Fiction Book Reviews

Giardina (Saints and Villains) offers Brontë fans a solid biographical novel portraying sisters Anne, Charlotte and Emily as different in temperament but in love with the same man, fighting the same illnesses and withdrawing from the same grim realities to write poetry and fiction that express their individual passions. Youngest sister Emily distinguishes herself at age six when, while attending boarding school, she admits to encounters with ghosts. (The punishment doled out by the headmaster does not deter Emily, but it does inspire a well-known scene in Jane Eyre.) Brontë men include brother Branwell, who struggles with addiction; father Patrick, straining to support his family on limited finances; and William Weightman, Patrick's young, flirtatious, social-reforming curate who becomes the key figure as he wins the hearts of the three Brontë girls. Giardina's mid-19th-century England is factually sturdy, while the relationship between Emily and Weightman is nicely nuanced, and the insights and inferences about Emily and Charlotte's relationship are convincingly rendered. You don't have to be a Brontë scholar to appreciate Giardina's novel, but having a little context will greatly increase the payoff. (July)

The enigmatic first novel from memoirist Nguyen (Stealing Buddha's Dinner) is a detailed character study of second-generation sisters who find themselves more anchored by their Vietnamese heritage than they had realized. Van and Linny Luong, estranged since their childhood in a suburb of Grand Rapids, Mich., return home for their father's American citizenship ceremony. Van, a lifelong goodie-goodie, finds herself abandoned by her husband, while Linny, Van's polar opposite, leaves her married lover once she discovers how he feels about her. Their father, a reluctant tile worker but enthusiastic inventor of devices to improve the lives of short people, provides a perfect diversion for his daughters—he needs them to come with him to Detroit to audition for a TV show. When the audition doesn't go as planned and family secrets start to come out, Linny, Van and Mr. Luong all get a chance to set aside their past failures and find a way to remake themselves. Though not all of the ideas put into play about immigration and immigrant life work themselves out, Nguyen's novel is clever and lively, a fine update to a familiar setup. (July)

The dense Wind River Mountains of western Wyoming is where Carlson (Five Skies) sets his brooding latest, a tale of expired love and desperate measures. Mack, son of a longtime rancher, has made many missteps in life, culminating in a recent stint in jail where “he'd rusted like an old post when the weather turned.” While he's in jail, his recently ex-wife Vonnie agrees to join him one last time on their annual ritual of backpacking through the Wyoming wilderness to fish, camp and rediscover each other. Mack, though, has a hidden motive: a friend/technical genius has hired him to retrieve a valuable drone that's crash-landed in the forest. Carlson describes the couple's six days wandering the wooded terrain in delicate, measured prose, careful to miss neither the lush scenery nor the incrementally amplified tension as Mack edges closer to his prize and shady characters from the past appear. Carlson has produced a work of masterful fiction, combining the sad inevitability of a doomed relationship with sheer nail-biting suspense. (June)

Gabbay's winning third thriller to feature CIA spook Jack Teller (after The Lisbon Crossing) focuses on Iran during two pivotal years: 1953, when a mistake-laden covert CIA operation overthrew the nation's prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, and 1979, during the chaos of the Islamic revolution and Ayatollah Khomeini's rise to power. In 1953, as a naïve Company recruit, Teller befriends an idealistic Iranian government official, Yari Fatemi, only to be manipulated into betraying him and his family. In 1979, when Yari's sister shows up in New York and informs Teller that her brother is in jail awaiting certain execution, Teller feels compelled to return to Iran in a suicidal attempt to save Yari. Powered by relentless pacing and a story line abounding in subterfuge, treachery and subversion, this Ludlumesque page-turner offers invaluable historical insights into the turbulent relationship between America (“the Great Satan”) and Iran. (June)

It isn't quite love at first sight when Celia, Sally, Bree and April meet as first-year hall mates at Smith College in the late 1990s. Sally, whose mother has just died, is too steeped in grief to think about making new friends, and April's radical politics rub against Celia and Bree's more conventional leanings. But as the girls try out their first days of independence together, the group forms an intense bond that grows stronger throughout their college years and is put to the test after graduation. Even as the young women try to support each other through the trials of their early twenties, various milestones—Sally's engagement, Bree's anomalous girlfriend, April's activist career—only seem to breed disagreement. Things come to a head the night before Sally's wedding, when an argument leaves the friends seething and silent; but before long, the women begin to suspect that life without one another might be harder than they thought. Sullivan's novel quickly endears the reader to her cast, though the book never achieves the heft Sullivan seems to be striving for. (June)

In Sokoloff's serviceable supernatural thriller, two Duke University psychology professors, Laurel MacDonald and Brendan Cody, stumble on suppressed findings of an inquiry into poltergeist activity conducted under the auspices of Duke's Rhine parapsychology lab nearly half a century earlier. All the participants appear to have died, disappeared or, in the case of Laurel's enfeebled uncle, gone mad. Determined to advance their academic careers, the pair corral two students with strong paranormal potential to camp out at the spooky Folger House, site of the original experiment. No sooner do they begin their study than they're confronted with uncanny phenomena that suggest they've awakened a malignant presence that pervades the house. Sokoloff (The Price) keep her story enticingly ambiguous, never clarifying until the climax whether the unfolding weirdness might be the result of the investigators' psychic sensitivities or the mischievous handiwork of a human villain. (June)

Mohr's first novel is biting and heartbreaking, a piercing look at the indelible scars a violent past has left on a young man named Rhonda. In the mental hospital where Rhonda spent his teenage years, a doctor he refers to as Angel-Hair diagnoses him with depersonalization, a disorder he uses to reconfigure the traumatic events of his life and render them in vividly surreal terms. To withstand the frequent absences of his alcoholic mother and her boyfriend's abuse, Rhonda imagines his childhood home in Arizona as a living thing, where rooms stretch and move, and desert wildlife wanders the halls. The disturbing narrative engine—Rhonda's renaming and reimagining of the world around him to fit into his damaged logic—keeps the story creepily moving as it touches on homebrew prison wine and Rhonda's friendship with his childhood self, little-Rhonda. Mohr uses punchy, tightly wound prose to pull readers into a nightmarish landscape, but he never loses the heart of his story; it's as touching as it is shocking, even if the ending's a smidge sappy. (June)

Evans and Jameson follow their bestselling debut, Category 7, about an evil scientist and his manmade hurricanes, with an eco-thriller with an even more imaginative premise. Deep beneath the seabed in the eastern Caribbean near the island of Taino lies a massive bed of methane hydrate, the only truly clean-burning fuel on earth. Megabusinessman Dennis Cavendish, Taino's owner, has built an undersea habitat, Atlantis, from which he plans to mine the methane hydrate, a complicated operation that, if bungled, could imperil the planet. Out to sabotage the process is charismatic Garner Blaylock, “Earth activist, unsung genius and Dennis Cavendish's worst nightmare.” Blaylock and his team of sex-enslaved women are prepared to die destroying all human life if it means cleansing the globe of pollutants. Readers will race right along with Dr. Sam Briscoe, a methane specialist, and the novel's other good guys as they feverishly strive to save the world. (June)

