Fiction Book Reviews: Week of 6/1/2009

For the first 10 years of her life, Lily Casey Smith, the narrator of this “true-life novel” by her granddaughter, Walls, lived in a dirt dugout in west Texas. Walls, whose megaselling memoir, The Glass Castle, recalled her own upbringing, writes in what she recalls as Lily’s plainspoken voice, whose recital provides plenty of drama and suspense as she ricochets from one challenge to another. Having been educated in fits and starts because of her parents’ penury, Lily becomes a teacher at age 15 in a remote frontier town she reaches after a solo 28-day ride. Marriage to a bigamist almost saps her spirit, but later she weds a rancher with whom she shares two children and a strain of plucky resilience. (They sell bootleg liquor during Prohibition, hiding the bottles under a baby’s crib.) Lily is a spirited heroine, fiercely outspoken against hypocrisy and prejudice, a rodeo rider and fearless breaker of horses, and a ruthless poker player. Assailed by flash floods, tornados and droughts, Lily never gets far from hardscrabble drudgery in several states—New Mexico, Arizona, Illinois—but hers is one of those heartwarming stories about indomitable women that will always find an audience. (Oct.)

A well-researched tale of the modern French Foreign Legion, Girardi’s first novel in seven years (after The Wrong Doyle) is a major disappointment that, marred by purple prose (“The pain... blotted out everything—courage, honor, love—and he lay on the sandy ground in the grips of this blackness, moaning weakly”) and undermined at key points by parody, fails on every level. The plot centers on three legionnaires: Phillipe de Noyer, an aristocratic officer; Evariste Pinard, a reformed Quebecois thug; and John Smith, an American musical theater actor who joins the legion after his selfishness leads to the murder of his ex-girlfriend. The three men become involved in the legion’s battle against an uprising in the western Sahara led by Al-Bab, a portly false prophet. After an attack on one of the legion’s desert forts, de Noyer and Smith become Al-Bab’s prisoners, and Pinard is dispatched to rescue them. But by the time Al-Bab’s actual identity is revealed (a sequence that is, simply, silly—the vital clue is a box of Cap’n Crunch cereal) and the prisoners are rescued, all but the most masochistic readers will have put this down. (Oct.)

Engrossing and suspenseful, Tucker’s remarkable fourth novel (after The Cure for Modern Life) unveils the motives behind the curious behavior and superfluous lies of unusually close-knit fraternal twins. Brilliant but mercurial Billy Cole, estranged from his wife, Ashley, commits suicide after losing visitation rights to his children. After Billy’s death, his fragile twin, Lila, immediately begins to break down, recalling bizarre incidents and feeling overwhelmed by dread. Once her husband, Patrick, who always prized reason over emotion, hears from Ashley that the twins lied about their parents being dead, he connects with Lila’s mother, Barbara, and gets a very different picture of the twins’ past. By rotating points of view between Lila, Patrick, Billy and Ashley, Tucker fleshes out the story, leaving readers understanding how both guileless and malevolent actions can be misconstrued. The strong, plausible narrative threatens to lapse into melodrama at the end but Tucker’s easy hand with characters and persuasive human trauma saves the day for this satisfying, imminently readable novel. (Sept.)

Former New York magazine “Mating” columnist Sohn zeroes in on the more-fertile-than-thou crowd in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood in her vinegary latest (after My Old Man). Like a Grand Hotel for the yuppie set, the lives of moody, angry, dissatisfied mommies intersect on the playgrounds and co-ops of their overpriced hood. Among them, Lizzie, whose lesbian proclivities mask her loneliness; Rebecca, whose libidoless spouse prefers his role as dad over husband; Karen, a social-climbing conniver; and Melora, a former Manhattanite whose psychiatric maladies are as pathetic as they are numerous. The gals in this comedy of bad manners are burned out, bitchy and beyond salvation as they maneuver to be noticed and loved. Meanwhile, there’s more name-dropping than in an edition of Page Six, and while Sohn is obviously intent on skewering the annoying urban mommy stereotype, 400 pages is a stretch for material that’s been blogged to death. There are moments of brutal honesty, but they’re far too few to allow readers to muster an ounce of sympathy for a crew of caricatures so broadly drawn and sadly conceived. (Sept.)

