Fiction Reviews

The narrator of Beatty’s late ’80s picaresque, Ferguson W. Sowell—aka DJ Darky—is so attuned to sound that he claims to have a “phonographic memory.” Ferguson, who does porno film scores for the money in L.A., has a cognoscenti’s delight in jazz, and he’s close to obsessed with Charles Stone, aka “the Schwa,” a musician who apparently disappeared into East Germany in the ’60s. Ferguson receives an already-scored tape whose soundtrack is so rich and strange and “transformative” that it must be by Schwa. Ferguson is soon on his way to Slumberland, a bar in West Berlin to which he sources the tape. He arrives just in time to experience the sexual allure black men exercise on Cold War Berliners, and stays long enough to watch the city’s culture fall apart after the fall of the Wall. With its acerbic running commentary on race, sex and Cold War culture, the latest from Beatty, author of Tuff and editor of The Anthology of African American Humor, contains flashes of absurdist brilliance in the tradition of William Burroughs and Ishmael Reed. But the plot seems little more than an excuse to set up a number of comic routines, denying the story a driving, unifying plot. (July)

Stirring and beautifully crafted, this debut novel recounts how the repercussions of a girl’s disappearance can last for decades. In 1984, Kate Meaney is a 10-year-old loner who solves imaginary mysteries and guesses the dark secrets of the shoppers she observes at the Green Oaks mall. Kate’s unlikely circle includes her always-present stuffed monkey; 22-year-old Adrian, who works at the candy shop next door; and Kate’s classmate, Teresa Stanton, who hides her intelligence behind disruptive behavior. Kate’s grandmother has plans for Kate: send her to boarding school. But Kate doesn’t want to go. Fast forward to 2003, where it’s revealed through Lisa, Adrian’s sister, that Kate disappeared nearly 20 years ago, and Adrian, blamed in her disappearance, also vanished. Lisa works at a record store in Green Oaks and is drawn to Kurt, a security guard whose surveillance-camera sightings of a little girl clutching a stuffed monkey hint that he might have ties to Kate’s disappearance. Teresa, meanwhile, now a detective, has her own reasons for being haunted by Kate’s disappearance. Gripping to the end, the book is both a chilling mystery and a poignant examination of the effects of loss and loneliness. (July)

Kushner’s colorful, character-driven debut succinctly captures the essence of life for a gilded circle of American expats in pre-Castro Cuba, chronicling a mélange of philandering spouses, privileged carousers and their rebellious children. K.C. Stites and Everly Lederer are raised among the American industrial strongholds of the United Fruit Company sugar plantation and the Nicaro nickel mines. As adolescents, they are confronted by the complexities of local warfare and backstabbing politics, while their parents remain ignorant of the impending revolution. Meanwhile, in Havana, burlesque dancer Rachel K and her former SS officer companion become entangled in Castro’s revolution. Toward the end of 1957, K.C.’s brother, Del, joins the rebels, and within a month the United Fruit Company’s cane fields are ablaze. Throughout the following year, the attacks on U.S.-operated businesses intensify; political and personal loyalties are shuffled and betrayed; and the violence between the rebels and Batista’s forces escalate. The action, while slowed at times by Kushner’s tendency to revisit plot points from multiple points of view, culminates in a riveting drama. Given the recent Cuba headlines, Kushner’s tale, passionately told and intensively researched, couldn’t have come at a more opportune time. (July)

Shakespeare’s quiet and moving fifth novel is a story as brooding and insular as the Tasmanian town in which it is set. Alex Dove, who left remote Wellington Point as a child, returns after college to deal with his deceased parents’ failing farm. Merridy Bowman is on leave from university to nurse her dying father, who has moved into a Wellington Point retirement community. The two outsiders forge a relationship (despite the brief but spirited attempt of a townie to win Merridy) and marry, settling on Alex’s family farm, where they eke out a modest living. Although the novel’s sympathies lie with Alex, it is his ambitious wife who drives the novel. Their struggle to conceive leads to Merridy’s unlikely return to her studies and, eventually, to rescuing a mysterious, troubled child from a shipwrecked boat. Trouble, as ever, is in the offing, and when it arrives, Shakespeare allows it to run its natural course without dipping into melodrama. Expertly crafted, the novel illuminates love’s craggy depths. (July)

D tells it like it is in this brutal sequel to Got, deploying a second-person point of view to roughly riff on the life of a desperate man trying to stay alive and get control of his life. The nameless narrator is still haunted by the first woman he killed. In Atlanta, the ex-Brooklynite enrolls in college; hooks up with Jennifer, a student and smalltime drug dealer; hangs with cousin Duronté and wants to be “normal, even though you know in your heart that you’ll never be normal again.” D unflinchingly depicts the narrator’s longing “to control all the variables, where you can corner them and make them talk.” He sends his cousin away after a power struggle in Atlanta and returns to Brooklyn for a showdown with the men who have him on the run. The narrator finds a surprising if unwelcome closure and faces some ugly truths in D’s gritty street noir. (July)

Dubus’s ambitious if uneven follow-up to House of Sand and Fog begins shortly before 9/11 with stripper April taking her three-year-old daughter, Franny, to work after the babysitter flakes at the last minute. Though she leaves Franny with the club’s house mother and intends to keep tabs on her, April’s distracted on the floor by Bassam, a Muslim who’s in Florida to take flying lessons and (like one of the real 9/11 hijackers) spends early September 2001 throwing around money and living lasciviously. Meanwhile, AJ, a down-on-his-luck local, lingers in the parking lot after getting thrown out for touching a dancer. The slow-starting plot splinters once Franny wanders outside and disappears. Soon, AJ’s wanted for kidnapping, April’s run through the social service wringers as an unfit parent, and the murky particulars of Bassam’s mission come into sharp focus as he struggles with his religious convictions. Dubus gives the breath of life to most of his characters (Bassam—not so much), though the narrative has a mechanical feeling, partially owing to the narrow emotional register Dubus works in: doom and desperation are in plentiful supply from page one, and as the novel fades to black, the reader’s left with a roster of sadder-but-wiser Americans to contemplate. (June)

Estranged sisters Ginny and Vivien Stone reunite after 50 years, releasing a flood of painful memories in Stone’s eerie, accomplished debut. Ginny and her younger sister Vivien lead an idyllic childhood in West Dorset, England, until Vivien nearly dies in an accident (the aftermath of which takes decades to unravel) when Ginny is 11 and Vivien is eight. Later, after the pair is expelled from school, a 15-year-old Vivien moves to London, and Ginny stays behind, covering up her mother Maud’s alcoholism while trying to assist her father, Clive, with his research on moths and butterflies. After Maud’s death and Clive’s subsequent dementia, Ginny lives alone in the massive house, a brilliant but increasingly reclusive scientist whose insular world is cracked open when Vivien announces her desire to return and live out her days with Ginny. Long-buried secrets float to the surface as Ginny narrates with scientific precision her life’s slow disintegration. Though the lepidopterological jargon and asides can slow things down, Adams expertly captures Ginny’s voice and the dynamics of a deeply troubled family as the book barrels toward its chilling conclusion. (June)

