Fiction Reviews: Week of 1/21/2008

Harris revisits characters from 1999’s bestselling Chocolat in this equally delectable modern fairy tale. More than four years have passed since Vianne Rocher pitted her enchanted chocolate confections against the local clergy’s interpretation of Lent in smalltown France; since then, Vianne has renounced magic, changed her name to Yanne Charbonneau and moved with her two daughters to Paris’s Montmartre district. There, Yanne embraces conformity and safety, much to the dismay of her increasingly troubled older daughter, Anouk. When Anouk becomes entranced with Zozie de l’Alba, an exotic itinerant who happens upon a job at the new shop, and the relationship grows increasingly sinister, Yanne must call up all of Vianne’s powers, culinary and mystical, to save her family. Harris again structures the narrative (told in alternate chapters by Zozie, Yanne and Anouk) around a liturgical season (in this case Advent). Harris gives fans much to savor in this multilayered novel, from the descriptions (including Yanne’s mouthwatering chocolate confections, Zozie’s whimsical footwear and Anouk’s artistic efforts) to the novel’s classic, enduring theme of good vs. evil—and the difficulty of telling the difference. (Apr.)

De Kretser (The Hamilton Case) presents an intimate and subtle look at Tom Loxley, a well-intentioned but solipsistic Henry James scholar and childless divorcé, as he searches for his missing dog in the Australian bush. While the overarching story follows Tom’s search during a little over a week in November 2001, flashbacks reveal Tom’s infatuation with Nelly Zhang, an artist tainted by scandal—from her controversial paintings to the disappearance and presumed murder of her husband, Felix, a bond trader who got into some shady dealings. As Tom puts the finishing touches on his book about James and “the uncanny” and searches for his dog, de Kretser fleshes out Tom’s obsession with Nelly—from the connection he feels to her incendiary paintings (one exhibition was dubbed “Nelly’s Nasties” in the press) to the sleuthing about her past that he’s done under scholarly pretenses. Things progress rapidly, with a few unexpected turns thrown in as Tom and Nelly get together, the murky circumstances surrounding Felix’s disappearance are (somewhat) cleared up and the matter of the missing dog is settled. De Kretser’s unadorned, direct sentences illustrate her characters’ flaws and desires, and she does an admirable job of illuminating how life and art overlap in the 21st century. (Apr.)

Set in 1931’s Jim Crow South, Feldman’s dramatization of the infamous Scottsboro case makes for bleak, if familiar, reading. Alice Whittier, an ambitious, crusading journalist at the left-wing New York City publication The New Order, covers the arrest of nine young African-American men in Scottsboro, Ala., for the alleged rapes of two white prostitutes. Four days later, the Alabama courts have tried and sentenced eight to die. With a keen sense of drama, Feldman follows the story as worldwide indignation grows, and the case bogs down in appeals and retrials before an eventual hearing by the U.S. Supreme Court. Through it all, Alice, the only woman journalist on the story, reports the events in gruesome detail, conducts her trust-funded life and quiets some rattling family skeletons. She emerges as a satisfyingly fleshed-out character, as does syphilitic, guilt-ridden accuser Ruby Bates. But the best thing about the novel is the detailed, matter-of-fact way in which it recreates Alice and Ruby’s milieus—both of which are removed, in very different ways, from the world of the accused. What emerges is a raw sense of alienation and collision, with the novel’s true protagonists mostly offscreen. (Apr.)

The ripsnorter sequel to Hollywood Girls Club revolves around sex and plastic surgery secrets that, if revealed, would destroy movie queen Celeste “Cici” Solange and likely “sink movie studios” and “destroy high-power industry marriages.” If that sounds like fun, it is. “Our world, our business, has nothing to do with substance or reality,” lectures Kiki Dee, the bad-ass publicist who collects stars’ secrets like Donald Trump amasses real estate. But superficial doesn’t come cheap in Hollywood, where A-lister Cici covertly goes under the knife knowing “her public expected her to personify youth and to age gracefully” and that aging gracefully “meant aging very little at all.” The surfacing of Cici’s other secret—a sex tape made by her ex—sets off a madcap plan to get it back before it hits big on the internet or her husband (and Worldwide Pictures honcho) Ted Robinoff finds out that it exists. Along the way, screenwriter Mary Anne Meyers rises to celebrity on the arm of screen idol Holden Humphrey; Jessica Caufield transitions from agent to big-time manager-producer-wife-and-mom; and production chief Lydia Albright’s uncertain about her future. Marr’s prose is fast and sharp, and she keeps the plots flying. (Apr.)

The brutal, materialistic and dysfunctional underbelly of prep schools and the females who live in it create the foundation for Schutt’s beautifully written but light-on-substance novel (following 2004’s National Book Award finalist Florida). In the midst of 1997 Manhattan, all-girl prep school Siddons churns out ladies with a wide spectrum of academic skills, mental problems and severe insecurities, all of whom have been touched in some way by the novel’s saintly lynchpin, Astra Dell, who leaves her studies behind to fight her rare cancer. Schutt introduces a large cast of characters who are dealing with Astra’s absence and their own personal problems: Astra’s best friend, anorexic Car; “dirty girl” Marlene; the inseparable and insensitive Alex and Suki; lesbian outcast Lisa; and their beloved instructors, the awkward Anna Mazur and Tim Weeks, the handsome colleague Anna’s in love with. Unfortunately, Schutt shoehorns too many characters into a relatively thin book, and though there isn’t a boring sentence in here, Schutt doesn’t do enough with the familiar prep school setting to make the story resonate. (Apr.)

In Gunning’s latest colonial page-turner, seven-year-old Alice Cole travels with her family from 1756 London to the New World, dreaming of a big house in Philadelphia and a new life. Her mother and brothers die on board and are buried at sea; the ship docks in Boston rather than Philadelphia; there, her father indentures her for 11 years without a backward glance. Alice does housework for the family of Simeon Morton of Dedham, in whose house she is treated almost like a second daughter, becoming constant companion to 10-year-old Abigail, or “Nabby.” When Nabby marries Emery Verley of Medfield, Alice’s indenture is signed over to him, but the Verley household turns out to be an abusive one. Alice flees and winds up on Satucket, Cape Cod, where Lyddie Berry, heroine of Gunning’s The Widow’s War, and her companion, the lawyer Eben Freeman, give her shelter and a job. Alice works hard for them, and they grow fond of her, but when Alice discovers she’s pregnant, she embarks on a journey of deceit and lies, one that comes to a bitter end. Gunning weaves a horrifying, spellbinding story of colonial indenture’s cruelties and a meditation on the meaning of freedom. (Apr.)

Advocates of flash fiction contend you can say a lot with a little. Unfortunately, you can also say a little with a little. Israeli writer Keret (The Nimrod Flipout) confirms both with this hodgepodge of 46 sketches, culled from his first collection. There are whimsical tales like “Nothing,” about a woman who “loved a man who was made of nothing” because “this love would never betray her,” and “Freeze!” about a guy who can stop the world and uses the power to score with hot girls. Despite an appealing, comic voice, many of these pieces feel insubstantial and leave the reader indifferent. Nevertheless, a haunting theme arises as stories featuring violence accumulate: “Not Human Beings,” in which an Israeli soldier is beaten by fellow officers when he objects to the cruel treatment of an old Arab man, screams in the face of bloodshed, whereas the irritation of the father in “A Bet,” when TV news reports on an Arab sentenced to death preempts an episode of “Moonlighting,” suggests how violence has been normalized. Keret demonstrates how the same short form that produces ineffective trifles can also create moments of startling power. (Apr.)

