Fiction Reviews: Week of 7/21/2008

Kieron Smith’s coming-of-age in a rough Glasgow neighborhood is grimly rendered by Kelman in this stark and affecting novel. The younger of two boys, Kieron is overlooked and seen as simple compared to his brother, Matt, the “smart one.” Kieron’s only safe haven is his grandparents’ house, where his grannie treats him as the favorite and his granda and uncle teach him to fight (Uncle Billy suggests Kieron use a brick against larger bullies). But when the family moves across town to a better neighborhood, Kieron falls in with a group of rowdy youth from his new primary school, including Mitch, an angry, abused child, and he takes to climbing drainpipes and scampering across rooftops as an outlet for his frustrations. As the years tick by, Kieron’s relationships with his family disintegrate (things with Matt get especially bad), and Kelman’s raw, blunt narration drives home all of Kieron’s loneliness, sadness and feelings of inadequacy. If you can roll with the Scots dialect, the narrative is rewarding, bleak and marvelous. (Nov.)

Veteran British biographer and novelist Wilson’s plodding latest concerns the private life of Adolf Hitler (Wolf) and his friendship and affair with Winnie, the daughter-in-law of Richard Wagner. The novel opens in 1925 and is composed by an unnamed secretary to Winnie’s husband. Though weighted down by detailed discussions of philosophy and the opera that so inspired Hitler, the narrative at times hums with life. Wilson offers a new way of viewing the charismatic (though sweating and flatulent) leader, who appears to the Wagner family as the savior who will raise up a starving and humiliated interwar Germany and who “made you feel that the struggle would not have been worth it unless it had gone too far.” Unfortunately, Wilson seems so intent on demonstrating the breadth of his knowledge and research that narrative technique feels like an afterthought. This dense and dry tale is unlikely to appeal to readers who aren’t already at least armchair scholars of the era. (Nov.)

Molloy’s debut stages a bittersweet love story against the backdrop of television news, and while it builds into a diatribe against the dumbing down of news, the book itself is about as sophisticated as a goofy prime-time sitcom. Scott Thomas, a 29-year-old field producer at an unnamed network, is recovering from a breakup when he’s sent on an undercover assignment to a fast-food restaurant called Gringo’s Southwestern Mexican Grille. Much of the novel is wasted on the tedium of uncovering the story, whether it’s debating the linguistics of sanitation manuals with his fast-food boss or having sex with his boss from the network. Scott is not an easy character to spend time with; his do-goodery is incredibly annoying (as when he argues with a rental car agency employee for not giving him a Prius), and his transformation late in the story comes across as temporary and false. Many of the plot points that bring about the novel’s close are as implausible as they are confusing. (Nov.)

Saramago’s philosophical page-turner hinges on death taking a holiday. And, Saramago being Saramago, he turns what could be the stuff of late-night stoner debate into a lucid, playful and politically edgy novel of ideas. For reasons initially unclear, people stop dying in an unnamed country on New Year’s Day. Shortly after death begins her break (death is a woman here), there’s “a catastrophic collapse” in the funeral industry; disruption in hospitals of “the usual rotational process of patients coming in, getting better or dying”; and general havoc. There’s much debate and discussion on the link between death, resurrection and the church, and while “the clandestine traffic of the terminally ill” into bordering countries leads to government collusion with the criminal “self-styled maphia,” death falls in love with a terminally ill cellist. Saramago adds two satisfying cliffhangers—how far can he go with the concept, and will death succumb to human love? The package is profound, resonant and—bonus—entertaining. (Oct.)

A road novel helped along by a lovably nutty cast, Toews’s latest (after A Complicated Kindness) follows a ragtag crew as they crisscross America. Hattie, recently dumped in Paris by her “moody, adjective-hating boyfriend,” returns home to Canada after receiving an emergency phone call from her niece. Turns out, Hattie’s sister, Min, is back in the psych ward, and her kids, 11-year-old Thebes and 15-year-old Logan, are fending for themselves. Thus the quirky trio—purple-haired, wise-beyond-her-years Thebes, recently expelled brother Logan and overwhelmed Hattie—embark on a road trip to the States to find the kids’ long-missing father. What follows is a Little Miss Sunshine–like quest in which the characters learn about themselves and each other as they weather car repairs, sleazy motel rooms and encounters with bizarre people. Toews’s gift for writing precocious children and the story’s antic momentum redeem the familiar set-up, and if the ending feels a bit rushed, it’s largely because it’s tough to let Toews’s characters go. (Oct.)

There were never such devoted sisters, or ones so hilariously and heartbreakingly conflicted about loyalty and love as the ones in Gabriele’s brisk second novel (Tempting Faith DiNapoli). Thoughtful, married-mom Georgie “Peachy” Archer and big-city-girl Beth, her older sister, grow up on a Canadian farm with their hairdressing, Vietnam draft–dodging dad, Lou, and share the pain of their mom’s suicide. But that’s where the similarities end—until the sisters swap lives for a weekend. Walking in Beth’s shoes around New York City, Peachy meets Beth’s discreet doorman, snarky friends and disapproving ex-boyfriend, and gets a crash course in understanding what her brash sister’s really about. Here is a charming, smart and honest story of two sisters who learn to embrace the lives they have. Gabriele’s writing is sharp and her heart is pure gold. This honest tale of passionate, mixed-up and forgiving families is hard to put down. (Oct.)

McGlothin’s steamy sequel to Sinful reveals what happens when the wicked Dior Wicker determines to marry Dallas pastor Richard Allamay, star of Church TV’s High Praise and “shepherd of Methodist Episcopal Greater Apostolic Church” (M.E.G.A. Church, for short). Dior’s best friend warns her to stay clear of the man, but the warnings go deeply unheeded as Richard, bored with his wife, is ripe for a fall. Lust drives Richard to strange lengths in his attempts to impress Dior (he misuses church money, and lies to his family and cheats on his wife). McGlothin unravels at a relentless pace a sexy and twisted story of marital and spiritual unfaithfulness, culminating in a shocker of a conclusion. Eric Jerome Dickey, watch out. (Oct.)

Author and scholar Aiken (1924–2004), known for her Jane Austen continuations, has imagined a sequel to Mansfield Park that’ll satisfy some Austen fans while enraging others. Heroine Fanny Brice has married her cousin Edmund Bertram and decamped for the family’s Caribbean plantation, leaving her younger sister, Susan, behind to serve as Lady Bertram’s companion at Mansfield Park. Less timid than her sister, but dismissed just the same by her finer relatives, Susan soon encounters the Crawfords, Henry and Mary, a diverting but amoral brother-and-sister pair who had nearly undone the proud Bertram family. Aiken’s sympathetic vision of the Crawfords’ fate, after their seduction of Fanny and her cousins, may strike a false note for Austen purists, but Aiken ably reproduces the author’s traditional plot twists and social comedy, if not her fluid prose or biting satire. (Oct.)