This debut novel, inspired by the life of the author’s Korean mother, is a beautiful, deliberate and satisfying story spanning 30 years of Korean history. The tradition-bound aristocratic calligrapher Han refuses to name his daughter because she is born just as the Japanese occupy Korea early in the 20th century. When Han finds a husband for Najin (nicknamed after her mother’s birthplace) at 14, her mother objects and instead sends her to the court of the doomed royal Yi family to learn refinement. Najin goes to college and becomes a teacher, proving herself not only as a scholar but as a patriot and humanitarian. She returns home to marry, but her new husband goes without her to study in America when she is denied a visa. As the Japanese systematically obliterate ancient Korean culture and the political climate worsens, so do Najin’s fortunes. Her family is reduced to poverty, their home is seized and Najin is imprisoned as a spy while WWII escalates. The author writes at a languorous pace, choosing not to sully her elegant pages with raw brutality, but the key to the story is Korea’s monumental suffering at the hands of the Japanese. (Aug.)

Setiawan’s debut novel spans 30 years in this heartfelt magical-realist story of two rival families living in a mystical world that transcends both time and place. Meridia is a lonely child; a mysterious incident when she was an infant has torn apart her parents, leaving them sharing nothing but a cold, mist-filled home. Not until Meridia meets the charmer Daniel, at age 16, does she finally feel loved. They marry and move in with his family and at first Meridia loves her life in Daniel’s home. But she quickly learns of matriarch Eva’s deceitful, manipulative ways and her power, both natural and supernatural, which she uses to control her family. When Meridia rebels against Eva, finding unexpected support from her parents, the rivalry solidifies and a lifelong battle begins. As time passes, Meridia faces heartbreak and betrayal, becoming a strong, fiercely independent woman. While filled with fortune-tellers, ghosts and unexplained phenomena, the relationships between the various characters are true to life so that fans of fantasy and fiction lovers alike are sure to enjoy this magical tale. (Aug.)

Set in a future American divided into two major regions, Edgar-finalist Ferrigno’s final entry in his Assassin trilogy (after Sins of the Assassin) nicely ties up the wildly diverse plot lines that have motivated his many characters. New York City; Washington, D.C.; and Mecca have all been nuked by the Old One, a 150-year-old Muslim fanatic trying to become the Muslim messiah who will lead a new caliphate. The only person who can stop him is Rakkim Epps, a fedayeen warrior whose historian wife, Sarah, is masterminding an effort to unite America by finding a piece of the true cross, buried somewhere in the D.C. nuclear hot zone. The Old One is aided by Baby, a brilliant blonde bombshell who’s married to the Colonel, a powerful warlord. One can read this volume as a stand-alone, but to enjoy the vast breadth of what is truly a remarkable achievement, one should start with book one, Prayers for the Assassin, and read the series in order. (Aug.)

Harry Potter discovers Narnia is real in this derivative fantasy thriller from Time book critic Grossman (Codex). Quentin Coldwater, a Brooklyn high school student devoted to a children’s series set in the Narnia-like world of Fillory, is leading an aimless existence until he’s tapped to enter a mysterious portal that leads to Brakebills College, an exclusive academy where he’s taught magic. Coldwater, whose special gifts enable him to skip grades, finds his family’s world “mundane and domestic” when he returns home for vacation. He loses his innocence after a prank unintentionally allows a powerful evil force known only as the Beast to enter the college and wreak havoc. Eventually, Coldwater’s powers are put to the test when he learns that Fillory is a real place and how he can journey there. Genre fans will easily pick up the many nods to J.K. Rowling and C.S. Lewis, not to mention J.R.R. Tolkien in the climactic battle between the bad guy and a magician. 5-city author tour. (Aug.)

