for dish, and it keeps the focus on the anxieties, excitements and sly, trenchant analyses that the three experience and produce together. The result is a book as unique as it is beautiful. (June)

Aseriously depressing book of prose poems from a tremendously talented poet, Moxley's fourth collection laments the “horrors of wasted potential” while pushing with measured fervor into “beauty, inward looking, consumed by its own desire.” Aside from Moxley's signature devastating one-liners on conflicts inherent in living and writing (“the flesh envies the word's longevity but not its delayed effects”), the 41 prose pieces, most about half a page and at times seeming like very-long-lined verse, tackle questions that have vexed poets for ages: “The gift of minor eternity, on a brief mammalian scale, is not this relentless coming to be but the tale you will later tell about it.” Moxley (The Sense Record) is deeply aware that poetic metatalk quickly grows wearisome if untethered to real Eros and anger, and keeps her explorations firmly grounded in experience: “Last night, believing yourself to be the bomb, you stripped him.... how could you be so stupid as to mistake deferential attention for ravenous sexual desire?” Moxley has captured an artist's mid-career ennui with shattering honesty and unflinching attention to the nuances of loss, verbal and otherwise. (June)

In Queeney's passionate, fast-moving first volume, autobiographical poems, sketches of archetypes and pieces about a persona she calls “the Anti-Leading Lady” describe a childhood and adolescence dominated by a self-dramatizing, unstable and ultimately threatening mother, and a young adulthood marked by Latin American travel, collegiate ambition and an almost frenzied search for love. Some of her best moments concern failed teen sex. Others render declaratory judgments on her family in the manner of Louise Glück or Sylvia Plath: “Because the mother was an error/ and her house had been a waste/ she sought to lay waste.” The work of self-definition all young poets—and all young people—move through takes place, here, in poems that sometimes stand on their own, but sometimes sound like exercises: “Courtney Queeney is an anatomy of melancholy/ written in egg white and cipher.” One of very few first books of poetry Random House has published in recent years, Queeney's debut can sometimes sound more promising than achieved. But, even with its rough patches, there may be a following for this gifted and direct writer whose travails many readers will understand. (June)

Heywood brings to life Michigan's Upper Peninsula in his predictable fifth novel to feature conservation detective Grady Service (after 2005's Running Dark), though an implausible plot fails to match the rich rural setting. Soon after Service's son and his girlfriend die in an auto accident, the grief-stricken Service finds evidence indicating their vehicle was forced off the road. Before his private inquiry can make much progress, an untrustworthy FBI special agent, Tatie Monica, enlists Service to pursue a murderer who has targeted conservation agents across the U.S., using an obscure and gruesome Viking pattern of mutilations. An improbable cameo by George W. Bush injects some lame humor (“You ain't one-a them Dem'crats, are ya, big guy?” the president asks Service), while the eventual revelation of the connection between the trail of bodies and the fatal accident will surprise few. (Sept.)

at the start of McBride's vivid third Det. Sgt. Logan MacRae police procedural (after 2006's Dying Light), the Aberdeen police, on the trail of a serial rapist, catch Scottish sports hero Rob Macintyre stalking tarted-up Woman Police Constable Jackie Watson, MacRae's live-in lover. Macintyre's arrest ignites public sentiment against the police, stifling the investigation. Meanwhile, a second case drags MacRae into the local s&m scene, where he gets an unexpected education in the sordid details from his red-faced assistant constable, and then he has to track down an eight-year-old killer. The one thing the three cases have in common is that nothing is what it seems. MacRae bounces back and forth among them, yanked between two cranky, childlike detective inspectors demanding overtime and loyalty. When Jackie starts behaving suspiciously, Logan fears the truth may be worse than unfaithfulness. With a dose of sharp wit, MacBride effortlessly interweaves the plot strands while conjuring up three-dimensional characters who slog through the relentless sleet of Aberdeen. (Aug.)