In Rucka's adrenaline-filled seventh novel to feature ex-bodyguard Atticus Kodika (after Patriot Acts), Atticus and his ex-assassin lover, Alena Cizkova, are living under assumed names in the remote town of Kobuleti in the Republic of Georgia. When the family of their next-door neighbor, Bakhar Lagidze, is slaughtered and Bakhar's 14-year-old daughter, Tiasa, is kidnapped, Atticus vows to do anything to get her back. After discovering Tiasa was sold to pay off her father's debt, Atticus reluctantly immerses himself in the seedy world of human trafficking, which takes him across Eastern Europe to Nevada, with stops in Dubai and Amsterdam along the way. When the men he's chasing target Alena for retribution, she too goes on the run, with help from an unlikely source: hard-nosed New York PI—and Atticus's ex-lover—Bridgett Logan, last seen in Critical Space. Series fans who have come to expect a nonstop thrill ride with a topical angle won't be disappointed. (May)

In Sigurdardóttir's engaging second crime novel to feature attorney Thóra Gudmundsdóttir (after Last Rituals), Jónas Júlíusson, a client Thóra assisted with a land purchase in West Iceland, calls for more help. The superstitious Júlíusson, who believes one of the farmhouses on the land he bought to develop a spa and hotel is haunted, invites Thóra to stay at his facility and investigate. Her arrival coincides with the discovery under some seaweed on the beach of the sexually abused corpse of architect Birna Halldórsdóttir, who was working on a new building. Júlíusson, who apparently sent a text message arranging a rendezvous with the victim at the time and place where she died, becomes the prime suspect. The lawyer shifts gears from ghost busting to amateur sleuthing. As Thóra pursues an array of suspects and clues, Sigurdardóttir keeps readers guessing whodunit. (May)

It takes skill and assurance to pull off this beguiling narrative-by-digression, a love story–cum–family history–cum–confession of sins, and Kirshenbaum (An Almost Perfect Moment) has both in plentiful supply. A romantic affair begins in Fiesole when narrator Sylvia Landsman, an out-of-work, 42-year-old New York divorcée, meets debonair Henry Stafford, a Southern-born expatriate with expensive tastes and a good nose for wine. At the outset, Henry reveals that he is married to a rich woman who permits his lavish expenditures, and yet Sylvia—cynical, wry and imbued with Jewish guilt—dares to hope that Henry will be the man who changes her life. While the lovers enact a contemporary Two for the Road in his green Peugeot, Sylvia entertains Henry with stories about her eccentric family, meanwhile disclosing her own foibles and hang-ups—including some portents about betraying her best friend, Ruby. Sylvia segues from comedic quips to sad aperçus, and from cultural markers to historical vignettes, finally confessing the sin of omission that ended her friendship with Ruby. What's crushing isn't Sylvia's secret—it's how knowledge hasn't made her wiser. There are no happy endings here; instead, Kirshenbaum delivers capital-T truths. (May)

Set in Oxford in the 1850s, this coming-of-age story looks at the son of an Oxford University night porter with academic ambitions for his heir. Instead, “oddness” and possible dyslexia steer young Edgar Jones to apprentice with a domineering blacksmith. Plucked from the forge by a rebellious Oxford anatomy professor, Edgar soon finds himself torn between his benefactor's progressive ideas about natural history and the traditional beliefs of his father. The succinct plot doesn't help rein in character development and tone, which are all over the map: instead of bright and unconventional, Edgar frequently comes across as antisocial, and his initially doting father turns tyrannical as soon as he finds Edgar struggling to copy out his assigned Bible verses. The middle third is richly drawn—almost Dickensian—but a late lunge into magical realism makes for an unsatisfactory ending. Though enlivened by obvious love for Oxford, memorable villains and a well-captured sense of science's ability to awe and baffle, inconsistencies will frustrate adult readers; historically curious young adults may be more forgiving. (May)

Near the start of this straightforward action thriller from bestseller Robinson (Ghost Force), insurgents fire internationally banned Diamondhead missiles at a tank convoy in central Iraq led by Navy SEAL Lt. Cdr. Mackenzie Bedford, incinerating a number of Mack's men in their tanks. In retaliation, Mack guns down the dozen Arabs who fired the missiles as they attempt a fake surrender, for which he's drummed out of the navy. Back home, Mack's son, Tommy, is suffering from a rare disease that can only be cured by an operation costing $1 million. Mack agrees to help assassinate right-wing politician Henri Foche, a major shareholder in the French manufacturer of the Diamondhead, to earn that $1 million. Foche, who's running for the presidency of France, promises policies that will ruin the shipbuilding livelihood of Mack's Maine community if he wins the election. Despite the opposition, Mack marches implacably and sometimes implausibly on to his foregone triumph. (May)

British novelist Millar offers up another nutty slice of interconnected lives in this tale of a lovelorn poet's quest for love. As London's Brixton riot rages, Lux, a 17-year-old vagabond poet waiting for fame to find him, dodges fire bombs, police and an awful thrash metal band as he searches for Pearl, who he is in love with, though she “doesn't care for him all that much.” She's fleeing the melee with her lesbian lover Nicky, who suspects her bosses at Happy Science are scheming to artificially inseminate her. Meanwhile, Kalia, an expelled angel trying to work her way back into heaven, moves through the ages performing good deeds as devil incarnate Johnny seeks to undo them. Their converging stories, minced together in a quick, Spartan prose, offer laughs and, finally, some touching insights into life's trajectory. (May)

Jason Bourne fans will welcome Grant's thrill-packed debut, which introduces Lt. Cdr. David Trevellyan, of Royal Navy Intelligence. Near the end of a mission in New York City, Trevellyan's chance discovery late one night of a bum in an alley with six neatly arranged bullet holes in his chest makes the secret operative the NYPD's prime suspect in the man's murder. After the FBI takes over the case, Trevellyan learns the victim was an undercover agent for the bureau, the sixth to die in a series of killings. Disavowed by his British bosses, Trevellyan realizes he has to fend for himself in what is clearly some sort of frameup. A villainess with a taste for genital mutilation lends a James Bondian touch, but Grant, bestseller Lee Child's younger brother, never strikes a false note in a plot that could have gone over-the-top in lesser hands. Effortlessly filling in bits of his protagonist's backstory during breathing spaces between action scenes, Grant closes on a nicely dark note. Author tour. (May)

A heroine with Bridget Jones-like neuroses and klutziness learns the costs of scoring a glamorous life in McElhatton's delightful second novel (after Pretty Little Mistakes). Jennifer Johnson is a financially unstable copywriter toiling in the marketing department of Keller's, a family-run Minnesota department store. Jennifer learns her ex is engaged and is subjected to her younger sister's wedding preparations, horrid dates and a fire in her Hello Kitty–adorned apartment. Enter Brad Keller, the caddish heir to the Keller's department store fortune. Though at first she couldn't imagine that he'd ever be interested in her, soon enough they're dating, and a marriage proposal follows. Things, of course, aren't exactly as they appear, and Jennifer's eventually confronted with the classic dilemma: money or love. Jennifer's a wonderful narrator—honest, witty, self-deprecating and sharply observant—which more than redeems the story's familiar aspects (gay best friend, high maintenance sibling's pending nuptials, lame Internet dates). McElhatton blends just enough cynicism into the whimsical narrative, creating a fun romp through a woman's manifold insecurities. (May)

This pallid, predictable retelling of the Trystan and Isolde myth, taking up the queen's perspective, adds nothing new to the Arthurian canon. Queen Isolde, recently widowed granddaughter of Morgan Le Fay, has inherited Le Fay's second sight but is powerless to control it; horrified and helpless, she watches warriors fight to take her husband's place as head of the Britons' army. The most powerful of them, Marche, takes a shine to Isolde; despite her wishes, even Isolde's closest advisers urge her to marry quickly before she's turned out of her own kingdom. When Isolde makes a connection with a well-informed prisoner, the mercenary Trystan, she discovers that even the castle is no longer safe. After being forced to marry Marche, Isolde flees with Trystan, and they form a cautious bond as mutual enemies of the state. Supernatural elements distract from the political intrigue, and Isolde's clueless naïveté—even while her informants are dying mysteriously around her—makes her largely intolerable (as well as an ill-suited candidate for queen). Trystan, meanwhile, never manages to crawl out from beneath his own mysterious shadow. (May)

