Fiction Book Reviews: Week of 4/20/2009

Doctor-novelist Moody (Best Friends) again zooms in to examine the many facets, features and fissures of a relationship, this time in the story of Genie Toledo, an Ohio cardiologist who has a 12-year-long affair with a married college basketball coach. From medical technology to billing bureaucracy, saving lives to losing patients, Moody shows the demands of medical practice and then treats readers to an almost equal display of insight into the world of college basketball as Genie's lover, Mick Crabbe, prods and nurtures his team to national prominence. Their time together expands from a weekly two-hour tryst after Mick's daughter becomes Genie's patient. Mick's wife further complicates matters when she begins confiding in Genie. And when Mick is diagnosed with cancer, Genie becomes further enmeshed with his family. Moody probes new layers of emotion and personal connection as Genie the heart doctor comes to understand the intangible aspects of the human heart. Instead of applying the clichés of traditional romance to a midlife heroine, Moody introduces readers to a woman who never stops learning about work, family, people and possibilities. (Aug.)

A group of strangers converges for a rafting trip in Hyde's fifth novel, an astute, engrossing character-driven affair. Assembled for guide JT Maroney's 125th excursion down the Colorado River are Peter, a Cincinnati 20-something; Harvard professor Evelyn; the Compsons, a family of four from Salt Lake City; and three couples: the Frankels, seasoned rafters in their 70s; mother and daughter Susan and Amy Van Doren; and the Boyer-Brandts, both 60-ish. After a cursory safety orientation, personalities emerge: Evelyn is nursing a broken heart; Peter is desperate to hook up with assistant guide Dixie; Ruth Frankel frets over her forgetful husband, Lloyd; and Susan battles inner demons and her overweight daughter, Amy (whose diary entries are interwoven). A stray dog joins the gang as bouts with heatstroke, festering open wounds and capsizing boats threaten to sabotage the adventure, though these seem tame compared to the surprise that hits downriver. The novel succeeds as both a study of strangers striving toward a common goal and as a suspenseful drama filled with angst and humanity. Hyde outshines herself with this wild ride. (July)

In this idiosyncratic bildungsroman set to a Britpop beat, an effeminate teenage boy coming of age in the '80s finds salvation in The Rocky Horror Picture Show and, especially, Andy Warhol. Born in Texas but raised in Washington, D.C., where he attends a series of exclusive private schools, Caleb Watson grows up feeling different until a seventh-grade field trip to the Hirshhorn Museum proves a life-altering experience when he is mesmerized by Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe's Lips. He quickly changes his appearance to resemble his new idol and begins to make Warhol-style movies with a crew of his own, including the beautiful Aaron, who is Caleb's partner in gay exploration; Sonia, his own personal Edie Sedgwick; and Brit, a young Marilyn look-alike and Rocky Horror aficionado who is really a runaway boy. Unfortunately, Caleb's story—his experiments with acid, suicide and sexual fetish—lacks cumulative dramatic power. Instead, the novel works best as a series of snapshots of the glammy 1980s and a depiction of the teenage outcasts who made Georgetown their hangout. (July)

A bad book review propels this farcical thriller from bestseller Koontz (Your Heart Belongs to Me). Bestselling author Cullen “Cubby” Greenwich is mortified when Shearman Waxx, “the nation's premier literary critic,” savages his work. Cubby manages to find the “syphilitic swine” at Roxie's Bistro in Newport Beach, Calif., where the author's six-year-old prodigy son nearly pees by accident on Waxx in the restaurant's men's room. In retaliation, Waxx threatens Cubby with doom and gets things started nicely by blowing up his house. With almost superhuman ease, the book critic keeps track of Cubby and his family as they flee for their lives. While some may take this as satire, the over-the-top villain's underdeveloped motivation and a jokey narrative tone that jars when juxtaposed with terrifying scenes of violence will leave others scratching their heads. By the time Koontz introduces a science fiction element, a lot of readers may have already checked out. (June)

Edgar-finalist Box's ninth novel to feature Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett begins with a bombshell: could Pickett's foster daughter, April, who apparently died six years earlier in a horrific conflagration when overzealous FBI agents confronted a group of dissident survivalists (see 2003's Winterkill), still be alive? Pickett's 17-year-old daughter, Sheridan, begins receiving disturbing text messages from someone claiming to be her dead sister, and Pickett's entire family is forced to relive the tragedy. Even worse, whoever is sending these messages is traveling cross-country with suspected serial killers targeting people whose carbon footprint is too high. Still struggling with the guilt of not protecting April from her nightmarish fate in Winterkill, Pickett vows to save her this time, no matter the cost. Powered by provocative themes of environmental activism, this relentlessly paced powder keg of a thriller could be Box's best to date. Author tour. (June)

Thriller author Unger's intriguing if overstuffed stand-alone introduces a tough and grudgingly vulnerable heroine who will stop at nothing to uncover the truth, even if it threatens to tear apart her life. Isabel Connelly, a bestselling novelist, and her loving husband, Marcus Raine, a computer game designer, have it all, including an elegant prewar apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side. When Marcus doesn't come home one night, Isabel goes to his office, where she's confronted by a dozen people with weapons drawn. Det. Grady Crowe later informs Isabel that not only is her husband missing but he's been lying about his past, having stolen the real Marcus Raine's identity years earlier. Despite a text from Marcus urging her to forget about him, Isabel vows to track him down. Usually adept at juggling multiple plot lines, Unger (Black Out) dilutes Isabel's story with point-of-view shifts and unnecessary subplots, including one about Crowe's marital woes. (June)

In the prologue to the winning eighth Kurt Austin adventure from bestseller Cussler and Shamus-winner Kemprecos (after The Navigator), 18-year-old Caleb Nye, a farm boy on his first sea voyage in 1848, finds himself a modern-day Jonah after being swallowed by a whale and then cut from the stomach, alive but forever changed. In the present, a Russian captain sees his Typhoon-class submarine sold to an unknown buyer, and in China, Dr. Song Lee, who's been banished to the countryside, gets orders to return to Beijing to fight a deadly SARS epidemic. Meanwhile, off Bermuda, Kurt Austin and the stalwart crew of the National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA) lower a bathysphere to the ocean depths, where something big snaps the cables connecting the vessel to the mother ship. Soon enough, the disparate plot lines converge in an action-packed tale that snags readers and drags them racing through heavy seas and high drama. 600,000 first printing. (June)

A tense literary whodunit set in a prestigious Canadian boarding school, McAdam's second novel (after Some Great Thing) delivers suspense and cunning psychological insight. Chapters alternate between the recollections of Noel, a coldly intelligent loner, and the stream-of-consciousness of Julius, a handsome, popular athlete whose girlfriend, Fall, vanishes one day. Unstated but implicit is Fall's fate at the hands of one of the boys, but, as in many literary mysteries, the plot is secondary to the graceful prose and characterizations. The male characters are drawn with precision; Fall less so, as befits their objectification of her, though the relationship between Fall and Julius is depicted with a bittersweet charm. Julius's point of view is particularly well-done, conveying the inner turmoil of a lovestruck teenager. Noel's memories of their senior year, meanwhile, subtly reflect his emotional distance from others while suggesting a solution to the crime. The book is pleasingly paced and absorbing, and likely to appeal to fans of Arturo Perez-Reverte and Jess Walter. (June)

