Fiction Reviews: Week of 9/17/2007

The experiences of a woman drawn into the 1971 Bangladesh war for independence illuminate the conflict's wider resonances in Anam's impressive debut, the first installment in a proposed trilogy. Rehana Haque is a widow with two children at Dhaka University, 17-year-old daughter Maya and 19-year-old son Soheil. As she follows the daily patterns of domesticity-cooking, visiting the cemetery, marking religious holidays-she is only dimly aware of the growing political unrest until Pakistani tanks arrive and the fighting begins. Suddenly, Rehana's family is in peril and her children become involved in the rebellion. The elegantly understated restraint with which Anam recounts ensuing events gives credibility to Rehana's evolution from a devoted mother to a woman who allows her son's guerrilla comrades to bury guns in her backyard and who shelters a Bengali army major after he is wounded. The reader takes the emotional journey from atmospheric scenes of the marketplace to the mayhem of invasion, the ruin of the city, evidence of the rape and torture of Hindus and Bengali nationalists, and the stench and squalor of a refugee camp. Rehana's metamorphosis encapsulates her country's tragedy and makes for an immersive, wrenching narrative.(Jan.)

Nobelist Coetzee's 19th book features a stand-in for himself: Señor C, a white 72-year-old South African writer living in Australia who has written Waiting for the Barbarians. C falls into a “metaphysical” passion for his sexy 29-year-old Filipina neighbor, Anya, and quickly plots to spend more time with her by offering her a job as his typist. C's latest project is a series of political and philosophical essays, and Coetzee divides each page of the present novel in three: any given page features a bit of an essay (often its title and opening paragraph) at the top; C's POV in the middle; and Anya's voice at the bottom. C's opinions in the essays are mostly on the left (he despises Bush, Blair & Co., and is opposed to the Iraq War) and they bore Anya, who wants something less lofty. Meanwhile, Anya's lover, Alan—a smart, conservative 42-year-old investment consultant who's good in the sack, and who stands for everything C despises—becomes increasingly scornful and jealous, and eventually concocts an elaborate plan to defraud C. of money. Unfortunately, Anya is little more than a trophy to be disputed, and Alan as an unscrupulous, boorish reactionary is a caricature. While C's essays, especially the later ones inspired by Anya, hold some interest, this follow-up to Slow Year is not one of Coetzee's major efforts. (Jan.)

A 14-year-old boy with an affinity for all things military makes for an extremely likable protagonist in former naval officer Garigliano's dark, wonderfully twisted debut. Habitually uprooted by his beautiful mother, Cecile, Loren despises her ever-revolving carousel of dolt boyfriends, so he revolts by torching the golf course where Cecile's latest dish, golf pro Tom, tees off. Loren gets caught, and Cecile reluctantly ships him off to Camp Ascend!—a six-week rehabilitation program for young miscreants headed by Ray Kellogg, aka the Colonel, an ex-con scam artist who charges a $7,000 fee for treatment at the ramshackle campground staffed by the Colonel's suntanned, heavily coiffed wife, Kitty, and Kitty's sadistic, malevolent brother Donovan, who likes to play drill sergeant and torture kids. Loren, clever and smitten with pretty fellow “inmate” Liz, uses the skills of the seasoned operative to navigate and, eventually, defuse the escalating dangers at Camp Ascend! in a thrilling denouement. What initially seems like a wacky teenage romp morphs into a harrowing story about resilience, redemption and the will to survive. Garigliano excels with this sinister, superlative debut. (Jan.)

McCullough (The Thorn Birds; The October Horse) continues her Masters of Rome series with a chronicle of one of history's most infamous love affairs. After the death of Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, Caesar's ambitious and brash cousin, and Octavian, Caesar's adopted son and designated heir, agree to jointly administer the far-flung empire: Antony in the East and Octavian in the West. It's not a happy arrangement, though, and their rivalry to rule Rome is the overarching theme of this sprawling, captivating saga. After a disastrous campaign to subdue the Parthians, Antony turns to Cleopatra, the enigmatic and fabulously wealthy queen of Egypt, to replenish his war chest. Determined to make Caesarion, her son by Julius Caesar, ruler of Rome, Cleopatra seduces Antony and soon has him “as soft as a mushy pudding.” Meanwhile, with the aid of his wife and Marcus Agrippa, Octavian secures his position in Rome and Italia. Prodded by Cleopatra, Antony gathers his forces in Greece for an invasion of Italia. The tragic denouement is, in McCullough's capable hands, no less compelling for being so well known. As with the previous volumes in this series, the author's scholarship and larger-than-life characters bring a tempestuous Rome to life. (Dec.)

Elegy Mary Jo Bang. Graywolf, $20 (104p) ISBN 978-1-55597-483-1 In her powerful fifth collection, Bang asks, “What is elegy but the attempt / To rebreathe life/ Into what the gone one once was.” Writing to mourn the death of her adult son, Bang interrogates the elegiac form and demands of it more than it can give, frustrated, over and over again, with memory, which falls pitifully short of life: “Memory is deeply not alive; it's a mock-up/ And this renders it hateful.” The urgent line breaks of Bang's fractured sentences build their own drama, as if her precisions might determine whether or not she will cross the fissures between what she wants to say and what she can't. Aware that there is no vocabulary equal to conveying the pain of losing a loved one or the struggle to be faithful to the loss, the poet ruefully admits, “That's where things went wrong./ Is went into language.” Plumbing a world made strange by grief means forsaking the mundane; as a result, there are only a few everyday objects in these poems— an overcoat,roller-skates and Phenobarbital pills. Ostensibly a linear account of a year of sorrow, the structure of the collection suggests rather that grief might be crystalline, the poems accruing around a memory that won't move on: “I say Come Back and you do/ Not do what I want.” While the poet must write and rewrite in order to get her subject right, the mother of a dead child writes to fill the a bottomless chasm. Like Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking, Bang finds no easy consolation, and there is pain for the reader here, too, as when, toward the end of the collection, Bang writes, “Everything Was My Fault / Has been the theme of the song.” Calling to mind Sharon Olds's The Father and Donald Hall's Without, two other harrowing contemporary book-length poetic studies of loss, Bang offers, if not hope, a kind of keeping company, a way, however painful, to go on: “Otherwise no longer exists./ There is only stasis, continually/ Granting ceremony to the moment.” (Oct.)

