Fiction Reviews

Motivated by advancing age, loneliness, latent guilt and a sense of unfinished business, the erstwhile Witches of Eastwick return to their former Rhode Island coastal town in this tepid sequel to the 1984 novel. Alexandra, the fleshy Earth Mother; Jane, the wasp-tongued snob; and Sukie, a would-be a sexpot operating beyond her expiration date, have each survived the second marriages that took place following their flight from Eastwick in the early '70s, after a rival, Jenny Gabriel, died as a result of their spell. Where before they were strong, sassy, lusty and empowered, now in late middle-age they are vulnerable, fearful and in thrall to their aging bodies. Witchcraft is now beyond them; when they try to resurrect their supernatural powers to atone for their guilt, an inadvertent death ensues. While Updike remains amazingly capable of capturing women's thoughts about their bodies and their sex lives, the plot never gains momentum; the first hundred pages, in fact, are tedious travelogues covering the widows' travels to Egypt and China. Updike's observations about culture and social disharmony flash with their customary brilliance—a less than sparkling Updike novel is still an Updike novel. (Oct.)

In her latest novel, Scotch tackles an oft-asked question—what if I had held on to the one that got away?—with an engaging, fast-moving, high-concept drama. Endearing Jillian Westfield seems to have it all: a loving lawyer husband, a healthy infant daughter, and a lovely home in Westchester County, N.Y. But cleaning spit-up and dealing with her husband's long office hours have begun to wear on Jill, and it hardly helps that she's just learned that her post-college boyfriend, Jackson, is getting married. The day after a deep, chi-clearing massage, Jill wakes up and finds herself seven years in the past, giving her the chance to revisit her life with Jack in Manhattan, when she worked as an advertising executive. Hindsight, of course, is anything but 20/20, and Jill's new choices hold unforeseen consequences for herself and those she loves. As Jill, through trial and error, rethinks her biggest decisions—such as her choice not to reconcile with her estranged mother—Scotch keeps one dexterous step ahead of page-flipping readers eager to guess the outcome. (Oct.)

In Hill's wonderful debut, young Rosie Kettle departs her quaint desert town to chase her dreams in 1960s San Francisco. Attending art college, Rosie has a chance encounter with an illegal immigrant named Peter who publishes a music magazine. Peter gives Rosie her first job, photographing a once legendary blues guitarist and his talented young partner, David Wilderspin. That assignment catapults Rosie into a hot career on the scene, an addictive lifestyle and a troubled affair with David. The two become inseparable, settling into a dream home and having a baby. But when David sets out on tour to support his disappointing new album, the road takes more out of him than he anticipated, and soon memories of his perfect life are drowned in booze. Hill's characters are believably flawed, and her powerful romance about the intersection of love, art and independence features troubling plot developments and a strong climax while deftly avoiding artists-in-love stereotypes. (Oct.)

In McLane's latest fast and furious romance (after Wild Ride), Supercross star Jayden Michaels gets a second chance at his lost teen sweetheart, Alexia Spencer, when she returns to Braxton, Tenn., freshly divorced and ready to rediscover her roots. Though reconnecting is a shock, their building passion feels fated—unfortunately, Alexia is carrying a 10-year-old secret that might destroy their newfound happiness. Alexia's sister, Brianna, meanwhile, finds herself falling for Jayden's business partner, Colin McCord, another motocross legend. As both couples tumble through bumpy courtships, readers will be pleased to find that most of the wild rides occur not on motorcycles but in the boudoir; McLane's skill with sex scenes makes for a hot, if familiar, read. (Oct.)

Sex in the City goes middle-aged, mordant and slapstick in Bushnell's chronicle of writers, actors and Wall Street whizzes clashing at One Fifth Avenue, a Greenwich Village art deco jewel crammed with regal rich, tarty upstarts and misguided lovers. When a “Queen of Society” dies, a vicious scramble for her penthouse apartment ensues, and it's attorney Annalisa and her hedge-funder husband, Paul Rice, who land the palatial pad, roiling the building's rivalries. There's Billy Litchfield, an art dealer who slobbers over the wealthy; strivers Mindy and James Gooch, and their tech-savvy 13-year-old Sam, the most hilariously bitter (and strangely successful) family in the building; gossip columnist Enid Merle and her screenwriter nephew, Philip Oakland, who struggle to uphold traditions and their souls; actress Schiffer Diamond, who lands a hit TV series, and her old love; and Lola Fabrikant, a cunning Atlanta gold digger whose greatest ambition is to become Carrie Bradshaw. Here are bloggers and bullies, misfits and misanthropes, dear hearts and black-hearts, dogfights and catty squalls spun into a darkly humorous chick-lit saga. (Sept.)

In Atkinson's stellar third novel to feature ex-cop turned PI Jackson Brodie (after One Good Turn), unrelated characters and plot lines collide with momentous results. On a country road, six-year-old Joanna Mason is the only survivor of a knife attack that leaves her mother and two siblings dead. Thirty years later, after boarding the wrong train in Yorkshire, Brodie is almost killed when the train crashes. He's saved by 16-year-old Regina “Reggie” Chase, the nanny of Dr. Joanna Hunter, née Mason. In the chaos following the crash, Brodie ends up with the wallet of Andrew Decker, the recently released man convicted of murdering the Mason family. Enter DCI Louise Monroe, Brodie's former love interest, who's tracking Decker because of a recent case involving a similar family and crime. When Dr. Hunter disappears, Reggie is convinced she's been kidnapped and enlists the reluctant Brodie to track her down. A lesser author would buckle under so many story lines, but Atkinson juggles them brilliantly, simultaneously tying up loose ends from Turn and opening new doors for further Brodie misadventures. (Sept.)

In this follow-up to his historical Baroque Cycle trilogy, which fictionalized the early-18th century scientific revolution, Stephenson (Cryptonomicon) conjures a far-future Earth-like planet, Arbre, where scientists, philosophers and mathematicians—a religious order unto themselves—have been cloistered behind “concent” (convent) walls. Their role is to nurture all knowledge while safeguarding it from the vagaries of the irrational “saecular” outside world. Among the monastic scholars is 19-year-old Raz, “collected” into the concent at age eight and now a decenarian, or “tenner” (someone allowed contact with the world beyond the stronghold walls only once a decade). But millennia-old rules are cataclysmically shattered when extraterrestrial catastrophe looms, and Raz and his teenage companions—engaging in intense intellectual debate one moment, wrestling like rambunctious adolescents the next—are summoned to save the world. Stephenson's expansive storytelling echoes Walter Miller's classic A Canticle for Leibowitz, the space operas of Larry Niven and the cultural meditations Douglas Hofstadter—a heady mix of antecedents that makes for long stretches of dazzling entertainment occasionally interrupted by pages of numbing colloquy. An accompanying CD of music composed by David Stutz is suitably ethereal. (Sept.)