Radish’s latest warm-fuzzy (after The Sunday List of Dreams) tracks the troubled marriage of Lucky and Addy Lipton. Lucky’s Kingdom of Krap—the garage littered with dismantled appliances, an old car and every other project Lucky never finished—has brought Addy nearly to the breaking point in her stale marriage, but it’s the last straw when their planned trip to Costa Rica (with its possibilities for romantic rejuvenation) doesn’t happen. What ensues is a summer of separation, discovering personal desires and strong female friendships (it is, after all, a Radish book). As the summer gives way to fall, Lucky tries to win his wife back, while Addy is torn between living alone or giving the marriage another go. Girl-power readers will get a kick out of the hokey girl get-togethers, and women will surely connect with Radish’s empowered femmes. (Apr.)

Hardened but not compromised by adult life, these 12 luminous stories from former National Book Critics Circle director Bingham (Transgressions) feature narrators who find mature, often solitary forms of reckoning, and even happiness. The four-time married mother of a successful novelist in “A Gift for Burning” justifies to an interviewer everything from her selections for stand-in fathers to enabling her son’s substance abuse—all, she admits, because she was too distracted at the time to pay much attention to him. “That Winter” imagines a lone woman writer “of no particular age” braving it out in isolated southern Colorado until an emergency brings the welcome warmth, and gradual love, of an undemanding stranger. Several of the stories are set in France, such as “Sagesse,” which involves an American family vacationing in Normandy at the close of the WWII. Yet the most exotic locale remains the quiet neighborhood in sunny Florida of the title story, where the eponymous red ’65 Pontiac convertible rests at the curb after innumerable changes in ownership over the years, telling the story of the end of a marriage. There is not a false note in Bingham’s striking collection. (Apr.)

Abrams’s debut novel is a revealing look inside the mind of a woman who enjoys being beaten, shamed and dominated by her lover. While pursuing her studies, 27-year-old anthropology graduate student Josie works as a nanny for a single mother with a special-needs son and a baby girl. While Josie may at first seem like a wholesome young woman, it isn’t long before she’s sneaking out in the middle of the night to rendezvous with her older Indian doctor lover, Devesh, who recognizes her sadomasochistic desires. With great excitement, she allows herself to be bound and whipped, fulfilling her desire to “play.” As Josie falls in love with Devesh, their bedroom escapades become increasingly brutal, and she struggles to make sense of her need for sexual violence as she explores her relationship with her mother and confronts her guilt about the death of her infant brother, who died under murky circumstances when she was a little girl. The narrative moves fast, and the stark swirl of sex, violence and near-madness will please readers with a dark bent. (Apr.)

In this witty novel by the author of Frenemies, Philadelphia cellist Courtney Cassel decides the occasion of her engagement is the perfect time to heal family wounds. Six years ago, wild-child middle sister Raine ruined oldest sister Norah’s wedding and ran off with longtime friend Matt Cheney, with whom Courtney was having a secret affair. Accompanying her supportive fiancé, Lucas, on a business trip to San Francisco, Courtney drops in on Raine unannounced and discovers Raine is still with the smoldering, charismatic Matt, whose mere presence can still reduce Courtney to the emotional state of an adolescent. Soon, Courtney’s questioning every choice she’s made. When Matt and Raine show up for the engagement party, scores are settled, lives are examined and a few secrets about strait-laced Norah come to light. Crane’s brisk voice and knack for finding the humor in Courtney’s angst keep the mood upbeat all the way to the rosy resolution. (Apr.)

Picoult bangs out another ripped-from-the-zeitgeist winner, this time examining a condemned inmate’s desire to be an organ donor. Freelance carpenter Shay Bourne was sentenced to death for killing a little girl, Elizabeth Nealon, and her cop stepfather. Eleven years after the murders, Elizabeth’s sister, Claire, needs a heart transplant, and Shay volunteers, which complicates the state’s execution plans. Meanwhile, death row has been the scene of some odd events since Shay’s arrival—an AIDS victim goes into remission, an inmate’s pet bird dies and is brought back to life, wine flows from the water faucets. The author brings other compelling elements to an already complex plot line: the priest who serves as Shay’s spiritual adviser was on the jury that sentenced him; Shay’s ACLU representative, Maggie Bloom, balances her professional moxie with her negative self-image and difficult relationship with her mother. Picoult moves the story along with lively debates about prisoner rights and religion, while plumbing the depths of mother-daughter relationships and examining the literal and metaphorical meanings of having heart. The point-of-view switches are abrupt, but this is a small flaw in an impressive book. 1,000,000-million copy first printing. (Mar.)

Master of the Bronx and Jersey projects, Price (Clockers) turns his unrelenting eye on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in this manic crescendo of a novel that explores the repercussions of a seemingly random shooting. When bartender Ike Marcus is shot to death after barhopping with friends, NYPD Det. Matty Clark and his team first focus on restaurant manager and struggling writer Eric Cash, who claims the group was accosted by would-be muggers, despite eyewitnesses saying otherwise. As Matty grills Eric on the still-hazy details of the shooting, Price steps back and follows the lives of the alleged shooters—teenagers Tristan Acevedo and Little Dap Williams, who live in a nearby housing project—as well as Ike’s grieving father, Billy, who hounds the police even as leads dwindle. As the intersecting narratives hurtle toward a climax that’s both expected and shocking, Price peels back the layers of his characters and the neighborhood until all is laid bare. With its perfect dialogue and attention to the smallest detail, Price’s latest reminds readers why he’s one of the masters of American urban crime fiction. Author tour. (Mar.)

Balogh’s lovely Regency series centering on Miss Martin’s School for Girls closes with the story of founder and headmistress Claudia Martin, an “aging spinster” past 30 who does not see marriage in her future. Two former teachers have recently made titled matches, however, and one of them sends Joseph, marquess of Attingsborough, to the school, along with his good looks, friendly manner and offer of a carriage to London. His title puts Claudia off; she distrusts his apparent interest in her school; his near-engagement to Lord Balderston’s daughter, the icily perfect Portia Hunt, makes him unavailable. For his part, Joseph, at 35, can no longer put off the need for a male heir. He is resigned to the match, but there is a very delicate matter that he needs to resolve beforehand, with Miss Martin’s aid required to safeguard his secret and his reputation. Joseph’s heart isn’t in the subterfuge, however, and as social pressures come to bear, both he and Claudia are forced to reexamine their priorities. Balogh has a particular gift for infusing the Regency romance with complex and engaging characters in challenging situations that move beyond the obvious. (Mar.)

Bestseller Ford’s 15th Doc Ford thriller (after 2007’s Hunter’s Moon) may baffle newcomers with a backstory relating to the murder of Ford’s parents. Ford, a marine biologist and covert operative who lives on Florida’s Sanibel Island, is busy serving his shadowy U.S. government masters by researching the potential use by terrorists of jellyfish and other venomous sea creatures when he receives a desperate appeal for help from an old friend. Shay Money, a successful 26-year-old businesswoman who’s about to be married, fears her future happiness is in jeopardy because an extortionist has videotaped her and three female friends in sexually compromising situations. While Ford manages to get the tape in exchange for a sizable payment, his suspicions that the criminal isn’t done with Money are soon confirmed. His efforts to protect her lead him to the Caribbean and a sophisticated blackmail racket with a lengthy list of victims. Despite some awkward prose (“The combination of flesh and death, the orderly geometrics of my wound, struck me as indefinably profound”), series fans should enjoy the ride. Author tour. (Mar.)