A daredevil pilot heads out on a wild goose chase and learns to slow down and enjoy life in Malone's (The Last Noel) exuberant but ultimately unwieldy 10th novel. After years of accompanying her con artist father on his exploits, seven-year-old Annie is left on the family's North Carolina farm with her aunt Sam. Annie relishes the stability, but still craves excitement as she grows up, learning to fly the single-engine plane her father left her and becoming a navy fighter pilot. When her father calls years later, he claims that he's dying and needs her help with one last escapade. She agrees—in exchange for the name of the mother she's never known. Annie travels to St. Louis, Mo.; Miami; and Cuba in the service of her elusive father, meeting quirky eccentrics along the way, including her one true love. Bizarre coincidences, caricatured criminals and characters who spurt groan-worthy puns, classic movie lines and Shakespeare quotes in place of meaningful dialogue keep the novel teetering toward the absurd. The novel's ambitious blend of humor, mystery, adventure and sentimentality can be as exhausting as Annie's fast-paced flights. (May)

William Shakespeare's older brother, John, plays sleuth in Clements's excellent debut, billed as an Elizabethan thriller. While Queen Elizabeth hesitates to sign the death warrant for Mary, Queen of Scots, her spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, fears the Spanish have sent an assassin to England to kill the country's greatest naval hero, Sir Francis Drake. John, Walsingham's “assistant secretary and chief intelligencer,” suspects the conspiracy against Drake may be connected with a murder John's investigating—the stabbing death of Lady Blanche Howard, whose mutilated corpse was found in a burning London building. His inquiries put him at odds with Richard Topcliffe, a fanatical servant of the queen known for his taste for torture and anti-Catholic zeal, who threatens to expose John's father's secret Catholic sympathies. The characters, action and period detail are all solid, though some may wish the end notes had provided information on the historical John Shakespeare. (May)

Fans of Stephen King's novella Secret Window, Secret Garden will enjoy seeing how Briant handles a similar plot in his creepy debut. A deranged vagrant, Albert K. Arnold, delivers a manuscript titled My Worst Nightmares—My Delicious Memoirs to bestselling author Dermot Nolan at Nolan's converted warehouse home in downtown L.A. My Worst Nightmares chronicles the atrocities of a serial killer who lures victims through a Web site, Dream Healer, and then slaughters them in ways that conjure up their worst phobias. After Arnold dies from a fall from a building, Nolan, who's in a profound writing slump and under increasing pressure to produce a new book, appropriates the manuscript and publishes it successfully as his own work. Growing evidence that Arnold's writings weren't fiction causes Nolan and his family no little concern. While many will anticipate the real villain's identity, Briant has crafted an exciting page-turner that bodes well for future thrillers from his pen. (May)

Steinhauer and Hendra's debut casts a reproachful gaze on the television industry as hopeful actor Mitch Gold stumbles from audition to audition. It's pilot season, and as Mitch fails to land a role and his career woes burden his marriage, his wife, UCLA poetry professor June Dietz, begins to lose sight of tenure and catch the eye of a television writer. Though Mitch is affable and insecure, there's a predictable rhythm to his troubles: first, he auditions, then he panics. Hendra and Steinhauer are at their best when they stick to June, who is lovable and sympathetic: an amateur gourmet with a caustic wit and a longing for New York, she loves her daughter and despises the mommy politicking that runs rampant at preschool, providing a rich line of comedy as svelte mommies say they love cupcakes before cutting them into bits and spitting them out, and ostracize June for having a career. The marriage and Hollywood troubles will be familiar to fans of light Tinseltown fare, but the authors' sense of humor gives this book plenty of pep. (May)

Evangelical Christian fiction author Musser (The Swan House) has penned a thoughtful, poignant novel involving, of all arenas, the publishing world. Lissa Randall, a depressed teenager, hears accusatory “words unspoken” every day as she relives the car accident that took her mother's life. Unable to drive by herself because of her paralyzing fear, Lissa enrolls in a driving school, where her elderly instructor, Ev MacAllister, fights similar emotional battles. The two explore their pasts, often with resistance, and both find a convergence of faith and eventual resolution. Musser's story line allows several themes to be subtly woven in: depression is a no-holds-barred victimizer; repercussions from past/present choices do make a difference; and there are no such things as “random occurrences” in this life. Musser somehow pulls her characters—a bevy of quirky personalities—back to a center point, mostly with success, although some of the conclusions read a bit too tidily. Overall, the novelist's work is solid and fans will be pleased. (May)

Baart (Summer Snow) writes an emotionally intense tale of two sisters. Past and present alternate as the history of their family unfolds in order to explain their present circumstances. The present is largely set in a winery in British Columbia, where one of the sisters, Abigail Bennett, pursues Tyler Kamp, her sister Hailey's boyfriend. The vineyard offers opportunity for beautiful description and resonant imagery as the narrative unspools. Abigail is presented in painful, almost claustrophobic, detail as she deals with the central puzzle of her family and history. But some of the supporting characters, while intriguing, are slightly off-pitch. Hailey's boyfriend Tyler isn't presented fully enough, and winemaker Eli Dixon occasionally becomes more of a symbol than a character with a compelling back story. But Baart has exactly right the members and dynamics of the Bennett family, locked in the manic dance of mental illness. She tells a poignant and gripping story. (May)

Not much happens in the small town of Echo, Fla., especially to the spunky yet agoraphobic widow, Velma True. But when a mysterious storyteller steps out of the wind and up to her front door, his ordinary-looking birthday gift sends Velma on a breakneck journey over the landscape of her memory, even though she can't even cross her yard to the mailbox. The gift has its consequences and forces Velma to relive both her happiest and darkest moments, trapping her between “what she has and what she wants.” Even more troubling, something evil wants the gift for itself and threatens to take away Velma's home, family and dearest friends. In a wild mix of thriller, mystery, romance and drama, Jordan (The Gin Girl) unravels a complicated plot that sometimes knots up and often leaves loose ends unexplained. Too many side plots and mysteries tumble together and become confused. Despite these vagaries, Velma True's mystical adventure will speak to an audience interested in a thrilling, often touching gothic tale about conquering fear and regret with a stubborn, Southern love. (May)

Christy Award–winning evangelical Christian author Turner offers fans a bittersweet introspective tale of a widower's internal journey through grief. Ben Buckley lost his wife, Chloe, years earlier, but has never gotten over the loss. Ben lives each day looking back, recalling his wife's faith and his resentment of it, and now regretting his callousness toward it. Ben, who owns Upstate Home and Garden Bazaar, pesters his assistant, Caroline, with quirky sayings and phrases that leave her both dismayed and baffled. In turn, Caroline puzzles over Ben's wife's death while attempting to make sense of her own life. Enter Kelly Kovatch, 20-year-old daughter of the deceased Chloe's friend, whom Ben despises. Against all reason, Ben hires the girl and alternately shuns or seeks her advice as he attempts to rebuild severely damaged relationships with his own adult children. Turner's work is tedious at many points; still, her loyal fans will continue to expect with eagerness her next novel despite the sluggish pace of this one. (May)

This 12th collection from the former U.S. poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize recipient is her third book-length narrative poem: it follows the real career of the violin prodigy George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower (1780–1860), “a former pupil of Haydn, as well as the grandson/ of an African prince,” or so his promoters and teachers in England said. Moving to Vienna during the Napoleonic Wars, the violinist met and befriended the famously moody Beethoven, who was prepared to dedicate his famously difficult “Kreutzer” Sonata to Bridgetower until a rivalry for the same woman drove them apart. Dove tells Bridgetower's story, and some of Beethoven's and Haydn's, in a heterogenous profusion of short poems, some almost prosy, some glittering in their technique. In quatrains, a double villanelle, what looks like found text, short lines splayed all over a page and attractive description, Dove renders Bridgetower's frustrated genius: “Music played for the soul is sheer pleasure;/ to play merely for pleasure is nothing/ but work.” Dove does not always achieve such subtleties—those who loved her early work may think this book too long: few, though, will doubt the seriousness of her effort, her interest at once in the history of classical music and the changing meanings of race. (Apr.)