Edgar-winner Woods's 15th Stone Barrington novel (after Shoot Him if He Runs) finds the familiar cast of characters up to their usual antics: dining at Elaine's, drinking expensive liquor and having fantastic sex. Stone's pal CIA deputy director for operations, Lance Cabot, asks Stone to watch over his brother, Barton Cabot, who's recovering from injuries, amnesia chief among them, after being beaten and robbed. Barton, who builds and sells reproduction antiques, lives in Connecticut, as luck would have it, near a cottage Stone owns. The plot centers on a missing 18th-century mahogany secretary, which is worth in the neighborhood of $24 million, and the theft of hundreds of gold coins from the South Vietnamese government when Barton was commanding a regiment there during the Vietnam War. As always, Stone gets to bed several new beautiful women in the course of pursuing the case. Series fans will find all their expectations nicely fulfilled. Author tour. (Sept.)

Welsh's most coherent and satisfying novel in a decade showcases the Scottish author's inimitable combination of dark realism, satire and psychological insight. Having been placed on leave after suffering an emotional meltdown, Edinburgh detective Ray Lennox, introduced in Filth (1998), and Trudi, his fiancée, fly to Miami for a few days to relax and plan their wedding, but from the start the trip is a nightmare. Lennox gobbles antidepressants and begins drinking again in a desperate frenzy, but things really tilt out of control when he parties with some locals, who reacquaint him with an old obsession, cocaine. One of his new “friends” has a 10-year-old daughter, who's been targeted by an organized ring of pedophiles. Can Lennox save the girl and redeem himself? The main action alternates with chapters set in Scotland, written from a claustrophobic second-person point-of-view. Welsh offers no easy answers in this complicated, unsettling and at times beautiful novel. (Sept.)

Bestseller Meltzer (The Book of Fate) deserves credit for an audacious conceit—wedding the biblical fratricide of Abel by his brother Cain with the unsolved 1932 homicide of the father of Jerry Siegel, the creator of iconic comic book hero Superman—but the results are less than convincing. A highly tenuous link between the two murders revolves around the mysterious weapon Cain (“the world's greatest villain”) used to kill his brother. One of numerous theories is that the weapon was a divine book containing the secrets of immortality. After coming to the aid of a shooting victim, Calvin Harper, a homeless volunteer working in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., soon finds himself hopelessly caught up in a life-and-death quest for the ancient artifact that includes the obligatory secret societies, Nazi conspiracies, enigmatic villains and cryptographic riddles à la The Da Vinci Code. A glut of two-dimensional characters and a plot riddled with coincidences don't help. (Sept.)

In Smith's winning fifth novel to feature Edinburgh philosophical sleuth Isabel Dalhousie (after The Careful Use of Compliments), Dalhousie, who's recently assumed ownership of the obscure journal she's edited for many years, the Review of Applied Ethics, applies her deductive gifts to the case of a disgraced doctor. When a patient dies after taking a new antibiotic that Marcus Moncrieff deemed safe in clinical trials, the doctor's original report turns out to contain falsified data. Did Moncrieff skew the data to please the drug manufacturers? Moncrieff's wife turns to Isabel for help in lifting her husband out of his despondency. While the truth isn't straightforward, the motives of the guilty party prove to be both plausible and rational. The strengths of the book, as with Smith's better known No. 1 Ladies' Detective series, lie in its protagonist's determination to treat others without judgment—and in the author's revealing glimpses into the human soul. (Sept.)

Bestseller Gerritsen's at times lackluster series heroines prove they can shine in her solid seventh thriller to feature Det. Jane Rizzoli and Dr. Maura Isles (after The Mephisto Club). When medical examiner Isles studies an X-ray scan of Madame X, which everyone assumes is a newly discovered Egyptian mummy, at Boston's Crispin Museum, she realizes the mummy isn't a priceless artifact but a recent murder victim, gruesomely preserved. Rizzoli focuses the police investigation on Dr. Josephine Pulcillo, a young archeologist recently hired by the museum who may have something to hide. More victims soon turn up, including a tsantsa (shrunken head) in a hidden museum chamber and a corpse resembling a well-preserved bog body in Pulcillo's car. After Pulcillo disappears, Rizzoli and Isles must scramble to find her before she becomes another trophy in the killer's growing collection. As usual, Gerritsen delivers an intricate plot that will keep readers guessing. (Sept.)

Best known for American Hero (1994), the jaunty political novel that became the film Wag the Dog, Beinhart offers something less jaunty but definitely more ambitious in this splendid religious legal thriller. When Ahmad Nazami, a Muslim scholarship student at the University of the Southwest, confesses under duress to the murder of Nathaniel MacLeod, an atheist philosophy professor, PI Carl Van Wagener, a born-again Christian, agrees to help Manny Goldfarb, a celebrated Jewish defense lawyer, prove Nazami's innocence. Van Wagener, a member of charismatic pastor Paul Plowright's Cathedral of the Third Millennium, is soon on the trail of a missing manuscript MacLeod wrote disproving God's existence. In a beautifully understated author's note, Beinhart lays out the factual basis for his provocative morality tale and invites readers to visit his Web site, which includes “a forum for an ongoing dialogue about religion, irreligion, faith, belief, and their intersections with politics, war, money, life, and death.” (Sept.)

After collaborating on Dead Heat (2007), bestseller Francis and his son, Felix, deliver another gripping thriller with a thoroughbred racing backdrop. Soon after London barrister Geoffrey Mason, an amateur jockey by avocation, starts receiving a series of threatening messages from a former client, Julian Trent, whose conviction for assault was overturned on appeal, Mason reluctantly accepts the defense of a jockey, Steve Mitchell, accused of the pitch-fork murder of fellow rider Scot Barlow at a steeplechase event. Mitchell and Barlow had fallen out over Barlow's sister, a vet and Mitchell's former girlfriend, who took her own life just a short while before. When unknown parties order Mason to lose the case, he must balance his professional ethics and his sense of self-preservation. The solid writing and engaging lead will carry readers along at a brisk pace, though some may find the dramatic courtroom revelation of the murderer overly theatrical. (Sept.)

