Fiction Reviews

“Could it have been that the desire to protect is the desire to possess?” wonders antiques dealer Terence Cave in Haig’s overwrought study of a father creepily bent on protecting his beautiful 15-year-old daughter, Byrony. Beset by tragedy—his wife was murdered and, later, Byrony’s twin, Reuben, was accidentally killed by bullies—Terence focuses all his energy on Byrony, but when she begins sneaking out to meet boys, Terence’s stepped-up efforts to thwart her behavior backfire, and soon she’s seeing one of the boys involved in Reuben’s death. As Terence’s drive to protect rapidly morphs into a dangerous obsession, his dead son’s spirit begins to haunt him, and Bryony pulls further away from her “weird, creepy fascist” father. The themes of possession and control are pounded out repeatedly, and Terence seems like a construct more than a person, coming off as repellant rather than complex and troubled. What could have been an original look at human relationships unfortunately devolves into a heavy-handed study. (Mar.)

A Viennese fur dealer confronts his life’s failures in this pleasantly bizarre novel from the author of The Perfect American. Gustav Rubin, a historian turned fur dealer, has returned from Europe to Manhattan to fetch his mother for a vacation at his lake house, but the trip goes awry at every turn, culminating in an epic traffic jam on the Tappan Zee Bridge. Lending a note of urgency is Gustav’s need to arrive at his lake house by dusk; as an Orthodox Jew (a faith his mother neither shares nor much respects), he must cease driving before the Sabbath begins. Mother and son bicker and reminisce about Ludwig Rubin, the family’s recently deceased patriarch, until Ludwig’s gigantic body appears beneath the bridge, lolling in the Hudson River. Marveling at his father’s enormous presence as he and his mother hammer out the many disappointments of his life, Gustav becomes increasingly aware of his parents’ power over his life. An unusual and inventive work, Jungk’s refreshingly strange images give some air to the otherwise claustrophobic narrative confines. (Mar.)

Halpin’s amusing fourth novel explores what happens when you mix art, love, friendship, business and children’s cartoons in the Age of Aquarius. It’s 1972 and Levon, Peter, Sarah and Julie, a group of idealistic young musicians, are holed up in the basement of ATN studios in New York City, attempting to write educational jingles for a Saturday morning children’s program called Pop Goes the Classroom. The group is led, albeit astray, by Pamela Sanchez, a brown-rice-and-millet-eating, aura-reading semifamous folk singer. At first it feels like a dream job: no regular working hours, free food stolen from the employee cafeteria, a warm place to crash and all the dope they can consume. The gang is briefly blissed out, but the freewheeling atmosphere can’t survive the office politics, crash-and-burn relationships and selfish manipulations that run rampant in the hazy basement studios. Like the group’s songs about George Washington and the magic of the number nine, this novel is clever and infectious. (Mar.)

Piñol’s second novel (after Cold Skin) is a fanciful metafiction that lampoons adventure stories while telling one with great enthusiasm. Nineteen-year-old orphan Tommy Thomson, a ghost writer struggling to make a living in WWI London, is hired to record the account of a man on trial for murdering two sons of a duke on an expedition in the Congo. The tale that unfolds draws from Stanley, Conrad and Verne, and borrows names from historical figures, often with irony (the man on trial, for instance, is named Marcus Garvey). Tommy spends four years writing and rewriting Marcus’s tale in which the doomed brothers and their enslaved African porters turned miners encounter a subterranean race reminiscent of Verne’s Morlocks. (Marcus calls them Tectons and portrays them as a barbarous threat to above-ground civilization.) Piñol has layers of commentary at work, touching on perception, the nature of literature, the need for heroes and the faults of hubris. It’s a smart book, and Piñol poses piercing questions; the adventure yarn that ties it all together is great entertainment. (Mar.)

The genius of Frank Lloyd Wright was both magnetic and cruel, as evidenced by the succession of failed marriages and hot-blooded affairs depicted in this biographic reimagining that drills into Wright mythology and the dark shadows of the American dream. The narrative moves backwards in time through the accounts of four women in Wright’s life: Olgivanna, the steely, grounded dancer from Montenegro; Miriam, the drug-addled narcissist from the South; Kitty, the devoted first wife; and Mamah, the beloved and murdered soul mate and intellectual companion. But the novel’s centerpiece is Taliesin, Wright’s Oz-like Wisconsin home. The tragedies that befall Taliesin—fires, brutality—serve as proxy for Wright’s inner turmoil; his deeper stirrings surface only occasionally from behind Boyle’s oft-overbearing depiction of Wright’s women. The most engaging person is Tadashi Sato, the Japanese-American apprentice and narrator who emerges via his frequent footnotes as a complex reflection of “Wrieto-san” and, with his inability to remain objective and his evolving view of Wright and Wright’s image, becomes the book’s most dynamic character. It’s a lush, dense and hyperliterate book—in other words, vintage Boyle. (Feb.)

An anatomist of contemporary American anomie, Amidon (Human Capital) follows, in this skillfully executed if not quite devastating novel, the serpentine events surrounding an alleged sexual assault in a sleepy Massachusetts college town. Edward Inman runs a security company and one night is called to the mansion of Doyle Cutler, a wealthy client. Later, college student Mary Steckl accuses Cutler of sexually abusing her at his home that evening. The police and the locals assume she’s covering for her father, a widower whose heavy drinking has gotten him in trouble with the law before. Mary’s plight quickly envelops others, including her classmate, Angela, who is sleeping with her English professor, a guest at the Cutler mansion on the night in question; Kathryn, a divorcée who embarks on an affair with an old love whose wife is running for mayor; and Conor, Kathryn’s troubled son and the only witness to what really happened to Mary. The reader stands by for the human catastrophe that will inevitably ensue, but despite its nuanced depiction of smalltown life and propulsive plotting, the novel fails to achieve a truly tragic dimension. (Feb.)

When world-famous Russian novelist Alexander Kurbsky decides to leave for the West in bestseller Higgins’s suspenseful 16th thriller to feature former IRA man Sean Dillon (after Rough Justice), Kurbsky turns for help to Dillon and other members of the British prime minister’s “private army.” Meanwhile, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin persuades Kurbsky to infiltrate this elite group and spy for Russia by showing him current photos of his sister, Tania, who the celebrated author thought died years earlier in a student riot. Tania’s release from a life sentence in prison is the price for Kurbsky’s cooperation. Dillon and the others, most notably Lady Monica Sterling, Dillon’s girlfriend, welcome Kurbsky into their circle in England, where the Russian begins to go about his deadly business. Several long flashbacks explore past events to good effect. The final dustup is a little rushed, but the crisp writing shows Higgins to be on top of his game. (Feb.)

