Fiction Reviews

Morgan's enchanting debut follows the travails of a young woman who moves to Kentucky with her bereaved lover in 1984. Aloma, herself an orphan from a young age, leaves her job at the mission school where she was raised to help her taciturn boyfriend, Orren, with his family farm after his family is killed in a car accident. Once at the farm, he retreats into himself and working the land, leaving Aloma to wrestle with her desire to pursue her dream of being a concert pianist. As her relationship with Orren becomes “more collision than cohabitation,” Aloma finds in a local preacher a deep friendship that complicates her feelings for Orren, who drags his feet on marrying her. Young Aloma's growing understanding of love and devotion in the midst of deep despair is delicately and persuasively rendered through the lens of belief—be it in religion, relationships or music. Morgan's prose holds the rhythm of the local dialect beautifully, evoking the land, the farming lifestyle and Aloma's awakening with stirring clarity. (Apr.)

One of the young African men in this WWII novel is so proud of his new military boots that he hangs them by the laces around his neck and starts a fashion trend in his village, providing one of many powerful and poignant images that fill Bandele's distinctive first novel. The story chronicles the Chindits, a band of African soldiers enlisted by the British military and sent to Burma to fight the Japanese. Among them is Farabiti Banana, a 14-year-old Nigerian who becomes a soldier to follow the lead of his friends and hopes the military will make him a man. Once out of training, life becomes increasingly dangerous for Banana and his eight fellow Chindits, and by the novel's climax, he's become a man, but at a great cost. Bandele favors a straight-ahead style fueled by imagery and wordplay, and his perspective on heavily traveled literary territory is refreshing and even endearing. (Apr.)

Heller (What Was She Thinking?; Notes on a Scandal) puts to pointed use her acute observations of human nature in her third novel, a satire of 1960s idealism soured in the early 21st century. Audrey and Joel Litvinoff have attempted to pass on to their children their lefty passions—despite Audrey's decidedly bourgeois attitude and attorney Joel's self-satisfied heroism, including the defense of a suspected terrorist in 2002 New York City. When Joel has a stroke and falls into a coma, Audrey grows increasingly nasty as his secrets surface. The children, meanwhile, wander off on their own adventures: Rosa's inherited principles are beleaguered by the unpleasant realities of her work with troubled adolescents; Karla, her self-image crushed by Audrey, has settled into an uncomfortable marriage and the accompanying pressure to have children; and adopted Lenny, the best metaphor for the family's troubles, dawdles along as a drug addict and master manipulator. Though some may be initially put off by the characters' coldness—the Litvinoffs are a severely screwed-up crew—readers with a certain mindset will have a blast watching things get worse. (Mar.)

Brennert's mostly successful follow-up to his book club phenomenon, Moloka'i, chronicles the lives of Asian immigrants in and around Hawaii's early 20th-century glamour days. As the tale begins, readers meet young Regret, whose name speaks volumes of her value in turn-of-the-20th-century Korea. Emboldened by her desire to be educated, Regret commits herself as a mail-order bride to a prosperous man in Hawaii, where girls are allowed to attend school. But when she arrives, she finds her new husband is a callous plantation worker with drinking and gambling problems. Soon, Regret (now known as Jin) and her fellow picture brides must discover their own ways to prosper in America and find that camaraderie and faith in themselves goes a long way. Brennert takes perhaps too much care in creating an encyclopedic portrait of Hawaii in the early 1900s, festooning the central narrative with trivia and cultural minutiae by the boatload. Luckily, Jin's story should be strong enough to pull readers through the clutter. (Mar.)

Here's the Cliff Notes you wished you'd had for King Lear—the mad royal, his devious daughters, rhyming ghosts and a castle full of hot intrigue—in a cheeky and ribald romp that both channels and chides the Bard and “all Fate's bastards.” It's 1288, and the king's fool, Pocket, and his dimwit apprentice, Drool, set out to clean up the mess Lear has made of his kingdom, his family and his fortune—only to discover the truth about their own heritage. There's more murder, mayhem, mistaken identities and scene changes than you can remember, but bestselling Moore (You Suck) turns things on their head with an edgy 21st-century perspective that makes the story line as sharp, surly and slick as a game of Grand Theft Auto. Moore confesses he borrows from at least a dozen of the Bard's plays for this buffet of tragedy, comedy and medieval porn action. It's a manic, masterly mix—winning, wild and something today's groundlings will applaud. (Feb.)

McGarrity's 12th Kevin Kerney novel (after Death Song) displays the author's usual fine sense of place along with an unusual amount of gore. When escaped convict Craig Larson goes on a rampage that includes the murder of Riley Burke, a neighbor and business partner of former Santa Fe police chief Kerney, that's enough to bring Kerney, at least temporarily, out of retirement—and back from London, where Kerney's wife is a U.S. embassy employee. Larson's crime spree becomes more deadly as he tacks back and forth as far south as Texas and north almost to Colorado. Kerney, acting as a special investigator with the New Mexico State Police, and his lawman son, Clayton Istee, partner up for the statewide manhunt. McGarrity is particularly adept at portraying multijurisdictional investigations. While this isn't a good starting place for newcomers, series fans will relish the deepening relationship of Kerney and Istee, who only recently learned they were father and son. (Jan.)

Downie, from 1991 until early 2008 the Washington Post's executive editor, delivers a nicely executed newsroom procedural in his fiction debut. Sarah Page, a Washington Capital investigative reporter who's been assigned to the national politics staff after being chastised for a romantic involvement with a colleague, is covering the presidential race between Democrat Monroe Capehart, an elderly Pennsylvania senator, and Republican Warner Wylie, the U.S. vice president. The race escalates after Susan Cameron, California's popular junior senator, becomes Capehart's running mate. Those looking for similarities between Cameron and Sarah Palin will be disappointed, but the same dramatic possibility that haunts the real campaign occurs shortly after the election is decided. Downie (Justice Denied) exposes corruption at the highest levels and shows how national security trumps pretty much everything, including justice, in an entertaining if familiar tale of murder, cover-ups and personal courage. (Jan.)

This stellar legal thriller from bestseller Patterson (Exile) both informs and entertains. On the eve of getting a divorce, Damon Pierce, a 40-year-old partner in a huge San Francisco, Calif., law firm, who specializes in international litigation, e-mails Marissa Brand, a woman he was once in love with in college, to update her on his life. Marissa is married to Bobby Okari, a firebrand reformer whose Nigeria-like country, Luandia, is awash in oil. With these riches come the usual scenarios: ecological disasters, a brutal dictator with murderous henchmen, a rapacious foreign oil company and an oppressed populace. After everyone in Okari's village is slaughtered, Bobby is arrested for the lynching of three oil workers. Damon, because he's a good man and because he's still in love with Marissa, signs on to defend Bobby from the bogus charge. Patterson has exerted all his considerable skill in creating a nightmare atmosphere that will cling to readers long after the last page is turned. Author tour. (Jan.)

Noonan's timely debut tells the Pat Tillmanesque tale of a football star turned soldier gunned down in Iraq by friendly fire. Abby, John Stanton's widowed wife, wants answers from the tight-lipped military who insist John was killed by an “insurgent,” and John's parents want him lauded in a hero's burial in Arlington cemetery. Meanwhile, the real killer, a psychopath in John's battalion, comes home and wants to take over John's once-charmed life. Written with great insight into military families and the constant struggle between supporting the troops but not the war, Noonan delivers a fast-paced, character-driven tale with a touch of mystery. Her only misstep is revealing the killer's identity too early—a forgivable sin in this otherwise respectable drama. (Jan.)