This fifth collection from Gilbert (Refusing Heaven) adds an intense, almost nonstop nostalgia to the gifts his longtime devotees will recognize. After early success, Gilbert spent much of the 1960s and 1970s in rural Europe, far out of the limelight; he lived for years on a Greek island with his first wife, the poet Linda Gregg (to whom he dedicates this volume). Here he remembers his years in Greece, where “the blue Aegean is far down and the slow ships/ far out,” and his almost equally bright years in rural Italy—though he also remembers the yearnings and struggles of “Growing Up in Pittsburgh.” Even more than landscape or cityscape, though, Gilbert's gravelly blank verse, unrhymed sonnets and looser forms remember the pleasures and sad moments of the body and of the erotic life: “The shameful ardor/ and the shameless intimacy, the secret kinds/ of happiness and the walled-up childhoods,” from first kisses to “the way love is after fifty.” However tied to autobiography, Gilbert seeks not confessional poetry, but the older, more spiritually alert tradition of Rodin and Rilke: “The world is beyond us even as we own it,” “Winter Happiness in Greece” begins; “It is a hugeness in which we climb towards.” (Apr.)

No one can be neutral about Seidel: to his admirers, he tells truths about American life that other poets are too cowardly to state—about our obsessions with sex and money; our love-hate relationship with terrorism and war; our hypocritical squeamishness about masculine desire. “I want to date-rape life,” one poem begins. From early work imitative of Robert Lowell, Seidel became by the 1990s a fecund dazzler whose rhyming lines, clear and sharp as diamonds, face the facts and stare down headline news. “My subject has always been death and breasts and politics,” he says in one poem. Arranged with 27 new poems first, and his debut volume, Final Solutions (1963) last, the hefty collection offers spicy surprises and sticky situations. “In the Mirror” finds Seidel at Claridge's, the expensive London hotel, musing, “I wouldn't dream of plastic surgery/ Unless it somehow helped the poetry.” The 100 poems in The Cosmos Poems (2000) digress instead to science (“It is the invisible/ Dark matter we are not made of/ That I am afraid of”). Detractors will ask whether Seidel relies too much, too often, on shock value, and whether he simply celebrates the voraciously boastful ego he claims to mock. This retrospective will continue to fuel that debate. (Apr.)

Louise Glück's sixth pick as judge of the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is a debut both whimsical and dark. In limpid free verse lines that slink down the page, Collins introduces a speaker with little confidence in the self or the world at large, prone to questions like, “Can I guess what I am thinking?” Collins's poems seek an almost religious sense of meaning in a world too cynical for faith: “God? you say, but not aloud. Since/ there is no god, you have to be/ both you and god. Yes, god says.” When the poems rely on overly flat or jokey surrealism—“He slaughtered a bear/ for a meat roast party”—it's hard not to wonder why the poems won't admit to how seriously they take themselves and their subjects. Yet, at their best, these poems—set in places as understated as “a zoo/ full of animals” or a “Heaven” that “is a white Formica table”—are driven by a real, if vague, fear that will likely be a familiar poetic pose to readers who came of age in the last two decades, and which is really the old existential terror that the self can't really be known and that the terms of life are always shifting. (Apr.)

This is the Jamaica-born Simpson's 18th collection; its dry trimeters and tragic resignations should certainly please the faithful fans who have followed Simpson through six decades of acerbic prose and verse about existential resignation and middle-class malaise. Headline news, schadenfreude and the trials of old age are for Simpson just examples of the limits and pains endemic to all human life: in one poem Simpson says “that the things we care about/ are suddenly disappearing/ and that they always were.” Yet the new poems, as much as any in his oeuvre, leave room for unexpected happiness: a brisk lyric celebrates the unconventional marriage of W.B. and Georgie Yeats. She took dictation from spirits, he wrote about ungovernable desires, “And if it wasn't love/ as love is in the movies,/ they didn't seem to mind.” Many of his new poems raise themselves above the bitterness his earlier work could court. And yet he remains alert to evil, too, as when he writes of notoriously grisly, nightmarish paintings: “This angel was painted by Goya/ who doesn't believe in God.” Simpson believes in endurance and the rewards of the ordinary. He can, at his best, make his readers believe in those things, too. (Apr.)

This sprawling book-length poem from an American countercultural giant takes its form and concerns from a Tibetan Buddhist ritual and from the poet's close encounter with the endangered aquatic mammal of her title. This visionary verse and prose attempts “to describe the known world of any reach or stretch of imagination/ the relative world of death & change”; to praise the resources, but also to limn the limits, of ecological science, of all Western ways of knowing; and to imagine the whole of human and prehuman history, from the “humdrum Paleolithic” across “20,000 years of 'keeping' time once keeping it for all & moving it, time, forward, & it, the art, forward, & it, humanity, forward, & now they want to kill it really they killed it.” Waldman's energetic odes and dialogues, part memory and part dream, may learn from the manatee “what it is to be human”; they also try to understand the nonhuman, from seaweeds and seashells to mammals, asking, “[A]re minds possible without language?” and answering that they must be. Exuberant as always— though detractors will call her undisciplined—Waldman figures the gap between mind and body as the gap between air and sea, between the manatee's world and our own. (Apr.)

Concise, witty and perhaps surprisingly grim, this second collection from Mann (Complaint in the Garden) pays homage to the titular poet, the British-born, San Francisco–resident Thom Gunn (who died in 2004). Mann emulates Gunn's signature virtues: a wry, careful tone; tight rhymed and unrhymed forms; explicit delight in sex between men, and in the modern culture of gay liberation; and an appreciation for the Bay Area. Yet compared to his model, Mann sounds less in love with life, more attentive to death: “I want lust/ as cold, precise and prescriptive/ as the en dash of a dead man,” one poem concludes; another, set on Mann's birthday, declares, “If life is ruin,/ then let it burn like Rome.” Poems set in Florida, where Mann spent an unhappy youth, pose stark counterpoints to Mann's cityscapes. Arch verses about the poetry industry (“A younger poet wrote to ask/ an older for a blurb”) offset what seems most personal elsewhere. Mixing literary sophistication with a visceral self-distrust, even paraphrasing Catullus (“wanting// again, a man I do not want”), Mann makes his dislikes at least as vivid as his admirations. On the whole, the collection is memorable as homage, but surprisingly far from what Gunn himself once named “The Passages of Joy.” (Apr.)

