Fiction Reviews: Week of 11/19/2007

In the second novel by British author Haig (The Dead Fathers Club), morality is left to the dogs. Prince, the Labrador narrator, lives by the creed, “Duty over all.” At the beginning of the novel, it seems that Prince has failed all of humanity and disgraced Labs for all time, and, as he is about to be put down, he tells his own tragic story. Although he clings to the teachings of his mentor, Henry, a former police dog, Prince can't keep his married master Adam's eye from roving toward Emily, the new gal in town who just happens to be married to old schoolmate Simon. Further puzzling Prince are the aromas of fear and desire that Adam's wife, Katie, exudes whenever Simon comes around. And he certainly can't seem to sniff out a fix for the teenage woes encountered by Adam and Katie's two kids. With dogged determination, he sacrifices his own pleasure to protect and serve the family that can neither understand his entreaties nor appreciate his level of commitment. Although a little heavy-handed and arguably gimmicky, readers can't help feeling bad for Prince, a good dog just trying to do the right thing. (Mar.)

Based on her semi-autobiographical one-woman show of the same title, Larkin's debut novel takes a comedic but heartfelt look at issues of identity, heredity and self-acceptance. Pippa Dunn—British, 28 and living with her sister in West London—loves her adoptive parents dearly, but has rarely felt at home with the primness and very British emotional restraint with which she was raised, as her funny, anxious narration demonstrates. When Pippa discovers that her birth mother, Billie, is an American (from Georgia, no less) she feels compelled to travel to the U.S. to meet the “the sweet, understanding, empathetic ethereal mother” she's always imagined. Not surprisingly, both Billie and Pippa's birth father, Walt, fail to live up to her imagined ideals. Although Larkin's premise leads to worthy reflections in Pippa's winning voice, awkward attempts to marry the birth-mother search to a conventional romantic comedy plot are less successful. Through a midbook e-mail exchange, we learn that Pippa met her soul mate, Nick (now a banker in Singapore), in a London park seven years before, but wasn't ready to feel love. Nick the banker-cum-painter is far too tortured and emotive to be believable, and the ensuing romantic revelations are predictable. Pippa, however, is a complex, compelling character—truly an amalgam of her heredity and her environment—and readers will root for her as she uncovers her roots and finds herself. (Mar.)

A native of Knockemstiff, Ohio, Pollock delivers poignant and raunchy accounts of his hometown's sad and stagnant residents in his debut story collection that may remind readers of its thematic grand-daddy, Winesburg, Ohio. The works span 50 years of violence, failure, lust and depravity, featuring characters like Jake, an abandoned hermit who dodges the draft during WWII, lives in a bus and discovers two young siblings committing incest on the bank of a creek, and Bobby, a recovering alcoholic who must face the imminent death of his abusive father. The language and imagery of the novel are shockingly direct in detailing the pitiful lives of drug abusers, perverts and a forgotten population that just isn't “much welcome nowhere in the world.” Many of the characters appear in more than one story, providing a gritty depth to the whole, but the character that stands out the most is the town, as dismal and hopeless as the locals. Pollock is intimate with the grimy aspects of a small town (especially one named after a fistfight) full of poor, uneducated people without futures or knowledge of any other way to live. The most startling thing about these stories is they have an aura of truth. (Mar.)

In her beguiling debut, Boaz ambitiously plays three time periods against one another to form a complex portrait of a brave, iconoclastic woman. In the summer of 1924, young, near-deaf, London-educated painter Doll follows British social philosopher Abe Bronstone and his German divorcée wife, Vera, to Taos, N.Mex.; there, the three plan to make a “fresh start” away from a “corrupt and rotten” Europe befouled by WWI. Flashbacks revisit Doll's childhood as the daughter of Victorian aristocrats and her student years at Slade School of Fine Art; the nartative jumps ahead to 1963 to relate the “folly of an old woman” in Doll's very physical affair with a much, much younger local man who may be mestizo. The forceful juxtaposition of the repressed, idealistic doings of 1924 against the totally erotic 1963; a spare lyricism that makes the sparse New Mexico landscape gloriously vivid; and page-turning suspense in the charged Doll-Abe-Vera triangle (centering on the attraction between Doll and Abe) mark this as an accomplished first novel by a gifted stylist. The novel is very loosely based on the life of painter Dorothy Brett (1882–1977), who followed D.H. Lawrence and his wife to Taos in 1924, and Abe's monologues sometimes spiral amusingly into Lawrence-like preachments. In the touching denouement, Boaz brings the three phases of Doll's life together with subtlety and warm humor. (Mar.)

Witchel (Me Times Three) returns to the romances of Manhattan's upper echelons in this Gawkeriffic potboiler. Ponce Porter passed up college and left Harding, S.C., to try New York as an aspiring young model and quickly ended up married to Lee Morris, a very wealthy TV producer almost 40 years her senior. Childless by choice and bored, Ponce enrolled in NYU and then law school, eventually settling at a prestigious firm. Cut to the now-widowed Ponce—now 42 and dubbed “The Spare Wife” for her ability to gracefully attend social functions with any and all of upper New York—locking lips in a Chicago hotel with the happily married celebrity fertility doctor Neil Grossman, where she's spotted by Babette Steele, an aspiring 25-year-old assistant at the prestigious Boothby's Review. Babette knows she has the breakout story of her career, but Ponce and her delightfully crafted cast of friends aim to spoil Babette's feast. Witchel's drama-filled portrait of 40-something socialites in the Paris Hilton era has scandalous affairs and social to-dos to spare. It's extravagant and shallow, closely observed and entertaining. (Feb.)

A troika of African-American misfits—father, son and grandson—fuel Woodward's raw, eclectic first novel. Teo Toak, one of eight brothers, is a crooked deal maker in fictional Johnsonville, Fla. An unscrupulous bail bondsman by day, Teo moonlights as a slumlord while keeping close tabs on his errant embarrassment of a son, Feddy, a drifter who lives on one of his father's properties and dates Sharon, a white unlicensed day-care provider with a penchant for black men. Feddy's 22-year-old son, Jesmond, repossesses rental furniture with an iron fist and finds himself in a compromising situation with sexy Peaches Richmond, a wanton woman married to a malevolent military policeman nicknamed “Special Ed.” Joining them is Medgar Coots, Feddy's psychiatrist, anxious to make a shady cemetery land deal with Teo, and Bayonne, the local pastor's gay son who becomes implicated in the death of “Big Boy,” his 500-pound, HIV-positive partner. An act of God forces the whole sordid cast to sort out their own personal demons. As the plot sputters on, so do the crude vernacular and raw imagery, and Woodward, a Harvard and Mayo Clinic–trained physician, ultimately leans too heavily on shock tactics instead of solid storytelling and plot development. (Feb.)

The irresistible antihero of this outstanding thriller from bestseller Parker (Laguna Heat) calls herself Allison Murrieta and claims to be a descendant of Joaquin Murrieta, a 19th-century figure who looms large in California folklore (he was either a ruthless robber and killer or an Old West vigilante and Robin Hood). By day, Allison is Suzanne Jones, an eighth-grade history teacher with three sons in Los Angeles; by night, she dons a mask, straps on her derringer and steals from the greedy. Beloved by the media, she never uses the gun; her victims are never sympathetic; and she gives part of her loot to charity. But while stealing diamonds belonging to a master criminal known as the Bull, she witnesses a gangland-style bloodbath at the hands of Lupercio, a ruthless assassin working for the Bull. As she's leaving the scene of the crime, L.A. sheriff's deputy Charles Hood stops her, and that's when the plot gets complicated. The Bull wants his diamonds back. Lupercio knows Murrieta/Jones took them. Hood wants Jones to identify Lupercio. And the public wants to know who Murrieta really is. This tour de force of plotting and characterization may well be Parker's best book. Author tour. (Feb.)