The 20th Kinsey Millhone crime novel (after 2005's S Is for Silence), a gripping, if depressing, tale of identify theft and elder abuse, displays bestseller Grafton's storytelling gifts. By default, Millhone, “a private investigator in the small Southern California town of Santa Teresa,” assumes responsibility for the well-being of an old neighbor, Gus Vronsky, injured in a fall. After Vronsky's great-niece arranges to hire a home aide, Solana Rojas, Millhone begins to suspect that Rojas is not all that she seems. Since the reader knows from the start that an unscrupulous master manipulator has stolen the Rojas persona, the plot focuses not on whodunit but on the battle of wits Millhone wages with an unconventional and formidable adversary. Grafton's mastery of dialogue and her portrayal of the limits of good intentions make this one of the series' high points, even if two violent scenes near the end tidy up the pieces a little too neatly. Author tour. (Dec.)

This second entry in Whyte's Templar trilogy (after Knights of the Black and White), covering Richard the Lionhearted's crusade, finds the author in top form. Alexander Sinclair, a Knight of the Temple, is part of a 50,000-man army headed to battle in the Lower Galilee. At stake for the Christian army is its claim to the Holy Land, now under the jurisdiction of Kurdish Saracen leader Saladin. The coming disaster will force English King Richard to raise an even larger army and set sail from England himself, along with Henry St. Clair, the English army's master-at-arms, and Henry's son, Andre, a member of the secret Templar society, Brotherhood of Sion. Whyte gilds the tangled political complications of the late 12th century with a rich trove of Templar lore—a treat for some readers, but superfluous for the more action oriented. And action is the point here: few authors can match Whyte when it comes to epic battle scenes involving blazing heat, choking dust, rearing horses and thousands of sword-wielding knights and Saracens locked in mortal combat. (Dec.)

Bestseller Bradford (The Ravenscar Dynasty; Voice of the Heart) presents the serviceable second chapter in her Ravenscar trilogy, a dynastic epic spanning the 20th century. In 1918, 14 years after assuming control of the family company, 33-year-old Edward Deravenel has “built it into the greatest trading company in the world,” with business interests ranging from French wine to Persian oil. Edward is also blessed with the sprawling Ravenscar estate and a son he hopes will eventually take the company helm. However, Edward has enemies on all sides, most notably his “treacherous” younger brother, George, and jealous wife Elizabeth. Even Edward's trusted youngest brother, Richard, may not be all he seems. A series of scandals threatens to ruin Edward's heirs' claim to the company, though much of the action feels muted. The plot gains much needed direction and momentum after Edward is felled by a heart attack, his two young sons disappear and the company's fate falls on the shoulders of his oldest daughter, Bess. The last third carries the book and makes up for the plodding earlier sections. This isn't one of Bradford's better books, but it should tide over her fans. (Nov.)

Along with Kurt Vonnegut, Barthelme (1931–1989) was one of the great 20th-century American absurdists. The 45 stories in this collection include stories Barthelme himself excluded from his two major collections, Sixty Stories and Forty Stories, and little that went previously unpublished. Packed with whimsical facts, “Emma Green Is 81,” which was the lead story in Barthelme's first book, concerns the verbose narrator's testy desire that Emma continue to finance the Journal of Tension Reduction, of which he is the editor. In “Pandemonium,” the story Barthelme was working on when he died, two unidentified voices finish each other's sentences as they lament that their staging of the Eve myth has been eclipsed by a sporting event. Barthelme registered the sexual revolution and the feminist response, both of which he treated via an ironic use of stereotypes: in “Perpetua,” a woman walks out of her marriage to a put-upon, unprepossessing, baffled man named Harold. And typical of several humorous riffs is “Marie Marie, Hold on Tight,” concerning a protest staged against the human condition outside a church. Even the lesser of Barthelme's funhouse mirrors reflect the world's tragicomic essence. (Nov.)

This impressive anthology of pulp-era crime stories from veteran editor and publisher Penzler reveals not only tales with surprising staying power but also some of high literary quality. To be sure, there are some selections sure to offend modern sensibilities and others whose extravagant prose now comes across as laughable or ludicrous. But aside from questions of quality and taste, these tales laid the foundation for most branches of the crime fiction genre as we know it today. Raymond Chandler's “Red Wind” is as effective now as it was when published in 1938. An unexpected treat is “Faith,” a previously unpublished Dashiell Hammett story. Multiple offerings from Erle Stanley Gardner, Hammett, Chandler and Cornell Woolrich add luster. Divided into three sections—the Crimefighters, the Villains, the Dames—with cogent intros by Penzler to each entry, this comprehensive volume allows the reader to revisit that exciting time when the pulp magazines flourished and writers pounded out fiction for a penny a word or less. (Nov.)

British author Wignall (For the Dogs) successfully channels Robert Ludlum in this lean, muscular thriller with more than a few parallels to Ludlum's Jason Bourne series. Conrad Hirst, a remorseless European hit man burnt out by a life of violence, plans to walk away from the business by eliminating the only four people who know his identity. Of course, it isn't that simple. Hirst's first target, Frank Dillon, admits as he's dying that he has lied to Hirst consistently about Hirst's true employer. Later, Hirst learns that the man he thought was his employer, German crime boss Julius Eberhardt, was only using Eberhardt's identity and may in fact be connected with the CIA. Hirst's ignorance of most tradecraft is a little less than plausible, as is his naïveté in trusting the attractive women he meets just as his plan hits high gear. Still, Wignall's ability to blend meaningful characterizations with suspenseful action shows a talent that many other genre writers would envy. A film, to be directed by Liam Kan and Grant Hodgson, is in the works. (Nov.)

Clubfooted, 60-something Cal Tech grad Julius Marantz is pursued by both the “Central Intelligence Corporation” and a corporate coalition known as “GEKO” in this Kafkaesque near-future mashup from Estrin (Insect Dreams: The Half-Life of Gregor Samsa). Julius's crimes include having perfected a mechanism known as “the Doodad,” which, among other things, polarizes the water molecules in living beings and is used to create rapture-like experiences among the multitudes of India. Julius cedes operating rights to the Doodad early on, and 200 pages of his kvetching reflections on his early life ensue. “Born to wear a pocket protector” and inspired by the exoticisms of Coney Island, Julius makes kid-genius forays into relativity; displays his mother's pickled appendix; and has his dog Yenta “bark mitzvahed.” His parents' fatal air accident leaves him with a sense of irretrievability that inspires research in magnetic fields at Copenhagen's Niels Bohr Institute and Cal Tech. With the Doodad in corporate hands, the world stands on the brink, threatened by way of product testing. Estrin's fantastical conceit conceals a very conventional story at its core, and neither one gets sufficient treatment. Scattered throughout this fourth novel are amusements, moving laments and inventive imaginings, but the narrative flow remains polarized. (Nov.)

