Fiction Book Reviews: Week of 5/18/2009

In this gripping tale, Huneven charts the parameters of guilt and how a young, wisecracking intellectual becomes a shadow of her former self. Patsy MacLemoore, a boozy history professor, is helping her boyfriend, Brice, take care of his niece, Joey, whose mother is undergoing cancer treatment. But when Patsy goes on a bender and emerges from a drunken blackout in jail, she learns she’s accused of having run down a mother and daughter in her driveway. After her conviction, Patsy transforms from free spirit into a convict, and Huneven deftly underscores the bizarre trajectory Patsy’s life has taken. In a prison AA group, Patsy seeks redemption and meaning; she also develops a relationship with the man whose wife and daughter she killed and helps put his son through school, stays the course after her release and maintains a friendship with Brice and Joey. Brilliant observations, excellent characters, spiffy dialogue and a clever plot keep readers hooked, and the final twist turns Patsy’s new life on its ear. Huneven’s exploration of misdeeds real and imagined is humane, insightful and beautiful. (Sept.)

This darkly humorous debut explores the world of eastern European mail-order brides and the men who finance them. Daria, a savvy, warmhearted but standoffish secretary in Odessa, Ukraine, fears that her boss will fire her after she refuses his sexual advances. So to keep him busy (and to keep her job), she sets him up with her shallow friend, Olga, who promptly turns on Daria. Fearing imminent unemployment, Daria takes a second job at Soviet Unions, an Internet dating service that connects Western men with available Ukrainian women. As Daria, who is fluent in English, bridges the language gap between the women and foreign men, she wonders if she will ever find true love. The endearing and forthright Daria is the perfect guide through the trickery and sincerity of chaotic courtships and short-order love. Meanwhile, her own romantic life swirls between a sweet suitor in California, a Ukrainian gangster and her manic boss. The teetering dance between humor and heartbreak burns through this tale that takes place at the intersection of love and money, East and West, male and female. (Sept.)

Tropper returns with a snappy and heartfelt family drama/belated coming-of-age story. Judd Foxman’s wife, Jen, has left him for his boss, a Howard Stern–like radio personality, but it is the death of his father and the week of sitting shivah with his enjoyably dysfunctional family that motivates him. Jen’s announcement of her pregnancy—doubly tragic because of a previous miscarriage—is followed by the dramas of Judd’s siblings: his sister, Wendy, is stuck in an emotionless marriage; brother Paul—always Judd’s defender—and his wife struggle with infertility; and the charming youngest, Phillip, attempts a grown-up relationship that only highlights his rakishness. Presided over by their mother, a celebrated parenting expert despite her children’s difficulties, the mourning period brings each of the family members to unexpected epiphanies about their own lives and each other. The family’s interactions are sharp, raw and often laugh-out-loud funny, and Judd’s narration is unflinching, occasionally lewd and very keen. Tropper strikes an excellent balance between the family history and its present-day fallout, proving his ability to create touchingly human characters and a deliciously page-turning story. (Aug.)

From Idov, a staff writer for New York magazine, comes a sagely wry novel loosely based on his experience running the short-lived Cafe Trotsky on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. In the fictionalized version, newlyweds Mark and Nina are living off her trust fund on the Upper West Side. Mark writes the occasional book review and Nina has given up her halfhearted career in entertainment law to pursue photography. After a guest (and, coincidently, Michelin reviewer) compliments their food at a dinner party they’re hosting, Nina confides that she has always dreamed of running a cafe, and soon the pair are preparing to open their own hip downtown Viennese paradise. Lacking in experience but full of enthusiasm, the couple battles with landlords, contractors, coffee distributors and temperamental pastry chefs, yet Cafe Kolschitzky bows badly: friends barely show up and a Starbucks knockoff sets up shop across the street. Meanwhile, their funding is cut, no profits have been turned and the naïve couple begins to unravel. Packed with insight and frequent hilarious asides, Idov’s debut mercilessly takes down “money is an illusion” bohoism. (Aug.)

Mercurio’s third novel is a riveting imagining of the inner life of a satyrlike John F. Kennedy, referred to as “the subject,” as he beds a steady stream of starlets, interns and prostitutes. Kennedy’s well-known insatiable and sometimes comical philandering is juxtaposed against his often cruel relationship with Jacqueline, his brilliance as a statesman (excerpts from his actual speeches are included) and devotion as a father, offering a unique portrait of a powerful yet stricken and conflicted man. The villains are the methamphetamine-prescribing doctors and the bloodthirsty American generals pushing the world to the brink of Armageddon. JFK’s contemporaries are also cast in provocative roles, with the coke-sniffing Marilyn Monroe plotting to be first lady, the mobbed-up Frank Sinatra and Kennedy’s Soviet counterpart—a peace-seeking Nikita Khrushchev—all making memorable appearances. Kennedy has figured prominently in hundreds of books, but Mercurio’s take on the subject is fresh, bold and provocative. (July)

In Edgar-winner Liss’s enjoyable third thriller to feature the estimable Benjamin Weaver, an 18th-century London “thieftaker” (after A Spectacle of Corruption and A Conspiracy of Paper), Weaver finds himself working reluctantly for a mysterious gentleman, Jerome Cobb. On Cobb’s orders, Weaver takes employment as a security man at the British East India Company’s headquarters, where he tries to obtain information about the death of one Absalom Pepper, of whom virtually nothing is known. To keep Weaver in line, Cobb has blackmailed Weaver’s friend Moses Franco, close confederate Elias Gordon and his beloved uncle Miguel. As usual, several beautiful women play roles in the complicated plot, which involves industrial spying and the international textile trade. Weaver’s two previous adventures could sometimes bog down in arcane financial and political detail, but Liss keeps the suspense at full boil and the action rolling swiftly ahead. (July)

Set in London and Nigeria during the latter’s 1969 civil war with flashbacks to the months after WWII, Duns’s terrific debut will draw inevitable comparisons to early John le Carré, though the lead character, turncoat British Secret Service agent Paul Dark, is a complete original. In Nigeria, KGB agent Vladimir Slavin has asked the British for asylum, offering in trade the name of a Soviet mole lodged in the upper echelons of the Secret Service. That mole, we soon learn, is Paul, an ideological victim of youth and notions of revenge, who in 1945 assisted his father, a fellow MI6 operative, in a number of secret missions to hunt down and kill Nazi war criminals. Paul flees to Africa, where he expects to find a former Russian nurse he once loved and whom he once believed long dead. Seldom has a thriller plot taken more unseen turns as Paul searches for the truth about his past and the reality of his present. Readers will eagerly await the sequel. (July)

The third installment to Downie’s Roman Empire series—the second-century saga of a witty and courageous army surgeon, Gaius Ruso, and his smart and loyal lover, Tilla, a barbarian woman from Britannia—continues in gripping fashion. Ruso returns to his family home in southern Gaul, summoned by a forged letter pleading for his immediate return. Once Ruso and Tilla return, Ruso is thrust into a dangerous quagmire involving a missing ship, huge family debts and, before long, the murder of the family’s principal creditor—a crafty phony named Severus—who is poisoned in Ruso’s home. While Ruso and his family are quickly suspected of the murder, Ruso and Tilla’s attempts to solve the crime are hampered by interfering family members, a lying politician, a greedy banker and a pair of too-eager investigators sent from Rome. Ruso and Tilla must also deal with prejudice, envy and a new religion, Christianity. The plotting is clever and suspenseful, with subtle clues and lots of action, while the setting and supporting cast are vividly drawn. This is solid entertainment, nicely done. (July)