The wry 11th and final Insp. Aurelio Zen mystery (after 2006's Back to Bologna) will leave the series' many fans in renewed mourning for Gold Dagger–winner Dibdin (1947-2007). When the corpse of American attorney Peter Newman is discovered in Calabria after an apparent botched kidnapping, Zen finds himself probing the rumor that Newman was not only born in Italy but heir to a family of southern Italian landowners. The detective must sort out other possible motives for the crime, including the dead man's work for an eccentric Hollywood producer hoping to outdo Mel Gibson with a film based on the Book of Revelations. The writing occasionally soars (“There is a unique flavor of melancholy to remote railway stations during the long intervals between the arrival and departure of trains”), and Zen's apt observations of his country's foibles and the unromantic portrayal of Calabria help to balance the sometimes brutal plot. This quirky series will be missed. (Aug.)

The hyper-fab Maggie Mars discovers the dangers of screenwriting in Kalian's snazzy sequel to 2006's As Dead as It Gets. After tantrum-throwing diva Allegra Cort, the star of Maggie's new movie Murder Becomes Her, is bludgeoned to death with her own Oscar, the cops find Maggie's prints on it, making her a prime suspect. Baffling spirit messages from TV psychic Mitzi Elgin, who's Allegra's friend (and Maggie's dad's girlfriend), attempts on Maggie's life and another shocking murder keep Maggie on her toes as she delves into Allegra's past. Maggie is no relation to TV sleuth Veronica, but their similarities don't end at last names and hobbies: Maggie's sticky intermittent relationship with LAPD cop Joe Camenetti is highly reminiscent of Veronica's teen romantic angst. The Hollywood collaborators behind the Kalian signature, veteran TV/film writer/producer Irma Kalish and Naomi Gurian, former executive director of the Writer's Guild of America, West Coast branch, keep things moving at a clip entirely suitable for TV adaptation. Stay tuned! (Aug.)

The seventh Inspector Brant noir from Shamus-winner Bruen (after 2006's Calibre) maintains the feverish pacing that has become Bruen's trademark. As incorrigible hardcase Brant sits in a London pub brooding about the recent demise of his hero, real-life author Ed McBain, a gunman opens fire and then disappears. Hit multiple times, Brant is rushed to the hospital. Local criminals and cops alike rejoice at this unexpected bit of good fortune, but within a few days he's up and crankier than ever, vowing revenge on his assailants. Meanwhile, his fellow cops grapple with their own personal crises: Sgt. Elizabeth Falls is harassed by a psycho named Angie (last seen in Vixen), fresh out of prison and anxious to settle the score; police constable McDonald, in a cocaine-fueled downward spiral, agrees to lead a group of senior citizen vigilantes. When one of the codgers is killed during their first mission, McDonald's fate is sealed. Bruen keeps this train wreck on proper course to a wholly satisfying, and very noir, conclusion. (Aug.)

Osawa's popular Japanese police procedural series makes its U.S. debut with this translation of the first volume. Maverick detective Samejima has made enemies on both sides of the law. Unwilling to compromise his principles, the young policeman refuses to turn a blind eye to the corruption engendered by the Yakuza, a powerful organized crime syndicate, and finds himself stuck patrolling Tokyo's grimy Shinjuku district and increasingly isolated on the force. That ostracism forces Samejima to launch his own probe when an elusive sniper begins targeting his fellow officers, using an unconventional weapon to kill them in pairs. While some rough sections of exposition disrupt the narrative flow, Samejima's compelling struggle to find the truth and the startling revelation of the killer's motive will leave most readers eager for the next book in the series to become available. (Aug.)

The popular and prolific Brett takes us into the world of cut, color and curl in his witty eighth Fethering cozy (after 2006's The Stabbing in the Stables). Carole Seddon needs a haircut: exactly the same, just shorter. She risks going to a salon in her small English town of Fethering, only to witness the discovery of the assistant, Kyra, strangled in the back room with evidence of a tryst all around her. When Kyra's secret boyfriend, Nathan, becomes the suspect, but his parents aren't worried, Carole decides the local constabulary needs help from her and her next-door neighbor and sleuthing partner, Jude. Brett perfectly describes the mannerisms of stuffy upper-middle-class Carole slowly letting her hair down; the odd, arty insouciance of Nathan's academic family; and anyone else who comes within range. This funny and intricately plotted story brims with affection for the affectations of our favorite Fethering friends. (Aug.)