In eight beautifully crafted, interconnected stories, Mueenuddin explores the cutthroat feudal society in which a rich Lahore landowner is entrenched. A complicated network of patronage undergirds the micro-society of servants, families and opportunists surrounding wealthy patron K.K. Harouni. In “Nawabdin Electrician,” Harouni’s indispensable electrician, Nawab, excels at his work and at home, raising 12 daughters and one son by virtue of his cunning and ingenuity—qualities that allow him to triumph over entrenched poverty and outlive a robber bent on stealing his livelihood. Women are especially vulnerable without the protection of family and marriage ties, as the protagonist of “Saleema” learns: a maid in the Harouni mansion who cultivates a love affair with an older servant, Saleema is left with a baby and without recourse when he must honor his first family and renounce her. Similarly, the women who become lovers of powerful men, as in the title story and in “Provide, Provide,” fall into disgrace and poverty with the death of their patrons. An elegant stylist with a light touch, Mueenuddin invites the reader to a richly human, wondrous experience. (Feb.)

Bestseller Rose concludes her thriller trilogy that began with Scream for Me and Die for Me with a bang. In Dutton, Ga., where 13 years earlier a secret rape club flourished among the bratty sons of the town’s elite, an elderly monster known only as Charles and his depraved minions steal teenage girls to sell to perverts in a lucrative human trafficking scheme. Hot on their trail are the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s special agent Daniel Vartanian; his partner, special agent Luke Papadopoulos; and his long-suffering sister, Susannah Vartanian, a New York City ADA. A botched raid spurs the murders of five girls and the removal of abused “assets” to another hiding place. Two courageous teen survivors provide the GBI with help, but a mole in the GBI working for Charles complicates the takedown. Rose juggles a large cast, a huge body count and a complex plot with terrifying ease. The sweet romance between Luke and Susannah provides welcome relief from the many scenes of brutality. (Feb.)

Forman’s debut, an offbeat crime novel, introduces Eddie Perlmutter, a tough Jewish Boston cop, who has had conversations since age 11 with his penis (“Hey, check me out. I can stand, I heard one night in bed”). In his late 50s, retired from the Boston force and suffering from arthritis, Perlmutter begins a new life in Boca Raton, Fla., where he soon steps on the toes of the local Russian mafia, falls for a nurse who happens to resemble actress Halle Berry and looks into the murder of golfer Robert Goldenblatt. Found in his garage with a four-iron embedded in his forehead, Goldenblatt was apparently the victim of a dispute over “country-club politics.” While the book’s overall silliness and lack of credible characters, not to mention the absurd solution to Goldenblatt’s demise, will put off some readers, those with a cockeyed sense of humor will find much to like in this parody of a cop caper. (Feb.)

At the start of Banks’s excellent sequel to 2008’s Saturday’s Child, Manchester PI and ex-con Callum Innes is taking a break from the investigation business by working as a caretaker at the Lad’s Club, a boxing gym run by Paulo Gray. Paulo decides to send Cal to Los Angeles with young Liam Wooley, who’s fighting in an amateur bout there. Cal’s not happy about going, but Paulo’s the boss, so the two fly off to L.A. and into trouble. In what turns out to be a serious mistake, Cal links up with Nelson Byrne, an ex-boxer he meets in a bar. Before Liam gets to fight his final bout, Nelson’s dead, Cal’s been shot and Liam’s been drugged and kidnapped. The writing is the real star of the book: violent, dark, funny and always profane. When a tough guy in L.A. threatens him, the unintimidated Cal replies, “I been told and warned by people who could shit you without grunting.” This is the cream of contemporary British noir. (Feb.)

This ambitious, vivid novel by writer, New Orleans resident and jazz record shop owner Maistros starts out in the Big Easy of 1891. Noonday Morningstar, an African-American Baptist preacher, is summoned to pray over a dying one-year-old boy whose supposed illness is actually demonic possession. Aided by Dr. Jack, an abortionist and witch doctor; Beauregard Church, a veteran prison guard; and Buddy Bolden, a cornet player specializing in the new jazz sound, Noonday performs a voodoo exorcism. Fifteen years later, Noonday is dead, and his youngest son, the diminutive and gifted Typhus, has developed an odd love for Lily, a girl he knows only through a photograph. Following Typhus and those connected to the exorcism through New Orleans’ vibrant underbelly, Maistros develops a rich, dangerous world of musicians, mob justice and magic. Stylistic flourishes, lush descriptions (especially of the voodoo practices), and dialect-heavy narration sometimes jar the story’s flow, but the plot’s insistent pace builds to a satisfying though familiar storm-buffeted climax. (Feb.)

Ogawa (The Diving Pool) weaves a poignant tale of beauty, heart and sorrow in her exquisite new novel. Narrated by the Housekeeper, the characters are known only as the Professor and Root, the Housekeeper’s 10-year-old son, nicknamed by the Professor because the shape of his hair and head remind the Professor of the square root symbol. A brilliant mathematician, the Professor was seriously injured in a car accident and his short-term memory only lasts for 80 minutes. He can remember his theorems and favorite baseball players, but the Housekeeper must reintroduce herself every morning, sometimes several times a day. The Professor, who adores Root, is able to connect with the child through baseball, and the Housekeeper learns how to work with him through the memory lapses until they can come together on common ground, at least for 80 minutes. In this gorgeous tale, Ogawa lifts the window shade to allow readers to observe the characters for a short while, then closes the shade. Snyder—who also translated Pool—brings a delicate and precise hand to the translation. (Feb.)

Gallaway’s provocative debut is a politically inspired romance set in contemporary Iraq. Before the start of the Iraq War, Leila al-Ghani’s family was among the most prominent and open-minded in Mosul. But since the release of the Abu Ghraib photos, her father, a judge under Saddam’s regime, has become increasingly conservative and bad-tempered. After being sexually harassed while working at an Iraqi hospital pharmacy, Leila, who yearns to become a doctor, becomes an Arabic-to-English translator at the hospital on a nearby American military base, though she must lie to her parents about her employment. At the hospital, Leila sheds her hijab and not only begins a relationship with handsome Special Forces Capt. James Cartwright but also begins treating detainees who are torture victims. When violence in Mosul reaches a fever pitch, Leila must choose between her family and what she knows is right. Though Gallaway often resorts to clichés and the trajectory of the story is predictable, she doesn’t flinch from depicting the everyday violence of Iraq or the difficult choices of life in a war zone. (Feb.)