A publishing sensation in China, this novel wraps an ecological warning and political indictment around the story of Chen Zhen, a Beijing student sent during the 1960s Cultural Revolution to live as a shepherd among the herdsmen of the Olonbulang, a grassland on the Inner Mongolia steppes. Chen Zhen is fascinated by the herdsmen, descendants of Genghis Khan, and by the grassland’s wolves, with whom the herdsmen live in uneasy harmony. When Mao’s government orders the mass execution of the wolves to make way for farming collectives run by Chen Zhen’s own people, the Han Chinese, he makes for a somewhat passive hero. Except for Bilgee, the wise old herdsman, and Director Bao, the face of the Communist government in the Olonbulang, the novel’s secondary characters make little impression. The wolf packs, however, are vividly and beautifully described. As Chen Zhen helplessly witnesses the consequences of the order, he risks the enmity of both the herdsmen and the state officials by capturing a wolf cub and lovingly raising it as his own wolf totem. Jiang Rong writes reverently about life on the steppes in a manner that recalls Farley Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf. (Mar.)

Hired by Father Vincent Tyrrell to find Patrick Hutton, a jockey missing for 10 years, Ed Loy quickly finds himself investigating not one but two grisly murders in playwright Hughes’s stellar third novel to feature the Dublin PI (after 2007’s The Color of Blood). At the same time, Loy must stay on his guard against members of the Halligan family, who blame him for the incarceration of one of their own. An innocent fling with the mysterious Miranda Hart leads Loy ever deeper into the heart of a complex drama that spans decades and involves several members of the powerful Tyrrell family. At least one murder turns out not to be what it seems. Beaten up, warned off and yet undaunted, Loy uncovers a horrible series of secrets, leading to a violent and labyrinthine conclusion at a famous Irish horse-racing festival. This intelligent, often brutal thriller will have readers’ hearts racing from start to finish. (Mar.)

This light and airy bow to the Darcys after their marriage offers an acceptably Austenian setting. With their children and those of their neighbors and friends coming into their own, it behooves Elizabeth and Darcy to give a ball; they’re mostly offscreen while several Pride and Prejudice plot lines are resolved neatly. Mr. Collins finally receives his feverishly anticipated inheritance of Longbourn; he dreams of leaving the clergy and joining the landed gentry. (Charlotte Collins, his wife, must be ambiguous about his goals, in deference to her friendship for Elizabeth Darcy.) Miss Anne De Bourgh, daughter of the late redoubtable Lady Catherine De Bourgh, is found happily married to a husband with great musical enthusiasm, if not talent, producing one of the gentle humorous moments in the work. Charlotte Collins experiences quite a change of life as well, as much due to Mr. Collins’s late-developing affection for her as from his unusual reaction to the final chapter of The Olde Curiosity Shop. Missing is any real dealing with the passing of Elizabeth’s father, Mr. Bennet, or Elizabeth’s reaction to it, but the addition of the Collins’s daughter, Eliza, is a welcome one. This mildly charming addition keeps the Austen mill churning. (Mar.)

Gross, who’s partnered with James Patterson on a number of bestsellers (Lifeguard, etc.), mixes murder, suspense, sex and romance as capably as his mentor in his assured second solo thriller (after The Blue Zone). Charles Friedman, a New York hedge fund trader, perishes in a bombing at Grand Central Station that destroys the railroad car in which he was riding one morning from his home in Greenwich, Conn. Ty Hauck, head of the Greenwich police’s violent crime unit, enters the picture when a hit-and-run victim turns out to have a vague connection to Friedman. Soon, Friedman’s widow and her kids are threatened by men searching for vast sums of money her late husband never earned. The stakes rise as Hauck’s involvement shifts from professional to personal. While the reader will occasionally see the next drop, tunnel or curve looming far ahead, the roller-coaster thrills are still there in abundance. (Mar.)

Set mostly in the Borscht Belt, Adler’s satiric take on 1930s New York gangsters falls short of the mark set by such other novels of his as The War of the Roses. Mickey Fine, an itinerant entertainer known as a tumler, has landed a gig at a Catskill hotel frequented by some of the leading thugs of the day. He falls for Mutzie Feder, a frustrated young woman from Brooklyn who’s ended up as the girlfriend of Pittsburgh Phil Strauss (aka Pep) after a makeover so she looks like Jean Harlow. As Fine’s feelings for Mutzie grow, he runs afoul of the jealous Pep and must develop a plan to free her from the life of prostitution the gangster has planned for her. At times Adler overdoes the Brooklynese dialogue (“Certain tings make me crazy. Like sweet liddle canaries who can’t keep der lips clamped shut”), while some readers may find the parodic element makes it hard to engage emotionally with the characters. (Mar.)

Set in the suburbs of Dublin in the early ’80s, this novel—Irish poet, playwright and novelist Bolger’s third—chillingly portrays a bleak Ireland that offers its youth few options. When Francis “Hano” Hanrahan finds temporary employment at the voters’ register’s office, he meets Shay, a charismatic trickster who spins entertainment out of their dreary workplace. As Shay’s sidekick, Hano gets caught up in Dublin’s nightlife and becomes further estranged from his parents. Before the year is over, Shay leaves for the factories of Germany and Hano’s father dies. Left responsible for his mother and four younger siblings, Hano has little choice but to work for local tycoon Pascal Plunkett, whose brother Patrick is a junior minister in the national government. As Pascal’s chauffeur and sometime heavy, Hano finds himself ensnared in the Plunkett brothers’ ruthless world. By the time Shay returns from the continent, both young men have been irrevocably damaged, and their attempt to free themselves from the Plunketts ends in tragedy. Bolger generates intensity and lyricism from his characters’ despair as they spiral into criminality. (Mar.)

Enamored by Hollywood in prerevolutionary China, Wang Qiyao serendipitously poses for a photograph that is chosen for the cover of Shanghai Life magazine. Dubbed “A Proper Young Lady of Shanghai,” she wins second runner-up in a 1946 beauty pageant and is soon mistress to a wealthy benefactor. After his death, marriage in her fallen state is out of the question, and Wang Qiyao embarks on a lonely, decades-long journey through Shanghai’s myriad longtang, or “vast neighborhoods inside enclosed alleys.” In a beautifully constructed cyclical narrative from Wang Anyi (Baotown), fashion serves as the lens through which Wang Qiyao analyzes her descent from fleeting fame to desperate anonymity. Charting her fortunes becomes a metaphor for a vanished way of Shanghai life in this ingenious tale: friends and lovers come and go, Maoist China undergoes immense social and political changes (none explicitly detailed), yet Wang Qiyao finds that “[t]here are only so many designs, and their rotation is what defines fashion. Only sometimes a cycle drags on too long.” As the novel builds to its tragic conclusion, the manner in which character types and events recur against the city’s shifting backdrop is impossible to forget. (Mar.)

Personal strength and resiliency are recurrent themes in Köenings’s surprising and inventive collection (after the novel The Blue Taxi) of five longish stories. They focus largely on relationships and loss, beginning with “Pearls to Swine,” about a narrow-minded wealthy woman whose vision of herself as a magnanimous host is threatened when the invitation she extends to two young women has unforeseen consequences. Expectations are equally disrupted in the title story, which tracks the parallel mishaps that befall a naïve female tourist in Africa and a bus ticket boy, Ezra. Assistance comes from the beyond in “Wondrous Strange,” when at a séance a woman receives instructions from an African spirit regarding a ritual she might perform to revive her ailing husband, and by extension, her own sense of competency. Köenings’s writing is dense but focused, and she often suggests the endings of her stories early on, allowing the reader to focus on the characters’ reactions, thoughts and emotions. The collection’s richness and complexity prove Köenings to be a skillful and imaginative storyteller. (Mar.)