In her third novel, Furnivall returns to the story of Lydia Ivanova from The Russian Concubine, a Russian girl who fled the Bolsheviks and settled in Junchow, China, with her mother, who was then killed. Alone in a strange culture, Lydia learns that her father, whom she believed to be dead, is imprisoned in a labor camp. She flees China with her stepbrother, Alexei, to search for her father, leaving behind her lover, Chang An Lo, a Communist rebel. When Alexei later abandons Lydia, Lo comes to the rescue, but not before Lydia learns the terrible truth about the only family she has left. Furnivall deftly evokes the details of a bygone era, though these often take too much of a front seat and distract from Lydia's quest to find her father. Fans of Furnivall's earlier works will enjoy the chance to see what has become of Lydia. (June)

Vanderbilt—socialite, artiste and pioneer of designer jeans—dips into the realm of spanking, thrusting, creaming and opening “as a flower toward the sun” with this dressed-up pulp erotica tale—Chip Kidd designed the striking cover, which features white-haired mannequins that (a certain type of person might be inclined to conclude) slightly resemble the host of CNN's AC360. After renowned architect Talbot Bingham dies, his widow, Priscilla, designates their Maryland estate (“of all our estates it was the one I loved most”) as a museum. In going through Talbot's papers there, Priscilla discovers letters from a woman calling herself Queen Bee that describe a physical passion utterly foreign to Pris. Repulsed and fascinated by Bee's purple correspondence (“Look Master, no doubt you didn't insist she wax her mons as you do mine”), Priscilla falls into a “labyrinth of pain and misery” and becomes increasingly obsessed with Bee. As Vanderbilt nudges the two women together, the already soft-focused narrative becomes nearly hallucinatory. Sadly, this is no Story of O: the prose is terminally puffy, the sex has been done (and done and done) and Pris is an unendearing priss. (June)

In bestseller Gardner's gripping 11th thriller, Sgt. Det. D.D. Warren, last seen in 2007's Hide, looks into the curious disappearance of Sandra Jones, a sixth-grade social studies teacher, from her South Boston home: Sandra's keys and purse were on the kitchen counter, nothing was disturbed, and her four-year-old daughter, Ree, to whom she was devoted, was asleep upstairs. The missing woman's reporter husband, Jason, becomes an immediate suspect because he refuses to answer questions and appears to have destroyed evidence. As a media frenzy envelopes the case, Warren's investigation reveals the couple's life as anything but perfect or normal. Full of inventive twists, this highly entertaining novel delivers a shocking solution as well as a perfectly realized sense of justice. Fans will appreciate the deft way Gardner weaves in a key character from 2008's Say Goodbye. (June)

Hilton's energetic but disjointed debut introduces British ex-soldier Joe Hunter, who after 14 years in counterterrorism now spends his time protecting those who need his help, as part hired muscle and part vigilante. Joe reluctantly agrees to track down his wayward half-brother, John Telfer, after his sister-in-law explains that her husband skipped out on the family and headed for America. As Joe and his friend Jared “Rink” Rington follow John's trail from Arkansas to the Mojave Desert, they come to realize that John's troubles run deeper than just unpaid debts. Interspersed are the musings of Tubal Cain, a man who claims to be the most prolific undetected serial murderer in America. When Cain's path overlaps with John's, it's up to Joe to bring his brother home alive and put a stop to Cain's spree. Hilton has an eye for action and gore, but can't quite wrangle his unwieldy plot. Hopefully, some of the many unanswered questions left at the end will be answered in the sequel. (June)

Hurwitz (Last Shot) blasts new life into a well-worn theme—the prominent politician trying to hide a dark incident from his past—in this intelligent thriller. Late one night, the Secret Service snatches 36-year-old Nick Horrigan, who's led a quiet life since making a fatal mistake in his teens, and whisks him to the San Onofre, Calif., nuclear plant. There a terrorist threatens to set off a bomb unless he can talk to Nick, who hasn't got the slightest idea why he's been summoned. After the terrorist gets his head blown off, Nick realizes this and subsequent events are connected to the death years earlier of his Secret Service agent stepfather. Working with his homeless pal, Homer, and his computer whiz ex-girlfriend, Induma, Nick pieces together a string of clues that point to a paternity case against either the U.S. president, Andrew Bilton, or Sen. Jasper Caruthers, Bilton's opponent in an upcoming election. While more astute readers may intuit the bad guy, Nick's ethical dilemmas, girlfriend dramas and sleuthing provide plenty of excitement. Author tour. (June)

Venezia's tale traces five generations of the Falcone family, beginning with Don Francesco Falcone—a rich, powerful, feared and often unsympathetic man—and his mistress, farmworker Concetta, who bears him six daughters before delivering a much-longed-for son. The women form the rich backbone of the story as they strive to overcome their sometimes unbearable circumstances. Through Gioia, a fifth-generation Falcone, Venezia travels among each generation. Sickly as a child, Gioia finds comfort and fascination in the stories of her forebears, then becomes a voracious reader of everything from Dostoyevski to calendars. Her own love of storytelling paints a word-picture of each of the eras of the family as well as the history of Grottole, the Southern Italian town where the story is set. Venezia also neatly weaves an Italian history lesson throughout, from WWI to the excesses of the '80s. Sometimes heartbreaking, always beautiful, these women will stay with the reader long after the final page is turned. (June)

In her second novel, Mascarenhas (Skin) uses a 15-year-old girl's disappearance to spin a multilayered history of a Venezuelan family, incorporating folklore, political intrigue and magical realism. Charismatic and rebellious, teenage Irene Dos Santos goes missing while on vacation with her best friend, Lily Martinez, and her parents; she's introduced through Lily's meandering memories, which seem at first like a convenient exposition dump. However, Mascarenhas sticks to the shaggy dog style, passing her close third-person narration from Lily to eight other characters, including Lily's parents and a seemingly unrelated boy named Efraín. Other recurring themes tying together disparate plot strands: an underground political struggle, the legend of unofficial saint Maria Lionza, telenovela screenwriting and the act of storytelling (a Martinez family obsession). At times overwhelming in its breathless explosions of information, this family epic is immersive; no character or event is left unexplored from multiple perspectives. Indeed, the conclusion is like the final piece of an intricate puzzle. (June)

Sex and the City meets London's Roaring '20s in Davis's satisfying fifth novel. Grace Rutherford leads a double life: by day she's an advertising copywriter supporting a widowed sister and mother. By night, she's Diamond Sharp—a newspaper gossip columnist and glamorous lady about town. She adores her single status until she meets mysterious American author Dexter O'Connell, with whom she begins a steamy cat-and-mouse affair that turns her world upside down. The trouble? She's concurrently swept off her feet by her charming and equally delicious neighbor John Cramer—Dexter's bitter enemy. Grace is determined to get to the bottom of their hatred for each other. But whose story should she believe? To make matters worse, her sister is possibly falling for John, too. When Grace delves into their closets looking for skeletons, she realizes she must ultimately face her own. Davis, best known for The Shoe Queen, delights once again with this romp through pre-Manolo chick lit turf. (June)

Tim Harding, the hero of this smoothly plotted novel of suspense from British author Goddard (Play to the End), makes an unlikely sleuth. The owner of a “middling garden maintenance and landscaping business” in Monaco, Harding agrees to travel to Penzance in west Cornwall to help Barney Tozer, his wealthy friend and client. Tozer wants Harding to purchase on his behalf an antique ring that will be in the estate sale of Tozer's late eccentric uncle. In Cornwall, Harding becomes involved with Hayley Winter, an enigmatic young housekeeper who resembles a reporter who drowned 10 years earlier while scuba diving with Tozer. After the ring is stolen and Hayley disappears, Harding's search—into Tozer's odd past, a family superstition and English history—is hampered because everyone lies or hides his or her past. Goddard's gentle pacing and even prose build to an absorbing finale. (June)