At the start of this fast-paced romantic thriller, the second from the bestselling mother and son Johansen team (Silent Thunder), Rachel Kirby, a computer whiz in Houston, Tex., is working hard to spur medical research on Krabbe’s disease, a rare nervous-system disorder afflicting her sister, Allie. After Rachel narrowly survives a sniper’s bullet, she receives an e-mail from John Tavak, a stranger who claims to be trapped in an Egyptian tomb, where he’s met Peseshet, an ancient physician who may have a cure for Allie’s ailment. The sisters set off on a globe-trotting adventure featuring gunfights, explosions and contrived romantic subplots. Rachel finds herself attracted to the enigmatic Tavak, while Allie starts falling for Hal Demanski, a spoiled billionaire who ends up aiding their efforts to get Peseshet’s secrets before an evil pharmaceutical company does. Despite the lack of character development or surprising plot twists, action fans should be satisfied. (July)

In Sheehan’s spellbinding latest (after Lost & Found), former lawyer Anna O’Shea becomes a time-traveling ex-wife when she returns from a vacation in Ireland and is enlisted to pick up her brother Patrick’s son from jail in Newark after Patrick is severely injured in a car accident. Anna retrieves troublesome 16-year-old Joe and sets him up at her home, then wakes in the middle of the night to find him rummaging through her luggage. Joe’s intrigued by a mysterious swath of cloth Anna picked up at a tourist trap, and when she tries to take it from him, the two are zapped back 164 years to pre–potato famine Ireland. Sheehan vividly depicts Irish-British conflicts as Anna becomes involved with an Irish smuggler’s group and falls for a rebel cartographer. Equally compelling is Joe’s experience as a wrestling champ and his romance with sparky lass Taleen. Throw in loyal Irish wolfhound Madigan, and you’ve got an altogether enjoyable romantic adventure yarn with a heavy helping of magic. (July)

Every bit as good as the better-known Jim Butcher, Carey hits his stride with his third hard-boiled supernatural thriller (after Vicious Circle). Felix “Fix” Castor, a London-based exorcist who uses music to fight evil spirits and other paranormal creatures, faces two major challenges. The burial of Fix’s friend John Gittings is disrupted by a lawyer with a court order mandating that the corpse be cremated; Gittings’s widow retains Fix to prevent the body’s exhumation. Meanwhile, a woman asks Fix to clear her husband of rape and murder charges by proving that Myriam Seaforth Kale, a gangster who’s been dead for 40 years, is actually responsible. While looking into how Kale has come back from the dead to resume killing people, Fix finds links to a larger threat from the dark side. Carey has a way with words (a character dresses “like someone who’d taken The Matrix a little too seriously”) as well as a gift for creating a plausible alternate reality. (July)

When California crook Robert Rivers sets his sights on a diamond necklace worth $250,000 belonging to socialite Evelyn Evermore in Thomas’s entertaining second caper novel (after Criminal Paradise), Rivers soon learns he’s not the only one with designs on it. After a rival thug foils Rivers’s first attempt to steal the necklace, Rivers and his rough-hewn partner, Reggie England, regroup and learn that Evermore has become a follower of Baba Raba, a charismatic guru based in sunny Venice, Calif. From posh hotels to flop houses, from ashram meetings to complicated burglaries, Rivers keeps his eye on the prize, but not without an appealing touch of knight errantry. Baba Raba, charlatan or not, has impressive powers as well as his own agenda. Rivers is a cunning and resourceful thief capable of blending into his surroundings like a chameleon or meeting force with force when necessary. He does both with charm, wit and surprising decency. (July)

Murder piled on grisly murder drives British author Brownlee’s uneven debut, a crime thriller set in contemporary Kenya, where expatriates and natives make their own destiny or are crushed by someone else’s. Former Scotland Yard copper Jake Moore, co-owner of a marginal sport fishing outfit in Mombasa, owes an Arab oil dealer $17,000 for diesel fuel because the country’s civil unrest has scared off “Ernies,” “pale-faced tourists who came to Kenya in search of big fish.” Jake; his fellow Brit partner, Harry Philliskirk; and Det. Insp. Daniel Jouma, possibly the only Kenyan cop not on the take, tangle with a variety of nasties, whose crisis-management skills are limited to personal disposal of their opponents. While the book occasionally provides terse, deadly insights into the local culture, it offers mostly predictable glimpses into the unsavory side of the dark continent. Still, Brownlee shows enough promise that readers can reasonably hope for more than just relentless brutality in the sequel. (July)

Ru Freeman’s debut novel chronicles the trials and travails of two Sri Lankan women and their pursuit of freedom. Orphaned then absorbed as a servant into a well-to-do Sri Lankan family at the age of five, Latha Kumari grows up in tandem with the family’s spoiled young daughter, Thara. However, Latha’s mysterious origins and ambiguous caste ensure her a future of unpaid servitude in the Vithanages’s household. Resentful, she involves herself with the man meant for Thara. This choice ultimately causes her loss and suffering. Alongside Latha’s story is that of Biso’s, who is fleeing a drunken abusive husband, a murdered lover and townspeople who whisper “whore” as she walks past. Biso escapes blindly to the salvation and promise of distant relatives in the north, but her journey with her three children across the country is tainted by murder and terrorism. The kindness of strangers runs out, but the end of Biso’s tragic journey will end up being the promise of Latha’s future. Freeman illustrates contemporary Sri Lankan life through the battles waged between lovers, friends and strangers alike in this study in dignity, strength of character, tolerance and perseverance. (July)

Set in the African-American community of Evansville, Ind., in the 1970s, Bennett’s (The Colored Garden) moral tale is brought back from the brink of didacticism by compelling main characters. After accidentally shooting and killing Lawrence, his older brother, teenager Terrell Matheus blames the killing on three white boys in a pickup truck. In the wake of Lawrence’s death, Terrell’s parents sink into depression, his community flashes with racial unrest and Terrell endures a waking nightmare of guilt. After Lawrence’s funeral, Terrell receives a friendly overture from Tamara Groves, an older girl who Lawrence was pursuing and who thinks her boyfriend, the neighborhood thug, may have killed Lawrence. Bonded by their guilt, Terrell and Tamara become wary allies, even after Terrell’s lie is exposed, causing even more agony for Terrell’s family and the community. What follows is an uneasy road to redemption for Terrell, and a period of transformation for Tamara. Though the supporting cast feels a little flat, Terrell and Tamara are wonderful characters whose complexity and self-determination demonstrate Bennett’s exciting if still developing talent. (July)

Knight (The Taqwacores) goes meta in this very self-involved satirical blitz, throwing characters from previous books into a psycho showdown with the author. The less than cohesive central narrative follows Iranian Shiite skinhead Amazing Ayyub—after he and burka-wearing punker Rabeya kidnap Matt Damon in a bid to end Hollywood’s puerile depiction of Muslims—on a cross-country journey to assassinate a sellout Muslim punk band. As Amazing Ayyub travels and dodges zombies and psychobilly jinns, first-person recollections by “the author” document his attending Islamic academic conferences and drolly conversing about Sufism, F. Scott Fitzgerald and his inability to create well-rounded female characters. The obligatory (and somewhat disappointing) final showdown between Knight and his perennially pissed-off creations hints that Knight’s interest remains with the antic adventures of the characters he clearly adores, rather than in, say, any traditional notions of plot. Knight’s potential is evident on nearly every page, but the in-jokes and frequent self-references will limit this book’s appeal to readers well versed in things taqwacore. (July)