Neuroscientist and debut novelist Genova mines years of experience in her field to craft a realistic portrait of early onset Alzheimer's disease. Alice Howland has a career not unlike Genova's—she's an esteemed psychology professor at Harvard, living a comfortable life in Cambridge with her husband, John, arguing about the usual (making quality time together, their daughter's move to L.A.) when the first symptoms of Alzheimer's begin to emerge. First, Alice can't find her Blackberry, then she becomes hopelessly disoriented in her own town. Alice is shocked to be diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's (she had suspected a brain tumor or menopause), after which her life begins steadily to unravel. She loses track of rooms in her home, resigns from Harvard and eventually cannot recognize her own children. The brutal facts of Alzheimer's are heartbreaking, and it's impossible not to feel for Alice and her loved ones, but Genova's prose style is clumsy and her dialogue heavy-handed. This novel will appeal to those dealing with the disease and may prove helpful, but beyond the heartbreaking record of illness there's little here to remember. (Jan.)

In this outstanding supernatural thriller from bestseller Burke (Kidnapped), her first venture into paranormal territory, Tyler Hawthorne, a British officer wounded at Waterloo, receives a memento mori ring on the battlefield from “Messenger” Lucien Adrian deVille, Lord Varre. The ring grants the wearer immortality, but in exchange Tyler must forever comfort the dying. Tyler also gets Shade, a black cemetery dog, for protection. In the present, a salvage diver uncovers Adrian's remains in a ship sunk in the Caribbean in 1815. A resurrected Adrian uses the diver to help locate Tyler in Los Angeles, where Tyler is attending to a leukemia patient. Tyler, an ageless 24, has also fallen for wealthy Amanda Clarke, who's haunted by family members killed in an accident that she survived. Mutual attraction and a dedication to do good unite the pair against the evil Adrian. Shade lends a distinctive Dean Koontzian flavor to the action, while Charlaine Harris fans will appreciate Amanda's ghostly abilities. (Jan.)

A veteran of Seattle's rock scene chronicles the darkly comic ups and downs of L.A. foursome Blood Orphans, who've stumbled into Amsterdam to play the last dates of a tour that has gone disastrously wrong. Led by mohawked female manager Joey and male lead singer Darlo, the group had been primed to become the next big thing, but after a rock journalist pegs the band's lyrics as racist, things crumble—a night in jail, a riot, dismal record sales and the band gets dropped as the opener on an Aerosmith tour. Told in retrospective with alternating chapters from Joey's, Darlo's and many other points of view—including eczema-ridden bass player Bobby, drummer and sex addict Shane and nice guy guitar player Adam, who tries to keep the band mates from tearing each other apart—the sometimes predictable Behind the Music retrospective framework is enlivened by characterizations as deep as would seem allowable for such a narcissistic gang and industry, brisk observations about the pitfalls of fame, and often funny banter among the dueling inhabitants of a sinking musical ship. (Jan.)

Robinson's atmospheric and dreary first novel (after story collection Officer Friendly) revolves around a man gone missing in a blizzard. Bennie, a 20-something college dropout, scratches out a middling existence in rural Maine and lives with his taciturn brother, Littlefield, in their family's rotting mansion. The brothers don't have much going for them, and things get worse after a mishap during a paintball game. During the match, played during a blizzard, Bennie falls into a gorge and badly hurts himself, and a drifter member of the opposing team disappears. His body isn't recovered, and nobody's sure if he just picked up and left town or was murdered. But Littlefield and Bennie's friend Julian both call attention to themselves by behaving strangely, and when Bennie's twin sister, Gwen, comes back for a visit, she and Helen, a young woman working for Julian who catches Bennie's eye, help Bennie ferret out the truth about the missing man. Though the labored shifts between past and present detract from the narrative's understated power, Robinson does a magnificent job of painting a bleak and vivid picture of a rough-hewn community and the bonds that hold it together. (Jan.)

Clunky pacing and cartoonish characters weigh down Vincent's third crime thriller, set in Las Vegas in 1980. Amid efforts by Nick Conti, the producer and chief writer of The Strip, a popular PI TV series, to keep the local Mafia from interfering and getting a cut of the show's action, Conti finds time to do it all. He negotiates with Hollywood moguls, soothes wounded TV star egos, offers his irresistible self up to fawning actresses and slugs it out with mobsters with names like Carlo and Fats. The rapid-fire two- and three-page chapters give the book a cut-and-paste feel that may work on film, but leaves readers with too little explanation for what just happened. Worse, most of the characters talk the same way—clipped, jaded and very, very with it. Himself a former writer and producer at Spelling Productions, Vincent (Mafia Summer) includes many real-life details and personages from Vegas's past, but the result is a story that reads like a superficial TV script. (Jan.)

In bestseller Cannell's implausible ninth Shane Scully crime thriller (after Three Shirt Deal), Scully is unceremoniously dismissed from the LAPD after striking a plea bargain to avoid prosecution for blackmailing a movie actress, Tiffany Roberts, who was seeking a hit man to off her unsavory husband. Outraged at reports that Scully slept with Roberts, Scully's wife, who's chief of detectives, throws him out. Eventually, the ex-cop lands an entry-level job in Haven Park, a city known for “the most corrupt police department in California.” Early on, a plot twist casts Scully's disgrace in a new light, but it might have packed more of a punch had it not been so telegraphed. The stakes rise after the detective's new colleagues on the Haven Park police force recruit him to hobble the political aspirations of a reform candidate for mayor. Unfortunately, this effort lacks the humor and realism that marked the author's acclaimed TV creations, such as The Rockford Files and Wiseguy. Author tour. (Jan.)

An assemblage of troubled grotesques struggle to retain identity and humanity in an alternately menacing and mysterious Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, under Soviet rule in the 1970s and 1980s. The late Gavelis's first translation into English centers on Vytautas Vargalys, a semijustifiably paranoid labor camp survivor who works at a library no one visits while he desperately investigates the “Them” or “They” responsible for dehumanizing and killing the humans around him, including his wife, Irena; his genius friend, Gedis; and the young siren, Lolita. Meanwhile, failed intellectual Martynas chronicles Vargalys's struggle and the city's mysterious energy in his “mlog,” library worker Stefanija Monkeviciute dwells on her wavering faith and personal humiliations, and the city itself speaks in the voice of a dog, claiming that Vilnius can't distinguish dreams from reality. Wrought—and fraught—with symbolism and ennui, the oppressive internal monologues of the characters and the city show the intense importance and equal absurdity of life. (Jan.)

A classic dime-store plot involving a trio destined for tragedy gets a stagy, gilded treatment by French novelist Laurrent, in English translation for the first time. At age 40, Clovis Baccara is a successful Parisian financial wheeler-dealer and lothario love struck by the sight of his longtime business partner's young intended, Veronica. Oscar, the would-be groom, has gotten increasingly paranoid about their life of white-collar crime, and the marriage marks his resolve to “get out of the business and start a family.” That plan goes awry when the police apprehend Oscar on his wedding day. Of course, he's left instructions for Clovis, the only man he can trust, to take his bride to the couple's honeymoon suite in Malibu and wait for his release. Clovis makes himself miserable trying to ignore Veronica's charms, and the animosity builds between them over the next several days, leading to the inevitable détente. Driven more by baroque description than actual plot, this over-the-top performance is a titillating comic romance with a heavy accent. (Jan.)

