Fiction Reviews

Set in Franco Spain in 1949, Barcelona novelist and playwright Baulenas's revenge tale of Legionnaire Sgt. Genís Aleu is drenched in desolation, fear and cruelty. After his father, Juan, enlisted to fight Franco, Genís was raised in a religious charity ward. Years later, former POW Juan, near death, extracts a grim, quixotic promise from Genís. He is to recover Juan's friend's remains from the POW camp and give them “a decent burial” in Barcelona. After eight years in Franco's celebrated Spanish Foreign Legion, Genís travels to the POW camp turned military base to fulfill his promise. Despite his professed loyalty, Genís actually seethes with a hatred for Franco that's fueled by his obsession to avenge his father. The bleak political struggles roiling the country bring to mind Darkness at Noon, while the soldiers' banter and ribald humor is of the Hemingway school. And though Genís's zealous devotion to his dead father (and the self-destructive lengths he goes to in following through on his promise) sometimes confounds, the narrative overall is brisk, tense and satisfyingly complex. (July)

Wickham (The Gatecrasher; also, the Shopaholic series as Sophie Kinsella) spins a delightful story of British families forced to spend their vacation together after a mutual friend promises them the same week in his Spanish villa. Chloe Harding hopes that a holiday will soothe the strain between her and longtime partner Philip Murray, who is worried that a recent takeover of his company may cost him his job. Their hopes are dashed when they arrive and find another family already settled at the villa. To Chloe's disappointment, she'll be sharing the space with Hugh Stratton, the beau who broke her heart 15 years ago. Now married to high-maintenance Amanda and with two children, Hugh apologizes, and though Chloe initially expresses nothing but hurt and disdain (all the while keeping their past a secret from Philip), she eventually considers beginning life anew with Hugh. Wickham does a bangup job of creating believable characters—even Amanda is less vapid than she at first seems. Surprises abound as the plot unfolds, and the families begin to wonder whether their mutual friend made an innocent mistake in getting them together. (July)

Townley (Little White Lies) misses the mark with this chronicle of the tangled web spun by Jessica Wild and her cohorts after Jessica unexpectedly inherits a fortune. After befriending Grace Hampton, a kindly woman at a nursing home, single workaholic Jessica fibs to her hopeful friend, saying she's dating—and eventually married to—advertising giant Anthony Milton. Upon Grace's death, Jessica discovers that she, or rather, Mrs. Milton, is the heir to Grace's vast fortune. A clause in the will states that she has 50 days to claim her newfound riches. Rather than admit her lie, Jessica decides to try and get Anthony to marry her. So begins a whisper-thin plot that involves a high-paid escort who teaches Jessica tricks (like pushing her cleavage out) and a matchmaker who advises Jessica to “play hardball.” After a couple of dates, Anthony caves, and the second half of the book is eaten up by wedding planning and Jessica's pining for Anthony's friend. A salvo of screwball surprises explode in the third act, but these only help sink the book. (July)

At 30, Londoner Joanna still spends her free time with her Oxford college friends, now with burgeoning careers and all on the cusp of real adulthood. Lucas, Joanna's closest friend and prolonged crush, inherits Stoneborough Manor, a huge and imposing house in the Cotswold countryside filled with priceless art, where all the college friends are to spend every weekend together. The first visit, on New Year's Eve, doesn't start well, as the Londoners get lost. To Joanna, the manor has a threatening and unsettling aura, and indeed, the big, dark, vaguely confusing house with its secrets and disappointments works well as an allegory for moving into the responsibilities and fears of growing up. Joanna and her friends proceed to deal with the unknown, some well, others destructively. A focus on the shifting relationships and loyalties doesn't leave much room for plot, but Joanna's voice is engaging, and Londoner Whitehouse, making her debut, manages to generate a lot of interest in the somewhat flat Four Weddings and a Funeral-esque ensemble: she gets the insecurities, pedigrees and Cotswold locale spot on. Unfortunately, this promising first effort features a truncated ending that is less evocative than jarring. (June)

In this debut novel, Blau addresses the coming-of-age of a young girl as she navigates her way through the confusion of adolescence. Fourteen-year-old Jamie lives in Santa Barbara with her 16-year-old sister, Renee, and their parents, Allen and Betty, two swinging, pot-smoking, part-time nudists. It's 1976 and Jamie isn't altogether comfortable with her parents' lifestyle, while Renee turns to straighter neighbors for a surrogate family. Overly anxious Jamie ends up with Flip, the cutest surfer in town. Before long they have progressed way beyond kissing, and Allen and Betty's casual ways result in a disaster that turn the family into pariahs in their middle-class neighborhood. Blau understands the mating rituals of 1970s teens, and she reproduces their mindless chatter with ease. Unfortunately, not all of the characters are fully realized; the adults, generally treated more obliquely, give off no more than hints of character. It's obvious that their excessive hedonism will eventually cause tragedy, so the book does have a growing dread that blossoms in the third quarter, but the reader may be left with the impression that all this ground has been covered before. (June)

After college, Lucy Venier's search for happiness takes her on a bumpy but ultimately fulfilling ride in Luongo's witty debut. Should Lucy be a Philly crime reporter, a Web content writer, an advertising whiz, or should she follow in her sister's footsteps and go to law school? Or should she embrace her gifted inner artist? Although Lucy's amazingly adjusted in some ways, she's woefully behind in others. Sometimes her boyfriends—an older newspaperman who uses her for sex; an abusive recovering alcoholic and a boorish store manager who talks like a wasted rapper—lead her down some unfortunate paths. But Lucy's irrepressible spirit helps her survive, while surprise reconnections with her sister and a former fiancé support her realization that life is an act of art-in-progress. Though it has the trappings of chick lit, this is much wiser and frequently funnier; it reads like a novel-in-stories, each piece contributing to the overall effect of a young woman coming—often roughly—into her own. (June)

Author and screenwriter Benioff follows up The 25th Hour with this hard-to-put-down novel based on his grandfather's stories about surviving WWII in Russia. Having elected to stay in Leningrad during the siege, 17-year-old Lev Beniov is caught looting a German paratrooper's corpse. The penalty for this infraction (and many others) is execution. But when Colonel Grechko confronts Lev and Kolya, a Russian army deserter also facing execution, he spares them on the condition that they acquire a dozen eggs for the colonel's daughter's wedding cake. Their mission exposes them to the most ghoulish acts of the starved populace and takes them behind enemy lines to the Russian countryside. There, Lev and Kolya take on an even more daring objective: to kill the commander of the local occupying German forces. A wry and sympathetic observer of the devastation around him, Lev is an engaging and self-deprecating narrator who finds unexpected reserves of courage at the crucial moment and forms an unlikely friendship with Kolya, a flamboyant ladies' man who is coolly reckless in the face of danger. Benioff blends tense adventure, a bittersweet coming-of-age and an oddly touching buddy narrative to craft a smart crowd-pleaser. (May)

Lee's poignant debut saga covers three generations of a Chinese-Canadian family in Vancouver. Their story begins when Chan Seid Quan emigrates to Vancouver in 1913 at 17, but the novel opens 10 years after his death at the age of 94, when his granddaughter, Samantha, leaves graduate school and a lover in Montreal to return to Vancouver to take care of her mother. Samantha—frozen with indecision about her future and resentful that she's burdened with responsibility she didn't choose—passes her days contemplating her family's past. Polished, nonchronological set pieces offer glimpses of hardship, alienation and despair in Vancouver's Chinatown. Seid Quan returns to China at intervals separated by years, just often enough to marry, father three children and return to Canada after each visit a lonelier man. His youngest child, a son named Pon Man, relocates to Vancouver in 1951 at 15, and eventually marries and has five daughters, the youngest of whom is Samantha. Seid Quan's wife, Shew Lin, survives war and occupation while caring for her three children, and eventually arrives in Vancouver. She's tough, particularly on Pon Man's wife, Siu Sang, who suffers postpartum depression. The present ceaselessly mirrors the past in this enlightening look at Vancouver's slice of the Chinese diaspora. (May)