In Graham’s muddled second legal thriller to feature John Delaney and Katherine Adams (after Majestic Descending), Delaney, a New York City law professor, welcomes the opportunity to visit Adams, his long-distance lover, in Atlanta, even if the occasion is a melancholy one. Delaney has agreed to resolve the estate of Sarah O’Connor, a former law student and the daughter of his father’s partner in the NYPD, who fell to her death off a cliff one night while camping in Cloudland Canyon in north Georgia. This routine assignment turns into anything but after Delaney learns O’Connor apparently stole a file from the federal prosecutor’s office where she worked as a summer intern that implicated a major-league bad guy. Improbable action sequences (e.g., a trained psycho killer turns his back on Adams with fatal results) and unconvincing court scenes add up to a subpar effort. (July)

At the start of this bloated thriller from Crouch (Desert Places), Abigail Foster, a Manhattan freelance journalist, reluctantly agrees to accompany her father, Lawrence Kendall—who abandoned her as a child—and paranormal photographers Emmett and June Tozer, to the remote remains of Abandon, Colo. The inhabitants of Abandon all vanished without a trace on Christmas Day 1893, and Abigail thinks she’ll write an article on the Tozers and the ghost town’s history. The present-day hikers face a number of obstacles, starting with an unexpected blizzard and including the arrival of ex-Marines intent on finding millions of dollars worth of gold supposedly stashed somewhere in Abandon. Despite the book’s intriguing premise, the action soon devolves into a Rambo-style melee, with enough blood and guts to put off weak stomachs. By the time Abandon’s fate is revealed in the overly drawn-out climax, few readers will care. (July)

“Poet. Teacher. Warrior. The best trial lawyers are all three at once,” observes Ty Buchanan in Bell’s good-natured third suspense novel to feature the quixotic L.A. lawyer (after Try Darkness) who lives in a trailer and provides legal services at St. Monica’s, a little Benedictine community. When Buchanan defends a client who insists on fighting a DUI charge despite the score the client registered on the Intoximeter, he fulfills the teacher function by giving the attractive prosecuting attorney, Kimberly Pincus, a lesson she’ll never forget. He turns warrior after an anonymous e-mailer’s ominous threats to Sister Mary Veritas, a sparky St. Monica’s nun, escalate. And poetically, Buchanan, uses a Beatles tune at a critical juncture. Bell infuses the legal maneuverings with enough humor, insight and intelligence to merit an exception to Shakespeare’s admonition to kill all the lawyers. (July)

In British author Blundy’s smashing Faith Zanetti thriller, her second to be published in the U.S. (after Vodka Neat), Faith starts receiving messages that appear to be from her father, Karel Zanetti, a celebrated U.K. journalist who was supposedly killed while covering the troubles in Northern Ireland years earlier. Meanwhile, Faith is writing an article for the London Chronicle on the 25th anniversary of the Lockerbie-style bombing of a 747 that claimed the lives of all 245 people aboard. While Libyan terrorists were blamed for the attack, the Chronicle’s editor, who believes the full story has yet to be told, wants Faith to identify who phoned a bomb warning beforehand to the U.S. embassy in Reykjavik. In her search for answers, Faith makes some dark discoveries, including that her father had an illegitimate daughter who perished on the fatal flight. This semiautobiographical novel—Blundy’s own journalist father was killed by a sniper in El Salvador in 1989—sizzles with suspense. (July)

Billingsley’s latest (after Can I Get a Witness?) chronicles the devilishly rude awakening in store for Houstonite Nina Lawson after she wins $8 million in the lottery. Not only are family members she hasn’t seen in years itching to share the loot, but her fiancé, Rick Henderson, starts counting on his piece before the check’s in the bank. Things get even more complicated after Todd, Nina’s ex-husband, ends up not being an ex; turns out his hoochie mama girlfriend, Pam, spent the divorce filing fee on a Fendi bag. Pam urges Todd to wrangle a chunk of Nina’s dough, and he agrees, though with a near-reasonable motivation: to get his ailing Grams a new heart. The ensuing slapstick is fast moving and hilarious as Billingsley ponders how Nina’s impulse to do the right thing gets her in trouble—and yet, somehow, love (and God) provides. (July)

This debut novel, written by a woman who experienced firsthand the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in the 1980s, weaves the horrors of war with the love and devotion of family. Ruba is seven years old, living in a small Christian village outside of Beirut during the Israeli invasion. Her father is depressed and lethargic; her older brother, Naji, avoids the family, more interested in guns and the local thugs. As the conflict draws closer to the town, causing acts of inhumanity based on religious differences, Ruba learns a secret from her father’s past that forces her to face the reality and cruelty around her. Abi-Ezzi walks the delicate tightrope between man’s inhumanity and the power and strength family members must draw upon in order to survive. The book is beautifully written, lyrical, with vivid, sensual descriptions that are sophisticated yet completely believable as experienced and retained by a child. (“My bedroom smelt of cotton and books, Mami and Papi’s room smelled of ironed sheets.”) This disturbing, beautiful book, in turn hopeful and despairing, brings clarity and compassion to an untenable situation. (July)

British author Smith’s so-so sequel to The Painted Messiah provides more of the backstory of a major character from the previous book, Lady Kate Kenyon. In 1997, 21-year-old Kate and her 37-year-old husband, Lord Robert, are honeymooning in the Swiss Alps. While attempting to climb the north face of the Eiger, the couple are attacked by two men, who push Robert off the mountain and almost do the same to Kate before she turns the tables on her assailants. Years later, Kate works with a former CIA agent, Thomas Malloy, to battle the Knights of the Holy Lance, conspirators somehow connected with the Blood Lance of the Cathars, a relic the Nazis also pursued. The truth behind the tragedy on the Eiger will shock few genre-savvy readers, who may also be bothered by some inexact detail (e.g., Malloy’s fake State Department ID identifies him as a CPA, which is a professional certification, not a government title like senior auditor). (July)

Evenson (The Open Curtain) accesses dark, unusual facets of human frailty, powerlessness and fear in this collection, haunted by themes of amnesia, aphasia and creeping infirmity. Hecker, the protagonist of O’Henry Prize–winner “Mudder Tongue,” can’t control which words he says and is incapable of expressing even the nature of the problem to his daughter, who thinks he just needs to get out more. A similar terror informs the title story, in which a plague of amnesia afflicts the area where Arnaud lives. The stricken forget their own names, bleed from the eyes and mouth, then lapse into unconsciousness and death. Arnaud catches the illness, and as he makes his way through a landscape of quarantined apartments, looters and corpses, he interacts with the dead and soon-to-be-dead in an effort to try to remember what he is trying to accomplish. Other ailments make cameos—blindness in “Helpful,” insomnia in “Dread”—and the thematic anxiety is heightened by graphic novelist Sally’s foreboding black and white line illustrations. This intense, nightmarish collection captures the fear of night terrors, when one wakes in the middle of the night, unable to move. (July)

