Fiction Reviews

This lavishly detailed if overlong debut novel set in 1920s and '30s Brazil follows two sisters who share excellent sewing skills, but take divergent paths into adulthood. Crippled by a childhood accident and mocked for her deformities, Luzia is considered unmarriageable. So after a bandit kidnaps her, she realizes that marrying the outlaw leader may be her only chance at independence and happiness. Beautiful Emília, yearning for the refinements of the big city, spurns her many rural suitors, but—reeling from her sister's abduction and her aunt's subsequent death—enters a disastrous marriage with a wealthy, suave stranger who has plenty of untoward secrets and a mother who treats Emília like dirt. The sisters' paths collide after Luzia, now mythologized as a vicious criminal known as the Seamstress, becomes targeted by Emília's criminologist father-in-law, unaware of the two women's connection. Though a good number of passages could have been left on the cutting-room floor, the leisurely pace and attention to detail immerse the reader in both gilded halls and unsavory bandit camps. (Aug.)

Cohen throws every imaginable obstacle at her protagonists in this thoughtful but overly dramatic tale of two single parents turned lovers. Rachel Berman, the divorced publisher of Perfect Parent magazine, is striving to be just that to her two children, rebellious teen Janie and 12-year-old Dustin. Len Bean, a widowed lawyer, meanwhile, tries to manage his daughter Olivia's learning disorder, a condition that causes her to repeatedly talk about rodents and dress inappropriately. When Rachel and Len serendipitously meet, they hit it off. Soon their lives and those of their children become intertwined, much to Janie and Dustin's dismay. As tension builds for the children, a secret from Rachel's past comes to the forefront, and Len receives bad news at the doctor's office. Regret, rejection and worry abound as the plot touches on the standard societal/familial issues (divorce, teenage sexuality, adoption), and Rachel fights to create her own legacy at work. Cohen's language is pleasant and the characters relatable, but the plot is so obvious that the narrative feels like a quirky soap opera. (Aug.)

After her relationship sours, Rose Nowak heads to the small town of Nauset on Cape Cod in this enjoyable debut novel. She quickly finds her place in the community and lands a job as a reporter for the local independent weekly. Among the new people Rose meets is Noel, a 22-year-old autistic savant whose talent for painting inspires Rose to write a story that gets picked up by USA Today. When boozy Simon Beadle reads about his nephew in a Florida hospital while recovering from a maritime accident, he becomes determined to get sober, return to Nauset and build a relationship with Noel. As the town prepares for its tricentennial, Rose and Simon grow close and the truth about several town secrets are exposed. Bonasia's portrait of a waterfront community's triumphs and squabbles is as endearing as it is convincing. (July)

A rainbow of contradictions and a master of guises, Rebecca Horowitz is Yunqué's wise-cracking, 34-year-old narrator who documents her descent into sex freakdom. Rebecca survives an ugly duckling postadolescence and moves in among the self-congratulating liberals of gentrifying Brooklyn. In saunters Charlie Maisonet, a Puerto Rican drug dealer turned painter turned film student who licks her hand when they're first introduced. This incites an extended sexual romp where multiple orgasms are the norm and no New York City landmark—the subway, the Central Park Zoo, the 42nd Street Library—is safe. Besotted Rebecca meets Charlie's mother, Mama Chavela, and soon ditches her job and her vegetarian diet, and changes her name to Zorida Delgado. But when Zorida takes Mama Chavela's advice to “use sex as a controlling device” and makes the rent by dancing topless and eventually by more dangerous means, she risks losing Charlie. The prose will either annoy or fascinate, and some readers may balk at how Yunqué parlays Puerto Rican stereotypes into too-easy jokes, but readers into the brash and the un-P.C. may enjoy this coupling of sex and identity politics. (July)

Parker applies his customary vigor to this sequel to Appaloosa (2005), in a sparse, bullet-riddled rumination on law and order, friendship and honor. Narrator and hired gun Everitt Hitch takes a job as lookout in Amos Wolfson's Blackfoot Saloon and, in short order, guns down local upstart Koy Wickman and stands up for the town's beleaguered prostitutes. Without fully intending it, he creates a haven of orderliness amid the chaos of sheriff-less Resolution. But larger forces are at work as Eamon O'Malley, competing with Wolfson for control of Resolution, hires freelance thugs Cato and Rose to replace Wickman. Lest Everitt end up outnumbered, his old friend Virgil Cole turns up just as Wolfson and O'Malley amass armies for a decisive battle. Wolfson's army turns out to be the more unsavory and dishonorable, winning the day against O'Malley—but Virgil, Everitt, Cato and Rose are prepared to settle things the honorable way. Though the plot meanders its way to a too-fast climax, Parker's dialogue is snappy and his not-a-word-wasted scenes suit this Spartan western. (June)

The latest from Barry (whose A Long Way was shortlisted for the 2005 Booker) pits two contradictory narratives against each other in an attempt to solve the mystery of a 100-year-old mental patient. That patient, Roseanne McNulty, decides to undertake an autobiography and writes of an ill-fated childhood spent with her father, Joe Clear. A cemetery superintendent, Joe is drawn into Ireland's 1922 civil war when a group of irregulars brings a slain comrade to the cemetery and are discovered by a division of Free-Staters. Meanwhile, Roseanne's psychiatrist, Dr. Grene, investigating Roseanne's original commitment in preparation for her transfer to a new hospital, discovers through the papers of the local parish priest, Fr. Gaunt, that Roseanne's father was actually a police sergeant in the Royal Irish Constabulary. The mysteries multiply when Roseanne reveals that Fr. Gaunt annulled her marriage after glimpsing her in the company of another man; Gaunt's official charge was nymphomania, and the cumulative fallout led to a string of tragedies. Written in captivating, lyrical prose, Barry's novel is both a sparkling literary puzzle and a stark cautionary tale of corrupted power. (June)

The third book from Vapnyar (following There Are Jews in My House and Memoirs of a Muse) links food to lonely, loveless dating among recent Russian immigrants over six tales. The opening “A Bunch of Broccoli on the Third Shelf” follows endearingly scatterbrained Nina, whose penchant for letting vegetables wilt in the fridge comes to symbolize her marriage. The warm, awkward “Borscht” centers on the monastic Sergey, who splurges on an “affordable” prostitute and finds the transaction doesn't go as planned. In “Luda and Milena,” the two titular elderly women try to outcook each other to win the affections of Aron, the 79-year-old widower who is the prize single man of their ESL program. Vapnyar, who emigrated from Russia in 1994, draws the humor from her characters' pretensions and predicaments, but also finds a great pathos in their quiet—and not so quiet—desperation. She ends the collection with a blog-voiced roundup of recipes that's incongruent with the delicate stories, but her take on the poignant oddities of New York Russian émigré life is universally palatable. (June)