With its roots in a 2004 New York Daily News feature about Edelman (a widow who, with two young girls, was so desperate for a husband that she promised to pay for a dream vacation for whoever found her one), Edelman's debut novel follows Isabel, a part-time publicist living in New Jersey with daughters Sadie and Jenna after the sudden death of husband Michael. To Isabel's surprise, she enjoys the dating game “in spite of the almost constant flow of letdowns, near misses, and largish disappointments,” and promises to underwrite a vacation for whoever introduces her to her future husband. Among the contenders is JDate-find Larry, who warns her that his post–prostate surgery sexual prowess is “like trying to shove a marshmallow into a piggy bank.” Also in the running are a vodka-swilling egomaniac friend-of-a-friend and plenty of other one-offs, but Isabel predictably winds up finding—for free—what she wants. Isabel's adventures in husband-hunting gyrate happily between soap opera and sitcom, and though comedy trumps high drama every time, the bittersweet account of grief and moving-on is a nice counterpoint to fluffy romances. (Nov.)

The superhero du jour in this smokin' sequel to Estep's debut (2006's Karma Girl) is flame-wielding Fiera, a member of the souped-up supergroup the Fearless Five, based in Bigtime, N.Y. As Fiona Fine, Fiera has a day job as a successful fashion designer, and in either incarnation, she is still grieving over the loss of her murdered fiancé Travis (aka “Tornado”). There's romantic promise in the form of hunky Johnny Bulluci, the brother of a rival designer, but soon another “Johnny” surfaces, a crime fighter who's assumed the identity of the previously murdered crimefighter Johnny Angel and is bent on avenging Johnny's murder by villain Intelligal. Fiera & Co. are made plenty busy by Intelligal's plans for taking over Bigtime via Intelligal's infernal Vamp Machine, which supersizes villain Siren's hypnotic, people-controlling voice. Feverishly clever plotting fuels Estep's over-the-top romance. (Nov.)

When kidnappers seize seven-year-old Carlos Acevedo, the son of a U.S. customs agent, on Halloween, Jersey City FBI agent Christopher Miller swings into action in Grabenstein's gripping second holiday thriller (after 2006's Slay Ride). Miller's sidekick, Lieutenant Cimino, wonders why Carlos would be abducted without ransom demands. Meanwhile, Miller's own seven-year-old daughter, Angela, remains traumatized from an encounter with a “monster” Santa who held a gun to her head the previous Christmas. Hiding at a remote Wyoming hunting lodge is the mastermind behind these crimes, Dr. John Tilley, with a demonic plan to take over the nation and save Western civilization. In New York City, an embittered ex-GI awaits orders from Tilley, “a visionary and prophet,” for the next operation. In a spectacular finish, SWAT teams close in on home-grown terrorists planning an attack on the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. This rapid-fire entertainment is sure to please Grabenstein's fans. (Nov.)

Báez delves into three decades worth of a community of Bronx Dominican women in these linked stories. Though many characters flow in and out of the stories, a few turn up frequently, including Mia and Zuleika, teenage friends who take their adolescent and postadolescent lumps together. In “The Red Shoes,” Zuki lusts after a pair of red heels that her mother thinks are whorish; as in almost every other story, a sexual undertone seethes, if awkwardly, throughout. “To Tell the Truth” is a more dramatic portrayal of sexual tension: Mia is caught skipping school and carousing with boys, bringing forth her father's wrath. In “Como Se Dice Success in Spanish?” Zuki and Mia read tarot cards and reflect on some of their lovers and their life decisions. Spanglish dialogue peppers the narrative, and though the prose is utilitarian, Báez's sympathetic portrayal of a niche group has flashes of insight. (Nov.)

Kessler's sizzling sequel to paranormal debut Hell's Belles puts ex-succubus Jezebel— the now-mortal Jesse Harris, a dancer at a strip club—stage center again. For a month after waking up in a hospital, the former 4,000-year-old, fifth-level succubus who used to seduce humans to claim their souls has been living a happy mortal life in New York with a devoted boyfriend, New York vice cop Paul Hamilton. So when Alecto, a Fury from hell, arrives and demands she return to hell to help Alecto's sister, Megaera (Jessie's former best friend who betrayed her), Jesse balks. Much of the rest of the book is spent convincing her to change her mind, with each sexy escapade topping the last, until (among other things) the demons go after Paul, and Jesse has to “pull an Orpheus.” Kessler's raunchy blend of heaven, hell and eros makes for a wild thrill ride, and hot, tough-talking Jesse has gumption and sass. (Nov.)

Arrested in L.A. and charged with the murder of her art restoration business partner, Jonathan Linton, Laurel Jennings fears that the evidence against her is strong enough for a conviction, especially with her fingerprints found on the murder weapon. After an anonymous tip, her ex-lover, former Los Angeles DA Damon Metcalf, returns to L.A. to represent her at her bail hearing. The Linton family's connections reach far and wide, and Damon stays on as Laurel's lawyer when no reputable L.A. criminal defense attorney will take on her case. A break-in at Laurel's business, a suspicious theft and a lucrative but sketchy restoration project deepen the mystery surrounding the death; soon there are more murders, and Laurel herself is in danger. Laurel and Damon can't keep it just collegial for very long. As the novel races toward its explosive conclusion, creative plotting insures that they have to stay together, right where romantic suspense fans will want them. (Nov.)

Jance keeps former L.A. TV news anchor Ali Reynolds in her native Arizona for her third lead appearance (following Web of Evil). Ali, still recovering from the murder of her not-quite-ex-husband, is aided by her parents and her old high school chum, newly divorced detective and marine reservist Dave Holman. Meanwhile, wealthy, reclusive Arabella Ashcroft, whose family's college scholarship program supported Ali as an undergrad, has read Ali's grief-filled blog, cutlooseblog.com, and wants Ali's help in writing an incest memoir: elderly Arabella says that her childhood was despoiled by a late stepbrother, Bill, and that she's being threatened by his son should she go through with writing about it. Soon after, Dave's daughter Crystal disappears from the Las Vegas home of his ex- and her new husband; Dave seeks Ali's counsel before barreling out there. Jance crowds the book with subplots, and her characters air a lot of opinions about sexual abuse and health care. But sparks between Ali and Dave and an upbeat ending keep this latest Ali outing on track. (Dec.)

K'wan (Hoodlum; Hood Rat) delivers a convoluted, overplotted and ultimately disappointing cautionary tale. Early on, the reader is introduced to Black Ice, the slick pimp; Don B., the rap entrepreneur and head of the Big Dawgz crew; True, Don B.'s hottest new rapper and protégé; Jah, the increasingly reluctant bodyguard; Jah's makeup artist girlfriend Yoshi; and Dena Jones, a local girl who falls into the wrong crowd. As True and the Big Dawgz crew prepare for a video shoot in Harlem, no one's aware that there's someone out to kill True. The video shoot sets up the rest of the novel's tragic events, including murders (there are a lot), a gang rape and manifold permutations of the mayhem caused by greed and deception. The novel's long on grit and violence, but readers will be put off by the scattershot structure, an unmanageably large cast and a consistently half-baked feel. (Nov.)