In Edgar-winner Ford’s disappointing sixth novel, the narrator—a nameless boy growing up on suburban Long Island in the mid-1960s—spends what remains of his summer vacation roaming the neighborhood with his older brother, Jim. At home, money is tight, forcing their father to work three jobs while their mother drinks herself to sleep every night. A prowler may be loose on the streets, and the narrator and Jim see a menacing man in a white car lurking near their house and school. When a local boy disappears soon after school starts, the narrator and Jim are sure “Mr. White” is responsible. They turn to their younger sister, Mary, for help, after she mysteriously moves figurines in the boys’ model town, reflecting events before they’ve occurred. The stage is set for suspense, yet Ford (The Girl in the Glass) deflates it at every opportunity with his unresolved subplots. Instead of building to a thrilling climax, the story peters out and loose ends are either forgotten or tied up too neatly. (Mar.)

Jill Rohmer, a convicted child killer with a borderline personality disorder, lures Charlotte “Charley” Webb, a popular columnist for the Palm Beach Post and single mom, into a web of danger and deceit in this spine-tingler from bestseller Fielding (Heartstopper). When Jill invites Charley to collaborate on the “true story” of what really happened to the three children she was convicted of murdering, Charley at first thinks it sounds like a great idea. Her sister Anne is, after all, a bestselling romance author, so why couldn’t Charley have a nonfiction bestseller? Charley meets with Jill’s attractive lawyer, Alex Prescott, who secures a book contract. After committing to the project, Charley begins dating Alex. Then Charley learns Jill had an accomplice, someone on the loose whom Jill calls “Jack.” Fielding pulls out all the stops as the identity of the ruthless murderer becomes obvious, and Charley must race against time to catch the horrible Jack and save his next target—her son. (Mar.)

Jewell’s boisterous sixth novel is a compulsively readable jaunt through the lives of a handful of suburban London misfits. Leah, a shopgirl whose live-in boyfriend flees when she mentions marriage, lives across the street from Toby, a struggling poet who lets out rooms in his bedraggled Victorian house to ragtag tenants who pay rent when they remember and clutter up his otherwise solitary life. There’s a cabaret singer who depends on sugar daddies to keep afloat; a mailroom clerk who shares a room with his mother; and a stylish recluse. And then there’s longtime tenant Gus, whom Leah finds dead on the front walk one day. When Toby discovers that Gus has willed him a sickly cat and a pile of pounds with the provision that Toby use the money to make his life “everything it could be,” it provides the impetus for a shakeup at Toby’s that sends the cast in different directions as they each find ways to grow up. Jewell (Vince and Joy) has a sure hand with the lightly humorous and romantic, and she delivers the goods: an eccentric cast, lively banter and plenty of warmhearted cheer. (Mar.)

This clunky thriller from Levinson (Ask a Dead Man) offers a superficial look at the Los Angeles music industry. Ex-cop Josh Wainwright, who runs a private security firm, has been one of the walking wounded ever since an unknown sniper killed his megastar wife, Katie Sunshine, just as she was about to perform at an L.A. telethon. Wainwright has no doubt that whoever pulled the trigger did so at the behest of Clyde “Mr. Magic” Davenport, an egomaniacal impresario, and is given a golden opportunity to get revenge when Davenport himself hires Wainwright’s firm. Ironically, Davenport wants Wainwright to prove him innocent of another murder. Some purple prose (“He wrestled the covers to a draw, paced the bedroom, stared endlessly out the window at a black sky he prayed would open to a light from heaven saving him from the hell of his confusion”) and less than startling plot twists make for a routine read. (Mar.)

Lehr turns out a frothy escape novel that examines a cross-section of contemporary Los Angeles divorcées who become fast friends despite themselves. There’s Diane, a mom of two whose husband’s gambling led to bankruptcy and divorce. Then there’s Lana, the former wife of a Hollywood heartthrob whose public breakup became a national punch line and led her to change her name and find work at a furniture store. Rounding out the cast is sweet-as-sugar Bonnie, a former homecoming queen now saddled with two children and an overbearing husband, and icy divorce attorney Annette, whose husband left her for another man. After a chance encounter in Lana’s furniture store, Diane discovers Annette is living in the house she lost, and Bonnie has a mini-breakdown while choosing a coffee table; the four eventually find themselves looking to each other for support, insight and favors. Although occasionally veering toward the implausible or clichéd—such as when Lana spurns her ex on national television—Lehr keeps the plot moving with madcap hijinks and tender moments. (Mar.)

Windle, author of the Christian suspense novels Firestorm and CrossFire, pens a flawed but engaging thriller with faith themes. Vicki Andrews, 25, is an inspector for Children at Risk, which funnels money to children’s projects around the world. Her latest assignment takes her to Guatemala City to determine if a faith-based mission may be a model for future partnerships. There, Vicki’s sister, Holly, a passionate environmentalist with Wildlife Rescue Center, is attacked and brutally murdered. In a scene that strains credibility, Vicki discovers her sister just as she is dying. When Vicki journeys to the Sierra de las Minas biosphere, it becomes a journey into her tragic past, which childhood trauma has prevented her from remembering. Her trip also holds the key to the secret of her parents’ deaths and perhaps her sister’s. Despite some slow pacing and too many suspensions of disbelief, Windle is timely in introducing readers to political rationalizations that cost innocent lives and ably paints the landscape of Guatemala. However, she portrays the tensions between environmental groups and children’s mission groups unevenly; greater subtlety would have made her points more powerful. A gratifying twist toward the end will ensure that readers make it to the final pages. (Mar.)

Celebrated on two continents, Polish poet Zagajewski (A Defense of Ardor) looks back with some self-consciousness, in these new poems, at the lyricism of his compatriot Czeslaw Milosz, at the prewar Poland he portrayed, and at a Miloszian mixture of pathos, faith and doubt. Set in Krakow, Italy, Houston and New York, these frequently brief and always inviting works present, at their most general, “the world’s materiality at dawn—/ and the soul’s frailty.” More specific elegies remember Milosz, Joseph Brodsky, Alexander Wat, W.G. Sebald, or look back on the poet’s own “childhood, which evaporated/ like a puddle gleaming with a rainbow of gasoline.” Cavanagh’s supple translations let the verse sing in American English without making this Polish poet sound too American: as much as he embraces his new home (he is now teaching at the University of Chicago), he remembers, too, that “the Holocaust Museum in Washington” holds “my childhood, my wagons, my rust.” Perhaps narrow in their sweet, sad moods, Zagajewski’s poems remain wide in their sympathies. One especially ambitious work imagines the people of the ancient Near East coming alive again, startling archeologists: “Look, a flame stirs from the ashes./ Yes, I recognize the face.” (Apr.)

The volatile young poet rose to prominence as a coauthor of the Russian Futurist manifesto “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” in 1912; the next five years saw the explosive sexual boasting and the fragmentary lines of such poems as “A Cloud in Pants,” experimental plays and even participation in important Russian modernist filmmaking. An enemy of tradition in all its forms, the moody, energetic Vladimir Mayakovsky supported the Soviet revolution wholeheartedly, writing a poem called “150,000,000” in support of the Soviet army. Yet the passionate poet became worn down by the grind of his personal life and by Stalin’s assault on something dear to him—modern art. Mayakovsky shot himself in 1930, and his subsequent canonization by the U.S.S.R. made him a figure of ambivalence even for Russians who liked his daring verse. Mixing well-translated poems with bits from Mayakovsky’s short autobiography I, Myself, excerpts from memoirs (by the likes of Osip Mandelstam and Francine du Plessix Gray) and short bits from critics’ writings, Almereyda attempts to give Mayakovsky a new audience. Alas, the bits may be too short to sustain readers’ interest, and the anthology—like the poet’s life—seems choppy, confusing and finished all too fast. (Apr.)