Harbison's witty, fast-paced follow-up to last year's Shoe Addicts Anonymous chronicles the foibles of four women brought together by—in this case—not shoes but debt. During a fateful trip to Las Vegas as chaperones of a school band trip, Loreen Murphy accidentally hires a male prostitute on the PTA credit card; pastor's-wife-with-a-past Abbey Walsh gets blackmailed by an ex-con ex-boyfriend; and usually restrained PTA president Tiffany Dreyer purchases thousands of dollars worth of clothes that she can't return. Enter the zaftig Sandra Vanderslice, who, before she started her shoe-importing business, made a living as a phone sex operator. She suggests her sister, Tiffany, hop on that gravy train to pay down her credit card bills. Loreen and Abbey join up, and soon the ladies are raking in dough and trying to hide their new source of income from husbands, kids and their snoopy nemesis, the cartoonishly judgmental Deb Leventer, who wants to take over the PTA. Harbison's writing is zingy and funny, and her light touch allows her to get away with the ridiculous situations in this nutty beach read. (June)

Set in Durham, N.C., Shiner's powerful and affecting sixth novel (after 1999's Say Goodbye) explores civil rights, race relations and “progress” in that city over the past half century. In 2004, 35-year-old Michael Cooper accompanies his father, Robert, who's dying of lung cancer, and his mother, Ruth, from Texas to Durham, to honor his father's wishes and to find out more about his father's past. Michael learns about Hayti, a well-to-do black neighborhood that was demolished to make way for an expressway, uncovers an old murder and finds himself point-man in a race to prevent a much greater tragedy. Shiner weaves Michael's, Robert's and Ruth's stories into a stunning tapestry that captures the hopes, dreams, greed, bigotry, ambitions and betrayals that shaped their destinies and those of our country. While the crime plot builds to a conventional resolution, Michael's poignant discovery of his parents' roots and the splendid depiction of Durham's changing social fabric more than compensate. (June)

Ohle's 1972 classic, Motorman, and its sequel, The Age of Sinatra (2004), made him a legend. Fans will rejoice—in their own dystopian way—at the arrival of this mesmerizing installment. Ohle presents a parallel universe where people travel in vehicles called Q-peds; subsist on starch bars, urpmilk and perhaps some imp-meat; and get drunk on Jake and stoned on willywhack to dull the anxieties of the age, which are many. The blighted landscape is overrun by “stinkers” suffering the final zombie-like stage of a parasite infection, and an unspecified “Chaos” perpetually threatens Pisstown. Then there is the deranged authority, the “American Divine,” led by Reverend Hooker. In this world, readers follow the fortunes of the Balls family. Grandmother Mildred is quarantined with a mild parasite infection and must protect a corral of stinkers from wild imps. At the family estate, Mildred's granddaughter, Ophelia, battles stinkers burrowing under the house until she receives orders from Hooker. Ophelia's brother, Roe, eventually comes under Hooker's sway as well. Ohle's creation of a vivid world, both familiar and foreign, dark and slyly humorous, makes the book a grim delight. (June)

Can a class of wannabe novelists solve a murder in their midst? That's the premise of this dark comedy of the absurd from Willett (Winner of the National Book Award), a boisterous satire of pseudointellectuals, impotent writers and the adult extension programs of public universities. The only things Amy Gallup, a once-noted California author, has published in years are blurbs of other writers' work. Amy's only income comes from teaching fiction writing to a motley collection of varyingly talented “prepublished” adults. Someone in the class is making threatening phone calls and sending extremely cruel notes to other students. When two of the students are murdered, a deep sense of danger takes hold. Yet the class goes on. Amy's lectures actually constitute a damn fine guide to writing fiction, while Willett's prose has sparkling moments (“The line was playful, offhand, the poem itself a smug, imperious cat stretch”). The tension is so strong that readers can hardly resist the temptation to peek ahead and see which student is the killer. (June)

From a Colombian slum to the streets of Tehran, seven characters in seven stories struggle with very particular Swords of Damocles in Pushcart Prize winner Le's accomplished debut. In “Halflead Bay,” an Australian mother begins an inevitable submission to multiple sclerosis as her teenage son prepares for the biggest soccer game of his life. The narrator of “Meeting Elise,” a successful but ailing artist in Manhattan, mourns his dead lover as he anticipates meeting his daughter for the first time since she was an infant. The opening “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice” features a Vietnamese character named Nam who is struggling to complete his Iowa Writer's Workshop master's as his father comes for a tense visit, the first since an earlier estrangement shattered the family. The story's ironies—“You could totally exploit the Vietnamese thing,” says a fellow student to Nam—are masterfully controlled by Le, and reverberate through the rest of this peripatetic collection. Taken together, the stories cover a vast geographic territory (Le was born in Vietnam and immigrated to Australia) and are filled with exquisitely painful and raw moments of revelation, captured in an economical style as deft as it is sure. (May)

In Persons's by-the-numbers second novel to feature psychic FBI agent Bernadette Saint Clare (after Blind Spot), Saint Clare, who's based in St. Paul, Minn., investigates a baffling series of water-related deaths. Some apparent suicides in the Mississippi have been followed by bathtub drownings—the latest of which, of troubled University of Minnesota student Shelby Hammond, has clear signs of foul play. The efforts of Saint Clare and Tony Garcia, her hunky supervisor, to find a link between Hammond and the other victims lead to a psychiatrist who had treated some of the dead girls and to a professor who had some of them as students. Saint Clare consults the ghost of a dead FBI agent on the case, though the author provides no backstory explaining how the paranormal exists in this fictional universe. Thriller fans who can't get enough of the familiar story of the attractive female agent vs. the psychopathic serial killer will find more of the same. (May)