In 24 brief, impressionistic tales, Murphy (Signed, Mata Hari) delivers an emotional wallop. The title story concerns a widow and her young son attempting to carry on after the suicide of the husband and father—and finding a watchful bear's presence near their house more protective than menacing. “Pan, pan, pan,” one of the longer stories, is named for the urgency call emitted by a plane that crashes near a lake where a family of three along with the brother-in-law is vacationing. The narrator is the nervous wife, whose small son is enthralled both by the overbearing brother-in-law and by details of the plane crash. Some of the stories capture a vernacular quirkiness, such as “Lester,” a stream-of-consciousness narrative by an angry urban dweller who's bitter that he'll never get to see the palm trees of Barbados, or the sky's constellations (the “Big Zipper,” he calls one of them), for that matter. Similarly, in “The Beauty in Bulls,” two men carry on a perpendicular conversation, one about bullfighting, the other about the rapturous body of a woman, that eventually dovetails into a testosterone-charged assertion of power and might. Murphy's tight, sharp sense of composition and tone renders these short takes more than mere formal exercises. (Feb.)

Gilb's new novel is hilarious and thought provoking as it traces the bigotry and alienation among the wildly varied cast of characters living in and around the Los Flores apartment building in an unnamed city that may remind some readers of Los Angeles. When narrator Sonny Bravo's mother, Silvia, marries Cloyd Longpre, the tightfisted landlord of Los Flores, Sonny is thrust into a racially charged environment on the brink of exploding. Sonny is an isolated teen whose only friends are the tragically dorky duo, Mike and Joe, from his new high school. He finds comfort in the menial chores Cloyd assigns him, as they give him a chance to escape the stifling apartment and to interact with the other residents, including Mr. Pinkston (known as “Pink”), an African-American albino who sells vintage cars to black customers in front of the building; Cindy, a broke and married teenage dropout looking for some fun; and Nica, a teen who is locked inside her apartment all day taking care of her brother. Racial tension boils over in the world outside Los Flores as Sonny navigates Cindy's advances and falls for Nica. Gilb (Gritos; Woodcuts of Women) offers sharp commentary via his quick-witted narrator, and the reader feels Sonny's disaffection as his world dissolves into chaos. (Feb.)

Set in Victorian London, this superb debut from British author Barnes raises the bar for historical thrillers, starting with its curious opening line: “Be warned. This book has no literary merit whatsoever.” A page-turner, it's full of peculiar characters, notably Edward Moon, a highly unorthodox detective, and Moon's bizarre sidekick, known only as the Somnambulist. Moon, “a conjuror by profession” whose act has fallen on hard times, has cracked some of the city's most notorious murders. Now, he's leading the investigation into a shadowy religious group aiming to overtake London and do away with its oppressive, bourgeois tendencies. Moon is a remarkable invention, a master of logic and harborer of all sorts of unnatural habits and mannerisms. The Somnambulist—a giant, milk-swigging mute—doesn't appear to be human at all, yet serves as Moon's moral as well as intellectual compass. Together, they wend their way through a London rich in period detail. Barnes saves his best surprise for the story's homestretch, when he reveals the identity of his narrator, who's been cleverly pulling strings since the opening. (Feb.)

Québécois novelist Trudel convincingly conjures the bitterly sad imagination of a 17-year-old boy dying of hip-bone sarcoma. Lying in a Canadian hospital near the Missiquoi Bay, Frédéric has “a kind of dark faith” in himself. Bored and often in terrible pain in his “bachelor pad,” he tools around the corridors in his wheelchair with other young patients and has faith in what he knows, which is that he is neither good nor bad, and that his soul will die with him. He fantasizes about his well-meaning but ineffectual psychotherapist, Maryse Bouthillier. With a 15-year-old leukemia patient he meets, Marilou Desjardins, he writes poetry and imagines sharing love, marriage and children. In his heart, Frédéric is furious at his bad luck and angry at such visitors as the Abbé Guillemette, who lectures about belief and sin when Frédéric cannot see any use for hope or penance, perversely signing his poetry after an 18th-century Italian poet, Metastasio. Frédéric refuses to entertain self-pity, and his voice is immediate, winning and utterly believable until the end. (Feb.)

After the acclaimed Gate of the Sun, Khoury returns with the spellbinding “confession” of Beirut criminal Daniel Jal'u, aka Yalo, who is picked up by the cops for rape, robbery and suspicion of arms smuggling. Under torture and the threat of more torture, Yalo writes numerous confessions, but seems unable to grasp the whole of his life, producing instead a series of conflicting sequences and inexplicable omissions. Brought up by his grandfather Ephraim, a half-mad Syriac priest, and his mother, Gaby, Yalo joins the army in 1979 and fights in the horrific Lebanese civil wars already under way. Deserting 10 years later, Yalo, after a series of adventures, ends up working as a guard for a rich lawyer whose villa is close to a wooded lovers lane; he progresses from voyeurism to robbing and, in some cases, rape. In so doing he meets Shirin, who will change his life—partially by turning him in. Khoury refuses to give the reader an easy position from which to judge Yalo—either as a poor soul or a serial rapist, criminal or victim of torture—or from which to judge Lebanon's tragic and violent fate. His novel is a dense and stunning work of art. (Feb.)

In this complex, at times slow-moving crime thriller from Norwegian author Holt, her second to appear in the U.S. (after What Is Mine), Oslo husband-and-wife detectives Adam Stubo and Johanne Vik go up against an ingenious serial killer whose first victims are a talk show host whose tongue is cut out and a female politician crucified with a copy of the Koran placed in a delicate position. Despite the dramatic nature of the murders, Stubo finds few leads. It's not until Vik, trained as a profiler, uncovers a vital piece of information about the children of the talk show host that Stubo can begin to make headway. Are the killings random, part of a pattern or personal? As Stubo and Vik painstakingly work to uncover the truth, the author intersperses scenes from the viewpoints of the killer and potential victims. While this approach dilutes some of the suspense, it does mean readers get a rich picture of Norway's politics and culture on their way to a somewhat anticlimactic resolution. (Feb.)

At the start of Shamus-winner Straka's disappointing thriller, a departure from his popular Frank Pavlicek series (Cold Quarry, etc.), former campus security guard Quentin Price is released from an upstate New York prison. New DNA evidence suggests Price is not guilty of the crime for which he was convicted—the rape and murder of college student Gwen Crawford nearly a decade earlier. Now Ruth Crawford, the victim's mother, wants Price's help in tracking down the real culprit. When the New York State attorney general drafts Garnell Harris, a veteran NYPD homicide detective, to take a fresh look at Gwen's murder and its possible links to some recent killings, Price finds himself under pressure to bring the true killer to justice. The underdeveloped plot, an unsurprising resolution and the unconvincing 11th-hour redemption of a particularly nasty character make this one of Straka's lesser efforts. Hopefully, this talented author will return to form with his next book. (Feb.)

In Dudman's slightly creepy first novel (after memoirs Expecting to Fly and Augusta, Gone), a woman still hurt over an unexpected breakup nine months earlier lets her obsession get the better of her. Narrator Virginia is a divorcée who believes she has found the perfect relationship with David, also a divorcée, until he unexpectedly ends it one New Year's Eve. After spotting David at a local specialty food shop (hence the title), Virginia hides in the back of David's Jeep, secretly rides home with him and eventually sneaks around in his house, roaming its rooms and indulging in memories of their relationship. Told in flashbacks, we learn that while she was content with their setup, David's desire to marry Virginia—and her repeated rejection of his proposals—led him to bouts of depression, impotence and the arms of another woman. Virginia is a tough narrator to root for—she frequently comes across as nastily self-involved—but for readers who can get comfortable in Virginia's head, there's a nice payoff at the end. (Feb.)

