Fiction Book Reviews: 9/21/2009

Ejecting from a plummeting jet high over the Potomac River is only one of fighter pilot Mary Goodwin's problems in this elaborately plotted war on terror page-turner from Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and novelist Adams (Harbor). A sense that something more than a simple malfunction downed her plane dogs Mary, but self-doubts springing from a dark past discourage her from digging any further and she soon ships out to Afghanistan. Stanley Belson, night editor of the Washington Spectator, has a similar hunch about the crash and he pushes his newsroom protégé to investigate. Operating in the shadows near the center is Will Holmes, the chair of a secret intelligence program. As the many subplots connect and evolve, something approaching a romance between Will and Mary sprouts in Afghanistan; Mary is hounded by tragic events; and Will's operation spins out of control. Though Adams's lean prose comes off as affected and her characters feel hollow, the dovetailing of Adams's cynical assessment of newsroom ethics and political maneuvering places this nicely among macroview novels of contemporary political intrigue. (Feb.)

Death haunts this underwhelming collection from essayist, poet (and undertaker) Lynch (The Undertaking). In “Catch and Release,” the shortest and best story, a fishing guide disposes of his father's ashes in an unusual way. “Bloodsport” is an undertaker's grim reflection on his peripheral involvement in the life of a murder victim. “Hunter's Moon” is a decent character sketch about a widowed former casket salesman, but as a story, it's too inward-looking and inert. “Matinée de Septembre” presents a portrait of professor Aisling Black that strands her in a lugubrious female version of Death in Venice set in a Michigan resort. “Apparition,” the centerpiece novella, is the story of Adrian Littlefield, a minister who becomes a bestselling self-help author after his wife leaves him. It's told mostly as flashbacks during Adrian's contemporary visit to the location of his ex-wife's first infidelity. Unfortunately, drawing this slight story out dilutes its promise. Overall, Lynch seems at a loss for what to do with his fictional creations; haunted as they are by deaths and burdensome back stories, his character's present lives feel contrived. (Feb.)

Like Tyler's previous protagonists, Liam Pennywell is a man of unexceptional talents, plain demeanor, modest means and curtailed ambition. At age 60, he's been fired from his teaching job at a “second-rate private boys' school” in Baltimore, a job below his academic training and original expectations. An unsentimental, noncontemplative survivor of two failed marriages and the emotionally detached father of three grown daughters, Liam is jolted into alarm after he's attacked in his apartment and loses all memory of the experience. His search to recover those lost hours leads him into an uneasy exploration of his disappointing life and into an unlikely new relationship with Eunice, a socially inept walking fashion disaster who is half his age. She is also spontaneous and enthusiastic, and Liam longs to cast off his inertia and embrace the “joyous recklessness” that he feels in her company. Tyler's gift is to make the reader empathize with this flawed but decent man, and to marvel at how this determinedly low-key, plainspoken novelist achieves miracles of insight and understanding. (Jan.)

A novel comprising electronic communications, Beaumont's sequel to e creates a stinging satire from a British ad agency's dirty laundry. An ensemble piece with meandering plot lines, it features a workaholic boss who can't figure out how to remove “The Man” from his e-mail signature, his lawyer wife who's lost control of their children, and several snarky staffers. Many of the story lines revolve around the agency's ridiculous (though perhaps not far-fetched) campaigns, including one to market minicigarettes to children and another to use Margaret Thatcher to sell perfume. Other subplots are more personal, such as a gullible staffer intent on traveling to Nigeria to rescue an heiress who e-mailed him a plea for help. Meanwhile, the characters who spend their workdays gossiping on social networks are so plugged in that one character answers his texts while about to jump off a building ledge. American readers might struggle with some British slang and pop culture references, and though some jokes are run into the ground, Beaumont's dry wit and pithy writing will have readers laughing out loud. (Jan.)

Hoffman's debut, a by-the-numbers Southern charmer, recounts 12-year-old Cecelia Rose Honeycutt's recovery from a childhood with her crazy mother, Camille, and cantankerous father, Carl, in 1960s Willoughby, Ohio. After former Southern beauty queen Camille is struck and killed by an ice cream truck, Carl hands over Cecelia to her great-aunt Tootie. Whisked off to a life of privilege in Savannah, Ga., Cecelia makes fast friends with Tootie's cook, Oletta, and gets to know the cadre of eccentric women who flit in and out of Tootie's house, among them racist town gossip Violene Hobbs and worldly, duplicitous Thelma Rae Goodpepper. Aunt Tootie herself is the epitome of goodness, and Oletta is a sage black woman. Unfortunately, any hint of trouble is nipped in the bud before it can provide narrative tension, and Hoffman toys with, but doesn't develop, the idea that Cecelia could inherit her mother's mental problems. Madness, neglect, racism and snobbery slink in the background, but Hoffman remains locked on the sugary promise of a new day. (Jan.)

Hart's accomplished debut follows Vietnam vet Bandy Dorner, who wakes up from a drunken bender to discover the cabin he shared with his pregnant wife, Iona, has burned to the ground and she is believed to have died in the fire. After Bandy gets in a scuffle with two policemen that ends with one cop dead and Bandy shot through the shoulder, he learns that Iona has, in fact, left with her lover. Fast forward to 1990, when Bandy's 18-year-old son, Tracy, visits his incarcerated father for the first time and soon moves into Bandy's dead parents' home, intent on fixing it up. After Iona joins Tracy, and Bandy gets released from prison, a brilliant depiction of family follows, though there's a great deal of turbulence before things even hint at coming together. The rugged Idaho backdrop adds sometimes stark, sometimes beautiful counterpoints to the stripped-to-the-bone narrative. Most impressive is Hart's ability to conjure rich and conflicted characters in an uncommon situation; his handling of the material is sublime. (Jan.)

No Cliff's Notes required for this classic, recast by Herendeen (Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander) with a bisexual backstory that would have had the Regency author blushing. Though Herendeen claims she's merely unearthed the “hidden” story from clues already written into the original, what unquestionably occurs in this unlikely redo is erotic, witty and as often silly as refreshing. Here, Elizabeth Bennett and Fitzwilliam Darcy match wits and sexual appetites while engaging in same-sex relationships, she with older-and-wiser Charlotte, he with younger and pliable Charles Bingley, who struggles with his attraction to Elizabeth's sister, Jane. Sure, the permutations make the already complicated plot even more convoluted, but the sex—hokey as it is with all the pulsing and throbbing—helps ease the prideful misunderstandings and ignorant prejudices. (Jan.)

Hobbet's compelling novel is set in Kuwait between the Gulf Wars, with the country poised for the next wave of unexpected terror while coming to grips with the last: “He'd expected to see some scars of the war. But there was nothing that spoke of the violence, not even a tank posed as a public memorial.” Hobbet's disparate protagonists come from different classes, countries and faiths: devoutly Muslim, wealthy Mufeeda; her young Indian cook, Emmanuella; California doctor Theo; Theo's Arabic teacher, Hanaan (a Palestinian); and timid American housewife Kit (also Mufeeda's neighbor). Each character is, to varying degrees, a misfit in a society beset by violence and ancient practices. When news of murdered maids begins circulating, several characters undertake a precarious plan to save a maid in danger, a dangerous mission with the potential to change all their lives permanently. Hobbet's extensive knowledge of Kuwait's people, customs and political landscape combine to make an immersive, authentic novel about Middle East life. (Jan.)