Cornelia Brown, heroine of de los Santos's bestselling Love Walked In, returns in a gracefully written if formulaic sophomore effort. Cornelia and her husband, Teo, move to suburban Philadelphia, where she finds it difficult to fit into the sorority-like atmosphere. Despite a bevy of domestic dramas (planning a family among them), Cornelia's first-person chapters are the quietest of the three points of view. Seemingly shallow and vicious, neighbor Piper shows her kinder side as she struggles through her best friend's fight against cancer. Though the extreme of Piper's two-facedness isn't convincing, her moments of sincerity invite genuine empathy. Cornelia also yields narrative time to Dev, a precocious teenager whose father is missing and whose mother develops a friendship with Cornelia. Dev's connection to the story is initially unclear, though he does grow close to Clare, a troubled teenager with an unconventional connection to Cornelia, and a late-breaking development grounds his role more firmly. Though each story line is a good read on its own, they don't always braid nicely, and while the predictable plot wanders into sappiness, the prose is polished and the suburban travails are familiar enough that fans of the women's fiction and higher-brow mommy lit will relate. (May)

At the start of Deutermann's exciting third suspense novel to feature Cameron Richter, a retired cop who runs Hide and Seek Investigations, a PI firm staffed by other ex-cops (after Spider Mountain), one of Cam's operatives, Allie Gardner, falls ill in Wilmington, N.C., while doing some philandering-husband divorce work. Soon she's dead on the floor of a gas station bathroom, burned from the inside out from having ingested a pint of highly radioactive water. When Cam looks into Allie's death, he winds up being hired by Aristotle Quartermain, chief of security at Helios, the local nuclear power station. Aiding Cam are the book's two most appealing characters, his German shepherds, Frick and Frack. Deutermann imparts much interesting scientific information on such things as the titular moonpool, where exhausted nuclear fuel is stored. Just as interesting, and far more chilling, is the author's depiction of how the Department of Homeland Security operates and why you never, ever want to get on their bad side. Thriller fans will look forward to further entries in this fine series. (May)

In the latest from Gilchrist—who won the National Book Award for the 1984 story collection Victory over Japan—the grand Raleigh, N.C., wedding between Winifred “Winnie” Hand Abadie and Charles Kane is canceled when Charles perishes in the World Trade Center attacks. Winnie becomes despondent, and well-intentioned cousin Louise Hand Healy, a producer of TV documentaries, goads her to move in with her in Washington, D.C. Another cousin, Olivia Hand, is deeply committed to her job as editor of a Tulsa, Okla., newspaper and is torn between two men she loves. Gilchrist shifts uneasily among the three women's perspectives, and between the first and third person. The political commitment underscoring the novel, particularly in Olivia's scathing antiwar editorials, is deeply felt, and a nice twist is introduced when, on September 12, Charles's twin cousins, Carl and Brian, join the Marines. Gilchrist never quite brings the three female leads into narrative harmony, but she makes the age's dangers palpable. (May)

This keystone of the bestselling WWII trilogy dramatizes D-Day and ups the bar for military historicals, demonstrating that Shaara (The Rising Tide) has hit full stride. The epic-scale novel opens on January 25, 1944, with British commandos gathering soil samples on Omaha Beach to assess landing sites. Shaara gives the Americans, called “the great waves of steel” by the Germans, their due portion in the grisly, brutal Allied invasion, and the experiences of the grunt soldiers—most notably the indefatigable U.S. Army Sgt. Jesse Adams—offers a field-level view of D-Day and afterward, generating more suspenseful reading than the matter-of-fact accounts of the big-brass dealings of Eisenhower and Churchill. The Allied leaders' personalities emerge with agile clarity, while German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel embodies “the good soldier” laboring under a delusional Hitler and German High Command ensconced in cozy Berlin. Rommel's ambivalent complicity in the assassination plot on Hitler is convincingly rendered and paves the way for the final act. The muscular prose, deft sense of military drama and relentless pacing are well suited for this crackerjack saga. (May)

With a Stegner Fellowship and some big-name poetry publications under her belt, it's not surprising that Ferrell delivers a stylized and exuberantly written debut novel. Matthew Acciaccatura begins his freshman year at NYU determined to become cool. As it turns out, Matthew is the fixation of Hans Mannheim, an incarcerated German professor who annotates the novel with his increasingly creepy thoughts on Matthew's quest. Ferrell and Mannheim track Matthew's ascent up the ranks of New York hip, culminating in his transformation into “Magic Matt,” the promoter of über-hot club Cinema. As his last name suggests (acciaccatura is a note that creates dissonance within harmony), Matthew's new job takes some ugly turns; they are unexpected by Matthew and those close to him, but painfully anticipated by the reader. Ferrell is at her best when focusing on language and the explosive emotions that accompany jaded youth and idealism. Less successful, however, is Mannheim, whose most remarkable aspect is how caricatured he is. The writing is fabulous, but it's unfortunately in service of a lackluster plot and gimmicky structure. (May)

Price-Thompson (Chocolate Sangria) offers a raw, sometimes moving, but flawed novel of triplet boys—Gabriel (Shug), Isaiah (Shyne) and Ezekiel (Shadow) Blackwood—raised in Brooklyn by their widowed mother. Six witnesses reveal the boys' tragic story as the clock ticks toward Shyne's execution for a horrendous crime he didn't commit, the rape and murder of a woman and her three-year-old child. Shadow, their mother's favorite, dies in an accident at age seven, a death Shyne is blamed for. Shyne becomes a street-wise player who's done time, while Shug, mother's new favorite, manages a path to college, law school and politics, including a bid to become the second black mayor of New York City. As Shyne drops all appeals and awaits execution, his reasons for so doing become clear. Price-Thompson skillfully sketches many of the racial rapids blacks must still navigate, but a number of improbable coincidences—such as the prosecutor who sought Shyne's conviction having been sexually involved with Shug at college—distract from the author's message. (May)

The first of exiled Honduran novelist Moya's eight fictions to be translated in the U.S., this crushing satire has at its center a feisty young unnamed writer in penurious political exile from an unnamed Latin American country. It opens as he explains the daunting and dangerous freelance job he has taken in an also-unnamed neighboring state: to edit a 1,100-page report prepared for the country's Catholic archdiocese that details the current military regime's torture and murder of thousands of indigenous villagers. The writer despises the Church, but is moved and agitated by the disturbing testimonies of the survivors, at once unspeakable in their horror and unforgettable in their phrasing: “the more they killed, the higher they rose up.” More or less one long rant, the book's paragraphs go on for pages as the writer gives way to paranoia, and to a sexual longing that his loneliness and powerlessness make nearly unbearable, and that he expresses profanely. It's Moya's genius to make this difficult character seem a product of the same death and disorder documented in the report, as the survivors' voices merge with his own. (May)