In her first novel, poet and playwright Chamberlain tells the vibrant story of Rose McGregor, a talented composer navigating academia in the early days of feminism. A temporary appointment as the token “Girl Composer” at a Minnesota college puts 25-year-old Rose on her own for the first time; the older of two New Hampshire sisters, Rose has always been the plain, responsible one, caretaker to sister Natalie, but finds her professional and personal lives blooming in the cold weather of St. Paul. She falls in love with Guy, a stonemason who wants to whisk her off to his farm, but the affair falls apart. From there, Rose joins eccentric cellist Lila Goldensohn, who has turned her country home into an all-female retreat. Living off the land without the distraction of love, Rose returns to composing until Natalie unexpectedly arrives, pregnant and in distress, to overtake Rose’s life again. Following Rose’s music career to the city, the West Coast and back again, Chamberlain makes a charming, quirky fugue of Rose’s pursuit of love, independence and success. (Feb.)

Bestseller Box (Blue Heaven) explores an adoptive parent’s worst nightmare in this compelling stand-alone thriller. Jack McGuane, an employee of Denver’s convention and visitors bureau, and his wife suddenly discover that demonic Garrett Morland, the birth father of their dearly loved nine-month-old daughter, Angelina, didn’t sign away his parental rights. Garrett and his powerful father, a sitting federal judge, give the McGuanes three weeks to return Angelina. In this bleak scenario, Box eschews facile sentimentality and meticulously builds pitch-perfect characterizations, notably that of McGuane, who grew up with uneducated but hard-working parents on a series of Montana ranches. Box’s equally convincing villains—gangsters, murderers, child pornographers—each provide a different face of evil, and each individual has to decide how best to get at the truth. As usual, Box blessedly reasserts that whatever the cost, such truth exists, and ordinary folk have the strength to find it. Author tour. (Jan.)

Perry’s exciting if relatively formulaic sixth Jane Whitefield novel (after 1999’s Blood Money) finds Jane, a Native American “guide” who helps people assume new identities, living quietly under an alias in western New York State, married to a local doctor. Shortly after pregnant Christine Monahan shows up at the hospital where Jane’s husband works, desperately searching for Jane, a bomb explodes in the hospital. The two women wind up fleeing cross-country with a cadre of thugs hot on their trail. Jane learns that Christine is the girlfriend of an abusive real estate mogul in San Diego obsessed with finding her and their unborn child. By giving Christine and her baby new identities, Jane once again puts herself in mortal danger. Blending the frenetic pacing of a top-notch thriller with Native American mysticism, this entry will more than satisfy longtime fans, though newcomers to the series may be confused by the lack of any kind of substantial backstory. (Jan.)

In bestseller Woods’s uninspired sixth Will Lee thriller (after Capital Crimes), the incumbent U.S. president, William Jefferson Lee, faces a series of crises in an election year: his vice president has died during surgery; a nuclear warhead is missing in Pakistan and believed to be in the hands of a terrorist group possibly connected to al-Qaeda; and an independent presidential candidate, a charismatic minister, has erased Lee’s once significant lead in the polls. To make matters worse, Lee’s newly appointed vice president, the former governor of California, has got himself entangled in a messy divorce as well as a sordid love triangle that, if exposed, could become front-page fodder for the tabloids and all but destroy Lee’s re-election bid. While Woods exhibits his usual brilliant sense of pacing, two-dimensional characters, a mechanical plot and an improbable ending far from satisfy. (Jan.)

Det. Kitt Lundgren and her partner, Mary Catherine Riggio, of the Rockford, Ill., Violent Crimes Bureau pursue a serial killer ripped from Internet urban legend in this unconvincing thriller from bestseller Spindler (Copycat). When Riggio’s too-good-to-be-true fiancé is caught in the line of fire, the shooting at first appears to be unrelated to the murder spree of Breakneck, who targets computer-savvy 20-somethings. Of course, the connection is immediately obvious to readers, if not the veteran staff of the VCB. Lundgren’s preoccupied with mending her broken marriage while ambling toward career burnout, and Riggio doesn’t hesitate to throw out the procedural rulebook, eschewing her police training in a desperate search for the truth. Spindler strays from her comfort zone in tackling the mysterious world of cyber crime. Casting disaffected youth as criminal masterminds doesn’t ring true, while descriptions of technology and its applications are painstakingly overexplained. (Jan.)

With a sensibility as sweet as a glass of sugary iced tea and a plot as placid as a hazy summer day, Kincaid’s sixth book (after As Hot As It Was You Ought to Thank Me) tracks the domestic travails of Truely and Courtney Noonan, brother and sister Mississippians who have forsaken sleepy rural life for adventure in California. Courtney is first to head west, finding marital contentment with Hastings, a countercultural hanger-on she meets at a Grateful Dead concert. With a scholarship for San Jose State, Truely soon follows, connecting with a computer whiz, making an Internet fortune and falling hard for Jesse. Both Noonans seem happily married, until Jesse miscarries and leaves Truely. Then Hastings leaves Courtney for a younger woman because he’s “not ready to grow old.” Though they both live in the Bay Area, these rootless siblings seldom cross paths, until Arnold, a black teenager, insinuates himself into their lives. Kincaid has been pigeonholed as a Southern writer, but this unsentimental story about the forging of an unorthodox family has universal appeal. (Jan.)

Uviller’s debut is as gleefully unpretentious as the rhinestones on narrator Zephyr Zuckerman’s thrift-shop dress. “This is not a Jesus-saving kind of story,” Zephyr warns, and, indeed, sex, bodily functions, white lies and general irreverence keep this tale of love, friendship and New York City popping along. Zephyr and her best friends are flawed and lovable: divorcée party-crasher Tag is a globe-trotting scientist; Lucy, a social worker, writes notes on $10 bills and hopes that the right man will answer her call; Mercedes, a violinist, snags a celebrity boyfriend; and Abigail, a professor, falls into Internet-dating catastrophe. Zephyr, meanwhile, has dropped out of school, and her major concern, other than getting over an ex, is figuring out what she wants to be. So when her super is arrested, Zephyr inherits his post and discovers that there is far more happening under her roof than she can handle. The novel gallops at full speed from the very first line, and though there are times when it would serve Uviller well to rein it in a bit, this is undoubtedly smarter and funnier than most other girls-in-the-city novels. (Jan.)