“Nothing strikes me/ as incredibly 'foreign,' ” says Kronovet in her whimsical, searching debut, selected by Jean Valentine for BOA's A. Poulin Jr. prize. Restlessly obsessed with travel and with awakening to the strangeness of the familiar, what Kronovet means is that, in fact, everything is foreign, which is its least incredible trait; what may be the most common fact on earth is transformed by revitalizing and humorous language: “The earth's humus is made fertile/ through the worm's anus.” In every poem, Kronovet searches “the corners/ of fact” and finds unusual things in plain sight, such as “light that makes the country classically itself,” “the three-wheeled taxi” and “A kind of clean./ The dirty kind.” These free verse lyrics, stacks of narrow couplets, prose poems and poems in two lines (“One way to avoid attention:/ Go. Go. Go. Go. Go”) are at once endearing and deadly serious; in even the slightest of these poems, the stakes are high and surprising. Throughout, Kronovet's playfully earnest speaker is ever approaching and fleeing a beloved, who is at once traveling companion, unexplored country and home, and for whom she says, “I hold softly, I eat sweetly/ try to be to you newly.” (Apr.)

Waldrop has long been a major force in American avant-garde poetics, and this substantial new volume is big news indeed. Comprising three sequences—each almost a book in itself—plus an epilogue, it is an extended philosophical meditation on what are, broadly, the major themes of all poetry: perception, the imagination, the body, and how the human inner life interacts with the larger world. In mostly short, jagged free verse pieces, Waldrop goes at these lofty concepts head-on in accessible, if cerebral, language. The speaker of the first sequence, itself composed of six sets of lyrics, lists and a longer poem, attempts to prove the claim that “I saw... everything/ that was happening on earth and can/ describe the hum of clouds.” The second sequence is a set of discrete poems made up of sentence fragments and aborted thoughts that strive toward completion and correspondence: “Most suicides/ in May, June, July. Unusual/ heat drives most toward God. A/ cul-de-sac.” The last is, again, a set of sets of poems, the most compelling of which, called “Carriage—a Transition—” pours lyric bursts down the page. The volume concludes with a longer poem called “Epilogue: Stone Angels” that meditates in a Rilkian mode on cemetery statues, which “are/ the opposite of perception: we/ bury our gaze in them.” These poems are similarly entrancing. (Mar.)

Unpredictable, articulate and sad, Brouwer's verse-portraits, lyrical episodes and well-framed memories begin “among the starry refineries/ and cattail ditches of New Jersey.” But the poet, we learn, will never feel at home—not in New York, Paris, South Dakota and certainly not in the bitterly troubled, and perhaps doomed, romance whose vicissitudes hold together this thoughtful third collection. In unrhymed couplets and casual free verse, brusque fragments make sharp contrasts with elaborate sentences. Known as much for his criticism and reviewing as for his earlier poems and prose poems, Brouwer uses his deft sense of literary history to delightful effect: he calls one poem “Peripetia in a Soggy Snapshot, Featuring Lines by Ashbery and Pronoun Confusion.“ Yet the poem itself becomes a dejected meditation on an old honeymoon, as Brouwer (Centuries) pursues the dejection at the end of any joy, the fragility of any relationship: “Are you the you who sparked your love down dark/ wires toward me/ Is a money order/ tunneling the prairie between us?... How thin is the ice on the river tonight?” Brouwer sounds almost afraid to say what his answers would be. (Mar.)

This second collection by Doller (né Doyle) takes as its inspiration the notion of the “Frequently Asked Question.” The cynical, or perhaps practical, presumption that underlies this book is that most people are likely to ask the same questions, to which there are simple, easily digested answers. In 53 poems mostly in prose and all but two titled “FAQ,” Doller (Radio, Radio) mocks this oversimplifying method of heading off real inquiry. He begins each poem “Thank you for your question,” which is always followed by terse, typically hostile disjunctive sentences that range from small and disorienting (“Thank you for your question: through the scope I see the infrared brick,” reads one poem in its entirety) to the rambling and discursive: “Inside my vacuum powdered milk. Inside hundreds of hornets. Another way to say it is I cannot empathize with the poor, though that's exactly what I am.” Each poem asks the reader to imagine the question that could have yielded such a text, as if from the answer we could derive the idiosyncrasies of the person who needed to hear it. Certainly a compelling avenue toward self-knowledge, though the book gives away its formula early on, leaving the reader longing for a surprise that doesn't quite come. (Mar.)

Is Hill the greatest living English poet? Many critics (including Harold Bloom) have said as much, since the 1970s, when a few dense books inspired transatlantic admiration. After four decades with just five books, the past 10 years have seen Hill offer six more, including a trio of long works some liken to Dante and Blake. This first selected since 1994 (and first since his move to Yale as his U.S. publisher) should get instant critical attention (and sustained academic adoption) even though it contains no new work. Here, entire, is Mercian Hymns, with its gorgeously medievalized evocation of a rural English upbringing. Here, complete, are all three recent long poems, with their erudite mix of elegy and jeremiad: “Age of mass consent: go global with her,” Hill admonishes himself in “Speech! Speech!” “Challenge satellite failure, the primal/ violent day-star moody as Herod./ Forget nothing. Reprieve no one.” Here are his late intimations of mortality: “Last days, last things, loom on: I write/ to astonish myself.” Here, too, are the descriptive beauties that sparkle through even Hill's most rebarbative works: in a rural lane, “the mass-produced wax berries, and perhaps/ an unearthed wasps' nest like a paper skull,/ where fragile cauls of cobweb start to shine.” (Mar.)

Borrowing her title and her eye for minutiae from Robert Hooke's popular 1665 scientific study of the natural world through a microscope, Emily Wilson argues, in these taut lyrics, that 350 years later we are still often mystified by the natural world. Favoring long, blocky stanzas that are dense with assonance and consonance, Wilson proves that language, like Hooke's lens, unravels the ordinary, revealing a “raw garden” where there are “back-tracking collages/ of brambles” and a bridge where “[r]amparts ruck over the underside slips.” As in her remarkable debut, The Keep (2001), in this second book, Wilson evokes landscapes that are dense and lush and legible, composed of “beautiful forestations of made language.” She also eschews the narrowness of the personal pronoun “I” to privilege instead an unbound lyric eye: “So the eye has no end/ going on outside its compulsion.” Her poems emerge as structures of a delicate and determined vision that sees “the things that were forms/ unparceling themselves from their forms.” This encounter, both lavish and intense, means that each poem is a “[w]ild sweet locus” for the world to be seen anew. (Mar.)

Already a celebrated critic, memoirist and classicist, Mendelsohn drew together his interests in ancient history, literature, gay life and culture, and beautiful language to produce the finest, most readable version of the modern Greek poet Cavafy (1863–1933) to come along in decades. Cavafy has long been highly regarded by American readers, especially for the straightforward, seemingly timeless, hard-to-pin-down tone of his poems—which alternately revel in and suffer from both ancient Greek history and homoerotic desire—but, as Mendelsohn observes in his deeply impassioned and informative introduction, many American readers overlook “those poems that are deliberately set in the obscurer margins, both geographical and temporal, of the Greek past... in favor of the works with more obvious contemporary appeal.” With this new, completely annotated, translation, Mendelsohn says he aims to “restore the balance,” to help readers reanimate Greek history with Cavafy, to see how relevant and pressing his whole oeuvre truly is. This larger volume (Knopf is also publishing Mendelsohn's version of Cavafy's Unfinished Poems, never before translated into English, as a separate volume, reviewed below) contains all the poems by Cavafy we have known in English, from famous works like “Ithaka” (“you will understand, by then, these Ithacas; what they mean”) and “The First Step” (“you must claim your right to be/ a citizen of the city of ideas”), all rendered with a lucid music. This is likely to be the definitive Cavafy for some time to come. (Mar.)