This patchwork anthology of 13 new vampire stories proves that heavyweight contributors can give some substance to a relatively slight theme. Harris (the Sookie Stackhouse novels), Kelner (the Laura Fleming mysteries) and 11 other writers with serious vamp credentials craft stories around the concept of birthdays for bloodsuckers. Most of the tales only blow out candles in passing, as with P.N. Elrod's “Grave-Robbed,” which mixes pathos and comedy as vampire PI Jack Fleming busts a phony medium mid-séance, and Tanya Huff's “Blood Wrapped,” in which Henry Fitzroy's search for the ideal gift for a vampire's 40th mixes with his pursuit of a human kidnapper. Christopher Golden takes birthdays to heart in his poignant coming-of-age story, “The Mournful Cry of Owls,” while Kelley Armstrong proposes in “Twilight” that a vampire's real birthday is the date of transformation from mortal to immortal. Fans of the many series vampires on parade here will be undeterred by the variable quality of their adventures. (Sept.)

Extinction or survival? Brooks keeps readers hanging with the hair-raising second installment (after 2006's Armageddon's Children) of a trilogy blending his bestselling Shannara and Void series. A plague-ridden future Earth faces annihilation from Void demons, once-men and other monstrous creatures. What chance do innocent children have? A pretty good chance when Logan Tom and Angel Perez, the last Knights of the Word, have pledged to defend them. Hawk, a child suffused with unpredictable magic, also helps the Seattle street kids called the Ghosts, but when he's whisked away to the magical Gardens of Life to learn of his heroic destiny, the kids come to depend on Logan and Cat, a part-lizard girl. Playing another important role is Kirisin, a Cintra elf hiding in the Oregon woods, who finds the blue Elfstones that can lead him to the powerful, myth-shrouded Loden Stone. Celebrating his 30th year as a professional writer, Brooks provides another fascinating group of characters tackling harrowing and inspiring life and death issues. (Aug.)

Editor/writer/musician Slattery's chaotic debut takes readers on a headlong trip to the end of the world. Manuel González, a legendary New York City party animal, has disappeared and his apartment has exploded, leaving behind only the memories of his thousands of friends and enemies. His lover, Wendell Apogee, is determined to find out what happened. So are police inspectors Herman Trout and Lenny Salmon, who uncover a web of bizarre characters, from Lucas Henderson, former Lunar Temple cult member, and Arturo “El Flaco” Domínguez,” González's worst enemy, to a washed-up '80s pop band the Marsupials. As Wendell tracks González through Darktown, “the place where you find lost things,” the prophecies of the apocalyptic Church of Panic begin coming true: aliens threaten to invade Earth, and Wendell must become superhero Captain Spaceman and save the planet. The story itself doesn't make much sense, but Slattery has a grand time showing off the colorful underground culture of cockfights, raves and endless intoxication that keeps things moving in his hallucinatory vision of New York. (Aug.)

Monette continues the fantastic saga begun in Mélusine and The Virtu with virtuoso narratives of theatrical, political and magical intrigues. Within the walled city of Mélusine, destabilized by unsolved murders and the lack of a legitimate royal heir, stands the fortress known as the Mirador, from which wizards strive to consolidate and increase their power. Felix Harrowgate, the Mirador's most powerful wizard, and his half-brother, former assassin Mildmay the Fox, find themselves mired in new intrigues when Mildmay's lover, the renowned actress Mehitabel Parr, becomes an unwilling spy for the rival wizards of the Bastion. Felix is further distracted by endless bickering with his partner, Gideon Thraxios, and trying to understand the implications of the backwards sky in the magical dreamworld of the Khloïdanikos. Mehitabel fears the destruction of her theatrical company, and the lowborn Mildmay struggles against the prejudice of wizards and lords. Though Felix's more esoteric magical problems remain unresolved, several plot lines find satisfying conclusions, and a well-developed world waits to be explored in sequels. (Aug.)