Through reviews in the New Yorker, the New Republic and elsewhere, Kirsch (The Wounded Surgeon) has fast become one of the country’s best-known poetry critics, advocating self-control, formal mastery, rational argument and attention to the past, and praising poets from T.S. Eliot to Anthony Hecht to Frederick Seidel. Kirsch’s first book of poems struck many readers as apprentice work: this second effort—composed almost entirely of 16-line sonnets (like George Meredith’s)—comes far closer to the ideals set forth in his prose. Kirsch’s subjects include New York City (where he lives) before and after 9/11; other poets (“Wordsworth,” “Larkin,” “Palgrave’s Golden Treasury”); “hip-hop’s favorite furrier”; a “pet adoption booth”; and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which Kirsch views with grim and complicated regret: jet contrails at JFK airport, in one powerful sonnet, are “advertisements in the sky/ For a new kind of combat that requires/ Us only not to notice and ask why.” An interlude of stanzaic poems built around lines from the medieval writer Boethius saves the book from formal monotony and excess topicality. These efforts—highbrow deliberation in verse—are a lot like Hecht, and good enough to stand, poem by poem, on their own. (Apr.)

The medieval Persian mystical poet Hafez used sinuous lines and ringing metaphors to write about wisdom, the dangers of repression and the paradoxes of his faith. His blend of simplicity and challenge makes him the most popular poet in Iran today. Bly and Lewisohn (a world-class Sufism expert) present clear and memorable versions of Hafez’s renowned lyric meditations, though they forgo the original ghazal form (with its intricate repetitions) in favor of unrhymed pentameters. Sometimes their Hafez offers good advice: “Let’s be faithful to what we love./ And keep our spirits high.” Sometimes he describes his warmth and contentment: “The delight of a few words/ With a soul friend for us is enough.” Just as often, though, he shows how the ways of his seeking, and the distance between divine immanence and earthly travail, can disturb even the most sincere follower: “Don’t imagine us to be like the tulip,” he concludes; “rather look at the dark/ Spot of grief we have set on our scorched hearts.” Though Hafez does not (yet) have the immense Western popularity of that other Sufi mystic, Rumi, his verse has all the ingredients to make a similar splash. (Apr.)

When she died this summer at age 84, Paley was widely and rightly remembered as a master of the American short story, an engagé raconteur who mixed earthly humor, Jewish-American heritage, outspoken feminism, antiwar activism and an understated postmodern self-awareness. Those facets did not all appear in Begin Again (2001), a collected poems praised more for honesty than craft; happily, Paley’s many fans may find that her best poems were her last. The wry, friendly voices in this posthumous assemblage address her later years with equanimity and humor. As in her short stories, the apparent naïveté of tone plays off the earned wisdom the teller finally conveys. In “I Met a Woman on the Plane,” Paley listens to a mother of five living children explain that she cannot stop grieving for her sixth, who died. Other poems praise the territories Paley has known, with wit and kindness: Manhattan and Brooklyn streets and the hills of Vermont. Finally, though, this wise and patient collection focuses on old age, presented with an appealing combination of impatience and fortitude: “Anyone who gets to be/ eighty years old says thank you/ to the One in charge,” Paley says, “and then im-/ mediately begins to complain.” (Mar.)

Boland’s resilient braid of outspoken feminism with Irish identity has given her a following on both sides of the Atlantic. Here is the recent Boland whose rapid verse celebrates women’s courage and women’s work, both public (several poems acknowledge Mary Robinson, the former president of the Irish Republic) and unsung: the poet remembers herself, when young, asking a statue in Dublin to “Make me a heroine.” Here is the poet who learned from Adrienne Rich, among others, how to tackle big topics of loyalty, rebellion, descent and dissent: “No testament or craft of mine can hide/ our presence/ on the distaff side of history.” Here, too, is the poet who broke new ground for Irish poetry in the 1980s by depicting with verve both domestic happiness and burdens, “the stilled hub/ and polar drab/ of the suburb.” The apprentice poet of the 1970s, learning not only from Rich but Auden, Plath and Yeats, is also here. Boland has never been subtle. Sophisticated readers may find her work hampered by windy rhetoric, as when “The Singers” in the west of Ireland are described “finding a voice where they found a vision.” (Mar.)

The prolific Young (Embryoyo) sometimes seems a creature of mere whimsy, spinning provocative sentences almost at random, one after another; at other times he’s a dynamo of invention, whose ceaseless changes of mood and topics, absurd connections between incompatible tones, explicitly sexual energies and underlying unease more than justify his recent prominence and his obvious influence over so many younger American poets. Between its postsurrealist comic claims (“In the desert I feel like I’m made/ entirely of broccoli”) and its fun with shock value (“We sniff glue./ I have a medium-sized White House in my sperm”), this ninth book will certainly please fans. Yet the volume also finds Young reaching more often for pathos and earnest representations of pain. One of the best poems begins, “Shouldn’t someone have run for help by now?” Another begins, “You must be careful eating thorns.” The moments of lament (evoking, at times, Wallace Stevens) allow Young to slow the book down, to make not only a poetry to caricature our contemporary culture (suffused as we are with so much information) but also a verse suffused with halting regret: these saddest of Young’s poems might even bring prior doubters into his fold. (Feb.)

Boruch’s superb instinct for the structure of free verse and her fine eye for daily life have won her national respect: this first outing since Poems: New and Selected (2004) confirms those strengths. Many of the poems here imitate the visual arts—one is titled “Still Life”; the poem “Ladder Against a House” aspires to a photograph, while “Seven Aubades for Summer” incorporates a daily record of outdoor scenes. Boruch’s best moments combine disarming observation with abstraction and quiet humor: touring a zoo, she declares, “In this saddest of worlds, think/ lunch! And an ocean of hope/ rides over us.” Few readers will come away unimpressed by the supple care Boruch takes in depicting her everyday scenes. And yet there are few surprises. (Feb.)

In the nine groups of six poems, all titled “please advise stop,” that form Morrison’s remarkable Sawtooth Poetry Prize–winning second volume, the now-archaic yet ever-mechanical language of the telegram is used to plumb the vicissitudes of grief and grapple with the death of the speaker’s father. Each line of these unpunctuated, nine-line poems ends with “stop,” “please” or “please advise,” appealing to some ghostly reader for assistance. The rhythm and torque Morrison (Whethering) creates is exquisite and evocative. Often dark and aphoristic, these lines shift between momentary observation (“the water puddle sways like an earthbound kite stop”), pained seeking (“night might still be floating somewhere above us its blood supple and aromatic stop”) and near action, perhaps in the hope of relief (“I stare until I consider the scene truly acknowledged stop”); always, anguish is an instrument for change. Most haunting are the poems’ final, pleading words: “into the dark trees invite the darker birds please advise.” Morrison’s vamp on grief not only draws readers’ attention to the tenuous capacity of language to manage loss, but also leaves the reader moved by what comes to feel like an intensely intimate work. (Jan.)

This second collection shows more unity but less versatility than Compton’s rightly praised, devil-may-care 2005 debut, Downspooky. “For Girls,” the first of the two sequences that make up the book, responds to, reacts against and takes many phrases from an 1882 “health manual” with the same title: its advice on fashion, bodies and morals gives rise, in Compton’s hands, to quirky but politically pointed verse: girls are told (too often, she implies) “to erase the body,/ blank the self/ to receive the costumes it consumes.” The source text—and all the antifeminist counsels, all the social pressure, it represents—may give Compton too easy a target: her sequence recycles its own attitudes, with too few surprises for its length. “Comedy of Manners,” the second sequence, may be harder to like at first, but should fare better over the long-term: its hints of romantic narrative, frequent sarcasm, riffs on found texts and ambitious range of diction (from elaborate to vulgar) all serve Compton’s consistent interest in how and whether the culture will ever let girls grow up: “Our official position is class piñata.” (Jan.)