Samartin’s disappointing latest (after Tarnished Beauty) queasily alternates between past and present, as Ana, tending to her dying lover, reflects on the events that have brought her to this point. Samartin is at her best dealing with Ana’s harsh childhood in war-torn El Salvador. But the story loses strength after a sympathetic nun arranges for Ana’s entry to the U.S. Once in California, Ana attends school and, upon graduation, enters a convent. But before taking her vows, she works as a nanny for the wealthy Trellis family, and the temporary job becomes permanent as Ana becomes increasingly involved in the Trellis family. However, the characters are so thin that it’s difficult to care about Ana or the Trellises, and the domestic dramas and descriptions of Ana’s household duties that make up the bulk of the book are less than exciting, while the plot twist at the end is predictable and hokey. Samartin’s writing, while sometimes fine, is often clotted with clumsy metaphors (a piano reminds Ana “of an eagle on the wing soaring through the sky”). The novel’s derivative premise is its most distinguishing feature. (July)

Brice’s uneven second novel (after Orange Mint and Honey) follows two lonely women as they discover they have a lot in common. Having survived a messy divorce and a move back to her hometown of Denver, Trish Taylor already has her hands full raising her teenage son when she reads a letter left by her deceased grandmother. In it, her grandmother reveals that Trish’s mother died from a heroin overdose and Trish’s baby sister, Billie, was given up for adoption because the father was black. Despite her grandparents’ prejudice, Trish has no issues with race. She’s white, her ex-husband is black, but Billie is unwilling to believe that her adoptive parents would have kept the secret that she was adopted and is biracial. Billie has other problems as well: an unplanned pregnancy has sent her jazz-musician boyfriend packing and she, like Trish, has lupus. Brice sets up the sisters for the blandest of confrontations (one watches chick flicks, the other teaches African dance), but as they come together in the second half of the book, the initially stock characters develop enough to compensate for a narrative tending toward melodrama. (July)

Fantastically imaginative, darkly ironic and marvelously crafted, these seven tales written in the 1920s were unpublished during Krzhizhanovsky’s lifetime. Set mostly in Moscow, where the toilsome workdays sap spiritual strength, the stories are about the strange, wondrous and alarming things that can result from a chance encounter. In “Quadraturin,” the most straightforward story, the resident of a “matchbox”-size flat is proffered an experimental formula for “biggerizing rooms,” which, when applied, expands the space and doesn’t stop until the room becomes a “black wilderness.” In “Someone Else’s Theme,” a writer meets a down-on-his-luck seller of “philosophical systems,” while the protagonist of “The Branch Line” is directed to a train that spirits him into a disorienting dreamscape. The long title story is the biography of a brilliant, lonely scientist, Max Shterer, whose obsessive pursuit of “making time dance in a circle” proves prescient and chilling. Turnbull’s translation reads wonderfully, capturing the isolation and strangeness of Krzhizhanovsky’s startling stories. (July)

The sixth novel from Valdes-Rodriguez (The Dirty Girls Social Club) is a mixed bag of overly ambitious prose, lighthearted romance and southwestern flavor. Vanessa Duran, one of Albuquerque’s most talented chefs, keeps falling in love with married men, so after a string of dud relationships, her sister extracts a promise: Vanessa will take a break from dating and use the time to figure out why she keeps getting involved with all the wrong men. Of course, Vanessa is attracted to the very next guy who crosses her path—Paul Stebbit, an unpretentious Iraq War veteran. The sparks and banter fly, and Paul seems different enough from her other disastrous relationships that Vanessa begins to open up to him. Of course, an obvious complication pops up. Vanessa’s Albuquerque serves as a nice backdrop, and the characters avoid most genre pitfalls, but there’s an uncomfortable disconnect between the expository passages and the inane dialogue, and some plot developments (particularly one involving a date featuring a flight in a fighter jet) stretch credibility. A few big holes come close to killing the froth. (July)

Hancock has cleaned up at the Christy Awards for excellence in Christian fiction with four previous visionary novels (most recently, Shadow over Kiriath), but this one falls short. Researcher Lacey McHenry has a lowly position at the cutting edge Kendall-Jakes Longevity Institute, where a peculiar intruder sets off a complex chain of events that draws together McHenry and researcher Cameron Reinhardt— a man with a powder keg of a past—as the two try to solve the riddles that keep cropping up in their workplace. Hancock has a plot so complicated that a lot of elements are unsatisfactorily resolved or are simple red herrings: Lacey’s abusive ex-husband, a host of intriguing but underdeveloped secondary characters, military action in Afghanistan that is part of Reinhardt’s past. Narrative energy instead goes to didacticism: Reinhardt, an evangelical Christian, argues with his fellow scientists about evolution in an episode that’s more polemic than dramatic. Visionary fiction is a narrow niche, and the Christian biblical literalism driving key action in the plot won’t do much to enlarge the audience. (July)

Evangelical Christian novelist Coble offers up a Texan-style serving of ranch, rodeo and rambunctious interpersonal conflicts. Single mom Shannon Astor returns to her hometown in Bluebird Crossing with her daughter, Kylie, in tow, to take over as local veterinarian. Immediately upon arriving at her late uncle’s dilapidated house, Shannon is faced with a dead farmhand. Before readers can recover from that episode, Shannon gets an emotional revelation involving Jack MacGowan, a wealthy landowner who ruined her reputation years earlier. Now, she must decide what to do with her newfound knowledge, and in quick succession her life is threatened, her daughter’s birth father re-enters her life, and she must put to rest demons from the past. Fans of Coble will enjoy the light banter and easy conversational tone of this story, but too many unlikely and unrealistic plot complications detract from what could have been a satisfying love story. (July)

Two escaped convicts, Paco Corvino and Lars Marlin, face off in Hubbard’s fast-paced high seas action yarn, first published in the November 1937 issue of Argosy. Some years after Corvino and Marlin independently broke out of French Guiana’s Devil’s Island, the men meet by chance in Rio de Janeiro, where the debonair Corvino works as the steward of the Valiant, a luxury yacht due to set sail. Corvino persuades the Valiant’s captain to hire Marlin, who’s an experienced skipper, as part of the crew, unaware that Marlin blames his hellish stint on Devil’s Island on his fellow escapee. Itching to take Corvino out with his trusty .38, Marlin must bide his time as the equally dangerous Corvino fingers his knife. Contraband cargo (heroin) and the yacht owner’s beautiful daughter add spice to this taut pulp melodrama. (July)

Galvin’s seventh collection of poems returns to the barren, apparently hopeless landscapes of his previous books, though, as before, hope pops up in the most unlikely places, at the most unexpected times. While not as sharp as the almost embarrassingly moving X, this book begins in the aftermath of the relationship whose demise X chronicled, opening in a vulnerable state where “Confusion/ Overwhelms” and “The whole world is watching.” Then, through willed belief—as in the poem prayer, which says “This poem is not what you think./ It’s what thinks you”—a measure of control is achieved. Toward the end, Galvin pays tribute to newfound love—“When I rest my head over her heart/ I can hear the rowing,/ Paddle-splash and oarlock-knock.” But of course it’s not that simple. Throughout the book are woven poems about a hazily sketched, cosmically powerful character named “The Mastermind,” who, with cohorts including “The Go-To Guy” and “The Expert,” gets in the way of smooth sailing: “Did I mention the mastermind was absent-minded?” But in Galvin’s world, which now mirrors and comments on post-9/11 America, the bad is as good as the good, because, “Everything/ That threatens us/ Threatens to save us.” (July)