With this debut, sportswriter Schilling has written one of the best baseball novels since Howard Frank Mosher's Waiting for Teddy Williams. Using actual events, Schilling has fictionalized a fantasy scenario in baseball history—the integration of black players into the major leagues in 1944. Bill Veeck Jr., a Marine veteran from a prestigious baseball family, buys the Philadelphia Athletics in 1943, becoming the youngest man to ever own a major league club. Veeck is a genius at publicity and promotion who wants to win the World Series—but using black players. He signs the best of the Negro League to the Athletics, against all conventional feeling and the opposition of Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis, the vicious commissioner of baseball. The Athletics romp through the 1944 season behind the on-and-off diamond antics of real-life stars like Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige and Roy Campanella, with Veeck struggling to raise money, avoid race riots and flummox Judge Landis. This exciting, fast-paced story is a fine commentary on baseball lore, race relations, and American sentiment during World War II, and it will have the reader hanging on every pitch, wondering how Veeck and his players will overcome racial discrimination to prove they can play in the major leagues. (May)

This debut novel from popular literary blogger Sarvas focuses on the midlife crisis of recently widowed Harry Rent. Harry maintained a complicated and uneasy relationship with his wife, Anna, who died during a cosmetic surgery procedure. On the day of her funeral, Harry meets Molly, a raven-haired diner waitress and grad student, and is smitten. To win Molly's heart, Harry devises a bizarre plan to transform himself from the sleazy, lying john that he'd become into an honorable and noble gentleman straight from the pages of a Dumas novel, through a series of far from selfless acts aimed toward Molly's old, crotchety co-worker, Lucille. Harry stalks Lucille to ascertain her financial needs and tries to rectify her pitiful situation—all just to get a night of passion with Molly, who already has one deadbeat in her life. Harry is also being followed by the private investigator hired by his sister-in-law, Claire, who holds Harry responsible for sending the beautiful Anna to her early death, but he is too wrapped up in his own game to notice. The novel hinges on Harry's transformation, and though there may be legions of writers spurned by his blog just willing for Sarvas to fail, this is a self-assured, comic and satisfying story. (May)

Precious Ramotswe, “Botswana's foremost solver of problems,” is used to handling mostly straightforward domestic cases, which makes a series of anonymous letters threatening her and her prickly assistant, Grace Makutsi, all the more disturbing in Smith's triumphant ninth No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency novel (after The Good Husband of Zebra Drive). The search for whoever penned the letters coincides with a new commission: Manka Sebina, whose birth parents gave her up as a child, hires the agency to track down any living relatives. Both problems afford Mma Ramotswe ample opportunity to display her winning blend of insight into others' motivations and an endearingly naïve belief in the best in human nature. Significant, if incremental, developments in the lives of the community Smith has lovingly created over the course of the series will intrigue old fans. Immediately accessible to newcomers, this entry will prompt them to seek out the earlier books. (Apr.)

Mystery Writers of America presents a high-quality anthology of 19 original stories that explore a wide range of police experiences, from newcomer Polly Nelson's superb tale set in 1864 Kansas, “Burying Mr. Henry,” to editor Connelly's powerful and grim Harry Bosch investigation into a young disabled boy's death, “Father's Day.” The sordid mean streets, depicted in Persia Walker's “Such a Lucky, Pretty Girl,” are nicely balanced with the lighter touches of Jon Breen's “Serial Killer,” a darkly comic tale in which two police detectives recount one of their cases to a community college writing class. TV writer Paul Guyot contributes one of the volume's strongest selections, “What a Wonderful World,” about a cop's obsessive search for the killer of a hot dog vendor. This is one of those rare themed anthologies that can be enjoyed at one sitting. (Apr.)

The late author of the beloved Flashman Papers (Flashman on the March, etc.) offers a 16th-century tale of swordplay and gleefully anachronistic wordplay along the Scottish borderlands. Fraser does a Highland fling with the English language as he unfolds a tortuous and torturous tale of four heroes: Gilderoy, dashing Scottish highwayman; Archie Noble, gallant Englishman and proud “double-nought operative, licensed to slay”; and a beauteous pair of ladies, the noble Lady Godiva Dacre and her randy companion, Kylie. Together the four must stop a Spanish plot to kidnap and replace James VI of Scotland with an impostor who will then gain the English throne on the death of Queen Elizabeth. They must overcome wizards, witches, warlocks and sundry other hazards while Archie and Gilderoy vie for Godiva's fickle affections. Readers must stay alert to keep up with the author's constant verbal sallies. Fraser died on January 2, 2008. (Apr.)

The Mississippian chiefdoms of 13th-century North America rule the latest Forgotten Past novel from the Gears (People of the Wolf, etc.). Split Sky City is the cultural and political center of a region ruled by the Chief Clan of the Sky Hand tribe—who in turn rule over several subjugated tribes. When the Chahta, of White Arrow Town, dare to resist the Sky Hand—retribution, led by sadistic Smoke Shield, is swift and vicious. As the political climate grows hotter, the fate of the entire region may rest on three wanderers with mysterious pasts: Old White, aka the Seeker, who has wandered from one end of the known world to the other; Trader, a traveling merchant who guards his past as an exiled head of the Chief Clan; and Two Petals, a young woman who, as a Contrary, is magically and spiritually powerful, but is almost incomprehensible to normal people. The three know they are fated to change things irrevocably at Split Sky City, but first they have to get there. Fastidious attention to detail—in politics, military strategy, trade, dress and characterization—make for a fascinating ride. (Apr.)

Known for 1969's Nog and the 1973 script for Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Wurlitzer delivers a mystic western possessed of anarchic charms and incantatory beauty. Mountain-man, trapper and opportunistic beast Zebulon Shook starts the tale by getting cursed by a half-Shoshoni half-Irish woman. Doomed never to know whether he is in the spirit world, the real world or just dreaming, he departs from his homestead along the Gila River in New Mexico to sell pelts. After meeting up with his adopted brother, Hatchet Jack, and losing at cards to Delilah, a beautiful Abyssinian courtesan, Zebulon is shot during a barroom dustup and sets out for California, where the gold rush is gathering steam, bringing with it the law and order that threatens the “mountain doin's” that he loves so dearly. Zebulon is pulled ever deeper into the era's bizarre historical footnotes: immortalized as a notorious outlaw by a reporter; narrowly missing joining the Walker expedition to colonize Nicaragua; reconnecting with Delilah at a San Francisco opium den; and finding the law and order forces dogging his heels to the last. This furiously told legend weaves history and myth into a riotous tale. (Apr.)

Told from a variety of perspectives, including that of Detective Sanchez of the Bronx NYPD, this fevered noir from Rodriguez (Spidertown) centers on law enforcement's search for a drug dealer known as Spook, who had agreed to launder huge sums of money for a terrorist group, but took off with the cash instead. Punctuating the main story line are chapters whose relevance is obscure; one, for example, contains short biographies of Leni Riefenstahl, Anne Sexton and Marlene Dietrich. The author eventually pulls the disparate strands together, including those to do with Ava Reynolds, a mysterious blonde with instant recall who proves her ability by memorizing a page of Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho. At its best, the novel carries the reader along by the force of its hypnotic prose, but the effort necessary to keep track of what's going on may turn off those more comfortable with a conventional linear narrative. Author tour. (Apr.)