A journey to Myrtle Beach, S.C., gives an elderly Southern mother the heartrending opportunity to share a painful, long-held secret with her gay son in Villas’s eloquent fiction debut. The veteran food and wine writer (My Mother’s Southern Kitchen) concocts a savory dish in Ella Dubose, a feisty 73-year-old widow who smokes, drinks, carries a gun in her purse and does what she wants, when she wants—just so long as Goldie Russell, her Cherokee companion, is riding shotgun. While vacationing at a seaside inn, and waiting for her famous author son to join them, Ella stumbles on a romantic surprise, vacationing Yankee Dr. Edmund O’Connor. When her son, Tyler, does arrive, Ella yearns to tell him about his real father—not her husband, Earl Dubose, father of Tyler’s two siblings—but a Jewish WWII veteran driven to suicide. Tyler, however, also has a secret and a struggle of his own. Villas depicts Ella’s dilemma and relationships with flair and a perceptive eye, capturing the Low Country’s nostalgic allure with loving skill. (Oct.)

In this postmodern satire set several years in the future, noted intellectual Walker Linchak, author of landmark books about AIDS and 9/11, finds a way out of writer’s block through a surprising act: picking his nose. Linchak discovers a euphoria that provokes him to blog about the activity, and the blog, of course, becomes immensely popular. Sara, Linchak’s young editor wife, catches on to the joys of rhinotillexis and convinces the media conglomerate she works for to create a mass market campaign to ride the wave of this new social phenomenon. Even George W. Bush gets in on the act; nose-picking has allowed him to be authentic and truthful in a way he couldn’t be during his administration. This is a psychotically narrow pseudo-intellectual romp, filled with pop-cultural references and technology gone wild. The author makes a convincing connection between uninhibited nose picking and the proliferation of the quick fix in a media-saturated world, though Shainberg has trouble in the third act, and the novel sputters to a conclusion that’s too goofy even for a book with a finger up its nose . (Oct.)

Debut novelist Silber delivers a captivating downhill ride through the alleys and clubs of LA’s 1948 bebop scene, crafting a fascinating antihero who will do just about anything to keep his fingers on the ivories. At first, Jewish musician Louis Greenberg seems downright courageous, using his charm and piano skills to earn a place in the black jazz clubs of Watts; he’s even pursuing an impossible love affair with a beautiful black regular, Beatrice. But soon it becomes apparent that his outsider status is deserved: his day job is swindling war widows out of their money, using the memories of their departed husbands as bait. So certain are Greenberg’s future heartaches—especially with Beatrice—and so profound is his love for jazz, it’s hard not to root for him, even as he draws an especially vulnerable widow into his web. Though gripping, the narrative’s pulp fiction overtones come across as more slapstick than hardboiled (“But here was this woman throwing me for more loops than a ride at Coney Island”), and his worshipful description of the music can be woefully shallow. (Oct.)

In Cain’s superb follow-up to Heartsick, damaged detective Archie Sheridan is back home in Portland, Ore., trying to resume a normal life. Archie’s ties to serial killer Gretchen Lowell still run deep, even if he’s stopped their weekly visits in prison. Meanwhile, reporter Susan Ward is finishing an article accusing a beloved U.S. senator of seducing his children’s 14-year-old babysitter a decade earlier. When three bodies are discovered in a local park—where Archie’s team found Gretchen’s first victim 12 years earlier—Archie worries another serial killer is at large. After the senator’s unexpected death, Susan discovers links between the sex scandal and the bodies in the park. When Gretchen escapes from prison, Archie knows he’s the only one who can stop her from killing. In Cain’s capable hands, Gretchen is both a monster and the only person who truly understands Archie’s pain. With its brisk pacing, carefully metered violence and tortured hero, Cain’s sophomore effort will leave readers desperate for more. 200,000 first printing. (Sept.)

In Johnson’s engrossing revenge tragedy, the follow-up to The Million Dollar Divorce (2004), selfish business tycoon Nate Kenny is determined to recover the millions his ex-wife, Monica, won from him in their divorce settlement. First, the nefarious Nate has one of his henchmen, Aaron Hunter (aka Glenn Billups), woo Tori Thomas, Nate’s former secretary and lover, who was paid for helping Monica during the divorce. As planned, Aaron marries Tori, then leaves her penniless in California. This is just the warm-up for Nate’s efforts to punish Monica, who’s now living in Chicago with the man Nate employed to seduce her to prove she was an unfaithful wife, Lewis Waters. Furious that Lewis wants to marry Monica, Nate hires Lewis’s troubled best friend from the hood, Freddy Ford, to frame Lewis. This scheme leads to unexpectedly bloody consequences. Johnson’s blunt, no-frills prose sketches a chilling portrait of an egomaniac who just doesn’t understand the high price tag of greed. (Sept.)

While Irish author Burke (Eight-ball Boogie) has been compared to Elmore Leonard, this effort falls short of Leonard’s superior blending of crime and dark humor. The impending parole of violent armed robber Rossi Francis Assisi Callaghan sets in motion a cascading series of events. Callaghan’s ex-wife, Karen King, herself a thief, fears he’ll come after her, and seeks to get herself some insurance in the form of professional kidnapper Ray Brogan. Ray, in turn, is hired to abduct Karen’s friend, Madge Dolan, by her husband, Frank, a plastic surgeon who wants to cash in a lucrative insurance policy. The waters are further muddied by questions about Callaghan’s parentage and the introduction of a vicious, half-blind dog named Stalin. The broadly drawn figures and situations are clearly not intended to be taken seriously, but the absence of any character a reader is likely to sympathize with is a significant drawback. (Sept.)

Near the start of Burke’s gripping second procedural to feature NYPD detective Ellie Hatcher (after Dead Connection), Ellie happens on the mutilated body of college student Chelsea Hart in East River Park while on her morning jog. Friends of the victim point the cops toward posh nightclub Pulse, located in the trendy Meatpacking district, where Ellie and partner J.J. Rogan are able to match a VIP’s credit card receipt to young and arrogant investment banker Jake Meyers, with whom Chelsea was last reported seen. But pinning the case on him doesn’t feel right when Ellie discovers similarities between Chelsea’s murder and two others from years past. Meanwhile, local media keep getting hold of unreleased facts of the case, making Ellie’s superiors suspicious of her romantic relationship with Daily Post crime reporter Peter Morse. Knowing the cops aren’t on the right track lends a sense of dread to the plot. Burke leaves her principle characters little time to sleep; readers will relate. Author tour. (Sept.)

Bestselling author Wiggs (Snowfall at Willow Lake) keeps her romance reputation going with this feel-good story of a wronged woman who gets out on her own and gets going. Sarah Moon, a comic-strip writer, is happily married to Jack Daly—until she comes home to find him entwined and naked with a business associate he had badmouthed to her just hours earlier. After five years of marriage, including months of infertility treatments because of Jack’s cancer, infidelity is the last straw, and Sarah pack ups and leaves Chicago for her hometown of Glenmuir, Calif. Sarah uses her comic strip, Just Breathe, to vent her frustration and relieve her stress. The character, Shirl, is undergoing fertility treatments, getting a divorce and moving back in with her mom. (Comic strips open each section of the novel). And in Glenmuir, lo and behold, Sarah’s dreams come true. She finds out she’s pregnant, and begins a friendship with her high school nemesis, Will Bonner, who’s now the town fire captain and a single dad whose lonely daughter reminds Sarah of herself as a young girl. Wiggs takes serious situations and weaves them into an emotionally wrought story that will have readers reaching for the Kleenex one moment and snickering out loud the next. (Sept.)