Southern gothic meets alt-country twang, and rural hardship meets terse postpunk sophistication in this lively debut. Ralph’s troubled characters and dissonant outbursts evoke a self-destructive youth: “It’s like somebody choking on a car horn,” one poem ends, “or something metal being born.” Ralph’s rough free verse—what he calls “Impossible Blues”—recall the deep Ozark surrealism of Frank Stanford and the early poems of Denis Johnson, though neither precursor takes on quite the same blend of upper South present and past—the bedroom of a punk rock girl called Spooky, “a riot/ of tattered magazines and rusted drums,” but also the coal beds and tornup slopes where “Egypt Mines had an operation/ once.” Ralph, who still lives and teaches in Kentucky, plays in alt-country bands now and grew up in Louisville’s influential 1980s alternative rock scene, known for such acts as Squirrel Bait, Slint and Rodan: alert readers might compare their sounds to his poems. Less evident in tone and manner—though quoted in epigraphs and cited by name—is Ralph’s declared commitment to Buddhism. Detractors may ask if Ralph paints with too broad a brush, if his lines seem too clear or too raw: defenders will say, rightly, that they depict something real.(July)

Harrison’s astute if uneven debut stages a contest between memory and geography. On the one hand, she writes about retrospect, regret, elegy: “my father gone into the long/ raveling of sidereal years was gone into coffin/ three days before someone remembered he had/ children somewhere.” On the other hand, she cannot help imagining travel, new vistas, escapes: one such poem, “Peace,” asks us to cherish “brief moments before dawn when you believe/ in other beds, lose possibilities,/ before you don your life like a B-movie/ unlovely and badly cut.” A former photojournalist, Harrison thinks in panels, exposures, frames: her quiet free verse neither undercuts nor much enhances her concise symbols: “You were the kite I used/ to learn to love the wind.” Given her insistence on change and travel, Harrison’s final section (poems about home and houses) can seem predictable. So can her efforts at descriptive epiphany: “the sky like some/ porcelain cup/ crazed and limned.” In her best moments, Harrison extends her poetic sympathies beyond herself—into the sunlight or the outlines of a new place, in a kite, in the rain or in the migrating monarch butterfly, “bitter with the weedy milk/ and his endless, vacant nations.” (July)

In her third book, Wolff (Figment) keeps company with Sylvia Plath, Sharon Olds and Beth Ann Fennelly, challenging the idea that motherhood is a glossy miracle that makes the mother special. “I had a baby,” writes a deadpan Wolff, “it was inevitable—I was pregnant.” In these short, jagged poems, motherhood often manifests itself in anxiety and self-consciousness: “I mean to say// something here! Not to enact/or reference.” Wolff is leery of such commands to the self, and leerier still of their results. In “A History of Depression,” she describes the defective desires of an upset speaker: “You command,/ in your grasp, a unicorn,/ or some other damned, faux-virginal/ beast: Paleface on the gospel path,/ damp./ Inclined to list.” Wolff, editor of the literary journal Fence, divides this long collection into seven sections, the first six of which carry titles evoking those forces that dominate the poet: “The Condition,” “The Baby,” “The King,” “The Man,” “The Baby,” “The Lord.” Wanting to negotiate—intellectually, emotionally, spiritually and poetically—such concepts leads Wolff into the mind’s knottier realms. In the book’s final section, “Depth Essay,” the speaker can be breathtakingly brave in her confessions, if not always pretty: “I’ve had my children and cannot/ take that back. Buddhists call // it suffering.” (June)

Pollitt now enjoys national fame for her political columns and her personal essays; she gained attention earlier, though, as a poet—Antarctic Traveller (1982) won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Twenty-seven years later, this second collection shows her fine ear and eye, urbane tones, attention to the ups and downs of middle age and motherhood, and her debts to Elizabeth Bishop, whose most ardent fans will find Pollitt at her worst derivative, but at her best a wise and worthy heir. “Shore Road” just rewrites Bishop’s “Filling Station” (”somebody/ crew-cuts the crab-grass... puts out the plastic lawn chairs”). Poems about biblical scenes and characters seem thin compared to Bishop’s prodigal son. Yet when Pollitt uses Bishop’s careful and careworn tones for autobiography, she achieves wry, urbane retrospect and a power all her own: “Old Sonnets,” for example, recalls Pollitt’s undergraduate poetic ambitions; “Always Already” considers how the adult writer loses herself in the forest of other works, where “culture is a kind of nature,/ a library of oak leaves,/ muttering their foregone oracles.” No one is likely to call Pollitt’s verse radically new. Yet these poems can rise far above their promptings, as fleeting verse about an urban scene can rise to representative powers: often enough, Pollitt does. (June)

Raab’s seventh outing pursues the same theme throughout, in tones as subdued as the subject is harrowing: the poems concern the end of everything—human life, humanity as a species, all that we can be or know or do. “A child dies, love fades, then friendship,/ and soon enough almost everything is gone,” says “Nothing There”; ”The God of Snow” concludes, regretfully, “that it had all started out so well.” Environmental destruction plays a role, too, in these pessimistic tableaux, which at their best recall Thomas Hardy: like Hardy’s, though, Raab’s sadness is finally personal and has something to do with advancing age. “The sea encourages me/ to think about the past,” he writes, “as if I could leave it where it is.” His free verse and restrained diction complement his conversational phrasing. There are glimmers of humor as well: “The life of the Japanese beetle/ is pointless and ugly.” Raab was a poet to watch in the 1970s, when his early, mildly surrealist collections drew extravagant praise: he has since settled down into quieter modes, the poems’ lack of sparkle offset—and then some—by the quality of pathos within their lines. (June)

Brash, confrontational verse and prose have made Alexie the most famous, and the most controversial, Native American writer of his generation. Alexie (First Indian on the Moon), in this first book of poems since 2000, sometimes works in sonnets, rhymed couplets, short quatrains, even villanelles. The results are mixed and occasionally naïve (“When I tell my wife about my adolescent rage/ She shrugs, rolls her eyes, and turns the page”). More successful are his many experiments with footnotes and interpolated blocks of prose within poems, devices that let Alexie explore his self-consciousness, as he looks back on his childhood on “the rez” in Washington State, inward to his sex life and his happy marriage, and outward to public events, from the Clinton impeachment to Gonzaga University basketball. Alexie’s self-interruptions also permit flights of comedy, with homages to Richard Pryor and to the porn star Ron Jeremy. The humor, in turn, lets Alexie brace himself for his most serious subjects: his love for his son, the history of his people and the last illness and death of his father, a flawed but durable example of the manliness for which Alexie so often strives. (June)

The youngest member of Lewis and Clark’s adventure, George Shannon rode off by himself to retrieve some lost horses, but got lost amid the endless buffalo pastures in what is now Nebraska. McGrath’s book-length poem follows Shannon’s thoughts, hopes and observations during his time alone. The young man faces practical difficulties: how will he hunt without bullets, how cook his food? “I am troubled to light a fire/ Lest it be the Sioux/ That take it as a signal.” As the poem continues, Shannon’s musings turn to theology, national destiny and (since he is 18) sex: “If my thoughts arise/ Direct from this land/ How other than God-ordained/ Could they be?” Neat visual effects (one page bears only the single word “buffalo”) complement McGrath’s sharp focus on his single character’s mind. Will he survive? (“Such a hunter as myself/ With game abounding to wither & starve/ Seems unlucky.”) Will he find his way back to his posse? Will America realize its own destiny? Should it? McGrath’s careful poem comes a few years after Lewis and Clark–themed novels (by Brian Hall and Diane Glancy), a bit late for the Lewis and Clark centennial; the poem should win notice on its very accessible merits nonetheless. (June)