Julia Lambert is a New York art professor spending the summer in Maine with her elderly father, a domineering neurosurgeon, and mother, a gentle soul succumbing to Alzheimer’s. Julia’s oldest son, Steven, joins the clan as tragic news surfaces: her second son, Jack, is addicted to heroin. Ex-husband Wendell, Julia’s distant sister Harriet and Jack himself soon arrive, and intervention is on the agenda. Jack refuses to go quietly, and Robinson, who has worked in multiple genres (including penning a biography of Georgia O’Keeffe), engulfs the clan in a sea of resentment and repressed hostility, spiked with the intermittent need to feel close. Her unrelenting look at the deep physical and mental distress involved in heroin abuse is not for the faint of heart, with key portions of the drama unfolding through descriptions of Jack’s perpetually itching skin, twitching muscles, heaving stomach, needle-tracked arms and addled brain. While the omniscient narration sometimes loses focus, Robinson offers adept closeups of family trauma. (June)

Chamberlain (The Bay at Midnight) lays out her latest piece of romantic suspense in a shattered chronology that’s as graceful as it is perfectly paced. Most of the adults in the tightly knit coastal community of Topsail Island, N.C., accept the widowed Laurel Lockwood’s 15-year-old mentally disabled son, Andy. But when Andy saves many of the town’s youth during a tragic fire, he becomes a local hero who garners national attention. Laurel, caught up with making sure Andy is okay, thinks daughter Maggie, a high school senior, can handle herself. What Maggie hides from everyone are her slipping grades, a taboo affair and a terrible secret, and when the fire’s origins are investigated and Andy is a person of interest, events turn progressively darker for the family. Long, juicy flashbacks cover the mysteries of Laurel’s husband’s death, of Andy’s condition and of Laurel’s preoccupation with him. Chamberlain offers no easy solutions, but her engrossing prose leads the way to redemption. (June)

The former publisher of Basic Books, Maguire published her first novel, Thinner, Blonder, Whiter, in 2002; she had completed this second novel when she died of cancer in 2006. Pitch perfect from start to finish, the book is couched as the memoir of once-popular writer Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840–1894): a manuscript left behind at her death to counter her image as “a long-suffering, martyred spinster.” At its center is the vibrant, intriguing relationship between Woolson and Henry James, whom she meets in Paris in 1879. James calls her Fenimore (she’s the niece of The Last of the Mohicans author James Fenimore Cooper), and she calls him Harry; theirs was, Woolson says, “[a] marriage not of bodies, but of minds.” The stuff of conventional memoir is judiciously tucked in (Woolson’s travels; her encroaching deafness; James’s sister, Alice, and his circle), but with an immediacy, embodiment and frankness 19th-century memoir almost always lacks. Through Maguire’s elegant pen, Woolson, a writer who was often pigeonholed as a mere verbal colorist, gets to establish her significance to James: “Whenever Harry left he always took something from me, a little piece of my own imagination.” Maguire’s vivid depiction of those complex exchanges is utterly absorbing. (June)

Mars follows her memoir (A Month of Sundays) with a midlife crisis bildungsroman that is largely unexceptional, though not without charm. New Yorker Ellen Kenny, a 46-year-old ex-hippie, takes a side trip on the way to Montreal to visit her sister and impulsively buys a decrepit house with her credit card. This startles her husband, Tommy, and the effect that Ellen’s sudden purchase has on their marriage encompasses the most interesting and touching parts of this novel. Less successful are Ellen’s entanglements in her new small hometown: her friendships with two feuding local rednecks, Rayfield and Rodney; her temporary guardianship of her sister’s son; and her strange dreams that inspired the house purchase and swirl with the secrets of everyone she knows. The narrative often resorts to silliness, camp (Rayfield nicknamed his obese ex-wife “Doublewide”) and mood-spoiling stereotypes (Ellen’s Peruvian brother-in-law, for instance, plays the pan flute on street corners). The clumsiness, however, does not entirely overwhelm the moments of sweetness and light humor, and though there’s nothing that really sings, it’s a passable story of self-discovery and self-improvement. (June)

Pulitzer Prize–winning editorial writer Fuller (Fragments) delivers a resonant, intricate saga of the multigenerational Bailey/Schumpeter family of Abbeville, a farming community in central Illinois. Karl Schumpeter goes to work as a clerk at his uncle’s logging outfit before moving at the end of the 19th century to cosmopolitan Chicago to deal in grain futures. Once married, young Karl returns to Abbeville and prospers as an entrepreneur and banker. Almost 40 at the outbreak of WWI, Karl oddly travels to France to serve in the ambulance corps (showing shades of Hemingway, another Illinoisan). Later, after Black Tuesday, Karl’s illegal loans to friends and family land him in prison. Impoverished and humiliated, Karl eventually returns home to Abbeville and the shell of his former life. Years later, Karl’s grandson, George Bailey, loses his livelihood in the dot-com bust and searches for meaning and strength by examining Karl’s earlier travails. However, the dot-com bust pales when juxtaposed to the 1929 crash. The tales of the past generations feel more compelling and immediate. Fuller’s a talented writer, and his gifts are on full display when chronicling Karl’s life and times. (June)

A chance encounter with an old flame in Giffin’s bittersweet, sometimes mawkish fourth novel causes Ellen Dempsey to consider anew what could have been. Shortly after marrying Andy, Ellen runs into Leo, her “intense” first love. Leo, a moody writer, has secretly preoccupied Ellen ever since he broke her heart, so after seeing him again, Ellen wonders if her perfect life is truly what she wants or simply what she was expected to want. This scenario is complicated by Ellen’s past: the early death of her mother and subsequent disintegration of her family have left Ellen insecure and saddled with unresolved feelings of guilt. These feelings intensify when Andy’s career takes the newlyweds from Ellen’s beloved New York City to suburban Atlanta. As Ellen’s feelings of inadequacy and resentment grow, her marriage begins to crumble. The novel is sometimes bogged down by characters so rooted in type that they, and the story line, can only move in the most obvious trajectory. However, Giffin’s self-aware narrator and focus on troubled relationships will satisfy those looking for a light women’s lit fix. (May)

Park’s warm and winning fiction debut is narrated by a collective “we” of youngish Manhattan office grunts who watch in helpless horror as their company keeps shrinking, taking their private world of in-jokes and nicknames along with it. The business itself remains opaque, but who eats lunch with whom, which of the two nearby Starbucks is the “good Starbucks,” and whose desk knickknacks have the richest iconography become abundantly clear. What starts out feeling like a cutesy set of riffs evolves into such a deft, familiar intimacy that when the next round of layoffs begins in earnest, the reader is just as disconcerted as the characters. As office survivors Lizzie, Jonah, Pru, Crease, Lars and Jason II try to figure out who’s next to get the axe, mysterious clues point to a conspiracy that may involve one or more of the survivors. By the time answers arrive, Park—former Voice Literary Supplement editor, a founding editor of the Believer and the creator of the e-zine the New York Ghost—has built the tension masterfully. Echoing elements from Ferris’s debut smash, Then We Came to the End, Park may have written the first cubicle cozy. (May)

Jenoff’s stirring sequel to her debut, The Kommandant’s Girl, chronicles the perilous post-WWII adventures of Marta Nederman, a member of the Polish resistance and best friend of the earlier book’s heroine. When the Allies liberate Dachau, where Marta has been imprisoned and tortured by the Gestapo, Paul Mattison, a handsome American soldier, tenderly gives the weakened Marta a drink of water. Later, at a refugee camp outside Salzburg, Austria, Marta befriends Rose, another recovering survivor. After Rose’s sudden death, Marta is able to use Rose’s visa to travel to London. When en route Marta runs into Paul in Paris, the passion between the pair ignites. They promise to meet in two weeks, but tragedy ensues when Paul’s plane crashes in the English Channel. Pregnant with Paul’s baby, Marta marries Simon Gold, a British diplomat. Two years later, Marta goes on a dangerous mission to Poland, where a Communist takeover is imminent and where the seesaw plot takes more than one surprise twist. Historical romance fans will be well rewarded. (May)