In the dark, compelling fifth Moe Prager mystery from Anthony-winner Coleman (after 2007’s Soul Patch), the PI and former New York City cop pays a heavy price for a choice he made in the late 1970s after locating the missing Patrick Maloney. Prager had decided to preserve both the secret of Patrick’s whereabouts and sexual orientation from Patrick’s sister, Katy. When Prager marries Katy years later, the shadow of his deception weighs heavily over him, and Katy’s eventual discovery of the truth—after Patrick’s death—costs him her love. The divorced pair reunite after an unknown enemy launches a complicated campaign of terror against them, aided by a seemingly resurrected Patrick. The occasionally overly convoluted plot and a heavy reliance on earlier books make this less accessible to newcomers, who may also not be as moved as old-timers by the downbeat ending. While this appears to be the end of the series, fans of well-written PI novels will hope to see more of Prager. (Apr.)

In Shamus-winner Bruen’s brilliant sixth Jack Taylor novel (after 2007’s Priest), the tormented Galway detective feels like a ghost in a newly prosperous city that little resembles his birthplace. Years of alcoholic dissipation have taken their toll. Jack’s apprentice and surrogate son, Cody, lies in hospital, the victim of bullets meant for Jack. His only real friend is Ridge, a lesbian Ban Gardai (female cop), and their relationship is a complicated mixture of affection and hostility. Jack decides to cut his losses and move to America, but first he agrees to help Ridge solve a series of heinous murders. A young man’s crucifixion is followed by his sister being burned to death. As Jack investigates, he squares off against a 20-year-old girl whose grief over her religious fanatic mother’s death in a hit-and-run accident has become a black insanity that demands biblical vengeance. Bruen riffs on different meanings and implications of the word cross throughout, and his insights into pain, loss and Irishness are unforgettable. (Mar.)

After a slow start, all the narrative strands, among them the voice of Queen Victoria, begin to work together in this engaging historical from Barron (Jane and the Stillroom Maid and eight other Jane Austen mysteries). Against a backdrop of national mourning for Prince Albert in 1861, an evil (complete with eye patch) German count, Wolfgang von Stühlen, tracks Irish barrister Patrick Fitzgerald, who 20 years earlier defended a would-be assassin of the queen, and Fitzgerald’s beautiful ward, Georgiana “Georgie” Armistead, who, unusually for a woman of the period, is trained as a doctor. Georgie’s specialized medical knowledge comes into play as the late prince consort’s concerns and his widow’s fears drive the fleeing pair to France, to visit Victoria’s youngest son, the sickly Prince Leopold, and on to Bavaria, the original home of the interrelated family of Victoria and Albert. (An opening genealogical chart shows that the queen and her consort were cousins.) The history of the royal line is diverting, and the royal gossip is even more so. (Mar.)

Murder’s on the menu at Simmer, a popular Boston restaurant, in the third saucy cozy to feature “gourmet girl” Chloe Parker from daughter-and-mother writing team Conant-Park and Conant (after 2007’s Simmer Down). When Leandra, a Simmer server, turns up strangled with her own apron strings in a seafood delivery truck belonging to Owen, the fiancé of Chloe’s best friend, Adrianna, there are plenty of suspects. Most of the restaurant’s staff appear to have despised the petite blonde, who happened to be the girlfriend of Simmer’s owner, but did they hate Leandra enough to kill her? Chloe discovers Owen’s been lying to Adrianna about something important, and Simmer employees and some of their significant others have a penchant for stealing. The snooping foodie dives deeper into danger as she decides to check out that delivery truck one more time. The authors serve up another delectable dish of detection. (Mar.)

Several cases keep Molly Murphy busy in Agatha-winner Bowen’s winning seventh mystery to star the Irish immigrant PI (after 2007’s In Dublin’s Fair City). In December 1902, Molly and her beau, suspended New York City police captain Daniel Sullivan, stumble on a near-dead young woman in a Central Park snowdrift. Her passions roused, Molly sets out to discover the identity of the poor traumatized creature and that of whoever cast her into the snow “clad only in a flimsy white dress.” Meanwhile, leading actress Blanche Lovejoy hires Molly to look into the ghostly shenanigans that threaten disaster for Blanche’s soon-to-open new play. Molly also agrees to help a wealthy society matron who wishes to know if her missing Yale student nephew has vanished because of the murder he’s suspected of committing. Theatrical life becomes the hinge on which everything swings, and Molly gamely takes to the stage as part of her assignment. It’s all in a day’s work for this delightfully spunky heroine. (Mar.)

At the start of Camilleri’s wry ninth Insp. Salvo Montalbano procedural (after 2007’s The Patience of the Spider), the irascible detective is hoping for a quiet day at his Vigàta office when a visitor, the beguiling Michela Pardo, implores him to help her track down her missing brother, Angelo. Montalbano accompanies Michela to Angelo’s apartment, where they find her brother’s gunshot-blasted corpse in a compromising position. Montalbano later discovers a possible link between the murder and a series of drug overdoses whose victims include a popular senator. Angelo’s affair with a professor’s attractive wife offers another avenue of inquiry, but one that gets complicated when the inspector begins to fall in love with the suspect. Humor, much of it provided by Montalbano’s eccentric colleagues, leavens the noirish story line, and the solution to the central puzzle is both psychologically plausible and intellectually satisfying. The crisp prose is a pleasure to read, and a last-minute twist a testament to the author’s artistry. (Mar.)

This magnificent eighth novel (after 2000’s Look to Windward) of the Culture, an interstellar posthuman civilization of incredible wealth and technological sophistication, centers on three siblings: Ferbin and Oramen, the misfit heirs of conquering King Hausk of the Sarl, who rules a backward and patriarchal realm deep beneath the surface of the artificial “Shellworld” Sursamen, and their exiled sister, Djan, now a powerful agent of the Culture’s Special Circumstances division. When King Hausk is murdered, Ferbin narrowly avoids the conspirators and sets out across the galaxy to ask Djan’s help with revenge against the killer, now serving as Oramen’s regent. Soon they learn of the horrific forces a hidden enemy is about to unleash on Sursamen, and must race to save the home that has rejected them both. Beautifully written and filled with memorable characters and startling technology, this tale of intricate politics and interstellar warfare ably demonstrates that Banks is still at the height of his powers. (Mar.)

Stemple explores the complications of family ties in this shimmering sequel to 2005’s Singer of Souls. American musician Douglas Stewart has imprisoned his former mistress, the evil but beautiful former queen Aine, and now rules the Daoine Sidhe. Douglas’s sister, Bridie, a former cop, thinks he killed their grandmother and is scouring Scotland for him. Their brother, Scott, an Iraq war veteran tormented by hallucinations, is stuck caring for the baby who has mysteriously appeared on his doorstep. Fortunately, Mundoo, a mysterious Native American god, is around to provide parenting advice. When the siblings reunite in the realm of the Sidhe, Bridie and Scott must decide how much Douglas, who seems to be taking a turn for the megalomaniacal, can be trusted with his newfound power. Stemple riffs off Native American and Celtic myths with ease while skillfully depicting a world where any move can have dire consequences. (Mar.)