Ford's adequate if overbusy latest begins with the body of sheriff Daniel McCloud, who went missing seven years ago, discovered buried in a box in the woods. As the investigation by the current sheriff, Nate Derry, progresses, the McClouds must come to terms with their father having been murdered, while McCloud's son, James, becomes the prime suspect, and a dark web of deception that chokes the Derry and McCloud families threatens to be unearthed. Leaning heavily on flashbacks, the story jumps between its perhaps too many points of view with relative ease. Ford handily navigates the suffocating intimacy of smalltown life, and his wide supporting cast has a few meaty characters. While the big reveal is set up very early on, the sprinkling of smaller mysteries and little tragedies will keep readers going. (June)

Brodie weaves an engaging tale of grief and loss in her “What if?” debut. When Sarah McConnell's husband of 17 years dies in a kayaking incident, she is left widowed and childless at the age of 39. But David's body is never recovered, and after three months of seeing glimpses of her husband at the grocery store and her home, Sarah wonders whether she really is a widow. On Halloween night, David shows up at her front door and offers a plausible explanation for his absence, and Sarah is, understandably, relieved yet also distraught—since she's the only person who has seen him, is he real? Or is she going crazy? Brodie expertly walks the line between reality and fantasy, life and death, heartache and love, leaving readers hoping for the best and prepared for the worst—without ever really knowing the truth—until the final five pages. (June)

In Wilson's insightful fourth and final Javier Falcón novel (after The Hidden Assassins), the intrepid Spanish homicide detective finds himself overwhelmed with the pressures of personal and professional entanglements. After a suitcase is recovered from a car accident containing several million euros and discs showing video footage of local council people in compromising positions, Falcón begins piecing together a vast international conspiracy that involves not only the Russian mafia and Islamic extremist groups but also implicates his best friend, Yacoub Diouri, a spy for the Spanish government. When the young son of his lover, Consuelo Jiménez, is abducted, Falcón comes to some startling revelations about his career, his relationships and his future. While convoluted plot lines initially slow the pace, patient readers will find the action-packed—and bombshell-laden—conclusion well worth the wait. As always, the richly described Seville backdrop is a plus. (June)

In Ajvaz's first novel to be translated into English, a Borgesian cohort of freakish creatures, talking birds and eccentric city dwellers lurk on the margins of an alternative Prague. An unnamed protagonist learns that a book written in an unearthly language is an opening to a dangerous world that is just around the corner from normal life. More and more frequently, the protagonist stumbles across scenes from the other city—he spies on an inscrutable religious service, is treated to “a lecture on the subject of Latest Discoveries about the Great Battle in the Bedrooms.” The city's inhabitants do not take kindly to his intrusions; he is pursued by weasels, shot at by a helicopter and nearly eaten by a half-man, half-shark. Meanwhile, overheard conversations dissolve into nonsense, elk are stabled inside statues and birds recite passages from an epic poem. Ajvaz's novel is a gorgeous matryoshka doll of unreason, enigma and nonsense—truly weird and compelling. (June)

Goldstein (The Prince of Nantucket) delivers up a mostly smooth-sailing novel of art, murder and politics. In one week, 20-something SoHo art gallery manager Madison Mandelbaum is getting married to the man of her dreams. Then an anonymous tipster begins leaving her disturbing messages about her fiancé, journalist and transplanted Brit Colin Darcy, who, apparently, does more than the investigative reporting for which he is quickly gaining fame. Colin, in fact, may have something bigger to hide than the call girl he was possibly seeing behind Madison's back. The hooker turns up dead and Colin is a likely suspect, though he swears he had nothing to do with it. Madison, however, has her doubts, and after catching Colin in some whopping lies and getting insider information from her assistant DA best friend, she determines to uncover the truth and save her wedding day. The backdrop of the final frenzy before a wedding makes this madcap romp zippy and fun, although Madison and her pals sometimes stretch credulity a smidge too thin. (June)

Newlywed Clare Finnegan, a boozy 27-year-old Chicago event planner and blogger, chronicles the tribulations of her unexpected pregnancy in this sparse novel. She details her disdain for her co-workers and clients, the increasing size of her butt and her mingled envy and disgust at social events where everyone except her is blotto. The writing displays the strengths and weaknesses of a blog: on the plus side are witty, fast-paced entries that provide a super–close-up examination of contemporary urban life. On the downside, the snide tone wears thin and doesn't allow for momentum building or character development. Little actually happens: her relationship with her husband is pleasantly superficial, and her pregnancy unfolds predictably. Individual snippets are hip and amusing, but, as a novel, it's less than exciting to read a series of prickly squibs from a woman whose main interest, it seems, is wondering how soon she can return to partying. (June)

With still more to say about marriage, fidelity and the importance of being wittily earnest, Asher (My Husband's Sweethearts)—Julianna Baggott's adult fiction pseudonym—brings an abundance of warmth and wisdom to this tale of lost-and-found love. Married woman Gwen Merchant agrees to pretend to be the newlywed of former beau Elliott Hull to appease his dying mom. Gwen, smothering in a marriage to Peter, jumps at the chance for a redo at an abruptly ended college romance, and it's a slippery slope that Gwen slides down with passion and verve, falling in love with Elliott and becoming attached to his sister and her precocious kids and the imperious and uncannily perceptive matriarch, Vivian. But while weaving one faux relationship, Gwen unthreads the very real sadness in her own tattered family, including a widowed dad and a marriage that hides more than it confides. It's more than a little disappointing, if not surprising, that Asher inserts an improbably happy ending to push the sweet and funny Gwen into a trite epiphany. (June)

South African–born Wicomb's second collection subtly portrays the shifting relations among family, friends and servants in a transformed South Africa. “Friends and Goffels” renders the disruption in the friendship of Dot and Julie, who were once united by their dark skin color but who have been separated by Julie's years abroad and marriage to a white Scotsman. In “Mrs Pringle's Bed,” Polly Pringle confines herself to the bed that once belonged to her daughter and, with the aid of her uncomprehending housekeeper, manipulates her bewildered husband. In these and other stories, changes in perspective open up what could be very claustrophobic narratives. Wicomb also sets many stories in Glasgow—both the title story and “There's the Birth That Never Flew” follow a newlywed South African couple on their honeymoon there; in “In the Botanic Gardens,” Dorothy Brink makes the long journey from South Africa to Glasgow to find her son, who has gone missing. Encompassing a range of voices and attitudes, Wicomb's work impresses, though some of the diction—South African and Glaswegian—and nuances of class and race may elude an American audience. (June)

The latest from Vanity Fair contributing editor Jacobs (Women About Town) has, at its core, a charming story about a grieving widow reborn, but it's pockmarked by pretentious dialogue and flat characters. Margret Snow quits her Ph.D. program in art to escape the romantic feelings she has toward her bird-watching partner (and Columbia University adviser), Charles Ashur. She whiles her time away as a window display designer at Saks and eventually works up the courage to confess her feelings, and they marry. Margret's memories shift between her and Charles's early bird-watching days and their marriage. But the most vivid parts of the novel are set in the gloomy present, when Margret, now a widow, throws herself in a new artistic direction that involves dead birds. Her connection to the dead sparrows and warblers seems more natural than the off-key relationships she has with the living, and her isolation from family and friends raises the question why she tries to keep the connections alive, while the grating banter between Margret and Charles only serves to caricaturize them. (June)