When an elk hunter is shot and gruesomely gutted in Box’s solid eighth Joe Pickett novel (after 2007’s Free Fire), Wyoming governor Spencer Rulon assigns Joe to the investigative team headed by Joe’s nemesis, game and fish director Randy Pope. The authorities suspect a group led by antihunting activist Klamath Moore, but Joe thinks an enigmatic clue near the body points to a serial killer. As usual, Joe stands alone against official protocol, placing his career and life in peril by following his hunches. He persuades Rulon to release his pal, iconoclast Nate Romanowski, who’s awaiting trial on spurious charges, to help him on the case. Writing beautifully about the mountain West and its people, Box takes care to present both sides of the controversial issue of hunting. The narrative alternates between the searchers and the killer, whose identity will keep readers guessing up to the surprising climax. Author tour. (May)

Centering on four women in pre-Depression Person County, in North Carolina, Shamp’s debut novel is slow to gain momentum and interest. Young widow Ina Fitzhugh moves to Roxboro from Virginia to teach school. Guerine Loftis, who specializes in putting on airs; tomboy Doodle Shuford, who runs her family’s farm; and Bertie Daye, a feisty women’s suffrage advocate, worry that newcomer Ina will look down on their smalltown ways—and for most of her first year in town, she does. While various love triangles eventually form and dissolve among several of the four, most compelling are Bertie’s adventures with the American Women’s Party in Washington, D.C. (Her sharp-tongued voice, however, feels forced; she decries, for example, “gotnab namby-pambyism.”) As the novel progresses, the women interact less as they pursue their own goals, reducing the tension, and some of the narrative’s gender- and race-based set pieces can be preachy. But the novel offers a detailed look at a vanished era of feminism and at a rural South that has changed dramatically. (May)

Fourteen-year-old Ariella “Ari” Montero, who’s half human and half vampire, wants to know why bees are vanishing as well as humans in Hubbard’s smooth supernatural thriller, the sequel to The Society of S (2007). Ari has moved to Homosassa Springs, Fla., hoping for happiness with her reunited parents, but after a hurricane hits and a fire almost kills Ari and her scientist dad, he leaves. Ari is further upset when a new friend, Mysty, disappears. The precocious Ari enrolls in college, dates and gets a crush on a visiting (vampire?!) politician, but is horrified when Autumn, another new friend, is murdered. After Ari’s father returns and becomes ill, she and her mom wind up fighting for her dad’s survival. The ending promises greater challenges ahead. Though Ari sometimes sounds more like 40 than 14, Hubbard’s intriguing tale poses a tantalizing question: will humans or vampires ultimately inherit Earth? (May)

The bumbling criminals in Irish journalist Kerrigan’s second novel to be made available in the U.S. (after The Midnight Choir) will remind readers of the hapless losers who populate some of Elmore Leonard’s books. Smalltime Irish hoodlum Frankie Crowe plans to kidnap Justin Kennedy, a wealthy, up-and-coming Dublin entrepreneur. But when Crowe finds out his intended victim is less flush than he’d believed, Crowe and his cohorts decide instead to abduct Kennedy’s wife, Angela. The bulk of the book centers on the attempts of Crowe’s crew to collect Angela’s ransom and the efforts to foil them led by Crowe’s bête noir, Det. Insp. John Grace. The framing device—the recollections of an older man who’s plotting revenge against Crowe for his role in an armed robbery of a pub—proves more interesting than the main action. The author’s fine ear for dialogue helps compensate for a less than compelling plot. (May) 

This richly textured historical romance from Scottish poet and short story writer Paisley reimagines the story of Col. Anne Farquharson, a real-life leader in the Jacobite uprising of 1745. When Bonnie Prince Charlie returns to Scotland in an attempt to take the throne, the English naturally seek to suppress his supporters. Aeneas McIntosh, chief of Scots Clan Chatton, reluctantly takes a commission with the English army, believing it the best way to preserve his clan and their land. His younger and far more impetuous wife, Anne, responds by joining with a former lover, Alexander McGillivray, and raising an army in support of the prince’s ultimately doomed claim. Aeneas and Anne continues to love and lust after one another, despite their political differences. A complex, passionate love triangle; a realistic look at the horrific consequences of war; and a balanced, satisfying resolution mark Paisley’s notable first novel. (May)

Bestseller Rose makes her hardcover debut with this intricately plotted romantic thriller, a sequel to Die for Me (2007). Georgia Bureau of Investigation Special Agent Daniel Vartanian, having recently buried his parents, who were done in by his late serial-killer brother, Simon, looks into a series of killings that appear to copycat the brutal rape and murder of Alicia Tremaine 13 years earlier. In the course of his investigation, Daniel meets Alex Fallon, an attractive nurse who asks him to help locate her hairdresser stepsister, Bailey Crighton, who’s mysteriously disappeared. In a twist, Alex turns out to be Alicia’s twin sister. The romance between Daniel and Alex intensifies along with the suspense as the body count rises. This chilling novel will leave Rose’s fans breathlessly anticipating her next release. (May)

At the start of this violent and intense noir and espionage hybrid from Swierczynski (The Blonde), David Murphy, the CEO of a Philadelphia financial company, summons his seven staffers for an important Saturday meeting, where he informs them that the business is being shut down, and that unfortunately he has to kill them all. Every escape route from the 36th-floor office has been sealed off or rigged with lethal sarin gas. Suddenly, mousy Molly Lewis pulls out a gun and puts a slug in Murphy’s head. The resulting chaos sets off a panicked scramble, as the reader gradually learns that the business is a front for a covert intelligence group called CI-6. Thousands of miles away in Scotland, two men monitor “Molly Lewis,” who’s actually a highly trained Polish operative named Ania Kuczun, as she performs her own private audition, which involves the systematic elimination of her co-workers using a truly imaginative array of methods. This action fest moves swiftly to its darkly satisfying conclusion. (May)

Spare, evocative prose lifts this impressive debut from Pekearo, who was killed in the line of duty as an auxiliary police officer in New York City in 2007. Marlowe Higgins, who’s both a werewolf and a detective, lives in the small town of Evelyn, “just outside the Tennessee border,” flipping burgers by day and waiting for the full moon that will awaken the blood curse that has afflicted his family for generations. Higgins has hit on a way to alleviate the guilt he feels for having claimed countless innocent lives—he investigates vicious crimes that have gone unsolved by the police and targets the perpetrators in his lupine form. When a sadistic serial killer known as the Rose Killer for the flowers left in the victims’ eye sockets appears in Evelyn, Higgins turns his attention to tracking him down. Higgins may remind some of Jeff Lindsay’s Dexter, but Pekearo’s skill at making Higgins both believable and sympathetic is a considerable achievement that should give this novel crossover appeal beyond crime and horror readers. (May)