In this carefully honed portrait that reads like a biography, Croatian author Drakulic (Café Europa) distills Mexican painter Frida Kahlo's life into one consistent theme: pain. From her bout of polio at age six to the streetcar accident that ensured her lifelong dependence on painkillers, Kahlo was always accompanied by the specter of death. In dreamy flashbacks, Drakulic tells Frida's story: raised by an illiterate mother and an epileptic German father who was a photographer, she was the only one of her sisters to get an education. Toughened by her accident, Frida's boldness attracts celebrated mural artist Diego Rivera, whom she calls the Maestro. His love for her is different from his casual relationships with other women, yet also underscores the grotesqueness of her body. His philandering plagues Frida with feelings of rejection and inadequacy until her death at age 47. After Rivera's affair with her younger sister Kity, Frida's paintings move from hobby to burning need, a way to survive his betrayal and her own cursed physicality. Intensely moving, Drakulic's novelization works from inside the raw psyche outward. (Sept.)

In her new novel, Kring (The Book of Bright Ideas) crafts a beautiful, witty story that rings with heartbreak, hope and laughter. Lucy McGowan is a 12-year-old genius with a photographic memory, an even more brilliant brother, Milo (IQ: 180), and a single mother, Tess, living in Chicago. What Lucy has that her brother doesn't is curiosity and “people smarts,” a quality that propels her to unearth the hidden relationships and buried secrets of her family. An imaginative and headstrong girl, Lucy finds herself on a grim family visit to her sickly, estranged grandfather in Timber Falls, Wis. Witnessing her mom's unshakable hatred for her dying father, Lucy begins to investigate her family's past; her love for the sick old patriarch she knows is challenged repeatedly by what she finds out about the angry, abusive man he used to be. Kring's brilliance lies in her powerful reversals and revelations, taking readers and characters on a dramatic, emotional roller coaster. (Sept. 30)

The unnamed narrator of this fine novel of psychological suspense from Argentinean author Martínez (The Oxford Murders) struggles as a young novelist to compete in a world dominated by international superstar Kloster. A literary giant with the attitude of Norman Mailer and the commercial success of Stephen King, Kloster has become the obsession of Luciana B, who once took dictation for both Kloster and the narrator. Reappearing after a decade, Luciana tells the narrator an outrageous tale of horror, claiming that Kloster is slowly murdering her family. Is she a bitter fanatic, or could Kloster be Latin America's cleverest serial killer? Believing she's marked for death, Luciana persuades the narrator to figure out whether the recent events in her life are part of a deadly game of cat-and-mouse or a series of tragic coincidences. This riveting tale will appeal to readers of literary fiction and thriller fans alike. (Sept.)

Fehlbaum's debut novel, set in a small Texas town, is overloaded with thorny issues and hindered by a “very special episode” tone, but features a genuine and empathetic lead. After enduring six years of sexual abuse from her step-father, 14-year-old Ashley Asher finally gathers the courage to confide in her mother; predictably, mom sides with step-dad. Soon, Ashley is sent to live with her estranged birth father, David, and his new wife and son. Though he's now a kind man who's put his life-long anger issues behind him, Ashley still struggles to trust her father. His wife, Bev, a high school English teacher, brings Ashley into her extended family of summer school students; a controversial reading assignment, Ironman by Chris Crutcher, provides the novel's other hot-button issues—racism, censorship, homophobia and religious extremism. An over-the-top scandal is followed by Bev's hokey, message-laden testimonial before the local school board. Throughout, Ashley's self-destructive tendencies, conflicted feelings and struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder read authentically; had Fehlbaum focused more on her recovery, rather than a raft of societal woes, this story would have been more powerful. (Sept.)

In this provocative and page-turning debut novel, Hinnefeld (Tell Me Everything and Other Stories) recounts the life of bird-lover, environmental activist and artist Addie Sturmer Kavanagh. Opening with Addie's death from cancer, and her troublesome dying wish—“clear orders for a brazenly illegal burial”—Hinnefeld's narrative migrates to Addie's days as a college art student, when she fell in love with birds and with the professor teaching her their biology, Tom Kavanagh. The early years of Addie and Tom's romance follows their birding and collaboration on an environmental, antiwar birding book destined to become a classic. Soon enough, though, the birth of their daughter, Scarlet, along with Addie's growing political and environmental awareness, relegate romance to the back seat. As Addie's creative vision shifts from avian homage to political tirade, the effects of her outspoken eco-outrage on her daughter, husband and two closest girlfriends are predictable but authentic, and at times moving. Hinnefeld's drama soars, especially in its depiction of Addie's complicated relationship with Scarlet, who's also trying to find her “wings.” (Sept.)

German author Moers has constructed a surreal adventure story inspired by 21 woodcuts by 19th-century French illustrator Gustave Doré, which are interspersed throughout the novel. Readers follow the exploits of a boy named Gustave, the captain of a ship that's destroyed by a storm. After he's blown to high heaven, Gustave meets Death, but instead of going quietly into the arms of the Grim Reaper, Gustave opts to be sent on a quest to complete six impossible tasks. Soon the young adventurer is in the company of naked damsels who hunt dragons, a group of malevolent giants, a crocodile who seduces his prey before he eats them and a huge winged talking pig. Moers infuses his tale with humor and life lessons (the benefits of leading a full life, the necessity of focus and the importance of staying in touch with your imagination). Still, the narrative relies too much on the conceit of plot points being connected through the art, and the material seems like the stuff of children's adventure novels. The illustrations are beautiful, and worth the time to stop and consider. (Sept.)