Rich in historic detail, this boilerplate immigrant family epic focuses on three Jewish sisters struggling to make something of their lives over 40 years of births, deaths, work, domestic abuse and two world wars. Gerber (The Kingdom of Brooklyn) focuses on the passions and cross-cultural currents whirling around Ava, Musetta and Gilda, the three daughters of Rachel, a Polish Jew who arrives on New York's Lower East Side in 1906. Rachel, still in thrall to Old World ways, brings little Ava with her when she confronts her philandering husband, Nathan. Nathan ditches the family, only to appear decades later after Ava marries Len, a smalltime Prohibition-era gangster. Ava's younger sisters, Musetta and Gilda, lock horns over everything from boys and a pet dog to war volunteer efforts. Unfortunately, the early 20th-century immigrant streets of New York are heavily traveled, and there's little to distinguish this novel from the crowd. (Nov.)

This workmanlike religious coming-of-age novel follows Sondra Apfelbaum through her adolescence in post-WWII Lincoln, Kans. Young Sondra, whose maternal grandparents were killed in the Holocaust, feels isolated and confused about her Jewish identity. She doesn't know many other Jewish kids and even contemplates dating a non-Jewish boy. When Sondra is introduced to a more religious Jewish family in Kansas City, she is gradually drawn to keep kosher, observe Shabbos and so forth. There is not much here in the way of plot. Rather, Silvers simply follows Sondra as she delves deeper into Orthodox practice and halachic observance, particularly after her cousin is in a tragic car accident. Sondra eventually travels to Israel for a year of study and meets a young man, also from Kansas, with a similar faith journey. Israel-based writer Silvers produces bland prose, and occasionally she gives in to a preachy tone, as when Sondra's friends in Israel discuss the importance of shared religious conviction as a basis for marriage and lecture her about prioritizing Jewish family life over career. Still, this novel ably presents much of the beauty and meaning of an observant Jewish life. (Nov.)

Ryan's first foray into chickish lit (after The Kingsley House) chronicles a troublesome wedding day through the eyes of the many people involved. Leading the cast is Anne, the wedding planner, who wears a smile for her difficult clients as she fights the emotional upheaval of having been served divorce papers earlier in the day. Her story bookends the nutty nuptials of “VHM” (very high maintenance) bride Allison and doofy groom Mead. By filtering the wedding day through a host of perspectives—the bride's divorced parents, family friends, vapid bridesmaids—Ryan fleshes out her initially screwball cast, showing the perfectionist aesthete behind the daddy's girl, the frightened woman behind the shrewish socialite, the kind heart of the much-reviled trophy wife. Naturally, hijinks threaten the big day: the groom may have slept with one of the bridesmaids; the flower girl, ignored by her partying parents, vanishes during the reception; the bride's hopeless sister gets ejected from the wedding party. Some characters remain opaque or superfluous, but there's enough goings-on to pull readers through the rocky spots. (Nov.)

Karon's bestselling series of Mitford novels has concluded with 25 million copies sold to date, but to the relief of eager fans, she introduces a new series featuring Father Tim. The beloved Episcopal priest returns to his childhood town of Holly Springs, Miss., where he reconnects with old friends and battles some old demons. The novel is thick with Father Tim's past, as Karon uses flashbacks to shed light on his early adulthood, especially his transition to seminary. In Holly Springs, his penchant for getting near strangers to open up to him—and his earnest, moving reflections on faith, prayer and the risks of love—are reassuringly present. His wife, Cynthia, is on stage far less than he, but when she appears, she is charming and insightful, as usual. Yet the book is far from perfect. Development of the quirky locals in Holly Springs is thin, and the end is a tad abrupt. Most frustratingly, the central drama of the novel falls flat: Father Tim discovers a long-buried family secret, but he doesn't grapple deeply enough with the emotional consequences of his discovery, nor does Karon fully explore the ways in which the secret plunges us into the Southern quagmire of race. Still, Mitford fans will enjoy this newest visit with wise, winsome, lovable Father Tim. (Oct. 30)

The “gulf” in the title of Pinsky's seventh collection is both the large southern body of water that has been the site of so much weather-related misery, and the unavoidable distances between an author's thoughts and feelings and his expression. Poems from the first section frequently butt up against subjects “too large for speech,” and break down into music and mystery. The title poem begins with a devastating hurricane in Galveston in 1900 and reaches after fragments and song to recall what was lost: “O try my tra-la-la, ma la belle, mah wallah-woe.” Another poem describes the “ecstasy of forgetting,” in which an enraptured audience at once hears and doesn't hear what it's being told. Pinsky (Jersey Rain) describes solid things in the second section, though he can't help noting that “thing” itself first meant “to confer or address.” Of a camera, he writes, “The flash of your hammer/ Fashions the shelter.” Signs of Pinsky's craftsmanship abound. Perhaps most laudable is that Pinsky—a former Poet Laureate and one of America's best-known poets—is not above self-criticism: in writing about peace, his last thought compares his own mind to a monkey “who fires his shit in handfuls from the cage.” (Oct.)

The verse and prose poems of this third collection by Harvey is rife with her signature wit (“the factory puffs its own set of clouds”), darkened by an ominous sense of fearfulness in a post-9/11 world, which the poems' seeming levity tries to combat. The backbone of the collection is a pair of sequences—titled “The Future of Terror” and “Terror of the Future”—that explore those two increasingly loaded words using a clever alphabetical system with surprisingly haunting results: “We were just a gumdrop on the grid.” Prose poems bookending the sequences present a fable about a lonely robot (“When Robo-Boy feels babyish, he has the option of really reverting”); a study of appetite (“Ma gave Dinna' Pig his name so that no-one would forget where that pig was headed”); an explanation of how the impossibility of mind-reading led to love (“Even when they press their ears or mouths or noses together, the skull wall is still in the way”); and an unlikely dinner ritual (“rip the silhouette from the sky and drag it inside”). A few short, lineated poems punctuate the blocks of prose: “World, I'm no one/ to complain about you.” Harvey continues to match her unique sensibility with subjects that matter; her poems are both empathic and delightful. (Oct.)