No Christian fiction novelist can tickle a funny bone like Gutteridge, and her third installment in the Occupational Hazards series (Scoop; Snitch) doesn’t disappoint and works easily as a stand-alone. Think Snakes on a Plane meets Airplane meets Billy Graham. Hank Hazard, a homeschooled, naïve mime in the Hazard Clowns family troupe, has struggled to find his niche since his parents died in a freak hot tub accident. The 28-year-old’s latest job foray is as an airline company spy for Atlantica, where he flies incognito to evaluate the service. Hank gets more than he bargains for on Flight 1945 to Amsterdam, which involves a rampaging pig, a senior flight attendant with hot flashes, some diamond thieves, a 103-year-old woman pronounced dead and an aging female pilot who pastes sticky notes on the windshield. Hank can’t resist evangelizing the passengers, and somehow Gutteridge makes it work without seeming awkward. Gutteridge is a pro, from smooth point of view changes to snappy dialogue. What could have been clichéd slapstick turns into unbridled hilarity in her capable hands, and the laughter doesn’t stop until the wheels touch the tarmac. (May)

The author of Julia’s Chocolates delivers a sometimes fun tale of revenge and rebirth that begins when narrator Jeanne Stewart discovers her longtime live-in boyfriend has been cheating on her. She exacts a creative revenge involving condoms and peanut oil (her boyfriend is allergic), resulting in “Slick Dick” suing her. His betrayal, following the death of her mother and weeks of working excessive hours, results in an embarrassing public nervous breakdown. Jeanne sells everything and lands in a small Oregon town, where, amid an eccentric cast, she enrolls in a court-ordered anger-management class and attempts to rebuild her life. Her initial recovery breakthrough occurs when she falls while running naked (this, strangely, is part of the program) along the river and a nice man helps her. When her brother urges Jeanne to work on a political campaign for Oregon’s governor, Jeanne discovers the candidate is her river rescuer. Other irons in the fire include Jeanne’s efforts to renovate a derelict house and her ex’s looming lawsuit. Though initially charming, the book has a tendency to overload the narrative with sass and excessive wordplay, which slows the plot and keeps the reader at an uncomfortable distance. (May)

Pan, the curiously nicknamed narrator of Brownrigg’s (The Delivery Room) trim latest, has come to realize the truth in the old saying, “What goes around comes around.” It’s been five years since her husband, Alan, left his wife for her, and she’s disenchanted that their married lovemaking isn’t as passionate as their adulterous action was. Plus, Alan barely helps around the house, Pan’s not exactly enamored of her stepsons, and Alan is still hopelessly entangled with his combative ex, Theresa. So when Richard, a kindhearted envelope salesman, walks into the stationery store where Pan clerks, a harmless one-sided romance blooms in the form of letters Richard leaves for her. Of course, when Alan finds Richard’s letters, he’s less than understanding. The early charms of this novel, including an absorbing rendering of a suffocating and dreary marriage, soon wear thin: Pan becomes increasingly precious as an episode from her past is clumsily offered as an explanation for her disaffection, and her obtuseness about her meanness toward Theresa is frustrating. The setup is there, but the follow-through doesn’t deliver. (May)

Set in 1857 New York City, this erotically charged chiller from Chance (An Inconvenient Wife) features spirit rappings, table tippings, deception and murder among its titillating treats. Michel Jourdain, a captivating Creole medium, has enthralled Dorothy Bennett, a sickly society matron who holds regular “spirit circles” to communicate with deceased loved ones. At one séance—attended by Evelyn “Evie” Atherton; Peter, her attorney husband, whom people suspect she married for his fortune; and Ben Rampling, Peter’s law partner—an errant pistol shot nearly kills Michel. Suspecting the misfire was no accident, Peter determines to investigate, but winds up dead from a knife wound in the East River just days later. When society shuns the upstart Evie, who’s charged with Peter’s murder, Ben offers his legal assistance. Dorothy gives Evie refuge at her mansion, where the seductive Michel, whom Dorothy plans to adopt, instructs Evie in spiritualism. Evie’s eerie discovery that the thirst for justice can reach beyond the grave enhances the neat resolution. (May)

Escaping a devastating divorce by returning, in the 1970s, to his backwoods Ozarks roots, a successful, unnamed curator of American antiquities intends to drink himself to death. “The Bluff-dweller,” who narrates the first third of this quietly ambitious novel from veteran Harington (The Pitcher Shower, etc.), has installed himself in a cave near an abandoned village that retains a single resident, and old woman. She narrates the book’s middle; her grandson, a millionaire pork packer, owns the town and most of the land around it—except the part that’s a national park, overseen by a forest ranger, who suffers the Bluff-dweller’s presence. Other characters include a moonshiner, and a historian, Eliza Cunningham, whose letters to a woman named Linda comprise the book’s final third. The plot, such as it is, involves whether the village should be restored, and whether the old woman will be able to bring the Bluff-dweller and Eliza together. Despite unreliable narrators and heavy conceits, there’s no sense of self-indulgence or self-consciousness to the seductive prose, which is laced throughout with wit and clever allusion. The result is a pleasing if perplexing read, with lots of observation but no real movement. (May)

In her rich and heartfelt sophomore novel, Ewen (Walk Back the Cat) bases the story line on her grandmother’s life as a missionary’s wife in the 1920s in what is now Thailand. Barbara is a gifted opera protégée who gives up her dreams when she marries Harvey Perkins, a medical doctor bound for Siam. Feeling stifled and afraid, she loses her comfortable Christian faith amid the rigid fundamentalism of the poverty-stricken mission in rural Nan. The couple returns home after Barbara has a nervous breakdown, but Harvey’s zeal for his work soon lands them in Siam again. The love between the two is endearing, and Ewen skillfully portrays Harvey’s inability to understand his wife’s deepest needs and her inability to understand what drives him. Ewen’s prose is laudably rich in specific and colorful detail, which becomes a problem when it slows down the pacing. Judicious cutting would have improved this overlong narrative. Barbara’s questions of faith constitute the core of the book, as she struggles to define what makes up a meaningful life. Some readers will be disappointed by her final choice, while others will cheer at the ending. Ewen is a talented writer, and this is a strong addition to Christian fiction. (May)

Two parallel missing person searches hurtle from New York to Italy in Paris Review editor Rich’s surreal debut. Eugene Brentani, avoiding his lonely father and Sutton Place upbringing just after college, ends up in far Northern Manhattan working for Abraham Chisholm, the biographer of Connie Eakins—the author on whom Eugene wrote his college thesis. Abraham’s lovely daughter, Sonia, goes missing in Italy while searching for the presumed-dead Eakins; Eugene, who met Sonia in New York and fell instantly in love with her, jumps at the opportunity to retrieve her. Once in Milan, Eugene finds danger lurking around every corner. Alternating chapters tell of elderly New York widower Mr. Schmitz (as he’s called throughout), whose friend Rutherford has left for Italy, and whose letters from there are troubling. Mr. Schmitz sets off for Milan, partially to help Rutherford reclaim the Italy the two men knew as WWII soldiers. Rich seems as interested in exploring different forms of miscommunication as in developing character and plot, and the two central mysteries, both centering on books and story-telling, have a distinctly Borgesian flavor to them. Rich is an impressive stylist, but this debut’s whole ends up less than the sum of its disparate parts, which a surprise ending fails to unify. (Apr.)