Bestseller Martini's entertaining ninth Paul Madriani legal thriller (after 2005's Double Tap) offers an improbable if intriguing premise. San Diego, Calif., attorney Madriani and Harry Hinds, his longtime partner, agree to represent Carl Arnsberg, a racist facing execution for the bludgeoning-by-hammer murder of author Terry Scarborough, whose nonfiction bestseller, Perpetual Slaves, has actually led to riots in the streets. Scarborough focused the U.S. public on the retention in the Constitution of offensive language defining African-Americans as three-fifths human, despite subsequent amendments overriding those statements. He intended to follow Perpetual Slaves with a sequel that would reveal the existence of a secret letter written by Thomas Jefferson whose contents Scarborough believed would prove even more incendiary. Madriani and his team race frantically to trace a copy of that letter, which disappeared from the victim's briefcase at about the time of his murder. Compelling courtroom scenes, which display a sophisticated knowledge of legal trench warfare, compensate for some less-than-credible plot twists. (May)

The U.S. is still recovering from “the American Holocaust,” a Russian air strike that killed and wounded thousands in 2004, at the start of this clunky techno-thriller from bestseller Brown (Strike Force). In 2009, Lieutenant General McLanahan, commander of the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center, fears the Russians are covertly arming Iran, now known as the Democratic Republic of Persia. An immoral and weak U.S. president, Joseph Gardner, doesn't help the situation. Full of technical prose (“Skybolt was powered by a MHDG, or magnetohydrodynamic generator, which used two small nuclear reactors to rapidly shoot a slug of molten metal back and forth through a magnetic field to produce the enormous amount of power required by the laser”) and broadly drawn characters, from Gardner, who can't keep his pants on even during a global crisis, to Senate majority leader Stacy Anne Barbeau, who wields her cleavage in the interests of her constituents as well as national security, this novel will appeal to readers who care more about advanced weaponry than a plausible plot. (May)

Gunshot wounds, crack pipes and rotting corpses abound in this raw and fascinating novel about Harlem paramedics in the mid-1990s, the second novel from former EMT Burke. Oliver Cross graduated from Northwestern as a middle-class do-gooder. But he and his partner, Rutkovsky, a jaded Vietnam veteran and one of the city's best medics, see enough massive trauma to put Cross on the fast track to deep disillusionment. Of the bizarre, tragic and often shocking emergencies encountered during Cross's rookie tenure, the crisis comes when he and Rutkovsky respond to a call from an abandoned building where a crack-addicted, HIV-positive mother has just given birth to a premature baby, and their handling of the mother and child—believed to be stillborn—will alter the course of both men's lives. Burke is a poet of trauma, and his expert, macabre portrayal takes its toll on the reader just as the job takes its toll on Cross. (May)

Just in time for summer, Porter (Flirting with Forty; Odd Mom Out) delivers another fine batch of mommy lit. Taylor Young has convinced the other suburban mothers of Bellevue, Wash., that she's the quintessential supermom who manages to stay impeccably coiffed while tending to her dapper husband, three amazing wee ones and picture-perfect home. But she has never shaken off her own insecurities, which include a psychic hangover from her troubled upbringing and an ongoing battle with bulimia. When hubby Nathan drops a bombshell on her, Taylor is forced to confront her fears and the reality of how her life will change, not necessarily for the better. While Taylor would be easy to loathe, her frailties and insecurities go a long way to turning her into an endearing lead, making this less dopey and more poignant than the standard mommy lit fare. (May)

Foxsports.com pundit Rosen (Barney Polan's Game) hits the hardwood in this entertaining sports novel. Pearl Harbor makes Jason Lewis, a promising senior guard for New York's Metro University, into an army enlistee. When he comes back from the Pacific missing several fingers, Jason is reduced to selling insurance for his father-in-law. Although he considers referees a necessary evil (“rogue cops with whistles”), he jumps at a chance to officiate high school games. Jason discovers that he enjoys just being around the game, but his elevation to the professional ranks coincides with a trifecta of personal and professional crises. Rosen's deep knowledge of basketball history and his nimble prose make this bittersweet sports novel a light swish. (May)

TV writers Leopold (Seinfeld, Cheers) and Sand (Laverne and Shirley, Full House) reimagine themselves in their wonderfully repugnant fiction debut. By 1968, the infamous comedy writing team of Milt Wagonman and Marty “The 'X' Is Silent” Sloyxne have become two washed-up, obnoxious 70-somethings who “couldn't even get blacklisted” during McCarthyism. When young East Coasters Tom and Bob move to L.A. to launch their writing careers, they encounter Milt and Marty on their first gig—writing for sitcom pilot Give Your Uncle Back His Legs. In a desperate mission to survive in Tinseltown, Milt and Marty attempt to hitch themselves to Tom and Bob's rising star, and the jokes pour out like schmaltz on the borscht belt. As Marty notes: “We're like two spent matches afloat in the crapper of a Beverly Wilshire banquet floor men's room... waiting for the bar mitzvah boy's fat self-conscious uncle... to flush us into the sewers of Beverly Hills.” Page after page of such observations make for an outrageously disturbing debut. (May)

Crime strikes close to home in this latest installment of Greenwood's charming series (The Castlemaine Murders, etc.) featuring 1920s Aussie amateur sleuth, Phryne Fisher. While the town of St. Kilda prepares for the 1928 Flower Parade, Phryne's adopted daughter, Ruth, disappears after learning her father's identity from her birthmother, Anna Ross. Phryne adds Ruth to her caseload, which coincidentally includes the search for another missing young woman, Rose Weston. As with other series entries, the solution to the mystery is secondary to the author's clever prose and gift for characterization. Phryne carries the action ably, even if her resourcefulness and unflappability sometimes border on the superhuman. The engaging cast of familiar supporting characters—including Phryne's maid, Dot, and her Chinese lover, Lin Chung—will delight longtime fans, but newcomers who like their crime on the lighter side can jump in without any trouble. (July)