Notley takes the title of her 30-somethingth collection from a notorious American folk song: a man tries to get his lover to admit she's been unfaithful, asking her where she's slept, and her ambiguous answer—“in the pines”—only makes things worse. That menacing rhetorical moment informs the whole of this searing collection, which is part autobiography, part riposte to literary culture, and part lyrical reclamation of feminist territory. The at times deliberately ugly long opening title poem is a grotesque's monologue that shades into omniscience—“All I am is this. So all of writing is changed”—and back to embodiment: “It's almost a story or a poem but it's really a song because it's ripping me apart.” Suffused with pain and white-hot accusatory anger, the poem delves into illness, death, love, and being “defective” in a manner that's almost unbearable to read, and which makes dazzling shifts in perspective that keep it rising like a house of cards, or a life. The two sections that follow—the prose poems of “The Black Trailor” and the lyrics of “Hemostatic”—amplify and expand the title piece, reverberating “in this crushed out room where/ all times come,” giving the book a crushing yet sad and graceful symmetry. This master poet continues to inspire and challenge. (Oct.)

Rich, who won the Yale Younger Poets prize in 1951 and who has published more than 25 books since, continues, in this unsparing collection, to make inquiries into real injustice and fables of its vanquishment: “loose floorboards quitting in haste we pried/ up to secrete the rash imagination/ of a time to come.” The penchant that this great American poet has for dating her books and her individual poems feels less like an attempt to situate them within history than a means to shock the self, and readers, into recognizing what has passed, and is passing: “smolder's legacy on a boulder traced.” Rich's stark, intimate voice seems to speak for a life lived at once at the margins and at the center. Some poems linger in diaristic dailiness (“My neighbor moving/ in a doorframe moment's/ reach of her hand”); others light out for the territory where possibilities are extinguished, and born: “beyond remorse, disillusion, fear of death// or life/ rage/ for order, rage for destruction//—beyond this love which stirs/ the air every time she walks into the room.” (Oct.)

The eight sequences of Tost's sophomore effort are brimming with ambition and, with unusual maturity for an emerging poet, they grapple with looming questions of form, perception and the role of poetry. Whitman Award–winner Tost (Invisible Bride) shares with Charles Olson (whose work casts a formidable shadow over this collection) the desire to use the poem as a place of experiment, as a place to enact rather than describe. Whether this is done through investigations into representing an authentic self (“By over-quoting my sources I have revealed only myself.”) or through similarly reflexive aphoristic quips (“A dying form knows/ that not everything translucent/ is transcendent.”), Tost's work synthesizes 20th-century avant-garde strategies, from objectivist and Black Mountain poetics through language writing and conceptual poetry, with nods to Emerson and deconstruction. Lines and sentences comment on their own creation (“The problem with syntax, the problem with giving, she stood on one foot, and imagined a future.”). The standout pieces here are the musically infused “World Jelly” and the 35-page title poem, which is an abecedarian orchestration of sentences by turns humorous, poignant and cerebral. This challenging book won't be for everyone, but it is likely to take the tops of more than a few heads off. (Oct.)

Wild with righteous anger and dreamlike invention that can border on randomness, the prolific Dubie maintains his neo-Surrealist niche with this 25th book. Many of the poems protest, and parody, the violence in Iraq; others search (or perhaps parody) a multicultural panoply of religions for a godhead in which to believe. The first long sequence juxtaposes the “Black Madonna” (a Catholic icon from Poland) with the “labyrinths” of Egyptian tombs where “the high priest, Mythic Destraktus, is now drinking/ the pod-water of immortality again.” A later lyric, as angry as it is absurd, concludes with a view of dead children “washed/ of the blood/ of baby Jesus, naked, on pine tables with kerosene.” William Blake, UFO cults and Queen “Elizabeth with her Privy Council” also put in appearances, as fast-moving free verse lines and broken-up stanzas help Dubie (Groom Falconer) seek a language that can include all he feels. At best, Dubie achieves a desert equivalent of the backwoods dream-vision poetry of Frank Stanford. Often, though, the lines seem rushed and sloppy, the poet inattentive to how he sounds—if only because, overwhelmed by vivid ideas, he finds himself in quite a hurry to record each vision before its successor arrives. (Oct.)

Stefans (Fashionable Nose) remains the most radically experimental of poets who began publishing in the late 1990s, a fact these seven beautiful new longer works affirm. Most immediately arresting is the title piece, set in three sections of 12 blocks of justified text. As the reader proceeds from block to block, an aching first-person address repeats almost verbatim, but with subtle—and sometimes not so subtle, and often very funny—homophonic or semantic substitutions, which then alter the unfolding story's course precipitously. “Where Stones Gather” is a play featuring a character named Kate Valk (who was played in a New York production by acclaimed New York theater actress Kate Valk), who is directed to nod into a telephone repeatedly. “Sehnsucht” consists, at least partially, of blenderized reconfigurings of Stefans's own early poems, and promises to “disinte/ grate you with/ a ray-gun, or/ Reaganomics.” “Two Introductory Essays” enumerate on the techniques of electronic writing (of which Stefans is at the forefront). Stefans works almost feverishly to fulfill Pound's dictum to “make it new,” and sees clearly that satire, even of poetic forms themselves, “is the preserver much more than the destroyer—a list of the dotted lines you've not yet signed.” (Sept.)

Staples's sophomore collection is informed in equal measure by traditional English balladry and post-modern literature. Her taut lyrics reimagine the English language, pulling multiple meanings out of word-sounds, à la Paul Muldoon at his most nonsensical: “I wracked my refrain, that blousy souse.// I was bard. I was crazed.// I was dog girl's shame.// So, I culled my maim.” Throughout these lyrics, prose poems and language sprays, Staples tempers her avant-garde tendencies with a folksy sentimentality. Though every commonplace trope and cliché is worried, torqued and tweaked—“damsel in undress,” “I feels sad tonight,” “I wore my best address”—the everyday matters of housekeeping, childbirth, marriage, sex and death are ever present. Occasionally the whimsy feels forced (“an uber tuber super dooper doplar radar”) but in her finer moments, Staples's poems can be truly singular: “leaves at full-tilt trillingly / a tremble is a hymn / 'I' a humble thrum's fable.” (Sept.)

Strand's 1980 Selected Poems has probably long had a home on most contemporary poetry readers' shelves. That book proclaimed Strand's status as a major poet writing in a sometimes surreal, humorous, oracular mode: “If a man gives up poetry for power/ he shall have lots of power.” This new volume extends that book to encompass the intervening two and a half decades and four collections of poems. From youthful masterpieces like the famous “Keeping Things Whole” (“In a field/ I am the absence/ of field”) through the haunting middle work of Darker (“The future is not what it used to be./ The graves are ready. The dead/ shall inherit the dead”) up to the self-conscious vignettes of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Blizzard of One (“It was clear when I left the party/ That though I was over eighty I still had/ A beautiful body”) and last year's Man and Camel (“The wonder of their singing,/ its elusive blend of man and camel, seemed/ an ideal image for all uncommon couples”), this important book offers the first panoramic view of the ongoing career of a poet who has mattered deeply to poets and readers alike. Strand's is one of the contemporary voices that will not fade. (Sept.)