The poems in Shaughnessy’s acclaimed debut, Interior with Sudden Joy (1999), earned her comparisons to Sylvia Plath for their sexual frankness, tight-to-bursting compression and musical invention. Her second collection, winner of the Academy of American Poets’ James Laughlin Award, brings a greater emotional bandwidth and stylistic suppleness to the task of unmasking “the hoax of boundlessness” in life and in love, “making and making to replace the dreaming at last.” The book’s three sections contain nine, 11 and 10 poems, respectively, and that off-kilter triangulation—from the terse, not-quite-tongue-in-cheek self-dismissal of the first heading, “Anodyne,” to the suggestion of galactic exploration and recording in the last, “Astrolabe”—proves the right three-cornered lens for looking into the darkest corners of human relationships, including their embodiment: “honeyed, self-twinned, fearless,/ a wineskin emptying/ into a singing stranger.” Most are in the second person, who is sometimes the speaker and sometime not; most often, the addressee is a love or lover, who changes, and who is exhorted, berated, courted, rejected, fucked, accepted, lectured, soothed, teased and, always, loved: “I am yours. I am still I.” In its worried acceptance of contradiction, its absolute refusal of sentimentality and its acute awareness of time’s “scarce infinity,” this is a brilliant, beautiful and essential continuation of the metaphysical verse tradition. (June)

Ali’s second collection continues the project he began in his debut, The Far Mosque (2005). Through these associative and sometimes disjunctive lyrics, Ali explores Eastern religions—Islam, Hinduism—as well as his relationship with a more personalized “God” who represents the unknown while still providing a sense of belonging in the world. In “Afternoon Prayer,” Ali asks, “God, a curt question or a curtain.” In the opening, “Lostness,” Ali describes his particular notion of deity—“dear God of blankness I pray to dear unerasable”—and then asks, “how could I live without You if I were ever given answers”; later, God is equated with the sparseness of daily life: “dear afternoon God dear evening God my lonely world.” Sometimes Ali arrives at mysterious, striking assertions: “A person is only a metaphor for the place he wants to go”; elsewhere, one finds well-rendered images: “the ocean will receive itself / opening its green pages to glass and sand.” A lack of mooring in the physical world makes some poems a bit slight. Nonetheless, Ali eloquently draws attention to the strange, dislocating home we make in human experience, in which “you are being whipped // around the galaxy’s center / at 25 million miles a second.” (May)

Celebrated since the 1980s for her deftly articulate, often wittily rhymed lyric poems, Salter demonstrates those strengths and others in this sixth volume. From the start, Salter’s verse can sound urbane and serious, ceremonious and supple: a nine-part elegy for a friend who died young contains a villanelle with the refrain “I know you’re gone for good. And this is how:/ were you alive, you would have called by now.” Other poems react to the death of Salter’s mother, to her own experience of parenthood, and to life with her husband, poet and critic Brad Leithauser. Salter may be the most gifted mid-career disciple of James Merrill’s work, and her detractors may say she still works in his shadow. Yet her loosely syllabic stanzas owe as much to Marianne Moore, and her best poems stand apart for their careful sensitivity both to works of art and to her own family life, sounding as much herself when sighing, “you reach an age when classics// are what you must have read” as when she “imagines the synchronized operations/ across the neighborhood:/ putting the children to bed;/ laying out clean clothes.” (Mar.)

Could Paul Cézanne be a killer? That’s one of the disturbing prospects confronting novice magistrate Bernard Martin in August 1885 as he starts to investigate the murder of Solange Vernet, a recent transplant from Paris whose brutalized remains are discovered near a favorite haunt of the painter’s outside Aix, in Pope’s provocative debut. Was the freethinking beauty with the flame-colored locks slain by her lover, self-professed Darwinian scholar—and likely scam artist—Charles Westerbury, as Martin’s boss contends, or by a smitten Cézanne? Martin quickly recognizes that the case could be a career maker—or breaker—if he antagonizes the artist’s powerful family without overwhelming evidence. Pope animates her canvas with plenty of vivid period detail, but subplots, romantic and otherwise, dilute the suspense; later she telegraphs what should have been a surprise ending. Still, Francophiles and history buffs will find much to like. (June)

Edgar-finalist Rehder’s sixth Blanco County (Tex.) mystery (after 2007’s Gun Shy) may be the best to date in this rollicking crime series. Soon after Hollis Farley, a backhoe operator clearing land for televangelist Peter “Pastor Pete” Boothe’s controversial new religious complex, discovers an Alamosaurus skull, an arrow hits Farley in the back, and the fossil skull disappears. Whodunit and whotookit? Series regular Red O’Brien persuades his best friend and housemate, 300-pound Billy Don Craddock, to whom Farley had mentioned the valuable discovery, to court Farley’s sister, Betty Jean, to see if she has the missing fossil. Other suspects include Vanessa, Pastor Pete’s unfaithful wife; debt-ridden Alex Pringle, Pete’s right-hand man; and Snake Sawyer, a convicted burglar who works for Darwin Parker, a dino-loving millionaire. Rehder’s satirical take on greed, faith and foolishness moves at a swift clip, punctuated with dizzy twists and even bittersweet turns, like a good toe-tapping, country and western tune. (May)

Poolshark-turned-PI Kristin Van Dijk, the heroine of Fate’s third hard-boiled 1950s mystery (after 2007’s Baby Shark’s Beaumont Blues), could give Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer a run for his money in the toughness department. At the behest of a Texas client, Travis Horner, Van Dijk and her partner, Otis Millett, travel to Oklahoma to track down Savannah Smike, Horner’s girlfriend, who’s being held for ransom. The assignment proves trickier than advertised, leaving the detectives doubtful of Horner’s integrity. After the pair successfully reunite Smike with her family, Millett is seriously wounded by gunfire, possibly from one of the thugs involved in Smike’s kidnapping. Vowing revenge, Van Dijk stealthily and skillfully knocks down doors and twists arms in her effort to identify the triggerman as well as uncover the true motive behind all the bloodshed. Van Dijk’s resourcefulness makes her a winning series character who merits a long run. Fans of Sara Paretsky and Robert B. Parker will find much to enjoy. (May)

In this assured suspense yarn from British veteran Barnard (A Fall from Grace), Eve McNabb receives many consolation letters after the death of her mother, May, the beloved head of a school in Crossley, Yorkshire. One missive, though, is disturbingly different from the rest. Addressed to May and signed Jean, this letter suggests there was once a physical intimacy between Jean and May and makes a veiled reference to “the business with John,” Eve’s late father. Determined to locate the unknown sender, Eve turns to Omkar Rani, an Indian policeman who’s also a philatelist, for help in deciphering the envelope’s smudged postmark. Omkar and Eve manage to track down an actress, Jean Mannering, who denies writing the letter, but drops the bombshell that Eve’s father emigrated to Australia for his health and could still be alive. Eve travels to Australia, but a message from Okmar that there’s been a murder in Crossley brings her home. Unexpected solutions and a clever closing switch make this a satisfying read. (May)

Morson, author of the Falconer series set in 13th-century England (Falconer’s Crusade, etc.), launches the first of a new series in this solid if unspectacular historical set in the court of Kubilai Khan, the legendary Mongol ruler. In 1262, Niccolò Zuliani, a Venetian businessman who’s been looking for a fresh start, agrees to serve as the bodyguard for Friar Alberoni, who’s journeying to the Mongol empire on the church’s behalf to track down the fabled Christian ruler, Prester John. Soon after their arrival in the city of Xanadu, Zuliani stumbles across the corpse of Francesco Pisano, the friar whom Alberoni had been seeking as part of his mission. Zuliani winds up having to identify Pisano’s killer, who must be among the select few with access to the Great Khan’s inner palace. While Morson is less adept than such other historical mystery authors as Simon Levack and Tom Harper at evoking his chosen place and period, the brisk plot will carry most readers along. (Apr.)