Holly Denham, the lead of this epistolary novel (and yes, the name of the author), is an overwhelmed receptionist at a major British bank. The reader's access to Holly's frantic life is via her e-mail inbox—the entirety of the novel, in fact, is e-mail messages sent by, among others, her gay best friend (a chick lit necessity), her brassy co-workers (another requirement), her meddling mother (check, again) and, of course, her would-be paramour (ditto). The plot runs along very traditional lines, and in the end overreaches for a happy ending, but this overlong novel's saving graces are its fast pacing and very funny writing. Some of the best exchanges are between Holly and her grandmother, who sends e-mails that just read “TESTING” and signs her up for annoyingly spammy Web services. Despite the limitations inherent in an e-epistolary novel, the book is populated by vibrant, endearing characters, and Denham manages to juggle a dozen story lines at once. The ending's contrived, but feel-good, which, in these gloomy times, might be enough to do the trick. (June)

Popular evangelical Christian novelist Gist tells a could-have-happened tale of a Seattle landowner who requires a wife to keep his 640 acres. In the land replete with timber but few women, widower Joe Denton signs a contract with Asa Mercer to deliver the wife he needs to ensure his land rights. Unfortunately, 19-year-old Anna Ivey doesn't realize she's signed on for marriage; she only wants passage out West and a job. Sparks fly as tempers flare when Joe and Anna discover they are at cross-purposes. Acquiescing to common sense as well as a sense of desperation, the two agree to work together temporarily. As Anna cooks up a storm in payment for the traveling debt Joe incurred on her behalf, Joe cooks up his own scheme for wooing Anna into marriage. Gist's work is comical, sassy and sweet—yet her story's ending ties together a bit too neatly for readers who relish real-life finales. (June)

Windle—author of the political/suspense thriller CrossFire—taps into current events with her newest novel, set in Afghanistan. Relief worker Amy Mallory had dreamed of working in Kabul for years, yet her first impressions of the dusty, tradition-bound city aren't great. Steve Wilson, leader of the personal security detail for Afghanistan's minister of the interior, carries memories of his last time in the war-torn country. And Jamil, the Afghan whom Amy hires as her interpreter, is haunted by his past. The trio's lives entwine as they struggle to live and work in Kabul, Amy through New Hope—offering protection to women released from prison—and Steve through protecting Khalid Sayef, a leader who promises reform. Windle's writing sings when she compares the teachings of Isa Masih (Jesus Christ) with those of Muhammad, but occasionally clunks with overuse of acronyms and convoluted sentences. Yet readers will be enthralled with this penetrating look at Afghanistan and its many mysteries revealed through the lives of flawed men and women. Windle is a top-notch storyteller. (June)

The newest historical romance from Christy-winner Moser (Time Lottery) is an imaginative biography of the 19th-century Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett on her way to becoming the wife of fellow poet Robert Browning and the author of the sublimely romantic sonnets from the Portuguese, of which the titular poem is best known. After her brother died in a sailing accident, the grief-stricken, sickly Barrett became a recluse who was spirited from her attic hideaway by Browning; the two wed and fled to Italy, and Elizabeth's control freak of a father disinherited her. The outlines of her life make a great story, but Moser is really challenged to make dramatic hay out of Elizabeth's recluse period. As a guilt-stricken Victorian invalid, Elizabeth leads a highly interior life, so the reader awaiting a grand love story needs patience. The name of her future husband doesn't enter the action until more than a third of the way into the book. Moser has done wonderful homework and shares snippets of what she found in an appendix. The text of Barrett Browning's sonnets are a true bonus. (June)

Joven's remarkable debut, while bearing obvious similarities to The Da Vinci Code, is much more than another pale imitation. Father Hector, a science teacher in a Spanish Jesuit community, finds relief from indifferent students in an online group devoted to the real-life Voynich Manuscript. Written in an unknown language, the 500-year-old document has defied the best efforts of cryptographers and scholars to decipher it. Hector's research into an actual recent book, Joshua and Anne-Lee Gilder's Heavenly Intrigue, which accuses Johannes Kepler of poisoning his mentor and fellow astronomer, Tycho Brahe, eventually ties in with the mystery surrounding the Voynich Manuscript. Local politicians' efforts to evict the order from the monastery where Hector works complicate the plot. Joven manages to cleverly blend fact and fiction as well as make the scientific debates of the 16th century relevant and compelling. (May)

New Yorker editor, music critic and novelist Greenman spins a fresh and explosive new novel about a fictionalized rock 'n' soul star who embraced and revolutionized American counterculture. Robert Franklin, aka “Rock Foxx,” quickly climbs the ladder from first single to first Billboard hit to the rhinestone stardom of a Rolling Stone cover. In the time of the Beatles, the Stones and Bob Dylan, Foxx injects his unique sound with hints of Otis Redding, Ray Charles and Curtis Mayfield. He sings to make an impression, singing about freedom that was constricting and how, even if you had everything, the mind (and the critics) were never satisfied. His fall from grace—and the spotlight—is as much about character as it is about the unrealized hopes and dreams of the turbulent '60s. McSweeney's regular Greenman (A Circle Is a Balloon and Compass Both) takes readers behind the rhythm and into the soul of a musician and the culture that made and destroyed him. It's a haunting vision of a man, the music and a culture, driven by the author's undeniable passion for his subject. (May)

Over two decades and five books, Fairchild, a native Midwesterner, has built a loyal highbrow following for deft compositions that depict, with wit, pathos and regret, the ordinary lives of modern Americans—a dispossessed Great Plains farmer; a young Jewish New Yorker working as a movie theater usher, who comes to terms with Christian theology; Doris Miller of Clyde, Missouri, “on evening break at Wal-Mart”; a pool room full of Texas college students drinking while thinking about higher math. All those characters turn up in this new collection; so does a set of prose poems devoted to classic B-movies, and another about “The Beauty of Abandoned Towns.” Other poems play philosophical games, as in the monologue spoken by the barber (famous in mathematical circles) who shaves all and only those barbers who do not shave themselves. Even there, however, everything intellectual becomes at last accessible, as if all ideas took place on “some vast, flat plain of pure event where things/ just happen.” Fairchild pays homage, by name, to the grim, witty Anthony Hecht, but his own compositions, suffused with prairie sadness, could easily appeal to the broader audience for, say, Garrison Keillor or Ted Kooser. (May)

Hughes is the daughter of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (their son, Nicholas, committed suicide last month), and though several new poems complain that reviewers have not judged Frieda on her merits, many more—remembering the death of her father, taking up his “Crow” image, describing her own traumas in Plath's signature rhythms—keep the poet's parents clearly in mind: “My buried mother,” one complains, “Is up-dug for repeat performances.” Hughes (Forty-Five) has talents for caricature and for allegory.” Yet those talents are too often eclipsed by failures of technique, by poems that sound too much like diary entries: “My head is full of graves/ Where I have buried my dead./ But in moments of weakness/ I hear them calling.” “Stonepicker,” a persona, represents women who cannot accept blame; “Stunckle,” Stonepicker's uncle, stands for men who want everything and give nothing (so the notes say). The two waltz together through “The Book of Mirrors,” the later and looser of the two sequences in this volume. Yet both characters recede before Frieda Hughes herself: a poet, but also a figure of intense biographical and journalistic interest, whose troubled times, chronicled here, should give life to these lines. (May)