In the latest loving church spoof from G'Orge-Walker (Sister Betty! God's Calling You, Again!), Sister Betty and her fellow evangelists get shipped off to Las Vegas to attend the evangelical Mothers Conference. After Betty and her two nemeses, Mother Sasha Pray Onn and Mother Bea Blister (about whom the Reverend Bling thinks to himself “Doggone Alzheimer's gonna make those two old crones destroy my place of business”), arrive with much hullabaloo, Bea spots someone she recognizes but can't place. The narrative then shifts to Zipporah, a beautiful homeless woman, and G'Orge-Walker expertly balances touching emotion with the ladies' antics as Zipporah gets a job that eventually leads her to the ladies and learns some things about herself in the process. Bickering, gambling and comeuppance are all on the agenda as the crew, far from the Pelzer, S.C., parish whence they came, negotiate Sin City. (Apr.)

An abrupt and chilling act of violence opens Bauch's 11th novel, marking the beginning of a bleak but compelling meditation on the moral dimensions of warfare. Cpl. Robert Marson is trudging up an Italian hillside, leading two of his men on an uncertain mission through the unrelenting winter of 1944. The soldiers are haunted by the cold-blooded murder by their sergeant, Glick, of a woman on the Italian roadside, and highly suspicious of the Italian farmer they have enlisted to act as a guide in their scouting mission. Snipers loom along their path, and the immediate fear of death seeps into each tantalizing memory of home. Equivocation between the absurdity of an unreported murder and the inevitability of killing as a means of survival drives the troops' despairing, profanity-laced banter as the meaninglessness of their mission becomes clear. The peace of the title is glimpsed only fleetingly, throwing into relief the stark, indiscriminate nature of war. Bausch's compassion for Marson and his men is evident, but his story is unforgiving; the tightly paced final scenes offer no clarity of purpose in a dark war story of unyielding sorrow. (Apr.)

Bestseller Kellerman serves up all the elements his fans have come to love in the 22nd entry in his Alex Delaware series (Obsession, etc.), including an intriguing plot, likable regular characters supported by an interesting secondary cast, diabolical villains, witty dialogue and a sense of humanity and justice. Alex and his LAPD detective partner, Milo Sturgis, are investigating several murders that, at first, appear to have only one thing in common: the perpetrator's use of expensive black automobiles while committing his crimes. Kellerman sticks to his usual modus, the patient and sometimes painfully slow accumulation of detail, as Alex and Milo slowly build their case. A subplot involves a missing child last seen selling magazine subscriptions in a tony neighborhood 16 years earlier. On the domestic front, Alex is again living with his girlfriend, Robin, with whom he has broken up several times over the course of the series. In the end, a nice twist reminds Robin and Alex to be more careful in the future about drawing assumptions in their private life before all the facts have come to light. (Apr.)

Bestseller Woods's third thriller to feature prominent New Mexican attorney Ed Eagle (after Short Straw and Santa Fe Rules) opens with a bang, but soon devolves into a fairly predictable cat-and-mouse game. Ed and his girlfriend, actress Susannah Wilde, are watching the Los Angeles trial on Court TV of his villainous ex-wife, Barbara, who stands accused of arranging for his murder, when a reporter announces that Barbara has escaped from custody just before the not guilty verdict. Soon, suitably disguised and under an alias, Barbara contrives to meet a recent widower, Palo Alto billionaire Walter Keeler, at a luxury spa and has him proposing marriage and making a new will in her favor. Meanwhile, her hatred for her ex unquenched, Barbara schemes to have Ed and Susannah killed. Bodies, innocent and otherwise, pile up, but there's little suspense about the outcome, and an improbable coincidence involving the billionaire may strike some as a plot weakness. Author tour. (Apr.)

A serial killer fixated on Edgar Allan Poe stalks New York City in this captivating paranormal romantic thriller from bestseller Graham (The Last Noel). When philanthropist Genevieve O'Brien hires PI Joe Connolly to investigate the murder of Thorne Bigelow, a member of the New York Poe Society, to which Gen's mother also belongs, Joe is initially reluctant to take the case. He's worried about his recently discovered knack for hearing dead people talk, though this psychic gift will come in handy when Joe starts checking out the surviving “Ravens,” whose numbers are dwindling fast. The romance that develops between Joe and Gen simmers subtly in the background, never overshadowing the pursuit of the culprit. Some helpful ghosts enhance a sinister tale sure to appeal to fans across multiple genre lines. (Apr.)

Greed gets Ethan Muller, a 33-year-old Manhattan art dealer, into hot water in Kellerman's superb third stand-alone thriller (after Trouble). When reclusive artist Victor Cracke disappears, Muller winds up taking possession of the boxes and boxes of intense, disturbing drawings that Cracke left behind in his shabby Queens apartment. A favorable New York Times article helps fuel lucrative sales at an exhibit of Cracke's drawings at Muller's Chelsea gallery. Soon, though, Muller starts to receive cryptic, vaguely threatening letters. He also hears from a retired NYPD detective, Lee McGrath, who recognizes the face of one of the boys in a Cracke drawing as belonging to the victim of a 40-year-old unsolved murder. That revelation turns Muller into an amateur detective as he attempts to discover how the dead boy's image—along with those of several other victims—made its way into the pictures. Kellerman has a gift for creating compelling characters as well as for crafting an ingenious plot that grabs the reader and refuses to let go. Author tour. (Apr.)

Kristi Bentz, having recovered from her last encounter with a sadistic monster in bestseller Jackson's Absolute Fear, faces an equally terrifying ordeal in this frantic paranormal thriller. Four female students associated with a vampire cult have gone missing at Baton Rouge's All Saints College, where Kristi is pursuing a journalism degree and plans to write about true crime. Kristi by chance rents an apartment once tenanted by one of the missing girls and begins investigating the case, thinking it might make a great first book. Kristi's old college sweetheart, Jay McKnight, provides an unexpected surprise (and protection) when he shows up as the fill-in for one of Kristi's professors. Not too surprisingly, “Vlad,” the mysterious serial killer, sets his sights on Kristi. Adding hot sauce to the blood bath is Kristi's new supernatural ability to detect anyone marked for a life-or-death struggle when she sees a person go from living color to deadly gray or black-and-white. Jackson peppers the action with insights into the challenges faced by law enforcement agencies trying to solve crimes in post-Katrina Louisiana. (Apr.)

Mix a history of Spanish conquistadors in the New World with a porny pulp tale, and the result is this entertaining novel. The premise: Juan Ponce de Leon, the venerable 16th-century Spanish conquistador, is alive and living in Florida thanks to the Fountain of Youth (which he discovered). But with the fountain running dry, the explorer is anxious to chronicle his 540 years on Earth before shuffling off this mortal coil, and summons ghostwriter Lee Siegel to record the lurid details of his countless love affairs. The irascible explorer—between coining imaginative words such as cardarring (meaning, among other things, to have sex)—lays out a reasonably reliable (lurid embellishments notwithstanding) rendering of Ponce de Leon's travels. In addition to his other vices, Ponce de Leon (who claims to have invented cigars, rum and popcorn) leans heavily on cocaine-infused rum punch and morphine as he and Siegel race to beat the explorer's quickly approaching death. While this novel offers a decidedly goofy point of view, surprisingly, it works. Siegel slips in the history lessons so deftly that readers will barely realize they are being educated as well as titillated. (Apr.)