In Viets’s sprightly seventh Dead-End Job mystery (after 2007’s Murder with Reservations), intrepid Helen Hawthorne, now a “customer care” clerk at the snobbish Superior Club in Golden Palms, Fla., is dismayed to run into her money-hungry ex, Rob, in the club parking lot. When Rob, who’s now married to a wealthy club member known as the Black Widow because her last five husbands have died mysteriously, tells Helen he fears for his life, the unsympathetic Helen hits him. Fellow club employees witness their fight, and one of them, Brenda, almost succeeds in getting Helen fired. Later, the authorities view Helen as a prime suspect after Rob disappears, a possible murder victim. When someone beats Brenda and a philandering plastic surgeon to death with Brenda’s seven iron, Helen has a lot more to worry about. The romantic ending will leave fans eager for the next installment in this superior cozy series. Author tour. (May)

Three separate investigations, conducted during a blackout, propel Clark’s diverting 11th mystery to feature PI Regan Reilly (after 2007’s Laced). Soon after Regan and her husband, Jack, head of the NYPD Major Case Squad, return home to Manhattan from a weekend on the Cape, the lights go out across the city. In the darkness, Regan is dismayed to discover an intruder has left behind a stun gun in their apartment, which is undergoing renovations. Hours later, Jack looks into the theft of some unusual glass sculptures from a SoHo art gallery. In addition, the pair become involved in the frantic search for Georgina Mathieson, a psychotic with a track record for branding blond men, before she can claim her next victim. The number of coincidences, including one that allows the heroes to save the day in the nick of time, may be on the high side, but fans of lighter crime fare will be satisfied. (Apr.)

Harris outdoes herself in this pivotal eighth Sookie Stackhouse novel (after 2007’s All Together Dead), packing the story full of romantic tension and supernatural action. Having barely survived a catastrophic vampire hotel explosion, Sookie’s back at work in Bon Temps, La., serving vintage blood and waiting tables at Merlotte’s, a vampire bar. Participating in a friend’s wedding and fending off the advances of her vampire ex-lover, Bill, and her blood-bonded pal, Eric, leaves Sookie chafing over the recent lack of communication from Quinn, her weretiger boyfriend. When a violent Were power struggle erupts as Vegas vampires attempt to take over Louisiana from disgraced queen Sophie-Anne, Sookie dives into the middle of it, determined to help her shape-changing, blood-drinking friends. Harris provides many fun twists, most significantly Sookie’s meeting with her fae great-grandfather, Niall Brigant, which paves the way for a shock ending that will delight longtime fans. (May)

DiLouie (Paranoia) flavors Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King” with a dash of Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War to create this rollicking military SF farce. Lawrence Dobbs and Timothy Muldoon are long-service NCOs in the Colonial Marines—very long service, over 800 years. They’re the kind of men who can conquer a planet all by themselves, but times have changed, and it’s just not the same Federation they signed up for. When they hear of a world where the natives have discovered the secret alchemical formula for gold, they gather up a team and make plans to rob the place blind. DiLouie spices up Dobbs and Muldoon’s adventures with loony ideas, from a computer virus that plays dice games with fate to a doomsday machine containing the maniacal consciousness of the last emperor of planet Xerxes. Fans of humorous science fiction will find plenty to enjoy in this time-traveling, galaxy-crossing romp. (May)

Dark fantasists Golden (The Myth Hunters) and Lebbon (Dawn) pair up for the first time in this macabre tale that recalls Holly Black’s acclaimed Valiant. As wary teenager Jasmine Towne runs from the mysterious Uncles who killed her mother, an impulsive dash into an Underground tunnel takes her to Deep Level Shelter 7-K, where she falls in with a group of homeless thieves led by the raggedly elegant Harold Pilkington Fowler. Jazz knows to fear the Uncles, who are stalking her for some magical purpose, but she never expected to see ghosts or hear “the restless spirit of the old city” wailing in the tunnels. With the help of enigmatic burglar Terence, Jazz investigates her mother’s murder and her own mysterious origins and powers. Occasional gaps in the story logic are easy to miss amid the super-fast pacing and creepy touches that give this teen adventure plenty of character. (May)

First in the Tide Lords series, this complex saga, like Fallon’s earlier Hythrun Chronicles, intertwines several vividly realized plots. One follows Arkady Desean, the “Ice Duchess” of Lebec and a scholar of ancient Amyranthan lore, as she interrogates Cayal, a hanged man who inexplicably did not die. She soon encounters legends of the immortal Tide Lords who created the human-animal hybrid slaves called the Crasii—canines to serve, felines to fight, amphibians to pull watercraft—and a thousand years earlier caused the Cataclysm that nearly destroyed the world. Arkady’s husband, Duke Stellan, guards his own deadly secret as he maneuvers through palace intrigues and inter-kingdom clashes. Royal spymaster Declan Hawkes secretly aids renegade Crasii and preserves the Cabal, humanity’s only protection from the Tide Lords. With snappy dialogue and deft characterizations, especially of her sympathetically drawn canine Crasii, Fallon neatly pulls the story threads together into a multihued tapestry of myth, deceit and ambition. (May)

Mosley, best known for his gritty Easy Rawlins mysteries, explores cosmic questions of justice and redemption in this odd tale of Tempest Landry, a black man shot dead by police when they thought he was pulling a gun. Landry throws the afterlife into turmoil by refusing to accept St. Peter’s judgment that he must spend eternity in Hell. Three years after his death, Landry is returned to Manhattan, with a new face and an angel named Joshua to watch over him. As Landry sets up one morally complex situation after another, Joshua engages him in discussions of situational ethics, trying to get Landry to accept that he is a sinner and deserves damnation. Eventually, Landry recruits Satan himself in his cause. The interesting concept is not matched by its execution, but some readers may find Landry a humorous creation and appreciate his eventual solution to his dilemma. (May)

After astro-archeologist Conrad Yeats and Vatican linguist Sister Serena Serghetti survived a disastrous Antarctic expedition in Raising Atlantis, Conrad falls on lean times: his reality TV show, Ancient Riddles, is canceled, and he buries his USAF general father at Arlington National Cemetery. Serena interprets Conrad’s father’s oddly sculpted tombstone to contain a cryptic message. Intrigued, Conrad investigates and discovers George Washington entrusted a treaty sealed in a celestial globe to the care of one of Conrad’s ancestors—but Conrad is not the only one looking for it. And when, according to the Atlantis prophecy, the stars’ align on July 4, 2008, with Washington, D.C., monuments, his sinister rivals’ new world order will begin clicking into place, if they manage to get hold of the globe. Greanias keeps the pace breakneck and the coincidences amazing, sweeping readers right into Conrad’s struggle. (Apr.)