A fictionalized account of the life of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s older brother, Audeguy’s second novel (after The Theory of Clouds) offers a fragmented, sometimes frustrating history of François Rousseau and the momentous century in which he lived. Born in Geneva in 1705, seven years before his renowned brother, and left to fend for himself after his mother dies, François finds a mentor in the Comte de Saint-Fonds, who initiates him into a world of science and reason while simultaneously illuminating forbidden desires. After a sojourn in a Geneva prison and a brief apprenticeship to a watchmaker, François escapes to Paris, where he establishes himself among the libertines and devotes his talents to producing devices designed to further his patrons’ erotic pursuits. But as the Revolution approaches, François finds that Paris is no longer a safe haven. Audeguy’s precision with respect to language and detail belie the novel’s faulty structure, a series of short, almost truncated scenes that keep the reader from full immersion. Still, the novel’s fresh view of an oft-covered era is worth the price of admission. (Sept.)

In French journalist Curiol’s mesmerizing debut novel, an unnamed young woman drifts, solitary and aimless, through contemporary Paris. She works as an announcer at a train station and is in love with a man who lives with another woman. Her longing to connect with others and dismaying inability to assert herself leaves the protagonist vulnerable to approaches by strangers with doubtful intentions, and she finds herself in a number of sordid and perilous encounters (a one-night stand with a transvestite, trouble with a drug dealer). The sparely plotted novel takes some surprising turns toward the end, as the protagonist and her beloved tentatively become involved, and she reveals to him the roots of her emotional fragility. The novel broods in a classically French way, and the bleak meanderings are beautifully wrought. The ending is, of course, a downer, but it’s earned and powerful. (Sept.)

In this fast-paced short novel of espionage and intrigue from pulp master Hubbard, Kurt Reid, bucko mate of the tanker Rangoon, jumps ship to avoid a murder rap. His goal is the city of Shanghai because “behind it lay all of China” and a fair chance for escape. Instantly, Reid is drawn into a plot involving a beautiful Russian spy, Varinka, and the sinister Gen. Lin Wang and his executioners known as “the Death Squad.” The equally beautiful Anne Carsten complicates the romantic equation. While not as polished or prolific as Max “King of the Pulps” Brand, the future founder of Scientology carved a solid career as a contributor to the popular magazines of his day. This action yarn first saw print in the April 1936 issue of Five-Novels Monthly—the bright primary colors of that original cover, reproduced here, add nicely to the timeless pulp appeal. (Sept.)

Urban Celtic fantasy slides down a dark, depressing slope in bestseller Moning’s third Fever thriller (after Bloodfever), centered on a hunt for the Sinsar Dubh, a black magic book more than a million years old. As All Hallow’s Eve in Dublin approaches, the walls between the human world and Faery verge on collapse. Can former Georgia peach MacKayla “Mac” Lane prevent a total invasion of the Unseelie Court? Originally intent on avenging her sister Alina’s murder committed by Unseelie Lord Master, Mac’s now a power-player in the war between the Seelie (good Fae) and Unseelie (bad Fae), after learning she’s a Celtic sidhe-seeker who can sniff out OOPS (Objects of Power). Meanwhile, the attractive V’Lane, a death-by-sex Fae, wants Mac’s help in securing the Sinsar Dubh for his Seelie queen, Aoibheal. At the end, erotic shocks await Mac in Dublin’s vast Dark Zone, setting up feverish—if wary—expectations for the next installment. (Sept.)

A compelling and sympathetic narrator instantly draws the reader into Bayard’s stellar third historical. In 1818, the notorious Vidocq, a master detective who’s rumored to work on both sides of the law, pulls 26-year-old Parisian doctor Hector Carpentier into a torture-murder inquiry. The victim, Chrétien Leblanc, died without revealing that he was on his way to visit Carpentier, news that comes as a complete shock to the doctor, as the dead man was a stranger to him. Vidocq soon discovers that Leblanc was actually in search of Carpentier’s late father, who bore the same name. The elder Carpentier cared for Louis-Charles, Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette’s young son, who died in prison in 1795. Bayard keeps the reader guessing until the end, though the puzzle aspect is less prominent than in his previous novel, The Pale Blue Eye, which featured Edgar Allan Poe as sleuth. Few writers today can match the author’s skill in devising an intelligent thriller with heart. (Sept.)

Occult horror meets chick-lit suspense in Gaylin’s entertaining if formulaic fourth novel. When investigative journalist Steve Sorenson hears that his best friend, celebrity reporter Zoe Greene, has fallen for soap opera star Warren Clark and is ditching Manhattan for Warren’s home in San Esteban, Mexico, Steve is alarmed not just because he’s secretly in love with Zoe. Not long before in San Esteban, a town full of expat hippies involved in a longevity cult, Sangre Para La Vida (“blood in exchange for life”), a visiting NYU student had his heart ripped out. As Zoe’s idyllic romance with Warren unravels in Mexico, certain locals show too much interest in Zoe’s blood. Zoe’s attendance at a scary SPLV party leads to a breathless finale. Avoiding the standard vampire twist, Gaylin (Trashed) opts for Aztec hoo-doo to keep the action hopping in a tale both shocking and silly about the pursuit of eternal youth and romantic obsession. (Sept.)

At the start of Gold Dagger Award–winner Indridason’s carefully plotted fourth entry in his crime series starring detective Erlendur Sveinsson (Jar City, etc.), a human skeleton surfaces in the bed of a lake near Reykjavik that’s been mysteriously draining away. The bones are tied to some kind of Russian listening device, presumably a remnant of the Cold War. As Erlendur and his colleagues, Elinborg and Sigurdur Oli, go about checking on people who went missing around 1970, Erlendur is reminded of the disappearance of his younger brother when they were children. Erlendur’s lifelong obsession with the missing provides a haunting metaphor for this lonely, middle-aged man, divorced and alienated from his own two children. Elinborg and Sigurdur Oli, on the other hand, aren’t particularly persuasive characters, but flashbacks to the University of Leipzig during the Cold War provide compelling insights into the splintered politics of the day, as well as the Icelandic students studying there at the time. (Sept.)

Nautical adventure fans will welcome Campbell’s third novel to feature intrepid Matty Graves (after The War of Knives). In 1800, the 17-year-old Graves, “a bastard and a Negro” despite both parents being white, is recalled to Washington City, where his rank is reduced from acting lieutenant to midshipman, and he’s questioned about his role in a duel between his friend Peter Wickett and another officer. Graves’s fortunes later turn after he’s promoted to lieutenant and given his first command, the schooner Tomahawk. On joining the American squadron in Santo Domingo, he’s ordered to capture an American officer who’s stolen a naval vessel and turned pirate—Peter Wickett. Graves proves equally brave and resourceful at navigating the bureaucratic minefield of the U.S. navy and at steering a steady course through the treacherous politics of various nations—Spain, France, England, Denmark—vying for power in the Caribbean. (Sept.)