This compilation of six short stories from the late Taiwanese novelist Guo (1938–2005) is a quiet meditation on overarching themes in Taiwan's history told through its troubled citizens. “Moon Seal” follows new bride Wenhui and her ailing groom, Tiemin, who suffers from tuberculosis. In Taipei after the war, Wenhui becomes more nurse than spouse to her ailing husband, and finds herself struggling to cope after he regains his health. In “Wailing Moon,” a widow visits a funeral parlor at midnight to sit at the side of her newly deceased husband and interrogate their past together, desperately hoping for answers before his body is taken away. “Running Mother” concerns a middle-aged man who, overwhelmed by recurring dreams of his unpredictable mother, attempts to decipher his complicated maternal issues with the help of his old friend, a psychiatrist. Though each story is translated by a different writer, Guo's compassion, insight and understated style shine through, tying his characters' lives to the contemporary cultural questions with grace and skill. (Jan.)

The Ukrainian-Canadian housewives of idyllic 1960s Kalyna Beach, Ontario, find that show business scandal has far-reaching power in this latest from Canadian novelist Keefer, her first published in the U.S. While their husbands work, former model Sonia Martyn and friends spend the summer of 1963 watching their children on the beach and reading racy books to discuss over Friday cocktails, while the kids test the limits of their mothers' supervisory skills and traditional Ukrainian values. Moms and daughters alike have become enchanted by the new film Cleopatra and the scandalous love affair between stars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. When the beautiful, sad wife of a local millionaire embarks on her own misbegotten affair, the ladies of Kalyna Beach feel their familiar world shift, opening up novel possibilities for freedom and betrayal. Keefer neatly captures the security and claustrophobia of immigrant communities, but diffuses her story's power with too many points of view. Just as the ladies' books cannot match the drama in their lives, this story only begins to capture the personal cost of immigration and assimilation. (Jan.)

In this haunting collection of linked short stories, Romano (When the World Was Young) explores the Italian immigrant experience in Chicago. Primarily set in the 1950s, several stories are narrated by Michelino and Giacomo as boys. These stories expand to include tales told through the eyes of their mother, Lucia, and later their own wives and daughters. Romano also examines the family from the outside in, such as the story “No Balls,” when Giacomo's coach vents his frustration when Lucia forces her son to eat so much that he's overweight for his wrestling match. In “Comic Books,” Giacomo learns a difficult lesson when he sees how his friend Angelo “earns” a motorbike from a local merchant. The overwhelming themes of love, loss, grief, struggle and isolation are expressed in unsentimental and sometimes even desperate prose. Dreams, and the failure to reach those dreams, choices, risks and settling (or not settling) permeate this moving collection of tales that will stay with the reader long after the book is shut. (Jan.)

The unhappy wife of a fireman in 1970 realizes too late that her independence comes at a high price in Riggs's often heavy-handed novel. Early pregnancy forced Cassie Johnson into a marriage and a life she wasn't sure she wanted. Her husband Peck's job as their small South Carolina town's fire chief prevents him from giving her the attention she craves. Cassie finds solace in the arms of another fireman, Clay Taylor, and leaves town with him, determined to start over, but when she realizes she's just repeating her mistakes, she flees to her mother in the mountains for some soul searching. Soon she realizes the unexpected and tragic consequences of her actions. Riggs's 1970s South bears little resemblance to the South of social turmoil, and he overuses tired metaphors of rain, drought and oppressive humidity. But despite Cassie's lack of complexity, Riggs captures her internal life well and gives her conflicts legitimacy and gravitas. (Jan.)

Sundaresan (The Twentieth Wife) bluntly questions how evolved the globalized world truly is in these stories of individuals trapped between India's archaic traditions and blitz into modernity. In “Three and a Half Seconds,” Meha and Chandar's arranged but loving marriage blossoms regardless of the unease they feel regarding the violent peculiarities of their son, Bikaner. As their humble but hard working lives wind down, they become victims of abuse in the home that they share with Bikaner and his wife. In “The Faithful Wife,” Ram, a journalist, is called home by his grandmother to intervene in a sati, the immolation of a widow on her husband's funeral pyre. The widow in this case is a 12-year-old girl. Finally, in “Hunger,” two women re-evaluate their own worth as well as their own definitions of love and happiness. The stories are sobering, all the more so for Sundaresan's nuanced character work and blistering social critique; she doesn't pull any punches in her heartbreaking and sometimes repulsive portrayals of oppressors and victims. (Dec.)

In this disturbing paranormal thriller, the second in a trilogy (after Blood Dreams) from bestseller Hooper, Noah Bishop, of the FBI's Special Crimes Unit, and Haven, “a civilian investigative organization,” take on the fanatical Rev. Adam Deacon Samuel. At age 10, Samuel murdered his abusive prostitute mother by using psychic powers, which a few years later increased after lightning struck him during a tent revival. Noah and his colleagues suspect Samuel, the leader of the Church of the Everlasting Sin, of killing at least eight people via supernatural means and of abusing young girls to enhance his powers. Tessa Gray, a Haven operative posing as a recent widow, reluctantly infiltrates Samuel's compound in the small town of Grace, N.C., near where the body of a fellow Haven operative surfaced in a river. Hooper pulls out all the stops in depicting the unholy preacher's apocalyptic breakdown as Noah's elite team tackles one of their nastiest assignments yet. (Dec.)

Set in Peru's capital city, this spare, unsentimental novel examines the far-reaching and life-changing consequences of sexual obsession. Carlos Bluhm, a married father of two, is enjoying an outing at a sleazy club in 1986 when he meets 15-year-old Juana Maria Fernandez, a dancer working two jobs and living in the slums. Maria is the polar opposite of Carlos's Germanic wife, Sophie, and he is immediately captivated by her. After Carlos takes Maria away for an illicit vacation, Sophie discovers her husband's affair and moves her sons, her mother-in-law and all of the house's possessions while Bluhm is on vacation with his mistress, leaving Bluhm to come home to an empty house. The second half of the book flashes forward 20 years, revealing Carlos and Maria uneasily living together and beginning to drift apart. Trying to preserve the lifestyle she's come to depend upon, Maria makes desperate attempts to keep Carlos under her spell. While the story ends with a whimper, the finely tuned human drama and subversion of the happily-ever-after drive home the setup's inherent sadness. (Dec.)

Lauded Chilean author Coloane (1910–2000) fills his stories with adventures in a bygone era of rough men and unforgiving landscapes. The title story examines baser human nature, following two hired soldiers and prospectors who quit their greedy employer and help each other survive long enough to betray each other as they discover their own source of gold. The protagonist of “The Empty Bottle,” meanwhile, is tormented by the trauma of a murder he committed. In “Five Sailors and a Green Coffin” an old sailor is slowly consumed by guilt over his inability to carry out his best friend's dying wish. The mean-spirited ship's cook in “Passage to Puerto Edén” undergoes a sea change after adopting a pet lamb. Although the stories feel aged, Coloane flavors his straight-forward prose with surprising and vivid imagery and insightful depictions of lives lived hard. It's a quintessentially manly book: hard-edged, stoical and heavy with regret and yearning. (Dec.)