Few new books of American poems have more unity—or more happiness—than the latest from Blumenthal: the law professor, memoirist, novelist (Dusty Angel) and psychotherapist has set himself the daunting task of depicting joy in all its varieties. Almost all the poems use long unrhymed lines and long sentences; all the titles begin with “And.” Many titles read like updates on biblical verse (“And Whose Is the Triumph of Stinky Similitude? And Where Is the Rapture of the Seas?”), as if Blumenthal were writing his own book of psalms. His extended praise includes the spiritual (“he knows// that the air is rife with the anarchy of the possible,/ that the hills are moving, ever so secretly, during/ the night”) but also the erotic and the familial: his poems about love almost dare us to call them sentimental. Blumenthal has long made the positive emotions, those that risk sentimentality, his special subject: sometimes the results of that long study turn sublime. Elsewhere, though, Blumenthal fails to find words as exuberant or as satisfying as he wants to remind us that life can be: some readers will thrill, but others will likely balk, at “the lustful little angel that inhabits his body,” “the deliquescence of the air whispering its soothing song.” (May)

While it might be possible, on first read, to assume that Field's quirkily, aphoristic poems are some kind of ode to a simple and innocent Southern aesthetic, with titles like “Self Portrait in Toad Suck, Arkansas” and “Possums and Critters Gets Back There,” her debut book is nothing of the kind, immediately assuring the reader that she “has already outlived her older sister/ and determines: I am blessed but not by God.” At the core of these searing poems is the story of Field's sister who was brutally murdered, which Field tells and retells in poem after poem, as if it could finally be got off her chest: “Only so much is let out/ of a face and I read in folk Someone killed your someone too.” The saddest of these poems see with eyes that “are big for wrong reasons,” but Field also has a warmth and humor that refuse to let every poem be sad. There is no wallowing, just cold observation of a hurt heart's deep life (“admit you feel as though you never wear shoes”), where there is no simple consolation for the things that shouldn't happen but do: “Murders happen all the time./ I really lost it walking from her new grave// to the car. Then the subject changes./ Someone tells me I'm so strong.” (Apr.)

Split between oddly angled bits of memoir and acts of Hollywood ventriloquy, this second poetry collection from Polito (Doubles) leaps between essays and lyrics, between theology and violence, between tell-alls and persona poems. “If only God would save me,” Polito writes in the title poem, “I would know how to hurt you,” with the kind of drama and intimacy that infuses many of the voices here. Even Paris Hilton weighs in on spiritual matters (“My God makes me feel good”). A story about a starlet who falls into a life of drinking, prostitution and poetry doubles as a sad coming-of-age tale, while “Please Refrain from Talking During the Movie” mixes interior and exterior voices, joining much in this book that's overheard, quoted and borrowed: love moans through hotel walls, instructions from an astrologer and memorized pieces of the Baltimore Catechism. Confused seekers also abound: a woman who thinks the “owlish man” she lives with is Bob Dylan; another woman who's conflation of her own face, Elvis and God ends tragically; and a man in search of a tintype of his grandmother that may or may not exist. Three personal essays anchor the poems, each a story about interrogating self and god, whether fallen, falling apart or missing altogether. (Apr.)

This second volume shows that Slate's Bakeless Prize–winning debut, The Invention of the Maggot (2005), wasn't just hype: Slate, who spent more than two decades in the corporate world before beginning his poetic career, is a poet for whom long, wide experience really seems to have turned into wisdom, whose deft handling of syntactic changes and verbal ironies supports considered verdicts on the things and people of this world. Poems reflect intercontinental travel and corporate responsibilities (now ended); dealings with elderly parents and with grown children; and welcome, if melancholy, time alone. They also give compact, sometimes grim, and vivid advice: “Don't call out to the world,/ since it can't answer in one voice.” Another poem summarizes firefighters' training: “Far out on an island in the harbor,/ recruits rehearsed in burning rooms.” Slate seeks and often finds a classical simplicity, not to be confused with simplification: his deliberate pace, his mergers of disillusion with an almost (but not quite) religious poise and his interpolated travelogues might put careful readers in mind of Robert Hass. “How far I am from what I'd cure with words,” Slate says late in the volume—and yet, for all his regrets and self-chastisements, there are spiritual ailments for which such careful lines may indeed be the cure. (Apr.)

This ninth collection of poetry finds Lauterbach doing what she does best, anchoring her roving eye and associative thinking among the banalities and raptures of a mature urban life. If her banalities, often comically deployed, are sometimes merely that (“There are new blinds on the windows across the way”), her raptures, often in the form of physical description, can truly exhilarate and sound like no one else's: “as the sun sets, tiny distinctions appear among luminosities, sky, river, car, white fence, yellow lights of passing cars, pale stone of the graves.” Less rhapsodic than usual, Lauterbach may apologize for “not making meaning,” but when she does make it, she reveals a gift for impeccably phrased insight: “one falls in love/ with the condition of hope// and falls out of love with its/ cruel replacement, hope....” Highlights of the book include its title poem, a breathtaking, understated 14-part elegy, and the centerpiece, “Alice in the Wasteland,” a playful semiotic dialogue that finds Carroll's Alice interrogated by an impersonal “Voice” as she wanders through Eliot's labyrinth of dysfunction. Intelligent but no less deeply feeling, this collection confirms Lauterbach's position as one of the most highly principled and tirelessly innovative poets writing today. (Apr.)

“Some people know how to write but they have no/ taste,” Minnis states toward the end of her fourth poetry collection, a book-length sequence tackling the sticky subject of poetry: the act of writing it and the meaning of being a poet. In a flurry of ideas, and with her typically sparse and open-ended lines, Minnis (Bad Bad) approaches her subject from a dizzying array of angles: ironic, celebratory, mournful, panicked and often funny. “In a poem,” writes Minnis, “You have to make a charitable sentiment... // But I like it without any of that fluff... // I like it to be very obscenely old-fashioned like an old/ fashioned stripper.” Addressing her readers directly, Minnis mixes the postmodern with the nearly archaic: her exclamatory lines contain an almost troubadourlike quality in their exuberance for announcing their thoughts: “I like to live a hard life but I know I shouldn't do it... // I should live an easy life or I am a fool!” Minnis isn't for everyone, likely too edgy for the more traditional reader and too personal for a more progressive crowd. However, most find this a careful and entertaining read that manages to be exhaustive, yet never exhausting. (Apr.)

Perillo is poet who aggressively, unflinchingly and humorously takes it all in; her poems here feature an ode to Motorola, a fat junkie, a bra fitting and Plath's hair, not to mention the act described in the title poem. She is not afraid of beginning a poem with a list of great men who all “had a woman and child/ they needed to ditch,” and then comparing the way the universe regards everyone to the way those great men regarded their children. She avoids sentimentality while confronting the rebellions of her own body, which landed her in a wheelchair: “She rolls up/ to watch me board, as people do,/ because it is interesting/ to see the wheelchair maneuvered backward/ into the van.” She manages to write a surprising poem about Viagra, with Niagara Falls' “silver surge” as its central image. Perillo is never uninteresting. In the title poem, her chutzpah and roving eye blend perfectly, demonstrating in fairly intricate detail how a German zoologist's preparation and approach toward an elephant's “vestibule” compares to the reader approaching the speaker's own inner life, her “seed-pearl” and “opalescent sorrow.” (Apr.)