Food aficionado Capella (The Food of Love) brews a tale of a young poet-turned-coffee-expert in 19th-century England. Robert Wallis, a lazy 20-something poet, meets a man in an artists’ cafe and soon has a job. With his talent for over-description, Wallis is the perfect employee for Samuel Pinker, a coffee merchant wanting to create a guide to the world’s coffee beans. Unfortunately, Wallis falls short trying to woo Pinker’s daughter Emily with charming “epigrams” and his oversized ego. To spare his daughter from scandal, Pinker sends Wallis on a journey around the world, and the real story begins. Political issues of the time—from the slave trade to women’s rights—provide the backdrop for Wallis’s expedition. Navigating a series of unpredictable challenges, Wallis transforms from an apathetic charmer to a poised young man. Despite the lack of food details prevalent in Capella’s earlier work—coffee doesn’t have quite the same appeal—the surprising plot twists and authentic love story will make this a crowd pleaser. (Sept. 2)

Danny McGregor, the narrator of this thin and underpowered novel, ditches Florida and washes up in Flagstaff, Ariz., where he tends bar at a tumbledown tavern and shacks up in his trailer with red-haired college student Libra. Though Libra’s wealthy parents threaten to cut her off, she stays true to her man, but, being a good guy, Danny dumps her so she doesn’t screw up her life. Then, as he’s walking along the railroad tracks to hop on a Greyhound back to Florida, he comes across her mangled body strewn across the tracks. He doesn’t report the death, and as he tries to get his life back together in Florida, he’s tailed by a P.I. hired by Libra’s parents. He’s eventually held to account for Libra, but the novel lacks the emotional depth and severity necessary to support the dark subject matter. The result is a series of shallow and mundane anecdotes that pile up, but don’t build. (Sept.)

This tepid debut novel follows four women as they band together to save a garden from being gobbled up by an expanding college campus. Mary, a Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist and professor; Hannah, an MFA student whose husband becomes increasingly distant; Sofia, a young mother who gave up her previous life as a powerful Hollywood agent; and Ashleigh, who is afraid to reveal her lesbian relationship to her conservative senator father, all share a love of the small garden nestled next to Manhattan University’s faculty housing, and as they organize to stop the imminent excavation, they form friendships and make major changes in their lives. There isn’t anything you haven’t seen before in here, but Rendell does a fine job of following the formula. (Sept.)

An aging spinster biology teacher and her 20-something niece spend a summer getting to know one another in this careful and plodding debut novel. Mary Alice McDonnell fits every stock description of the lonely, middle-aged schoolmarm: dowdy and prickly, devoted to her mundane, hermit-like routine. It works for her until her niece, a perky graduate student named Claire, inherits a house from Mary Alice’s recently deceased mother. Mary Alice and her mother had been estranged for 40 years following a mysterious event, dangled through alternating flashback chapters; needless to say, Claire’s sudden appearance in the small Virginia town brings back unwanted memories. In an extraordinary coincidence, Claire also reintroduces a piece of her aunt’s history: the e-mail address of Michael Harrison, Mary Alice’s erstwhile beau, now a famous New York poet. When everything blows out into the open at last, readers may be too wary to notice; too rich with contrivances and expository dialogue, the book falls short of its potential. (Sept.)

Green’s knowledge of and passion for all things operatic shines through this debut short story collection, based in part on “inspiring conversations” with a long list of artists (Placido Domingo and the late Luciano Pavarotti among them). The first narrator provides an “Overture,” addressing an audience as though onstage; though the point of view changes, the stiff language and frequent use of exclamation points are signs of things to come. The funny, lively title story follows opera buff Emilia Marty, who professes to be 395 years old. Based on a real onstage death at the Metropolitan Opera House, the somber “This Very Vivid Morn” uncovers the dark side of an otherwise typical rehearsal. In “Such Dear Ecstasy,” however, the plot follows Italian composer Vincenzo Bellini’s work so closely that it gives the effect of deeply researched nonfiction. Average readers may find it hard to relate to Green’s intricate stories, but if you are already steeped in the nuances of Giuseppe Verdi, Victor Hugo or Giacomo Puccini—to name a few—you will likely find yourself among eccentric, old-fashioned friends. (Sept.)

It starts with a standard conceit: “What I saw on my semester abroad.” Alex Larson, a “wholesome-bordering-on-nerdy” Des Moines girl, interested in photography and what lies beyond her upstate New York college, spends a year in Nepal. While she’s on a trekking trip, as a favor to Will, a charismatic American expat 13 years her senior, Alex contacts his friend Maya. The two young women meet, and under the cover of night Alex delivers Maya from traditional village life to the relative metropolis of Kathmandu, and Will’s bachelor pad. The triumvirate bond over elaborate meals, pilgrimages and drugs; just before the house of postcards begins to topple, Alex reluctantly returns to college. She comes back four years later to find Nepal changed, and Maya has fallen in with a questionable crowd, disappearing for days at a time. On Falkland Road, Bombay’s red-light district, Alex, armed with a camera and her wits, must confront the seedy underbelly of her fantasyland to find her friend. Equal parts coming-of-age quest and travelogue, this debut novel dazzles most with its deft descriptions, which transform an unimaginably foreign land into terra cognita. (Aug.)

In this 14th collection of his own verse, the much-honored Howard (The Silent Treatment) returns to the kinds of poems that made him famous: elaborate dramatic monologues, impersonations and dialogues that are intricately alert to literary history and sexual desire. The first and longest poem imagines a three-way exchange of versified letters among Henry James, his California-based niece and L. Frank Baum, the man who created Oz. Another poem comprises a tetchy interview with the mother of Medea, the cruel princess of Greek tragedy and myth. A central sequence consists of letters from a comically (if morbidly) articulate fifth-grade class that asks its teacher to imagine a world without sexual intercourse . Pulitzer Prize–winner Howard is also nationally known for his translations (over 150 from the French), and what James (one of Howard’s perennial models) called the “international theme” is again very much in evidence here; so is the abstract style the mature James himself did so much to invent. In these thoughtful new poems, Howard offers, and excels in, sophisticated verbal comedy, making his personae of all ages show and say more than they know. (Oct.)

In her debut poetry collection, published on the heels of her debut novel, The Answer Is Always Yes, Ferrell fills richly textured lines with a cast of personas inhabiting a vague space between waking and dreaming; as these speakers undergo metamorphoses—from human to animal, girl to woman, powerful to powerless—they persistently ask, “Who was she?” Ferrell’s voice mixes mythic and contemporary, classical and hip, weaving a tapestry of mini-epics in an odyssey from the Garden of Eden to Alphabet City, with pit-stops in Babylon, Oslo and the isle of Capri. In one poem we meet “a shepherd asleep on a mirror in a mountain”; another offers the plainly magical fact, “Once I met the doctor who delivered me.” While her tone can at times feel heavy-handed, the diligence with which Ferrell pursues the project of blurring the line between myth and history in the service of illuminating life’s everyday transformations demands, and benefits from, repeated readings. This is an impressive first effort by a fresh, original and promising new voice wholeheartedly committed to her craft. (Oct.)