This grim and vivid sequel to 2007’s The Blade Itself transcends its middle volume status, keeping the reader engaged with complicated plotting and intriguing character development. As savage Northmen invade Angland, the northernmost province of the unwieldy Union, honorable, hard-working Union soldier Colonel West watches his notions of civilized warfare erode in one horrible battle after another. In Dagoska, a southern city threatened by Gurkish soldiers and left undefended as Union troops head to Angland, dreadfully maimed Inquisitor Glokta employs tortures and deceptions to ferret out conspiracies against the king. Ignoring these worldly concerns, disreputable magus Bayaz of Calcis drives a squabbling little band through a wasteland in search of a relic that can open a gate to the realm of demons. Abercrombie leavens the bloody action with moments of dark humor, developing a story suffused with a rich understanding of human darkness and light. (Mar.)

Wright (A Manhattan Ghost Story) unravels all the old conventions of ghost stories with this rich collection of new and reprinted writing and artwork. Other than “Rainy Day People,” a gently unnerving study of cabin fever complicated by a supernatural siege, and “His Mother’s Eyes,” a brief yarn about the stubborn lines between fantasy and reality, most of the stories focus quite strongly on the dead. Prettily written and engagingly strange, if sometimes abstract and unclear (as with “The People on the Island,” where the only certainty is that at least one character is no longer alive), the stories provide crucial context for the crown jewel of the collection: “Cold House,” a short novel about two old lovers who have fallen out of touch. Wright’s ghosts frequently make for unreliable, confused or insane participants, keeping the reader intrigued and guessing. The only major flaw is the poetry, which mostly interrupts the steady flow of smooth oddness so painstakingly developed in the prose. 14 color illus. not seen by PW. (Mar.)

Military SF thriller, xeno-archeological adventure, interstellar romance and shamanistic vision quest combine in this ambitious but flawed sequel to 2007’s The Outback Stars. Chief Petty Officer Terry Myell—whose taboo enlistee/officer marriage to Lt. Cmdr. Jodenny Scott has landed him a tedious desk assignment—is kidnapped and forced to join a mission seeking a group of researchers who disappeared while investigating a network of spherical gateways that allow almost instantaneous travel between the stars. Inexplicably, Myell is the only one who can get the system to work. As he and his captors explore strange worlds for signs of the missing scientists, they discover a hostile reptilian race bent on controlling the secrets to the gateways and wiping out anyone in their way. McDonald leaves substantial questions of crucial backstory unanswered, and the divergent plot lines laden with Australian Aboriginal myth and folklore references leave this sophomore effort disjointed. (Mar.)

Adventure blends with mind-boggling mathematics and science in this idea-heavy reprint collection. A detailed introduction for laypeople explains the “malleable” math of quantum mechanics, curved space and number theory. “Luminous” and the title story follow two academics turned spies who fight off deadly incursions from a mathematical realm that could unravel our own universe. Mathematical secrets are also the key to an ancient mystery and a modern war in “Glory,” while “Riding the Crocodile” details the millennia-long efforts of a pair of scientists to understand the Aloof, a mysterious race living in the heart of the Milky Way. The Hugo-winning novella “Oceanic” closes this intriguing array with a look at a far-future colony where science and religion collide in faith-shattering ways. Egan (Teranesia) is renowned for bringing the most abstract concepts of physics and philosophy to life, and these diamond-hard science fiction stories ably showcase his talent. (Mar.)

This unwieldy debut from former Alabama state senator Drinkard introduces a low-tech world where human reproduction is controlled to concentrate desirable traits. Life is regulated by the scriptures of Geerna, a primitive human who long ago reached a covenant with the goddess Shetow. The wise women of the Medora Council interpret Geerna’s words and protect her secret prophecies, overseeing the competitions where adolescents demonstrate their skills and suitability for mating. Occasionally indulging in too-chunky exposition, Drinkard unfolds a world more complicated than it first appears. Seven young men and women, chosen to represent humanity when Shetow passes judgment, soon learn their goddess is not at all what she seemed. Shifting romantic entanglements, team dynamics and personal growth keep the human level interesting despite revelations in which the characters are largely passive, but the eventual pairing off is too pat, and the conclusion ducks the moral questions raised by such social engineering. (Mar.)

Chaos rules in Armstrong’s complex eighth Women of the Otherworld installment (after 2007’s No Humans Involved). The formidable Benicio Cortez once helped “tabloid-reporting, gun-toting, chaos demon spy girl” Hope Adams out of a jam, so she agrees to go undercover and join a supernatural youth gang that’s been causing problems for Cortez’s multinational corporation. Assuming the persona of bratty rich co-ed Faith Edmonds, Hope works her way into the gang, participates in heists and soon finds herself dangerously attracted to one of the other members, cute Jasper “Jaz” Haig. All too soon, Jaz’s diabolical plans lead to a shocking tragedy. Armstrong excels in depicting Hope’s transformations, but new readers might want to read earlier books to get context for all the mayhem. (Mar.)

Camp (The Marriage Wager) crafts a spirited plot for the newest installment of her Matchmakers series. Returned to his family in 1807 after being kidnapped and raised in the slums of London, Gideon, earl of Radbourne, begins searching for a wife at the behest of his demanding grandmother, Lady Odelia—one who will please his noble family and his own unpretentious nature. The constant stream of predictably giggly, fan-waving eligible maidens do not arouse his interest, but nonconformist, plainspoken and drably dressed Lady Irene Wyngate, a near-spinster at 25, does. The palpable sexual tension between the two soon has Irene rethinking her plan of remaining unattached and provides Gideon with newfound hope that a caricature bride can be avoided. Lively and energetic secondaries round out the formidable leads, and despite Irene’s excessive and lackluster ruminations, the mystery surrounding Gideon’s parentage continues to unravel until the very last pages, assuring readers a surprise ending well worth waiting for. (Mar.)

After two years of grueling work for the International Criminal Court in The Hague, an international terrorist incident prompts divorced lawyer Sophie Bellamy to recognize that her work is meaningless without her two children—Max, 12, and Daisy, 19—who are living with their remarried father. On the snowy night Sophie returns to Avalon, N.Y., she meets the handsome bachelor veterinarian Noah Shepherd, who’s looking for the right lady to mother his kids and live in his rambling farmhouse with him. While Sophie is happy to be part of a community, get reacquainted with her kids and care for her grandson (Daisy has an infant boy with a recalcitrant father), she is thrilled at Noah’s sexy attention until she learns he’s 10 years younger than she—29 to her 39. In her latest Lakeside Chronicles title, Wiggs (Dockside) jovially juggles the lives of numerous colliding characters and adds some winter-favorite recipes for a festive touch. (Feb.)

Brook crafts an entertaining, slow-building romance for her latest Guardian series entry. Charlie Newcomb is a recovering alcoholic working at a bar and just trying to keep her head above water when she comes across a group of vampires nesting on the establishment’s roof. Luckily, her enigmatic next-door neighbor Ethan McCabe is a Guardian, or angel, who is keeping an eye on her. The two get caught in a demonic plot that threatens Charlie’s sister, Jane, while Charlie must wrestle with not only the undead but with her growing attraction to Ethan. Charlie’s traumatic past has left her believably afraid of her own needs, and Ethan is a brave, sweet guy with old-fashioned ideas about chivalry. Brook gives them distinctive dialogue and paints a fascinating, erotic world full of angels, demons, vampires and ambiguity. (Feb.)

When handsome spy Trevelyn Deveridge comes to the house of young widowed duchess Artemisia Pelham-Smythe, an accomplished painter, she assumes he is there to be her new nude model. He complies with her request in order to get the information he wants, and they soon develop an immediate, potent attraction to each other. As Trevelyn tries to learn more about Mr. Beddington, the business manager who has a key to Artemisia’s father’s safe, the spy finds himself falling in love with the spirited duchess. Meanwhile, Artemisia hides secrets of her own related to her professional ambitions, forbidden to Victorian women. Bryan has a great handle on the material and her characters, creating a charming, colorful story with an intricate, fast-paced story line. (Feb.)