Rock and roll and old-school hard SF go together like peanut butter and jelly in Jarpe's debut novel. At 53, Aqualung is an old man on the rock scene, but his voice and the Machine, a device that uses low energy sound waves to tweak the emotions of the audience, have made the Snake Vendors an overnight sensation. Brilliant Web guru and computer architect Quin Taber is determined to discover the origins of the Digital Carnivore, an AI virus Taber calls “the Robin Hood of file-sharing daemons”; the Sheriff of Nottingham part is played by megalomaniacal Walter Cheeseman, head of the all-powerful information purveyor WebCense. When Quin learns that Aqualung is one of the Digital Carnivore's original designers, the rock star becomes a target. Running for his life, Aqualung finds sanctuary on the orbital space station Freefall, which becomes the front line in the battle between Cheeseman's forces and the independent-minded folks of Freefall and the moon colony Luna. Fans of Nirvana, Buddy Holly and Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress will gladly soak up the Spandex and Doc Martens atmosphere. (Aug.)

Set in an alternate Earth where Ice Age animals like mastodons have survived into the Victorian era, Barlough's superb fourth Western Lights fantasy (after 2004's Strange Cargo) introduces the quiet English village of Market Snailsby, whose lovingly described inhabitants would be at home in a P.G. Wodehouse or Agatha Christie novel. One spring afternoon, while driving a cart through the dark woods outside the town, Jemma Hathaway, “a substantial citizen of Market Snailsby,” spies two small children at the side of road who appear to be lost. When she tries to rescue them, she has a frightening vision. Subsequent reports of ghostly apparitions amid the trees prompt Jemma and her brother, Richard, to investigate. The engaging plot and the artful writing elevate Barlough's work far above most other contemporary genre fiction and should send new readers in search of the three preceding books in the series. (Aug.)

Joyce's seventh de Warenne novel is another first-rate Regency, featuring multidimensional protagonists and sweeping drama. Six months after the death of her father, Lady Blanche Harrington must seek a husband to help manage her vast fortunes. It's an unfortunate but necessary duty for the chilly Blanche, who's carefully controlled all emotions since the death of her mother two decades earlier. As Blanche travels to her late father's estate in Cornwall, she makes an ill-timed appearance at the home of a former suitor's brother, Sir Rex de Warenne, catching him in a compromising (but strangely enticing) position with the maid. The attraction between the self-loathing Rex and self-denying Blanche is vivid and believable, developing gradually under the watch of Rex's bitter former lover. When Blanche's repressed memories of her mother's death begin to resurface, a tumultuous chain of events threatens the couple's love and possibly Blanche's life. Entirely fluff-free, Joyce's tight plot and vivid cast combine for a romance that's just about perfect. (Aug.)

Those with weak stomachs will want to skip Little's latest shocker (after The Burning), which dishes out blood, bowels, mutilation and rape with an unsettling knack for the truly repulsive. Parallel stories revolve around several bloody episodes in which previously respectable California businessmen turn into raving killers, torturing and slaughtering their families. Heroes Brian Howells, a journalist investigating a blood-stained letter from his estranged father, and Carrie Daniels, a social worker looking into a series of beastly birth defects, team up to find out what's behind it all. As Brian and Carrie unearth the secrets of families and friends, flashbacks tell the story of a 19th-century would-be gold prospector who discovers primordial, succubuslike beings swarming the Californian backwoods, beings that now stalk a present-day family on vacation. Little's swift prose jumps from one gut-twister to the next, providing an engrossing if familiar romp that ends in a messy Lovecraftian climax, which may prove too absurd for some readers to swallow. Despite shortcomings, Little again displays, with a plethora of gore and perversion, his robust ability to disgust (and delight) even the most seasoned horror enthusiast. (Aug.)