In his best book in a decade—and one of the best outright—Merwin points his oracular, unpunctuated poems toward his own past, admitting, “I have only what I remember,” and offering what may be his most personal, generous and empathic collection. Somehow, he manages to dissolve the boundaries between one time and another, seeming to look forward to the past or remember what has yet to happen, as in a recollection of traveling to Europe by boat and seeing “a warship I recognized/ from a model of it I had made/ when I was a child/ and beyond it/ there was a road down the cliff/ that I would descend some years later/ and recognize it/ there we were all together/ one time.” The poems show the marks of having weathered “...the complete course/ of life,” but also feel fresh and awake with a simplicity that can only be called wisdom: “the morning is too/ beautiful to be anything else.” Gorgeous poems about enduring love melt time as well, looking toward a moment when “we will be no older than we ever were.” These are among Merwin’s best poems, because, as he says, “it is the late poems/ that are made of words/ that have come the whole way/ they have been there.” (Sept.)

Armitage is one of the U.K.’s most popular, important and prolific poets—as well as a writer for TV and radio, a translator, a teacher and a member of a rock band. Following his 2005 selected poems The Shout, as well as a recent translation of Sir Gawain and a dramatic version of The Odyssey, this is Armitage’s first individual collection to appear in the U.S., and it’s high time. The collection, Armitage’s 11th, amounts to an ambitious, personal meditation on the ugliness of life in a Western civilization at war with the Middle East, something Americans and the British have in common. A passage from the Cyclops section of The Odyssey, in which the hero and his crew commit an “act [that] was to haunt us,” sets the stage for haunted political poems like “Republic,” where the government forbids all but one color of car each day of the week, and “After the Hurricane,” in which citizens “drink and smoke/ amongst mortar and bricks, here at empire’s end.” More personal poems bring the same feeling home with darkly self-deprecating humor: “I’m ugly because I proved God to be a mathematical impossibility.” This collection attests that Armitage deserves to be seen as major poet at the peak of his powers on both sides of the pond. (Sept.)

Perhaps the most prominent African-American poet of his generation, the prolific Young (For the Confederate Dead) begins his sixth book, which gathers sets of independent short poems—some very funny, some heartbreaking, almost all in deftly enjambed, uncommonly various lines—with evocations of his childhood, at once cozy and surrounded by half-secret threats: “Back/ in the day, my mother cut my afro/ every few months, bathroom layered/ with headlines proclaiming the world’s end.” Young then launches into odes to foods, many (but not all) of them from African-American traditions: “I know you’re the blues/ because loving you/ may kill me,” says “Ode to Pork.” Other work finds lessons in country and country-rock music (“On Being the Only Black Person at the Johnny Paycheck Concert”). For all the humor, and all the autobiography, in this big book, Young digs deepest and sounds most powerful when he returns to the unlucky, unlovely, generalized personae of blues, who become in his hands at once a source of energy and a means for elegy: “Let me be what/ dust has to be, settling// over everything,” he says in the bluesy “Lullaby,” “& I promise to dream// of new houses & old/ loves no longer.” (Sept.)

“These poems were written while I was thinking about my generation’s relationship to quotation and collage,” writes Stonecipher (The Reservoir) in an introductory note. A child of the ’70s, she came after Joseph Cornell but before DJ Danger Mouse, so the relationship is neither groundbreaking nor comfortable but instead fraught with ambiguity. Her thinking manifests itself in quotations—she calls them “inlays”—from writers like Franz Kafka and Susan Sontag, placed in the midst of original sequences of brief narrative prose poems. Through these samplings readers can follow Stonecipher’s interest in juxtaposition and parataxis as it resonates from one poem to the next, though this is not what makes this book—Stonecipher’s third—engaging. In fact, many of the quotations feel superficial, more like decals than an encoding. But Stonecipher’s seductive sentences succeed in drawing readers in. Not unlike John Yau, who selected this book for the National Poetry Series, or Lydia Davis, there’s a dreamy clarity to Stonecipher’s best writing. “Pity we who must corset our mental splendor into the whalebone of grammar,” she writes in “Inlay 4 (Susan Sontag),” “which laces us up so tight we have to remove a rib to breathe.” (Sept.)

The ninth outing from Olds (Blood, Tin, Straw) should again please the many admirers of her raw, vivid and often explicit poems, but might surprise few of them—until the end. As in all her books, Olds works in a demotic free verse, driven by rough enjambments and shocking comparisons: she devotes much of her energy (three of five sections here) to sex, remembered pain and parenthood—the dramatic, abusive household in which she grew up and her tender relationship with her own daughter. Olds depicts the traumas of her first decades with undeniable, if occasionally cartoonish, force: “When I think of people who kill and eat people,/ I think of how lonely my mother was.” Olds can also offer high-volume poetry of public protest, as in the set of sonnet-sized poems against war with which the book begins. What seems new here are Olds’s reactions to her mother’s last years, and to her mother’s death. On an antidepressant, briefly “adorable,” and then in failing health, “my mother sounds like me,/ the way I sound to myself—one/ who doesn’t know, who fails and hopes.” Both the failures and the hopes find here a voice that takes them seriously. (Sept.)

In this follow-up to her National Book Critics Circle Award–winning Columbarium, critic and poet Stewart offers sequences and serial poems that move across historical time, and continually reveal the ominous hiding in the innocuous, or vice versa (“burning bread smells like/ baked earth”). Beginning with children encountering the world through play, this gathering of poems, with their masterful cadences, allegorically pitched narratives and various speakers “bound/ deep to old griefs and wonder,” build toward an indictment of aggression and war. Contemporary violence meets canonical literature, illuminating the repetition of history and calling for a reexamined culpability: “War profiteering has many means, including/ the sale of poems against war.” Whether it’s the command of a window seat leading to a mediation on ecological disaster, or the discovery of an arrowhead (“sharp enough/ to penetrate/ fur or hide/ or hated flesh,/ and pin it/ back to earth”) to a question about imperialism, these poems ask the reader to register anew, from “small changes of perspective,” the darker implications what we take for granted, even when “[t]hings beg to be used,/ to be turned, and/ the reasons to withdraw/ are hard to know.” (Sept.)

The latest from former U.S. laureate Collins (The Trouble with Poetry and Other Poems) again shows the deft, often self-mocking touch that has made him one of America’s bestselling poets: while this volume hardly breaks new ground, it should fly off the shelves. To his jokes about, and against, his own poetizing, Collins now adds two new emphases: on life in France, where (to judge by the poems) he has spent some time and (more pervasively) a preoccupation with the end of life. Collins is never carefree, but he is, as always, accessible and high-spirited, making light even when telling himself that nothing lasts: “Vermont, Early November” finds the poet in his kitchen, wringing his signature charm from the eternal carpe diem theme, “determined to seize firmly/ the second Wednesday of every month.” For Collins, such are his stock in trade, humorous and serious at once. His tongue-in-cheek assault on the “gloom and doubt in our poetry” is his only remedy for the loneliness that (even for him) shadows all poems: “this is a poem, not a novel,” he laments, “and the only characters here are you and I,/ alone in an imaginary room/ which will disappear after a few more lines.” (Sept.)