“Simply put, we are a failed and ruined people/ incapable of even silence. We are equal to nothing./ The earth given to us, we have lost even that. Big eaters of America, I join you in your parade.” So proclaims Beckman (Shake) in his fifth collection, a searching dramatic monologue that relentlessly pursues knowledge while remaining attentive to disorder. Though he joins America in its parade, he also maintains his distance from the masses and delivers “a speech befitting the wayward traveler stilled only/ by glory's momentum.” Sometimes deeply dissatisfied with, and sometimes in complete awe of the natural (and social) landscape, this inspired speaker argues with himself as much as he does with his country, making a wholehearted plea for unity in the face of folly and predicament. Beckman scrutinizes the human tendency to organize and systematize, and offers an uncanny ode to entropy (“Architects of the world/ enclose me not tonight in your thoughtful rooms,/ let me fall down the unbuilt hill, let me die/ in the inconsiderate sun.”) In what may be his best book, Beckman wistfully takes to the road and does the incredible work of writing poems full of desire, for a world in the midst of radical upheaval. (Apr.)

In his 19th collection of prose poems, Edson's imagination remains as bizarre as ever, although he breaks no new ground. Edson inflicts deformities of body and character onto his humans and inanimate objects alike, introducing, for example, “a woman whose face was a cow's milk bag” or a man who “had only one eye. In the other socket was a belly button.” The humor in these passages—such as when a man puts a hat on his head and “the hat thinks he's feeding it, and begins to swallow his head,” is often mingled with obscene or oddly tragic moments, as when a farmer announces to his wife that he is going to have sex with the cow he is about to slaughter. There are also rare instances of poignant beauty, such as a man whose daughter is a mouse, pressed dead between the pages of a book like a flower. Edson's fragmented tales often trail off into ellipses that alternately seem like lazy storytelling or a provocative tool. But longtime Edson fans will find as much to enjoy as in Edson's other books. (Apr.)

In his sequel to Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved (2005), Orr offers more short (many don't break 10 lines), earnest poems that take as their central metaphor “the beloved,” Orr's word for a conflation of a loved human being, the idea of a kind of higher power beyond the self at which love and energy are directed, and the poetry itself, which bears all this praise in what Orr calls “the Book.” The best of these poems are compact missives addressing in the most direct language possible many of humanity's most dire needs and fears: “That single line: a rope/ The poem tossed out/ Into the dark./... / You're holding one end; The beloved, the other.// Rescue is imminent.// Too soon to say whose.” Elsewhere, the language is so direct that it's more like journaling than poetry. Most perplexing and interesting, however, are many poems in which the language would fall flat, except that Orr's line breaks add meaning and almost Rilkian power; imagine this going down the page: “...death is real, and all/ That is/ Flows toward its brink.// No wonder we need/ Hope and courage—// What the book brings.” (Apr.)

Titled Stratton's War in the U.K., this outstanding first in a series set during WWII won Wilson (A Little Death) the Ellis Peters Historical Dagger Award. In the summer of 1940, Det. Insp. Ted Stratton investigates an apparent suicide that leads him into a maze of brutal gang violence and bland official evasion. Meanwhile, icily beautiful upper-crust Diana Calthrop tries to escape a hateful marriage by devoting herself to MI5 intrigue. At first, playing spy is fun, but she soon finds herself passionately involved with another agent who may be a murderous sociopath. Wilson convincingly evokes what it was like to sleep in a bomb shelter or stumble through shattered London streets in the dark. The characters are convincing, too, especially Ted and Diana in their tentative, unwilling attraction to each other. Wilson also adroitly handles such issues as the treatment of homosexuality as a crime and the government use of the wartime emergency to justify violating personal rights. (July)

In Davis's otherworldly fourth chick lit cozy to feature San Francisco author and amateur sleuth Sophie Katz (after 2007's Obsession, Deceit and Really Dark Chocolate), a chance meeting with her realtor ex-husband leads Sophie to the three-bedroom Victorian of her dreams. The price is unbelievably low, but there's a catch. The house's owner, Kane Crammer, has stipulated Sophie must join the San Francisco Specter Society and regularly attend séances. The deal appears harmless enough, until one of the society members is murdered in a genuine locked-door mystery. The victim's estranged wife hires Sophie's current lover, PI Anatoly Darinsky, to find the real killer and eliminate her as a suspect. Sophie, unable to resist investigating on her own, soon discovers Kane harbors ulterior motives and has no intention of letting her buy his property. Humor, romance and an appealing, spirited protagonist add up to an entertaining read. (June)

Sefton's seventh puzzler to feature Kelly Flynn, crafty sleuth of Fort Connor, Colo., and the House of Lambspun knitters (after 2008's Fleece Navidad) finds them worrying about their friend Jennifer Stroud, who's been raped. Though Jennifer initially refuses to report the attack to the authorities, she agrees to attend a weekend workshop for women who've suffered sexual violence. Kelly and physical therapist Lisa Gerrard are teaching a fiber class for the May retreat at Lazy C Ranch, whose owner, Cal Everett, turns out to be Jennifer's assailant. When Cal's found dead, pushed over the railing of a steep deck with Jennifer's latest afghan project draped over his body, Jennifer becomes a murder suspect. Sefton skillfully handles a sensitive topic while weaving in happier moments for her amateur detectives, such as the marriage of Mimi Shafer, Lambspun's owner, and Burt Parker, a retired Fort Connor detective. (June)

The home of Chuck Palahniuk, Powell's City of Books—and the place with more strip clubs per capita than any other city in America—gets its due in this splendid entry in Akashic's noir series. Portland natives will appreciate shout-outs to lesser-known landmarks, like the weekly showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show at the Clinton Street Theater in Ariel Gore's “Water Under the Bridge,” while outsiders may recognize some of the city's more famous draws, like the Shanghai Tunnels in Gigi Little's “Shanghaied.” Standouts include Floyd Skloot's eerily poignant “Alzheimer's Noir”; Jonathan Selwood's “The Wrong House,” about a drug deal that goes horribly awry; and Bill Cameron's “Coffee, Black,” which features not only his series regular, retired detective Thomas “Skin” Kadash, but also one of the city's most prized commodities: coffee. The 16 stories in this anthology demonstrate that a little rain is never a deterrent to murder. (June)

Edgar-winner Pattison blends an eye-opening look at contemporary China with a traditional whodunit in his stellar sixth Tibet mystery (after 2007's Prayer of the Dragon). Shan Tao Yun, exiled after a career pursuing high-level corruption in the Chinese government, is arrested for the murder of China's minister of tourism, gunned down along with an American woman, Megan Ross, near Mount Everest at about the time an avalanche crushed a military bus transporting political prisoners. Though Shan persuades the arresting officer to release him from custody, he's replaced in the dock by Colonel Tan, Shan's only hope of rescuing his imprisoned son, Shan Ko. If he's to see Shan Ko again, Shan must clear the colonel by finding the real killer. The official consensus that Ross, a veteran climber, is still alive complicates Shan's efforts. Newcomers as well as those already emotionally invested in the resourceful and ethical sleuth will cheer him on. Author tour. (June)