In this enthralling headscratcher of a first novel, Unferth (the story collection Minor Robberies) weaves an intricate tale of quests and escapes, of leaving and following. As a child, Myers falls out of a window, shattering his skull and unknowingly living the rest of his life with a misshapen head. Years later, he follows his wife, who spends her evenings following a man she doesn't know. The man, whom Myers identifies as a former classmate of his named Gray, is unaware that he is being doubly tracked. The marriages of both men fall apart, and Myers finds himself on “vacation,” traveling in search of Gray while Gray's ex-wife and daughter look for him, too. The problem is that “Gray does not know where Gray is.” If this all sounds puzzling, it is; still, with grace and skill, Unferth manages to weave together the most far-fetched of events. A subplot involving a dolphin “untrainer” and a woman in search of her birth father is distracting, and Unferth's wordplay can verge on the excessive, but a poignancy emerges in spite of Unferth's post-modern indulgences. (Sept.)

After thriving in science fiction (the Arthur C. Clarke Award–winning Air), Ryman takes on the political history of Cambodia in this unsettling if overlong novel. In 2004, U.N. archeologist Luc Andrade discovers a 12th-century memoir written by Jayavarman Seven, one of the first Buddhist kings of a predominantly Hindu kingdom. While transporting the book to safety, Luc is kidnapped by a disgruntled Cambodian army lieutenant-colonel who believes the book should be returned to the people. As Luc fights to stay alive, his Cambodian friends—Map, a former Khmer Rouge murderer who now makes money hustling tourists, and William, a motorcycle taxi driver whose parents were killed during Pol Pot's regime—search for Luc and the ancient treasure. Ryman mixes his contemporary storyline with a less compelling narrative of Jayavarman, a precocious young prince turned exiled warrior king. While Luc's life story and current predicament are particularly well done, Ryman's take on Jayavarman and the development of his battle strategies can be plodding. In the end, it's the vibrant emotional lives of Luc and his friends that capture the tragic beauty of Cambodia. (Sept.)

The ongoing tragedy of the Congo serves as the backdrop for this tepid thriller, Donelson's first novel. After TV newscaster Valerie Grey gets passed over for an evening anchor job at the MBS network, she tries to lose herself in Africa, where she stumbles on a diamond-smuggling scheme involving not only a sleazy American televangelist but also the George W. Bush–like U.S. president. Valerie quickly becomes the target of the conspiracy's members and, predictably, finds herself falling for the hunky idealistic doctor who runs a local clinic. Readers should be prepared for some clunky prose (“Valerie's brown eyes flashed a warning, the green flecks in the irises dancing with anger”). Those seeking a novel that explores human exploitation in 21st-century Africa on the level of, say, John le Carré's The Mission Song will be disappointed. (Sept.)

Near the start of Hunter's cartoonish fifth Bob Lee Swagger thriller (after The 47th Samurai), Nikki Swagger, the series hero's journalist daughter, is seriously injured when a hit man runs her car off the road in Tennessee hill country. Despite Swagger's fears that the legion of enemies he's made over the years are responsible for the attack, the former marine leaves Nikki vulnerable to another attempt on her life in the hospital where she's being treated—an attempt foiled only by chance in the nick of time. Such plot-driven implausibilities are rampant as Swagger investigates his daughter's recent assignments, which lead him to drug-running along the Tennessee-Virginia border and to a NASCAR event. At the violence-filled conclusion, one of the supporting characters, in keeping with the book's overall arms-length relationship with realism, says, “In some perverted way, I think everybody who didn't die or lose their business kind of enjoyed it.” Hunter fans may feel similarly. (Sept.)

Following Jane Austen's untimely death in 1817 at age 41, her “most beloved sister” destroyed most of their correspondence; in her first novel, House of Lords peer Pitkeathley attempts to fill in the gaps through the eyes of Cassandra, Jane's closest confidante and sharpest critic. Cassandra tells of the Austen family's precarious position on the lowest tier of Hampshire's aristocracy, Jane's early attempts at “scribbling” and the crushing romantic disappointments of the two. Throughout, Cassandra's detailed look at her younger sister showcases not only Jane's literary accomplishments and “the low spirits, the anger, even the bitterness in her,” but also her indefatigable romanticism. Cassandra's voice is perfectly pitched, true to Austen's England, and jam-packed with Austen trivia. Descriptions of known events in the sisters' lives, however, tend toward the didactic, especially compared to Pitkeathley's imaginative leaps regarding the sisters' secrets; as such, the seams between actual and imagined history are entirely too visible. Ardent Austen devotees will be undeterred by the uneven narrative, but casual fans may want to pass. (Sept.)

Who wants to read a novel about a leper? Anyone who wants to be enlightened, educated and entertained by bestseller Thayer's (The Weatherman) unusual but awe-inspiring hero. After stumbling on a French-German leper village while serving as a marine captain during WWI, John Severson takes a healthy little girl to safety while his near-mutinous men are ordered to return to the front. After an inquiry ends favorably, Severson returns home to St. Paul, Minn., where he becomes a high school math teacher and is secretly engaged to his favorite student. His happiness shatters after a routine medical check identifies him as a leper. In the wake of the Spanish flu epidemic, this means forced quarantine at Louisiana's Witch Tree leprosarium, which Thayer describes in disturbing and sometimes lurid detail. After escaping from Witch Tree, Severson winds up as the sheriff of Hawaii's Molokai leper colony, a relentless crusader for Hansen's disease sufferers, whose rights as U.S. citizens were too long compromised by fear. This book deserves a wide readership. (Sept.)

Poet Ronk (Vertigo) is an elegant stylist who showcases her narrative wiles in this polished first collection. Often told from a tenuous, trance-like first-person point of view, these “landscapes of estrangement” explore relationships that are painfully evolving, interior-driven and often despairing. “Cones” traces the gradual unraveling of an affair based on “storms and calms”—she is the storms, he the calms—as he slowly withdraws, leaving nothing behind but a faint trace like a “cone of less faded paint” revealed after a piece of furniture is moved. The narrator of “The Gift” speculates on the success and failure of a seemingly perfect romance, while the daughter narrator in “Their Calendar” delineates the chilling uncommunicativeness of her newly retired parents. “La Belle Dame” is a particularly fine example of a narrator's awkward, rather endearing relation to the world around her: at a dinner party, she closely observes the hostess's husband, engrossed in his own “rhapsody of thought,” and recognizes how much she is like him. Ronk's delicate, nuanced renderings are exquisitely crafted and demand careful attention. (Sept.)