A teen imprisoned in 1959 for crimes he didn't commit finds bittersweet justice more than 20 years later in Davis's second Southern gothic (after Angel's Rest). Benjamin Purdue grew up the son of a prostitute in Shady Hollow, a remote Blue Ridge Mountains outlaw settlement. He had hope in the form of Amanda Lynn Jennings, a pretty girl with a dangerous secret, but that, like everything else, withers after he shoots a man in self-defense and gets sent to prison for it. In 1980, when Ben gets out of prison, he heads home and discovers the town he remembers has been replaced by a ritzy housing development. Only the cemetery remains with tombstones noting his family members' deaths. Craving answers and longing to find Amanda, he embarks on a harrowing journey of self-discovery. Davis's depiction of Ben's quest to recoup the life stolen from him is enhanced by a gritty first-person narration that's hypnotic and haunting as Ben learns “you can't fence sunshine.” (Dec.)

In Ketchum's by-the-numbers suspense thriller, divorcée Dora Welles, a New York City antiques dealer who's unlucky in love, decides to track down her old high school squeeze, Jim Weybourne, through a detective agency that specializes in locating lost lovers. When Jim turns out to be happily married with two children in California, the resourceful Dora finds a way to insinuate herself casually into their lives. Dora soon begins scheming how to supplant Jim's wife and reclaim him for her own. Though Dora makes an interesting study as a woman whose driven personality needs the least nudge to pitch over into violent psychopathology, this slim story offers no twists or surprises, especially for readers who have seen the theme treated countless times before in fiction and film. Ketchum (Joyride) reveals in an afterword that he originally wrote the novel as a screenplay; indeed, this might have worked better as a B-movie. (Dec.)

Jackson's Yada Yada series has sold half a million copies, and this new offshoot series—the Yada Yada House of Hope—promises the same. Gabrielle Fairbanks moves to Chicago with her businessman husband, Philip, leaving their sons behind at boarding school in Virginia. She literally stumbles over a homeless woman, an event that changes Gabby's life. She looks her up at Manna House, a homeless shelter, and first finds welcome and eventually a job. But her husband is hostile toward both Gabby and her job. Can she juggle her angry husband and his new business, her sons when they come home for the summer, her ill mother, her job and her growing interest in God? While the plot certainly generates interest, readers may become weary of Gabby's lack of grit when it comes to Philip, as well as his selfishness and anger toward his wife. But the book's dramatic ending highlights both, leaving readers eager for the next installment in the series. (Dec.)

Paralyzed in a bicycle accident at age 12, Guest as an adult has turned his serious anger, his irrepressible energies and his sex drive into an instantly recognizable and passionate style. This third collection (his first from a New York trade house) comes with a blog and the promise of a memoir, which should raise the profile of these poems. On the one hand, the zigzag free verse portrays the poet's frustrations, “twenty-one years/ into the telling of a poor joke,/ made of pain, nerves snuffed like wicks”: “No music but smashed guitars/ would be enough.” On the other, the poems race, churn and tumble over themselves with a welcome, often R-rated, power of invention. Guest (Notes for My Body Double) might be Percy Bysshe Shelley crossed with Nick Flynn, or Neruda fused with Dean Young, at once perpetually dissatisfied and breathless with anticipation. A poem called “Audio Commentary Track 1” brings in “stuporous public sex/ at skating rinks and professional wrestling matches,” along with “lethally ascetic Canadian monks,” then explains, “To me each convulsive sob sounds like joy.” Guest's fast-paced, sometimes even offensive third volume could be a poetry hit. (Dec.)

The latest from the prolific and ferociously intelligent Hix (Chromatic) again offers long sequences, complicated allusions to older works and a tumultuous focus on sexual love. The long, breathless lines and run-on sentences all over “Star Chart for the Rainy Season” show the poet's wild self-reproach, prompted perhaps by the end of an affair or a marriage: “I regret nothing having done nothing worth regret nothing reckless ever/ having realized so little of my will.” The much longer “All the One-Eyed Boys in Town” strings together sonnet-sized units, each built around a small quote from another (usually contemporary) long poem (John Ashbery, Jim Harrison and Anne Carson all turn up), focused again on sexual love: “While the victims freed themselves/ from birds and their absences,/ my body learned that the tips/ of your fingers regulate/ hurricanes.” Hix grows more vivid, and easier to follow, in the third set, a 12-page tour de force of one-sentence poems (each beginning “If...” and including a “then” or “thus”) juxtaposing erotic longing with the satisfaction in the visible world: “wonder of sliced apple/ fed to me, dreamed storms, grass wet when I wake.” A quieter, concluding sequence about the life of Jesus offers fewer surprises, but may not weaken the overall force of this strange and fierce writer's seventh collection. (Nov.)

In this beautiful anthology, the poetry editors of the literary journal Tin House have cherry-picked from the magazine's past contributors. Representing the establishment are venerable poets such as Sharon Olds, Charles Simic and Donald Hall. Hall's poems are heartbreaking meditations on loss, containing the ghostlike presence of his late wife and muse, the poet Jane Kenyon: “The months of absence hurry./In sleep I touch her skin/And wake in the stain of dawn, in fury.” Among the younger poets are two who continue to draw wider attention: Matthea Harvey, who has a brilliant knack for whimsically relaying the everyday oddity of the contemporary world, and Christian Hawkey, who conveys some of the widespread feeling of helplessness: “I will sit down in the middle of an intersection.../ & pour gasoline over my head,/ & gaze up at the clean white object of a gathering cloud.” Poetry in translation also has a strong presence, through Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska and the late Yehuda Amichai, among others. Also adhering to the magazine's dictum to showcase both the very well known beside up and comers, this book gathers poems that are never self-indulgent, occasionally political, often intimate and in many cases timely, both universal and approachable, such as the title poem by Ben Doller: “When I bend back to look at the satellite convulsions, I/ am an aqueduct for twilit rain.” (Nov.)

The Savage Detectives, the best-known novel by the Chilean-born Bolaño (1953–2003) recently found spectacular success across the English-speaking world, bringing much attention to his other work. Now comes a very competently rendered bilingual selection of his fiery, if sometimes uncontrolled, verse. Bolaño began as a poet, and some of the work here seems to have come from an extraordinarily young man: a record of stormy, untamed teen emotion—the depths of despair (“From these nightmares I'll retain only/ these poor houses”) or the heights of sexual adventures. Bolaño moves easily into a blend of surrealism and populism, with in-your-face gestures learned perhaps from Pablo Neruda, as when he watches “a trail of nurses and a trail of scorpions” wending their ways home. Other poems are closely tied to The Savage Detectives: Bolaño's dreamt motorcycle journey in “The Donkey,” mirroring the life of the real poet Mario Santiago, will send readers back to the fictionalized portrayals of Bolaño and Santiago (Arturo and Ulises) in the novel. Bolaño the poet's “deliberate immaturity/ And splendors glimpsed on another planet” can delight: they echo his brilliant but out-of-control authorial persona, with its high-speed, self-conscious verbal play, and those echoes will be more than enough to lead fans of his prose straight to his verse. (Nov.)