In this muddled follow-up to 2006's engaging The Assassins Game, Robbins attempts to create suspense by revisiting the multiple attempts made on Fidel Castro's life in the early 1960s. Professor Mikhal Lammeck—an expert on political murder—arrives in Cuba on the eve of the much-rumored U.S.-supported invasion at the Bay of Pigs, but soon finds himself transformed from detached academic into participant. Thrust into this murky world of double-crossings and shadowy government missions, Lammeck becomes privy to a conspiracy involving a former U.S. marine sharpshooter. Robbins has set himself a daunting task in maintaining tension and interest when the reader knows Castro will survive. Unfortunately, the author doesn't manage to overcome the challenges he sets for himself, and his efforts to weave together fictional characters and historical events are heavy-handed at best. (Feb.)

Brown stays on familiar turf—rural Oklahoma—for this contemporary chaste romance, the first of the Broken Roads series. After Dee Hooper's marriage to an upper-crust Pennsylvanian is annulled, she returns to Buckhorn Corner and the embrace of her charmingly eccentric Southern family: feisty grandmother Roxie, unlucky-in-love mother Mimosa, jailed sister Tally and precocious 11-year-old niece Bodine. And awaiting her next door is Jack, Dee's childhood friend, an independently wealthy writer of computer games who likes the simple country life. Everyone but Dee's aware that Jack's always carried a torch for her, and though a couple of obligatory obstacles are placed between them and a rosy resolution, there isn't much in the way of tension. Readers who enjoy wholesome romances will find one here. (Feb.)

At the opening of Krentz's disappointing latest featuring the Arcane Society—a covert organization devoted to paranormal research—costume shop owner Raine Tallentyre hears voices: in her deceased aunt's home in Shelbyville, Wash., she discovers and rescues a potential serial killer victim, and locks in on the disturbed killer's vibes. Raine's aunt also heard voices, but was also known as the town nut; Raine thus hesitates in going public. Meanwhile, Zack Jones is a PI hired by the Arcane Society: he gets a visceral sense of crimes with visions, but tracks Raine because of the secret research her father was doing on a special formula that enhances paranormal powers. Raine, meanwhile, has always believed that her father was killed by a member of the Society—one of Zack's relatives in fact—and is wary of Zack's motives. Krentz, who wrote the Arcane Society novel Second Sight as Amanda Quick, knows how to make sparks fly among the gifted, but this outing feels comparatively flat. The paranormal elements don't coalesce with the boy-meets-girl story. A repetitious dwelling on Raine's past, whereby potential partners were creeped out by her abilities, is a less serious flaw than the way the denouement makes use of them. (Jan.)

Through the 1920s and '30s Russian-Jewish émigré Némirovsky, author of the recently rediscovered and internationally bestselling Suite Française, was a popular and critically acclaimed novelist in her adopted France. These four short early novels reveal her clear-eyed view into the deeply compromised human heart. David Golder, her third novel and the only one in the volume previously available in English, is saturated with the despairing mood of its title character, an embittered Jewish business- and family man in ill health, left after the suicide of his bankrupt partner to question the value of the great petroleum fortune he has amassed. The Courilof Affair is narrated by Léon M., a dying Russian revolutionary: he recounts his relationship with Valerian Courilof, the minister of education in imperial Russia. Léon grew to like the decrepit, politically ruined Courilof, even as he was ordered to kill him. The Ball is a psychologically acute account of the relationship between a narcissistic French mother—married to her former boss, a rich German Jew—and their enraged adolescent daughter, Antoinette; the similarly brief Snow in Autumn is a tender portrait of an old, devoted Russian nanny who cannot adjust to life as an émigré in Paris. These four early works by Némirovsky reveal her impressive range, bitingly exact settings and insight into profoundly flawed and compromised characters. (Jan.)

The centennial of Richard Wright's birth occasions the publication of this still-unfinished crime novel, which Wright was working on when he died in 1960. Ruddy Turner, a black Chicago police officer, is appointed the police chief of a rich Chicago suburb, Brentwood Park, when the current police chief is murdered. As Ruddy settles into his office, a woman is found dead in the Brentwood Park woods, possibly the sixth victim of what we would now call a serial killer. Ruddy's son, Tommy—a brilliant but high-strung sociology student at the University of Chicago who makes Ruddy uneasy because of his difficult temperament—knew one of the murder victims well and has been “studying” Brentwood Park. In an atmosphere of mounting hysteria in town, Ruddy's unconscious cop mind begins to connect Tommy to the murders. Is it due to some Freudian rivalry between the father and the son, or to the facts of the case? The plot elements and dialogue in this draft are crude, and it's hard to say how the book would have been shaped out of its state of flux. A short introduction from Wright's daughter, Julia, speculates provocatively and notes how Wright brings race, class and family dynamics to bear on Ruddy's actions and thoughts, which he does brilliantly. (Jan.)

A man displaced anchors Wodicka's funny, poignant and historically canny debut, previously published in Britain. With the death of his beloved wife, Kitty, 63-year-old Burt Hecker sells the Queens Falls, N.Y., B&B he and his wife ran and heads to Germany to reinvent himself as a medieval re-enactor with a troupe of chanters for the 900th anniversary of the birthday of Hildegard von Bingen. Burt, a dedicated member of the Confraternity of Times Lost Regained, never strays “Out of Period” (OOP), wearing a tunic and drinking homemade mead; derailed emotionally, he is estranged from his two grown children—June, who is on the verge of single motherhood and wants to return home but doesn't know her father has sold the inn, and Tristan, a brilliant Juilliard dropout who moved to Poland to reattach himself to the Lemko roots of his emigrant grandmother and now headlines at a Prague jazz club with a group of folk musicians. With the help of family lawyer Lonna Katsav, Burt attempts a détente with his resentful children. Burt's cutting wit and intelligence comprise the novel's intellectual center, while his unfettered love for Kitty gives it its massive heart. (Jan.)

Ernie Stark, self-confessed “two-bit hustler, con artist, junkie,” rides the razor in this rediscovered early novel from Bunker (1933–2005), who was once on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List, but achieved true cult status playing Mr. Blue in Tarantino's film Reservoir Dogs. Compact, brilliantly detailed, set in the beach community of Oceanview, Calif., in 1962, this effort predates Bunker's sensational fictional debut, No Beast So Fierce (1973). A staccato introductory burst by James Ellroy aptly compares the action to a Gold Medal paperback original of the '50s. As a drug addict, Stark needs to keep clear his supply line from his dealer, Momo Mendoza, even as the brutal cop Patrick Crowley pressures him into setting up Momo. The mute killer Dummy lends some menace, and the beautiful Dorie Williams some allure. Stark thinks that Dorie has about her “something childish and undefiled—or perhaps only half defiled.” The scams, shoot-outs and sweat of desperation come straight from the street in this posthumous wild ride from a modern master of crime fiction. (Jan.)

At the start of this subtle look at the price of the war on terror from Hungarian author Kertész (Liquidation), Antonio Martens, a policeman in an unnamed Latin American country, awaits trial for multiple counts of murder after the regime that employed him was toppled. Martens tells how he was transferred from the criminal investigative branch of the police to the Corps, a security unit, where, unfettered by any meaningful restraints, he pursued the case of Federigo and Enrique Salinas, a father and son who operated the country's leading department store chain and were suspected of plotting treason. Kertész, who won the 2002 Nobel Prize for Literature, charts Martens's incremental descent into barbarism to chilling effect. This relevant and timely political allegory will remind many of J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians. (Jan.)