A young French-Jewish man obsesses about taking over his father’s fine art dealership before WWII, and tries to locate its lost canvases in the war’s aftermath in Houghteling’s ambitious and satisfying debut novel. Halfhearted medical student Max Berenzon tries to impress upon his father, Daniel, that he should inherit the business, and spends the rest of his energy wooing Rose, the gallery assistant. But the war soon makes talk of the future a moot point, and the Berenzons survive the war in a cellar in the south of France. When father and son return to Paris, their gallery is empty, looted by the Nazis. In dirty postwar Paris, Max chases both the missing art and Rose, and though both his targets remain elusive and the gaping hole left by the roundup of French Jews is impossible to close, Max does shed light on his own family’s secret tragedy. Houghteling dazzlingly recreates the horrors of war, and it’s the small, smart details—a painting that was a sentimental family treasure turning up years later in an ordinary gallery; an offhanded anti-Semitic remark in a cafe—that make one uncommon family’s suffering all the more powerful. (Jan.)

The author of Hearts and Bones returns with a clunky sea-crossing historical thriller that promises to imagine what may have happened to the lost colony of Roanoke. At the center of this tale is Gabriel North, ordered by the conniving handlers of an aging and cash-starved Queen Elizabeth, who’s just survived an assassination attempt, to travel across the ocean in pursuit of the legendary riches that supposedly abound in the New World. But as much as Sir Walter Ralegh and others see Gabriel as a pawn for their bidding, they aren’t prepared for Gabriel’s eventual alliance with the Secota Queen Naia. Though well researched, the novel suffers from wooden dialogue, is filled with far too many minor characters and fails to deliver a stunning reveal about Roanoke’s fate. (Jan.)

Set in the 1300s largely in what is now Alabama and Mississippi, this complex novel tracks three wanderers’ quest to create peace in violent times. The Sky Hand people control their territory from Split Sky City (Moundville, Ala.), ruled by scheming chief Flying Hawk and his ruthless nephew, war chief Smoke Shield. While they plot to suppress the enslaved Albaamaha people and to conquer their neighbors, three people pursue a mission to restore peace. Old White is a prophet and “the most dangerous man alive”; Trader is a man with blood on his hands and a stunning secret; Two Petals is a shaman woman who says and does everything backwards. Together this curious trio must bring down Flying Hawk and Smoke Shield. The story is loaded with early Native American lore, spirituality, economics, government and daily life; however, it is not for the squeamish, as it also contains plenty of blood and gore, hideous torture, rape and chilling cruelty. Still, blended with the carefully drawn suspense of court intrigues, colorful characters and sharp plot twists, this is a terrific tale. (Jan.)

Beachy’s coming-of-age debut about a clueless, jobless, self-pitying college grad is at once hilarious, strange and uncomfortable. After graduating, Potter Mays returns to his parents’ home, where, unable to decide whether he really loves his girlfriend, Audrey—who is spending three weeks backpacking through Europe with her bisexual best friend—he retains the services of his childhood friend, Stuart, who makes his living as an independent thought contractor. Potter pieces together memories of his troubled romance, such as his and Audrey’s past indiscretions, her family’s disregard for him and his lust for Audrey’s best friend. As the summer progresses and Potter remains oblivious to even his parents’ obviously damaged marriage, he makes an unfortunate and extremely ridiculous series of mistakes in his quest to prove his love. Beachy’s characters, infinitely fallible, are real and fleshy, and their loneliness is palpable. Potter’s total lack of discipline and common sense are as funny as they are frustrating, and he is lovable even when he’s annoying. (Jan.)

A darling of the French literary scene, Nothomb delivers a complex story of first love set in late 1980s and early ’90s Tokyo. Amélie is a 21-year-old Belgian student studying Japanese in Tokyo when she begins tutoring Rinri, a sweet, shy and wealthy 20-year-old, in French. The relationship quickly evolves into a friendship and, soon after that, into romance. Rinri is a young soul who is easily swept up in his love for Amélie, and his charm is undeniable as he courts her, but Amélie wrestles with the classic situation: she loves spending time with Rinri, but she doesn’t love him, and she cannot deny her need for independence. Nothomb thankfully forgoes the standard approach to passion and unrequited love, leading the reader to hope the adorable couple don’t get married and instead find their own separate happiness. Nicely told, intimate and honest, the book depicts perfectly a nontraditional romance. (Jan.)

The unnamed heroine of Spiller’s debut is an L.A. epicurean who’s made a career writing about her perfect dinner parties. The only problem? She hasn’t thrown one in years—in fact, she dislikes socializing at all. But when a well-placed magazine editor asks for an invite, our heroine is forced to reproduce her fantasy life for a do-or-die dinner. What looks at first like a three-act rom-com spends hundreds of pages spinning its wheels, the paralyzed narrator pinging between food trivia and recollections of a neglectful, withholding mother. As promised, the novel contains recipes, but most are unexecutable and only some relevant. Aside from epicurean concerns, the heroine’s focus sticks mainly to the flaws in her surroundings; there’s no learning or growing, just a litany of worries over the coming party, lots of blame-throwing and unhappiness. Despite Spiller’s clever way with words, her reach falls short of social satire, resulting in a static character study of a whining foodie. (Jan.)

Amen to Lovely’s hilarious follow-up to Love Like Hallelujah, featuring her signature formula of divine and devilish folks trying to follow the word of God and keep it real in the bedroom and out. Passion Perkins attends Logos Word Interdenominational and is ready to end her several-year sexual drought. Love-hungry Passion lusts after Lavon Chapman, a producer helping Logos Word’s married pastors Dr. Stanley and Carla Lee create an inspirational DVD series. Lavon, alas, prefers the voluptuous Carla, whose husband’s lackluster erotic prowess makes her ripe for Lavon’s picking. They embark on a heated affair that Passion seeks to expose after Lavon refuses her overtures. Several subplots barrel along, including a bisexual love triangle involving church members. The scintillating brew of sex, faith and sharp humor will have Lovely’s fans breathless for more. (Jan.)

The overpublished religion vs. atheism debate takes a refreshing turn here. In an understated way, Killham (How to Cook a Tart) takes a modest run at the great questions: does God exist? if so, where is he when people get ill or get mugged? These are the matters chewed on by 13-year-old narrator Nic (as in Nicolaus Copernicus) Delano, whose astrophysicist mother, Lucy, is an atheist who believes in nature. Nic’s teen hormones make his curiosity more than intellectual, and he’s as interested in girls as he is in the Bible, a suitably rebellious topic for an atheist’s kid. Nic is attracted to things about the Bible-believing Christian lifestyle: for one thing, his friend’s mom bakes cookies. But many things forge the ties that bind. Minor characters could be more memorably drawn, and the interfaith range of beliefs (the Muslim babysitter, the Jewish relatives) is more convenient than convincing. But for those who prefer stories of love, faith and pain to a theological argument about them, this is a sweet, engaging read. (Jan.)