In bestseller Jance's middling fifth Ali Reynolds thriller (after Cruel Intent), the ex–TV journalist takes over a media-relations job at the county police department in her hometown of Sedona, Ariz., after the previous flack is sent on administrative leave for misconduct. Soon after being fitted for the mandatory Kevlar vest, Ali goes to the site of a subdivision fire that has left an unidentified woman in critical condition. All signs point to arson, but the fire's amnesia-ridden survivor is the only one who knows the truth. With the help of a hospital nurse who's also a nun, Ali—mostly undercover in a red wig in the hospital's burn unit waiting room—slowly pieces together the victim's identity and her relationship to the fire. That Ali is essentially cast as a stenographer, surreptitiously transcribing the conversations of those visiting the victim's room, narrows the window for heart-racing action. A desert shoot-out tacked on toward the end adds some excitement. (Dec.)

Bestseller Berry deftly blends contemporary suspense and historical mystery in his fifth novel to feature former U.S. Justice Department operative Cotton Malone (after The Charlemagne Pursuit). Danish billionaire Henrik Thorvaldsen, a friend of Malone's, has become consumed with finding out who masterminded the slaughter outside a Mexico City courthouse two years earlier that killed seven people, including his young diplomat son. Once he learns that a wealthy British aristocrat was behind the outrage, Thorvaldsen gets entangled in a conspiracy that involves an elite group of ruthless financial experts planning to destabilize the global economy, a terrorist plot to destroy a European landmark, and a legendary cache hidden by Napoleon. Malone soon finds himself in a desperate struggle to save not only Thorvaldsen's life but the lives of countless innocents as well. While the plot takes a few predictable turns, this well-crafted thriller also offers plenty of surprises. 5-city author tour. (Dec.)

From National Book Award–winner Jin (Waiting) comes a new collection that focuses on Flushing, one of New York City's largest Chinese immigrant communities. With startling clarity, Jin explores the challenges, loneliness and uplift associated with discovering one's place in America. Many different generational perspectives are laid out, from the young male sweatshop-worker narrator of “The House Behind a Weeping Cherry,” who lives in the same rooming-house as three prostitutes, to the grandfather of “Children as Enemies,” who disapproves of his grandchildren's desires to Americanize their names. Anxiety and distrust plague many of Jin's characters, and while the desire for love and companionship is strong, economic concerns tend to outweigh all others. In “Temporary Love,” Jin explores the inevitable complications of becoming a “wartime couple” or “men and women who, unable to bring their spouses to America, cohabit... to comfort each other and also to reduce living expenses.” With piercing insight, Jin paints a vast, fascinating portrait of a neighborhood and a people in flux. (Dec.)

Roker (Al Roker's Big Bad Book of Barbecue) teams with Lochte (Sleeping Dog) on a solid, exciting crime novel that revolves around a fictional TV program much like NBC's The Today Show. Billy Blessing, a New York City celebrity chef who owns a restaurant and does a variety of segments on Wake Up, America!, has just begun filming a reality food show when he becomes a suspect in a murder case after Rudy Gallagher, Blessing's executive producer on the show with whom he has clashed, dies after eating some poisoned coq au vin from Blessing's restaurant. When the Manhattan DA shut downs the restaurant and Gallagher's replacement suspends him from his main television gig, Blessing turns sleuth. The gold standard for investigating network TV skullduggery is still the late William DeAndrea's Matt Cobb series (Killed in the Ratings, etc.), but snappy prose and well-developed characters will leave readers wanting to see more of Blessing. (Dec.)

Flaming's debut mixes time travel, historical grit and an alternate history of the American frontier in a romance with a fantastic bent. A contemporary antiques dealer, after coming across an old photo, unspools the story of Peter Force, newly arrived in 1900 New York from Idaho, as he joins a crew of laborers toiling in grim conditions to build the subway system. A chance encounter throws Peter into the path of Cheri-Anne Toledo, a troubled woman who claims to have traveled seven years into the future from the Lost Kingdom of Ohio, a small frontier kingdom over which her father reigned. Cheri-Anne's plight, and his feelings for her, drags them into the orbits of a crusty J.P Morgan and of dueling inventors Thomas Edison and Nicola Tesla. As Peter and Cheri-Anne evade the powerful forces invested in Cheri-Anne, the moment when their lives and the contemporary narrator's intersects looms closer and closer, creating palpable suspense. The journey through the seedier side of New York's Gilded Age, with reprisal killings for labor agitators and nights spent in drunken dance halls, is an arresting contrast to classic time-travel themes. This is a real crowd-pleaser. (Dec.)

Noble charts the intertwining lives of the residents of a New York City apartment building in her charming love letter to Manhattan. After banker Ed Gallagher's promotion necessitates a move from the U.K. to New York, he and his wife, Eve, are thrilled to find the perfect Upper East Side apartment, though Eve struggles to meet people until she befriends Violet Wallace, an 82-year-old fellow Englishwoman in her building who enchants her with the story of her path to Manhattan. Elsewhere in the building, shiftless trust fund baby Jackson Grayling III has fallen in love with Emily Mikanowski, a stunner living downstairs, while Emily's downstairs neighbor and friend, frumpy librarian Charlotte, works up the nerve to speak to Che, the Cuban doorman. And on the sixth floor, the Kramers and Schulmans, married couples with young children, struggle with two sets of very different marital problems. Noble (The Reading Group) presents her sprawling cast without neglecting them as characters or confusing the reader, and though she's got something of a wooden ear for her younger characters' dialogue, her handle on heartbreak and hopefulness is admirable. (Dec.)

Morgenroth's latest begins with the police report of a homicide, then introduces the two main characters and works backwards. Bullied Nora is stuck in a dead-end job in Kansas, caring for her cancer-stricken mother. Spoiled rich boy Timothy walks into the coffee shop where Nora works, and it's mad love at first sight. A more unlikable pair of lovers is hard to imagine. She's spineless, he's brutally selfish, but they are united in their mutual distaste for their dreadful, if hopelessly stereotypical, families, who return their disdain. Alternating chapters—“Timothy,” “Nora,” and “The Investigation”—describe the course of their relationship and its consequences, one of which is a murder the morning of their wedding, the same murder that opens the book. As in They Did It with Love, the final revelation (who is murdered? who is the murderer?) is meant to be shocking. But after the hackneyed romance, obvious metaphors (e.g., the murder victim is stabbed through the heart) and nonsurprises, it's difficult to still care. Morgenroth has a strong, snarky voice and good pacing, but this book is a misfire. (Dec.)

In these reconstituted, previously published stories, late experimental author Jonke (1946–2009) deploys a literary alter ego to take readers on a tortuous, playful journey through memories of Vienna, the author and hero's native city. Interlinked tales, crafted in ambling sentences, follow the protagonist (born, like Jonke, in 1946) recreating moments from his childhood and young adulthood with sensuous precision: riding the streetcars through Vienna's numerous districts; studying musicology at the University of Vienna; and meeting an array of city workers, from a sculptor who lectures on the deceptions of his craft to a wholesale fish dealer who claims to have more power than the chancellor. The narrator also communes, extensively, with caryatids and atlantes, human-shaped statuary that serves as support in prominent Viennese architecture. Often mimicking his hero's existential paralysis with circuitous text, Jonke strikes out in the direction of the fantastic and absurd, revealing unexpected meaning in the vibrancy of Viennese life. (Dec.)