Emerson (Firetrap) takes a page from James Dickey's Deliverance in this rousing survival yarn that pits a group of mountain bikers against gun-toting, vengeance-obsessed adversaries and the unleashed fury of Mother Nature. Zak Polanski, a 28-year-old firefighter, is looking forward to a long weekend in the wilds of western Washington with his buddies. Their goal to traverse the Cascade Mountains, however, is almost derailed when authorities declare all backwoods areas in the state off limits due to wildfires. Deciding to risk it, the bikers set off into the pristine wilderness only to run into a raucous group of affluent adventurers. Polanski is shocked to find his former girlfriend's fiancé, William “Scooter” Potter III, leading the drunken crew. Equal parts “reckless brats and self-satisfied billionaires,” Potter and his accomplices begin to antagonize Polanski. As tensions rise, so does Polanski's willingness to murder the man who, in his mind, stole away his future wife. While the pacing is consistently pedal-to-the-metal and the intense description of the approaching wildfires memorable, too many two-dimensional characters undermine the thrills. (Jan.)

Odrach's delightfully sardonic novel about the Stalinist occupation of Belarus that began in 1939 is rich with history, horror and comedy. The story unfolds in Pinsk and the villages of the Pinsk Marshes, where peasants who endured czars and Polish conquerors squirm helplessly under the boot of a regime more authoritarian than any they've known. Families are sent to labor camps on trumped-up charges; hapless innocents are tortured and executed without explanation. Ivan Kulik, the headmaster of an elementary school in the Ukrainian-speaking village of Hlaby, is frustrated with farcical Soviet demands, especially that classes be taught in Belorussian (none of the students or teachers speak the language). University-educated Ivan is fluent in Russian but prefers his native tongue, which doesn't help when he becomes infatuated with the beautiful Marusia Bohdanovich, who incompetently affects Russian airs. Potentially deadly trouble looms for Ivan and Marusia after she catches the eye of a sociopathic secret police lieutenant named Sobakin. There's a surplus of tragedy, but Odrach finds amid the havoc an affecting thread of humanity. The novel has been skillfully translated into English by Odrach's daughter. (Jan.)

Ten reflective, connected vignettes set in a San Antonio, Tex., whorehouse comprise the haunting debut by former Texas Observer editor Rips, winner of an Association of Writers and Writing programs AWP Award. The 60-something narrator, Chuy Testimonio de Felíz Pingarrón, is the son of one of the bordello's working girls (now dead). He still lives in the house, and he's plagued by a congenital spinal condition that has left him twisted and in pain. Most days, he sits on the front porch observing the comings and goings of the customers and musing on the various prostitutes. He dwells especially on his favorite, Angelita, “famous for her hands.” The misery he witnesses in the women's lives reflects his own blunted condition. Often Chuy visits with Don Apolo, deformed and immobilized in an iron lung, who was abandoned at the house more than 30 years ago and has lived in a back room since, whose words are sage and saintly. Rosa Milagros, known as the Midwife, runs the whorehouse and commands Chuy's respect because she “takes back a little of the control that the world tries to keep all to itself.” Chuy resists salvation and embraces his sad, sordid life. Unsparing and a little raunchy, the novel bears out the Midwife's aphorism: “Everything that happens in the world sooner or later drags itself into this house.” (Jan.)

Lambert's debut is an elegant three-generation weeper about mothers and daughters and the links that bind and repel them. The narrative unfolds as diarylike entries from each generation: in 1945, new mom Helene leaves her baby daughter in England to be with her husband stationed in India, and falls in love with another man; rebellious Vera, Helene's youngest daughter, embraces the revolutionary zeal of the '60s; and modern Londoner Susie, Vera's oldest daughter, nurses her dying mom and acts as the narrative lynchpin. Each story has its own particular passion and power: Helene's illicit love of a rakish RAF flyer and his betrayal and tragic end and Vera's agonizing pregnancy and her estrangement from her philandering hubby. But it's a grownup Susie taking care of her dying mother that provides the book's most potent wallop. In the end, these separate stories are far greater than their sum: a predictable and throwaway reunion of the generations is both sullen and vacant. Better to savor the individual stories of love, life and choices of three very different women who share a surprisingly similar soul. (Jan.)

Pushcart Prize–nominee Kamata follows an American woman out of her depth in Japan in this thin debut novel. Young South Carolina painter Jill Parker flees to Japan after a breakup in the late '80s, hoping to pursue the life and work of Blondelle Malone, a late–19th-century South Carolina artist who had also ventured to Japan for inspiration. After a stint in Tokyo, and knowing some Japanese, Jill ensconces herself in comfortable anonymity on the island of Shikoku, where there are few foreigners, save the surfer Eric, who gets her a job as a hostess at the seedy Cha Cha Club. At a gallery opening, Jill meets gallery owner Yusuke Yamashiro; he offers her a show and they soon marry. Before they do, the demands of a traditional Japanese marriage are clear to Jill, who has lived in Japan long enough to have her eyes wide open. After living with icy Yusuke and his critical mother, and giving birth to a boy, Kei, Jill ceases to paint and finds her sense of self dissolving. She plans her divorce and attempts to flee the country with her son, but is thwarted and threatened by Yusuke. In alternating chapters, set in the late '80s and late '90s, Jill spies on Kei, spiraling into self-pity and alcohol abuse, yet it's hard to feel sympathy for her self-perpetuated plight. Vivid atmosphere and characterization make one wish for a tighter plot. (Jan.)

Lehman's cheerfully eclectic, determinedly accessible and defiantly sex-positive collection—a savvy extension of his successful Best American Poetry franchise—marches from an unlikely beginning (“On a Young Lady's Going into a Shower Bath” by Francis Scott Key), past Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, through the modernist era (Conrad Aiken's truly sexy “Sea Holly”) and on to the present, where poets male and female, gay, straight and bisexual, describe bodies and pleasures in an array of verse forms. Sestinas abound; Lehman also finds a villanelle, a pantoum, a brace of sonnets and, not surprisingly, lots of swinging free verse. Lehman's best choices give off both heat and light: Dennis Cooper remembers the aches of eighth grade; Maggie Wells's “Sonnet from the Groin” approaches her own sex organs with bounce and honesty; and Bernadette Mayer's echoic couplets in “First turn to me...” evoke the lucky days at the start of a great romance, when sexual wishes are commands. (Feb.)

In this fourth collection by the popular Lee (Book of My Nights), timely immigration issues drive such poems as “Self-Help for Fellow Refugees,” but Lee swiftly folds them into broader inquiries about inheritance, memory and loss: “you'll remember your life,” he advises, “as a book of candles,/ each page read by the light of its own burning.” Lee's late father appears in the light of his evangelical Christian beliefs, his mother and sister as cherished links to childhood. Biblical allusions enliven an otherwise spare verbal world, while aphorisms and spiritual advice strike a note reminiscent of Rumi: “Every wise child is sad.... Every wind-strewn flower is God tearing God.” Rarely subtle, Lee can nevertheless be concise: every line bears the weight of long meditation, sometimes even of wisdom. “Virtues of the Boring Husband,” the longest piece, is one of Lee's best: a discourse on the nature of love—ponderous but shot through with golden truths—that comes from the mouth of the sheepish partner who admits, “Whenever I talk, my wife falls asleep./ So now, when she can't sleep, I talk.” Lee's ringing clarity and his compelling life story have brought him uncommonly loyal readers: this volume should swell their ranks. A CD of Lee reading many of the poems is included. (Jan.)