Much like its unnamed narrator, Pernice’s first novel ambles in no discernable direction, nudging up against tantalizing stories but never quite connecting. In it, the narrator retreats to a Cape Cod cabin, owned by his sister’s ex-husband, after fleeing a days-old marriage. He then spends his time interacting with townsfolk; reminiscing about Jocelyn, his abandoned bride; babysitting his infant nephew; and assisting an alluring neighbor in coming to terms with her tragic past. The author, a noted musician, seeks to emphasize the ordinariness of his main character by leaving him anonymous, but the man is not ordinary at all—he is, in fact, pathologically aimless. He can never quite say why he left Jocelyn and has no idea what he hopes to accomplish in his exile; worse, there is no sense that he has any desire to find out. The main supporting characters, ex-brother-in-law James and neighbor Marie, are more compelling than the narrator, but of course their scenes are marred by the narrator’s necessary presence. Pernice’s easygoing prose is attractive, but the fetishizing of slackerdom is a make-or-break proposition. (Aug.)

In her fourth novel (after The Way Life Should Be), Kline traces the construction and collapse of two long-term relationships. On her way home to New Jersey after an awkward party for her lifelong friend Claire’s highly autobiographical first novel, Alison gets into a car accident that kills a boy in the other car. Even though the accident wasn’t her fault, Allison, a mother of two young children, is wracked with grief and guilt. Her husband, Charlie, also struggles with the impulse to blame his wife, especially as he longs for any excuse to escalate his nascent affair with Claire and end his marriage. Episodes detailing the inevitable collapse of Alison and Charlie’s marriage, as well as Claire’s marriage to her well-meaning husband, Ben, are interspersed with vignettes revealing the four friends’ 10-plus–year history together. Shifting perspectives and thoughtful interior monologues reveal just how isolated, and in some cases misguided, the characters are. Kline’s unflinching gaze and lovely prose sets Kline’s novel apart from the herd of infidelity/marital ennui novels. It’s well-done, thoughtful and thought provoking. (Aug.)

A bungled burglary sparks Starr’s darkly humorous crime thriller. Carlos Sanchez wasn’t expecting anyone to be home, much less have an entire clip emptied into him as he reached the top of the stairs of the brownstone he breaks into in Forest Hills Gardens, Queens. The gun-wielding psychologist, Adam Bloom, is almost equally surprised—instead of being hailed as a hero for defending his wife and daughter in his own home, the media vilify him as a crazed vigilante for using all 10 bullets. Even worse, the sociopathic Johnny Long, going along with his pal Carlos for an easy score, decides to make the Blooms pay in more blood for the incident after he escapes into the night. Targeting the wife and daughter, the vainly handsome Long may be a delicious bit of self-parody by the photogenic author, who remains unexcelled in portraying self-involved New Yorkers. Funny and suspenseful, this novel is Starr delightfully at the top of his game. Author tour. (Aug.)

Based on a true story, this absorbing stand-alone thriller from bestseller Haig (Secret Sanction and five other books featuring army JAG lawyer Sean Drummond) charts the incredible rise and fall of a Russian multimillionaire. The brilliant, hard-working Alex Konevitch amasses a fortune in the building trades in the early 1990s only to have it stolen by a cabal of KGB men led by the KGB’s deputy director, who not only takes Konevitch’s money and control of his company but also frames him for assorted crimes. Pursued by assassins, Konevitch and his wife go on the run. The couple make their way to America, where they begin to prosper, then fall afoul of a venal FBI director out to enhance his own reputation. The reality aspect of the tale will remind readers of the repressive regime that Russia was and may be again—and of the perfidy of individuals in our own government when greed and ambition are put before democracy and justice. (Aug.)