Yang's debut is as full of surprises as it is full of fish. Most of its 60-odd short poems, arranged alphabetically, take their names from aquatic creatures: “Orca,” “Parrotfish,” “Nudibranch.” Though he does incorporate oceanology and fish biology (“Scientists exploit/ the mormyrid's unique electrical/ properties to test water”), Yang also brings in Chinese classical poetry, Hindu myth, “intelligent design/ and think tanks” and political quips (“The U.S. is a small fish/ with a false head”). He is no less attentive to modern history and contemporary, Internet-based events: one poem praises the Italian revolutionary hero Garibaldi; the next explains, “Google is a sea of consciousness.” Another thread has to do with East and West—and the oceans between. Yang's pithy free verse insists on entanglements among the literary arts and the natural sciences, as among East Asian, South Asian, European and American literatures: “Triggerfish” includes Hawaiian proverbs, Catholic philosophy, comparative mythography and that inveterate comparer, the poet Ezra Pound, always “testing the overtones.” Those who read the collection quickly may find it witty but gimmicky; those who bring more attention will take more away from this rare first book that combines a simple theme (poems as sea life, the book as their tank) with clear, sharp thought at the level of sentence and line. (Nov.)

In just four books since the 1960s, the calm, California-based writer—whose works also describe his travels in Vietnam, Laos, India and even the Solomon Islands—has gathered devotees to his pellucid free verse, with its unpretentious, unbuttoned feel and its Buddhist overtones. A poem about walking in England tells us “how to walk the freshness/ back into your life”; “Ode to the Smell of Firewood” begins, “Late, when the stars/ open in the cold/ I opened the door./ The sea/ was galloping/ in the night.” Stroud's confident understatements, with their debts to non-European traditions (especially to Chinese and Japanese classics) could well find many more fans. Stroud (Country of Light) arranges his poems not chronologically but by form or theme: the best poems are those that take him outside himself, and he has rightly placed them at the start and near the end. First comes a set of vivid six-line lyrics (some new, some from the 1990s); much later come prose poems about the Italian artist Giotto. “If he wants to paint crowns, he must learn how to hammer gold,” Giotto says of an apprentice. “If he wants to paint Paradise, he must first find a pig.” (Nov.)

Lesser has become an important translator from German and Swedish; this first Selected Poems from the New York–based writer (All We Need of Hell) often shows her thinking about translation—living and thinking in more than one language, travel and how to approach a work of art. On the one hand, “Language/ study, first of all, means commitment/ to rules, keeping oneself within lines,/ not reading between them”; on the other, translation can bring “someone else's voice:/ Ringing and lucid, whispered, distant, true.” Lesser's attention to prior art includes not just the poems of Rainer Maria Rilke and Gunnar Ekelöf but also modern figurative paintings: her strongest new poems describe a disturbing set of canvases, collectively called The Girls, by Lena Cronqvist, in which Lesser sees alternate selves, and prays: “May they keep/ their heads—balanced... smiling heavenward.” The earliest poems reflect her undergraduate years at Yale and her debts to the confessional poetry of the 1970s; the latest describe the old age of Lesser's mother, the end of a transcontinental romance and the memory of mental illness, all in stark, disarming, sometimes plain lines: “You mentioned ex-/ ploring Vienna's ex-/ pat community I/ fell silent Protected/ from you by my mother/ until she dies.” (Nov.)

Long known for his frequently blistering, sometimes brilliantly written, book reviews, Logan also merits attention for his verse: his shapely, often rhymed stanzas and unrhymed sonnets are crisp, well observed, frequently angry, propelled by his sense of the past. “At eleven, I wanted to own/ the corroded, omnipotent gods,” he says of the statues he saw as a child in church; in a tour de force quartet of sonnets on paintings and photographs, “The mists leak cream, clouds filthier than cream,/ dragged like an afterthought from the sky's lead bowl.” Logan's range of subjects is larger, his voice more assured, than in other recent volumes. Poems about travels in England and the Netherlands speak fruitfully to the quieter poems on the same subjects published by Logan's partner, Debra Greger. (There is even a finely tuned love poem to her.) Logan may at times sound more like Robert Lowell than like himself, but he often sounds wonderful, poem by poem—and he brings, at his best, a sense of human life, of answers ignored and potential squandered. Logan's acrid wisdom offers a sense that he has seen through the facades we perversely maintain: “Things went back to normal,” one poem ends, “or the normal that children have to call normal.” (Oct.)

When, in the first parts of this eighth collection, Greger (Western Art) translates and imitates Horace, the careful, deceptively conversational urbanity comes over completely into her wry and disillusioned stanzas. Greger excels not only when she writes about such perennial topics as political fear or resentment in love, but also when she addresses her “subtropical students” in Gainesville where she teaches, and when she writes a verse-letter to Jane Austen from modern-day Bath: “have you slipped in/ to the costume museums, where no one ever goes?” Greger rarely rejoices, though she can surely console; her pruned-back, autumnal sensibility and her balanced lines suit the scenes she portrays. When she turns to her own biography, though, or to her travels in France and the Netherlands, she can veer from the classics, landing too close to her American models, Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, though Greger's eye is colder, her preferred tones bitterer. This might be Greger's best book. It might also be her most restrained—a restraint that suggests both a choice and a character trait: we know her best when she writes most about the lives of others, least about her own. (Oct.)

Valles's terse, learned, harsh collection is one of the standout first books of the year. The polyglot poet, who has lived in Amsterdam, Britain, Poland and Russia, stirred up controversy with her recent translation of Zbigniew Herbert's Collected Poems; her travels and his work inform her stark regard for the brutalities of European history, represented here by spare handfuls of images—“the North shaves and washes in its cold mirror.” Valles adapts almost equally well to very long lines and to short ones, to Continental and to American scenes: in Chicago, “the trees by the lake are ripping a thousand plastic bags to shreds.” When she takes a longer view, adapting ancient myths or ancient authors, her lapidary talents are almost unequaled: “Constant fire, passing into the created world,” says the title poem, “loses track of its source and destroys its end.” Like Pound before her, Valles constructs a fiery multipart poem of grief around a free adaptation of the Latin poet Propertius, which is suggestive not so much of recent American poetry as of classical models or of the best bits of Pound: “Fire frays, rain seeps, the years' heels beat all into the ground.... But the clear light of the mind knows no hours or years.” (Oct.)

Komunyakaa (Taboo) achieved his genuine national eminence with poems about his service in the Vietnam War and about the African-American culture of the rural South; his recent work has turned his spare, bluesy inflections to subjects from world history and myth. This strong, often harrowing 14th collection brings his own memories and his global aspirations together through the grim lens of current events, especially the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pulitzer-winner Komunyakaa opens with sonnets about conquests ancient and modern, fought on horseback or with “bullets & grenades.” Poems in the center of the volume continue the sad look at warriors, victims and international conflict throughout history, from “the Cossack gunner// trying to light the cannon fuse” to a careful poem whose shape imitates the twin towers. The most ambitious, longest and least guarded poem comes last: “Autobiography of my Alter Ego” is a “confessional” poem spoken by a fictional Vietnam veteran: a bartender “at the Chimera Club/ for twenty-some-odd years,” this “alter ego” delivers, in syncopated two-part lines, a clutch of profound statements about America, history, memory, guilt and experience that are at once personal and national. Late in the sequence, the poem considers Abu Ghraib: “here's the skin/ growing over a wound,/ & this is flesh interrogating a stone.” (Oct.)