McLane (who teaches at Harvard) has built up a national reputation as a critic and reviewer, and this debut showcases a poet who is always clear if sometimes terse or challenging, often allusive, yet open about her own life, McLane’s spare free verse, splayed out across the page, draws on such seemingly antithetical resources as Grace Paley and Ezra Pound, the New York painter Philip Guston, Lorine Niedecker, the fragments of Sappho (the basis for one sharp sequence) and the resources of contemporary slang: “we video’d our way from thing/ to thang to thong.” “Catechism”—among McLane’s more serious poems—warns “The place I live is only sometimes shareable thus weeping.” If McLane’s poems, with their white spaces and their clipped phrases, sometimes seem too fragmentary, too much like ordinary speech, often enough their rough edges turn out to be part of a careful design. Alert to tragic truths and to comic moments, politics in America and in France, urban life and country retreats, McLane concludes with what may be her strongest suit: tough-minded eroticism: “do I still turn to them the dead/ who speak in type the way sun bursts between the legs those days/ a tongue moves so.” (Sept.)

Nurkse’s ninth book takes its title from the Latin origin of limbo (limbus, hem or border). As the “second kingdom” (after Heaven), it edges on paradise; in Nurkse’s hands, limbo is obsessed with various borders—dusk, dawn, border towns, a fall out shelter. A group of 9/11 poems reveals a devastating divide between before and after, as horrors are captured in lovely, if prose-like, descriptions: “We filled the streets,/ squinting upward, shading our eyes,/ searching for the towers,/ or more planes, or rescue choppers,/ and a great silence built....” The first section contains biblical persona poems. In the more directly personal poems in the next two sections—“The Limbo of the Fathers” and “The Limbo of the Children”—Nurkse, also a writer on human rights issues, truly plumbs the depths of his muse. In beautiful, effortless lines, Nurkse discusses family, love, sex and children. In “Return to Underhill Road,” he employs his most affecting language to describe an ordinary family, in an ordinary home, experiencing something universal and timeless: “the child in the next room/ swathed in her crib/ makes every sign in every alphabet/ and sings every sound in every language/ until it will become a story—// two rooms, one marriage, / this trance, happiness.” (Aug.)

James took his own life in January 1974. He was 27, gay and the author of one poetry book published in 1973 by Houghton Mifflin; it received little attention. However, since then, in American poetry’s back rooms, a kind of cult has grown around it—passed from poet to poet in photocopy, Letters to a Stranger has become an underground classic, largely due to an obsessive campaign by the poet Lucie Brock-Broido, who has written a shimmering epistolary introduction for this edition, which includes 13 uncollected poems, and is the second volume in Graywolf’s Re/ View reissue series. James was enthralled by Plath’s Ariel, suicide and the transformative capacities of his own verbal music. Mostly dramatic monologues, his poems speak directly to their “stranger,” haunted (“I am heir to the old decisions”) and hauntingly true: “It is easy to surrender to the point of a needle:/ It is like lying down to love.... ” Self-dramatizing, brilliantly imaginative, wildly sad, they long, with romantic futility, to be heard, reveling and wallowing in the wide spaces of their privacy: “I will last forever. I am not impatient,” says James, in the voice of a mummified Egyptian noble, as if aware his book would last: “I’ll lie here till the world swims back again.” (July)

At the start of Balzo’s spirited third Maggy Thorsen mystery (after 2007’s Grounds for Murder), Rachel Thorsen, the wife of Maggy’s ex-husband, Ted, shows up at Maggy’s Brookhills, Wis., coffeehouse, Uncommon Grounds, and confides she suspects Ted is cheating on her. When Rachel disappears and is later found murdered, Ted is the chief suspect. Since Maggy and Ted share a son, she feels compelled to help, despite her budding relationship with Sheriff Jake Pavlik. Convinced that Ted is the killer, the members of Rachel’s wealthy family spare no expense in trying to prove him guilty. It’s up to Maggie to find the truth, even if that means helping the man who dumped her. An engaging sleuth, Maggy puts her own humorous, breezy spin on everything, from coffee lore to the colorful locals, in a cozy that will leave readers guessing until the end. (Oct.)

Gregory brilliantly evokes 1663 London in her brisk third mystery to feature spy Thomas Chaloner (after 2007’s Blood on the Strand). On returning to England after a perilous mission on the Iberian peninsula, Chaloner finds himself out of favor with his mercurial employer, the earl of Clarendon, England’s Lord Chancellor. He gets a chance to return to the earl’s good graces if he can solve the peculiar death of Thomas Newburne, a solicitor and newsman who died after eating a cucumber. Chaloner soon learns that others have recently perished after a similar meal. His inquiries into the murky world of journalism and propaganda bring him into conflict with the Butcher of Smithfield, a shadowy thug and associate of Newburne’s. Gregory salts the plot with several tantalizing subsidiary puzzles, and has impressively integrated into the story line not only historical figures but debates about the content of the period’s newsletters and newsbooks. (Sept.)

Baseball fans will welcome Shefchik’s second mystery to feature sports sleuth Sam Skarda (after 2007’s Amen Corner). A claim that the Boston Red Sox’ victory in the 2004 World Series resulted from a fix takes Sam from Minneapolis to Boston, L.A. and Caracas as he fends off hit men and fights the clock: he has five days to break the case before Red Sox owner “Lucky” Louie Kenwood must pay an extortionist $50 million. Otherwise, a confession from a key St. Louis Cardinal player will reveal the Sox victory to have been a sham, thereby disgracing—if not destroying—Major League Baseball. Kenwood’s executive assistant, the beautiful and brainy Heather Canby, helps Sam investigate, while Fenway Park’s iconic “Green Monster” provides the setting for two climactic scenes. Like a pitcher changing speeds, Shefchik takes enough off his characterizations to avoid straight-out stereotypes, and he spins a fair simile now and then—a pitch he should add to his regular repertoire. (Sept.)

A murder in the midst of Mardi Gras propels Childs’s enjoyable sixth Scrapbooking mystery (after 2007’s Frill Kill). Carmela Bertrand, the owner of the New Orleans scrapbook shop Memory Mine, and her best friend, Ava Gruiex, are eager to begin the festivities with a party hosted by their float designer pal, Jekyl Hardy. But the discovery of the garroted Archie Baudier, Jekyl’s assistant, puts a damper on the fun. In their efforts to solve the murder, Carmela and Ava encounter a host of eccentric characters, including a sullen Russian, a rare coin dealer, a meek curator of the local historical society and all manner of costumed party-goers. Carmela, in the process of a divorce, also meets dapper police lieutenant Edgar Babcock, who might be unappreciative of her investigative efforts but provides some romantic heat. Glossing over the effects of Hurricane Katrina, Childs paints a picture of New Orleans sure to appeal to cozy fans. (Sept.)