Near the start of Balzo's lively fourth Maggy Thorsen mystery (after 2008's Bean There, Done That), a sudden spring “thundersnow” traps Maggy and friends in Benson Plaza, the Brookhills, Wis., strip mall where Maggy rents space for her coffee shop, Uncommon Grounds. Cut off from all communication, with minimum light and no heat in her store, Maggy decides to seek help elsewhere in the plaza. In the snow she stumbles on the mall's landlord, Way Benson, with a hatchet or cleaver buried in his back. Since Way was threatening to evict Maggy and other Benson Plaza proprietors in order to sell the mall to a superstore chain, Benson had no lack of enemies. Murder suspects include the mall's barber, an elderly pharmacist, the lone worker at the Bible Store and the Vietnamese father and daughter with a food shop. Credible characters and a well-constructed plot compensate for Maggy's sometimes tedious deductive methods. (June)

Set in 1870 New York City, this middling first in a new series from Rogow (The Problem of the Surly Servant and three other mysteries pairing Arthur Conan Doyle and Lewis Carroll) will have limited appeal to historical whodunit fans. The law firm of Pettigrew and Roth has just obtained the surprise acquittal of Bertram Delacorte, accused of stabbing Civil War widow Suzanna Kendall to death in a boardinghouse. Soon after, Delacorte's corpse, which has also been stabbed, surfaces in the Hudson River. Partner Joshua Roth, who personally represented the dead man, teams with a female law clerk, Peggy Pettigrew, and the prosecutor who was Roth's courtroom opponent, Michael Riley, to try to solve both murders. The point-of-view shifts among these three characters can be distracting, while the pages detailing the Pettigrew household's efforts to communicate with a new cook who speaks only Italian slow the narrative. Few readers will have trouble identifying the real killer. (June)

Broad humor bordering on the absurd propels Agatha-finalist Slan's uneven second mystery to feature St. Louis scrapbooker Kiki Lowenstein (after 2008's Paper, Scissors, Death). When one of Kiki's fellow scrappers, Yvonne Gaynor, keels over during a cropping event because of a severe allergic reaction, the police suspect someone sabotaged the epinephrine syringe Yvonne always carried for such an emergency. Despite all warnings, Kiki decides to launch her own murder investigation, which is soon complicated by hate crime attacks against Kiki's employer and other local Jews. On the bright side, three handsome men take an interest in Kiki, while her late husband's mother, Sheila, interferes in her life to her benefit. Filled with scrapbooking lore, this relatively clean cozy contains scenes that will make you either laugh or cringe, like Sheila's sticking penis-shaped vibrators into her lawn to get rid of her mole problem. (June)

Mystery novelist Antonia Darcy and her husband, Maj. Hugh Payne, travel to India in Raichev's witty fourth mystery to feature the amateur sleuths (after 2008's Assassins at Ospreys). The couple stay at Coconut Grove in Goa, the hacienda-style home of Roman Songhera, an Indian gangster. The scandalous behavior of Songhera's mistress, Marigold “Ria” Leighton, the daughter of Lord Justice Toby Leighton, has driven Songhera to the brink. At a lavish garden party at Coconut Grove, a drunken Englishman claiming to be in the employ of Lord Leighton tells Antonia that he saw Songhera kill Ria and fears for his life. With nods to Agatha Christie, John Buchan, P.D. James and other mystery greats, the amiable detectives sort out motives and suspects to arrive at the truth and a poetic justice more fitting than a mere jail sentence for the culprit. Clever chapter titles echoing classic detective fiction titles (e.g., Christie's The Mirror Cracked) add to the fun. (June)

Reynolds (The Prefect) returns to the universe of his 2005 novella “Thousandth Night” in this sprawling novel of intergalactic intrigue. It is 6.4 million years in the future and humanity has spread throughout the Milky Way. Some cultures have established transient empires across space; others, the Lines, have used relativistic travel to colonize deep time. Clone-siblings Campion and Purslane are delayed on their way to a Gentian Line reunion, a coincidence that saves them from a massacre. Allied with potentially hostile Machine People and an enigmatic post-human god called the Spirit, armed only with fragmentary records and hints that Campion's research provoked the mysterious House of Suns, the Gentian survivors struggle to find and stop their enemies before the genocide can be completed. Intriguing ideas and competent characterization make this a fine example of grand-scale relativistic space opera. (June)

Epic fantasy heavyweight Sanderson (the Mistborn series) pens a powerful stand-alone tale of unpredictable loyalties, dark intrigue and dangerous magic. To keep a treaty made long ago, the king of Idris must send his daughter to marry Susebron, the God King of Hallandren. Loath to part with his eldest daughter, Vivenna, King Dedelin instead sends his youngest daughter, tomboyish 17-year-old Siri, who struggles to make sense of the schemers and spies in Susebron's court. Hoping to rescue her sister, Vivenna joins a group of Idrian operatives with questionable motives. As Vivenna comes to terms with her magical abilities, resurrected hero Lightsong questions the role of the undead Returned Gods, who command Hallandren's mighty army of zombie soldiers. Sanderson melds complex, believable characters, a marvelous world and thoughtful, ironic humor into an extraordinary and highly entertaining story. (June)

Grand Master Silverberg (Roma Eterna) is one of science fiction's finest short story writers, and this superb volume shows him at his best. In the masterful novella “Born with the Dead,” Jorge Klein cannot accept that his recently resurrected wife no longer loves him, preferring the company of other “deads.” “Schwartz Between the Galaxies” introduces a near-future anthropologist who lectures on the destruction of indigenous human cultures while daydreaming of interstellar travel. In “The Dybbuk of Mazel Tov IV” an alien approaches secular Jew Shimon, speaks to him in fluent Hebrew and claims to be possessed by the soul of Shimon's departed friend. Thought-provoking and deeply ironic, these stories and the others in this volume are as powerful today as they were when they first saw print. (June)

The third Tess Noncoiré adventure (after 2007's Moon in the Mirror) follows the fantasy author and rogue demon-hunter to Las Vegas. While appearing as the guest of a regional writers conference, Tess and her imp sidekick, Scrap, are appalled to learn that the beautiful dancers performing in the hit show Faery Moon are supernatural beings kidnapped from Faery.Local vampire crime boss Lady Lucia offers to help Tess free the faeries and get them home, which seems easy enough, but the presence of another rogue Warrior hints that there's more going on. Meanwhile, Tess's old flame Donovan Estevez shows up, raising the possibility of conflict with her new would-be lover, Gollum aka Guilford Van der Hoyden-Smythe. The dark ending is leavened by the usual insider references to filk, as well as plenty of sword swinging and romantic angst. (June)

Frenetic action dominates Williams's cyberthriller sequel to 2008's The Mirrored Heavens, replicating the rapid-fire cuts, high-tech equipment and flat characters of computer games and Bond movies. Nearly incomprehensible to new readers, this novel chronicles a dehumanized 22nd century wracked with cyberwarfare and espionage. The North American empire and the Eurasian Coalition attack each other with mind-scrambled “razors” (superhackers) and “mechs” (black ops warriors), battling over ownership of inhabited asteroids in Earth's orbit. Small icons heading each subsection provide some help in tracing the novel's disorienting shifts in points of view from super-razor Claire Haskell to imprisoned U.S. spymaster Matthew Sinclair and other players in this mélange of shifting alliances and outright treachery. Foggy betrayals and mass exterminations provide plenty of sizzle, but the lack of clear structure and satisfactory characterizations result in a disappointing fizzle. (June)