Repercussions from a teen prank turned deadly fuel the U.S. debut of Duffy's popular U.K. series featuring lesbian investigator Sally “Saz” Martin. Taking a temporary break from cracking cases, Saz happily minds her baby daughter, Matilda, in London while her physician partner, Molly, brings home the bacon. It's a contented life until Janine Marsden, a 20-year-old skeleton from Saz's closet, resurfaces. An emotionally ravaged victim of the sadistic bullying game in which Saz and others participated, Janine first contacts Will Gallagher, the leader of the group and now a TV celebrity. At Will's urging, Saz tracks down their other old classmates, including a filmmaker-turned-teacher and a religious trophy wife. The survivors agree to meet with Janine, hoping to prevent her from contacting the media, but the past refuses to stay buried. Duffy pulls no punches in unraveling this knot of teen brutality, which serves as a potent reminder of the mindless cruelty found both on the playground and in the adult world. (June)

At the start of bestseller Saylor's stellar 10th novel in his Roma Sub Rosa series featuring Gordianus the Finder (after 2004's The Judgment of Caesar), Gordianus is at first reluctant to accept a commission from Julius Caesar's wife, Calpurnia, to discover which of the general's many enemies may be plotting her husband's assassination soon after his victory in the Roman civil war. When Calpurnia reveals that the first man she'd hired for the job, Hieronymous, was murdered, the sleuth agrees to help because Hieronymous was an old friend of his. The suspects in Hieronymous's death, who include such prominent figures of the period as Cleopatra and Marc Antony, may well be the ones seeking to kill Caesar. Since the action takes place two years before Caesar's actual death in 44 B.C., there's little suspense about the outcome, but Saylor ably rises to the challenge. The convincing backdrop of daily life in ancient Rome helps make this compelling whodunit a triumph. Author tour. (May)

Hawaii's in a “hot wave” during a dry El Niño spring made hotter by protests against same-sex marriage advocated by the gay and lesbian members of Hawaii's Marriage Project in Plakcy's engrossing third Mahu mystery (after 2007's Mahu Surfer). Kimo Kanapa'aka, an openly gay Honolulu detective who's investigating a homeless man's murder, gets distracted after a bomb goes off at a Hawaii Marriage Project fund-raiser. Vice-mayor Wilson Shira, an antigay politician, dies in the explosion, while others are injured, including Kimo. As leads on the homeless man's murder dwindle, Kimo focuses on finding the bomber and even goes undercover with the aspiring cop daughter of his boss, Lieutenant Sampson, to attend a meeting of the antigay Church of Adam and Eve. Kimo's lusty affair with his new fireman boyfriend, Mike Riccardi, softens the edges of this sharp whodunit. Readers should be prepared for explicit gay sex. (May)

Swedish author Eriksson's masterful ensemble procedural, the third available in the U.S. after The Cruel Stars of the Night (2007), immerses the reader in the ordinary and extraordinary lives of detective Ann Lindell and her colleagues of the Uppsala police force. The odd assemblage of characters who engage the interest of the police include a Mexican peasant, Manuel Alavez, who has traveled to Sweden to see his imprisoned brother; a restaurant owner, Slobodan Andersson, whose successful restaurants, Dakar and Alhambra, owe much to shady funds and his unusual partner, Armas; and a single mother, Eva Willman, for whom a waitressing job opens new vistas. After Armas is found dead of a knife wound, others get caught up in the turmoil caused by the crimes of a few. There are plenty of shades of gray in this tale told with wry humor, compassion and a fine understanding that in life often things cannot be resolved either neatly or completely. (May)

In Wright's sprightly fourth mystery to feature Magnet Springs, Mich., realtor and sleuth Whiskey Mattimoe (after 2007's Whiskey and Tonic), one of Whiskey's duplex tenants, Twyla Rendel, whom she believed to be a struggling single mother of two, is seen by a neighbor with seven children. After Whiskey informs Twyla she faces eviction, Twyla and the children vanish. Whiskey and Magnet Springs police chief Jenx Jenkins are determined to investigate these disappearances as well as the reported sightings of Whiskey's old realtor rival, Gil Gruen, whom Whiskey saw die the previous winter. Twyla later turns up dead, but where are the children? Wright's mix of humor, crime and romance infuses this cozy with down-home zest. At the same time she makes some solid points about greed, bad parenting and real estate. (May)

St. Louis ADA Jack Hilliard has it pretty easy in attorney Compton's less than assured debut. Jack is married to a beautiful and intelligent law professor; he's also the protégé and assumed successor to his influential boss and mentor, DA Earl Scanlon, and is considered by his peers to be an all-around charismatic and upstanding man, both in and out of the courtroom. But all that is hearsay: Jack, for the life of him, keeps making the same mistakes and placing himself again and again in compromising situations—on purpose. In a bid to become district attorney, Jack sidesteps admitting his anti–death penalty stance in order to get elected, then he falls for his campaign treasurer, Jenny Dodson. When Jenny is accused of murder, will Jack provide the alibi that could save her life but wreck his career? Despite Compton's efforts to make Jack sympathetic, many readers will have a hard time caring about a lying, cheating jerk. (May)

In this gripping tale of survival, betrayal and murder set in the Pacific Northwest in 1935 from Straley (Cold Water Burning), Slip Wilson is just trying to find work, food and a little justice when he hooks up with a bottle-blonde, Ellie Hobbes, who drags him into her edgy, ragtag life. At the last minute, Ellie, a notorious “red” union organizer who faces mounting problems with antiunion forces, and her young niece hop aboard the same rickety boat Slip is escaping on that's traveling from Seattle to Juneau. The odd trio barely catches a breath as weather, hunger, a Seattle homicide detective and a revenge-seeking gang of thugs hound them all the way up the Inside Passage. Ellie isn't big on explanations, so Slip isn't sure until nearly the end of their journey if she's a heroine or a scoundrel. Straley's beautifully understated narrative, vivid sense of place and unapologetic, unadorned characters make this a riveting, unpredictable ride. (May)

Tightly focused and deftly handled, this adult debut from YA and comic book author Sniegoski (The Fallen) covers familiar ground in entertaining new ways. The angel Remiel wanders the Earth in human form as private investigator Remy Chandler, experiencing the mortal life while indulging his fondness for the trappings of noir. When the Angel of Death vanishes, Heaven hires Chandler to find him as well as a missing set of scrolls that could bring about the apocalypse. Sniegoski's choice to frame this high concept with a straight noir detective tale grounds the world for the reader and highlights the mystical elements. Chandler's dog, Marlowe, written with a humorous but heartfelt voice, shows off Chandler's ability to talk to animals and provides some charming comic relief. Fans of urban fantasy and classic detective stories will enjoy this smart and playful story. (May)