This middling first of a new series from Simonson (Larkspur) features a familiar mystery-solving duo of police professional and amateur sleuth: sheriff’s deputy Rob Neill, who’s inherited his grandmother’s house in the town of Klalo, Wash., and his new next-door neighbor, Meg McLean, freshly arrived from Southern California to head up the town’s library system. When a dead body is found buried in Meg’s garage, their friendship moves from budding romance to investigative partners, as Rob deputizes Meg so he can take advantage of her research skills. A strong narrative line focused on the looting of Native American artifacts isn’t enough, alas, to carry an otherwise bland and awkwardly plotted story. The novel is set in one of the country’s most visually stunning areas, yet almost no attention is given to the landscape. The book’s title, from an e.e. cummings poem, is the book’s most original aspect. (Sept.)

Coel introduces a tenacious heroine, Denver investigative reporter Catherine McLeod, in this stellar first in a new series. After an attempt on her life, Catherine realizes she was far from a random target when Arapaho elder Norman Whitehorse informs her that she’s “one of us.” Adopted as a child and still unsure of her identity and heritage, Catherine begins to understand the deep connection she feels to her latest story, about the 1864 Indian massacre at Sand Creek. Whitehorse and Cheyenne leaders call for the tribes’ further compensation for Sand Creek, but when Catherine starts digging, she realizes that there’s more to the land fight than meets the eye, and the trail leads all the way to Washington. With a killer hot on her heels and his collateral damage accumulating, Catherine hurtles toward a conclusion that’s both fitting and unanticipated. A cameo appearance by Coel’s usual leading lady, Arapaho attorney Vicky Holden (The Girl with Braided Hair, etc.), hints at a much welcome future collaboration between these two crime-solving women. (Sept.)

In this solid British police procedural from Simms (Pecking Order), Manchester Det. Insp. Jon Spicer looks into a bizarre series of murders, starting with the death of 22-year-old singer Polly Mather, whose throat is found clogged with a mysterious hard white substance. Simms shifts back and forth between the present—the autumn of 2002—and earlier the same year, when Spicer reconnected with an old friend, Tom Benwell, an advertising executive. Benwell has an unusual phobia, triggered by discarded used chewing gum, that’s extreme enough to jeopardize his job. As Spicer investigates the murders, he finds a prime suspect in Benwell’s company, a social misfit known by his colleagues as Creepy George. The author does a decent job of mixing the police investigation with Benwell’s professional decline, though the resolution may strike some readers as too predictable. Spicer makes an appealing, if familiar, lead character. (Sept.)

A pedestrian plot and a garrulous narrator given to less than compelling interior monologues mar Dunlap’s debut. One chilly night in the woods north of Duluth, Minn., avid birder Bob White stumbles on a dead body while stalking a rare Boreal Owl. Then Stan Miller, a rival birder who may be “just plain nuts,” almost hits White while shooting at a bear near the body. How Stan did so accurately while holding a crossbow in his other arm may puzzle some readers. Dunlap’s lengthy set-piece flashbacks about youthful birding trips and environmental causes slow the narrative, which is full of improbable coincidences, like suspect Bradley Ellis popping up just when White happens to be poking around Ellis’s college office. For those enamored of avian mating habits or North Woods scenery, this slight effort might suffice for a long winter’s night, but mystery buffs will likely find it strictly for the birds. (Sept.)

When Stefanos Kantartzis is found dead in his home in Athens in 1929 , his closest friend, mathematician Michael Igerinos, becomes the obvious and only suspect in his murder. The dead man had had an affair with Igerinos’s ex-wife, and, more recently, had begun a relationship with Igerinos’s former mistress. Told mostly in flashbacks, Michaelides’s less-than-gripping mystery debut begins with Igerinos’s first encounter with Kantartzis at the Second International Congress of Mathematicians, held in Paris in 1900. Since the sleuthing is secondary to the author’s efforts to engage the reader in the intricacies and disputations of higher mathematics, the book’s appeal will be largely limited to hardcore math fans. (Sept.)

Initially, this impressive novel by British SF rising star Levy will fascinate but also puzzle readers. The characters are immediately intriguing, the writing vivid and tight, but how do the sections of action fit together? What does dangerous tunneling beneath the inhospitable surface of far-off planet Haven have to do with the way brutal lords control villages on the forest world Haze? And what could these distant civilizations have to do with a near-future televangelist exploiting human weakness on Earth? However, as scene follows melancholic scene, some containing disturbing violence committed on or by children, cross references begin to show that the parts are somehow related. Even as connections are revealed, it’s never safe to relax into easy assumptions about the relationships among Levy’s believably flawed, sometimes monstrous but sometimes hopeful characters as they explore the pain of alienation and the improbable miracle of isolated people coming together. (Sept.)

Martinez (The Automatic Detective) staffs this whimsical fantasy with his trademark weird beings and sets it in the mysterious castle of powerful, cruel wizard Margle the Horrendous. Margle’s kobold housekeeper, Nessy, who likes order but wants excitement, spends most of her time in the company of curse-transformed wizards and heroes, such as skeletal kitchen slave Decapitated Dan, invisible Echo and Margle’s powerful brother, Yazpib, now only a collection of body parts in a jar. When Margle ends up the victim of one of his own spells, Nessy and friends try to reverse their curses while battling the intrusion of evil wizardess Tiama the Scarred. Nifty ideas like a soul-extractor and the Sword in the Cabbage never quite go anywhere, and though Nessy makes a capable heroine, events move only when Tiama is around as a foil. Too insubstantial and smug for adults, this story might do better with teens. (Sept.)

This unclassifiable debut from the son of legendary thriller author John le Carré is simultaneously a cautionary tale about the absurdity of war; a sardonic science fiction romp through Armageddon; a conspiracy-fueled mystery replete with ninjas, mimes and cannibal dogs; and a horrifying glimpse of a Lovecraftian near-future. “Go Away” bombs have erased entire sections of reality from the face of the Earth. A nameless soldier and his heroic best friend witness firsthand the unimaginable aftermath outside the Livable Zone, finding that the world has “unraveled” and is home to an assortment of nightmarish mutations. With the fate of humankind in the balance, the pair become involved in an unlikely and potentially catastrophic love triangle. Readers who prefer linear, conventional plotlines may find Harkaway overly verbose and frustratingly tangential, but those intrigued by works that blur genre boundaries will find this wildly original hybrid a challenging and entertaining entry in the post-apocalyptic canon. (Sept.)

Uneven pacing and an overcrowded cast try the reader’s patience in Robson’s third Quantum Gravity novel (after 2007’s Selling Out). Though the part Goth, part rock-and-roll tone is consistent throughout, the template shifts halfway through. Series protagonist Lila Black mopes through the book’s first half with occasional interruptions from would-be assassins, pausing at intervals to puzzle over her built-in robotic weaponry’s new self-upgrading abilities or to bicker with her two husbands—elf-lord Zal and demon Teazle—and with Tath, the dead necromancer whose consciousness she’s hosting. Little of note happens until Lila and her entourage journey deep into faery realms, where a seemingly simple mission quickly turns into a surprisingly traditional fairy-tale quest with potentially world-altering consequences. The novel belatedly sparkles in this final section, suddenly sprouting a cleverly nuanced plot. Newcomers should look up prior volumes first, but series fans will be reasonably satisfied. (Sept.)