Consistent throughout in its embittered tone and its focus on disillusion and failed love, Bernard’s articulate fourth collection could please connoisseurs with its panoply of modes and forms: epigrams in an almost classical style, scenes from a nonexistent, racy Victorian novel (“Under the Rose/ by Langley Boisvert”), arias from nonexistent operas, translations from nonexistent German poems and a brace of unrhymed sonnets. Bernard has always blended sadness with literary sophistication, and after the disappointingly earnest autobiography of Swan Electric(2003) she returns to some of her strengths here. The troubles Bernard describes are finally less political than existential, familial, personal. Single poems remember the lives and the deaths of poets she knew (Jason Shinder, Aga Shahid Ali), but the whole collection turns her attention more often to the collapse, the near-death, within parts of herself. “Love breaks me like a corn cake/ in a boy’s mouth,” says one poem. A prose poem uncovers an even more striking image for Bernard’s combination of raw pain and canny reserve: “When I was under snow,” she writes, “it took a lot to persuade me to dig out, and now and then I think of that ice burrow with real longing.” (June)

Goldbarth’s ample output, frequently comic effects, reader-friendly free verse and almost dauntingly omnivorous reference—from Roman history to cardiology to 1950s science fiction—have slowed down what might otherwise be the widespread acknowledgment of an American master: that has started to change (he won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2002) and might change further with this 25th book of verse. Here is “my shtick/ and my stump-speech exhortation to you, delivered in spittle/ and neural knot-ways,” part of a seven-page poem that advises, again and again, “Keep a dream journal.” Elsewhere is a five-part poem that seeks, through facts from William Carlos Williams’s biography, modern cosmology and 19th-century typesetting, the mysteries of “whatever/ you call it, animus, or consciousness—the 'soul.’ ” The sciences, “The Writing Life” and “Everything” make repeated appearances in Goldbarth’s fast-paced lines. Yet for all his oddball flights, all his “waggly buggish-visaged aliens” and the like, Goldbarth returns, most of the time, to first and last things—to why some marriages (his own, for example) last: to how we deal with parents and friends who fall ill; to how we get all we can, and more than we know, out of life and out of death. (May)

“What if there is nothing special/ about this particular moment,” asks Gizzi in this 15th collection, which, indeed, gathers together surreal fragments of the everyday to show the kind of world that could only appear in poems. Gizzi, a well-respected experimental poet in his own right, is the elder brother of poet and Nation poetry editor Peter Gizzi. As the title suggests, these poems are deeply deadpan. Poems in prose paragraphs and short stanzas pile up clever, grim and ironic statements to describe surreal places or states of mind. While the poems rarely render a narrative, their emotions are crystal clear, as in this description of a common adult longing for the past: “I must spend a night under the enormous rock I associate with childhood.” Elsewhere, what seems like nonsense turns out to be common sense: “A popular corrective to self-focusing/ would be love.” (May)

Discursive yet aglitter with images, often abstract and yet insistently regional, the ninth collection from the Arizona-based Ríos (The Theater of Night) includes something for almost everyone. A plethora of quiet poems explore such basic concepts as body and spirit, life and death, phenomenology and circumstance: “Night surrounds the sun as well, which tries every day// So hard to make us think otherwise”; “I am stuck inside the house of myself, my address... squarely in that place between// What I remember and what I can guess.” Ríos also tries for a sort of Stevensian and slightly ponderous comedy: “I am the commander of the suddenly portly vessel of myself,” begins a poem about overeating. Yet Ríos remains a writer alert to “the corners of the great American southwest,/ The orange and brown bricks, the lazy half-blue// Jacaranda,” and a writer conscious of his own Mexican ancestry, especially as the volume nears its close. As general as these ambitious poems can get, they circle back to the locales, sounds and tastes that he and his family know. Their experience finally exemplifies the rhythms of Ríos’ stable universe, “making the night into a nest/ Fixed and filled enough for what comes next.” (May)

At the outset of Royal’s absorbing sixth medieval mystery to feature Prioress Eleanor of Tyndal (after 2008’s Forsaken Soul), Eleanor and a group returning from a journey through Norfolk take shelter from a bitter autumn rainstorm in a manor house near Tyndal after one of their party, a young nun, falls gravely ill. Eleanor and her companions receive a warm welcome, but they soon realize all is not well at the manor, whose residents include the earl of Lincoln’s steward, the steward’s family and staff. When a groom is brutally butchered in the stable and the cook accused of his murder, Eleanor and her faithful friend, Brother Thomas, can’t help investigating what they soon see is a convenient rush to judgment by the local sheriff. As the death toll mounts, they discover any number of suspects among the manor’s household. Once again, Royal combines a well-executed plot with authentic period detail. (Aug.)

A chance encounter leads Artie Cohen to a disturbing Brooklyn crime scene in Nadelson’s outstanding eighth novel to feature the New York City police detective and son of a former KGB officer (after 2007’s Fresh Kills): a woman has been wrapped in duct tape and tied to a playground swing. Artie calls the murder in, but his attempts to remain uninvolved in the ensuing probe are futile. The more Artie learns about the victim, Masha Panchuk, the more he suspects that she was not the killer’s intended target, and that his love, Valentina Sverdloff, daughter of his best friend, Tolya, was. When someone smothers Valentina to death, Artie must travel to London to break the tragic news to Tolya, a shady entrepreneur whose business activities straddle the line between legitimate and illegitimate. As the dark, compelling plot gathers momentum, Artie, a principled, street-smart guy with very human failings, launches his own quest for justice. (July)

Fans of Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, the sleuth who doesn’t do deductive reasoning, will welcome the first in Vargas’s inspired crime series (This Night’s Foul Work; Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand), originally published in France in 1990. Newly transferred from his home in the Pyrenees to Paris, the 45-year-old Adamsberg arrives with a reputation for solving big cases, though his diffident manner doesn’t impress his colleague and foil, Adrien Danglard. A solitary man drawing blue chalk circles at night around stray objects in Paris streets manages to create a media sensation, but Adamsberg senses evil behind the act. When the corpse of a woman is found encircled in chalk, he’s proven right. Adamsberg’s indirect approach, his ability to sense cruelty and to let solutions percolate to the surface make him one of the more intriguing police detectives in a long time. (July)

In Buzzelli’s enjoyable sequel to 2008’s Dead Dancing Women, aspiring mystery novelist Emily Kincaid, who moved to rural northern Michigan to pursue her writing career, is making ends meet by contributing stories to the local newspaper. Among her fans is Deputy Dolly, of the Leetsville police department, who calls on Emily after receding lake waters reveal a human skeleton. Evidence links Dolly’s former husband to the bones, and her loyalty to him leads her to rash action. The growing closeness between the two women is one of the book’s strengths, as is Buzzelli’s portrayal of the local Odawa tribe. Determined to be independent, Emily lets her loneliness lead her into making some poor decisions regarding her charming ex-husband. Despite too many extraneous details (“There were dishes to scrape and pile into the dishwasher”), the plot hangs together and builds to a satisfactory conclusion. (July)