At the start of bestseller Brown's discursive seventh crime novel starring master of fox hounds “Sister” Jane Arnold (after The Tell-Tale Horse), Sister is busy showing her hounds in the hunting off-season. Then calamity strikes. At the Mid-America Hound Show in Kentucky, an unpopular master is shot dead with “rat shot” (aka bird shot). Back home in Virginia, a member of Sister's Jefferson Hunt Club disappears. When a veterinarian, despondent over her divorce, apparently commits suicide, Sister decides she can no longer leave matters to the police. As usual, a wealth of fox-hunting lore lends interest, but too many incidentals—a conversation about a saint, the furnishings of Sister's house, a prep school commencement—neither further the plot nor illuminate character. Still, series fans should enjoy catching up with old friends among the Virginia fox-hunting gentry. (Sept.)

Playful, self-deprecating and wickedly sharp, McClanahan's nine autobiographical short stories delve into youthful shenanigans and poignant first love in the late 1940s in Bracken County, Kentucky. McClanahan has an enormously personable style, ambling back in time to his junior year at Maysville High School in “Great Moments in Sports,” when, mooning about the four Stonebreaker sisters like every other horny goat in town, he experienced his greatest moment of coolness and his greatest humiliation. In “Dog Loves Ellie,” a high-school reunion of his Class of '51 prompts the author to revisit magnificent, painful memories of his first major crush, Ellie Chadwick, who invited the gangly youth to the Sadie Hawkins dance and then dumped him for a less worthy suitor named Dog. “Fondelle, or: The Whore with a Heart of God,” the most sparkling of the collection, chronicles the author's early hitchhiking adventure the summer before his senior year in college. A former Merry Prankster, McClanahan muses on the writing life and classic Americana with giddy nostalgia and gently barbed humor.

The unnamed narrator in Duteurtre's unrewardingly whiny novella has something to get off his chest—customer service in the computer age is, it seems, a shambles. Telephones are answered by machines, high school kids are technology gurus, airlines are inflexible, and don't even get him started on the trouble of remembering PINs and passwords. The ensuing 74-page rant takes this frustrated 40-something narrator through all of these experiences and more, as he riffs on all that is wrong with the world today while trying to finish a magazine assignment and change his cell phone plan. The thin plot involves the narrator trying to discover whether the cell phone company's director of customer service actually exists. The catalogue of frustrations will be familiar to everyone, but the many pages of grousing are not cathartic, funny or enlightening. It's like Andy Rooney wrote a French novella. (Sept.)

In this crisp if airless antiwar allegory, poet Hazo traces the efforts of a band of guerrillas as it resists eradication by a murderous, America-backed dictator. Set in an unnamed Spanish-speaking country ruled by a premier named Caseres (who bears a resemblance to any number of autocrats in recent history), the novel moves among various points of view to set up a guerrilla ambush of government troops at the mountain village of Megiddo. The guerrillas are led by an ascetic Corsican, a veteran of wars in Algeria, Ireland and Jerusalem, and aided by embittered rebels like American Vietnam vet Hull and former priest Sabertes. As Caseres, ailing from a heart condition and in love with a singer whose brother is secretly fighting with the Corsican, prepares a crushing assault on the guerrillas, he grooms his ill-prepared son, Radames, to take over. Hazo has a convincingly bleak vision, but the narrative's mechanical feel and allegorical trappings leave the reader at an emotional remove. (Sept.)

Philadelphia homicide detectives Kevin Byrne and Jessica Balzano take on a high-profile cold case in Montanari's superior thriller, which combines a genuinely creepy villain with fully fleshed-out victims. The dead-end inquiry into the drowning death of 17-year-old Caitlin O'Riordan four months earlier gets a boost when someone, privy to details never made public, tips the police to an abandoned building in a bad neighborhood that later turns out to house a second corpse. The stakes are raised even higher when another body turns up, an ex-girlfriend of Byrne's who'd worked for the local district attorney. Segments from the killer's perspective increase the tension, and Montanari (Merciless) does a nice job of concealing one of the murderer's alter egos. The fiend's methods, modeled after elaborate magical tricks, are a welcome change from the gore typical of the serial killer subgenre. Likewise, Byrne and Balzano possess a psychological depth all too rare in such fiction. (Sept.)

Strong characterization and tight plotting distinguish British author Hurley's seventh police procedural to feature Portsmouth Det. Insp. Joe Faraday and Det. Constable Paul Winter. Faraday, unsettled by a recent romantic disappointment, takes charge of a high-profile and extremely challenging case—the death of a man chained to railway tracks in a darkened tunnel. After some heavy digging, Faraday's team manages to identify the dead man as fringe political activist Mark Duley. Before that identification is conclusive, however, Winter fastens on another candidate for the corpse, Alan Givens, who'd worked at the local mortuary. Winter, who almost died of a brain tumor, ends up pursuing a separate investigation that threatens his life and his professional reputation. This entry makes an excellent introduction for first-timers, who are sure to seek out previous books in the series (Blood and Honey, etc.). (Oct.)

At the outset of Galligan's stunning third Montana-set fly-fishing mystery (after 2005's The Blood Knot), Ned “Dog” Oglivie, a self-described “traveling drunk” and “trout hound” who lives out of his asthmatic 1984 Cruise Master RV, has befriended a jailed bull rider's daughter, Jesse Ringer, and her black boyfriend, D'Ontario Sneed. Then, off a mountain road outside Livingston, soon after an ugly encounter with skinheads, Dog finds Jesse shot to death on the ground and Sneed unconscious in Jesse's sealed car, nearly dead of carbon monoxide poisoning. Sneed's earthy mother, Aretha, supplies Dog with comfort and common sense as he seeks to prove Sneed didn't murder Jesse. With a plot as entangled as a drunkard's fishing line, this Big Sky excursion into the wilds of human frailty deftly and surely snags the imagination. The ending offers just a hint, elusive as that legendary brown trout of fishermen's dreams, of redemption for Galligan's beguiling antihero. (Sept.)

In Jones's spirited fourth mystery to feature Philadelphia art therapist Zoe Hayes (after 2007's The Deadly Neighbors), Zoe's discovery of an eviscerated human body on her patio puts a crimp in her wedding plans. When the brothers of her overly protective fiancé, Det. Nick Stiles, arrive in town, Zoe wonders if one of them could be the killer. The stakes rise after a hit-and-run driver, apparently intent on mowing down Zoe and her baby son, strikes a colleague of Zoe's instead. When she discovers that several unstable patients were recently released from the psychiatric institute where she works—including a former student with an unhealthy obsession with Zoe's pregnancy—Zoe realizes she's caught in the middle of something more sinister than just a series of hurdles before her big day. Jones pulls out all the stops in portraying Zoe as crime-solver and bride-to-be, and though there are several unsettling surprises, the resolution is a charmer. (Sept.)