The great Spanish modernist García Lorca (1898–1936) didn't much like the Big Apple: depressed by the grime, the crowds and the tall new buildings, aghast at American capitalism with its big winners and its destitute losers, uneasy with his identity as a gay man, fascinated (and sometimes repelled) by street culture in Harlem and homesick for his native Andalusia, he turned his year at Columbia University in 1929–30 into some of the fiercest, unhappiest and strangest poems of the century. This facing-page translation—inspired, the translators say, by 9/11—preserves the oddities and the angers in Lorca's metaphor-loaded free verse. The famous “Ode to Walt Whitman” salutes the “Fairies of North America,/ Pajaros of Havana,” hoping against hope to resist self-hate. Interludes in Vermont and a coda in Cuba suggest the mystical ties with nature that Lorca could not find in Manhattan. Yet the dominant note is a brilliant hostility: at “Dawn in New York,” “furious swarms of coins/ drill and devour the abandoned children.” The Chrysler Building suggests “a million iron workers/ forging chains for the children to come.” Lorca's power, and the translators' fidelity, make this a worthy new version of a 20th-century classic. (Jan.)

This first book, winner of the 2007 Colorado Prize for Poetry, has the plainspokenness and unguarded candor about writing and ambition more often found in a later book by an established poet—think Robert Creeley. As such, it shows a rarer thing: a young poet in thrall to the promise of being a poet and taking that as his topic. Teicher, an associate editor at PW, quotes E.M. Cioran—“one does not write because one has something to say but because one wants to say something”—and, in these 22 poems, he seeks his voice (“Inaudible voice, silent voice /voice of my head”), analyzing who he is hearing: a father, a mother, the voices of other poets—A.R. Ammons and William Bronk among them. Ammons, in fact, is unabashedly imitated in the leisurely 40-page “Poem to Read at My Wedding,” while Bronk's “as if” formulations drive several of these poems: “As if// a thing lost or forgotten, discarded,/ fled, written down and revised, revisited/ were a cure for dead dogs....” Teicher puts his faith in the hypothetical “as if,” as if being in love with poetry made poetry, as if being in love made love. The book's title poem conflates these two—poetry and love: the room in which the poet's wife, Brenda, roams and works is also the stanza, which itself means “room.” Part of the charm here is how poetry and love are not suffered ironically, but gathered and won, “As if the answer is flowers”—a surprisingly sage observation for this young poet who indeed has something to say. (Jan.)

Sharma's third collection places its author in the bewildering atmosphere of unfamiliar customs and ambiguous relationships, often expressed as a clash between Eastern and Western culture, but in a broader context. In these poems, Sharma craves simplicity and honesty in a world that seems increasingly corrupt. “Off-Year: Several Hopes & Health Games” examines the power dynamic in relationships between women and men: “You are not really a master!” she says, “I just invented this to control my own longings.” Sharma also asks serious questions, but gives in to passion, too, though not without complications. Convictions and morals fight with a desire for absolute abandon; this conflict is figured as a charming innocence, corruptible but ultimately prevailing: “Her wooden nickels paid for wilderness.” Lyrically motivated and contemplative, Sharma (The Opening Question) may be more concerned with language than with the images it can conjure, but finds meaning by observation and definition, attaining her own peculiar logic and phrasing. (Dec.)

The free verse of Ossman's debut moves through its erotic confessions, New England walks and household memories, in a voice remarkable for its confidence and fierceness: “I am the woman you should have married,” one poem concludes, “offering you another chance,” a “slick kiss landing firmly on your lips.” Ossman can also tone things down enough to present simple domestic details: “late and missed meals,/ Swiss chocolate, English tea and jam.” Such items hold places, or mark chapters, in the lives these articulate, welcoming poems describe: a “red glove in the road/ this morning” recalls good fortune in having experienced only “minor loss,” while the shapes of the trees in Maine, “the 'V'/ in my satin green pajamas,” a bass-guitar riff on the radio, “my first bikini brought to light” in a drawer, may all invoke romantic ups and downs—breakups, liaisons, vacations and further breakups, some apparently with the same man. The fluent results make Ossman at once an easy-to-like nature poet and a chronicler of risqué moments. Ossman serves as executive director for Alice James Books, and her style suggests long acquaintance with the conventions of intimate, autobiographical 21st-century verse and a daring all her own. (Nov.)

Equal parts eco-conscious reportage, childlike whimsy and intellectual exploration, this U.S. debut from an award-winning British poet will test how far the appeal of her language extends. Oswald's 1990s triumphs were her sonnets, devoted either to the seaside or to romantic love; the poems' naïve tones belied their serious invention: “The sea is made of ponds—a cairn of rain/ It has an island flirting up and down/ like a blue hat.” Her genre-defying long poem Dart, also included here, records sights and sounds collected on walks down the length of the river Dart, which flows through England's Southwest—“the soundmarks of larks,” “corn-blue dinghies,” a Royal Navy trainee who told Oswald he had “serious equipment in his head.” Oswald followed up with diverse short poems, some resembling nursery rhymes, others in the voices of woods, frogs, sheep, and others still in more abstract, speculative modes: “there lay the world,” she recalls in “Field,” “wedged/ between its premise and its conclusion.” While some Americans may not know what to make of this poet so closely tied to the English pastoral tradition, the scope of her imagination and the oddity of her talent should repay close listening, and this collection offers American readers their first view of Oswald's compelling career so far.. (Nov.)

Over the past three decades Howe has worked as a kind of poet-scholar manqué, mixing into her books prose explorations of early American spiritual and historical chroniclers and her own distinctive poems, usually terse, four-stress snippets that themselves seem like fugitive fragments from a larger suppressed text. In her newest book, Howe stands in thrall to a 17th-century history of Deerfield, Mass., and then chases down an obscure reference to “Labadist” in Wallace Stevens's family tree, which brings her to the story of a short-lived Utopian “quietest sect,” followers of Jean de Labadie who established a community in Maryland in 1684 that vanished within 40 years. It is in these vast tracts of time made intimate by texts, by language, that Howe operates: “I keep you here to keep/ your promise all that you/ think I've wrought what// I see or do in the twilight/ of time but keep forgetting/ you keep coming back.” Beginning with a quote from Jonathan Edwards equating the silkworm to “a type of Christ” and ending with a photograph of a fragment of the silk wedding dress of Edwards's wife, onto which Howe projects a text (“I have already shown that space is God”), this is intense stuff. Published simultaneously with a new edition (prefaced by Eliot Weinberger) of Howe's classic critical work My Emily Dickinson. (Nov.)

Short, vivid, frankly erotic and remarkable for their emotional intelligence, Syrian poet Al-Massri's poems are as startling in English as they must have been to their first Arabic readers. Her acute renditions of pain and pleasure are more than a bit suggestive of Catullus—or rather a female Catullus, whose mix of the familial and the bodily, of worries about motherhood with expression of lust, first shock, then draw admiration for their concise artistry: “Before you fell asleep,” a one-sentence poem asks a lover or husband, “why did you forget/ to switch off/ the lamp/ of my burning desires?” A lover appears “in his old cotton clothes/ and his torn socks,” “the way the need for love/ strips naked.” A woman with unconsummated yearnings compares herself to a fruit tree the birds leave alone. A happier woman, at the end of a tryst, will “search for pieces/ of my clothes/ to wear me,” leaving only “tears/ of pleasure” behind. Mattawa renders the traditional Middle Eastern forms of Al-Massri's lyric sequences into brief English free verse. The results sound just familiar enough to draw Americans in, just strange enough to keep them in memory. (Nov.)