A novelist and columnist for the newspaper Kathimerini, Michalopoulou has fashioned a baker's dozen of tart, experimental, grown-up stories for literary tastes. The most fully fleshed story is the title piece, in which the narrator, a weary painter trapped in a marriage to an even wearier writer, acts out her frustration upon meeting another, more exalted literary couple whose matrimonial malaise reflects her own. Many of the stories seem like tentative beginnings of novels; in “Light,” for example, an elderly widow invites her even older sister to live with her, but soon regrets her decision. “Daily life seemed meaningless to her,” the author writes of the older sister, and so she leaves, while her younger sibling takes solace from Mormon leaflets promising a paradise in which the two will be reunited. “Pointe” demonstrates how tricky the author's narrators can sometimes be, allowing the reader to believe a bored wife and mother is entertaining several lovers when the reality is much more complex. Another standout story, “The Most Wonderful Moment,” recounts the queasy meeting between an elderly “Great Writer” and the admiring woman journalist interviewing him. Michalopoulou's tales are uneven, but delightful when they hit true. (Apr.)

Tom Nelson, a Texas academic, is devastated when his wife, Jane, drowns their two-year-old son and almost kills the boy's twin sister in Harrington's uneven debut. To Tom, Jane's violent act was inconceivable and impossible to predict, but after she's found not guilty by reason of insanity, he becomes the object of vilification and, eventually, criminal prosecution for child endangerment and neglect. The novel alternates between Tom's trial and flashbacks that include the efforts of Jane's clairvoyant relative, Mariah Hernandez, to recover the events in Jane's past and in her ancestors' lives that may have predisposed her to kill. Mariah's visions—flashbacks within flashbacks—distract from the main plot, while those interested in the legal issues may be put off by such amateurish mistakes as the prosecutor calling Tom to the stand in apparent ignorance of the Fifth Amendment. At her best in conveying Tom's despair, the author fails to do full justice to the complex and fraught subject of maternal filicide. (Apr.)

In Sigler's riveting horror thriller, alien seeds from outer space infect a number of unlucky humans, who develop some unusual symptoms—itchy, blue triangular growths on their skin—that eventually result in the carriers becoming screaming, homicidal maniacs. CIA agent Dew Phillips must find out why these formerly docile citizens are running amok, aided by Margaret Montoya, a Centers for Disease Control epidemiologist, who reported the first of the strange cases. One of the infected, former football player Perry Dawsey, doesn't take any crap from anybody, not even the aliens residing in his body. Sigler (Ancestor) leads the reader from one startling detail to the next—the creatures learn to speak (“feed us we hungry”); they grow little black eyes—until even hardened genre fans will find themselves whimpering at each new revelation. This terrifying page-turner could be the author's breakout book, fueled by an extensive online podcast campaign. 5-city author tour. (Apr.)

This solid historical from Ripley, best known for his Angel crime series (Angel's Share, etc.), chronicles the exploits of Hereward the Wake, an 11th-century rebel against the Norman rulers of England. The story alternates between the narrative of Gerald of Wales, a 13th-century monk commissioned to write the family history of a nobleman who may be related to Hereward, and an account of Hereward's life by Thomas of Ely, a 12th-century churchman. Gerald comments on the historicity of Thomas's work, which traces Hereward's rise from obscurity to legend as a sort of Robin Hood figure. Swashbuckler fans will appreciate the tales of Hereward's ambushes of William the Conqueror's men. Readers who may wonder why Gerald devotes so much space to assessing the reliability of Thomas's text will be rewarded in the end. (Apr.)

A dream of love becomes a nightmare in this creepy erotic thriller from Marlow, the pen name of bestselling romance writer Cheryl Holt (Too Tempting to Touch). After a chance encounter with attractive Jordan Blair and his girlfriend at a resort hotel on the Oregon coast, 23-year-old Meg White, who works as a dessert chef at an upscale Portland restaurant, and her boyfriend agree to go to Jordan's beach house for a night of fun. Though Meg is uneasy when their hosts expect them to participate in kinky sex games, Meg allows Jordan to seduce her. In dizzy detail Marlow charts Meg's growing obsession with the abusive Jordan, who manipulates her into marrying him. The nasty secrets Meg learns about Jordan during her ordeal strengthen her resolve to escape his sadistic clutches. This sordid cautionary tale will leave readers in the mood to donate to the nearest abused women's shelter. (Apr.)

In his savvy sophomore suspense novel, former indie bookseller Robertson (The Heir) uses multiple points of view to set up a seemingly innocuous story line—the proposal to build a road—that will keep readers glued. Octogenarian Joe Esterhouse has served enough decades on the Jefferson County, NC., Board to smell a rat, and something disturbs him about a proposal to bring Gold River Highway over the mountain into tiny Wardsville. Board members are dying and nothing is what it seems on the surface. Self-interest threatens to override the common good, and what is truth and what is perceived to be truth become nebulous. Robertson creates some of the most engaging characters and relationships encountered in faith fiction: Joe is a genuine sage, and other characters are no less captivating. Although the rapid-fire point of view changes are reminiscent of a novice stick-shift driver (and threaten whiplashlike confusion early on), once readers get the rhythm they will be compelled along. This top-notch offering features genuine humor, clever writing, a surprise ending and a strong portrayal of evil's power that doesn't succumb to clichéd violence. It deserves a wide audience. (Apr.)

The Civil War is but the noisiest of the struggles that the ambivalent hero of this historical novel wants to distance himself from. In 1862, at age 17, John Muro is packed off from Lynchburg to the University of Virginia Medical School, a berth that exempts him from the Confederate draft. Thanks to a flood of casualties, he's soon promoted to full-fledged doctor at the local military hospital, where his sense of detachment helps him deal with the carnage of war—and spills over into the rest of his life. He coldly repudiates his family after their textile mill fails; he's so inattentive to his beautiful girlfriend, Lorrie, that she has to browbeat him into courtship; and his best friend is a wounded Union POW who awakens John's longing to head North. John appraises the world with a clinical mindset (“Her affect, surprisingly, was like that of a patient suffering from one of the tropical fevers” he observes during his first kiss with Lorrie) that excuses his passivity and irresponsibility. Debut novelist Taylor recreates the detail—if not always the spirit—of the Confederacy's Victorian language and culture. But as John struggles to avoid entanglement with the (often underdeveloped) characters around him, his coming-of-age saga remains uninvolving. (Apr.)

Edgar nominee Scott (No Good Deed) mixes adventure, supernatural phenomena and cryptography to create a fast-paced supernatural thriller. Mayan apocalyptic astronomical documents chillingly predict that the world will end on December 21, 2012, unless 13 crystal skulls are reunited. Cedric Owen, a 16th-century scholar and physician whose family has safeguarded one of the skulls from time unknown, struggles to unlock the jewel's secrets and arrange for its safety. Nearly five centuries later, newlyweds Stella Cody and Kit O'Connor unlock Owen's cipher and track the skull to its hiding place, only to find themselves caught up in a global struggle between the keepers of the skulls and those who are determined to destroy them and bring about the end of the world. Stella and Kit's race to prevent the apocalypse turns into a life-threatening, heart-pounding battle between good and evil. (Apr.)