The absence of twists or suspense mars the emotionally muted fifth installment of Magson's Gavin and Palmer series (No Tears for the Lost, etc.). When the police summon Riley Gavin, a British investigative journalist, to a murder scene in the Essex countryside, she recognizes the victim, Helen Bellamy, a fellow reporter. Gavin deliberately downplays her knowledge of Bellamy, failing to mention that the woman was once the love interest of her frequent partner, PI Frank Palmer. Palmer himself comes clean to the authorities, and vows to track down the reporter's killer. He becomes concerned for Gavin's safety after she's offered a lucrative but suspicious job writing for an obscure magazine, East European Trade, which may be connected with some unsavory Russian thugs. Few readers will be surprised to learn there's a link between the publication and Bellamy's murder. (Sept.)

Fans might like to forget Notre Dame's terrible 2007 football season, but it's perfect fodder for McInerny's 12th mystery to feature Knight brothers Roger, a professor, and Philip, a PI (after 2007's Irish Alibi). As the 2007 season progresses, three factions pursue very different agendas. Iggie Willis, an ardent alum, creates a Web site calling for the football coach's dismissal. Other alumni form the Weeping Willow Society and begin demanding answers about such things as the drop in Catholic faculty members. Professor Horst Lipschutz wants Notre Dame to abolish football altogether as part of a larger, more ambitious plan. McInerny produces a lively mix of institutional history and criticism with colorful individual foibles and the obligatory murder. The end result should please any but the most rabid Notre Dame football fan for whom any recall of the 2007 season is too painful. (Sept.)

In Crawford's fun, well-plotted fifth culinary cozy to feature Bernadette and Libby Simmons (after 2007's A Catered Valentine's Day), the sisters cater a fundraiser for the Longely, N.Y., volunteer firemen that includes a high-tech haunted house, formerly the Peabody School. In a room evoking the setting of Poe's “The Pit and the Pendulum,” the severed head that rolls down some stairs and lands at Libby's feet proves to be real. The victim, Amethyst Applegate, had been a student years earlier at the Peabody School, where another student at the time, Bessie Osgood, died under suspicious circumstances. Is Bessie's ghost still haunting the place? Aided by their father, Sean, the town's retired police chief, Bernie and Libby discover that Amethyst, a notorious home wrecker, had no lack of enemies. A selection of delectable seasonal recipes rounds out the volume. (Sept.)

The five stories in this outstanding collection from Mankell (Faceless Killers) provide glimpses into Kurt Wallander's early life as a policeman as well as paint evocative portraits of contemporary Swedish society. An unremarkable businessman is poisoned in “The Man on the Beach” but—in typical Mankell fashion—the case is larger, more complex and more interesting than it first appears. In the volume's best entry, “The Death of the Photographer,” Simon Lamberg takes studio portraits of weddings and children, but a couple of nights each week, he uses his darkroom to distort published photographs of politicians and newsworthy people for a macabre personal scrapbook. It's a bizarre hobby, but the cause of Lamberg's brutal, apparently senseless death is an even stranger puzzle. Like the Wallander novels, these stories rank among the finest police procedurals being written today. (Sept.)

Manus's debut depicts a mystery entirely through a blog devoted to noir, but the execution fails to match the intriguing concept. L.G. Fickel lets her audience in on a traumatic event she witnesses—the suicide of a man who jumps in front of a train at the Mass Avenue T station in Boston. Fickel, at least as she relates the story, soon moves from being merely a witness to becoming a person of interest once the police discover that the platform encounter she had with the dead man wasn't her first. Her accounts of her experiences with the official investigators provoke a slew of theories from posters to her blog, including one that the police are lurking on the Web site to get incriminating details from Fickel herself. Manus does a nice job of keeping the reader off balance as to what, if anything, has actually happened, but even Web-savvy readers may find the sniping and bickering of the posters, complete with crude insults, tough slogging. (Sept.)

Set in modern Istanbul and narrated by a nameless transvestite, this first in Somer's Hop-Çiki-Yaya series is a strange blend of blithe and bloody, more about atmosphere than the mystery itself. A serial killer is murdering transvestites, and the narrator, who kick-boxes for fun and owns part of a nightclub, decides to investigate when police commissioner Selçuk Tanyer and his staff are unable to solve the killings. Cute dialogue and breezy descriptions undercut the seriousness of the crimes, even as the author strives to make a statement about Turkey's treatment of the transvestite community. While the resolution may be pat and the more graphic elements unsettling, the interesting narrator and exotic elements of Turkish culture will appeal to many readers. (Sept.)

This vivid sequel to 2007's The Sunrise Lands opens in 2021, a generation after the Change that brought magic back into the world and made electric and explosive power inoperative. New post-industrial societies have risen, some seeking to restore technology and some celebrating its demise. One of the latter is the Church Universal and Triumphant, a group of genocidal Luddites with a prophetic theology that is more Dark Ages than New Age. Clan leader Rudi MacKenzie frequently butts heads with the “Cutters” and their Prophet as he struggles to cross the devastated Eastern “Death Zones” and reach Nantucket Island, birthplace of the Change, where he hopes to understand and perhaps reverse the replacement of technology with myth and magic. Stirling (The Sunrise Lands) eloquently describes a devastated, mystical world that will appeal to fans of traditional fantasy as well as post-apocalyptic SF. (Sept.)

The breathless third installment of Farland's second Runelords quartet opens with the cliffhanger from 2007's Sons of the Oak: flameweaver wizard Fallion Orden, son of the Earth King, is trapped by fiendish Lord Despair in a savage new world Fallion himself had made by melding two realities. Fallion has rejected “endowments,” transfers of power or skill that leave the donor drained of the attribute they bestow on the recipient, but his lover, Rhianna, her foster sister, warrior maiden Talon, and Talon's noble idol, the Emir Tuul Ra, accept numerous endowments, vowing to pay any price to rescue Fallion from Rugassa, where torture is an art. Oscillating between lurid depictions of blood-soaked vistas and heroic tales of noble adolescent saviors, Farland attempts to leaven the violence with enchanting parallel-world landscapes and charming minor characters, but the atmosphere overall is unrelentingly gloomy. Nonetheless, this series promises to continue as long as stalwart-stomached readers can keep turning its grisly pages. (Sept.)