Mashima (Rave Master) is back with a brand new series about the juvenile delinquents of wizardry and magic, set in a mythical world of small towns, steam engines and horse-drawn carts, where magic is mainstream, young wizards follow glossy magazines that profile popular wizard guilds and everyone has hidden magical abilities. Fire-eating wizard Natsu initiates young and sexy Lucy, a celestial wizard, into his oddball guild, Fairy Tail. Soon we meet the womanizing Loke; the ice wizard Gray Fullbuster, who is often found wandering around in just his boxers; and the heavy-drinking Cana, who is never far from a barrel of wine. It’s goofy fun and playful troublemaking—minus any sort of criminal element. Mashima sets a careful balance between showing the Fairy Tail wizards’ troublemaking mentality while still establishing that the heart of each wizard is the heart of a hero. With a violence that harks back to the Looney Tunes where all combatants suffer heavy blows but always come out alive, albeit with some scratches, the story is more akin to Bugs Bunny than Harry Potter. But fans of both will be pleasantly entertained. The first two volumes of this series are being released simultaneously. (Mar.)

Apparently there’s always an audience for a formulaic secret agent yarn. No reader will be surprised that retired spy Eric Westfall takes on one more assignment from the CIA, this time to track down the rogue agent who’s plotting to sell a laptop full of secret data to the Russian mob. It’s also no surprise that the rogue turns out to be his former lover Emma, though it’s a bit of a twist that what she’s selling is proof that the president personally authorized torture and other misdeeds. Predictably, Eric is torn between what his duty demands (snuff her) and what his conscience says (protect her). Because readers can fill in the gaps of motivation and plotting with details from other stories, Mosher is able to do a minimalist script featuring long stretches without dialogue as the characters race through exotic settings. Francavilla’s art makes the most of those passages in pages full of what look like storyboards for the movie version; he is less successful with characters, though their lack of expression could be taken for world-weary ennui. In all, this book is easy to read but equally easy to forget. (Mar.)

A futuristic SF tale that’s set in modern-day Tokyo, this manga triangulates good old-fashioned monsters (chimera), a government research lab and a high school girl in a gory narrative that exploits trust and vulnerability. Fifteen-year-old Aiko had her left arm mysteriously replaced with one having chimera-type attributes and is immediately recruited as a lab rat/secret weapon for the government. Sugimoto fleshes out her protagonist’s desire to please everyone around her and, as a result, her inability to say “no.” Both play key parts in her willingness to be tested and studied as a human experiment and likewise, used as a killing machine. Sugimoto also adds weight to supporting character Sudo (Aiko’s handler) by offering his backstory and his reasons for wanting to stay close to Aiko. By exploring Aiko’s insecurities, Sugimoto makes this a girl-oriented shonen that boys will read, while offering SF/fantasy-loving girls a high school outsider comic that they can appreciate. Sugimoto’s gritty shonen aesthetic couples nicely with the blood and guts of the story, as well as the raw, emotional aspect of both female and male protagonists, making for a subtle, well-thought-out story. Rated mature for violence, but no sexual overtones in this series so far. (Jan.)

Delicate mood and generous empathy help this teen-girl romance cross cultural boundaries. Twelve-year-old Ann feels disoriented when her newly divorced mother leaves Tokyo and moves back to her village and less-than-sympathetic parents. Ann has trouble adjusting to rural culture—where, for example, cute wild bunnies are not pets but food. However, the townspeople, especially rabbit-hunting young Daigo, offer Ann friendship and support after her mother commits suicide. As they go to summer camp with other young teenagers two years later, Ann and Daigo still are close, but Ann worries about losing him to a rival while she also obsesses about when she’ll begin having regular periods. Some of the plot complications are predictable, such as lonely rich-kid Fuji beginning to cast yearning glances at Ann, and some of the characters’ concerns may seem trivial to grownups. But Ashihara’s art is quietly lovely, especially winter scenes with the air swirling with snowflakes or when a summer night is full of fireflies. Her script treats all the characters with gentle respect. The translation ignores differences in regional dialects, missing some clumsiness in conversations, but this manga still succeeds in showing the delight as well as the awkwardness of developing relationships. (Jan.)

If there is a genre of manga that is yanki shojo (gangster girl comics), then Sunzen! is it, a quiet, girlish answer to thug high school manga (i.e., Cromartie High). Satsuki Kurakawa, the toughest girl in Tama High, a school comprising yakuza-in-training, is best friends with Aya Sendo, the toughest guy in Tama High. The story line dissolves into the recurring “platonic boyfriend” scenario rife in shojo manga (Sendo has feelings for Kurakawa, but Kurakawa is oblivious), but Sakurai gives the tough-girl routine a sweet, feminine finish. Whereas most gangster girl characters are designed to be prickly and abrasive, Kurakawa is tough but loyal and affectionate. However, the best part is the chapter breaks, where Sakurai literally illustrates the challenges that she encounters as a creator (i.e., taking the bullet train to Tokyo to hand in her pages on time, then spending hours in the publishing office toning her pages). This could be a safe manga for the uninitiated reader, with its accessible “girl power” themes and recognizable cityscapes. Sakurai’s style is quite beautiful and leans more toward josei (women’s manga) simplicity. However, like josei, the story is subtle and requires two reads for full appreciation—a task that newbies may concede to, but veterans may pass over in search of more immediately entertaining fare. (Jan.)

Signature

Reviewed by Brenda Shaughnessy

Marie Howe’s books of poetry materialize once a decade and are big news and cause for celebration. Both of her previous collections moved me to tears and have continued to move me. Reading her third is like finally having a very long thirst quenched.

Howe’s debut, The Good Thief, contains a poem, “Part of Eve’s Discussion,” which remains one of the most breathtaking out-of-body experiences in contemporary poetry: “...when it occurs to you/ your car could spin/.../ it was like that, and after that, it was still like that, only/ all the time.” When I teach poetry classes, this is what I start with: it makes young poets want to write.

Then there are the rapt, anguished poems about all-too-corporeal experiences in What the Living Do, which struggles to reckon with a beloved brother’s death from AIDS as well as a rough-and-tumble childhood. Howe finds the flash point of illumination in the chaos of grief and murky memory. This book has become a classic text in coping with life, love and loss. How do we save each other, or how do we watch helplessly? How can we live with our memories or with losing them, or each other?

Howe is the rare poet who offers answers to these questions.

This third book unites and develops all the strength and beauty of the previous two. Metaphysical aspects of Thief find advanced life forms in mind-benders like “Limbo” (“Do I have an I?/ One says to another... ”) and “Easter.” a brilliant short poem about reanimation (“And the whole body was too small. Imagine/ the sky trying to fit into a tunnel carved into a hill”). The earthbound qualities of Living also find new form here: political, indeed global concerns are posited with signature clarity, expressing, through simple observation and empathy, the hope for more humane systems.

A cycle of heartbreaking poems about motherhood, called “Life of Mary,” looks back on the speaker’s own dead mother, while other poems look straight into the moment, joyfully, reverently and always with a pause for reflection and amazement, with her daughter.

Howe is a careful and soulful alchemist. She makes metaphor matter and material metaphysical. She becomes magic with her transforming perspective that is part mother, part muscle, part music, part mind. This book has the amazing thing that Howe always seems to pull off: the miracle. “I saw it./ It was the thing and spirit both: the real/ world: evident, invisible.” (Mar.)

Brenda Shaughnessy is the author of Interior with Sudden Joy (FSG, 1999) and the forthcoming Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon, 2008), which won the 2007 James Laughlin Award. She is poetry editor of Tin House magazine.