With a pure shot of Christian fiction testosterone, pro NFL kicker Elam and pastor turned full-time writer Yohn offer a second Riley Covington thriller. The pro football life of Riley is wrapped around a terrorist plot to kill him after he heroically thwarted a full-blown stadium attack months earlier, in Monday Night Jihad. For readers who enjoy a suspenseful near-super-hero versus underworld story, this thriller disappoints with its predictable arc and passages of dialogue that are downright mundane and off the plot path. More successfully, the authors use multiple points of view to get inside the minds and excruciating decisions of individual terrorists wrestling, along with the bombs in backpacks, with their own jagged emotions and faith. The novel mixes inside looks into pro football, the faith decisions of terrorists and an irresistible passion between hero and heroine. Christian thriller fans will find enough to keep them on the hook until the last page. (Jan.)

Smith’s thrilling seventh collection begins with an odd invocation of its audience: “I Speak to Fewer People,” reads the opening poem’s title. Smith’s speaker is an all too self-aware rogue, running the gamut from romantic to misanthropic, “talking about romance or trucks.” Sudden shifts—from high to low, from archaisms to slang, from swagger to sadness—render “all life a contortion pressed through a slot in time.” Jagged lines move casually through politics, nature, love, loss, beauty and waste, their sneaky pathos (“taking out the trash and you/ get lonely sometimes”) balanced by a cynical wit (“I got caught/ a few years ago in an internet scam, and/ spent several months/ retrieving my identity”). Smith rues a hardness that comes with experience, age or both, observing that “you keep trying to hold your meanness back,” but he’s never too hard to resist a punch line. Smith’s velocity is captivating and occasionally unnerving: this poetry will hold your hand the whole way, though in all its swerving and speed, it pauses for moments of delicate and unexpected loveliness: “The ocean yesterday was smooth over lumps like a blanket.” (Jan.)

Pulitzer-winner Dunn has, since the 1970s, offered pellucid free verse with a great deal of thought cast into deliberately plain diction, about the ups and downs, the epiphanies and the wisdom, of middle-class domestic life. This 16th book of poems and second Selected will certainly give loyal readers what they seek: prose poems and free-verse stanzas about small pleasures, houses and roads, disappointments, and sex, or the lack of it. “One night they both needed different things/ of a similar sort: she, solace, he to be consoled,” one subtle if typical poem begins; another finds Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, “almost ready to praise this awful world.” In his recent poems (including 20 new ones) faithful readers will also find surprises, none harsher or more startling than the poems from The Insistence of Beauty (2004) about late-life divorce. Dunn also takes into his usually calm sensibility the public events of recent years—9/11, the war in Iraq; these politicized calamities give him unsettling backdrops for his pathos, and his ongoing search for consolation: “how sad it is,” he imagines telling God, “that awe has been replaced/ by small enthusiasms, that you’re aware/ things just aren’t the same these days.” (Jan.)

National Book Award–winner Clifton has long enjoyed national acclaim for her careful, colloquial, compact renditions of African-American voices, in memoirs, books for children and more than a dozen books of poems. This relatively short new collection excels in its opening pages, with wry comic verse in the voices of Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben and a devout raccoon: “oh Master Of All Who Take and Wash/ And Eat lift me away.” Clifton’s more serious poems, where she speaks as herself, address her late parents, her delights as a grandmother and her mixed feelings about memory and her own body as she begins her eighth decade. A visionary sequence of very brief lyric works, “A Meditation on Ten Oxherding Pictures,” winds the volume up: “i am lucille who masters ox/ ox is the one lucille masters/ hands caution me again/ what can be herded/ is not ox.” Where Clifton’s earlier poetry sought strength in African-American oral traditions, these poems look even further back, to the origin of writing (where a sketch of an ox became an aleph, then an “A”). Clifton (Mercy) retains an undeniable sincerity, an openness to her own emotions, and a rare warmth. (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 Ekelof, but also modern figurative paintings: her strongest new poems, a sequence titled “The Girls,” describe a disturbing set of canvases 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.)

The first half of this vivid debut reacts to the poet’s travels, mostly in Central and South America. One poem watches “Ziggy Marley at the Estadio Nacional”; another envisions a nation in which “When asked about hunger,/ the children replied with hunger.” Novey strikes a fine balance between hints and allusions to political history and generalized or allegorical locales, not proper nouns or place names but “leaping wells to the underworld”; she mixes prose poems with solidly crafted free verse, poems about particular sites with poems about travel itself, “from the Home Depot in Lima/ or in search of the Dalai Lama.” Novey (who is also a translator) fills the second half of her volume with equally well-made poems about American places, which follow the history of a family, perhaps her own. “They met at Hardy’s in a highway town,” one poem opens; another looks harder at the American isolation of the plains, where “After the last house,/ the land extends like a hand before the mouth of a horse.” Carolyn Forche selected Novey for a prestigious chapbook prize, and Novey’s poems will certainly inspire comparisons to Forche’s. But the wide range of this book attest that Novey has many unique gifts of her own. (Nov.)

Not a biography, but instead a very coherent book of free translations, this new volume translated by Young (Black Lab) gives the sense of a life as lived, a life that belongs at once to Du Fu (712–770, also called Tu Fu) and to any sympathetic reader who has experienced beauty in nature, disillusion in politics, or love and trouble at home. These 168 poems, along with clear footnotes, also create a sense of the poet’s own times. Du Fu began his poetic career as a bachelor writing beautiful seasonal poetry, a close friend of the great, and slightly older, poet Li Bai (Li Po). “Autumn again and you and I/ are thistledown in the wind,” he told his friend in one early poem. But Du Fu married and began a family, and then, seeking noble patrons, had to travel through war zones. He wrote, in consequence, poems about conscription, battle, poverty and loneliness: “on my face new tears/ are running down familiar tracks.” Search for secure employment later on brought him to far-flung provincial towns, where he produced his most tranquil verse: “here comes some tea and sugarcane juice/ brought down from the house.” (Nov.)