Nelson's newest collection continues the genre dodging of her second poetry collection, Jane: A Mystery. Narrative, sentimental and self-indulgent, this third collection risks many possible poetic pitfalls and comes through unscathed through sheer intensity of and commitment to her voice. Over three sections, Nelson employs a consistent narrator, recognizable settings, recurring characters and a few structures closely resembling plots. But it's not fiction. And though each section also has lines, stanzas, and lyric musicality, it's “poetry” only in a very loose sense. Instead, it's a stunning collection of real-world stories shadowed by the netherworld of poetry: “The hippie tells us his dog/ has terrible luck. A week ago/ it fell into a silo; yesterday/ it got electrocuted while peeing/ on a pole. We don't really know/ how to respond. The sky is amazing/tonight, full of blurry swans.” (Nov.)

Nuala Anne McGrail, fey Irish singer and part-time psychic problem solver, takes on another mission of the heart in her 11th adventure (after 2007's Irish Linen). Maria Angelica Sabattini Connors is a widow and real estate whiz whose Elegant Homes software helps users create their own designer homes. John “Jack” Patrick Donlan is a wealthy widower and investment broker who meets Maria when they become business associates. They fall in love and marry despite some nasty backlash from Jack's daughters and his dead wife's family, who believe rumors that Maria sleeps around to advance her business. Maria's unsavory mob-connected brothers, a sneaky businessman and a creepy politician lurk in the background. Maria and Jack turn for help to Nuala and her husband, who must find a way through in their inimitable and indomitable fashion. Greeley's slightly patchy narrative, laced with his trademark Irish humor, serves as a reminder that faith and courage can make marriage succeed at any age and against any adversity. (Feb.)

British clinical psychologist Tallis follows his superior debut, A Death in Vienna (2007), with this gripping sequel. Viennese Det. Insp. Oskar Rheinhardt, already faced with finding the person who butchered the emperor's favorite anaconda, comes under even more pressure from his superiors when several murders are committed in quick succession. The inspector enlists the assistance of insightful Freud disciple Max Liebermann, who quickly deduces that the killer is choosing his victims to correspond with the plot of Mozart's The Magic Flute. The book's strength lies in the relationship and interplay between the two detectives, whose friendship, which includes a shared love of music, may remind some of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey and Maturin. The clever plotting and quality writing elevate this above most other historicals, even if the solution to the crimes comes as no great surprise. (Jan.)

Series hero Philip Dryden pits his wits against the scattered former residents of an abandoned British village in his dramatic fifth outing (after 2007's The Coldest Blood). After an ancient hanged body is revealed in a pub cellar during artillery practice, Dryden, a skilled investigative journalist, finds that other things in the deserted village are not quite right. Why is an old tomb partly open? What happened to the cellar's owner in the evacuation? Dryden soon bypasses the police and launches his own investigation, putting his safety at risk. The large number of interviewees and suspects can be confusing; many appear only once or twice and their characters are vague, but they supply vital information for the careful armchair sleuth. Kelly's evocative descriptions of the flat and misty fenlands meander through a revealing look at the deterioration of contemporary village life under the stress of large-scale agriculture and rural depression. (Jan.)

Hills's gripping fourth John McIntire mystery (after 2006's Witch Cradle) introduces the Hofer clan, who move to rural St. Adele, Mich., in the 1950s. When Reuben Hofer, an abusive father and husband, is shot dead in his tractor, town constable McIntire investigates and finds few who will miss Reuben. During WWII, Reuben spent time in a camp for rebellious conscientious objectors, not far from St. Adele. His extremely ill wife raised their children mostly on her own, only to have Reuben walk back into their lives and run the household like a prison camp. As word of Reuben's death spreads, strangers show up in town, as does Reuben's rigidly religious sister. Hills weaves her tale skillfully with a plot as richly textured as her Midwestern landscape. Her characters—untamed, reticent, lonely and proud—are exquisitely rendered in this postwar morality tale. (Jan.)

Richards takes a break from her Madeline Carter series (Mad Money, etc.) with this winning hard-boiled 1931 whodunit with a twist: the main sleuth is not world-weary L.A. PI Dex Theroux, but his loyal secretary and assistant, Kitty Pangborn. Theroux, who drinks far too much to drown his memories of WWI, gets a rare paying assignment when beautiful, wealthy Rita Heppelwaite hires him to tail her married boyfriend, Harrison Dempsey. Kitty tags along, only to find their quarry's corpse, a development that Theroux wants to keep secret. After her conscience prompts her to tip off the police to the body, Kitty finds herself involved even deeper when word reaches her that Dempsey is alive and well. Well-developed lead characters, in particular the insightful Kitty, who shows potential as a series detective, more than offset the routine plot. 8-city author tour. (Jan.)

The desperate search for a missing child makes Newark PI Tamara Hayle's eighth outing (after 2005's Dying in the Dark) a chilling, thought-provoking read. Gold-digging Lilah Love gave Tamara $30,000 years earlier after some shady doings in Jamaica. Now Lilah's sister, Thelma Lee, has Lilah's daughter, Baby Dal, and refuses to give her back. Lilah threatens harm to Tamara's son, Jamal, unless Tamara takes on her case. Tamara doesn't want to help Lilah, who sees Baby Dal as a bargaining chip, so she lets Treyman Barnes II, the child's wealthy, powerful grandfather, hire her instead. Then Thelma Lee disappears with the baby, and Lilah is found murdered in her car with Jamal's backpack in the rear seat. Tamara realizes she must find Lilah's child in order to protect her own. Wesley recounts Tamara's struggles with equal parts irony, compassion and insight. (Jan.)

Martinez (In the Company of Ogres) tickles the funny bone in this delightful, fast-paced mishmash of SF and hard-boiled detective story. Mack Megaton drives a cab in the mutant-infested “technotopia” of Empire City. It's a step down for a massive killing machine created for world domination, but kindhearted Megaton has bucked his programming, and when his secretive neighbors, the Bleakers, go missing, he begins a search. Young Holt Bleaker has something in his mutant blood that makes him valuable to aliens poised to invade Empire City, and only a giant robot—a robot like Mack Megaton—can break him out of the fortress where he's held prisoner. Soon plans go awry when sinister psychic Grey subverts Megaton's programming, but he finds an unlikely ally in Lucia Napier, an outrageously beautiful and talented media star and roboticist. Eccentric characters, all of whom are clever twists on stereotypes, populate a smart, rocket-fast read with a clever, twisty plot that comes to a satisfying conclusion. (Feb.)

Writing in the tradition of M.R. James and Algernon Blackwood, Monette reconstructs the traditional English ghost story—insinuated horror, no gratuitous sex or violence—with a decidedly modern-day approach in this laudable collection of 10 necromantic mystery stories featuring introverted museum archivist Kyle Murchison Booth. Noteworthy selections include “Elegy for a Demon Lover,” which chronicles Booth's entanglement with a seductive otherworldly entity who teaches him about “pleasure and pain and the shadowed places in-between.” In the brilliantly Lovecraftian “Bringing Helena Back,” Booth agrees to help an old college friend bring his wife back from the dead, with horrifying results. Booth also investigates the skeleton of a woman sealed within the basement walls of the museum where he works, a house haunted by the spirit of a young girl and the ghost of a murdered private school student. Cerebral, ethereal and stylishly understated, this entrancing collection will appeal to fans of literary horror, dark fantasy and supernatural mystery. (Jan.)

Based on a concept discussed between Norton and Rabe before Norton's death in 2005, this long-delayed sequel honors the classic elements of Norton's 1972 young adult fantasy Dragon Magic while taking on a decidedly modern air. Shilo's ordinary teenage life has been shaken up by her father's death. Now living with her grandparents in the backwoods of Wisconsin, Shilo rummages in the attic one night and finds a wooden picture puzzle with four dragons on the cover that belonged to her father. When she completes the puzzle, Shilo finds herself transported to ancient Babylon, where a dragon entreats her to help save its eggs and keep the earth from being overrun by demons. Rabe (The Finest Creation) has built on Norton's estimable groundwork to produce an action-packed, satisfying young adult story that will be very accessible to modern teens as well as now-grown fans of the original Magic books. (Jan.)