In the last months of his life, Cavafy told a few friends that he had 25 more poems he was working on. This last work, abandoned at various stages of drafting, was mostly lost until it was discovered in the Cavafy Archive, carefully filed and dated by the author, in the 1960s. An authoritative Greek-language edition of Cavafy's unfinished poems—30 in all, written between 1918 and the poet's death—did not appear until the 1990s. Mendelsohn, by special arrangement with the Cavafy Archive, is the first person to be allowed to translate these poems into English, to be published alongside Mendelsohn's Collected Poems of Cavafy (reviewed above). Mendelsohn, in his introduction, says these poems “represent the last and greatest phase of the poet's career” and that they “fully partake of Cavafy's special vision, in which desire and history, time and poetry are alchemized into a unified and deeply meaningful whole.” Most of these pieces seem as “finished” as anything in the Collected Poems, though perhaps in full command of a kind of erotic abandon that Cavafy only exposed in the latter part of his writing life: “Ah the ancient Greeks were men of taste,/ to represent the loveliness of youth/ absolutely nude.” (Mar.)

Dial, a former LAPD Hollywood Division commanding officer, puts 27 years of experience and a lot of heart into her gritty, sporadically powerful debut. Sgt. Mike Turner, a principled cop working in Internal Affairs, thinks he's lost his fire for the job as he begins to investigate the sensitive case of a female officer found stabbed to death in a police car parked in a deputy chief's driveway. Turner enters a maelstrom of “incompetence, indiscriminate sex, and major backstabbing” among his colleagues, most jockeying for promotion, like his live-in lover, Lt. Paula Toscano. Like Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, Turner walks L.A.'s mean streets as a man of honor, doing the right thing in an organization that “rewards the weak and destroys the strong.” Awkward point-of-view shifts, stereotypical minor characters and a tendency to overdo perversions mark this as an apprentice work, but Dial's realistic, often poignant portrayal of police work make her a crime writer to watch. (June)

Part biblio-mystery, part tragedy and all brilliant, Padura's follow-up to his Havana Quartet (Havana Gold, etc.) finds Mario Conde 14 years after retiring from the police force pursuing books instead of criminals, acting as a book scout to earn enough for food and drink. His famed intuition leads him to a decrepit mansion, its old and odd inhabitants, and to the most impressive private library ever assembled in Cuba, untouched for 43 years. Stuck in between a book's pages, he discovers a 1960 magazine photo of a sultry singer, Violeta del Río, who disappeared in the 1950s. Conde's curiosity turns to obsession as he tries to unravel Violeta's sad fate. The trail takes Conde into the past when Batista ruled, revolution was near and gangsters like Meyer Lansky oversaw casinos, clubs and brothels. It will also take him into the most dangerous and terrible of Havana's barrios. The glory of Cuba's biblio-history drives this exceptional novel. (May)

A locked-room murder provides Marcus Didius Falco with an intriguing challenge in Davis's 19th novel to feature the first-century Roman sleuth (after 2007's Saturnalia). In the spring of A.D. 77, while on vacation with his family in Alexandria, Egypt, Falco is stunned to get word that Theon, the Great Library's head librarian, with whom he just dined, has been found dead with neither marks of violence on the body nor evidence of how the killer got away from the scene of the crime. Falco probes the academic politics surrounding the Great Library to determine whether one of Theon's potential successors was the culprit. Other deaths follow, including that of a philosophy student, mauled by a crocodile that escaped from the local zoo. While the impossible crime's solution may disappoint some readers, the twisty plot with its various false leads and the author's plausible depiction of ancient Alexandria make this one of the stronger entries in this solid historical series. (May)

Last seen in Diamond Dagger Award–winner Barnard's A Fall from Grace (2007), Det. Insp. Charlie Peace investigates deadly doings surrounding a long-running TV soap opera, Jubilee Terrace, filmed in Leeds in a novel of suspense sharing more than a passing kinship with the world of TV soaps: the craftsmanship is never less than professional, the plot keeps percolating, but by the end, the reader is unlikely to give it a second thought. The opening roster of characters on Jubilee Terrace and the actors who portray them is useful, since apart from Peace—who shows up on the set to look into the tip that an unpopular thespian's death might not have been accidental—and a few others, it's tough to keep the players straight. The ante escalates after a fire claims two lives, though Bernard miscalculates by tipping what should be the climactic twist too early. Fans may enjoy catching up with Peace, but other mystery buffs will find little cause for jubilation. (May)

In Wall's poignant ninth Bay Tanner mystery (after 2008's The Mercy Oak), the Hilton Head, S.C., PI faces two daunting challenges: finding a bone marrow donor for young leukemia patient Kimmie Eastman by locating the long-lost sisters of Kimmie's African-American mother, Joline Eastman, and tracking down Julia Simpson, a half-sister Bay first learns about from reading the will of her dying father, retired judge Talbot Simpson. What Bay doesn't expect is the lack of cooperation from Joline's relatives and old friends when confronted with Kimmie's plight—or the fierce resistance from Julia's guardian to Bay's request to meet her half-sister. As Bay copes with her father's imminent demise, she must also confront her fears about marrying her police sergeant fiancé, Red Tanner, her late husband's brother. While the pace can be slow at times, series fans are sure to cheer Bay's efforts to make peace with the past. (May)

As mystery fiction expert Penzler notes in his concise overview of African-American crime writing at the start of this welcome anthology, despite the central element linking the 15 short stories, they “transcend race and genre to fulfill their primary purpose—to inform and entertain.” Contributors include expected names like Walter Mosley and Chester Himes, not to mention Robert Greer, Gary Phillips and Eleanor Taylor Bland, as well as writers rescued from obscurity by their inclusion in this mostly reprint volume. Edward P. Jones's “Old Boys, Old Girls” is the standout, a powerful if grim psychological portrait of a man after his imprisonment for murder. Of historical interest are Hughes Allison's “Corollary” (1948), the first story by an African-American to appear in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and Pauline E. Hopkins's “Talma Gordon” (1900), the first impossible crime tale published by an African-American. (May)

At the start of Egan's refreshing debut, Jenny Chase, a divorced former college teacher now assistant golf pro at the Harbor Terrace Country Club in Poningo, N.Y., early one morning happens on the head greenskeeper, Rick Gilbert, hanging from a rope tied to a rafter in the golf cart barn. Despite this upsetting discovery, Jenny wins a Women's U.S. Open sectional qualifying tournament later that day, giving her hope for a new future for her and her morose teenage son, Sam. When she learns that Rick's widow, Kit, has been denied life insurance because the authorities have ruled Rick's death a suicide, Jenny vows to help Kit and Kit's Down syndrome son investigate. Meanwhile, when Sam gets in trouble, she must call on her lawyer ex-husband for help. A look into the professional golf world complete with helpful tips, down-to-earth characters and a conclusion notable for its realism will leave the reader eager for more from this promising author. (May)

The summer art scene of idyllic Sea Harbor, Mass., provides the backdrop for Goldenbaum's engaging second knitting cozy (after 2008's Death by Cashmere). When Izzy Chambers finds fiber artist Willow Adams lying in the display window of Izzy's Seaside Knitting Studio, she at first thinks Willow is dead, but Willow, whom she invited to do a demonstration at her shop after meeting the waiflike young woman a year earlier in Boston, is merely asleep. When someone fatally poisons Aidan Peabody, a popular Canary Cove artist, Willow becomes a suspect after the authorities learn she's Aidan's sole beneficiary. Other suspects include a frustrated art teacher, a greedy developer and a gallery owner who was jealous of Aidan's influence with Canary Cove's arts council. Goldenbaum weaves a tight plot as Izzy and her knitting friends attempt to untangle another puzzler without dropping a stitch. (May)