Ponderous prose weighs down Rocha’s sequel to 2008’s The Last Pope, which centered on a conspiracy to murder Pope John Paul I. This follow-up treads similar ground, but a plausible premise—that the truth behind the 1981 attempt on the life of John Paul II was never revealed—is undercut by a muddled story line and such winks to the reader as naming a British agent Simon Templar (the hero of a popular 1960s TV series starring Roger Moore) and one character telling another that the previous book (i.e., The Last Pope) is available “for sale in the bookstores.” Long-winded descriptive passages, like the opening set at an expensive restaurant in an unnamed city, dampen the tension in a novel alleging dark doings at the heart of the Vatican. Still, those with a limitless appetite for stories about evildoing involving the Catholic Church may be satisfied. (Aug.)

A mother-daughter road trip forms the outline of Gable’s debut, but the emphasis of this quietly moving novel is on the daughter’s inner journey toward maturity. Eleven-year-old Katherine McConnell’s passion for the American Civil War isn’t surprising; she’s been raised in Marietta, Ga., on stories of her ancestors’ bravery during the “war of northern aggression.” So when, during the hot 1968 summer, Katherine’s mother abruptly proposes the two of them take a trip up the East Coast to collect antiques for her latest business venture, Katherine plots out a route that will take them past as many battlefields as possible. Excited about setting foot into Yankee (read: enemy) territory, Katherine gradually comes to learn the truth behind their trip. Katherine’s narration, enriched by vignettes in which the young Rebel recasts her problems as those of a Confederate general, is credibly naïve without seeming precious, while the Civil War narratives Katherine constructs add texture and weight, keeping this from becoming another maudlin child-narrated coming-of-age story. (Aug.)

The Gilford family’s yearly reunion encompasses the lives of matriarch Marty Gilford and her four daughters, especially youngest daughter, Emma, 43, who has spent a good part of her life doing whatever her mother and sisters want without really thinking of herself. Then Samuel, a voice from her past, calls up to rekindle their romance and throws Emma’s well-ordered life into turmoil. Emma is forced to do some tough self-examination and to embrace her sisters for who they are—good and bad. Radish displays an intimate understanding of boisterous families, and as a veteran at portraying female relationships, her affection for her characters shines through, but she’s covering a lot of familial ground here, and it’s easy to confuse the characters. Also, the complaining, put-upon Emma is not totally sympathetic. While those familiar with Southern families will delight in a taste of home and there are many funny parts, overall, Radish’s latest falls short. (Aug.)

Dunant (The Birth of Venus) revisits 16th-century Italy, where the convents are filled with the daughters of noblemen who are unable or unwilling to pay a dowry to marry them off. The Santa Caterina convent’s newest novice, Serafina, is miserable, having been shunted off by her father to separate her from a forbidden romance. She also has a singing voice that will be the glory of the convent and—more importantly to some—a substantial bonus for the convent’s coffers. The convent’s apothecary, Suora Zuana, strikes up a friendship with Serafina, enlisting her as an assistant in the convent dispensary and herb garden, but despite Zuana’s attempts to help the girl adjust, Serafina remains focused on escaping. Serafina’s constant struggle and her faith (of a type different from that common to convents) challenge Zuana’s worldview and the political structure of Santa Caterina. A cast of complex characters breathe new life into the classic star-crossed lovers trope while affording readers a look at a facet of Renaissance life beyond the far more common viscounts and courtesans. Dunant’s an accomplished storyteller, and this is a rich and rewarding novel. (Aug.)