This beguiling, inspirational family-first tale from Lowcountry native Seitz (A Hundred Years of Happiness) follows the revelatory and haunting journey of a single mother from South Carolina who discovers she's pregnant and needs to clear her head to plan her next step. Priscilla Lynn Macy quits her job and hits the road with her daughters, Rainey Dae, 17, who has Down syndrome, and Janie Doe, her precocious eight-year-old. Grandma Mona's in the backseat with her husband, “Poppy” Grayson. Janie's and Grandma Mona's perspectives on Priscilla's situation invigorate Seitz's folksy prose as Priscilla looks for Harlan Bradfield, Janie's dad, who took off one day on his motorcycle. The tribe ends up at the Macy ancestral home in Forest Pines, S.C., where Priscilla reconnects with her half-brother, Pastor Fritz Rosier, who helps her make peace with past mistakes and to decide about the future. Seitz has a gift for creating wonderful characters, especially the young girls, and while she's strident in her antiabortion stance, this tale's spooky sweet dénouement includes a magical twist about spirited little Janie that's marvelously memorable. (Dec.)

Kent's 11th erotic SG-5 thriller (after 2009's No Limits) doesn't feature that crime-fighting organization directly, but does showcase a related character, Kingdom “King” Trahan, a rich Louisiana model and ex-con who rescues wan makeup artist Cady Kowalski. King first meets Cady when the battered girl climbs into his Hummer, pleading for a ride out of town. When they stop by Cadie's apartment to pick up her things, Cady's roommate tries to shoot her, setting off King's protective instincts. Not surprisingly, a passionate attraction develops between them, and the suspense heats up similarly; as King and Cady avoid hit men and car bombs, King learns that Cady carries a heavy secret—the part she played in her brother's death eight years earlier. Before long, the pair is recruited by a mysterious agent to catch one of their pursuers, who also had a hand in Cady's brother's death. As always, Kent's mix of thrills and romance is familiar but satisfying. (Dec.)

When civil war threatens to turn Ashaara, an impoverished nation on the Horn of Africa, into a failed state and a potential sanctuary for jihadists in Poyer's outstanding 12th thriller to feature Cdr. Dan Lenson (after The Weapon), U.S. naval forces stationed near the Red Sea quickly respond with humanitarian relief. The lack of any legitimate local government leads to escalating chaos, and the mission soon changes for Medal of Honor winner Lenson and his cohorts to nation building and then counterinsurgency. Assorted Islamic militants, Westernized liberals and remnants of the former dictatorial regime manipulate each other as well as Western governments in an effort to control a desiccated chunk of land that makes Somalia look like paradise. Poyer, an Annapolis graduate, focuses on how his vividly drawn characters behave amid the shifting alliances, while the action inexorably builds to a conclusion that's both tragic and ironic. (Nov.)

Bestseller Folsom's improbable sequel to his equally improbable The Machiavelli Covenant (2006) takes ex-LAPD detective Nicholas Marten, who's trying to create a new life for himself as a landscape architect in England, to Equatorial Guinea, at the behest of the U.S. president, John Henry Harris, who became his confidante in the previous book. In a village on the island of Bioko, Marten meets Willy Dorhn, a 78-year-old German-born priest, who shows him photos of rebels being armed by members of a U.S. security firm hired to protect American oil workers. Soon after, soldiers who serve the impoverished country's brutal dictator attack the village, leaving Dorhn dead and Marten a fugitive. Marten's efforts to report what he's learned to people he can trust lead him to Germany and Portugal. Readers expecting a nuanced look at corruption in sub-Saharan Africa in the vein of John le Carré's The Constant Gardener will be disappointed. (Nov.)

Firmly straddling the ground between war novel and military history, the conclusion to Shaara's WWII European theater series contains the usual mix of real life military leaders and fictional soldiers in combat, recapitulating the last five months of the war, from the Battle of the Bulge to the liberation of concentration camps. Shaara's real-life figures (generals Dwight D. Eisenhower and George S. Patton, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt) mostly appear in stilted scenes to discuss strategy, while fictional characters carry the narrative by doing the fighting. Thanks to Shaara's visceral descriptive powers, we ride on a bombing mission with bombardier Sergeant Buckley as his B-17 flies through the flak-filled skies over Germany. With Private Benson, we feel the cold, deprivation and sense of dislocation of the Ardennes. And we sit in an observation post right on the Germans' doorstep as Captain Harroway calls down artillery fire on the enemy. In the end, Shaara delivers nothing we haven't already read in Stephen E. Ambrose's Band of Brothers or Cornelius Ryan's The Last Battle, but fans of military fiction will definitely gobble this up. (Nov.)

This slender sendup of life in rural Albania under the Communist regime offers a hilarious look into a simple, uneducated people's mores and passionate natures. Narrated by a girl who lives with her beautiful, unhappy mother while her father is imprisoned for absurd “political” reasons, the punchy vignettes treat aspects of village life that center on a sunny lassitude and a preoccupation with ensuring a girl preserves her “immaculate flower”; the local school, where the narrator is punished by her zealous Communist teacher; the sad fates of neighbors; and the narrator's uneasy relationship with her absent father, whom she recalls as brutal and a slobbering kisser (“Why did I bother giving you life if I can't even give you a kiss?”). Books offer her the prospect of escape, and our intrepid protagonist procures them by offering a venal elementary school teacher her mother's jewelry in exchange for access to “the great stockpile of dreams.” Vorpsi cleverly melds old wives' tales, a child's naïveté and sharp-edged irony for a not-so-gentle skewering of her homeland. (Nov.)

At the start of Michaels's debut, a predictable postapocalyptic thriller, Charles Spencer, his wife and their two children as well as his brother, Dan, have come to the Caribbean island of St. Barthélemy to bring his dying 81-year-old father back to the U.S. When nuclear missiles devastate the United States and Europe, the Spencer family finds they have limited contact with the outside world. Who was behind the attacks remains obscure as the militaristic Dan wastes little time seizing a cache of guns and recruiting allies both to defend the hotel where the Spencers are staying and to make sorties in search of provisions. The inevitable bloodshed between competing groups of survivors and discussions of what sacrifices are necessary to insure viability follow. Readers would do better to go back to such classics of this genre as Nevil Shute's On the Beach and John Christopher's No Blade of Grass. (Nov.)

Odiwe's sequel to Sense and Sensibility is best at recalling Austen's descriptive abilities, but falls short in its treatment of Austen's beloved characters. Three years after Marianne and Col. William Brandon get married, they're still unable to discuss two critical and intertwined issues: namely, that Marianne feels jealous of William's ward, Eliza, the illegitimate daughter of his first love; and the reappearance of Eliza's father, John Willoughby, who was once Marianne's love. Matters are complicated by the growing affection between Marianne's sister, Margaret, and William's nephew Henry, a developing relationship that serves as a stand-in for the original book's. As their unshared feelings fester, distance grows between Marianne and William; Odiwe nods occasionally to the inequality between marriage partners, which allows the man to carry on much as he did prior to marriage, an issue that Austen herself would likely tackle; unfortunately, it's hard to maintain suspense when the central plot conflict can be cleared up with a five-minute conversation. (Nov.)