Culture clashes resound through this multi-layered coming-of-age tale from fantasist Baker (The Anvil of the World). Shaped in movements like a verbal symphony, the novel follows half-demon foundling Gard from a pastoral childhood punctuated with vicious raids by the savage Riders. Gard's willingness to kill in self-defense leads to a career as gladiator and sex slave under the insatiable Lady Pirihine and his training as a powerful mage, all contrasted with and eventually tied into the Gospel-like story of the Star, a John the Baptist–like figure, and the Child, a young girl who becomes a saint. Somehow this unusual and mostly charming mélange of basic fantasy motifs, fair and feral landscapes, and ironic characterizations ranging from gentle to raucous all comes together harmoniously, like extended variations on the theme that achieving adulthood is not for fainthearted sissies. (Sept.)

In this fascinatingly flawed fourth episode in the bloody horror-noir chronicles of New York vampire PI Joe Pitt (after 2007's Half the Blood Of Brooklyn), relations between the city's vampire clans are unraveling. The Cure is researching antidotes to the ravenous vampire-creating Vyrus, while the better-nourished Coalition seeks the Cure's downfall and the Society plays both sides. Dodging death threats and brokering shaky deals, Pitt shuttles among all three until he learns the Coalition's secret, a revelation so volatile that it may lead to all-out war. Huston supplies terse dialogue and convincing gore in expertly pitched prose, but the beautifully cinematic nastiness doesn't quite mask a key difficulty: Pitt's enemies set their hate aside too easily at his appearance, and their rational behavior is at odds with the emotional intensity (and sheer implausibility) of the climax. Newcomers may find the relationships difficult to parse, but those familiar with the series should be enthralled. (Sept.)

Book eight in the intensifying Malazan series (following 2007's Reaper's Gale) sees the grinding, bloody clash of newly created deities against longstanding, increasingly powerful Gods. The Crippled God, born in the city of Darujhistan, and the Dying God, who bleeds a poison that enthralls and addicts his followers, both vie for a place in the formal pantheon, using humans and the goddess-descended Tiste Andii as pawns in their unholy, greedy game. Warrior-hero Anomander Rake subtly manipulates the factions from the sidelines. Finally, the gods' slaves and representatives and the common people of the Darujhistan meet in one dark, thunderous, transformative night. This is a praiseworthy entry in the massive series encompassing multitudes of characters, complex plot lines and grotesque violence, but it's not lightweight in tone or in heft, and new readers will be entirely at sea. (Sept.)

An unseen bell haunts a seaside town and a magical mansion in this delicate fable from World Fantasy Award winner McKillip (Od Magic). Inside the baffling Aislinn House, young chambermaid Emma, opening an ordinary cabinet door, might find a rack of towels or encounter knights, crows and a lonely princess. As Lady Eglantyne, the ancient matron of the house, lies dying, her long-lost grand-niece is sent for. The townspeople are delighted by wealthy, city-bred Miranda Beryl, but suspicious of her eagerness to make herself at home and inherit the house—spellbound bell and all. Meanwhile, vacationing academic Ridley Dow's interest in Aislinn House hints at another motive for his visit to the village beside the ocean. Romantic intrigue and touches of this fantastic make this light mystery an easy and pleasant read. (Sept.)

After a brutal assault, New York artist Kate Corbin attempts to make a new life for herself and her family in the small town of Wickfield in this suspenseful but ultimately unsatisfying mystery. After she voices her suspicions that their strange, doll-collecting neighbor is to blame for a series of abductions and murders, Kate's sanity is called into question by her frustrated husband, rebellious teenage daughter, Grace, and even the local police. Then Grace goes missing, and Kate knows that she can rely on no one but herself. Drake (The Next Killing) heightens this thriller with depictions of the perverse, sadistic killer, who leaves a nude photo of each victim as a signature memento. The conclusion leaves too many questions unanswered and plotlines unresolved, and the killer's motivations make little sense, but readers will enjoy Kate's passionate and intelligent sleuthing. (Sept.)

Force's debut contemporary reads like an overly long category romance. Ryan Sanderson, three-time Super Bowl–winning quarterback for the Denver Mavericks, interrupts his almost-ex-wife, Susannah, while she's dining with her new fiancé, Henry, and his parents. Ryan threatens to slow the divorce proceedings, delaying Susannah and Henry's wedding, unless she allows him to woo her until their marriage legally dissolves in 10 days. Susannah capitulates, and after they finally communicate with one another about the stillbirth that destroyed their marriage, their passion reignites. When Henry reappears on the scene, however, the story falters. Henry, who has loved Susannah for years, always tried to get between her and Ryan, and she seems to have meekly tolerated it. Susannah's passivity and poor judgment reflect poorly on her, and Henry has few positive qualities. Ryan, on the other hand, is a good guy desperate to fix past mistakes, a terrific change of pace from the typical reluctant hero. (Sept.)

Wells (Scandal's Daughter) sets bedrooms ablaze with more than candles in this sex-drenched tale set in 1817 London. Maxwell Brooke, a dangerous operative for the Home Office, has unexpectedly become a duke, thanks to an arson that killed the four heirs ahead of him. Determined to bring the suspected perpetrators to justice, he has jailed Reverend Stephen Holt, who may know their whereabouts. Outraged, Holt's sister, widowed Lady Kate Fairchild, threatens to publish a diary that could embarrass high figures in government unless her brother is freed. Although the scandals are real, she hasn't actually written the book yet, and the handwritten volume Max steals from her home contains only Kate's sexual fantasies. He kidnaps her (on the thinnest of pretexts) and begins to make her dreams come true, despite her blushes and his moral compunctions. The predictable mix of romance and intrigue nonetheless has sparks of genuine passion that will keep readers turning the pages. (Sept.)