Tasked with representing European poets who began publishing after 1970, poets and editors Miller and Prufer recruited 24 regional editors—including Marilyn Hacker (Belgium, Luxembourg, France and Switzerland) and Rika Lesser (Finland and Sweden)—to select and translate 270 contemporary versifiers. The resulting anthology—designed to emphasize poets not already well represented in English—is sure to be a boon to all kinds of poetry lovers and an important reference for decades to come. From Valzhyna Mort of Belarus (“Outside your borders/ they built a huge orphanage,/ and you left us there, belarus”) to Poland's Adam Wiedemann (“Imagine a situation where it never occurs to you/ to think of any other situation”), Norway's Cathrine Grøndahl (“...the most frightening thing is simply/ to be named John Doe and to land in Smalltown”) to Portugal's Rui Pires Cabral (“Great city/ of the missing, so often I didn't have/ the vigor to take pleasure in/ your small, deserted/ gardens”), these poets range from the surreal to the all-too-real, portraying decades of sweeping political change throughout Europe and rendering inner lives shaped by circumstances and places as varied as the languages in which they write. American readers are sure to find many new favorites among those included, and they may even find their whole conception of contemporary European literature upturned. (Apr.)

The witty, gritty poet and memoirist Kleinzahler (The Strange Hours Travellers Keep) has produced chiseled, sometimes curt and finely observed free verse for decades. Kleinzahler has lived in Montreal, San Francisco, Vancouver, Portugal and Berlin; his sketches of characters and places from at least four continents include affectionately cynical portraits of hoodlums, odes to the autumn failures of baseball teams and swiftly cinematic depictions of Tartar hordes in medieval Europe, “ripping the ears off hussars.” Hackensack, N.J.; the foggy Bay Area with its foggier ex-hippies; and northern European lakes and mountains all receive their due in a poetry that aspires to the feel of bebop and the delight of travel writing, that never bores and rarely repeats itself. New poems add to, rather than swerve away from, Kleinzahler's strengths in close observation and all-over-the-map diction, from slang to technical terms. Overheard speech in “Above Gower Street,” a poem about the loneliness of international travel, ranges from an answering machine's anodyne messages to an explicit sexual come-on; in “Vancouver,” “the neon mermaid over the fish place/ looks best that way, in the rain.” This ninth book of poems and first trade press new-and-selected should bring this master of free verse lines even more admirers. (Apr.)

The 26-year-old Belarusian Mort has made a big splash in Europe. With help from the popular, Pulitzer-winning Franz Wright, this thin, uneven, but decidedly exciting bilingual first U.S. edition shows how Mort's energies work. Some poems last just a few lines; others stretch out across pages of fast-moving prose, and the best bring into disturbing collision the difficult circumstances of Eastern Europe (crowds, relative poverty, bad weather) and the recent results of globalization (suicide bombers, teen culture, game shows with telephonic “life lines”). Mort says of her compatriots in “Belarusian I,” “we gorged on dirt thinking it was bread” and calls “our future/ a gymnast on a thin thread of the horizon.” Later poems reflect her move to the U.S. (she now resides in Virginia), and contemplate those who have made the same move before: of “Polish Immigrants,” she asks, “how do they break away from the land/ where even stones take root.” At her best, Mort shows a ragged power Americans might not otherwise know: she writes in a crackling prose poem, “I protest against everything: low-quality goods in supermarkets, pigs in the subway, and those who protest against pigs in the subway... this is the only way to survive.” (Apr.)

Always thoughtful, sometimes hard to follow, the New York–based poet and critic Welish (The Annotated 'Here') attracted smart if circumscribed attention to each of her five theoretically sophisticated previous books. The eight sequences here—seven short groups of stanzas or sentences, then a longer one called “From Dedicated To”—pursue familiar forms of self-consciousness about representation and naming, language, objecthood and signs. One anaphora-driven poem promises “a concordance/ of marks to future anthems.” A set of two-line poems based on texts found on public signage (“TAKE ONE,” “START HERE”) includes the advice: “ 'O Pen' of information abundantly lettered safeguards the mimetic 'collated pasts.' ” A prose poem deconstructs a note about a lost cat; several sequences, in their play with fonts and with white space, recall Mallarmé. The long closing sequence imagines the motion of meaning through mental space: “the sentence's/ coruscated encounter// with speech's simulated elevator/ including the coveted/ audio.” Such lines may puzzle before they inspire. Yet this book could be Welish's breakthrough, offering her clearest, most discursive works, proximate in their edgy attentions not only to art-world thinkers but to Anne Carson, whose more numerous fans might like Welish now. (Apr.)

The prolific Lux (The Street of Clocks) should please but may not surprise his many admirers with this 11th book, accessible and surrealist-influenced. Lux begins on a personal note, with a sentimental elegy for the New England poet and critic Peter Davison, “the gentleman who spoke like music.” By the end of the book, though, he has depicted little of his external life, few facts and stories about himself, and yet revealed a whole personality through dreamlike scenes, jokes and a persistent grimness. In “The Republic of Anesthesia,” evolution creates “arid hairsplitting” amid cruelty, as ”One frog eats another frog.” Lux favors an unobtrusively fluent free verse, whose motions and line breaks focus less on sound than on image and tone. Reminiscent sometimes of a darker Billy Collins, sometimes of an easier-to-follow James Tate, Lux mixes deep gloom with a broad sense of humor, confessing his “Autobiographophobia” (“I will not confide/ my serial poisoning of parakeets”), contemplating “black thoughts... remedyless and truculent,” depicting an ideal library beside a nightmarish zoo or musing on dilemmas few of us will ever face: “How Difficult/ for the quadriplegics to watch/ the paraplegics play.” (Mar.)

This seventh from the popular Hirsch (Lay Back the Darkness) brings its demotic, heartfelt, autobiographical pieces together to form a picture of Hirsch's whole life, with sadness always visible, but joy in the foreground. He begins with his immigrant “grandfather,/ an old man from the Old World”; remembers “the second-story warehouse” where the young poet “filled orders for the factory downstairs”; and moves on to his own life as a struggling, and then a successful, writer, teacher and father. Jewish and Yiddish heritage, in memory and on canvas (Chaim Soutine, Marc Chagall) pervades the first half of the volume—“Gone are the towns where the shoemaker was a poet,/ the watchmaker a philosopher, the barber a troubadour.” The second half follows Hirsch as an adult, to Houston (where he taught for many years) and back to New York City, where he now heads the Guggenheim Foundation. Closing poems present a passionate new love affair: “I wish I could paint you,/ your lanky body, lithe, coltish, direct.” No one will question Hirsch's sincerity nor his commitment to lyric tradition. Many will be moved by the frankness and vulnerability of these difficult self-assessments: “I'm now more than halfway to the grave/ but I'm not half the man I meant to become.” (Mar.)

This second book from Knox, a young New York poet, continues the playful romp through the warped Americana she began in her debut, A Gringo Like Me. Here, Knox gives voice to wayward teens, drug-addled sages and fat dogs fantasizing about killing babies—among other unsavory characters—through dramatic monologues and quick narrative sketches. There are many rats, guns, genitals, fried foods and drugs, too, along the way, and Knox catalogues them all in a breezy voice suited to barrooms and club stages, echoing standup comedy and performance art. Even a rigorous pantoum called “59 Tenets About Meat” sounds casual (“I am totally freaking out”). Reminiscent at times of a comic book Bukowski—“Apparently, all those margaritas and cocaine / have saddled me with a profound bout of diarrhea”—a pervasive, sentimental fascination with the down-and-out lurks behind Knox's layers of irony and comic distance. Elsewhere, she self-consciously toys with her own image in poems like “Ideal Reader for Jennifer L. Knox.” She's at her best and most entertaining in bursts of everyday surrealism—like the poem “Pastoral with Internet Porn,” which bristles with energy and imagination. This is poetry few would be intimidated by, though it could entertain many. (Mar.)