With the health of England's Edward IV in decline, potential successors jockey for position in Sedley's absorbing 18th Roger the Chapman mystery (after 2008's The Green Man). If allegations about the monarch's suspect parentage can be substantiated, then the duke of Gloucester would be the rightful heir. Timothy Plummer, the king's spymaster general, dispatches the reluctant Roger to France to find what evidence still exists on the matter. The preparations for the trip as well as the trip itself are marked by several murders, which may be the work of forces inimical to Gloucester's ambitions. Sedley does a fine job of making 15th-century England live and breathe as well as blending action and detection. Though most readers won't be surprised by the killer's identity and some may be dismayed by the abrupt ending, Sedley shows she can more than hold her own in comparison to better known medieval historical authors. (May)

Winged things abound throughout this heavy-handed second installment of Genesse's Iron Dragon fantasy series (after 2008's The Golden Cord). Some, like the stately alicorns, are kind and good; some, like the fearful wyrm-king Draglune, are horribly vengeful and bent on world domination by means of the all-powerful Crystal Eye. The dragon-princess Verkahna, determined to replace her father, both helps and hinders the little band of dragon hunters led by dwarf war priest Bellor and human crossbowman Drake on their predictable quest to keep the Eye out of Draglune's claws. Genesse stresses the necessity of trust between races and cultures and the perils of bias and dissension, and he keeps the plot moving quickly despite cardboard characters, soggily sentimental romance and frequent apparent deaths followed by implausible resurrections. (May)

Swords, sorcery and science fiction combine to give Tierney's tale of the historical Simon of Gitta notable dash and vigor. In the Middle East of the first century, Simon plots revenge against the Romans who killed his family and sold him into slavery. In his company are his mentor, Dositheus, and the youths Menander and Ilione. The anachronism in this traditional fantasy setup is Tierny's pulp SF hero John Taggart, a time-traveling spacecraft pilot who repeatedly saves the quartet from agents of supernatural evil and who has an unusual—and not unrelated—interest in the Rabbi Yeshua bar Yosef (aka Jesus Christ), whose path they occasionally cross. Though it's sometimes hard to keep track of all the fantastic paraphernalia that Tierney (The Gardens of Lucullus) introduces, the novel offers a rich evocation of a primitive past when the supernatural was entirely believable. (May)

In the dramatic third and almost certainly concluding volume of Campbell's Deepgate Codex (after 2008's Iron Angel), an apocalyptic battle between warring gods puts the very existence of humankind in jeopardy as gore-splattered battlefields spill over from the realm of mortals and the depths of Hell to the labyrinth of Time itself. Featuring an ensemble cast of richly described characters, including a soul-eating giant and an angel trapped inside a 400-foot-tall golem, the numerous story lines eventually converge in a finale involving a multiverse of time paradoxes and mind-bending plot twists. Campbell's experience in video game design is evident in the relentless pacing and highly imaginative settings as well as his meticulous attention to detail in the many fight sequences. Readers will thrill to the hellishly dark imagery and labyrinthine plot lines. (May)

Flinx and his feisty minidrag, Pip, reunite with old friends for one final slam-bang universe rescue in the 14th title of one of science fiction's longest running series. After the devastating events of 2008's Quofum, Flinx is at his most self-destructive. His malaise is compounded by his knowledge of the Great Evil that threatens to destroy all intelligent life, a monster only he can defeat. On his way to that fateful confrontation, dodging dark agents of the Order of Null, Flinx negotiates a temporary peace between the human Commonwealth and the AAnn, reconciles with his one true love, Clarity Held, and reunites with his old mentors Truzenzuzex and the sociologist-soldier Tse-Mallory. Once the story picks up steam, the pace never slows. Flinx fans will delight in seeing familiar faces come together for one last grand adventure. (May)

Readers unfamiliar with Cherryh's Foreigner series (most recently 2007's Deliverer) are likely to be somewhat at sea in this complex and sophisticated 10th installment, but those who persevere will be rewarded with a space opera where ideas are as important as action. This book continues chronicling the experience of Bren Cameron, who serves as the paidhi-aiji, the interpreter for human colonists stranded on the planet of the alien atevi. Cameron's current concern is the spread of human technology, which has the potential to wreak havoc with the formal communication protocols the atevi rely on to maintain their societal structure. Cameron must engage in subtle diplomacy and political maneuvering while evading attempts on his life and keeping track of a headstrong young atevi nobleman. The lack of basic background may discourage new readers, but fans will be delighted. (May)

Reductive gender stereotyping and sloppy pacing sink this ambitious foray into psychological horror. When the autopsy of a homeless man reveals that his brain has mysteriously vanished from his unopened skull, Detective Benek is initially alone in his determination to pursue the matter. Then a dead priest is discovered in a church with his brain lying beside him and a woman named Dierdre Matera passed out in a back pew. Even after Matera drugs and rapes Benek and demonstrates her brain-snatching abilities on various other victims, Benek can't convince anyone of her evil predations. Zebrowski (Macrolife) builds a simplistic and biased portrayal of the mating game, casting women as cold predators and men as befuddled innocents. As the characters become mired in repetitious reflection, the reader is likely to feel as confused as the hapless protagonist. (May)

Ward powers into hardcover with the tangled seventh title in the Black Dagger Brotherhood series, picking up four months after the end of 2008's Lover Enshrined. Rehvenge, a “symphath” vampire who gets energy from manipulating others' emotions, is recruited by a group who want to displace vampire king Wrath, a gruff, determined vigilante. Rehvenge is also falling hard for vampire nurse Ehlena, who disdains his affections and focuses on caring for her ailing father. Ward easily juggles numerous personal and political plot lines, keeping the tension revved high while moving forward with subplots that have lingered for several books and will please longtime fans seeking resolution. New readers may be a little lost despite a helpful glossary, but the fast pace and cliffhanger ending will have fans wishing they could start the next book right away. (May)

Modern-day Regency fashion expert Eleanor Pottinger consorts with ghosts and travels in time in Brown's charming romance. Eleanor discovers her hotel room is haunted by sisters Mina and Deirdre Cracklebury, and she agrees to a deal: she will save their brother, Teddy, from a deadly duel by keeping the wicked Lord Shermont from seducing one of the sisters, in trade for meeting Jane Austen. Eleanor wakes up in 1814, meets smarmy Teddy and is instantly attracted to Lord Shermont, who is not all he seems. Soon she's forced into a terrible choice: “Hot sex or the real Jane Austen?” True Janeites will find scant evidence of Austen's acerbic wit in either character or tone, but the sprightly humor, handsome hero and twisty ending will please most Regency romance fans. (May)

Bestseller Gibson's thoughtful stand-alone romance immerses the reader in the world of professional hockey and the hearts of two compelling characters. Ty Savage, newly signed player with the Seattle Chinooks, is devastated by the death of the team's elderly owner, Virgil Duffy. Duffy's young widow, Faith, an ex-stripper trophy wife who knows nothing about hockey, will now be the team's owner, much to everyone's dismay. Though Ty and Faith's initial mutual dislike quickly evolves into an all-consuming passion, they soon discover that their attraction goes much further than sexual heat. Magnificently breaking with stereotype, Ty is a tenderhearted man who wants a lifelong relationship, while Faith is emotionally strong, intelligent and caring. With humor and eloquent prose, Gibson (Not Another Bad Date) brings substance and depth to this loving, modern romance. (May)