For wisecracking single mother/professional assassin Gin Bombay, who comes from a line of career killers stretching back to ancient Greece, an invitation to the family reunion brings problems that go well beyond Aunt Jean's unappetizing potato salad. For starters, reunion business will include the mandatory blood initiation of Gin's five-year-old daughter, cementing her to the family business; on top of that, Gin's been assigned to eliminate a spy within the family, who may be her beloved younger brother. Things only get worse when she finds out that one of her marks is a client of her brand new boyfriend, a hunky Australian bodyguard. The beleaguered soccer mom/assassin concept is a winner, and Langtry gets the fun started from page one with a myriad of clever details, like the Hello Kitty phone perched in our heroine's “death lab.” The book's chief flaw is in Gin's one-liners; unlike the gracefully underplayed wisecracks of Janet Evanovich's like-minded bounty hunter Stephanie Plum, Gin's are one-joke affairs—all assassination, all the time—that quickly become grating. (Aug.)

Even for a suspense thriller protagonist, Goodman's Hannie Reynard encounters some seriously grisly stuff—and that's before she even leaves the bathroom. The heroine, an Australian documentary filmmaker, suffers from Crohn's disease, a chronic, incurable bowel disorder that can be, well, pretty gross (“She had hunched on the cold toilet for fifteen minutes, pushing out small globules of mucus and blood”). But illness doesn't deter her from aggressively pursuing her latest project, a film about young women considered medical “freaks”; Hannie's real problem is that her interview subjects are being mysteriously evasive. When they start dropping dead, Hannie and her partner, Mosson Ferret, a bean counter from the Independent Film Fund, are unwittingly thrown into the midst of a murderous international plot. Meanwhile, Hannie's got a dark secret to protect that, if revealed, could jeopardize her career and her budding romance with Mosson; Mosson, meanwhile, has a secret of his own he's trying to keep. Unfortunately, Goodman spends too much time with the minutiae of her (admittedly vivid) characters to deliver much suspense, which may leave readers with a chronic case of the snoozes. (Aug.)

Geary's ninth volume in his violent but informative and well-researched series covers the little known tale of the so-called Bloody Benders, a mysterious family of possibly German immigrants who set up a small grocery/hotel catering to travelers along the Osage Trail in southern Kansas in 1870. The townspeople figure out pretty quick that the Benders are an odd lot (the ethereally beautiful daughter holds séances and claims to be a healer, while the ape-like father barely speaks, and the son seems simpleminded). It takes them quite a bit longer to glom on to the fact that too many travelers, especially those with money, are disappearing near the Benders' place. By the time the locals catch on, the Benders have fled, leaving a multitude of gruesome clues behind. Because much about the Benders remains unknown, the story easily lends itself to fantasy and speculation, and Geary recounts theories about who they really were and what happened to them, presented in a quite credible manner, all accompanied by his usual exquisite art. Geary's riveting writing has a journalistic, matter-of-fact tone, making it quite palatable to adult audiences; though the subject matter may make some school librarians think twice. (July)

This long-running yaoi series concludes with the drama at a high pitch, as emotional revelations and family secrets unfold. But as one would expect, there aren't a lot of entry points for those not already following along. Georges, 15, has taken off in order to find out more about his history, returning to the orphanage from which he was adopted. There, his assumptions about his biological father change greatly when he sees his parent as a person instead of a role. Meanwhile, Georges's very close friend Robert has set out to find him and bring him back home. Slivered panels and a reliance on facial closeups emphasize emotional revelation. Georges spends the volume learning secrets and feeling a form of survivor's guilt, as the only one of his family who's still alive. He likely seems less whiny—why me? the world would have been better off if I'd never been born—to readers who've gotten to know him over the earlier books in the series. Others may appreciate the pathos of the visuals of a young blond boy, depressed and hurt by recent revelations, tormented by his “forbidden” and unrequited (he thinks) love, wandering blindly in the snow. (June)

Veitch has led one of the more idiosyncratic careers in comics in the past 30 years. Both small publisher and mainstream writer (most recently of the brilliant war comic, Army at Love), Veitch's obsessions and anxieties manifest themselves in multiple formats, though always with a surreal, dark tinge. This new collection compiles his earliest work for anthologies including Heavy Metal and Epic, complemented by a fun, discursive little memoir. Here are stories of futuristic humans slaughtering wildlife, of alien disease epidemics and final frontier affairs. Veitch, then as now, has a keen moral conscience, and rarely does a story go by without some kind of lesson to be learned, particularly regarding what he sees as the craven behavior of human beings. These stories are prime examples of late 1970s/early 1980s dark science fiction, and Veitch's artwork is as good as it's ever been. Period-style airbrush-work elevates these tales above their pulp sources to pop psychedelia, as characters and aliens take visionary trips through what appears to be Veitch's own interior spaces. While the material itself may be dated, the presentation is not, and Shiny Beasts presents a fairly compelling portrait of a young artist. (June)