A crime solver armed with a yoga mat, Anna Jolie “A.J.” Alexander, 35, is a Manhattan marketing consultant by day. She’s recovering from a messy divorce when Det. Jake Oberlin of the Stillbrook, N.J., Police Department calls with terrible news—A.J.’s beloved aunt, Diantha Mason, has been murdered: she was found in “corpse pose” at her posh New Jersey yoga compound, Sacred Balance. A.J.’s actress mum, Elysia Alexander (aka Easy Mason) arrives from Britain, hoping to help sort out who’d want to kill Aunt Di. As the primary inheritor of the immense estate, A.J. is on the suspect list, along with an angry heir-apparent yoga teacher; an Olympic hopeful with a bad habit; an unstable teen; and a farmer whose dairy products were vilified by Aunt Di. Killian’s light yoga twist enhances a simplistic but nicely executed cozy. (Apr.)

Fortune smiles on Allie Daniels and her elderly Nana in the form of an unexpected West Texas inheritance from a mysterious “Uncle Jefferson Platt,” of whom Allie doesn’t recall any talk. Raised by her grandparents, Allie quit college to take care of frail Nana at her grandfather’s death, and, at 26, has held a variety of dead-end jobs. She and Nana are enchanted by the West Texas property on Twisted Creek and have soon reopened its rundown bait shop–cum–general store and cafe to serve the “Nesters,” an eccentric bunch who live lakeside year-round. Half-Navajo undercover ATF agent Luke Morgan is one of them, and he’s intent on catching the killer of Uncle Jefferson, who was his own granddad’s best friend—and to put some drug traffickers out of business in the process. Morgan tries to resist his feelings for Allie, but Thomas sketches a slow, sweet surrender, keeping the tension building to a rewarding resolution in this unsentimental, homespun romance. (Apr.)

Returning from Touch the Dark and Claimed by Shadow, Cassie Palmer has finally become Pythia, the supernatural community’s all-knowing oracle. She’s struggling with her new powers (such as shifting back and forth through time) and is stuck between good and evil factions of the paranormal community. Her main concern, though, is to figure out how to reverse a pesky spell that threatens her independence: the geis, once placed on her for protection, is now trying to bind her to the handsome master vampire, Mircea, with results detrimental to them both. The only solution is to find the fabled book that has the counterspell—find it in space and in time. Cassie—in her struggles between her passionate need for independence, her burgeoning feelings for Mircea and her conflicts with her new role as Pythia—is a well-rounded character, and the intensity and complexity of the plot puts her through her paces physically, emotionally and psychically. (Apr.)

A memoir made while Schrag was still in high school, Potential is an honest, rambling, obsessive narrative of high school angst, with a potential of its own peeking through. The story starts as Schrag comes to terms with the fact that she “only likes girls,” and then moves into her first failed foray at a relationship, the loss of her virginity and the ups and downs of her first serious lesbian relationship. The plot is bumpy; some segments are awkwardly inserted and lack significant resolution, such as the section focusing on Schrag’s attempt to lose her virginity to a guy friend. While an important episode of her adolescence, the segment seems isolated within the larger narrative of Schrag’s relationship with her girlfriend, Sally, which is well developed and poignant. The art is very impressive for a comic made by an artist still in high school and matures over the course of the book. The emotional depth of the characters is depicted through vivid and fluid expressions, and Schrag uses different styles to illustrate varying states of consciousness. Schrag’s later works are more mature and better formed, but this coming-of-age story amply displays the emotional uncertainty of adolescence. (May)

With a Drinky Crow Show cartoon in development, the popular Sock Monkey kid’s series to his name, and several Eisner Awards to his name, Millionaire is well positioned for multichannel success. That said, his strip—the last two years’ worth of which are collected in this book, elegantly designed by Chip Kidd—remains something of an acquired taste. Although Millionaire’s gorgeously ornate and lively art (also his habit of filling space at the bottom of the strip with a second, even looser story) recalls early 20th-century newspaper strips, his subject matter, perverse and scatological when not strictly non sequitur, is strictly out of the late 20th-century hipster ironist’s school. The main character is mostly perpetually sozzled Drinky Crow (eyes usually rendered as Xs) and occasionally his enabling Uncle Gabby. The strips themselves go for the one-off joke more often than not, getting plenty of mileage out of Crow’s aggressive boozing (he briefly encounters sobriety, declaring it to be “horrifying, a hideous sack of pain, anguish and terror” before returning to the “joyous world of the drunken”), as Millionaire knows quite well at this point just how many laughs he can get from the site of an angry, drunk bird. (Apr.)

All six issues of Nelson’s reworking of War of the Worlds are collected in this colorful volume that includes all of the staples of a classic alien invasion story: big monsters, ordinary people thrown together, looting, rioting and tyrannical redneck sheriffs. Protagonist Miles is haunted that on the day of the invasion, he hid his wife in the basement while he went to get the car—and moments later, aliens crushed the house. He’s also haunted by the marital discord of his past, which is skillfully woven into the present story through flashbacks. But he doesn’t have too much time to think about it, as a second wave of aliens lands, and he and his friend Duke end up on the run, ad hoc leaders of a small group of survivors that includes an angry mother, a protective father of a diabetic girl and an autistic boy of unknown origin. Chee makes great use of full spreads to convey just how incredibly big the aliens are—sometimes letting a single leg dominate an entire page. Despite the dark nature of the story, the book’s oh-so-bright colors recall the vibe of old Saturday-afternoon movie serials. Visually stylish, fast-paced and very exciting. (Mar.)

Higuchi’s odd mashup of superhumans and cruel prep school antics (think X-Men meet Harry Potter) continues in this second volume of the popular Japanese series. Ten-year-old Heroine Mikan has just received a disastrous “no-star” rating at the Alice Academy. As a result, she’s been demoted—she has to move to the “no-star” dorm rooms, her allowance has been cut, and most of her school privileges have been revoked. Devastating? It would be if the rest of the volume addressed those consequences. Instead, Mikan immediately joins the maverick “Special Class,” participates in an out-of-control game of dodgeball and tries to get in touch with the grandfather she left behind. Higuchi has created a detailed world, with lots of rules and backstories, but the continued focus on school story tropes means that the world is revealed almost arbitrarily, making it hard to keep track of. Higuchi’s art is more than competent. Consistently thin lines leave characters appearing consistently vulnerable, and once every several pages there is a lovingly rendered detailed background. If one can get past a few unintentionally creepy moments (like Mikan climbing into bed with a teacher and asking if she can call him grandfather), this manga is an acceptable entry in the vast school story category. (Mar.)

Seth Collins, a bitter Civil War veteran, is drawn to the small Western town of Silver Branch by a letter from his estranged sister. But as his coach approaches the town, it is attacked by a giant wolf that slaughters the other passengers, leaving only him and the driver, Webster, alive. When they reach the town, they learn that this is not the first time the mysterious wolf has struck. With the town on the verge of a panic or a riot, the sheriff is intent on maintaining peace, regardless of the price, and Webster, who has been acting strangely since he was bitten by the wolf, is the perfect scapegoat. This fusion of the classic werewolf story with the Old West injects what could be a played-out tale with novel texture. The stark black and white art accentuates the horror of the story, especially in the fierce, brutal drawings of the attacks. The deep shadows that saturate the story, however, make it sometimes difficult to tell one character from another. Though the plot turns are all predictable, the backdrop of a West still scarred by war and the gritty art makes this a thrilling addition to the werewolf genre. (Mar.)

Our favorite poetry books coming out this April.