In this labored vision of a future dystopia, amnesiac Sergei Plotkin finds himself torn between the mission planted in his brain by unknown overlords and the desire to protect his creator. As he travels through computer-controlled UniWorld, Plotkin slowly regains conflicting memories and learns he is meant to kill Grand Junction spaceport's mayor. While plotting homicide and investigating illegal Christians, Plotkin meets Vivian McNellis, whose genetic abnormalities give her an angel's power to rewrite the world. Learning that Vivian created him and is now dying from exposure to her metaphysical opposite, Plotkin abandons his mission, determined to eliminate the threat and save Vivian's life. Dantec, winner of France's Prix de I'Imaginaire for Les racines du mal, writes harsh, choppy prose—not improved by Kover's translation—and the convoluted plot often grinds to a halt amid technical jargon, discourse on society's devolution and abstruse narrative philosophy. (May)

With only one installment left in Kerr's popular Deverry cycle, this 14th novel set in her fantasy realm of Annwn sets the stage for a climactic finale that fans have been anticipating since 1986's Daggerspell. The collective future of the humans, elves, dwarves, dragons and other fantastical inhabitants of Deverry is in jeopardy. Savage Horsekin tribes escalate their bloody assaults on Northlands settlements in the name of their goddess, Alshandra. As apprentice wizard Neb struggles to come to grips with his past life as the powerful sorcerer Nevyn, the magical island of Haen Marn suddenly reappears from nowhere, and few can agree whether this bodes well or ill. With multiple simultaneous plot lines, many of them dealing with relationships in past incarnations, pacing and continuity wallow, and the ending is merely an arrangement of chess pieces for the complex endgame of the final volume (tentatively titled The Silver Mage). (May)

This yummy lovefest from Gibson (after Tangled Up in You) focuses on a familiar dilemma: how to end bad luck in love. At 35, successful Idaho SFF novelist Adele Harris has had it with losers who make fun of her “big fat ass.” She feels cursed—and she was, by old rival Devon Hamilton-Zemaitis, who stole Adele's first love, football star Zach Zemaitis. When Devon dies following an accident, she must remove the curse that's prevented Adele's happiness so she can go to heaven. Meanwhile, Adele gets a frantic call from older sister Sherilyn, who's divorcing her husband and has moved back to their old hometown of Cedar Creek, Tex.—where Zach now coaches high school football, and where Sherilyn needs help with her 13-year-old. Gibson keeps the action light but dead-on delicious in Adele's and Zach's sizzling second-chance-at love. (June)

Vampire hunter Riley Jenson (Embraced by Darkness) returns to take on two serial killers: one kills high society women and the men in their lives; the other is kills seemingly unrelated people, gruesomely. Riley has her own problems: she can't sense the spirits of the dead at the murder scenes, and she's nursing a broken heart. The more investigating Riley does, the more she realizes that her brother's lover may be in danger, and the reappearance of Quinn O'Connor, a vampire that she loved and lost, complicates matters further. The paranormal Australia that Arthur concocts works perfectly, and the plot speeds along at a breakneck pace. Riley fans won't be disappointed. (May)

A New Orleans ballerina in the 1920s, Neomi Laress had her life cut short by a murderous fiancé. She has haunted her estate, Elancourt, for the past 80 years, desperately seeking contact. Conrad Wroth is a self-loathing vampire mercenary with serious bloodlust. His brothers bring him to Elancourt to try to make him sane again, but he soon gets drawn into Neomi's difficult world, and the two fall for each other. But since Neomi isn't embodied, they can't touch. And that's just one of their problems. The banter of secondary characters, particularly Mariketa the Witch, distinguishes this standard story of an unattainable woman who needs saving and a rageful man who needs taming. (May)

Gideon MacInnes is next in line, among Scottish werewolves, to be the guardian of the Stone of Destiny, but he wants to see the world first. In northern New York, he's attacked by mercenary werewolves hired by his treacherous cousin, Malachi. Wounded and near death, Gideon flees to the doorstep of Carly Silver, who takes in the sad-looking animal and nurses it to health. When she wakes, the wolf has become a man. Carly reacts well, and her attraction to Gideon is immediate, but her life is in danger from the werewolf following Gideon. Carly's job as the owner of a book store specializing in romances won't go unappreciated. Some readers will want more pack dynamics and supernatural elements, but fans of straightup romance looking for a little extra something will be bitten. (May)

Long before Criterion DVDs or the Independent Film Channel—which is to say, in 1990—painter Muth adapted Fritz Lang's classic serial killer tale M into a four-part comics miniseries. He hewed closely to Lang's original German script, employing a painterly, photorealistic style that evoked the grainy, tinted footage of early talkies. The result, more influential than popular in an era of rampant speculation and chromium covers, was undeniably gorgeous. Eighteen years later, after popular artists like Alex Ross have cited Muth as a major influence, Abrams has re-released M as a hardcover graphic novel, and the deluxe treatment only adds luster to the project. Lang's story—an unidentified serial killer stalks children in a small German city—is simple but compelling, allowing Muth's masterful technique to shine through. The watercolors are primarily sepia-toned, with occasional splashes of color for emphasis, giving the project a surreal, dreamlike quality that serves to heighten suspense. Muth's layouts are excellent, creating mise-en-scènes that evoke Lang without copying him, and his figures' “acting” (body language and facial expressions) also serves both story and mood. An informative afterword lets readers hear from Muth about technique and why he would even try to remake Lang: to see what he could learn. Readers will find it an impressive lesson. (Apr.)

Returning to print after more than a decade, this first volume in the relaunch of the Classics Illustrated series presents a handsomely rendered adaptation of the orphaned Pip's first-person narrative of his journey from humble childhood to adulthood as an English gentleman. Though quite involving, this retelling of the Dickens classic registers as a “fast forward” version of the epic tale of one man's evolution and the hard lessons learned from it, but that aspect is a minor quibble shoved aside by Geary's charmingly cartoony art. Long hailed for his unique work in such diverse showcases as the New York Times, National Lampoon and his exceptional continuing series A Treasury of Victorian Murder, Geary's fleshy characterizations breathe a near-animated life into the classic tale. This pleasant graphic interpretation can serve as an introduction to Dickens for younger readers and perhaps eventually steer them to the wider world of the source material and beyond. (Apr.)