At the start of Konrath’s brisk and breezy sixth Jack Daniels mystery, the guilt-ridden Chicago cop, who’s attending the funeral of a loved one, takes a call from Alexandra Kork, the sadistic psychopath who did in the loved one at the end of 2008’s Fuzzy Navel (“I checked the Weather Channel.... It’s raining in Chicago. That’s appropriate, don’t you think? Funerals on sunny days seem so wrong”). Barred from the official hunt for Kork because she’s personally involved in the case, Daniels soon finds herself on the wrong side of the law with few of the usual resources to call on. Meanwhile, the wily Kork, who’s stopped counting her victims (after 50 they blur), strews bodies over a wide area as part of a scheme to lead Daniels to a slow and painful death. Konrath leavens the violence with offbeat humor, including a feces-throwing monkey in love with a cashmere sweater. The slam-bang ending is sure to satisfy series fans. (July)

Set in 1829 London, Pepper’s hard-hitting first Pyke mystery introduces the vicious and vengeful Pyke, a crooked Bow Street Runner. Reform-minded home secretary Robert Peel plans a new police force to replace the Bow Street Runners, whose cozy relationship with London’s low-life and corrupt elite have benefited Pyke and company, heretofore the only law enforcers in town. The murders of a runaway Protestant/Catholic Irish couple and of Pyke’s mistress inflame sectarian conflicts. Framed by his enemies, Pyke is sent to notorious Newgate prison, where he and an aristocratic female prison reformer begin a long and tortured relationship. In a gripping chase scene, Pyke manages to escape Newgate and find his way to Ulster in pursuit of a hate-ridden Irish constable. While readers will learn a lot about the turbulent period in British history that culminated in Catholic emancipation, the brutish Pyke and the book’s graphic violence won’t be to every taste. (July)

Fans of well-researched historicals will welcome Jecks’s 26th Knights Templar mystery (after 2008’s The Prophecy of Death). In 1325, England’s Edward II prepares to pay homage to the French king, Charles IV, in order to retain two precious territories in France. At the last minute, Edward decides to send his willful and untested teenage son in his place, with orders to Sir Baldwin de Furnshill and Baldwin’s longtime friend, Simon Puttock, to watch over his son on the journey. In Paris, Queen Isabella, Charles’s sister and Edward’s wife, is trying to keep the peace, though she bitterly resents her husband’s relationship with his intimate adviser, Sir Hugh le Despenser. Meanwhile, the Procureur of Paris, Jean de Poissy, has two murders to investigate—that of a man who was on a mysterious visit to the Louvre palace, and that of a naked woman found near the palace. Frequent scene shifts help move the complex, multilayered plot. (July)

Anthologist Elrod (My Big Fat Supernatural Wedding) taps into the urban fantasy craze with a mixed bag of wizardry, mystery and glamour. The best include Patricia Briggs’s wistful “Seeing Eye,” wherein blind witch Wendy Moira Keller helps werewolf Tom Franklin search for his missing brother, and Jim Butcher’s funny “Last Call,” which finds wizard Harry Dresden hot on the tail of Meditrina Bassarid, a wicked wine-loving maenad who wreaks havoc in a Chicago bar. In Rachel Caine’s romantic “Death Warmed Over,” Holly Anne Caldwell, a resurrection witch, falls in love with Andrew Toland, a corpse from 1875, while Elrod’s “Hecate’s Golden Eye” tells of a 1937 hunt for a curious family gem. Though not particularly groundbreaking, these tales will easily keep paranormal mystery fans entertained. (July)

The werewolf plague is so widespread in this less than thrilling near-future fantasy from bestseller Farris (The Fury) that the authorities have established an agency, International Lycan Control (ILC), that keeps most of the creatures under control with surgical implants that diffuse medications to prevent transformations during the full moon. When California ILC agent Rawson sees a werewolf decapitate Artie Excalibur, a businessman whose sideline was providing lycan escorts to uninfected humans, Rawson suspects Excalibur was deliberately targeted for death. Lacking the black humor of Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files, the book fails to offer anything particularly new to the concept of a hard-boiled narrator pursuing a murder case in a world where the supernatural is real. More of a backstory, particularly one that explained how the U.S. was replaced by a group of city-states, might have helped. (July)

Fans of the popular Legacy of the Aldenata series (A Hymn Before Battle, etc.) will rejoice as Ringo brings together characters and plot threads from his solo novels and collaborations. After the Earth is invaded by the voracious Posleen, Lt. Gen. Michael O’Neal discovers evidence that the Galactic Confederation’s Darhel leaders have been manipulating humanity to keep them from subverting the galactic order. Before O’Neal can take action, a new and totally unexpected threat, the Hedren, disrupt the Darhel sabotage. With the Confederation’s capital in danger of falling to the Hedren, O’Neal must organize a counterattack despite widespread corruption and apathy in Earth’s military. Some potential repercussions from prior events are resolved a bit too easily, but Ringo’s lively action scenes and thorough knowledge of military subculture dynamics make enjoyable reading. (July)

Accomplished editor Adams (The Living Dead) explores a host of galaxy-spanning empires in this breathtakingly rich anthology. Lois McMaster Bujold’s elegant, elegiacal masterpiece “Aftermaths” brings grace and sorrow into the silence between stars. Clever and subtle, Alan Dean Foster’s “Pardon Our Conquest” examines how diplomacy is perceived by the losing side. Even Harry Turtledove’s “Someone Is Stealing the Great Throne Rooms of the Galaxy” far surpasses what one might expect from the pun-filled adventures of a space hamster named Rufus Q. Shupilluliumash. Newer writers also contribute standouts: Trent Hergenrader’s “Eskhara” is poignant, masterful and terrifyingly relevant to modern life, Georgina Li’s “Like They Always Been Free” is a harsh, bright vision of futuristic love and Catherynne M. Valente’s “Golubush, or Wine-Blood-War-Elegy” smoothly transforms mundane copywriting into a linked series of flash fictions. Superior writing, fantastic storytelling and creative adherence to the theme will keep readers enthralled. (July)

This steampunk novella, set in 1844 London, follows the exploits of the harlots of the exclusive establishment known as Nell Gwynne’s, where they gather intelligence for the shadowy Gentlemen’s Speculative Society, a predecessor to the Company featured in several of Baker’s novels (most recently 2006’s The Machine’s Child). Lord Basmond hires the ostensibly blind madam, Mrs. Corvey, and some of her girls to entertain his wealthy foreign guests at an odd party, where it quickly becomes clear that Basmond is selling a mysterious item to the highest bidder. Things heat up when someone goes missing and two people end up dead. The beautifully drawn Victorian era is neatly spiced up with futuristic technology such as mechanical eye implants. Baker’s fans will delight in this slight, bawdy and funny confection. Illus. by J.K. Potter not seen by PW. (July)