In this predictable but good-hearted novel, a father and his daughter—a damaged but loving Iraq War vet named Ray and a budding 12-year-old naturalist named Lindy—live happily off the grid in an Oregon forest until the day Lindy is spotted by a bird-watcher. Notified of a young girl wandering alone deep in the woods, the police assign dedicated officer Jessica Villareal to the case. Recently rejected by her own daughter and still smarting, Jessica sets out with the best of intentions for helping Lindy, but risks destroying the life Lindy and her father have built for themselves. Examining people willing to sidestep the rules in pursuit of a greater good, Shortridge's fourth novel (after Love and Biology at the Center of the Universe) recalls Barbara Kingsolver's Pigs in Heaven; Shortridge even manages to finesse authentic performances from her population of familiar types: a pitiable war veteran, a conflicted cop and a poor but precocious youngster. (Nov.)

Bestseller Connelly nimbly balances Harry Bosch's personal and professional lives, both of which take a substantial beating, in his 14th novel to feature the LAPD homicide detective. Bosch, last seen with his recently discovered half-brother, lawyer Mickey Haller, in The Brass Verdict (2008), investigates the shooting death of a liquor store owner. While the murder has none of the hallmarks of a regular gang hit, Bosch discovers the dead man was paying a weekly protection fee to a man Bosch suspects is part of a Chinese triad. Even though Bosch is warned to drop the case, he doesn't take the threat seriously until he receives a video showing his 13-year-old daughter, Madeline, being kidnapped in Hong Kong, where she lives with her mother and Bosch's ex-wife, a former FBI agent. Bosch flies to Hong Kong to try to rescue Madeline, prepared to face down one of the world's most powerful crime syndicates. Tenacious as ever, Bosch is even more formidable in his role as a protective father. 10-city author tour. (Oct. 13)

This promising first in a new series from bestseller Baldacci (First Family) introduces Beth Perry, chief of the District of Columbia's Metropolitan Police, and Beth's younger sister, Mace Perry, a former police officer dubbed “the Patty Hearst of the twenty-first century” after she was seized by bandits, drugged and taken along on a series of armed robberies around Washington. Mace, who's just getting out of prison after serving a two-year sentence, is willing to risk everything to clear her name and reclaim her life as a cop by cracking a big case on her own. The rape-murder of a powerful lawyer as well as the killing of a prominent U.S. attorney provide Mace an opportunity to vindicate herself. While Baldacci draws his characters in bright primary colors, and some of the action reaches comic book proportions, he delivers his usual intricate plotting and sets the stage nicely for highly competent Beth and impulsive, streetwise Mace to take on more bad guys. (Oct. 27)

Hix's eighth collection is a fine addition to this protean poet's fast-growing (and critically lauded) body of work. The German-American artist Petra Soesemann, known for her abstract textiles, discovered in middle age that her father was not the man who raised her but rather a Turkish man she had never met. Hix knew Soesemann when both taught in Cleveland; he has now written a book of fragments from an imagined verse biography, riffing on incidents and themes from Soeseman's life, including her time spent in Peru. Eight-line pentameter units, most given interviewers' questions for titles (“Why did your mother tell you after all this time?”) dominate the volume, though some of its best moments (e.g., a scary recollection of a would-be killer on an airplane) occupy longer forms. Like C.D. Wright, Hix works both with highly wrought descriptive passages and with verse that sounds like regular speech cutting swiftly between them. In one poem, the Peruvian “coast, imprisoned between one/ vain desire and its equal opposite, drones/ desert dunes that mimic wave and peak alike.” In another, Soesemann recalls nearly drowning in childhood: “Mother leaves the beach then,/ comes running back with my father, who pauses/ to assess the situation,” then “swims out to save me.” (Nov.)

In her follow-up to the National Book Critics Circle Award–winning Elegy, Bang is up to some of her old tricks again, but the previous collection's tour of a loss-inflected world has also taught her some new ones. The book takes the alphabet as its jumping-off point, with one or more poems titled for each letter (“A Equals All of a Sudden,” “Beast Brutality,” etc.) Here again are Bang's quirky poetic leaps (“In another corner, Freud says, Yes/ In the dark of primitive desire means yes/ Forever”), but somehow they are more foreboding than before, the wild associations of a haunted mind: “The note rises from something awful./ A woman in a jam. Train wreck of crumpled cars.” Poems vamp on literature, fables, fairy tales, pop culture icons (like Cher) and shards of a lost childhood world. One poem rewrites Poe's most famous work (“Her name is Lenore Nevermore”), while “B is for Beckett” sums up the Nobel laureate's work in one line: “There is so little to say.” The book concludes with a short series of prose pieces that flirt with memoir. This book bridges a gap between an experimental tradition in American poetry and an older high lyric tradition. This is some of Bang's best writing, and one of the most exciting books of the year. (Oct.)

McHugh's eighth book finds this acclaimed poet as odd and entertaining as ever, with her trademark slippery associative lines and jagged stanzas (“The mystery of speaking every day/ So plainly from a face she cannot see/ Unsettles her...”), but also subtly sobered by growing older while living through the grim political climate of the last eight years. McHugh's short, jerky lines, odd rhymes, bemused gravity and slant perspective on the world at hand bring Emily Dickinson to mind. “The man of the moment would kill/ to be man of the hour,” she says in “Unto High Heaven,” a poem that seems to recall the Bush presidency and the rise of the Internet, which she touches on elsewhere in a poem that demands we “Webcam the World”: “Get all of it. Set up the shots/ at every angle; run them online/ 24-7.” Other poems try to make sense of life's little mysteries: “Through petri dishes' rings/ life is transmogrified. When we/ look into things, we see// there's space inside,” reads the entirety of “The Microscope.” McHugh remains one of our most important and unusual poets in a world where YouTube makes every experience fodder for entertainment and a person “cannot die again; and I/ do nothing but re-live.” (Oct.)

Snow, a professor at Rice, has devoted a good deal of his life to bringing into fluid, lyrical English more of Rilke's books than anyone else. He is Rilke's best contemporary ambassador to the English-speaking world. Rilke, of course, is one of the major poets of the 20th century, author of such famous poems as “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” “The Panther” and “The Duino Elegies.” Snow's translations of the complete texts of Rilke's original collections—including both volumes of New Poems, The Book of Images, Duino Elegies and the revelatory Uncollected Poems—are beautiful works in their own right and bring across all of Rilke's intensity and focus. This mammoth book brings together generous selections from all of Snow's volumes of Rilke in their recently revised editions; it's certain to be the definitive collection of Rilke for some time to come. Readers will be helpless, after passing through this book, against the command that closes “Archaic Torso”: “You must change your life.” (Oct.)

Effortless and stunning in its grace and movement, Ponsot's newest collection follows the prompting of its title, which can be read as personal affirmation or a direction: “simmer down” she imperatively writes, “lay your cards on the linen faceup // causing a music to start.” Many of the poems create connections across distance, whether it's the air in a kitchen evoking “Alhambra years ago,” the cloud barrier separating earth and space, or something even more ephemeral: “Between silence and sound // we are balancing darkness.” Playful humor springs up, as well as departures to childhood or rewritten fables. Yet even at these moments the poems are like “stones, holding each other into a wall.” Old age is an ever-present lens for Ponsot (Springing), who is in her late 80s. “Walking Home from the Museum,” for instance, recalls “radiant saviors... // at ease in their deathlife.” Ponsot is a master poet, still at the height of her powers: “The place of language is the place between me// and the world of presences I have lost” (Oct.)