Fans of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea will enjoy Golemon’s recasting of the Jules Verne novel, his fourth Event Group thriller (after Ancients). A prologue set in 1802 at an isolated French prison evokes another well-known classic, The Count of Monte Cristo, then the action leaps forward by increments until it reaches the present day. The U.S. president calls in the Event Group after a mysterious undersea vessel, the Leviathan, begins terrorizing the seas, sinking ships and subs alike. Those aboard the Leviathan threaten nuclear destruction if the land dwellers don’t stop their abuse of the ocean. A traitor enables the terrorists to infiltrate the Event Group’s headquarters and take its leadership hostage. Once Event Group operatives manage to board the Leviathan, the plot echoes its inspiration even more closely. While Golemon adds his own closing twist, the story line’s overall lack of originality makes this less interesting than the series’ first and strongest entry, Event. (Aug.)

Set in England in 1796, Melikan’s sprightly sequel to The Blackstone Key (2008) finds Mary Finch, once a poor teacher, now a wealthy heiress. At a ball given in London by Mary’s friend Susannah and Susannah’s new husband, Colonel Crosby-Nash, Mary witnesses Crosby-Nash meeting with a disguised stranger. Mysterious espionage expert Cuthbert Shy guesses that Crosby-Nash is involved in sedition and encourages Mary to travel with the couple to their Kent estate to gather more information. Mary’s researches are aided, yet also complicated, by Capt. Robert Holland, an artillery officer whose headquarters in Woolwich is one of the plotters’ targets—and whose romance with Mary is stymied by her new fortune. Overdoses of conversation and coincidence weaken the middle chapters, but the novel’s confident voice, quirky characters and sparkling period detail should keep fans of light historical thrillers turning the pages. (Aug.)

In her first novel, Eisdorfer offers as a guide to Victorian England her entertaining and surprising protagonist, Susan Rose. A bawdy young woman who could easily have walked off the pages of The Canterbury Tales, Susan ends up wet-nursing after getting unexpectedly and illicitly pregnant, and her alcoholic and abusive father forces her to leave her child and take up the occupation. Her journey into the intimate lives of England’s upper crust proves an illuminating and dangerous one as Susan jumps from family to family—until her father sells her son. As Susan attempts to balance other peoples’ babies with her quest to regain her own, she is faced with difficult choices between duty and love, and between her life and her child’s. Whether she is carousing in the Jewish quarter or planning how to reclaim her son, Susan navigates the stratified social world with humorous vigor. A promiscuous, randy and hefty lady, Susan’s a vibrant character, at once sweet and scheming, and given to such a crass frankness that even readers wary of historicals may want to give this a look. (Aug.)

Australian actor and young-adult writer Laguna (Too Loud Lily) delivers a grim, creepy, powerful first-person narrative about a direly neglected child whose knowledge of the world is severely circumscribed by her fanatically Christian parents. Told entirely in the solipsistic point of view of Hester, the only child of paranoid, abusive parents, the novel pursues the girl’s deeply troubling relationship with them and their bizarre world view. Begrudged her difficult birth, Hester is routinely hung, Christ-like, from her arms in the basement by her depressed mother, who sequesters the young girl in their shared cabin, her only book The Abridged Picture Bible. Hester’s brief foray to school, thanks to the intervention of the town authorities, proves eye-opening (she makes her first friend, Mary), but ultimately disastrous. Molested by her father through her adolescence, Hester is finally institutionalized when her parents can no longer control her. Laguna’s rendering of Hester’s fragile mental state is sympathetic and touching, especially through imagined dialogue with inanimate objects and in the friendship Hester makes with Mary, and then in the institution, with Norma. A truly haunting tale that readers won’t soon forget, from a compelling, original voice. (Aug.)

In Rosenfelt’s excellent seventh legal thriller to feature Paterson, N.J., defense attorney Andy Carpenter (after Play Dead), Andy takes on another canine client—Waggy, a Bernese mountain puppy, who’s somehow connected to the murder of Walter Timmerman, “a semi-titan in the pharmaceutical industry.” Andy represents the dog in a custody battle between Diana, Walter’s widow, and her stepson, Steven, who’s a suspect in his father’s shooting. Shortly after Andy picks up Waggy from Diana, she dies in a bomb explosion at her house. When Steven’s arrested for Diana’s murder, Andy agrees to represent him. After Andy’s police chief girlfriend, Laurie Collins, who’s visiting from Wisconsin, is shot and wounded while playing with Waggy and Tara, Andy’s golden retriever, Andy realizes Waggy was the real target. Rosenfelt injects this clever installment with courtroom twists, a peek into some scary DNA research and a romantic surprise. (Aug.)