In Golynko, Russian poetry has produced a Language poet who utilizes post-Soviet, reconstructed, contemporary Russia as fodder to build poems that operate like postmodern linguistic games: “elementary things/ don’t take up a lot of space/ that must be the formula of modernity.” This first collection in English spans 15 years during which Golynko crafted an increasingly unornamented verse, replacing absurd linguistic playfulness (“lobster, Chianti,/rare beefstext” with vulgarity and an atmosphere of haplessness in jerky, associative poems and sequences: “whip out, yeah, eat it up.” The book begins with faux European narratives such as “Sashenka” (“I stole gooseberries, crowfoots in the municipal gardens of Tartu”), moves to a series of emotionally loaded list poems called “The Revered Categories” and finally merges the two forms to create the title poem , a bleak narrative of despair and loneliness with occasional sparks of dark humor: “men occupied with the quest for fire/ generally pay no attention to women.” Wildly experimental in the original Russian, this book was no doubt difficult to translate, and some of its force may have been lost in the process, but fans of experimental and Eastern European poetry may find much to like. (Nov.)

In Mayer’s 21st collection, the prolific New York School veteran mixes prose poems, pastorals, sonnets, epigrams and dream catalogues to create an unruly but characteristically joyous book of everyday transcendence. As always, the pleasures of Mayer’s poetry come not only from her calculatedly casual voice and her artful restraint but especially her messy insistence on play and her explorations of what is and is not literature. “[I] write unbalanced poetry,” she says. “As a 61-year old poet,” she writes in “Summer Solstice 2006,” “my aims haven’t much changed.” Yet this late work is elegiac and defiant while still quotidian, colloquial and self-reflective, as poems with titles like “Winner of the Bad Poem Contest” and “Inky Dinky Parlez-Vous: Variations on Sponge Bob Square Pants” attest. After her many incarnations as ingenue, performance artist, teacher, mother, shaman and poetry rabble-rouser, Mayer’s become something of a wise woman of letters. “Sometimes,” she writes, “it seems like every-/thing’s a mistake.” Readers will wish more people could make mistakes like these. (Nov.)

Hauge (1908–1994) worked as a farmer and gardener in the fjord region of his native western Norway—his spare, psalmlike poems seem to be made by someone used to working with his lands, like maker of the houses “of branches we built/ when we were children.” These are also poems infused with a wry, modernist perspective: “Today I saw/ two moons,/ one new/ and one old./ I have a lot of faith in the new moon./ But it’s probably just the old.” Hand in hand with that sensibility comes an allegiance to Japanese haiku—Hauge delivers odes to Basho in addition to Brecht—and readers may be reminded of Kenneth Rexroth. Together, the poems in this beautifully translated selection (the book contains the Norwegian en face) provide us with the autobiography of a poet who felt most at home during winter, in solitude. Hauge deserves a larger American readership, and this book may summon it. (Nov.)

More interested in the generative possibilities of questions than in their answers, the well-crafted, rangy free-verse lyrics of Hartigan’s Colorado Prize–winning debut obliquely interrogate humanity’s relationships with larger forces, both natural and man-made, as well as notions of love and motherhood. Nature itself is reshaped simply by virtue of man’s way of looking at it: “Here the animals/ we’ve plucked/ from books or fields, [are] placed// into our hearts/ like lanterns.” The thrilling title poem, a cascade of meticulously described actions and things, views many created objects as though they are part of nature, equating “One bus arriving with blue and black windows” with “One goldfish darting six inches.” Yet amid all this transformation, a sense of paralysis surfaces, as if seeing beyond appearances merely reveals other appearances. Fans of Jorie Graham will find much that is familiar—and much to like—in Hartigan’s careful lines and obsessive, off-center observations. Hartigan distinguishes herself from her peers—she shares with many young poets a hip penchant for fragmentation and elliptical imagery—with her careful eye (“Wood chips/ burning/ by the pharmacy”) , her ear for the ways soft and sharp sounds make music together (“one leaf from among/ the accumulate of leaves”), and her earnest search for “One voice rising and falling in one chorus.” (Nov.)

Bestseller Winspear’s sixth Maisie Dobbs novel (after 2008’s An Incomplete Revenge) raises the stakes considerably for her psychologically astute sleuth. On Christmas eve 1931, a man Maisie passes on a London street detonates a bomb, killing himself and slightly wounding Maisie. This traumatic event turns out to be linked to threatening letters the British prime minister starts to receive, the first of which mentions Maisie by name. Maisie joins a high-powered investigative team devoted to averting the cataclysmic disaster promised by the unknown author of the messages. By providing the letter writer’s perspective, Winspear removes some of the mystery. In addition, Maisie’s speculative guesses about the profile of the criminal, while accurate, have less logical grounding than traditional puzzle fans might prefer. Still, Winspear does her usual superb job of portraying London between the world wars. (Feb.)

At the start of British author Southey’s excellent second mystery set in 18th-century Newcastle (after 2007’s Broken Harmony), harpsichordist Charles Patterson, newly dumped as city musical director, is teetering on the verge of starvation when cantankerous organ builder William Bairstowe makes him an offer he can’t refuse—to discover the source of threats against Bairstowe’s life. The plot, as intricate as a fugue, intriguingly counterpoints Patterson’s detection of mayhem and murder with his unresolvable attraction to his wealthy and flagrantly breeches-wearing music student, Esther Jerdoun, aged 38 to his 26. The book’s major appeal, like Hogarth’s, lies in realistic but wickedly pointed characterizations and the convincing evocation of the sounds and stink of a preindustrial city. Southey deserves an encore for this ingenious satire of a society as full as ours of nefarious predators—and for her bittersweet sympathy for the underdog. (Jan.)

Set in Hollywood in 1931, Richards’s swell follow-up to Death Was the Other Woman (2008) finds ace-in-the-hole secretary Kitty Pangborn still lifting as much of the load as her PI boss, Dex Theroux, who has a tendency to spend his afternoons “with all the boys: Johnnie Walker, Jack Daniels, Jim Beam, Jose Cuervo.” Fortunately, Dex is sober when a mysterious man hires him, on behalf of “a group of concerned citizens,” to observe movie star Laird Wyndham, whose morality is suspect. Dex senses a setup, confirmed when Wyndham is arrested for a starlet’s murder. The turnaround is complete when Wyndham hires Dex to clear him. Richards handles the slang and patois of the period neatly. Likewise, she paints a vivid picture of the contrast between those just scraping by during the Depression and those living high on the hog. Kitty has plenty of moxie, and while Dex gets top billing on the office door, she’s no second banana in this class act. (Jan.)

In Martin’s solid fourth Edwardian-era whodunit to feature railway detective Jim Stringer (after 2008’s The Lost Luggage Porter), a blizzard forces the train on which Stringer, his wife and young son are riding home to York one cold December day to stop at a remote station. When workmen find the remains of photographer Paul Peters in a nearby storage building, a length of rope dangling from the roof beam above the body, Stringer discounts the obvious explanation that the man hanged himself. After Stringer realizes the exposures in Peters’s camera are missing, he gets on the trail of a secretive upper-class society whose ranks had been dwindling until it went out of existence a year earlier. If he solves the murder, Stringer might just get promoted to sergeant. While the revelation of the crime’s motive may disappoint some mystery fans, the period atmosphere and railroad lore provide ample compensation. (Jan.)