Adventure sportsman Ullmann pours real-life mountain climbing know-how into this impressive debut thriller. Ratings-hungry television producer Terrance Carlton sends two teams of veteran mountain climbers on a do-or-die race to the top of Tibet's 22,000-foot-high (fictional) Kuk Sur. Besides the $2 million prize, all involved have their own private reasons for making the trek. Tight-lipped millionaire Preston Child and his daughter, Malika, give only vague reasons for buying their way into the competition. Veteran mountaineer Conner Michaels is hunting for the body of his brother, a casualty of his last Kuk Sur climb. The members of the two teams duke it out with the unrelenting elements, the unmovable mountain, each other, their own demons and a ferocious yeti. The chills and thrills are only outnumbered by the sports gear brand names, which add verisimilitude at the cost of pacing. (May)

Rose revisits the world of 2008's Bound to Love Her with this clever fantasy romance. Adlia is an orphaned elf who works at Elf Ops, a Boulder, Colo., organization run by local elves to manage their land. Elves are tied to their land—they live inside it and rejuvenate by melting back into it—and must constantly combat human encroachment. Newly emerged and disguised as human, Adlia struggles to keep from falling for Mark Speranzi, her warmly affectionate photography teacher. When a wayward amnesiac elf is brought to Elf Ops and Adlia's mentor begins relying heavily on another outsider, Adlia must combat jealousy and suspicion as well as questions about her identity and feelings for Mark. Adlia's efforts to untangle the numerous plot threads are hampered as she and others miss obvious clues, and numerous implausible coincidences fuel the unsatisfying resolution. (May)

Before becoming known by his Treasury of Victorian Murder historical true crime series, Geary published the occasional (fictional) adventures of an intrepid young woman named Blanche, since gone out-of-print. Collected by Dark Horse in a single volume, with a new introductory episode, these three chapters (structured as the heroine's letters home to her patient parents) have an American Gothic tone that won't surprise Geary's older fans, and a sense of rip-snorting fun that comes as something of a shock. Blanche is a bright and proper young lady who comes to New York in 1907 to study music, but gets caught up in horrific conspiratorial doings in the city's underworld of subway construction and secret cults. Later episodes follow the scrappy musical ingénue to Hollywood (bursting at the seams with big personalities, crime and labor unrest) and Paris (redolent with early 20th-century bohemian glamour and criminal undertakings). Geary's penchant for mixing historical education with bold and daring adventure makes for a winning combination that will likely have readers new to his series asking for more. (Apr.)

This wonderful graphic novel offshoot from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland need not worry those concerned about some crass Disney effort to strip-mine yet more revenue out of a beloved children's classic. Author Kovac and artist Liew's six-chapter novel is a droll and urbane imagining of the story behind a very minor character from Carroll's tale: Mary Ann, the White Rabbit's maid, who was mistaken for Alice. In Kovac's telling, dark-haired Mary Ann is a compulsive cleaner and follower of rules, who cares not a whit for the legendary “Alice monster,” as everyone terms the rebellious blonde, whom Mary Ann sees as little more than a “back-talking, stuck-up little prat.” Mary Ann tromps through Liew's lusciously colored landscapes, encountering all the expected characters (Cheshire Cat, Mad Hatter, Jabberwock) and getting into trouble with most of them. Although the mood is correctly tea party surreal, Kovac manages to add in unexpected elements, from courtly intrigue to fanaticism (Alice even has her own cult, known as “the Curious”), while never losing track of Carroll's hyperactive gamesmanship. It's a rare piece of literature that's been inspired by another yet deserves its own prideful place on the bookshelf. (Mar.)

To quote humorist Tom Lehrer, “dirty books are fun,” and they seldom come more prurient or entertaining than this massive collection of once-illegal “Tijuana Bibles,” jaw-droppingly smutty little eight-page comic books that flourished from the late 1920s until higher grade erotica in the form of Playboy drove them from the scene in the 1950s. As explicitly pornographic as anything seen today, the over-the-top bedroom gymnastics of the Tijuana Bibles were gleefully performed by caricatures of popular media stars as well as copyright-infringed comic strip characters, all to great if sophomoric comedic effect. Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, Clark Gable, Mae West, Little Orphan Annie (with her trusty dog, Sandy), Captain America, Flash Gordon and countless other notables of nostalgia are all seen doing things their copyright holders never thought they could do. Produced by artists whose identities remained hidden because of the black market nature of the material, the genre's artistic merits were usually questionable at best, but occasional works showcasing competent-to-professional skill are seen here. This omnibus of smaller collections last released 10 years ago presents a glimpse into the history of American sexuality and some genuine laughter as well. (Mar.)

At the formerly all-girl, elite and oversexed Joshi High, a competition is underway for the new boys just admitted as students. The newly coed Joshi is home to the elite S-Class, comprising only the smartest and richest students, including the few new boys. The arrival of male transfer student Azusa Mizutani shakes things up when he inadvertently breaks the rules and chooses Rise Okitsu, who is not a fellow S-Class student, to be his pretend girlfriend. What follows is a deviant game of cat and mouse as Mizutani pleads with Rise not to throw him to the wolves by breaking off their pretend romance all the while forcing her to endure torture at the hands of jealous female classmates. Yuzuki creates a situation that is undoubtedly meant to awaken feelings of romance in readers by relying on a mix of hostility from the female classmates and cluelessness from the main male characters. At times, the story is almost endearing, and you want Mizutani to just get it and be sweet to Rise already, while at others it borders on perverse. Gakuen Prince is fun in this first volume, but walks dangerously close to just being trashy. (Mar.)

Variety is a major attraction of the 23 pieces selected from this publisher's online smorgasbord for prospective comics buyers. The longest section features stories about three of Robert E. Howard's larger-than-life, macho characters—Sailor Steve Costigan, Solomon Kane and Conan—prefaced with a wistfully vainglorious personal reflection by Howard himself. Otherwise, moods and styles vary wildly from one item to another. Cantankerous, violent humor from Evan Dorkin's Milk and Cheese is not far from Jason Graham's creepy kiddy story but also in the neighborhood of John Arcudi and Stephen Young's gritty tale of the Old West acted out by talking beetles. Readers can jump from David Malki!'s surrealistic collages of 19th-century engravings to Francisco Ruiz Velasco's occult trench warfare in the style of Warhammer; fans of continuing stories can catch a new episode of the Hellboy-related B.P.R.D. or the first independent appearance of Captain Hammer, nemesis of Dr. Horrible. If any of these fails to please readers, they can skip a few pages ahead and find something completely different. Dark Horse's willingness to let creators try idiosyncratic projects is well and enjoyably displayed. (Mar.)

British author Pears matches the brilliance of his bestselling An Instance of the Fingerpost (1998) with this intricate historical novel, which centers on the death of a wealthy financier. In part one, after John Stone falls to his death from a window in his London mansion in 1909, Stone's seductive, much younger widow, Elizabeth, hires Matthew Braddock, who works as a journalist, to trace a child of her late husband's she never knew existed until the child is named in his will. Braddock, a novice in the world of finance, uncovers evidence that Stone's actual net worth was far less than commonly believed, even as he finds himself falling for his client. In part two, set in 1890 Paris, Henry Cort, a shadowy spy, provides another perspective on the bewitching Elizabeth. Stone's own reminiscences from his time in Venice in 1867 cast further light on the circumstances of his demise. The pages will fly by for most readers, who will lose themselves in the clear prose and compelling plot. 10-city author tour. (May)