Well observed, careful and shot through with sadness, this eighth set of poems from Ohio resident Baker (Midwest Eclogue) is his best: syllabic stanzas, occasional rhyme, and short, clear looks at nature frame a life that almost came apart in middle age: we read of the poet's days with his young daughter, and of what appears to be his recent divorce. “When a lark flies/ up, I know its name,” writes Baker—it is no boast: he returns over and over to the natural history of the Midwest, its meadows and exurbs, where “Hummer” means both a tiny bird and a gargantuan vehicle. Baker's daughter's childhood, his own teen years, middle age and approaching death get attention from his exacting eye. And as he looks hard at animals, they look back at him: he sees, in a poem about Virgil, how “the oval eyes/ of goats and sheep/ turn rounder as the day/ goes down.” Like Marianne Moore and Amy Clampitt, this poet likes to borrow from earlier texts: swaths of quotations from 17th-century prose can overwhelm his quiet verse. Yet most of the time Baker's terms remain his own: “To see each thing clear/ is still not to see// a thing apart from/ words or our wild need.” (Oct.)

Pulitzer-winner Levine invites readers into familiar landscapes—Detroit, gritty America, forests chock-full of truth and beauty, “the shaded woods/ where I go evening after evening/ to converse with tangled roots and vines”—in his 20th books of poems. He continues to romanticize hardscrabble living—pumping well water, working in an auto factory—but this collection is less an update about the current political or social situation than it is news about Levine himself. He writes in an autobiographical mode, in long stanzas that flirt with iambic pentameter, while also encouraging the reader to participate as he describes “An actual place in the actual city/ where we all grew up.” Prose poems treat adventures in far away places (“You may hear that Australia is a continent. I lived there, I know it's an island”) while other poems recall Levine's past: “When my brother came home from war/ he carried his left arm in a black sling/ but assured us most of it was there.” While Levine charts no new territory, fans will happily get what they came for. (Oct.)

Muscular and musical, this second collection from Calvocoressi (The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart) combines boxing, Elvis, church burnings, sex and horses to produce a book that is pure Americana. Exploring the parameters of masculinity, Calvocoressi plays with the gender of the narrative voice from poem to poem, “Have you/ ever gotten hit or thrown against a wall?/ There's a sweetness to it, at that moment when/ your God would forgive you anything.” The result is a not unpleasant ambiguity. Unafraid of interacting poetically with severe subject matter, in “Fence” she describes the murder of Matthew Shepard in the voice of a disgusted everyman. “They took that boy and tied him to a fence/ and beat him till he didn't know his mother's/ name.” Boxing is the overlying theme of the collection; in “Fugue” Calvocoressi turns Rilke's “Archaic Torso” toward Duk-Koo Kim, the South Korean lightweight who died after a fight with Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini: “For here there is no television/ that does not see you.” Calvocoressi's poetic intensity makes energetic identity politics into verse: “Take my hand,/ take my whole life too. I've slicked/ my hair back, I've made myself/ a boy for you.” This is a compelling sophomore effort from a very promising poet. (Oct.)

In her new collection, Andrews (Sleeping with Houdini) takes a candid look at growing up in the South and puts vernacular speech at center stage. There's an abundance of lively phraseology to savor, and the joy of learning to make language one's own is palpable throughout. The chatter of family and neighbors rings out on almost every page, and expressions such as “dipping into our lives like a pumpkin vine in compost” delightfully animate this coming-of-age narrative. Andrews touches on both the idyllic and melancholy aspects of youth, from sitting on the floor to “fiddle/ with the stations on the radio/ and peel a dirty Band-Aid off so slow” to listening to Elvis and feeling “lonesome for that dusk that was all around me, the daylight fading so fast, I knew nothing ever lasts.” Whether writing in prose poems or short-lined free verse, Andrews's voice is marked by an effortlessness that can send the reader into a pleasing state of reverie; her art lies in her ability to transport readers to a place where it's possible to savor the waning of childhood innocence. (Oct.)

Pulitzer Prize–winner Glück's 11th collection is set in an unidentified rural hill town somewhere in the Mediterranean. Less narrative than it is impressionistic, the book takes its undulating shape from natural cycles—the obvious but nonetheless awesome impact of days and seasons changing. Glück has shown herself to be an astute, heartbreaking and often funny observer of everyday violence. In poems like “At the River” and “Marriage,” she tracks life's messy movement from innocence and curiosity through lust, loss, anger and resignation. However, the relationships she studies are as much to the land—with its single, looming mountain, worked fields and increasingly dried-up river—as between individuals. Glück's achievement in this collection is to show, through the exigencies of the place she has chosen, how interpersonal relationships are formed, shaped and broken by the particular landscape in which they unfurl. Though the poems are intimate and deeply sympathetic, there remains the suggestion of a distance between Glück and the village life she writes about. When she declaims, “No one really understands/ the savagery of this place,” it feels as though she is speaking less about her chosen subjects than about herself. (Sept.)

From the moment series editor David Lehman invokes the myth of Jacob wrestling the Angel in his introduction, the gloves are off in this year's installment of this popular annual anthology. Lehman devotes much of his introduction to throwing jabs at longtime sparring partner and professional poetry grump William Logan, whom Lehman calls “wounded” and “thin skinned.” Guest editor Wagoner chooses to abstain from the scuffle, but there's no denying the aesthetic character amassed by the poems he's selected: American poets not only want to talk about their country this year, they want to talk violence in (and toward) their country. “They came to blow up America,” writes John Ashbery, followed hard on his heels by Mark Bibbins, who warns our fifth state, “Connecticut! we're sawing you in half.” Denise Duhamel envisions “How It Will End” (“We look around, but no one is watching us”) and Rob Cook, in his bold and incantatory “Song of America,” tells us, “I'm raising my child to drown and drop dead and to carry buildings on his back.” It appears our poets are at last ready to confront the hysteria and violence of the past eight years, and who can say there's a better year than 2009 to begin. (Sept.)

Once more the Pulitzer Prize–winning Wright (God's Silence) delves into his own exceptionally troubled past and comes up with fractured and frightening—but also well-constructed and self-aware—poems about his former addictions, his inner depths and his recovery, giving thanks to his wife and to the Christian God. “I don't want to see a doctor/ I want to kill a doctor,” one poem opens. “And this is my alone/ song, it isn't/ long.” Wright's poetry of extremes has attracted both a wide audience and a sophisticated one: he speaks with terse authority about religious transcendence, crushing and even suicidal depression and well-known drug troubles—”Pretty soon you won't be doing that to get high./ You'll be doing it to get dressed.” If this collection differs from earlier volumes, it is in the kind and degree of attention that Wright pays to his father, the poet James Wright: “There's this line in an unpublished poem of yours./ The river is like that,/ a blind familiar.” Family matters, like much else, give Wright bleak grief: he turns, as he has often done in recent years, to religious faith, exploring his doubts but returning to his belief: “The world didn't give me this/ word, but// the world cannot take it away.” (Sept.)