This insubstantial sequel to Dark Warrior Rising (2007) is concerned mainly with skullduggery in the labyrinth of caverns where various groups of dark elves, the Niflghar, fight perpetual war. One of their human slaves, Orivon Firefist, grew to brawny manhood and escaped from the city of Talonnorn. Now, as he returns to rescue more humans, the Niflghar themselves sabotage the city. Along with a fondness for tongue-twisting names, the villainous Niflghar enjoy making sneering orations at inappropriate times and simply can’t resist a chance to stab each other in the back, to the point where the story’s climax becomes a gory slapstick farce. Masses of lore hang over the action, magic is stored in physical objects and squeezed out as needed, colorful extras are manipulated and thrown away, and events pour out in a jumble. The book will be appreciated by readers who want to participate in a D&D game without the bother of throwing the dice. (Sept.)

London (Highlander Unbound) sets this convincing tale of romance and intrigue in the early 1800s, an obscure period of strife in the English monarchy. Nathan Grey, the Earl of Lindsey, lost himself in liquor and debauchery after the death of his infant son, while his wife, Evelyn, abandoned their loving but superficial marriage and began flirting with another peer. Three years later, when Nathan learns that Evelyn could be named in Princess Caroline’s infamous “Book of Scandal,” he kidnaps her from court, pretending they’ve reconciled. Nathan’s attempt to guard the family’s reputation soon blossoms into a genuine desire to rebuild their marriage, but Evelyn resists. Meddling by servants and both sets of parents provides needed backstory and also unites the couple against their “helpful” interference. The only sour note is Nathan’s insistence that Evelyn apologize for adulterous thoughts that pale compared to his unabashed actions. Despite the confusing court scandals, this reunion story is mostly a joy. (Sept.)

This jolly series debut from the husband-and-wife Lavene team serves up medieval murder and mayhem. USC doctoral candidate Jessie Morton studies medieval crafts every summer at Columbia, S.C.’s Renaissance Faire Village. While working with basket weaver Mary Shift, Jessie gets a shock when Mary’s estranged husband, Joshua, is murdered in broad daylight. She quickly learns the actors at the Faire may be hiding more than their mundane lives. Jessie is certain that Mary is innocent of the murder, but also suspects the old weaver knows more than she’s revealing. The situation becomes more complicated as secrets from Mary’s turbulent past comes to light. Faire bailiff Chase Manhattan (whose hilarious name goes oddly unremarked) occasionally distracts Jessie with the promise of summer romance, but her focus is on solving the mystery. Fans of the Lavenes’ Peggy Garden mysteries will appreciate Jessie’s charm and determination as she sets out to clear her teacher’s name. (Sept.)

More Spamalot than Camelot, the debut of Black’s Doomsday Brotherhood series introduces Marrok of Cadbury, who was a brave warrior in King Arthur’s army until his unhappy lover, Morganna le Fay, cursed him with immortality and perpetual sexual frustration. Fifteen centuries later, Marrok is working as a sculptor in London and searching for a way to unlock Morganna’s nasty little book of spells, the Doomsday Diary, though he’s not sure he can break the curse without unleashing the book’s deadly magic. Marrok also has to hide the Diary from villainous wizard Mathias d’Arc (“Cruel, clever, hedonistic, rapacious. Brilliantly evil.”) and decide whether beautiful art gallery owner Olivia Gray, Morganna’s descendant, is his greatest nemesis or his sexual salvation. This orgasmic paranormal might make T.H. White turn over in his grave but will keep Black’s fans panting for the next installment. (Sept.)

Kearney (This Forsaken Earth) retells Xenophon’s Anabasis with great attention to detail but little novelty. The Macht, a race of mercenaries, are hired to sail across the oceans and serve as a conquering army for Arkamenes, who is bent on stealing his brother Ashurnan’s throne and taking over the Ashur empire. When Ashurnan slays Arkamenes, the Macht are left stranded in the middle of the empire surrounded by hostile armies. Their quest to return home becomes the stuff of legend as they fight overwhelming odds to win their freedom. The story is simple enough to follow, but the characters themselves are forgettable: hard to identify with as men, easy to cheer for as a group. With no sense that the Macht will be anything other than victorious, the drama resides solely in how many named characters will die in the endless, indistinguishable battles. Kearney’s considerable talent fails to come through in this unremarkable bloodfest. (Sept.)

Nationally published comic strip artist Henley offers a warm, funny memoir of adopting her son, William, which will make you cry. With its talk of yoga, dating and the wacky freelance life of a cartoonist, it starts off sounding like a Sex in the City for the Austin, Tex., set. It’s not. Where many older women comic artists fall into triteness, quips about men and snark, Henley rolls the reader back to a place where different generations matter and life makes sense. Comics are known for craziness, but they’re also a medium that, unlike prose fiction, has a talent for making art from happy situations. On the surface, the protagonist’s life is going to the aging, creative woman’s hell: approaching 50, childless, with a younger boyfriend possibly afraid to commit, and, oh, yeah, her dad’s dying. But even as the adoption agency screws up again and again, people come through, and her father finally meets the new son. The art’s thin black lines belie the depth of the book. The drawings’ simplicity works with the story, but the lines could be more expressive. Someone needs to take her roller-ball away from her. Otherwise, it’s a near perfect book, especially for women over 30. (Sept.)

The Flight anthology series has often been accused of being uneven, and this fifth installment will do nothing to change that—there are a handful of gems scattered through some very forgettable vignettes. Tony Cliff’s “The Aqueduct” is an appealing blend of steampunk and Arabian Nights with a good sense of humor; Reagan Lodge’s “The Dragon” also blends genres, skillfully swirling samurai action into a giant robo story. Sarah Mensinga’s “The Changeling” is a standout thanks to a simple, understated story and a warm color palette. Also excellent is the poignant “Beisbol 2,” in which a little boy learns that heroes don’t always behave like heroes. For pure self-referential silliness, though, the high point might just be Ryan North’s “Scenes in Which the Earth Stops Spinning and Everybody Flies into a Wall,” which is exactly what its name suggests, but with an elegant twist at the end. Many stories, though, feel either unfinished or inconsequential, like Sonny Liew’s brief meditation on what it means to be a robot and Matthew Bernier’s tale of vanishing mountains. It is a handsome volume, however, and the beautiful art throughout is a pleasure in its own right. (July)

Ranmaru Shindo wants to solve the mystery of his parents’ death. Along with his younger sister, Saya, he joins the police force intending to solve the brutal crime. But on the day of his graduation he is late, distracted by dreams of a mysterious red-haired woman standing in a pile of corpses, holding a giant sword. This is just the beginning for Shindo, who soon finds himself plunged into a world of darkness and demons. He is drawn to the mysterious woman, Sakura Rokujo, and to the Tokko division—the only thing saving Japan from being overrun by demons. Creator of the popular series Rose Hip Rose and Rose Hip Zero, Fujisawa brings readers an action-packed story that moves swiftly through the underbelly of Japan. The art, like the story itself, is stylish and sexy. While possessing many of the familiar manga elements, Tokko entertains with a well-executed take. (July)