Hamilton's 17th Anita Blake novel draws the vampire hunter into a game of cat-and-mouse with a particularly monstrous vampire named Vittorio. Aided by sadistic serial killer Otto Jefferies, convenient sociopath Edward and fanged escorts handpicked by her lover Jean-Claude, U.S. marshal Anita offers her services to Las Vegas, now under siege from Vittorio's army of enthralled preternatural beings. Manipulated by the cunning Vittorio and occasionally misled by coincidental events, Anita employs her insight into Vittorio's condition and weaponized libido as the decisive weapons in this struggle. The book is largely concerned with the melodramatic conflict between hunter and hunter and Blake's soap-operatic love life, but Hamilton does manage some genuinely moving passages, particularly those describing the terror of innocent vampires caught up in the arbitrary and draconian U.S. legal system. (June)

Though set in 1818 London, Kent's debut lacks any real period feel, but it does include a refreshing romantic dynamic: honesty. Violet, Lady Carrington, is a thrice-widowed beauty of 31 who values her freedom as well as her sensual affair with the younger Lord Peter St. Johns. Peter wants marriage, but Violet refuses. She cannot readily admit emotion, and her past relationships justify her caution. Violet suspects her mercenary older brother has pushed their 19-year-old sister, Isabella, to seek a husband, and she determines to protect Isabella even at the cost of driving Peter away. Violet's failure to communicate this plan to Isabella predictably leads to problems, but her conversations with Peter are as articulate and open as their limited self-awareness allows, and this realistic bluntness helps to balance out some otherwise implausible plot twists. (June)

This lighthearted romance anthology is as flighty and inconsistent as its fey protagonists. The most charming tale is Logan's “A Little Bit Faery,” in which appealing young faery Tia Mayberry becomes enthralled by life in Manhattan and a sexy mortal firefighter. In Hauf's whimsical “Dust Me, Baby, One More Time,” prudish fairy Sidney Tooth is forced to ally with the arrogant sandman Dart Sand against skeptical humans. Davidson pairs a tiny magical census taker with a half-mortal giant in the choppy, crowded “Tall, Dark and Not So Faery,” while Greiman's banal “Pixie Lust” sets up naïve California pixie Avalina and real estate developer Will Timber, whose characterization is as wooden as his name. Even the most forgiving fans are unlikely to be enchanted. (June)

Craig (Divorced, Desperate and Delicious) fills her new romantic thriller with a playful tone and quick banter. Law student and pizza delivery girl Macy Tucker becomes the special project of detective Jake Baldwin after her sweet but unreliable brother, Billy, escapes from jail on the heels of suspected killer David Tanks. Jake starts out focused on recapturing Tanks, his nemesis, but soon begins to feel very protective towards Macy. Unpleasant experiences with her dying grandfather, abusive father and cheating ex-husband have left her with little trust, so Macy has sworn off men, but Jake is persistent and attractive, and their families quickly begin encouraging the match. Supporting characters like Macy's sexy, yoga teaching grandmother are engaging and funny without being caricatures, and the mystery and romance plots fit seamlessly into a witty and fast-paced novel that's easy to read and satisfying to the heart. (June)

Short story author van Eekhout makes a successful leap to long fiction with this thrilling urban fantasy. As human civilizations crumble, Valkyries prepare for Ragnarok by using DNA testing to select perfect warriors for their army of the dead. Resurrected NorseCODE operative Mist loses faith in the project after a tragic accident, and she goes AWOL. After Mist encounters the near-forgotten god Hermod as he investigates portents of doom along the California coastline, the two journey into the afterlife of Helheim, where they make some unexpected allies. With deities scheming and ancient prophecies coming true, can a reluctant Valkyrie and a world-weary god prevent the apocalypse? While a few aspects of the conclusion don't quite hang together, the compelling prose and epic blend of mythological and modern elements make it clear that van Eekhout is an author to watch. (June)

As a young girl, Ruka sees a fish turn into light and disappear at the aquarium where her father works, but no one believes her. Years later, the mystery of the ghost of the sea unfolds before Ruka and a pair of mysterious young boys, Umi and Sora. Both boys were raised in the ocean by dugongs and can hear the same strange calls from the sea that Ruka does. After being suspended from her handball team, Ruka becomes caught up in the boys' world, which seems to ease her feelings of loneliness. This gentle tale of oceanic adventure reveals itself slowly, building upon the inherent mystery of the sea, as the kids become involved in the worldwide mystery of disappearing fish. Igarashi creates characters that are interesting on multiple levels and relatable for both young and adult readers. The art style is simplistic and almost delicate, but it's fitting for the overall feel of the story. Igarashi is an award-winning mangaka whose work is much in the mood of Miyazaki, and this nature-centered tale shows why. (June)

This manhwa—first in a trilogy—chronicling the lives of a single mother and her daughter in rural Korea is a moving and evocative look at love as seen through the eyes of one feeling it for the first time and another who longs to savor it once more. The story follows daughter Ehwa from age seven up as she discovers the physical differences between boys and girls, grows into young womanhood and undergoes her initial confusing experiences with attraction and romance. Ehwa's interest is piqued by a young Buddhist monk, a lad whose interest is mutual but doomed to futility thanks to his faith's strict code of celibacy. Meanwhile, Ehwa's mother, who was widowed at an early age, finds her loneliness soothed by the attentions of an artistic traveling salesman known only as “Picture Man.” Their relationship later helps Ehwa understand much about the joys of making a romantic connection. This book has no conflict other than that common to youthful competition over boys, but it is a work of great humanity that sucks the reader in. Kim's artwork is stunning, and seldom has a male writer captured the attitudes, emotions and behavior of female characters so believably. (Apr.)

This anthology about Asian superheroes drawn exclusively by Asian comic artists is a noble concept, but the submissions very greatly in tone, concept, length and overall quality. The book is broken down into sections by theme—historical concepts, one-page hero pitches, a section on “girl power” and another focusing on “ordinary heroes” (some of whom happen to have supernatural powers). Many works in the book, such as “The Hibakusha”—Japanese children born after Hiroshima who gain superpowers—take themselves very seriously. The highlight is “The Blue Scorpion & Chung” by Yang (American Born Chinese) and Sonny Liew. In a thinly veiled parody of the Green Hornet, the Blue Scorpion's chauffeur is a talented Korean man doing most of the work for his alcoholic employer. The 12-page short effectively confronts race with just the right amount of humor and cynicism, while simultaneously telling a satisfying story. The fake comic cover “The Y-Men” says everything many of the short stories are trying to, but does so with more effective humor in just one page. (Apr.)

This collection of 30 essays, many of which began as book reviews, confirms Stephen Burt's reputation as the leading poetry critic of his generation. Informative, matter-of-fact and abounding with an excited spirit more common to film and pop music reviews than to literary criticism, these essays will appeal to the unpracticed reader of contemporary poetry as well as the seasoned reader. The author of two full-length critical studies of poetry and two poetry collections, Burt comes to the poets he considers—including Rea Armantrout, Juan Felipe Herrera, Paul Muldoon and James Merrill—as both a scholar and a practitioner of the art, but he eschews the specialist's jargon as well as the indulgent lyricality that makes some poets' criticism more dazzling than illuminating. He prefers a more methodical, practical approach, carefully mapping a poet's characteristic formal habits, thematic concerns and apparent affinities and influences, asking nuts-and-bolts questions like “Who was [Frank] O'Hara, and how did he learn to write like that?”Burt has an encyclopedist's will to explicate and taxonomize—his branding of the “Elliptical” school of poetry in 1998 (including poets like Lucie Brock-Broido and Mark Levine) garnered enormous attention here and abroad. He never quite manages to figure out exactly how O'Hara came to be O'Hara—how could he?—but he always succeeds in providing the reader with a learned, insightful and energizing blueprint for his or her own reading pleasure and surmise. (Apr.)