This audacious second installment of the Texas Vampire series (after Bond of Blood) blends European and American history and contemporary paranormal romance into a shockingly heady brew. Beautiful widow Hélène d'Agelet fell hard for Jean-Marie St. Just, George Washington's former spymaster turned compañero—enslaved by blood—to the sister of powerful vampiro mayor Don Rodrigo Perez. The Napoleonic wars disrupted their affair, and after an explosive espionage incident involving Hélène's sister, double agent Celeste de Sainte-Pazanne, Hélène and Jean-Marie believed each other dead for centuries. Celeste's lover, Raoul, killed her parents, so Hélène killed Raoul. Now the sisters, both of whom have become vampiras, are hunting each other down, bent on revenge. Filling the story with explosions and blood and the prose with enough French, Spanish and purely invented terms to require a glossary, Whiteside merrily rampages through history and vampire lore, building an impressively sturdy and compelling narrative from the wreckage. (Jan.)

The newest Wild Cards mosaic novel marks a new beginning for the long-running saga. Veteran contributors such as Melinda M. Snodgrass and John Jos. Miller and newcomers like Carrie Vaughn and S.L. Farrell create a new generation of fantastical characters, including Jonathan Hive, who can transform himself into a swarm of wasps, and the six-armed, tattooed giant Drummer Boy. Twenty-eight superhuman “aces” are cast in a new reality show called American Hero. As the contestants compete in staged challenges and systematically get voted off amid Hollywood-fueled melodrama, horrific events in the Middle East bring to light the glaring unreality of reality television. When the show reaches its climactic final episode, some of the contestants decide to forsake the trappings of fame and fortune and become real-life heroes. The first volume of a projected trilogy, this fast-paced and sardonic story will appeal to comic book aficionados and heroic fantasy fans alike. (Jan.)

Vampires and mortals fight a modern battle of Gettysburg in vampire hunter Laura Caxton's gore-soaked second outing (after 2007's 13 Bullets). When a college archeological dig uncovers a cache of Civil War–era coffins, each containing a corpse minus heart, grizzled detective Jameson Arkeley recognizes these remains as evidence of a forgotten Union vampire corps and immediately summons Caxton. Before the two can unravel the historical mystery, someone reanimates one of the vampires, setting the stage for the full vampire army to rise and resume its unfulfilled mission. Wellington keeps the pace brisk, alternating action-packed chapters set in the present with chapters cast credibly in the form of extracts from period journals, letters and dispatches that gradually reveal the origin and intent of the vampire regiment and its enigmatic leader, Alva Griest. The taut narrative never slackens, providing thrilling entertainment for readers who like their horror raw and bloody. (Jan.)

Given the middling quality of these 12 stories in this reprint anthology, it would be optimistic to suggest that the next Edgar Allan Poe will emerge from Wildside Press's revival and recent redesign of Weird Tales, whose original goal was finding Poe's successor. The volume as a whole is entertaining but unremarkable, lacking both clunkers and triumphs. The best of the lot is Paul E. Martens's hilarious “What Happened When Tammy Brookmeyer Sold Her House” (to a bear), which may strike some as a humorous take on T.E.D. Klein's “Petey.” Carrie Vaughn also manages a few new wrinkles on an old theme in “For Fear of Dragons.” Too many of the rest, like Bob Bodey's “Body Parts,” are cliché-laden splatterfests. If this is the cream of the crop, Weird Tales may need more than a makeover to reach new readers and keep current ones happy. (Jan.)

After the U.S. president-elect dies during sex with a hooker at the high-class residence where Emma Jamison is working as a butler, her world falls apart. Fleeing the premises in a state of undress, Emma gets tabbed by the media as the hooker involved, which she isn't, and is further victimized by a Secret Service coverup. Broke and disgraced, she takes a housekeeping job at her grandmother's retirement home in the small town of Chartreuse, La., where she's determined to lead an obscure and blameless life. But Emma hasn't counted on her outrageous grandmother's sexual shenanigans with a handsome Alzheimer's patient; on her own attraction to the man's grandson, local district attorney Max Duval; or on an ambitious young reporter dogging her trail. Despite the saucy premise, Wells's (The Babe Magnet) madcap and enjoyable romantic comedy is only mildly spicy. (Feb.)

Following her father's heart attack, Candie Montgomery takes leave from her advertising job in Chicago and returns to Pinewood, Ky., to help her twin sister, Sarah, run the family's used-car business. The townsfolk blame Candie for the recent breakup of her sister's engagement to longtime love, Nick, so Sarah suggests Candie find a boyfriend to take the heat off; the gorgeous and amiable Tommy Tucker, the new rec director at a local park, offers before she can even ask. The two soon discover an ease with one another along with a great attraction. Candie's idea to revamp the business brings Nick back into their lives, and a clever plan to reunite him with Sarah ensures. There's a fair amount of corn to this romance, but there's also an infectious quality to the writing, and some great humor. (Jan.)

Coulter's latest in the historical Sherbrooke series (following Lyon's Gate) stars Rosalind de la Fontaine, a beautiful young woman with an ethereal voice who has no memory of her name, her family or her heritage since being saved and adopted by Ryder Sherbrooke as a girl. Nicholas Vail, the new earl of Mountjoy, returns to England and recognizes her as the girl he has seen in his dreams since childhood chanting, “I am your debt.” The two are soon inseparable, and their relationship reaches an altogether new level when they inexplicably discover an old book written in code, with tales of a magical place filled with dragons, wizards and abundant evil: the book urges them toward the realization of Nicholas's “debt” and the interpretation of a haunting song that Rosalind sings spontaneously. Coulter leaves some important questions unanswered, and her emphasis on the supernatural results in a faltering romance, but the suspense and the spirited mystery will keep readers glued. (Jan.)

Set once again in Minnesota and chock-full of eccentric characters, Brockway's latest (following Hot Dish) centers around the fate of Chez Ducky, the Olson family's century-old summer retreat on the shores of Fowl Lake. With Chez Ducky in desperate need of repair, property taxes rising and palatial homes defiling the once pristine shoreline—like the one next door built by millionaire whiz kid Prescott Tierney—the family decides to sell. Mimi Olson thinks selling is a bad idea, but 40 years of skirting responsibility, organization and commitment of all kinds keeps her from getting it together, despite fond memories of the family's annual skinny dipping. During her farewell visit to Chez Ducky, Prescott and his dad, Joe, have a run-in with a Minnesota snowbank, and suddenly Mimi's in charge of two injured men, three dogs and her pregnant half-sister, who shows up unannounced. While the book moves along at an entertaining pace and the narrative is lively, readers might have a tough time empathizing with the apathetic heroine, even as she discovers her purpose in life. (Jan.)

It took Proust 14 years to complete his loosely autobiographical seven-volume novel, Remembrance of Things Past, but it has taken Heuet more than nine years to finish even a third of this most ambitious project: adapting Proust's entire 3,000 page magnum opus into the comics medium. In this fourth installment, Proust's narrator revisits the past of a dandy named Charles Swann, who struggles to separate his concepts of art, love and ideal beauty as he develops an unlikely obsession with a young socialite in 19th-century Parisian society. Heuet's translation to sequential art retains the work's distinctive period feel and eye for detail, while necessarily paring the florid prose to its least superfluous elements. With a clear line style reminiscent of a slightly more adorned Hergé, the art likewise renders the characters with a sometimes disappointing simplicity that contrasts both the intricate period backgrounds and the exhaustive social intricacies they contain. Although a true Proust fan will find it no substitute, Heuet's graphic adaptation is a useful primer for anyone who finds it hard to penetrate the French author's challengingly dense masterpiece. (Dec.)