Anyone with doubts about the place of politics in poetry should have this book thrust in his hands. Prufer (Fallen from a Chariot) makes the political personal and the personal political, all in the service of sinuous, moving free verse. He has a rare gift for bringing the inanimate to life on the page. The American West becomes a drifter on a raft, his chest “brown and flecked with hair,” and the title poem begins with a shopping center calling out like a lover. Elsewhere, ancient Rome, its empire in slow, steady decline, is found “curled on a pew, asleep,” a haunting parallel for contemporary America. Poetry—a possible source of salvation?—is a boy locked in a car's trunk, screaming and refusing to die. And there are people in these poems, too: a speaker who writes love notes he describes as “empty and vaguely/ sad.” Dead children, soldiers and those left behind in an evacuation speak and are spoken about. An absurdly large parachute falls over a suburb, and the speaker writes letters to his lover while trying to find his way out from under it. Near the end of the book, Prufer writes, “I don't know what to do/ with the doomed, the chilled over and gone,/ but drink until my fingers become twigs.” This powerful collection, Prufer's fourth, is an ongoing elegy for a dark time in American history(Feb.)

British author Rickman once again cleverly blends supernatural elements with a conventional whodunit plot in his ninth Merrily Watkins novel (after 2007's The Remains of an Altar). An apparition resembling the ghost in M.R. James's short tale, “Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad,” has appeared at an abandoned house near the Welsh border that's to be restored by a trust connected with Prince Charles. When Felix Barlow, the builder set to do the renovation, complains about the ghost, the bishop of Hereford orders Watkins, a minister who specializes in exorcism cases, to investigate. After Barlow is found bludgeoned to death, suspicion falls on his beautiful assistant, Fuchsia Mary Linden, who appears to have committed suicide out of remorse. Doubtful of the official line, Watkins does her own digging. The writing and characterizations are first-rate, though Rickman gives away part of the game rather earlier than most mystery fans would like. (May)

This impressive debut from Stanley, the South African writing team of Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip, introduces overweight assistant superintendent David Bengu of the Botswana Police Department, whose nickname is, fittingly, Kubu (Setswanan for hippopotamus). In investigating the case of a partially consumed human body found in a remote area of a game reserve, Kubu keeps running across tangential links to Botswana Cattle and Mining, the country's largest company. As more people connected to the case turn up dead, Kubu realizes that multiple murder may be just the byproduct of a much more heinous crime. The intricate plotting, a grisly sense of realism and numerous topical motifs (the plight of the Kalahari Bushmen, diamond smuggling, poaching, the homogenization of African culture, etc.) make this a compulsively readable novel. Despite a shared setting with Alexander McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, this fast-paced forensic thriller will resonate more with fans of Patricia Cornwell's Kay Scarpetta. (Apr.)

Kennealy deals another winning hand in his second Carroll Quint mystery (after 2007's Jigsaw). Quint, an entertainment writer for the San Francisco Bulletin, reports to editor-in-chief Katherine “the Great” Parkham, who's worried about the Bulletin's possible acquisition by Sir Charles Talbot, a media magnate and famed art collector. Hoping to prevent the paper's sale, Parkham asks poker expert Quint to uncover how Talbot's son, Charlie, cheats at cards. Meanwhile, Quint's mother, a former Hollywood actress, asks him to investigate the recent Sausalito “suicide” of an old friend, aspiring actress Ulla Kjeldsen (aka Vicky Vandamn), who once dated Talbot Sr. Quint discovers that Vicky died while working on a scandalous memoir, which has since disappeared. The murder of an art curator and the disappearance of a Picasso painting from Talbot Sr.'s collection send Quint on a wild ride for answers that will keep readers turning the pages. (Apr.)

In bestseller Barr's chilling 14th mystery thriller to feature National Park Service ranger Anna Pigeon (after 2005's Hard Truth), Anna joins the team of Winter Study, a research project intended to study the wolves and moose of Michigan's Isle Royale National Park, the setting for 1994's A Superior Death. Complicating the study is Bob Menechinn, an untrustworthy Homeland Security officer assigned to shadow the research. Crowded into inhospitable lodgings and persecuted by unrelenting cold, Anna is far from her comfort zone as nature turns awry with a series of bizarre events. The team stumbles upon the tracks—and the mutilated victim—of a preternaturally large, unidentified beast, and local packs of wolves descend on human-populated areas, a behavior out of step with their species. The campfire legends of youth metastasize into adult fears as Anna must piece together a connection between these anomalies while guarding herself from the strangers around her. Barr's visceral descriptions of the winter cold nicely complement the paranoia that follows the appearance of the mythic monsters at play. Author tour. (Apr.)

Annie Darling, proprietor of Death on Demand, “the finest mystery bookstore north of Miami,” once again proves a resourceful sleuth in Hart's scintillating 18th Death on Demand mystery set in the South Carolina island community of Broward's Rock (after 2006's Dead Days of Summer). When Annie's devoted PI husband, Max, who's busy renovating historic Franklin House, puts off returning a frantic phone call from a prospective client, Annie later discovers the caller, Gwen Jamison, dying of a gunshot wound in Gwen's house. It appears Gwen wanted to tell Max that after finding on her property eight gold coins worth nearly $2 million that were recently stolen from Gwen's employer, island civic leader Geoffrey Grant, she had hidden the coins at Franklin House. When Gwen's dropout son, Robert, is implicated in both the theft and the murder, Max believes Robert's been framed and works to clear his name. This tight, Agatha Christie–style puzzler will keep readers guessing to the end. (Apr.)

In Pastor's gripping second fourth-century Roman historical to feature Aelius Spartianus, an imperial envoy, historian and military commander who uncovered a conspiracy in Egypt that threatened the empire in The Water Thief (2007), Aelius tackles another problem worthy of his sleuthing skills in the province of Belgica Prima. Agnus, a Christian healer known as the fire waker, has supposedly brought brick-maker Marcus Lupus back from the dead, but when Lupus's supervisor finds him stiff in his bed one morning, this time there's no resurrection. Aelius's probe into Lupus's murder soon leads him to another killing—that of a judge who presided over proceedings against Christians—and to a possibly related case of procurement corruption. Pastor vividly depicts the politics of the day, with the four joint emperors (or tetrarchs) vying for power, while the logical solution to the intertwined puzzles will leave readers eager for the next entry in what one hopes will be a long series. (Apr.)

At the start of Meade's diverting third Marjorie McClelland 1930s cozy (after 2007's Ghost of a Chance), Marjorie agrees to help an anxious young wife, Elizabeth Barnwell, find her missing husband, Michael. When Marjorie and her fiancé, wealthy Englishman Creighton Ashcroft, discover a dismembered body that turns out to be Michael's mistress, the philandering husband surfaces shortly thereafter and is arrested for murder. Marjorie, though, suspects the police have the wrong man. Meanwhile, the members of Marjorie's church in Ridgebury, Conn., have planned a wedding reception for her and Creighton complete with Mrs. Shutt's “revolting” Perfection Salad. Can they gracefully get out of this without hurting any feelings? While weak on period detail, this light whodunit does offer a surprise closing twist. (Apr.)

Stoker-winner Lebbon successfully combines quest adventure and horror in this gripping and disturbing tale. Some 4,000 years before the events of Dusk (2006), the people of Noreela are just beginning an era of expansion, with explorers going constantly further into unknown territory for profit and glory. Blocking the voyagers' southward journeys, however, is the Great Divide, a cliff that reaches into the clouds. Ramus Rheel, an aging explorer battling cancer, and Nomi Hyden, whose wealth has not diminished her craving for adventure, are “friendly enemies” who set out to scale the Divide and earn recognition as the greatest voyagers of all. When they find the lair of one of the ancient Sleeping Gods, they get considerably more excitement—and terror—than they bargained for. Lebbon creates vivid and convincing major and minor characters, places and creatures, blending wonder and nightmare in this dark and memorable novel. (Apr.)