Cabot's cute third crime fest featuring Heather Wells, teen pop sensation turned 20-something college student (last seen in 2006's Size 14 Is Not Fat Either), tackles the recent graduate student union controversy at NYU-like New York College head-on. Heather is paying her tuition by working at the college's Fischer Hall, a residence hall nicknamed “Death Dorm” after several recent murders. She's also semisecretly dating Tad Tocco, her remedial math prof, while pining for her neighbor and true love, Cooper, a PI who's not happy about Tad but has difficulty expressing his feelings. When Fisher Hall's interim director, Dr. Owen Veatch, is murdered, Sebastian Blumenthal, a Graduate Student Collective protest leader, becomes the prime suspect. A tip that Blumenthal is innocent leads Heather into some tight spots. Thankfully, Tad has coaxed her into working out occasionally, and she's more than able to squirm out of trouble while never losing that perky princess Cabot vibe that keeps fans coming back for more. (Dec.)

Cops, criminals and neglected families collide with disastrous results in Edgar-winner Schwegel's intense third novel (after 2006's Probable Cause). Chicago PD detective Craig McHugh is deep into an undercover investigation of a deadly batch of heroin allegedly being peddled by the Fuxi Spiders, a powerful Chinese gang. Hoping to gain their trust, Craig burns through his department allowance and his own funds playing at a Fuxi card game. Meanwhile, Craig's sullen teenage daughter, Ivy, is dragged home from a party by his police colleagues after being caught with ecstasy. Unaware of her husband's undercover assignment, Craig's wife, Leslie, is convinced he's having an affair, and she soon begins flirting with Ivy's handsome jazz-playing boyfriend. As Craig's work life spills into his personal one, his family must come together to stay alive. The well-placed action scenes are brutal enough to resonate, but the violence is never gratuitous. This pitch-perfect portrait of a family in crisis reinforces Schwegel's position as one of today's top authors of hard-boiled police procedurals. Author tour. (Nov.)

No expletives have in fact been deleted from this nose-thumbing anthology of original stories (and a single reprint, Laura Lippman's mildly profane but clever “A Good **** Spoiled”). Jordan's selections prove beyond a doubt that expletives are a guarantee of neither success nor failure. Standouts include Ken Bruen's “Spit,” which proves that his flair for language is undiminished by copious profanity; Olen Steinhauer's grim “Hungarian Lessons”; Libby Fischer Hellmann's “The Jade Elephant,” a clever twist on a redemption tale; and Russel D. McLean's awesomely dark “Pedro Paul.” Unfortunately, they're overshadowed by disappointments like Nathan Singer's incoherent “The Killer Whispers and Prays... Or Like a Sledgehammer to a Ribcage” and Kevin Wignall's unconvincing “The Preacher.” The shock value of the language is minimal and the repetition monotonous, and somehow not a single entry manages to be both erotic and explicit. As a tribute to that most banned of all English words, this volume merits only a half-hearted (if not one-fingered) salute. (Nov.)

Bringing 1990s Communist China alive, Qiu's masterful fifth Inspector Chen mystery (after 2006's A Case of Two Cities) finds Shanghai terrorized by its first-ever serial killer. The murderer dresses his victims' corpses in fancy red mandarin dresses before leaving them in public places. Insp. Chen Cao of the Shanghai Police Department has taken a step back from his professional life to pursue an advanced literature course instead of investigating a politically sensitive corruption case, but now he must return to active duty and help in the manhunt. He learns that the symbolic garb may be connected to the corruption scandal, but not before a young female officer falls prey. The solution may strike some as a little pat, but the first-rate characterizations and elegant portrait of a society attempting to move from rigid Maoist ideologies to an accommodation with capitalism will keep readers engaged and eager for more. (Nov.)

Neither very mysterious nor set in the Klondike, Canadian author Rowse's debut drowns out its straightforward whodunit plot with somewhat awkward period detail. John Lansdowne Grenville, an English nobleman's fourth son, sought his fortune in the New World, but came up bust after a stint in the Yukon gold fields. Later, in Vancouver in 1899, Grenville runs into his former partner, Sam Scott, who convinces him to sign on as a guard for a silk train, a high-speed train that rushes raw silk shipped from the Orient to Vancouver onto the East Coast. When a body is found near the train, Scott is arrested for murder. Grenville declares himself a detective and sets about attempting to clear his friend's name, taking on young errand boy Trent Davis and bored society girl Emily Turner as sidekicks. Perhaps the proposed series will flesh out the characters and setting, but Rowse does little more than set the stage in this unprepossessing kickoff. (Nov.)

The12th Charlie Moon mystery (after 2006's Stone Butterfly) from world-class storyteller Doss has more twists and turns than the road to Charlie's acerbic Aunt Daisy's. The ratings for Colorado's most famous TV psychic, Cassandra Spencer, go through the roof when she describes a truck-stop murder as it takes place, but she fails to predict the horrific death of her newly wed eldest sister, Astrid, apparently mauled by a wild animal. Rancher Charlie Moon, a Ute tribal investigator, and his best friend, Granite Creek police chief Scott Parris, team up with Aunt Daisy and her connections in the spirit world to search for an inhumane—and possibly inhuman—killer, while Cassandra and her remaining sister, Beatrice, vie for the hand of Astrid's widower, who has secrets of his own. Doss's narrative and chatty asides are finely cut gems. This latest Colorado mystery leaves no doubt that Doss has carved out his own niche. (Nov.)

When Meg, deputy sheriff Claire Watkins's 15-year-old daughter, doesn't come home from a Halloween party hosted by close friend Krista Jorgenson at the start of Logue's harrowing fifth mystery set in Pepin County, Wis. (after 2005's Poison Heart), Claire fears the worst. Early the next morning, Claire discovers Krista, still wearing her Halloween costume, lying dead at the foot of a high limestone ledge called Maiden Rock. Two hours later, Claire and Meg, who had spent the night making out with a boy in his car, have a tearful reunion. After Meg learns of Krista's apparent suicide, she blames herself because the two had had a falling out at the party. But when meth turns up in Krista's bloodstream and a woman manufacturing meth in her trailer dies in an explosive fire, it becomes clear there's a serious drug problem among the community's young people. With minimal detail, limited characterization and few plot twists, this cautionary tale may be too straightforward for many mystery readers. (Nov.)