A fun, often suspenseful addition to Carey's already notable fantasy/horror-driven work. The premise reads just like the modern Japanese horror movies on which Crossing Midnight is clearly based. A man, Yasuo, prays for a child to be born, and instead he gets twins—a boy and a girl. They grow up normally until one day a demon comes to cash in on Yasuo's promise of an “offering.” The demon takes the daughter, Toshi, who finds herself in training to be a warrior princess, while son Kai watches helplessly. Meanwhile, Yasuo appears to have mob-related problems. Carey moves this plot along briskly, offering a wealth of details about modern Japanese life in Nagasaki. He's done his research and it pays off in a sense of realism. Fern complements this with detail-driven art that immerses the reader in the time and places of the story. His clean lines and exactitude work in both city streets and mystical byways, while the characters are both visually and thematically appealing. This is a solid, entertaining and beautifully executed exercise in Japanese genre fiction—every bit as gripping as its filmic equivalents. (June)

Signature

Reviewed by Michael Coffey

If this novel, Johnson's first in nearly a decade, is—as the promo copy says—about Skip Sands, it's also about his uncle, a legendary CIA operative; Kathy Jones, a widowed, saintly Canadian nurse; Trung, a North Vietnamese spy; and the Houston brothers, Bill and James, misguided GIs who haunt the story's periphery. And it's also about Sgt. Jimmy Storm, whose existence seems to be one long vision quest. As with all of Johnson's work—the stories in Jesus' Son, novels like Resuscitation of a Dead Man and Fiskadoro—the real point is the possibility of grace in a world of total mystery and inexplicable suffering. In Johnson's honest world, no one story dominates.

For all the story lines, the structure couldn't be simpler: each year, from 1963 (the book opens in the Philippines: “Last night at 3:00 a.m. President Kennedy had been killed”) to 1970, gets its own part, followed by a coda set in 1983. Readers familiar with the Vietnam War will recognize its arc—the Tet offensive (65 harrowing pages here); the deaths of Martin Luther King and RFK; the fall of Saigon, swift and seemingly foreordained.

Skip is a CIA recruit working under his uncle, Francis X. Sands, known as the Colonel. Skip is mostly in the dark, awaiting direction, living under an alias and falling in love with Kathy while the Colonel deals in double agents, Bushmills whiskey and folk history. He's a soldier-scholar pursuing theories of how to purify an information stream; he bloviates in gusts of sincerity and blasphemy, all of it charming. A large cast of characters, some colorful, some vaguely chalked, surround this triad, and if Tree of Smoke has a flaw, it is that some characters are virtually indistinguishable. Given the covert nature of much of the goings-on, perhaps it is necessary that characters become blurred. “We're on the cutting edge of reality itself,” says Storm. “Right where it turns into a dream.”

Is this our last Vietnam novel? One has to wonder. What serious writer, after tuning in to Johnson's terrifying, dissonant opera, can return with a fresh ear? The work of many past chroniclers— Graham Greene, Tim O'Brien, the filmmakers Coppola,Cimino and Kubrick, all of whom have contributed to our cultural “understanding” of the war—is both evoked and consumed in the fiery heat of Johnson's story. In the novel's coda, Storm, a war cliché now way gone and deep in the Malaysian jungle near Thailand, attends preparations for a village's sacrificial bonfire (consisting of personal items smashed and axed by their owners) and offers himself as “compensation, baby.” When the book ends, in a heartbreaking soliloquy from Kathy (fittingly, a Canadian) on the occasion of a war orphan benefit in a Minneapolis Radisson, you feel that America's Vietnam experience has been brought to a closure that's as good as we'll ever get.

Michael Coffey is PW's executive managing editor.