Taking a break from urban fantasy, Murphy (House of Cards) turns to this uneven opener for a Reformation-inspired fantasy series. Belinda Primrose is a lovely young woman whose mysterious father, Lord Drake, has trained her to be an assassin serving Lorraine, the queen of Aulun. While Belinda is Lorraine's unacknowledged bastard, young Prince Javier of Gallin was secretly adopted by Lorraine's dangerous rival, Queen Sandalia, when her husband's untimely death caused her to miscarry the child who was to be Gallin's heir. When Javier encounters Belinda while she's on a spy mission in Gallin, he falls hopelessly in love with her, a devotion that deepens when they discover they're both “witchbreed” magic users. Murphy excels in depicting their passion, but readers looking for romance will be shocked when Belinda incites and abets Javier's rape of another woman, and the talky political intrigue frequently comes at the expense of much-needed action. (Apr.)

Structured around a series of folktale motifs, Valente's eloquent second full-length poetry collection dissects the perceived roles of women in Earth's and otherworldly fable and myth. One prevailing theme is women's subjugation by tradition and ritual in male-dominated societies, as in “How Comes This Blood Upon the Key?” wherein a wife imprisoned in her own home protests: “I did not look/ for a house to become my limbs,/ for cast iron pans to become my joints,/ for doors and keys to become/ the stuff of my blood,/ for a bed to become my face.” The young title character in “The Child Bride of the Lost City of Ubar” is ruthlessly and needlessly sacrificed, and in “Glass, Blood, and Ash,” a woman's dream of falling in love with a prince is shattered by harsh reality. Fans of Valente's Orphan's Tales duology will find this collection similarly embittered, enlightening and enthralling. (Apr.)

This grand interstellar adventure exemplifies Hugo-winner Steele's skill with near-future tech and struggle with human interactions. Kicked out of the Western Hemisphere Union Astronautica space fleet, 20-ish Jules Truffaut cleverly stows away on the Robert E. Lee, bound for the Coyote Federation, where he intends to defect. Circumstances force him to accept a mysterious job as shuttle pilot for billionaire Morgan Goldstein, who's plotting to corner trade with the alien hjadd. Steele (Spindrift) makes in-flight technicalities almost tangible, and he equips his hissing, grunting, slithering aliens with convincing motivations. He's less adept at portraying the human crew who accompany Truffaut to a vast space city, where the interstellar coalition called the Talus must decide whether to allow humans to join. Subplots such as Jules's attraction to sexy crew member Rain Thompson and Goldstein's predictable big-boss machinations are tepid, even stereotypical, but a rousing climax rescues the crew and the novel from boredom. (Apr.)

This complex trilogy opener, YA author Freeman's first book for adults, describes the Eleven Domains, a landscape littered with prophecies, gods and ghostly warnings. Saker, a wealthy and callous enchanter's apprentice, seeks to avenge his family's massacre. Bramble, gifted with a connection to animals and woodcraft, kills a warlord's man in self-defense and must flee her home. Nervous young guard Ash trains to become an assassin and endures his beloved mentor's exploitation of his necromantic abilities. When Saker's vengeance-seeking walking dead roam the land, Ash must find ways to stop them as Bramble seeks to protect the people they threaten. Freeman shies away from simplistic morality, building elegantly well-rounded characters—most notably Bramble, who manages to be tough but not hard, a loner but not unsympathetic and sexual but not obsessed with romance—and interwoven stories that at times draw too heavily on George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire novels for inspiration. (Apr.)

First published in the U.K. in 1995 as Stranglehold, this extremely disturbing novel from Ketchum (The Girl Next Door) effectively examines the insidious effects of child abuse as it spreads from generation to generation. When Lydia McCloud meets Arthur Danse at a wedding party in Plymouth, N.H., she thinks he's a man she could grow to love. When Arthur meets Lydia, he thinks that she's the sort of woman people would always want to protect—and that he's going to show her “she wouldn't always be protected.” Once their only child, Robert, is born, Arthur's behavior worsens. When the courts become involved, the nightmare really begins. This scathing novel is an indictment of a justice system that makes a mockery of its very name. In a new afterword, Ketchum (aka Dallas Mayr) discusses his real-life sources. (Apr.)

Shinchan has been equated with Bart Simpson, but as a cartoon character, he is also reminiscent of a contemporary, South Park–influenced Dennis the Menace. Previously published by now defunct ComicsOne, the famed manga has been picked up by CMX following the Shinchan anime's appearance on Adult Swim. Despite his juvenile antics (dropping his pants in public) and precocious behavior (perusing the adult section of the bookstore and hitting on women), Shinchan retains an element of innocence and naïveté. The first book is compiled from vignettes illustrating Shin's relationship with his parents and aptly entitled “Mom and I Are Best Friends.” Usui portrays this innocence through everyday activities. Shin wants to make a grocery list for mom, but doesn't know how to spell. He doesn't need help, however, when it comes to drawing all over his stomach and genitals using his mother's lipstick. The book has a mature rating and, like South Park, it needs one. There are lewd references to women's genitalia, and Shin's ability to copy the worst of adult male habits can be unsettling to see in a five-year-old. But like contemporary laddy movies like American Pie or Superbad, as distasteful as it may be, it's still funny. (Mar.)

Dave is a poor vampire, working the night shift at the 24-hour convenience store run by his vampire master, Lord Radu Arisztidescu, who thinks Dave is pretty much a wuss as a bloodsucker. Truth is, Dave would rather steal his nutrition from a blood bank than kill the innocent. But this choice leaves him weak and vulnerable to more predatory types like alpha-vampire surfer dude Wes, who's making a move on Rosa, the Latina gothic babe Dave has his eye on. There's plenty of humor with Dave's friend Jerome acting as a Clerks-like foil, coming over to Dave's work at night when the black-eyeliner crowd comes by (“the Running of the Goths”). Life Sucks also gets a good deal of mileage out of the ironic distance between the romantic visions that Rosa and her mortal crowd have of the vampire lifestyle and the grimy reality of Dave's life as an eternal wage slave. Even if it doesn't pan out satisfactorily (the conclusion seems particularly truncated), Abel and Soria's light approach, combined with Pleece's bright, Technicolor art, gives the book an entertaining Joss Whedon gloss to its Gen-Y bloodsucking melodrama. (Feb.)

Blood+ is a little bit of everything for everyone. As a franchise, there are two video games, soundtracks, a cartoon series, three comics and two novel series. Likewise, this first volume of the graphic novel series is a mix of mystery, vampire horror, high school romance and government intervention. Saya is a high school girl suffering from amnesia. In this volume, she's recruited for a part in the school play, hunted down by a boyish vampire, hidden by a secret sector of the government and finds out that she is an immortal and the only one who can kill the demonic monsters that threaten them. She also realizes that she's forged a special bond with her adoptive bad-boy brother, Kai. There are many strands at work in this opener, each given equal weight, which may work for the different Blood+ products out on the market but weakens this story. With so much going on, the reader is pulled in too many directions at once and the overall reading experience distracts and detracts from the story. However, this could be a good book to have open while updating a MySpace page and IMing friends on the Nintendo DS Light. (Feb.)