This “graphic adaptation” of Howard Zinn's A People's History of American Empire is, on almost every level, a disappointment. Its basic concept seems to be a Cliff's Notes version of the original, implying that the comics format makes information more accessible, without realizing that perhaps information might be lost in the process. The problems begin with introducing a caricature of Zinn as the narrator. We see Zinn at a podium, speaking the text of his book. One might suppose Zinn is an eccentric old professor, and this caricature does him no favors. From there the caricatures continue. Weakly rendered versions of American figures follow: the artwork by Konopacki resembles a high school yearbook artist's “humor” drawings. None of this would be quite so offensive if it wasn't such a squandered opportunity. Historical and polemical comics can be done well (James Sturm, Jack Jackson, Joe Sacco and others are masters of it), but when the artwork detracts and the whole thing feels like a grade-school exercise, it's hard to take seriously. And that's too bad, as Zinn is an important voice. In this case, however, he's been silenced. (Apr.)

Best known for the Mr. Jean series that he collaborates on with Charles Berberian, Dupuy strikes out on his own in a graphic novel first published in French in 2006. Looking more like the sketches for a novel than the novel itself, Dupuy's loosely imagined fantasy is structured around an episodic series of “Run Movies” wherein the runner has incidental encounters and thoughts. Interspersed with these episodes are recollections of dreams, presumably from the runner's unconscious, of uncommon darkness (usually of the violently sexual mythological variety). Eventually the two series begin to merge, as in “Run Movie #3,” wherein the runner falls into an empty museum and is informed by a barking dog that “oddly enough, bare spaces sometimes invite the most curiosity.” Dupuy's loose sketches evoke the occasional shiver of discomfort, but sometimes he brings the dark dream world into sharp focus. In one story, the runner encounters an erudite duck living in a fantastically large house, after which the two have a conversation that begins in the ridiculous but ultimately edges into the sublime. While Dupuy's artwork and sometimes cruel-seeming viewpoint toward his characters repel at first, eventually the book becomes like a dream itself, next to impossible to resist. (Mar.)

Shohei Aiba gets more than he bargained for when he tries to take a panty shot of nerdy but beautiful Kasumi Asakura, the undercover police assault squad ace. He quickly becomes entranced with the mysterious Asakura, from her expert fighting skills to her rose tattoo; this 17-year-old girl is anything but average. As he attempts to unravel Asakura's secrets Shohei finds himself caught in the middle of the search for a serial killer named Sheppard who has targeted Asakura's alter ego, Rose Hip. But Sheppard may not be the only one interested in Rose, and a larger plot is likely unfolding behind the scenes. This action-packed sequel to the popular shonen manga Rose Hip Zero delivers as much punch and as many panty shots as its predecessor. Fast paced and flirty, Shohei and Asakura have a heated chemistry that will keep readers eagerly turning pages. Fujisawa once again creates a beautiful yet sometimes brutal manga that is fun and entertaining to read. (Mar.)

Three slim works in translation—one from Korea and two from Eastern Europe.

Stories within stories unfold in the title novella: a brother “disappears,” a mother grieves, a daughter witnesses her mother's death; consequent traumatic events leave the daughter self-destructive. The novella is haunting, painful and affirming, full of illusions and hallucinations while rooted in the graphically physical. In “Whisper Yet,” a woman's thoughts about her daughter alternate with a story from her own childhood that she's never told anyone before, a device through which three generations and two Koreas coexist. In “The Thirteen-Scent Flower,” the world is one that slides deftly from fable to satire as a truck driver who dreams of becoming “a denizen of the Arctic” crosses paths with a suicidal teenage girl with a preternaturally green thumb. Everything about Yun's work is brilliant. (May)

Hungarian Nobel Prize–winner (2002) Kertész delivers a taut, grim allegory of man in the face of oppression. A government commissioner is deposited along with his wife in an unnamed European city in order to make a site inspection of a factory. Ridding himself of a colleague named Hermann (who seems complicit in a crime associated with the site) and his wife, the commissioner discovers the site turns out to be an overgrown but otherwise empty field, giving him a bewildering sense of disorientation and defeat. The next day, in the town of Z, the commissioner finds the “insatiable Moloch,” spewing like a “pestilential organism” and so grotesque that it may negate the commissioner's existence. Kertész is a master at delineating the tricky nuances of human conduct. He indulges at moments in overwrought prose and heavy-handed symbolism, but the underlying hope clarifies and uplifts. (May)

Estonian novelist Unt (1944–2005) gets a bang out of remixing Dracula as a postmodern fable and a metaphor for postcommunist life. A writer receives a summons to meet a stranger in Leningrad, and, after much internal strife, he decides to go. Once the writer is in the city, the novel is thrust into an underworld of vampires, blood suckers and superstition. Unt fills the novel with amusing asides and comments, indicating his awareness of the thinness of his plot. He clearly prefers narrative playfulness to straightforward storytelling here, and though the novel is a bit of a chore to get through, hints of vampirism as a powerful metaphor for communism and postcommunist upheaval are sprinkled throughout like allegorical Easter eggs. (May)

...And so does a lot of drama in our May romance round-up

Reichs is the daughter of bestselling thriller writer Kathy Reichs, and her cute romantic comedy debut makes BDOYL syndrome—imagining your wedding day as the “Best Day of Your Life”—scarily palpable. A 20-something Washington, D.C., wine buyer, “Vi” Connelly (née Kevin—her parents expected a boy) embarks on an excruciating, crushingly expensive odyssey: she attends more weddings than you can count on two hands in less than two years, all the while searching for the love of her life, and mooning over her lost first love Caleb Carter. Fans of Meg Cabot's 27 Dresses will find that Reichs rewards those patient enough to sit through all the toasts, and Vi's Web store purchases allow for some comic e-mail–based retail moments. (May)

In the basement of a Southern California yogurt shop one hot summer night, Jonathan, a down-on-his-luck fro-yo slinger, discovers several young, beautiful naked women encased in glass and suspended lifelessly in a milky mixture. Jonathan's boss, Spinner, catches him nosing around and reveals his experiment: acidophilus, yogurt's active culture, has the uncanny ability to preserve and nourish life, he explains, and the women bobbing before Jonathan's wide eyes are making “an investment in their future.” When foul play suddenly makes the women Jonathan's wards, he has to see if he has the right stuff to care for them—and perhaps free them. Poet Krusoe's fiction debut is as whimsical as multicolored sprinkles and as sweet as a dollop of Pinkberry. (May)