Canadian author Gray (The Fiend in Human) joins the growing ranks of novelists using Edgar Allan Poe as a fictional protagonist, but despite flashes of brilliance—especially in the portrayal of the corrupt Philadelphia of the period—the book falls short of the standard set, for example, by Louis Bayard's The Pale Blue Eye (2006). The first-person narrative of Baltimore doctor William Chivers, a childhood friend of Poe, alternates with the third-person account of Irish rabble-rouser Finn Devlin. Dr. Chivers, who attends the famous author after his collapse in 1849 that in real life led to his demise, agrees to help Poe evade his enemies by colluding in a scheme to fake his death. The plot thickens after Devlin slaughters Charles Dickens's U.S. publisher in a manner reminiscent of one of Poe's tales and later kidnaps Dickens, who's on tour in America. Poe fans may find his prolonged absence from the action not compensated for by the extended portrayal of the tormented Chivers. Still, Gray does a fine job of evoking his mid–19th-century milieu. (Nov.)

Coe follows the Winds of the Forelands series (Weavers of War, etc.) with this absorbing trilogy opener set across the sea in the Southlands, where a mysterious plague is heightening tensions among three groups: the Qirsi, who wield life-draining magic; the Mettai, who cast spells with blood and earth; and the nonmagical Eandi. Decades earlier, the plague destroyed the Mettai villagers of Sentaya, leaving only young Lici alive. No one in Lici's adopted village of Kirayde realizes the depth of her mental scars until she disappears 64 years to the day after her arrival, intending to use blood magic to punish the Qirsi she feels were responsible for the plague. Fans will cheer on Forelands series hero Grinsa, a powerful but pacifist Qirsi, who ties the two series together as he strives to understand Lici's motivation and aims to find a peaceful resolution to the escalating Qirsi-Eandi strife that follows in her wake. (Dec.)

Lansdale's The Nightrunners (1987), the centerpiece of this chilling collection, set new standards for the depiction of graphic violence and is probably the best novel of its type between Psycho and The Silence of the Lambs. Monty Jones, the very model of the modern sensitive male, is badly shaken after the gang-rape of his wife, Becky. Having left their home in Galveston, Tex., the couple hope to restore their damaged relationship at a friend's country cabin, but unbeknownst to them, Becky's assailants are coming back to finish what they started. This upsetting look at the human capacity for evil breaks with crime novel conventions when a supernatural element enters the story in the form of the grotesque deity known as the God of All Things Sharp. Twenty years later, The Nightrunners retains its ability to awe and to horrify. Six short stories that grew out of the novel, one previously unpublished, round out the volume. Glenn Chadbourne provides suitably disturbing illustrations. (Nov.)

The third novel in Hunter's postapocalyptic fantasy series (after 2006's Seraphs) finds neomage Thorn St. Croix working as a jeweler and town mage in the rural Appalachian town of Mineral City, Carolina. Then her former home, the New Orleans Enclave, sends arrogant metal mage Cheran Jones, ostensibly to instruct her in “media relations” as she is “woefully lacking” in diplomatic knowledge and abilities. When the deadly succubus queen's war on Mineral City provides enough death energy for the powerful Dragon to escape its prison between the planes of reality, Thorn is pulled between the demands of the ultra-lawful Administration of the ArchSeraph and its rivals, the Earth Invasion Heretics, who claim to know the origins of seraphs and demons and the whereabouts of Thorn's missing twin, Rose. Hunter's world continues to expand in this highly original fantasy with lively characters where nothing can ever be taken for granted. (Nov.)

In Murphy's exciting series opener, Alban Korund, a winged, shape-shifting gargoyle, is framed as a murderer. He begs legal help from Margrit Knight, a human lawyer who at first thinks he's your average Central Park stalker. Margrit soon becomes attracted to her stony client and fascinated by the shadowy world of the Old Races, who live secretly among humans. As she struggles to prove Alban's innocence, Margrit herself battles a dangerous dragonlord, other gargoyles and a powerful vampire, as well as taking on the case of a selkie mother and baby living in a building destined for demolition. Margrit must also decide what to do about her jealous on-again/off-again boyfriend, Tony, a homicide detective who dislikes Alban and thinks he's guilty. Realist, feminist Margrit makes for a deeply compelling heroine as she struggles to sort out the sudden upheaval in her professional and romantic lives. Murphy (Coyote Dreams) has created a refreshing addition to the urban fantasy landscape. (Nov.)

Despite its provocative title and aggressive opening vignette, sex and sexuality fade into the background of Berman's quiet compilation of fantasy tales. The modern urban and suburban settings that dominate the anthology may be partly responsible. Two of the 22 stories feature New York backdrops, and a number of others occur in unnamed cities that might as well be the Big Apple. Most tales also feature classic Shakespearean or Celtic-inspired faerie folk, though Eugie Foster's “Year of the Fox” and Craig Laurance Gidney's “A Bird of Ice” draw effectively on Asian motifs, and Christopher Barzak nods toward Egyptian myth in “Isis in Darkness.” The tone is mostly light, often with more than a touch of ironic humor, as in Elspeth Potter's “Detox”; hauntingly tragic romances from Kenneth D. Woods (“The Kings of Oak and Holly”) and Laurie J. Marks (“How the Ocean Loved Margie”) provide some ballast. Neither pornographic (despite a handful of explicit sex scenes) nor militant, this anthology is wholly readable and likely to engage general readers as well as its target audience. (Nov.)

The tense third Cassandra Kresnov novel (after Breakaway) further develops the series' intriguing far-future setting. Cdr. Cassandra “Sandy” Kresnov, a “GI” genetically engineered to be a crack soldier and spy, is now second-in-command of the Callayan Defense Force: a tough job, especially now that President Neiland has nearly succeeded in making Callay's capital city, Tanusha, into the new Federation capital. Earth doesn't look kindly on this upstart world taking away its last claim to fame, and loyalists from the Federation Fleet have occupied Callay's space stations. With dock workers refusing to service Fleet ships and civil war threatening to break out, the last thing Sandy needs is to be targeted for death. She suspects someone has infiltrated Callay's security forces, but even as she struggles to uncover the spy, a rogue GI similar enough to be her sister appears, testing Sandy to the limit. Robert Ludlum meets Elizabeth Moon in this classic military SF adventure, buoyed by Shepherd's knack for balancing crisp action with characters you can really root for. (Nov.)