Eschewing the more quotidian pursuits of such contemporary comics anthologies as Kramer's Ergot and Mome, Hotwire is as subtle as a poke in the eye, of which there are several. With an aesthetic reminiscent of Blab! and the lowbrow art movement, it's a brutal journey into a world of low-class grifters, fatal car crashes and neighbors who suggest inappropriate sex acts. Disturbing sexual imagery is pervasive, as in editor Head's “Oozing Dread!” a perfervid story with Wilhelm Reich and his “orgone machines” at the center. While the ongoing mood is frantic, doomed squalor, the talent assembled is impressive and the cartooning vigor gives the subject matter some humanity. R. Sikoryak supplies a retelling of Dorian Gray in a spot-on pastiche of Winsor McCay; Carol Swain imagines a plague of books; and Mary Fleener vividly recalls a bad trip on angel dust with cubist-inspired imagery. Tim Lane presents a number of short tales that manage to infuse the gloom with a bit of narrative heft in a few pages. Although Sin City is profanely parodied in Hotwire, readers who enjoyed that tale's melodramatic violence will find much more of the same here. (Feb.)

Signature

Reviewed by Reginald Shepherd

Doty's first book, Turtle, Swan, appeared in 1987. He has published six books of poetry and four memoirs, all excellent, since. This hefty selection from his seven collections, plus a generous sheaf of new poems, should solidify his position as a star of contemporary American poetry.

Doty's poetic career really took off with My Alexandria (1993), his third book, which made his reputation. Fire to Fire contains only two poems from his first two books—“Adonis Theatre,” about an old movie palace turned gay porno theater, and “The Death of Antinous,” about the Roman emperor Hadrian's lover's afterlife in statuary, both of which are meditations on representation, absence and desire. Desire, and its capacity to transform and transfigure, is one of Doty's main themes. Enough desire (so often mixed, as T.S. Eliot wrote, with memory) can make us as beautiful as the objects of our desire.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Doty has never eschewed beauty. Indeed, beauty, its unlikely, often unexpected, yet constant recurrence and its elusive fleetingness, is central, as demonstrated by several new poems titled “Theory of Beauty,” each with a parenthetical specific occasion. Beauty is found everywhere in Doty's poems, in a band playing cast-off chemical drums in Times Square, even in Chet Baker falling from an Amsterdam hotel window: “a blur of buds//breathing in the lindens/and you let go and why not.”

The title poem “Fire to Fire,” from School of the Arts (2005) is a gorgeous meditation on the way that life's fire infuses the world, in sunflowers, goldfinches, and even a neighbor's puppy: “fire longs to meet itself/flaring, longing wants a multiplicity of faces,//branching and branching out.” The selections from “The Vault” (which really needs to be read in its entirety) reveal the poetry in men meeting other men's bodies in a sex club, incorporating references to the Middle English poem “Western Wind” and to James Wright's “A Blessing,” and including a subtle revision of Rilke's “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes” in which the men are deep in the club's “mine of souls,” “that shaft where inner and outer//grow indissoluble.”

At times the poems unnecessarily explain what their vivid images and striking phrases makes clear, but the commitment to the particular, and to its possibilities, is unwavering. As Doty writes in “Ararat,” “Any small thing can save you.” The poems combine close attention to the fragile, contingent things of the world with the constant, almost unavoidable chance of transcendence, since “desire can make anything into a god.”

Reginald Shepherd's most recent books are Fata Morgana, poems, and the just-published Orpheus in the Bronx, prose on poetry.

Stories descend from stories as families descend from families in the magical third novel from Alameddine (I, the Divine), telling tales of contemporary Lebanon that converge, ingeniously, with timeless Arabic fables. With his father dying in a Beirut hospital, Osama al-Khattar, a Los Angeles software engineer, returns in 2003 for the feast of Eid al-Hada. As he keeps watch with his sister, Lina, and extended family, Osama narrates the family history, going back to his great-grandparents, and including his grandfather, a hakawati, or storyteller. Their stories are crosscut with two sinuous Arabian tales: one of Fatima, a slave girl who torments hell and conquers the heart of Afreet Jehanam, a genie; another of Baybars, the slave prince, and his clever servant, Othman.

Osama's family story generates a Proustian density of gossip: their Beirut is luxuriant as only a hopelessly insular world on the cusp of dissolution can be; its interruption by the savagery that takes hold of the city in the '70s is shocking. The old, tolerant Beirut is symbolized by Uncle Jihad: a gay, intensely lively storyteller, sexually at odds with a society he loves. Uncle Jihad's death marks a symbolic break in the chain of stories and traditions—unless Osama assumes his place in the al-Khattar line. Almost as alluring is the subplot involving a contemporary Fatima as a femme fatale whose charms stupefy and lure jewelry from a whole set of Saudi moneymen, and her sexy sister Mariella, whose beauty queen career (helped by the votes of judges cowed by her militia leader lovers) is tragically, and luridly, aborted.

Alameddine's own storytelling ingenuity seems infinite: out of it he has fashioned a novel on a royal scale, as reflective of past empires as present. (Apr.)

The University of Georgia Press and Virginia Quarterly Review have teamed up to launch the VQR Poetry series, curated by VQR editor Ted Genoways and his staff. They're kicking off the series with four new books.

In the face of helplessness, the speaker of Chang's intense poems seeks to harness the power of nature: the mysterious force of the ocean and its often sinister inhabitants, as well as birds, which perhaps Chang overuses. She is at her best and boldest in raw poems such as “Innocence Essay,” which revisits the terror and desperation felt by an abused child. It's at the center of the book's haunting second section—following the extended title poem that opens the book—in which, with the nighttime forest as a backdrop, Chang ponders just how alive nature really is: “every puddle rivers with desire.” If nature is no less complex than humanity, it is perhaps less willful in its brutality, which is a small consolation. The final section continues the narrative of the victimized child, her sister, and her mother, with frankness and a refreshing lack of melodrama. (Apr.)

In his debut, McFadden is big on wordplay, particularly anagrams. Attempting to make meaning of the similarities in words—how words as arrangements of letters may connect associatively—McFadden fashions a book too coherent to be Language Poetry, though it certainly pays its respects: “Can't tell your oh from your ah? Go, go or else/ go ga-ga. What, were you born in a barn? Oh.” Longer poems show a less self-conscious and more ruminative sensibility. In “Famed Cities,” the narrator reflects on memories of growing up in Ohio via a survey of cities in short poems rife with both cynicism and nostalgia. Typically, Cleveland is broken down to word bits: “C-level fits:/ the even keel, average but no slacker.” The poems are often a mouthful, and one occasionally wants more seriousness, but this debut showcases a wild and powerful wit in action. (Apr.)

This second collection from Kate Tufts Award–winner Phillips (Chattahoochee) is haunted by memories, could-have-beens and what-ifs, as when an infant son dies instead of recovering from a fever, or never even makes it through birth. Phillips is consumed with his vulnerability as a parent and finds himself lost in the cyclical recurrences of time: “What happened never happened on its own/ the future and the past collide.” Fatherhood, of course, also recalls mixed memories of being a son. Phillips enacts the anxiety and grief of the knowledge that there is no escape from death, no matter how much we may love and protect someone. “It will be the past/ and we'll live there together” the final poem begins; it ends: “It will be the past/ and it will last forever.” (Apr.)

The sharp, pastoral imagery of Parks's debut is set ablaze by an ominous tone and the author's fine musical ear. Her tight tercets and prose blocks convey a sense of isolation, which, when broken by the appearance of someone other than the speaker, is as jarring as a rock heaved into a still pond: “No matter how dearly I willed my floodgates shut,” she writes, “I took on water like a buckshot dory, a hungry bucket.” Nature is alternately a close companion and a spurning lover. In the book's third section (of five), a series called “Letters of a Woman Homesteader,” brief, glistening epistles addressed to a mysterious “Mrs.” invoke a lonely speaker sometime in the past, brimming with desire, but hemmed in by manners: “Want/ leisure, physician, housekeeper, him.” Parks is a poet to watch. (Apr.)