Gorilla Black, né Bilal Cunningham, is born into the Richmond, Va., projects, but poverty does not stop him from becoming a voracious reader. His mother constantly puts him down, favoring her neglectful boyfriend over her son; Bilal finds love with Starr, the girl next door. Equally at home quoting Shakespeare and selling cocaine, Gorilla Black has a number of crises to face, but none tougher than when a rival gang threatens his girl. Seven makes a splashy debut with this gritty urban drama, the first in the Nikki Turner Presents series, that features plenty of hustle and an explosive climax. (May)

Poet Bobis serves up compassion and tenderness in generous portions in her fiction debut. Twelve-year-old Nenita is the first of six children born to her destitute parents in a Filipino village. Hungry and abused by her overwhelmed mother, Nenita drops out of school one summer in the hopes of earning enough money to support the growing family. Hired as the house girl of her well-to-do neighbors, the Valenzuelas, she befriends her mistress, the beautiful Señorita VV. The entire village experiences profound change during that sweltering summer, mirroring Nenita's coming-of-age. Nenita's passion for food sustains her through difficulties of all sorts, and she relishes each morsel and taste as a treasured gift, even as she faces continued difficulty. (May)

An award-winning high school science teacher who juggles marriage, motherhood and massive traditional Italian meals, Mira Serafino is called Miss Control Freak by her best friend Lannie, an eccentric musician who owns a yarn and guitar shop in their close-knit community of Pacifica, Ore. Shortridge (Eating Heaven) flashes back to Mira's difficult childhood (where she adopted the role of “Saint Mira, absorber of all family pain”) as her marriage hits a major snag, sending Mira into a process of self-examination. Mira's Type A–ness comes through clearly, and secondaries—including a difficult daughter, incommunicado brother and a father who is “about as sensitive as a Mack truck”—deepen her dilemmas. (May)

Brown (Criminal Minded) packs her latest New York street fable with titillation, betrayals, violence, sex, histrionics and an amazingly improbable redemption through true love. An extremely fed up Celeste Styles sets her beloved salon, Dime Piece, on fire in an attempt to head South and start her life anew, away from her married boyfriend Rah-lo, a dealer. Meanwhile, Ishmael, Rah-lo's business partner, best friend and confidante, tries to forget his feelings for Celeste with a relationship with Nina—and a rekindled affair with Robin. Brown keeps the drama flowing and the pages turning as the love triangle converges explosively in Atlanta. (May)

Cinnia, daughter of the king of Belmair, is a sorceress with a problem: she wants to rule her father's kingdom as a queen in her own right. The Great Dragon, Nidhug, has other ideas, and selects Dillon, a mighty sorcerer from another world, as ruler. Tradition dictates that Cinna must marry him, which doesn't turn out too badly for her. Soon, however, Dillon must face Belmair's crisis: women have been disappearing over the years, threatening the race. The fourth book in the World of Hetar series, Small's newest novel is a sexily fantastical romp. (May)

The latest entertaining Edwardian from Dain (The Courtesan's Daughter) aims from the start at putting fiery and beautiful Lady Louisa Kirkland into the right beau's arms. Whether Louisa knows it or not, her companion in friendship since her coming out, Lord Henry Blakesley, is the one for her—not the more delectable marquis of Dutton. Luckily, former courtesan and current countess Lady Sophia Dalby has the perspicacity to perceive that fact. When Lady Louisa comes to Lady Sophia and asks for help landing the marquis, the latter knows just what to do. With some help from a sinful cast of seconds and a few carefully placed red herrings, Sophia arranges all. Frank sexual content, highly amusing repartee and some wickedly attractive open ends round things out. (May)

Stephenie Meyer, author of the bestselling Twilight YA series (Eclipse, etc.), makes her adult debut.

In this tantalizing SF thriller, planet-hopping parasites are inserting their silvery centipede selves into human brains, curing cancer, eliminating war and turning Earth into paradise. But some people want Earth back, warts and all, especially Melanie Stryder, who refuses to surrender, even after being captured in Chicago and becoming a host for a “soul” called Wanderer. Melanie uses her surviving brain cells to persuade Wanderer to help search for her loved ones in the Arizona desert. When the pair find Melanie's brother and her boyfriend in a hidden rebel cell led by her uncle, Wanderer is at first hated. Once the rebels accept Wanderer, whom they dub Wanda, Wanda's whole perspective on humanity changes. While the straightforward narrative is short on detail about the invasion and its stunning aftermath, it shines with romantic intrigue, especially when a love triangle (or quadrangle?!) develops for Wanda/Melanie. 10-city author tour. (May)

Editors blend speculative fiction with other genres to create anthologies with broad appeal.

Fans of alternate history and crime fiction should enjoy this high-quality anthology from noted editor Anders (Outside the Box). The tone of the 15 contributions ranges from the tongue-in-cheek (Mike Resnick and Eric Flint's “Conspiracies: A Very Condensed 937-Page Novel,” featuring an alien abduction of Jimmy Hoffa) to serious political theory (Stephen Baxter's “Fate and the Fire-lance,” a whodunit set in a 20th-century Roman Empire). Jon Courtenay Grimwood weighs in with “Chicago,” a twisty tale in which technological advances allow the narrator to plot a perfect murder. The standouts are S.M. Stirling's “A Murder in Eddsford,” which could be at home in a collection of English cozies, and Mary Rosenblum's “Sacrifice,” which marries a vision of advanced Aztec civilization to an intricate plot. (June)

Tan (Sex in the System) presents the top stories from Circlet's Best Fantastic Erotica contest in an anthology that runs the gamut from sensual SF to surreal fantasy. Arinn Dembo's “Monsoon,” the deserving prize winner, tells the tale of Benton, a photographer and womanizer traveling in India, whose encounter with a mysterious seductress results in an eerie surprise. Other highlights include Carolyn and Steve Vakesh's wry “Capture, Courting and Copulation: Contemporary Human Mating Rituals and the Etiology of Human Aggression,” a scholarly lecture by and for dragons; Connie Wilkins's “The Bridge,” about a British veteran's curious encounter with the Green Man; and Catherine Lundoff's hilarious “Twilight,” in which half-vampire co-ed Mariel tries to dodge annoying yet seductive vampire hunter Christopher Van Helsing. (May)