Burcell's second novel to feature FBI forensic artist Sydney Fitzpatrick (after 2008's Face of a Killer) offers plenty of action, if not the freshest ideas. After Fitzpatrick helps identify the faceless corpse of a young woman as the daughter of the U.S. ambassador to the Holy See, Fitzpatrick decides to follow mysterious, predictably gruff covert government agent Zach Griffin to Rome. There they search for a “third key,” alluded to by a forensic anthropologist friend and colleague recently killed in a hit-and-run accident. Fitzpatrick and Griffin believe the key will lead them to a map, buried in the crypts of Rome or Naples, that may be connected to bioterrorism and a very bad guy named Carlo Adami. All this excitement takes them through standard variations on the Freemason conspiracy theory and a good deal of underground scrambling, Indiana Jones–style. It's all fun, if somewhat clichéd, and a little burdened by Fitzpatrick's many moments of brooding and indecision. (Dec.)

In Rowland's masterful 14th historical to feature Sano Ichiro, a year has passed since the events chronicled in 2008's The Fire Kimono, but the calm that has prevailed since the shogun made Sano and his archrival, Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu, co-chamberlains is about to be shattered. Maj. Kumazawa Hiroyuki, Sano's estranged uncle, comes to him for help after the major's 33-year-old daughter, Chiyo, disappears. The detective-turned-politician manages to find Chiyo, but not before she has been violated. The search for her assailant becomes more complicated once word reaches Sano that Chiyo was the third in a series of victims, following an elderly nun and a powerful gangster's teenage daughter. Established fans will be pleased by how Rowland has developed Sano's son, Masahiro, along with other secondary characters they have become attached to, while newcomers should find the people, plot and early 18th-century Japanese setting hard to resist. (Nov.)

Long-festering family secrets, treachery and worse threaten Sebastian St. Cyr in Harris's addictive fifth Regency-era mystery starring the dashing soldier-turned-sleuth (after 2008's Where Serpents Sleep). From the start, St. Cyr's mission is sensitive: finding out who killed the bishop of London, a leading candidate for archbishop of Canterbury, in the crypt of the same country church where the mummified body of another murder victim was discovered only hours earlier. It becomes downright dangerous once the charismatic viscount unearths the surprising connection between the men as well as the many powerful enemies with motives for their murder—including his own father. Harris weaves palpable period detail and romantic subplots with such ease that her occasional descriptive laziness, such as repeats of “fiercely blue St. Cyr eyes,” grates inordinately. But it shouldn't keep you from being swept up by her seductive antihero at his swashbuckling best. (Nov.)

Sister Fidelma encounters a raft of political, religious and cultural conundrums in Tremayne's engrossing 18th full-length novel to feature the seventh-century Celtic advocate (after 2008's Dancing with Demons). Accompanied by her companion, Eadulf, Fidelma journeys to the French city of Autun to serve as aide and adviser to Abbot Ségdae at a conference of church leaders. Before they arrive, one delegate is murdered and suspicion falls equally on two others who are bitter enemies. Bishop Leodegar charges Fidelma, because of her reputation as a sleuth, with determining which of the two is guilty of murder. Tremayne's seamless blend of church history (e.g., Pope Vitalian's efforts to impose Rome's authority over disparate western churches) and political squabbles (e.g., among Britons, Angles and Saxons) provide meaty background. Fidelma's ability to best opponents, whether in argument, strategy or audacity, makes her a heroine for any age. (Nov.)

The discovery early one Christmas morning of the bodies of best friends Jason Wyatt-Yarmouth and Ewan Williams, two privileged young men from Toronto, in an SUV sunken in an ice-covered river propels Delaney's stellar third mystery to feature constable Molly Smith of Trafalgar, B.C. (after Feb. 2009's Valley of the Lost). Molly investigates what at first appears to be an accident, but when the times and manner of Jason's and Ewan's deaths turn out to differ, she and her colleagues have a murder case on their hands. Whether at the Glacier Chalet B&B, on a black diamond ski trail or in the police station, Delaney glides between scenes with ease. She uses a bare-bones style, without literary flash, to achieve artistry as sturdy and restrained as a Shaker chair. Warmth and menace, past and present, are nicely balanced, with a denouement that's equally plausible and startling. This confident performance is sure to win new fans to the series. (Nov.)

College football star Ennis Skinner, whose reckless love affair with a drug addict, Alice “Faye” James, ruined his gridiron career, hopes for another shot at happiness in literary critic Curnutt's dark crime drama set in Montgomery, Ala. After Ennis, the son of a white civil rights hero, serves a 10-year prison sentence for drug dealing, High C, a former meth king who now peddles books like The Hit Man Handbook on the Web, asks Ennis to locate his missing, mentally challenged 19-year-old daughter, Dixie, whose mother was the now deceased Faye. Adding heat is the Montgomery mayoral race between white incumbent Amory Justice and African-American Walk Compson, who may have a link to Dixie. The author sensitively explores still simmering racial tensions in the South and inserts a lovely tribute to Zelda Fitzgerald, but a murky ending and an unconvincing twist to do with Dixie dissatisfy. This is Curnutt's second novel after Breathing Out the Ghost (2008). (Nov.)

Matt Royal displays an amusing gift for understatement—whether intended by the author or not—in Griffin's fourth mystery to feature the retired trial lawyer and Vietnam vet who makes Florida's Longboat Key his home (after 2008's Blood Island). When the book's love interest asks Royal what's going on after his car has been firebombed and, in another violent incident, shots fired at him, Royal responds, “I'm not sure. Someone's trying to kill me, I think.” Someone is indeed trying to stop Royal from pursuing the hit man who blew out the brains of a close friend, history professor Laurence Wyatt. Wyatt and a fellow Florida academic, who was gunned down on the same day, had been researching the Nazis and Vichy France. Amid the predictable shootouts and hostage takings, readers should be prepared for some awkward prose (e.g., “The death of a friend impales you with a barbed javelin of despair”). (Nov.)

In Graham's quirky second quilting mystery to feature Sheriff Marc Antony “Tony” Abernathy (after 2007's Murder by Serpents), what appears to be the stabbed corpse of Queen Doreen, the despised wife of the mayor of Silersville, Tenn., turns up under a “murder quilt” (an antique quilt with bloodstains). When Doreen appears at her own funeral, folks realize the victim is actually Doreen's look-alike half-sister. Meanwhile, Tony's wife, Theo, who owns Theo's Quilt Shop, has found skeletal remains behind her best friend's house, and a dying tipster has informed Tony that a female serial killer is on the county tax rolls. In addition, a rash of garden gnome thefts has the down-home locals in a tizzy. Cozy fans with a taste for tongue-in-cheek humor will enjoy the wacky crime solving. Quilters will welcome the pattern of “a mystery quilt” attributed to Theo, “Night on the Mountain.” (Nov.)

Ferris's spooky 13th needlecraft mystery (after 2008's Thai Die) finds Betsy Devonshire, owner of the Crewel World needlework shop, preparing for the upcoming Halloween festivities in Excelsior, Minn., along with a host of other locals, including Leona Cunningham, a Wiccan and senior partner in a microbrewery pub, who's mixing a new brew called “Don't Be Afraid of the Dark Ale.” When Ryan McMurphy, an auto mechanic who's offered his restored antique fire truck for the parade, turns up dead in a friend's basement sewing room, Betsy once again puts on her sleuthing cap. Some of the stitchers, who serve as a sort of friendly Greek chorus, are into blackwork, an intricate reversible form of embroidery. Instructions for a blackwork pattern, “Witchwork,” appear at the end. (Oct.)