In Shapiro’s bubbly latest, self-help guru Julia Goodman is fresh out of advice. Just as Julia is about to follow up her bestseller Up in Smoke with a book about controlling her food addiction, her shrink, Dr. Ness, and best friend, Sarah, both leave New York, sending her into a cupcake-scarfing tailspin. Soon she has packed on some extra pounds that she must lose before Food Crazy is published. To make matters worse, her director husband, Jake, has been called away to L.A., leaving no one to stop her late-night binges. Without Dr. Ness’s tough talk, Sarah’s help and Jake’s love, Julia searches for a new support system, interviewing eight shrinks in eight days. Her selection, Dr. Cigar, only complicates her quest to return to her svelte weight in time for her Today show interview, leaving her to find her own answers to the weight question. Shapiro rescues a conventional plot with an original voice and an energy that will resonate with anyone who’s ever stared down a Twinkie. (Aug.)

The peaceful home life of two L.A. architects is brutally disrupted after they find their overnight guest, eccentric artist Tom Field, hanging from their neighbor’s tree in Gadol’s sad, chilling sixth novel. Is it suicide, murder or a prank gone seriously wrong? As LAPD’s Detective Michaels investigates, the architects Rob Voight and his partner of 20 years, Carlo Stein, each nurse a secret. Carlo, who met Tom after a carjacking months earlier, had an affair with him that ended before Tom showed up at their office needing a phone. Rob retrieves Tom’s address book without telling Carlo or Michaels, and begins calling Tom’s contacts to inform them of his death and to learn more about him. Acts of vandalism aimed at Rob and Carlo contribute to the brooding sense of unease. While some readers may find the ending confusing, Gadol (Light at Dusk) scores points about the importance of truth in enduring relationships. (Aug.)

Christian fiction writer Hake, who is also a nurse, offers her fans a mixed blend of fun, witticism and romance and a theme of medicine, with scenarios involving the care and keeping of man and beast. Against a backdrop of male chauvinist prejudice and smalltown small-mindedness, twins Enoch and his sister Taylor Bestman, veterinarian and medical doctor respectively, arrive in Gooding, Tex., with the best of intentions. What they find is a great deal of anti-female sentiment when it’s discovered that Taylor, the new medical doctor, is a woman. Determined to prove herself, Taylor takes on whatever the little town can throw at her and slowly wins over most of the people’s affections, including that of a stubborn blacksmith who views medicine as an inappropriate profession for a woman. Hake’s text is sweet, to be sure; still, the plot resolves all too neatly and swiftly, almost like an unlikely miracle cure. (Aug.)

Strom, evangelical Christian author of 34 books and an activist against modern slavery, takes an indirect approach to calling attention to that issue with her newest fiction title, the first of three planned in the Grace in Africa series, set in West Africa in 1787. Strom’s protagonist, Grace Winslow, the daughter of an English sea captain and an African princess, aligns herself with her father’s slaves. Young adult Grace is promised in marriage to a pompous, offensive white man and even Grace’s mother (who endured the same fate, having been forced to marry for political reasons) colludes with Grace’s father in this scheme. Grace, realizing she is just as much a slave as her full African counterparts, runs away and discovers a new life and a better reason for living. She also has her eyes opened to the atrocities that have surrounded her for years. Strom’s fictional account of the battle at the fortress of Zulina between the slaves and their masters is mostly believable, though some of the dialogue sounds a bit stilted. Strom does succeed in capturing how utterly reprehensible any form of slavery is, past or present. (Aug.)