Prolific novelist Stross pauses to collect short stories that have not (yet) been stitched up into his longer work. Stories that move the U.S.–U.S.S.R. conflict onto a massive disk in another galaxy (Locus Award–winner “Missile Gap”), offer a spam-filter solution to the Fermi paradox (“MAXOS”) and suggest clever bargains with the devil in a newly frozen Scotland (“Snowball’s Chance”) demonstrate Stross’s ability to crisscross genres, blending SF, fantasy, horror and espionage. He also pays homage to his literary forebears, combining Lovecraft and the Iran-Contra scandal (“The Colder War”) and bringing in Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould as characters. Though individual pieces are well-done and deservedly popular, the collection has an overall sense of early drafts and reworkings of other pieces, as with “Trunk and Disorderly,” a P.G. Wodehouse–on–Mars “test run” for 2008’s Saturn’s Children. (July)

In this thoughtful debut, a retelling of an ancient Cherokee myth, Sunoya, born under a sign revealing that her life would be either one of great blessings or darkness, sets out on a path toward becoming her tribe’s medicine chief. When she is grown and a vision shows her people facing destruction, the responsibility to save them—at the cost of a great sacrifice—falls first on her and then, years later, on Dahzi, a boy she’s rescued and adopted. Dahzi struggles with his heritage and typical teen desires as he fights for his people and eventually confronts the Immortals, the beings who created the world. Fox elegantly blends the old tale and contemporary fantasy without being anachronistic or plodding, bringing depth and humor even to often-clichéd elements such as Sunoya’s spirit guide. (July)

Anderson (Cutting Loose) creates a sexy, feel-good contemporary romance starring down-to-earth Seattle artist Poppy Calloway and handsome but rigid police detective Jason de Sanges. When three teenagers are caught defacing some neighborhood stores, Poppy suggests they clean up their mess and replace it with a mural. Jase, vexed by beautiful and unpretentious Poppy, scoffs at the mural idea, but his higherups agree to it and put him in charge of the teens. Poppy and Jase have met previously and seem perpetually at odds, but they can’t deny sharing a visceral and intense chemistry. After some suspicious accidents, Jase leaps to protect the woman he once dismissed as “a damn bleeding-heart liberal.” Palpable escalating sexual tension between the pair, a dangerous criminal on the loose and a cast of well-developed secondary characters make this a winner. (July)

This engrossing debut adds another captivating protagonist to the urban fantasy ranks. FBI profiler Jace Valchek is abruptly yanked into a parallel universe where vampires, werewolves and golems are 99% of the population. The supernatural beings aren’t affected by mental or physical disease, so they’re baffled by the emergence of a crazed human killer. Vampire NSA chief David Cassius hopes Jace, who has special skills in dealing with mentally deranged criminals, can catch the “Impaler.” Until she succeeds, he won’t let her go back home. As Jace investigates the Free Human Resistance, a terrorist group, she starts to wonder which side she wants to be on. Barant’s well-developed world offers intriguing enhancements to mythology and history. Jace is remarkable, strong-willed and smart, and she sets an unstoppable pace. Look for the Bloodhound Files to go far. (July)

Doherty’s fifth ancient Rome mystery, the first to be released in the U.S., picks up with former legionnaire Attius Enobarbus found murdered in a locked room. Emperor Constantine’s mother, pious Christian Helena, dispatches her servant Claudia and the ex-gladiator Murranus to find the secret Attius held: the location of the tomb of the apostle Peter. Claudia discovers that Attius was suspected of being the Nefandus, a brutal serial killer, but the Nefandus resurfaces after Attius’s death, and Claudia must discover his or her identity as well as the key to Peter’s tomb. Meticulous historical detail, a carefully constructed plot and an intriguing array of prostitutes, German mercenaries and other underground Roman characters make this an engrossing and informative read, though scant backstory and references to earlier books may frustrate first-time readers. (July)

Bestseller Gilstrap (Nathan’s Run) launches a thriller series following PI Jonathan Grave. Much like Bruce Wayne, Grave is single and rich, uses expensive gadgets and has a vigilante alter ego. Hokey dialogue (“I respect anyone willing to die for a cause.... My goal is to help [terrorists] die for their cause. But I still respect them”) hampers an otherwise entertaining read as Grave investigates the disappearance of investigative reporter Tibor Rothman, husband of Grave’s ex-wife, Ellen. Sheriff Gail Bonneville of Samson, Ind., is chasing Grave in turn, since a hostage rescue mission he fronted turned into a shootout. Thriller fans may not mind the cheesiness or flat characters like brutish pilot Boxers and sassy computer specialist Venice (“pronounced Ven-EE-chay, by the way”), as this fast-paced tale of violence and revenge is all about plot, of which there is plenty. (July)

Future Diary, like Battle Royaleand Gantz before it, belongs to the forced-fight-to-the-death subgenre of manga, full of capricious puppet masters and bloodthirsty school girls. Yukiteru is a sweet-natured loner who spends most of his time with his cellphone diary and his imaginary friend, the troublemaking deity Deus Ex Machina. The problem is that this trickster god is quite real and out of boredom has created a “game” in which mortals find that their cellphone diaries can predict the future and must use them to fight to the death. Oddly, the only contestant who seems to be bothered by this is Yukiteru. Of the others, his new friend, Yuno, finds it romantic since she’s utterly in love and thrilled to protect him; Takao was already a serial killer; and Minene is cheerfully using it as an excuse to blow people up with improbable amounts of explosives. Esuno’s art is sprightly, sweet and deceptively innocent. So much so that Minene, a murderous goth lolita gone wrong, is so disturbingly cute that it somehow rebounds and makes her even scarier. Perfect for teen readers who want their fights to the death less gory or who just really like cellphones. (May)

The big-label relaunch of the once–self-published Syncopated anthologies (“a New Yorker for the comics set”) is a uniformly classy affair with only a few slow moments. As the title suggests, the book collects meaty article presented as comics. Series editor and curator Burford contributes two pieces, one of which might be the book’s high point: a study of the life of Boris Rose, who built probably the world’s largest collection of live jazz recordings, still locked in storage and most of it never heard by anyone but Rose himself. Alex Holden provides an amazing bit of picto-journalism in “West Side Improvements,” the story of Manhattan’s riverside train tracks and the vibrant graffiti culture that grew in their tunnels. Nick Bertozzi’s “How and Why to Bale Hay” is a somewhat traditional graphical memoir; Greg Cook’s “What We So Quietly Saw” is anything but traditional, using only silhouettes to tell selected stories from inside Guantánamo Bay. Only Dave Kiersh’s “Welcome Home, Brave” fails to fully satisfy, due to a flat narrative. An elegant and smart volume, well worth the space on the collector’s shelf. (May)

Reprinting most of the popular Web comic’s first two years, along with bountiful extras, this amiable collection introduces college students Hawk and Jayce, mangaesque stand-ins for the young creators. Most of the time they are just typical American game-playing, comics-reading, Mac freaks—with extra smarts to realize their fantasies but enough shrewdness to realize how absurd they sometimes look. Since Hawk has trouble getting a date, for example, he builds a robot woman who promptly changes her system password and begins zapping the inferior computers around her. Occasionally, their South Asian heritage influences the action, as when Hawk fasts for Ramadan while Jayce tempts him with glazed doughnuts. Haque’s layouts and artwork are so full of exuberant energy that it’s sometimes hard to follow conversations or the continuity of panels, but Panagariya’s wry scripts keep the characters accessible and likable. Besides the Web comics themselves (each one with commentary by Panagariya), the book includes pinups, contributions to convention programs, samples of the creators’ fiction and sketches, and guest artists’ versions of the characters. This attractive collection will appeal to old and new fans. (May)