In Bruce’s assured debut, idealistic 25-year-old Gary Goodhew, recently promoted to detective constable at Cambridge’s Parkside Station, gets a chance to prove himself to Parkside’s seasoned veterans after the discovery of a young woman’s body atop a heap of trash bags on Midsummer Common. Like many a British police procedural, the novel opens with a flurry of activity and the introduction of numerous characters, but the action soon slows to a series of scenes, marked by descriptive passages full of precise details, in which the victim’s actions leading to her murder come into focus. Fortunately, halfway through, the pace picks up as the workaholic Goodhew pursues every twist in the case. By the end, readers will be flipping back to the beginning to suss out those clues that they may have missed. Bruce is also the author of two works of nonfiction, including Cambridgeshire Murders. (Jan.)

An apparent mugging gone wrong results in the murder of Wilson Willetts, a renowned Chicago architect, in Kleinfeld’s overly long so-so debut. Initially, the police have an open-and-shut case against Emilio Garcia, a drug-addicted loser identified by three eyewitnesses to the fatal shooting as the gunman. Indicted for the crime, Garcia goes to trial in a politically motivated prosecution. As Chicago PD detectives Mark Bergman and John Dunegan investigate further, they find that the suspect’s claim he was framed may have some credence. By having the story alternate between the police probe and the efforts to conceal the truth by the forces behind Willetts’s murder, the author eliminates any suspense about Garcia’s guilt. The formulaic plot includes such clichés as an implausible escape by one of the detectives from the bad guys’ clutches despite being restrained in a chair. (Jan.)

Readers will be delighted with this collection of original novellas tied to popular crime/fantasy series. The standout is Sniegoski’s “Noah’s Orphans,” in which angel PI Remy Chandler must solve the murder of the biblical Ark’s builder, whose battered corpse is found on an abandoned oil rig. Sniegoski manages to make a far-fetched setup both plausible and moving. Butcher’s “The Warrior” hints at a mysterious ongoing war, while wizard detective Harry Dresden solves a case with typical dry wit. Green employs darker humor in “The Difference a Day Makes,” in which PI John Taylor assists a woman who wandered into the dark world hidden within London, while Richardson’s “The Third Death of the Little Clay Dog” neatly merges noir conventions with a fantastical plot. All solid and suspenseful, these stories are sure to please. (Jan.)

The long-awaited, intricate sequel to Cherryh’s Hugo-winning Cyteen (1989) brings events full circle. Brilliant 18-year-old scientist Ariane Emory, a clone, resumes the work of her original: psychogenesis, the cloning of psychology and memory. Fellow clone Justin Warrick tutors “second Ariane,” but when Justin’s exiled original, Jordan, returns to Cyteen’s research city of Reseune, he stirs up trouble and questions about who really killed first Ariane and why the clones of the participants in Cyteen’s original power struggle seem to be reprising the roles of their predecessors. Plots and subplots revolve around second Ariane as she desperately attempts to unravel the motivations of players alive and dead. Complex and rich, with beautifully rounded characters, this novel can stand alone, but will delight fans of Cyteen with extra layers of meaning that resonate between old and new. (Jan.)

Secombe (Limbo) limply recycles a worn-out plot: a bet between God and the Devil has placed the world in jeopardy. God’s lack of interest in the bet’s outcome and his obsession with golf forces Archangel Gabriel to enlist depressed dentist Martin Gray to help uncover the Devil’s final scheme, with the only clue the word “Endgame.” Martin is an absurdly bad selection, but he does his best to assist while dodging an IRS agent, trying to patch up his marriage and attempting to connect with his teen son, Luke. There are some amusingly wacky moments, such as Frank Sinatra and Francis Drake ferrying souls to the afterlife and Gabriel, wearing only a loincloth and a trench coat, skulking around gobbling danishes, but readers will be frustrated by Secombe’s two-dimensional, clichéd characters and the tiresomely predictable story line. (Jan.)

Six Earth women must work together to defeat the evil that threatens the magical land of Lladrana in the fifth and final Summoning book (after 2008’s Keepers of the Flame). Raine and Jikata are the last of the six Exotiques to be summoned to Lladrana, sailor and architect Raine to build and direct the warship that will lead an invasion force and lonely pop singer Jikata to cast the musical spell that will destroy the Dark. Compelled to stay in Lladrana until they complete the tasks they were summoned for, the women are drawn into the mission, finding friends and love along the way. Romance readers who prize charming fantasy settings and armored warriors as much as tangled love affairs will especially appreciate the action-packed happy ending. (Jan.)

Known for dark fantasy that skates the edge of horror, Kiernan (Tales of Pain and Wonder) turns to science fiction with equally unsettling effects in these eight stories. The mostly off-screen aliens in “Zero Summer,” “The Pearl Diver” and “Bradbury Weather” seem oddly tentative compared to the fully realized monsters of Kiernan’s fantasy tales, and “Riding the White Bull,” “In View of Nothing” and “Ode to Katan Amano” focus on fraught relationships more than their isolated, almost sterile settings. Fans of Kiernan’s fantasy will be more drawn to two poignant rejoinders to stories of post-human glory: “Faces in Revolving Souls,” wherein a woman is isolated from her smug new culture by surgical rejection, and “A Season of Broken Dolls,” whose nameless protagonist is fascinated and revolted by art made of people. (Jan.)

The meandering sixth entry (after 2007’s The Witch Is Dead) in Damsgaard’s Ophelia and Abby supernatural mystery series brings troubling erotic dreams to Ophelia, rural Iowa’s reluctant novice witch. She’s unsure what her nocturnal fantasies portend until she comes face-to-face with the man of those dreams, exposé author Stephen Larsen. Just after their first kiss, Stephen is shot. As he lies comatose in the hospital, Ophelia’s dreams quickly shift from sexy to mysterious, playing out like a serial drama taking place in WWII Paris, while some failed attempts on Ophelia’s life lead the Summerset sheriff to suspect that she was the shooter’s real target. Ophelia must turn to Abby, her master witch grandmother, for help saving Stephen’s life and bringing together the myriad threads of the rather disjointed plot. (Jan.)