In his seventh book, Bidart condenses his searing, guilt-ridden meditations on the possibilities and limits of the imagination into shorter lyrics, as opposed to the long poems for which he is known. Mostly written in the second person, this speaker addresses himself, fighting the fear that “...all that releases/ transformation in us is illusion” with the flailing hope that, “[t]he rituals// you love imply that, repeating them,/ you store seeds that promise/ the end of ritual.” Bidart’s rituals of consolation include replaying records from the early decades of recorded music; revisiting and revising old, failed loves (“...you persuade yourself that it can be/ reversed because he teasingly sprinkles/ evasive accounts of his erotic history”); watching a film of the aging Russian dancer Ulanova, who is “too old to dance something but the world wants to record it”; and learning caution and peace from the Tu Fu poem from which the collection takes its title. In his most intimate and vulnerable book, Bidart enacts a troubled longing to parse the real from the merely imaginary, the transcendent from the merely real, which is answered, even if incompletely, only by the human capacity to create, as “the irreparable enters me again, again me it twists.” (Apr.)

Graham’s 11th collection contains what might be her most urgent and impassioned writing to date. These 19 poems continue Overlord’s (2005) meditation on current political and social crises, but the relative composure and straightforwardness of that volume has given way to panic, breathlessness, vertigo and fracture: “life disturbing life, & it/ fussing all over us, like a confinement gone/ insane, blurring the feeling of/ the state of / being.” Humankind’s degradation of the environment and itself during wartime are Graham’s primary concerns, with the title referring specifically to the way in which an apparently small shift—an undercurrent’s “warming by 1 degree”—will bring forth ruin: “the in - / dispensable / plankton is forced north now, & yet further north,/ spawning too late for the cod larvae hatch, such/ that the hatch will not survive, nor the/ species in the end.” Here, the interconnectedness of all life isn’t just a spiritual commonplace, it is grounds for a call to action, and one that Graham—a poet of rare responsiveness to the natural world and a thinker of great ethical responsibility—is uniquely qualified to make. (Apr.)

You/ should have seen the sweat of still-being-alive,” writes Lemon in his sprawling, varied, and ambitious second collection. Thoughts of joy and pain, eros and death, not to mention references from Van Gogh to “half-scratched lotto tickets” collide in these unclassifiable, rapid-fire poems. Lemon (Mosquito) constantly asks the reader to take his complex ecstasies in one swallow, diction and image madly comingled: “Alleluia, asshole, amen./ “Together: let us eat.” Elsewhere, “a car wreck/ In my hands,” is followed by a plea to “Come with me tonight, my chocolate-/smelling love” At times the fever pitch of these poems is diminished through repetition, but the book’s two long poems—“Abracadaver” and the title piece—provide a counterpoint to Lemon’s freewheeling antics: a softer, more stripped-down voice amid the rush “in the matchbook of our heads.” (Apr.)

Longtime Swensen fans will not be surprised to find a myriad of ideas and directions on a single subject—French gardens, this time—in her 12th collection. She has similarly treated hands, odd inventions, paintings and other subjects in previous books. Created for the nobility and now mostly for public usage, gardens here become all-purpose metaphors. “A garden is a tide,” writes Swensen; elsewhere it’s a letter, an allergy, a tithe. The book’s title is a translation of the last name of Andre de Notre, the man considered to be the father of the French formal garden. The poems, even as they are peppered with detailed histories (“In 1675, Louis XIV made Andre Le Notre a noble”), are free to go anywhere. In “Marie (1573–1642),” Marie Medici, the wife of Henry IV, finds herself at the Luxembourg Gardens in the summer of 2007: “She stood a full minute, shocked and then started screaming./ The rue d’Assas has cut off the entire northwest sector, and half the trees are gone.” This may be the most engaging and delightful of Swensen’s recent projects. (Apr.)

In his 18th collection, Poet Laureate Simic’s neat stanzas continue to deliver odd moments and unexplained memories, by turns surreal, horrifying, funny, sad, and spoken with this Pulitzer Prize winner’s trademark friendly bemusement. The startling solemnity of a “Metaphysics Anonymous” meeting for addicts of “truth beyond appearances” in one poem meets, in another, a list of topics for a “late-night chat,” including 'How to guess time of night by listening to one’s own heartbeat.” The second of the book’s four sections takes on a decidedly political tone, as in “Dance of the Macabre Mice,” in which “the president smiles to himself; he loves war.” Similarly, “Those Who Clean After” imagines what’s “being done in our name” while the speaker listens to “the sounds of summer night.” The final section groups short poems that Simic (My Noiseless Entourage) calls “Eternities”—each offers a preserved moment’s thought or image: “Sewing room, linty daylight.” While fans will find no stylistic surprises here, there is still the agreeable pathos in Simic’s work, as in “To the Reader,” which ends, “Bang your head / On your side of the wall / And keep me company.” (Apr.)

With erudite yet accessible wit, Knox (He Paves the Road with Iron Bars) continues her exploration of just how far one can actually stretch the definition of poetry before it breaks. Like contemporary cabinets of wonders, the poems in this sixth collection display linguistic oddities, both archaic and everyday, quirky historical facts, unlikely literary references and richly extravagant diction (“O/ for a bombazine cloak the color of plankton!”). Her wildness, however, is tempered by a serious commitment to fixed forms—as one of her poems reports, this book contains “two sonnets, two haiku,/ a sestina, an homage/ to George Herbert, some tercets,/ a masque, two translations,/ two erasure poems, an elegy,/ a recipe, a song, an ABC,/ an eclogue, a canzone,/ a group of rubayyat, and other poems.” But this is a far cry from New Formalism. Knox is our most irreverent poet to revere history in its various forms. (Apr.)

In her previous collection, Spar (2002), Volkman stripped away the formal conventions of lineated verse (as well as overtly stated subject matter) to explore what a poem could say in prose, using rhythm, sound and tone as her principal tools of meaning-making. In this third collection, a sequence of 50 untitled, rhymed sonnets, she takes her interrogation of the poem as formal machine a step further, using English poetry’s most famous form as her guide. Like her prose poems, these sonnets are concerned with love and some notion of a higher, or other, power, or at least with the capacity of language to bridge the gap between addressor and addressee, seeking “a nascent book/ in which the wind has written.” Channeling Emily Dickinson, the poems are at once fierce, ravished, perplexed and perplexing (“If final fell/.../ would time annul the zero in the laws?”), gesturing toward sense, never quite making it, yet mysteriously giving and withholding enough to keep the reader in their thrall. (Apr.)

Over the past several books, the prolific Pulitzer Prize winner Tate (Return to the City of White Donkeys) has been inching toward the invention of a new kind of American poem, a hybrid of prose poetry (though he’s got loose, almost arbitrary line breaks), fable, surrealism and a sort of outsider folk poetry. These chatty, narrative works humorously treat all kinds of subjects, from civil unrest (“ 'There are soldiers everywhere. Its’ hard/ to tell which side they’re on,’ I said. 'They’re against us./ Everyone’s against us. Isn’t that what you believe’ ”) to altruism (“I said I didn’t want any help from anyone, but, then,/ when no one offered to help, I was really hurt”) and wildcats (“I loved his quick, agile movements, never doubting himself,/ as most of us do). A dark undercurrent runs beneath them all, and war and politics—which tend to confuse the poems’ speakers—are frequent subjects. It’s rare that a poet so far into his career—this is Tate’s 15th collection—comes up with something new; quietly, Tate has found a fresh way of telling some of America’s stories. (Apr.)