On the one hand, somebody should probably find a way to get Nakaji off the caffeine, or sugary cereals, or whatever it is that has locked her creative brain in a permanent sort of frenetic high-spin cycle. On the other, that would likely drain away the main thing this manic series has going for it. Set at the Seifu Private Academy, the story pairs two mismatched 15-year-old roommates and watches the sparks. Sonoh Kirihara is the uninterested heir to the family ikebana (flower arranging) business; he's aristocratic, moody, morose and generally fascinating to those around him (he's also a twin, just to keep things complicated). His roommate, Takaaki Asakura, is a pretty femme-looking kid (he's mistaken for a girl on his first day) with a flower fixation and an unrequited crush on a girl named Marika. Nakaji's energetic art is typical of the genre, with the addition of much use of chibi (cartoony versions of the characters used to show extreme emotions) and the persistent motif of flowers. The story is full of the usual misunderstandings and explosions of embarrassment, all revolving around Nakaji's twin obsessions: flowers and feminine boys. There's a yaoi vibe given the subject matter, but nothing overwhelming. (Nov.)

Although essentially a tie-in to a pop culture hit, this graphic novel isn't bad. Conceived as an integral part of the popular TV show, the book collects a series of weekly online comics that appeared right along with the TV show. The comics are used to skillfully introduce both new characters and equally engrossing plot lines into the Heroes story, and they offer background info that supplements what's on TV. Heroes is the story of a group of otherwise normal people spread around the world, who have extraordinary—and potentially destructive—powers they often barely understand. These “special” people are hunted down by both a mysterious organization and a superpowered serial killer. The comic follows the show's major characters, but also introduces new ones, like Hana Gitelman, known as Wireless, who can literally hear digital communication transmissions; the comic also provides background on politician Nathan Petrelli and the mysterious Linderman that takes them back to the Vietnam War. Produced by a long list of prominent creators, the art is inconsistent, ranging from competent to excellent (“War Buddies” and Tim Sale's 9th Wonder covers shine) and is held together by the rich color production. An impressively readable melding of TV and comics storytelling. (Nov.)

In this third and final trade paperback collection, Van Lente and Dunlavey return once more to their comics précis of philosophy with a survey of Greek philosophers, a Law and Order–style trial of God with Kant as his “epistemological attorney,” and a hilariously spot-on parody of Peanuts (“You're a Good Man, John Stuart Mill”), before closing with a “lightning round” that runs a gauntlet of 11 philosophers, ranging from Lao-Tzu to David Hume, in 32 pages. As with most of the series, it negotiates the turbid waters of philosophical theory not only with ease but laugh-out-loud irreverence. This is no dumbed down My First Philosophy book for grade schoolers; although it gilds the theories of philosophers like Epictetus the Stoic with word balloons and cartoon slapstick, it never shies away from complex ideas, even if that means occasional lapses into philosophical jargon (“in a synthetical cognition, you augment an intuition with a conception”). Van Lente and Dunlavey engage some of philosophy's most recondite notions with wit, clarity and brilliant accessibility, but intelligence is always presumed and demanded. Only the most precocious of children need apply. (Nov.)

Grossman once claimed poetry to be “the historical enemy of human forgetfulness.” This interest—or better, faith—in poetry's capacity to perform distinctly human acts of preservation has informed Grossman's writing from the beginning. This most recent book showcases some of Grossman's most affecting and memorable lyrics to date.

Poems like “The Caedmon Room,” “Lost, Lost” and “The Invention of the Night” present poetry as speech made excitable through devotion to its addressee or object, an expression of what Grossman has elsewhere referred to as “the magnanimity of the self toward the other”: “Song is extreme work. Help me, river sister!/ It's getting dark. Hey, sweet water! Flow fresh/ through ocean's salt. Give me some words for him/ I love, so he can give words to someone else.”

Throughout his 50-year career as a poet-critic, Grossman has remained profoundly mindful of lineage, both in terms of poetic tradition as well as of his own family history. Poems such as “The Lending Library” and “Shipfitters,” like so much of Grossman's most compelling later work, perform a marriage of both kinds of lineage by magnifying the image of the beloved (here, as is often the case, the memory of the poet's mother, Beatrice) to the status of Muse or poetic icon. An extraordinary meditation upon making, memory and mortality, “Shipfitters” begins with the observation that “Leonardo's/ angels—who are so beautiful—are inadequately/ provided with wings by the curious master” and then proceeds to contrast the artist's apparent lapse in design to the scrupulous craftsmanship evinced in a small model river boat from China given as a gift to his mother in 1951, “a 'junk'/ ...made by learned felons/ in Nanking prison on the Yangtzee, all dead,/ but in their time they knew how to make a boat.” The poem concludes on a turn at once inevitable and unmistakably Grossmanesque, the poet at 75 more aware of his mortality than ever: “'That will be my death-ship,/ when it comes time,'” he writes, touchingly, especially given the vessel can no more carry his body than Leonardo's angels' wings could carry theirs.

Named in tribute to that 17th-century French philosopher who discovered “the world for the first time”—as “each one of us must,” Grossman tells us—in solitude, Descartes' Loneliness is a splendid addition to one of American poetry's most powerful, aspiring, inimitable and least frivolous bodies of work. (Dec. 28)

Signature

Reviewed by Paul Pope

This comics adaptation (including prequel) of King's Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born follows the early days of the Gunslinger, Roland Deschain. For the first hundred pages or so, you think you're in the old American West, until we come across a landscape littered with rusted oil rigs and vintage WW2 Panzer tanks. This sort of future-past otherworldliness typifies Roland's experience as he begins his quest as a teenage cross between Malory's Lancelot and Sergio Leone's Man with No Name. He and his young friends, high-born sons of the landowning political cadre called the Affiliation, are student-apprentices in a sect of knights bearing an arcane code of ethics, who must undergo strict training in order to bear the title Gunslinger. Early on, Roland earns the title Gunslinger by overcoming his teacher in a masterful fight sequence.

Eventually, Roland and a group of fellow Gunslingers are sent to spy on the evil John Farson. Pretty soon, things get medieval. Maidens in distress appear, as do sadistic bad guys, witches and a weird monster called the Thinny. The Gunslinger's world is a weird hodge-podge of 1066 Hastings, 1865 Appomattoxand 1941 Warsaw—and in places the mélange is quite exciting.

Still, a lot of The Gunslinger Born's plot is unclear and the prose purplish. Characters walk on and walk off, communicating in monotonous speeches wedged between scenes of murder and torture. The requisite love affair between Roland and young Susan Delgado is a bit passionless, and there's very little mirth; emotional ranges stretch from grimacing endurance to abject misery. Writer/adapter Peter David turns some nice phrases in a sort of sub-Faulknerian style, but the wordiness slows the action. At times, artist Jae Lee and colorist Richard Isanove are left with little to do other than create static pinup pages to accompany the prose.

Nevertheless, there is a palpable charisma embedded in The Gunslinger Born—you can tell everyone involved is having a blast. Lee's drawings are smoothly rendered and realistic, yet sensually illustrative, and his art has never seemed so warm. And there's a touch of legendary underground comics artists Richard Corbin and Frank Frazetta in Isanove's palettes. The Gunslinger Born is the perfect starting point for those who think comics contain nothing but men in spandex costumes and masks. If it hooks new readers, that's good enough for me.

Paul Pope is the artist/writer of the Eisner Award–winning graphic novel Batman Year 100 (DC Comics) and PulpHope: The Art of Paul Pope, recently published by AdHouse Books.