McDonnell's promising fantasy debut portrays a land inhabited by the black-skinned Theseni, brown Ibeni and tan Doreni. Peace among the three tribes is disrupted by the paler-skinned, domineering Angleni as well as inner clan conflicts. Loic tyu Taer, the son of the wealthy headman of the Doreni Pagatsu clan, falls in love at first sight with Satha tya Monua, the impoverished but proud daughter of his father's old Theseni friend. Loic requests an immediate marriage and Satha's parents agree, but for Satha, passion takes longer to ignite, and Loic's father's jealous third wife plots to destroy their happiness. The two must reaffirm their faith in each other and the Creator God to find their way through their troubles. McConnell's language is delicate almost to a fault, even as he describes betrayal, rape and slavery, while his elegant, meticulous world-building shimmers with the ambience of an old-world folktale. (Oct.)

One of a handful of novels he was working on at the time of his death, this fine, perhaps final, work from hard-boiled fiction icon Spillane (1918–2006) was prepared for publication by Hard Case vet Max Allan Collins. In it, NYPD detective Jack Stang receives word that his old fiancée, Bettie, who supposedly died in a kidnapping-gone-wrong 20 years earlier, is still alive and residing in a small Florida coastal community. The good news is countered by the fact that, in the car crash that was supposed to have killed her, she lost her eyesight and all her memories. Even worse, the men who had her kidnapped in the first place have perfectly good memories and are still looking for her—and willing to kill for the information locked in her damaged brain. This is a more sentimental Spillane than readers might expect, but the women are still “dolls,” the bad guys are still louses, and the hero still packs a helluva punch (along with his trusty .45, natch). Spillane always said he wrote for his fans, not for the critics, but both should be pleased with this late addition to the writer's canon. (Nov.)

After centuries of protecting lost souls, modern-day earthbound angel Gawan of Conwyk is a month shy of retirement (into blessed mortality) when a new case drops in his lap—or, more specifically, onto the road to his ancient, spirit-inhabited castle. When he finds Ellie stumbling in the rain, she doesn't know who she is or how she got to the north of England; as it turns out, she's more dead than alive, a corporeal projection “fluttering about betwint the living and the unliving.” To help her, Gawan's got to track down her real body and solve the mystery of her near death, but he knows that once he saves her life, she'll forget him—a matter complicated by Gawan's discovery that she's his one-and-only soul mate. Miles's sophomore novel (following Spirited Away) is another sweet paranormal featuring a sparkling lead couple and a supporting cast of ghostly charmers. Gawan is brawny, charismatic and funny; Ellie is a worthy, witty damsel in distress, and the growth of their relationship (despite the foreordained outcome) is plausible and endearing. A welcome break from vamps, demons and werewolves, this adorable, otherworldly romp is sure to leave readers feeling warm and fuzzy. (Nov.)

Part human, part Shalott demon—the feared assassins of the demon race—bronze-skinned, golden-eyed beauty Lady Shay has blood that's a potent mix of vampire aphrodisiac and cure-all. Bound by a curse to the guardianship of a greedy troll, Shay soon finds herself being sold to a stunning, silver-haired vampire whose life she saved only weeks earlier. Named Viper, the vampire is determined to win her for his own—without the aid of enchantment—but Shay finds it hard to believe that Viper wants anything but to drain her dry. Fueling Shay's mistrust is the memory of her father, lost to a vampire clan when Shay was just a child. As it turns out, that same clan is now in pursuit of Shay, planning to use her blood to cure their leader's mysterious illness. Viper and Shay spend most of the book outrunning the clan's dark forces—all manner of monsters and hellhounds—occasionally losing themselves in their spiraling emotions. Though black satin sheets, gothic candelabra and the demonic beasts feel stock, the second book in Ivy's Guardians of Eternity trilogy delivers plenty of atmosphere and hot-blooded seduction. (Nov.)

In Drake's ponderous historical, Gwyneth Maclead is a native Scot who's become maid and confidante to Mary, queen of Scots. When the Catholic Mary, barely 19 and newly widowed, leaves France to claim her Scottish title, loyal, forthright, knowledgeable Gwyneth is at her side to teach her about the country she left as a child. Accompanying them is Rowan Graham, Highland laird and valued friend of Mary's half-brother James Stewart. Gwyneth immediately distrusts the handsome, powerful noble who seems both annoyed and amused with her, but the queen forces their collusion when she sends them to England on a mission to persuade Queen Elizabeth, Mary's Protestant cousin, to name Mary as her heir. When Gwyneth and Rowan fall for each other, it sets off a series of unforeseen political events, culminating in a power grab by Mary's ambitious new husband, the branding of Rowan and James as traitors and Gwyneth's abduction. Attempting to cover entirely too much of Elizabethan religious and political maneuverings, Drake (aka Heather Graham) ends up with wooden characters and an unfocused plot. (Nov.)

Evans (The Christmas Box) returns with narrator Nathan Hurst, a frequently traveling, Tourette's-suffering security chief for a retail chain. When Nathan gets snowed in at the Denver airport at Thanksgiving, he offers half his hotel suite to a stranded needy family: recently divorced single mom Addison (a massage therapist), and her two children, Lizzy and Collin. Collin, who has leukemia, cures Nathan's Tourette's with his gift of healing touch. Exercising his secret gift makes Collin sicker, though, and as news of his healing powers eventually leaks out, leading to a demand for his services, his condition worsens. Nathan, meanwhile, feels emboldedened by his cure, and moves to address childhood woes when visiting his nursing home–bound mother. The tightly honed narrative, brimming with good intention to find courage in shared suffering, soon brings everyone together. (Oct.)

Brockmann's 12th Troubleshooter thriller (after Force of Nature) opens with gay FBI agent Jules Cassidy's marriage proposal to gorgeous A-List movie star Robin Chadwick (recently out of the closet and out of rehab). The two men's Boston wedding shower is crashed by Globe reporter Will Schroeder, and the tape of Will's revealing interview with Robin ends up on the Net. Jules's angry friends from high-tech private security firm Troubleshooter Inc. move to shut him down. With the wedding set for December 15, Jules is sent to Kandahar (ruining Thanksgiving), and an insane celebrity stalker believes Jules, Robin and their mutual ex, Adam, are robots who need to be eliminated. A winning, innovative runup to Christmas from bestselling Brockmann. (Oct.)

With her truculent family gathered at her stately Charleston mansion for Christmas, 93-year-old matriarch Theodora is having a hard time tolerating the lot of them. Theodora hankers for her 1920s childhood, when Pearl, the family's stern black maid, enforced strict houshold discipline and took no guff while working hard at Christmas, all the while singing gospel favorites such as “Come en Go wid Me.” When Theodora's usual maid is called away, Pearl herself (as a ghost) blows in, ready to set the house in order, She unearths the antique crèche and other Christmas heirlooms long buried, and altering the family's general bad temper. Frank (The Land of Mango Sunsets) includes homegrown recipes that further sweeten this Lowcountry holiday confection. (Nov.)