Bestseller Slaughter brings together characters from her two series for the first time with electrifying results. Dr. Sara Linton, who lost her husband in 2007’s Beyond Reach, has left rural Grant County for a new life in an underfunded Atlanta hospital. Georgia Bureau of Investigation agents Faith Mitchell and Will Trent, last seen in 2008’s Fractured, happen to be in the hospital’s ER when a woman known only as “Anna” arrives. Anna was hit by a car after escaping from an unknown captor, whose underground torture chamber Will soon uncovers near the accident site, along with the body of a second woman he believes was held in the same bunker. When another woman is snatched, Faith and Will realize they’re chasing a sadistic serial killer. As the GBI agents try to connect the victims, Sara becomes more involved in the investigation, even as it dredges up painful memories from her past. Slaughter ups the emotional ante with every twist and turn in this disturbing thriller. (July)

MWA Grandmaster Burke spins a tale replete with colorful prose and epic confrontations in his second novel to feature smalltown Texas sheriff Hackberry Holland (after Lay Down My Sword and Shield). An anonymous phone call leads Holland, a Korean vet who survived a POW camp, to the massacre and burial site of nine Thai women, a crime that brings FBI and ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) officials running. As a slew of bad guys relocated from New Orleans after Katrina grapple for advantage in new territory, mercurial killer “Preacher” Jack Collins finds plenty of work. Pete Flores, a possible witness to the massacre, and his girlfriend are targeted by Collins for elimination, and by the FBI for bait. Holland must protect the hapless Flores and his girl from both. Three strong female characters complement the full roster of sharply drawn lowlifes. The battle of wills and wits between Holland and Collins delivers everything Burke’s fans expect. (July)

A buddy comedy with a Nick Hornby vibe, this debut novel from British musician Thornton charms from the very first chord. As a schoolboy in the late ’80s, Clive Beresford is a devoted fan of indie band the Thieving Magpies. Lance Webster, the band’s frontman, becomes Clive’s hero, a pop culture god Clive follows from gig to gig. After Lance publicly self-destructs and disappears from the public eye, Clive stumbles into an adulthood of failed romance and dismal job prospects and wonders if he’ll ever get out of his rut. But after he discovers his former idol living a few doors down the street, Clive makes painfully awkward contact, and the two begin an unlikely friendship with Clive pretending to be clueless about who his neighbor is while secretly intent on writing a tell-all book. Thornton nails the changing music scene of the past two decades, combining real-life artists with the imaginary Magpies, and effortlessly captures the magnetic allure of great rock (“The album gave me an unprecedented sense of belonging. Or at least, the potential of belonging”). Best of all, though, are the quirky lead characters, two has-beens who jump-start each other’s lives. (July)

South of Broad Pat Conroy. Doubleday/Talese, $29.95 (512p) ISBN 978-0-385-41305-3

Charleston, S.C., gossip columnist Leopold Bloom King narrates a paean to his hometown and friends in Conroy’s first novel in 14 years. In the late ’60s and after his brother commits suicide, then 18-year-old Leo befriends a cross-section of the city’s inhabitants: scions of Charleston aristocracy; Appalachian orphans; a black football coach’s son; and an astonishingly beautiful pair of twins, Sheba and Trevor Poe, who are evading their psychotic father. The story alternates between 1969, the glorious year Leo’s coterie stormed Charleston’s social, sexual and racial barricades, and 1989, when Sheba, now a movie star, enlists them to find her missing gay brother in AIDS-ravaged San Francisco. Too often the not-so-witty repartee and the narrator’s awed voice (he is very fond of superlatives) overwhelm the stories surrounding the group’s love affairs and their struggles to protect one another from dangerous pasts. Some characters are tragically lost to the riptides of love and obsession, while others emerge from the frothy waters of sentimentality and nostalgia as exhausted as most readers are likely to be. Fans of Conroy’s florid prose and earnest melodramas are in for a treat. (Aug.)