The strange is matter-of-factly mundane in Canadian author and editor Lalumière's collection of 10 reprinted and two original stories of the surreal and fantastic. Deities and spiritual grace are both unfathomably alien and somehow less than you might expect when Lucifer makes a deal with the phone company (“A Place Where Nothing Ever Happens”) and likewise in the title story, where keeping your gods satisfied is like caring for extra-finicky but disturbingly powerful cats. Lalumière's love of comic book heroes informs the antics of “Hochelaga and Sons,” “Spiderkid” and “Destroyer of Worlds,” and the daily lives of zombies set the stage for the blackly comedic “The Ethical Treatment of Meat” and “A Visit to the Optometrist.” Even when the plots aren't quite enough to carry Lalumière's curious ideas, they're still intensely memorable. (Nov.)

Having repaired a dimensional rip and stopped a barbarian invasion in 2009's Noonshade, the Raven, a cohort of world-saving mercenaries, face a homegrown threat when Lyanna, the five-year-old daughter of two Raven members, manifests power that triggers natural disasters, devastating entire towns and swallowing castles whole. Navigating among somewhat random plot elements—four competing colleges of magic, witch hunters, guardians of elven lore and three stranded dragons—the Raven find their personal loyalties pitted against their team unity as they debate whether to save or sacrifice Lyanna. Barclay's characters have matured and aged since their first adventure, and while the cinematic and violent battle scenes will likely be the primary draw, readers will also get a few lessons about how would-be heroes handle obligations to family and friends. (Nov.)

Clarkesworld editor Wallace and former editor Mamatas present 25 stories published in the Hugo-shortlisted online magazine of the fantastic. Despite the editors' inexplicable decision to lead with Ken Scholes's saccharine “Summer in Paris, Light from the Sky,” a puerile tale about Hitler's implausible redemption in a shoddy alternate universe, most of the selections are noteworthy stories, such as Yoon Ha Lee's “Blue Ink,” a tale of alternate futures made personal, and Jeremiah Sturgill's “Flight,” wherein a quest for artificial beauty ventures into the grotesque. Stephen Graham Jones (“Captain's Lament”) and Samantha Henderson (“Curse”) skillfully reimagine well-known folklore and urban legends, and Stephen Dedman incorporates Edgar Allan Poe's work into the clever “Teeth.” Readers who get past the opener might even find themselves inclined to visit the magazine's website. (Nov.)

This exceptional collection of Smith's short fiction showcases the underrated pulp master's storytelling genius in 18 stories, most originally published between 1931 and 1935. In the dark fantasy gem “The Isle of the Torturers,” a king loses his realm to plague and seeks sanctuary on an island inhabited by sadists. The sublimely lyrical “The City of Singing Flame” describes a portal to a realm of unparalleled beauty and terror. Equal parts science fiction thriller and gut-wrenching horror, “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis” pits a team of Mars explorers against an unearthed nightmare. Though over 70 years old, these stories are still wonderfully weird and wildly entertaining, making this collection a timeless treasure to be cherished by fans of horror and the pulps. (Nov.)

Horror Grand Master Lansdale (Sanctified and Chicken-Fried) serves up a mishmash of essays and short fiction in his usual unapologetically cheerful style. “Just Do It” and “Typewriter Mystique, the Bull of It” offer advice to new writers, while four other essays explore the work of classic fantasy and science fiction authors. The short fiction ranges far and wide, from bleakly obsessive “Coat,” wherein a fashion faux pas leads to murder, to the silly “Jack's Pecker,” about a prodigal penis gamboling across Europe. From the arch and nasty epicurean fantasy of “Dragon Chili: From the Grand Church Cookbook” to the unrelenting darkness of “Surveillance” and “Rainy Weather,” Lansdale's stories are deliberate and ironic, invested with inevitability. A must for Lansdale completists, this short collection is also a nice introduction to this unique author's work. (Nov.)

Wearing her influences openly and simply, Marillier (Heir to Sevenwaters) incorporates familiar elements of mystery, fantasy and Irish history into a strong tale of very human romance. Trained by her father as a scribe, 18-year-old Caitrin yearns to practice her craft, but she must first escape a forced marriage to a brutal man. Her flight takes her to Whistling Tor, where the crippled, cursed chieftain Anluan rules over a wasteland of horrors. Against the odds, Caitrin makes a place for herself in a household of ghosts and in Anluan's heart, but when the Norman conquerors arrive, violence once again threatens to destroy everything she holds dear. Not innovative but eminently readable, Caitrin and Anluan's love story is bittersweetly realistic, best suited to romance readers who like a bit of fantasy rather than fantasy readers who like a bit of romance. (Nov.)

Genre-bending anthologists Kelly and Kessel (Rewired) select a wide range of post-1970 stories by authors who occupy the nebulous land between “literary” and “genre.” Offerings like Margaret Atwood's “Homelanding,” a vignette about alien life, and Steven Millhauser's “The Wizard of West Orange,” which conclusively demonstrates that any story centering around a new science is science fiction, make it clear that nongenre authors have been writing stories that appropriate many genre tropes. But while the title will attract genre fans, “li-fi” readers who might otherwise be drawn in by T.C. Boyle and Don DeLillo may well be put off by the Tachyon imprint and the words “science fiction,” undermining the editors' assertion that “the walls that separate the mainstream from science fiction are, in fact, crumbling.” (Nov.)

Though this omnibus volume of opera singer Marley's 1990s science fantasy trilogy gets off to a rocky start, overloading the reader with fabricated words and poorly elucidating its system of psionics, it soon settles into a rich story of cultural revolution. The singers of the ice planet Nevya use their musical psi-powers to hold back the deadly cold. In Sing the Light, young singer Sira loses faith in doctrine after a violent encounter with power-hungry politicians. She sets out on her own in Sing the Warmth, spending years gathering and training like-minded individuals. Her attempt at peaceful cultural change is nearly ended when the mad carver Cho attempts to take over Nevya in Receive the Gift. This tale of duty, loss, self-sacrifice and standing up for one's beliefs is occasionally gritty, often suspenseful and always emotionally gripping. (Nov.)

Lush landscapes and eerily beautiful quasi-human “fliers” don't quite compensate for a thin plot and jolting narrative shifts in the breathless sequel to 2008's The Silver Ship and the Sea. Biologically engineered Chelo Lee was cast out of the colony planet Fremont by her family and saved by her brother, Joseph, a pilot and “Wind Reader” who can create new human beings. She and Joseph now join their extended family on Lopali, which is considering entering a war against Islas, which opposes interference with divine prerogatives. Romantic entanglements hamper Joseph's efforts to help the local sterile fliers to reproduce and outwit rebel fliers' plots, all couched in adolescent cheekiness that dilutes Cooper's antiwar theme. Young adults may find this us-against-the-worlds excursion exciting, but more mature readers will growl with Joseph's dog, Sasha, who's rightly suspicious of oversimplifications. (Nov.)

Nolan (Science Fiction Origins) and Brock (Totems and Taboos) have put together a compelling anthology of dark short fiction that includes unused Twilight Zone scripts and unpublished work by the likes of Ray Bradbury and Richard Matheson. There's something for everyone in the 20 stories and scripts that span such genres as erotica (Nancy Kilpatrick's “Hope and the Maiden”), horror (Gary A. Braunbeck's “A Certain Disquieting Darkness”) and humor (Matheson's short screenplay “Madri-Gall”). Highlights include Bradbury's “Some of My Best Friends Are Martians,” John Shirley's violent ghost story “Just a Suggestion” and an excerpt from Dan O'Bannon's unproduced screenplay Omnivore. These pricy limited editions are aimed squarely at horror collectors, who will not be disappointed. (Nov.)