A supple and well-read poet with a fine ear, Beachy-Quick has long studied—some might even say he has been obsessed with—Moby-Dick; his second (of three) books of verse, Spell (2004), wove references and passages from Melville's novel into poems. This much longer book of short prose essays responds in more straightforward ways: each of its two-to-three–page pieces takes up a topic from the lives and thoughts of Ahab, Ishmael and their crew (such as ”Vengeance,” ”Flame” and “Fate”) and reflects on it. Often the whale, and the book, represent the endlessness of all quests, our enduring hunger for the right, last word. Jewish philosophy and wisdom literature (Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas), other famous modern thinkers (Wittgenstein, Derrida) and Shakespeare's King Lear also guide Beachy-Quick's thoughts, while the rhythms of not only Melville but Emerson and Thoreau guide his resonant prose. The poet Charles Olson launched his own career with a book about Melville, and Beachy-Quick may have Olson in mind; he has certainly paid rapt attention to a world masterpiece. Yet that attention too often produces predictable arguments, ideas that many other readers of Melville will easily recognize, though Beachy-Quick's lyrical evocation may also give them new life: “The whale is the wall behind which the universe mockingly lingers whole.” (Oct.)

In her characteristic fragmented lyric, Sikelianos finds words for a range of thought and emotion called up by new motherhood post-9/11. Separated into nine sections, her fifth book is concerned with time and its effect on the body: “The body was an eyelash skittering/ across the hours, bumping over midnight/ & sleep a grainy ghost.” Ruminating on triumphs and tragedies both public and private, Sikelianos gives equal voice to joy, anger and boredom. Like fellow poets Catherine Wagner and Rachel Zucker, Sikelianos casts an unflinching gaze on not just the wonder but also the terror of bringing a new life into the world. While that means occasional diversions into indulgently hermetic or obscure territory—bewildering runs like “to settle in dark mantle deposits, the moon's maria/ to land in the Lake of Excellence” can confound—the awed tone gives rise to some of Sikelianos's best work to date, and a fine, aesthetically challenging treatment of an age-old subject. (Oct.)

Medievalists rejoice! British author Clark's debut, the first in a projected series, offers careful plotting, well-drawn characters and smart dialogue. In November 1382, Sister Hildegard, a Cistercian nun, is hoping to find in the East Riding of Yorkshire a place where she and several other sisters can establish an abbey to minister to the sick and the poor. Hildegard seeks help from the local magnate, Lord Roger de Hutton, in securing a suitable property, but after someone tries to poison Lord Roger, she winds up turning sleuth. Both members of his household and political rivals have motives for wishing Lord Roger dead. Hildegard's status as a nun allows her plenty of room to move through the different strata of society. Readers should be prepared for some slow pacing at the start, part of the scene setting that prepares for later plot developments. Clark may well do for Yorkshire in the age of Chaucer what Michael Jecks has done for Devonshire in his Knights Templar series set half a century earlier. (Feb.)

Fans of Stuckart's impressive debut, The Queen's Gambit (2008), may wish Leonardo da Vinci, the ultimate Renaissance man, was on stage more often in this sequel. As readers of the previous book know, the artist's apprentice, Dino, who serves as narrator, is secretly a woman, Delfina. When Bellanca, a servant to the duke of Milan's ward, Contessa Caterina, falls to her death from a tower, Leonardo's investigation into what proves to be a murder case requires that Delfina pose as a female servant herself. Bellanca's death is soon followed by that of another member of Contessa Caterina's retinue. Already hard-pressed to maintain the deception, Delfina finds her undercover role complicated by a somewhat predictable romantic entanglement with a handsome soldier. Da Vinci emerges at the end to solve the crimes in an action-packed sequence more reminiscent of Magnum than Columbo. As in The Queen's Gambit, Stuckart convincingly captures the flavor of 15th-century Italy. (Jan.)

If Stephanie Plum had a Texas cousin, Edgar-finalist Moore's Cézanne Martin, a Fort Worth cop turned lawyer, would be it. Adding extra pizzazz to the hilarious third installment (after 2004's The Wild Orchid Society) is Deuteronomy “Duty” Devilrow, Cézanne's African-American teenage ward, whose “words-from-the-hood” often threaten to steal the show. The action opens with a bang as Cézanne wakes up late one night to find a gun in her face—held by Darlene Driskoll, a soon-to-be-convicted crazed murderess and prison escapee. After eluding Driskoll in the course of a harrowing car ride, Cézanne seeks help from the FWPD's star detective, Wolfgang “Slash” Vaughn. News that Bob Martin, her long-lost dad, has died disrupts her life further when she discovers elderly Aunt Velda squatting in her inheritance, a Fort Worth house. Then Cézanne's brother, Henri Matisse Martin, suddenly appears, wanting his share of their dad's estate. Moore makes sure it's all a hoot and a half. (Dec.)

Goldberg's seventh novel based on the popular cable TV series fails to capture the spirit of actor Tony Shalhoub's portrayal of Adrian Monk, the brilliant obsessive-compulsive former SFPD detective traumatized by his wife's unsolved murder. To be fair, so much of the show's humor derives from visual gags that translating the character's fastidiousness and quirkiness into print would be a challenge for any writer. After a trip to Germany to track down his shrink, detailed in Mr. Monk Goes to Germany (2008), Monk takes a detour to Paris at the instigation of his long-suffering assistant, Natalie Teeger. Like Jessica Fletcher of Murder, She Wrote, Monk can hardly go a day without stumbling over a corpse. En route, he solves the in-flight murder of a fellow airline passenger. Once in Paris, Monk visits a sewer museum, where he notices a fresh skull amid a pile of centuries-old bones. This one's likely to divert only die-hard fans of the TV show. (Dec.)

Thai silk to die for plunges Betsy Devonshire, the proprietor of Crewel World in Excelsior, Minn., into danger in Ferris's winning 12th needlecraft mystery (after 2007's Knitting Bones). Among the many souvenirs Betsy's friend Doris Valentine brings home from a Thailand vacation is a stone Buddha to be delivered to a St. Paul antiques dealer. When Doris discards the dirty cloth the Buddha was wrapped in, Betsy rescues the cloth, which turns out to be valuable silk more than 2,000 years old. Has Doris become an unwitting pawn in an international antiquities theft operation? After someone ransacks Doris's apartment and murders the antiques dealer, Sgt. Mike Malloy of the Excelsior police and “civilian detective” Betsy find themselves involved in a case more complicated than any needlework pattern she's ever attempted. With more action and a stronger plot than Knitting Bones, this entry in the popular cozy series offers such choice knitting tidbits as how to spin hair from a 14-pound angora rabbit. (Dec.)

In South's delightful second Regency mystery (after 2006's In Milady's Chamber), recently widowed Lady Julia Fieldhurst decides to leave London and spend the summer in Yorkshire with Sir Gerald and Lady Anne Hollingshead, largely to avoid gossip surrounding her husband's murder. Alas, tragedy strikes shortly after Julia arrives at Hollingshead Place. The local vicar, Mr. Danvers, who regales the family over dinner with talk of his almost completed book on the history of the village, dies later that night in a fire at the vicarage. Julia writes to Bow Street runner John Pickett in London for help in investigating what may be a crime. Pickett poses as Julia's footman, allowing the reader a view of what goes on downstairs as well as up. Tension between the eldest Hollingshead daughter and her parents over her love for a poor curate as well as the growing attraction between Julia and Pickett lend romantic interest. The manners and mores of the period as South depicts them ring true. (Dec.)