Callahan (a pseudonym for Texas-born author Jeffery McClanahan, coauthor of Since You’re Leaving Anyway, Take Out the Trash and others as Dixie Cash) drops a sizzling romance into the wilds of West Texas. Judith Ann “Jude” Strayhorn, the smart, beautiful heir of the Strayhorn Circle C ranching dynasty, plans to purchase a deceased neighbor’s ranch, only to find it’s been left to Brady Fallon, one of her father’s newest cowhands, who refuses to sell. Jude and Brady’s friendship takes an intimate turn, but their budding romance cools in the face of class realities, even when Jude’s father offers Brady a challenging job that frequently brings the lovers together. McClanahan’s knowledge of the complexities of ranching and her multifaceted character development, swift pacing and sensuous love scenes set this western romance well above its contemporaries. (Jan.)

Shortly before the Cuban missile crisis, mystery Grand Master Block (Hit and Run) donned a pen name to publish this absorbing yarn about five men vying for a $100,000 prize put on Fidel Castro’s head by a mysterious guy named Hiraldo. Bounty hunter Ray Garrison only works on his own; hardened murderer Michael Turner is paired with 19-year-old Jim Hines, avenging his brother’s execution; and Earl Fenton, longing to do some good before he dies of cancer, teams up with jack-of-all-trades Matt Garth, who just wants the money. As they make their way to the Cuban coast, sympathetic locals support the five would-be killers in their titular goal despite their penchant for rape and mayhem. Passages discussing Castro’s life and times add depth to this intense, taut thriller, just as good now as it was in 1961. (Jan.)

Karen Miller (The Riven Kingdom) launches a trilogy, her first venture as Mills, with this droll tale of magical bureaucracy. Gerald Dunwoody, a Third Grade wizard and lowly safety inspector for Ottosland’s Department of Thaumaturgy, inadvertently blows up a factory while trying to save it. Summarily fired, Gerald takes a job in almost bankrupt New Ottosland as royal court wizard for King Lional the 43rd. To prove his powers to the doubtful king and his put-upon sister, Prime Minister Princess Melissande, Gerald turns a cat into a lion and transforms the dowdy princess into a literally bewitching fashion plate, but preventing war between New Ottosland and Kallarap and making a highly illegal dragon for the king may be beyond his will and abilities. Miller’s whimsical prose keeps the plot jumping and the readers laughing. (Jan.)

An “otomen” as defined by this book is “[a] male who has feminine hobbies, skills, or way of thinking.” Asuka, the title otomen of this well-drawn comedy, secretly reads shojo manga, makes stuffed animals and prefers caramel macchiatos to coffee. Forbidden by his mother from girlish behavior after his transvestite father abandoned the family, Asuka takes on a very masculine public character. He is nationally ranked at judo, karate and kendo. Asuka’s tragedy is somehow hilarious. He falls for Ryo, the nongirly daughter of a manly martial arts instructor who finds Asuka unacceptable as a friend, let alone a potential suitor: “Men don’t go in the kitchen!” he bellows. The strange deus ex machina character Junta acts as a catalyst to bring Asuka and Ryo together while enjoying Asuka’s elaborate bento lunches. The over-the-top gender stereotyping is ham-handed at times, but reveals interesting insight into what the Japanese consider the most manly and most girly extremes. The strong artwork carries the comedy premise further than the script could alone, and the manga-within-a-manga, Love Chick, is a hilariously accurate parody of typical shojo. Kanno’s other manga in translation include the sci-fi series Blank Slate and angel comedy Soul Rescue. (Feb.)

The debut volume of Bone creator Smith’s new series is distinctly not for kids, but its gripping images and swift pacing are as impressive as anything he’s done. In its first two chapters we meet Rasl, an art thief who’s mixed up in some very weird circumstances: to make his getaways, he passes (painfully) through a sort of other-dimensional warp called the Drift, and sometimes he doesn’t end up on the right version of Earth. He’s also got a mysterious gunman following him, a mysterious tattoo on his arm and a prostitute girlfriend with a mysterious necklace that displays a “symbol of emergence.” More even than Bone, Rasl is built around a few indelible images, like the agonized appearance of Rasl emerging from the Drift and the sinister grin of the strange-faced man who’s following him; it’s a pretty minimal story so far (the book was reviewed from an incomplete galley), and Smith clearly knows more about the world he’s building than he lets on. Still, his scrubby, rough-edged brushwork (showcased nicely by the book’s oversized format) gets across the story’s foreboding, quiet moments as well as its chaotic chase scenes, and his knack for character design is always a treat. (Dec.)

This ongoing comic strip chronicles the lives of a tight-knit group of lesbian friends over an astounding 21 years of life, work, love, boredom, political activism and countless reversals of fortune. At its heart are six women: the promiscuous Lois, a feminist bookstore clerk with a penchant for gender-bending; her two roommates, the overworked academic Ginger and self-identified “bisexual lesbian” Sparrow; their domestically partnered friends Clarice and Toni; and Mo, who despite (or perhaps because of) her frequent politically charged outbursts of neurosis is the hub of her circle. These characters, flawed but endearing, are brought to life by Bechdel’s quirky artistic sensibility. Facial expressions are carefully nuanced, and she seems to take great joy in using small details to differentiate emotions. Late in the collection, when a character receives treatment for cancer, a tiny caret in her cheek is enough to transform her from a fresh-faced mischief-maker into a sallow and frightened chemo patient. What cannot be overemphasized is the sheer scope of the collection, which follows these women from idealistic young adulthood to contentedly disillusioned middle age and, for some, parenthood. All eventually end up a little more haggard than they began, but there isn’t one whose Bechdel-illustrated bags under her eyes were not hard fought for and hard won. (Nov.)

Building on Heath Ledger’s performance in The Dark Knight (although long before the movie’s debut), Azzarello creates a memorably cringe-worthy story. Rather than a natty Clown Prince of Crime, this Joker looks like a glam rocker gone to toxic seed. Newly released from Arkham Asylum, he begins disorganizing the criminal establishment of Gotham City. Although he claims to want power and money when he confronts Two Face and his peers, he really seems just to enjoy playing with people—shooting them, setting them on fire or skinning them alive. Accompanying him is Jonny Frost, a young thug who takes a long time to recognize the drawbacks of seeing a vicious sociopath as a role model. Like Jonny, however, readers may find that, horrifying as the Joker is, they can’t take their eyes off him. Even Batman, when he inevitably enters the action, functions largely as the Joker’s partner in a dance of death. Azzarello has learned how to create a menacing, morally ambivalent atmosphere in his years of scripting 100 Bullets, and Bermejo’s jagged, shadow-saturated art sustains the mood. The result is fascinating but extremely dark. (Nov.)