Campbell (Untouched) matches up two proud, wary victims of abuse in this smart Regency romance. Sir Gideon Trevithick, an English spy captured in India, was tortured for a year before rescuers brought him home as a national hero. After so long chained to his compatriots' corpses, he can't abide human touch, but he's still able to feel sympathy when he encounters battered Lady Charis Weston. She distrusts and despises men after being beaten by her greedy stepbrothers, who want to prevent her from inheriting a family fortune. Gideon tries to fight their growing attraction, believing the beautiful and warm Charis deserves better than a man so damaged by trauma and survivor's guilt, but Charis's clever plan to heal his wounded soul reveals delightful insight and leads to luscious love scenes. Readers will cheer for these lovable and well-crafted characters. (Nov.)

Francis (Path of Fate) begins her high-energy, gritty new Horngate Witches series by introducing Max, a magical warrior forced to serve her ex-roommate, “witch-bitch” Giselle. When the ancient Guardians of Earth decide to destroy the mortal world and recover its magic, Max discovers that she has been prophesied to save both her coven home and all humanity, and she must put aside her anger at her servitude to soothe coven rivalries and lead her fellow Shadowblades against powers much bigger than themselves. Emotions run mercurial, flashy and unsubtle throughout, and Max's near-invulnerability, self-healing and possession of an unrestricted wishstone make her more of a superhero than a woman dealing with real internal conflicts. The tough, feel-good, grand-scale supernatural fights, however, will keep action fans coming back for book after book. (Nov.)

Bestseller Sizemore launches the Vampire Book Club series with a far-future paranormal romance supposedly read by characters in her Primes novels (Primal Needs, etc.). Human diplomat Zoe Pappas is negotiating with the alien Asi when the enemy Hajim attack and seize her command ship. Taken to a prison planet where humans uneasily coexist with other species, Zoe finds that the human leader, the physically imposing Brig. Gen. Matthias Raven, refuses to allow any escape attempts. Disguised as a navy lieutenant, Zoe attempts to navigate the prison's unfamiliar system and her attraction to Matthias while hiding her powers and guarding a dangerous secret. When an unexpected threat closes in, they must join forces to save all the prisoners. Though technically a stand-alone, this tale will appeal most to Primes readers tickled by the idea of Sizemore writing her own fanfic. (Nov.)

Known for light fantasy, Kenner (Carpe Demon) takes a darker turn in this unremarkable addition to the legions of demon-huntress urban fantasy series. After Lily Carlyle dies while trying to kill her sister's stalker, an angel offers her another shot at life. Lily awakens in the body of Alice Purdue, a young waitress whose generically happy life rings false when Lily begins training to assassinate demons, but no one will tell Lily what really happened to the original Alice. Further confusing things is the clichéd mysteriously sexy Deacon Camphire, a man who saves her life but whose touch fills her with visions of horrifying darkness and incomprehensible lust. As her supernatural abilities grow, Lily finds herself becoming more like the monsters she hunts. A few twists to Lily's angst and the requisite world-saving prophecy make this otherwise middling story worthwhile. (Nov.)

These latest tales from the art comics trailblazers are sure to draw readers in with their melancholic tone and the adventurous comic art that has enthralled readers for decades. The volume is bookended with Jaime's Ti-Girls stories. In the first, titled “Daughters of Doom,” we see Jaime's superheroes going wild, both narratively and visually. The caped and powerful Ti-Girls fight, fly and reflect on the changes taking place in their universe. Gilbert's stories stand at the center of the volume. “Sad Girl” is the story of a busty teenager nicknamed Killer. The story follows her as she tries to get back at her ex for dumping her by acting in a movie that everyone is wrongly convinced is porn. This is classic character-driven storytelling from Gilbert and will be welcomed by all the Luba fans out there. His second story, “Hypnotwist,” is the cherry on top of this volume, with its wordless narrative of a beautiful young woman who travels the streets of a dark city, seeing strange, lovely and horrifying sights along the way. The narrative's dreamlike quality and its rich and mesmerizing imagery make it a surreal tour de force. (Oct.)

The Comicbook Artists Guild is a networking group that publishes a yearly anthology to promote the work of its members. This one has 10 tales in all, based on existing characters, whether legendary—Sherlock Holmes, John Henry, the ghost of Ebenezer Scrooge—or historic—Mark Twain. The story that asserts that Gustave Whitehead, not the Wright Brothers, flew first reads like propaganda. (Since the CAG aims to get this book into schools, having a character say “The truth isn't always what we learn in school” may be problematic.) Others are straight retellings in odd settings, Robin Hood as a western or Prometheus as a scientist fighting supersoldiers. The choice to present existing tales with a twist instead of having writers create their own stories and characters is strange and sometimes unimaginative; several of the stories require the reader to know the previous version in order to appreciate them. Most of the art is at least competent, although some demonstrate the lack of backgrounds and inconsistency from panel to panel that mark the artists as “aspiring” instead of “accomplished.” Overall, the project has good intentions, but the result is a middling selection of mediocre heroic tales. (Sept.)

Kuper has long been among the most politically engaged and stylistically distinctive artists working in comics, and both qualities take center stage here. This dazzling annotated sketchbook recounts two years Kuper and his family spent living in Oaxaca, Mexico. Anticipating a sojourn from American politics, Kuper instead found himself in a city roiled by a teachers' strike that was violently suppressed by the regional government. He recorded his observations in his sketchbook and in illustrated letters home, crisply reproduced in this bilingual (English and Spanish) book. Kuper's facility with diverse art media shines in early pages covering political action, as colorfully penciled protestors stand against rigidly inked military barricades set against the lush backdrops of Oaxaca. As the populist forces are rapidly suppressed, Kuper records a panoply of further visual impressions: beaches, stores, dogs, vendors, ancient ruins, street art and many, many insects. Throughout, Kuper's letters, rooted in personal observation but clearly intended as eyewitness reports for public consumption, provide helpful context. And if his increasingly profuse style mixing suggests a departure from earlier visual in the book, the final observations about a beautiful, merciless natural order obliquely ratify the political convictions that open the book. (Sept.)

Kitchen is a veteran cartoonist, having been publishing her work for the past five years. That's not unusual. The surprising part is that she's 10 years old, and what she lacks in technical skill she makes up for in brio. Call her the real life Greg Heffley. It's fascinating to see which parts of a mature cartoonist's skill set she's just beginning to develop—proportion, observation, storytelling—and which are already pretty much there. She can compose a panel or a page at least as well as most cartoonists three times her age, and her gag writing has absorbed a lot from her older colleagues. (Matt Groening is a particular influence.) Unsurprisingly, Kitchen's protagonists Kathy Ford, Molly, Sharon and Hurricane Abby are all preteen girls a lot like her. Her sense of humor is unmistakably a 10-year-old's idea of what's funny—messy bedrooms (drawn with scribbly glee) and annoying siblings are reliable sources of comedy. But there are some unexpectedly calm, pensive moments, too, particularly a wordless two-page strip about the frustrations and consolations of art. As a look inside a very young artist's mind, Kitchen's work is pretty charming; aspiring preteen cartoonists may find it inspirational. (Sept.)