Dawson (Never Say Never) introduces two sexy and evenly matched ex–military ops heroes, Mark Callahan and Annabelle Monroe, in this heart-pounding romantic thriller. After a short-lived marriage and months of estrangement, Mark and Annabelle finally divorce, only to be reunited unexpectedly when an old friend, a member of their covert ops unit, is murdered. When they discover that multiple members of their unit have died mysterious deaths, they are determined to find the murderer before he can strike again. Explicit love scenes scorch the pages as their relationship reignites and Mark comes to terms with dark secrets from his past. While the conclusion is somewhat predictable, it alludes to the possibility of a sequel featuring this tough, high-energy duo. (Sept.)

Video gamers should enjoy this byproduct of a popular franchise. As game creator Mechner explains in an afterword, the original Prince of Persia was widely played in the early 1990s and famed as one of the few video games that had a story line with literary merit. It's been upgraded several times with somewhat different versions of the hero, which Mechner justifies as reflecting the fluid, dreamlike nature of Eastern storytelling. Sina's script for this book lays out two stories simultaneously, echoing and overlapping each other. In the 9th- and again in the 13th-century Persian city of Marv, a rightful prince is denied the throne, a vizier lusts for power, a courageous damsel fights for her lover, etc. The characters can't be sure whether their knowledge of events comes from memory or prophecy, creating a multi-leveled narrative that reflects the game, although readers will need to keep track of which hero is performing on a given page. There's plenty of action, and the artwork by Pham and Puvilland is suitably vigorous and exotic; however, without the thrill of participating in the action on-screen, reader involvement is limited. (Sept.)

Faust is the Stateside release of a McSweeney's-style Japanese literary journal of short fantastical fiction by young authors for an anime and manga audience. The manga included in the back of the book is flashy and exquisitely drawn but painfully short; this volume is primary a work of prose. An excerpt from an xxxHOLiC “light novel” (a short genre novel aimed at young adult readers) opens the book; unfortunately, the interesting part of CLAMP's manga is the artwork, and in prose form the story is lacking. The highlight of the book is Otaro Maijo's “Drill Hole in My Brain,” a piece of pop culture–filled, avant-garde pornography written in the style of William S. Burroughs or Mark Leyner. A boy with a screwdriver stuck in his brain narrates a brilliant psychedelic stream-of-consciousness sexual fantasy that takes place inside his head. “F-Sensei's Pocket” is a surprising and delightful story of what happens when the two most hated girls in class come into the possession of several magical items from Doraemon. The many amusing self-referential nods to the publisher Kodansha and copyright infringement add to the fresh, contemporary feel of the piece. “The Garden of Sinners” excerpt is hindered by a hard-to-follow shifting perspective and a particularly nonsensical philosophy of flying. (Aug.)

Although Inoue's imported teen sport-romance manga Slam Dunk—a big hit back in Japan—is ostensibly about the love of basketball, it really starts out as a chronicle of love and rejection in high school. The series' towering, red-haired hero, Hanamichi Sakuragi, is first shown in utter dejection, after having been rejected by 50 girls in a row (apparently, people are keeping count). But saving him from utter despair is the appearance of the angelic Haruko Akagi, who flirtatiously swoons over his stature and wonders whether or not he plays basketball. After some gentle considerations of whether he's interested (“If only I could walk her to school!! Then I could die happy”) Hanamichi sets about trying to get on the basketball team. Haruko disappears from the pages not long after she has conveniently set the plot device in motion, leaving Inoue free to depict Hanamichi's attempts be accepted by the arrogant upperclassmen who dominate the team. It comes as a disappointment to Hanamichi—a hot-tempered kid who prefers to pick fights and slam dunk than learn how to actually play the game,—that winning Haruko's heart is going to take some work. Inoue's pacing is frantic, if somewhat padded, but he manages to maintain a welcome sense of humor amid all the adolescent gamesmanship. (Aug.)

Robinson (Box Office Poison, Tricked) returns with his latest, a high-concept graphic novella. In 2010, mild-mannered software engineer Andrew Wicks goes to a hypnotist to quit smoking, but wakes up from his trance to find himself in high school in 1985. While the “Peggy Sue Quits Smoking” premise could have been disastrous, with this slim volume, Robinson cements his reputation as a master cartoonist. The art is exceptional. His characters are all visually distinct, with subtle facial expressions and body language. He uses layout and even lettering to establish mood and keep the reader firmly fixed through complicated shifts in time, place and perception. Two sequences—the initial hypnosis scene and a later confrontation between two characters—are bravura performances, using innovative but still clear ways of depicting complicated inner monologues. Unfortunately, while Robinson has mastered the “graphic,” his skill with the “novel” lags behind, with some wordy dialogue and occasional narrative clunkers: one piece of foreshadowing is so clumsy it reads better as a typographical error. When Robinson the writer catches up with Robinson the artist, watch out. Even with its flaws, this is still a master class in graphic storytelling. (July)

Last year's The Savage Detectives by the late Chilean-Mexican novelist Bolaño (1953–2003) garnered extraordinary sales and critical plaudits for a complex novel in translation, and quickly became the object of a literary cult. This brilliant behemoth is grander in scope, ambition and sheer page count, and translator Wimmer has again done a masterful job.

The novel is divided into five parts (Bolaño originally imagined it being published as five books) and begins with the adventures and love affairs of a small group of scholars dedicated to the work of Benno von Archimboldi, a reclusive German novelist. They trace the writer to the Mexican border town of Santa Teresa (read: Juarez), but there the trail runs dry, and it isn't until the final section that readers learn about Benno and why he went to Santa Teresa. The heart of the novel comes in the three middle parts: in “The Part About Amalfitano,” a professor from Spain moves to Santa Teresa with his beautiful daughter, Rosa, and begins to hear voices. “The Part About Fate,” the novel's weakest section, concerns Quincy “Fate” Williams, a black American reporter who is sent to Santa Teresa to cover a prizefight and ends up rescuing Rosa from her gun-toting ex-boyfriend. “The Part About the Crimes,” the longest and most haunting section, operates on a number of levels: it is a tormented catalogue of women murdered and raped in Santa Teresa; a panorama of the power system that is either covering up for the real criminals with its implausible story that the crimes were all connected to a German national, or too incompetent to find them (or maybe both); and it is a collection of the stories of journalists, cops, murderers, vengeful husbands, prisoners and tourists, among others, presided over by an old woman seer.

It is safe to predict that no novel this year will have as powerful an effect on the reader as this one. (Nov.)