As Elizabeth Hand aptly observes in her introduction to this exceptional debut horror collection, Langan's tales “celebrate supernatural fiction's antiquarian and visionary past with as much eloquence and acuity—and terror—as they explore the dark heart of the 21st century.” The richly atmospheric title story evokes the weird fiction of both Henry James and M.R. James in its account of a family cursed with a demonic familiar with a ravenous appetite for disobedient children. “On Skua Island,” a relentlessly creepy monster story, pits a team of modern espionage operatives against an implacable creature of the living dead out of Norse legend. The five tales run the gamut from supernatural satire (“Tutorial”) to apocalyptic nightmare (“Episode Seven”), but whatever their theme or tone, Langan shows uncommon skill at balancing character, plot and mood to achieve the perfect pitch for each. Horror readers will welcome a new voice speaking in a classic tongue. (Dec.)

British humorist Rankin's latest journey into absurdity manages, sometimes in spite of itself, to be a entertaining read. Teen narrator Tyler spends the 1960s alternating between playing glam rock with his band, the Sumerian Kynges, who signed a fame-and-fortune contract in blood with the mysterious Mr. Ishmael, and working as a private detective. His adventures eventually lead to encounters with “the Spirit of the Nineteen-Sixties,” the Rolling Stones and the evil Papa Keith Crossbar. Frequent Rankin readers will recognize '50s private eye Lazlo Woodbine and the secret Ministry of Serendipity (last seen in The Brightonomicon) as well as plot twists involving time travel and parallel worlds. The narrative occasionally gets muddled—notably during the mid-book scenes with Elvis and the hurried denouement—but fans of Rankin's zany style will find more than enough humor to outweigh their quibbles. (Dec.)

This ambitious fantasy combines three very British stories: an Arthurian fable, a Victorian murder mystery and a modern-day YA adventure tale. A strange visitation sends young father Galaad to Caer Llundain in the year 498. American teenager Alice Fell, who gets holy visions during epileptic seizures, makes a similar pilgrimage to London in 2000. In 1897, as Queen Victoria celebrates her jubilee, consulting detective Sandford Blank and his sidekick, Roxanne Bonaventure, investigate a series of brutal murders. The hinted interconnections between the three tales are complex and fascinating, but as the stories come together, the novel disintegrates into a confusing mélange of ancient computers from the future, overlapping characters and objects moving through time and space. Though it jumps the tracks at the end, Roberson (Paragaea) still makes this a rollicking ride. (Dec.)

Hugo winner Simmons (the Hyperion Cantos) combines his fine prose with a well-developed sense of wonder and love for reworked literary and mythological materials. In this far future, Earth is a mausoleum and the far-flung human race occupies the lowest level of a complex interstellar hierarchy. The Earth's Men travel to distant worlds and perform Shakespeare before human servants and slaves, bringing them some moments of pleasure and notions of Earth's lost glory. When aliens take an interest, the Earth's Men find themselves giving command performances of King Lear, Hamlet and “the Scottish play” for a series of increasingly important alien species, with evidence that the fate of all humanity may rest on the quality of their work. This finely crafted novella is a perfect example of Simmons's many strengths. (Dec.)

The entertaining fourth Age of Fire novel (after 2007's Dragon Outcast) reunites three dragon siblings in a land at the threshold of major change. When scaleless AuRon the Gray hears rumors of his long-lost sister, Wistala, he leaves his family on the Isle of Ice to search for her. Their paths cross in Lavadome, where their outcast brother, RuGaard, now rules. Although some blame RuGaard for a recent food blight, the more likely source is Ghioz's masked Red Queen, who wants to make Lavadome part of her empire. Brought together by chance, the siblings must overcome their differences and persuade rival nations to stand together against the Red Queen's forces. Knight turns the familiar features of epic fantasy upside down in this unique world of medieval politics and ancient magic seen through the eyes of dragons. (Dec.)

Completing Subterranean's series of urban fantasist de Lint's early stories, this collection comprises 17 tales inspired by the quirky high fantasies that dominated before the Tolkien tidal wave. In brocaded prose, bejeweled and stiff (“the stars sent their hearts to dream as they lay bespeckling the midnight skies”), de Lint pays homage to Lord Dunsany in “Nareth the Questioner” and William Morris in “Llew the Homeless.” A tribute to Andre Norton's Witch World (“The White Road”) and stories for Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword and Sorceress collections (“Cold Blows the Wind,” “The Weeping Oak” and “Into the Green”) show him learning from modern masters as well. Though undisguised jabs at organized religion may put some readers off, fans will treasure the rare material and snap up the simultaneously released $200 limited edition. (Dec.)

The eclectic second installment of Prime's annual anthology draws equally from venerable genre magazines like Weird Tales and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and more literary publications like McSweeney's and The Cincinnati Review. Standout stories include M. Rickert's “Memoir of a Deer Woman,” a heartrending tale about a loving husband who must somehow come to grips with his wife's metamorphosis into a deer, and “The Drowned Life” by Jeffrey Ford, an allegorical look at the looming economic crisis through the eyes of a disenchanted HMO employee. Fantasy fans will also enjoy Deborah Coates's paranormal-nuanced “Chainsaw on Hand” and the dark lyricism of Erik Amundsen's “Bufo Rex.” Though it contains few blockbuster stories, this solidly entertaining anthology exemplifies the continuing evolution and expansion of the genre. (Dec.)

Filled with kisses and kick-ass action, the second installment of this campy series (after 2007's Dances with Werewolves) finds paranormal investigator Delilah Street taking on her first case in an alternate 2010 Las Vegas. When Delilah and her boyfriend, ex-FBI agent Ric Montoya, find the bodies of two teens killed in Sunset Park in 1946, the girl's ghost appears and claims the killer was her father, werewolf mobster Cesar Cicereau. Vampire mogul Howard Hughes hires Delilah to learn the identity of the girl's vampire companion, and she also comes under pressure from albino vampire rocker Snow; television producer Hector Nightwine; and the Invisible Man, a zombie merged with Claude Rains's black-and-white film character. Douglas's dishy style compliments the twisty plot, and she helpfully includes references for the numerous nods to the silver screen, Egyptology and cocktails. (Dec.)

Only a predictable ending mars this smoky Victorian romance, a follow-up to 2008's Never Trust a Scoundrel. Outspoken, progressive Abigail Shaw has reluctantly decided that society gossip is the only thing that will bring readers back to her father's dying newspaper. A rumor from a friend mentions Christopher Cabot, the duke of Madingley, so Abigail sneaks into his sister's debut. When she finds the duke hiding from two marriage-minded ladies, Abigail brazenly offers to play the role of his lover, keeping his preying suitors at bay while learning more about his secret past. As they play their roles to perfection, their sham relationship grows into something genuine, until a malicious reporter resolves to disgrace the duke and Abby's true identity is revealed. While the story's finale is scripted and cheesy, readers will enjoy the preceding trysts, secrets and passion. (Dec.)

Relentless pacing and well-crafted suspense drive the fourth Ulysses Grove thriller. When FBI profiler Grove wrote a textbook on the psychopathic mind, he never expected that someone would use it as an instruction manual. Then two murders are committed, copied from the examples in the text's pages. Called to the scene of one of the killings, Grove finds details that only appeared in his draft manuscript, things no one else could know about. His only clue comes from a cryptic message written by a dying friend. To catch the killer, Grove must delve into secrets of his past, enlist the aid of FBI recruit Edith Drinkwater and make an arduous cross-country trek. With skill and intelligence, Bonansinga (Twisted) combines intricate mystery, macabre deaths and a horrifying villain with a slight supernatural twist, leading to a heart-stopping climax. (Dec.)

Bodine's contemporary romance has strong bones, but the execution is marred by stock characters. Media mogul David Sumner buys the Chicago Mail and immediately moves gossip columnist Rebecca Covington to the home and food section, replacing her with young, aggressive Shannon Forrester. Rebecca enlists her gay best friend, Harry Grant, to cook while she spices up her columns with gossip. Bodine (author of several series romances as Lynn Leslie and Leslie Lynn) drowns her characters in cliché: big-spending divorcée Rebecca's endless label-dropping (“[she] hiked up her black Carolina Herrera skirt... not caring if the expensive Wolford fishnets got bigger holes”), Harry's immaculate home, widower David's vow to never love again, Shannon's endless jealousy. Even good chemistry between Rebecca and David can't diminish the sense that the real star is Rebecca's Juicy Couture cashmere jogging suit. (Dec.)

What is it about the French and their interest in the western genre? Generally, it's a good mix, and often a great mix. This book is the latter. Cowboy Gus and his gang rollick through 13 interconnected stories, serial reels of sorts. Gus and his two buddies are on the lam, but none can stand to be away from women—any and all women—so they all sneak off to town and find themselves on the run from both the law and their girls. Blain's drawing line is expressive and full of life, and the eight-panel page structure reins in his loose style to great, calming effect. This one-two punch of all-out energy and rigid formalism hurtles the reader through the stories, which often veer into romance, as Gus's entourage takes turns bedding tough frontier women and hiding out from the law. The most interesting flip comes at the end when one of Gus's outlaw cohorts, Clem, begins to navigate a return to his family while his former love interest, an independent woman who's a sort of artist/photographer, turns to robbing banks. Blain starts the book strong and finishes stronger, creating a rich story line with characters whose ups and downs come alive on the page. (Oct.)

The epic battle between hero and villain rages on in this second volume of artist Alex Ross's ambitious tales of the greatest heroes of the DC Comics universe. After Lex Luthor, the Riddler and other villains share a vivid dream in which the Earth is destroyed for trusting in the superheroes, they strike hard against the Justice League, immobilizing many heroes and offering to help the world in ways the League never did. As Ray Palmer (the Atom) struggles for his life, a mysterious force continues to control Batman. Badly beaten and struggling, the heroes converge on the Fortress, where they realize that saving the Earth may not be as simple as stopping the villains. Together, Ross and Krueger craft an epic story, compelling in its delivery and a swift read. The choice of using incarnations of characters outside of DC's current story lines makes it accessible to all fans, and the story requires no broad understanding of their history. Paired with Braithwaite, Ross has a different sense of anatomy in his art, but it's as rich and vivid as ever. (Oct.)

Author Butcher is the creator of the Dresden Files series of novels (the basis for the short-lived Sci-Fi channel series), and this fun graphic novel is the prequel to his first Dresden book, Storm Front. Blurring the lines between fantasy and noir, Dresden is a scrappy, rough-and-tumble “consulting professional wizard” who's often hired by the Chicago police to work on those crimes that enter the supernatural. Given only 24 hours to solve an inexplicable and gruesome murder at the zoo, Dresden has to deal with unhelpful zoologists and police, a helpful but confused potential love interest, packs of demonically possessed animals and several deadly enchanters along the way, eventually uncovering a plot by one of mankind's great ancient foes. If the story is not particularly deep, it's breathlessly paced, with plenty of quirks and details (one of Dresden's closest friends and allies is an ancient talking skull), and a compelling page-turner. Syaf's art is always effective, but sometimes ping-pongs between generic action-comic combat poses and more personal and evocative horror art. This book is a decent start to a new medium for the series and may pique the interest of those unfamiliar with Dresden and Butcher. (Oct.)

Nora is a demon who has an attitude problem. Unruly, loud and defiant, he crosses his Dark Liege one time too many, leading him to be sent to Human School. Forced into a body of servitude, Nora becomes the familiar to aloof star student Kazuma Makkari. Mayhem swiftly ensues after Nora discovers he can only use magic with permission from Kazuma, and the two butt heads both literally and figuratively. Packed with action at every turn, the two are forced to work together, although not necessarily get along, as the Dark Liege wants them to fight renegade demons. The story is less compelling than other stories of a similar vein and relies too heavily on violence and slapstick humor. There is a general lack of character development, and both Nora and Kazuma are highly predictable. Kakei's art is comical; the characters often wear exaggerated expressions and frequently appear angry or distressed. Nora isn't bad, but falls short in many ways. (Oct.)

Li's magnificent and jaw-droppingly grim novel centers on the 1979 execution of a Chinese counterrevolutionary in the provincial town of Muddy River and spirals outward into a scathing indictment of Communist China. Former Red Guard leader Shan Gu is scheduled to be executed after a denunciation ceremony presided over by Kai, the city's radio announcer. At the ceremony, Shan doesn't speak (her vocal chords have been severed), and before she's shot, her kidneys are extracted—by Kai's favor-currying husband—for transplant to a high regional official. After Shan's execution, Kwen, a local sadist, and Bashi, a 19-year-old with pedophile leanings, bury Shan, but not before further mutilating the body. While Shan's parents are bereft, others celebrate, including the family of 12-year-old Nini, born deformed after militant Shan kicked Nini's mother in her pregnant belly. Nini dreams of falling in love and—in the novel's intricate overlapping of fates—hooks up with Bashi, providing the one relatively positive moment in this panorama of cruelty and betrayal. Li records these events dispassionately and with such a magisterial sense of direction that the reader can't help being drawn into the novel, like a sleeper trapped in an anxiety dream. (Feb.)

The Los Angeles–born Spicer died young, at age 40 in 1965, of acute alcoholism. In his lifetime, he published six books of poems with tiny presses. Though he was influential, he operated in a small circle, mostly in Berkeley. It was at the Six Gallery he cofounded that Ginsberg gave the first reading of “Howl” in 1955; he was very close to the poets Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser, but as the editors of this extraordinary collection point out, “Spicer was never fully embraced within the official culture or counter-culture of the period.” This remarkably fresh assemblage, which gathers from two earlier posthumous (and now out-of-print) collections and adds many unpublished poems and sequences, will dramatically expand Spicer's influence. Like the work of Emily Dickinson and W.B. Yeats, Spicer's poems still seem to come from somewhere else (in fact, Spicer claimed he received Martian signals). But what a reader finds here is a poet deeply engaged with language, a gay man consumed by desperate affairs of the heart and flesh, a lover of jazz and baseball and weather, and possessed of the tenderest lyricisms and biting wit. His After Lorca series still shocks with its bold presumption of the dead Lorca's voice; many of the previously unpublished “one-night stand” poems are marvelous (see “Any fool can get into an ocean...”) and the Letters to James Alexander, found by the editors amid the Spicer collection at Berkeley, is Spicer at his best—rendering letters as poems, cauterizing the wound of a love affair: “Dear James/ It is absolutely clear and sunny as if neither a cloud nor a moon had ever been invented.” (Dec.)