Fiction Reviews: Week of 4/30/2007

The past wrecks the male members of the Mirsky family differently in story writer Havazelet’s haunting debut novel, his first book since 1998’s Like Never Before. Growing up in early 1970s Queens, Nathan Mirsky idolizes his older brother, Daniel, a student antiwar activist at Columbia University, but after Daniel moves to the West Coast and begins a downward spiral into addiction, the brothers grow apart. Twenty years later, Nathan, a medical resident in Boston, receives a letter from Daniel mailed the same day Daniel was murdered. Their father, Sol, a widower and Holocaust survivor compiling an archive of Holocaust stories, accompanies Nathan to San Francisco to learn more about Daniel’s death. There they meet Daniel’s lover, Abby, and her six-year-old son, Ben (who isn’t Daniel’s). The story reveals less about Daniel’s death than about the accumulated grievances and regrets that comprise his, as well as his father’s, legacies. Havazelet treats painful subjects—the death of an infant, concentration camp scenes—with wrenching understatement, and his depictions of Nathan’s therapy sessions provide insight and levity. The novel ends on a surprisingly optimistic note, but what lingers are its portraits of people bearing the weight of their family history. (Aug.)

Ten elegant stories from Welsh author Hadley (Everything Will Be All Right) explore the various stages of women’s experience. The title story, set at a seaside cottage in Wales and told in an austerely omniscient voice, tracks two attractive early-30ish mothers, one married, the other partnered, who each begin a flirtation with a visiting doctor friend. In “Mother’s Son,” the other woman in an adulterous affair that ended 20 years before finds herself ruefully counseling her grown son—the product of the affair—on dealing with his romantic troubles. Each of these beautifully crafted tales (some set in the 1970s) encapsulates a tender, transformative moment for these real characters, such as the provincial vicar’s daughter in “Buckets of Blood” sent up to visit her older sister in Cambridge for the week who finds, to her horror and disappointment, her sister reeling from a miscarriage that puts her, like their worn-out mother, among the “ranks of women submerged and knowing amid their biology.” In another tale, a man tracks down the now matronly woman who flirted with him when he was a blushing 13-year-old on a seaside holiday with his family 25 years before. Hadley’s eerie, knowing portrayals speak to the heart as much as the mind. (Aug.)

Pettiness, backstabbing, social striving and tit-for-tat favors are “the gasoline in this town”—Washington, D.C.—in the third fast-paced, entertaining Beltway sendup from New Yorker editor Frank (following The Columnist and Bad Publicity). As the Clintons make way for the Bushes in 2000–2001, the novel follows Trudy Hopedale, television host of a certain age and D.C. social mainstay, who is fast fading into political and social obsolescence. Trudy’s husband, Roger, is a retired career Foreign Service man with a shady past who is working on an embarrassing novel, while “handsome and brilliant” vice-presidential biographer Donald Frizzé is suffering from writer’s block. As the gelling Bush administration creates shifting power dynamics and loyalties, readers must read between the lines to gather information from these three very different unreliable narrators, each with secrets and ulterior motives of his or her own. Supporting cast members are one-dimensional, and Trudy can seem too petty even for satire, but Frank’s lively writing and sharp eye for the story’s fourth major character, the “soiled town” that is political Washington, carry the day. (July)

Malouf, who won the Commonwealth Prize for his novel The Great World, is a master storyteller whose imagination inhabits shocking violence, quick humor, appealing warmth and harsh cruelty with equal intensity. Three previous collections (Dream Stuff, etc.) and a section of new work comprise this engrossing compilation of the Australian writer’s shorter work. Several stories are rooted in that continent’s hardscrabble interior and coastal enclaves; others are set in Australia’s past. The youthful dreams, physical desires and psychic despair of Malouf’s richly varied characters, however, are wholly universal. Older standouts include “The Prowler,” about suburban hysteria in the wake of an omnipresent rapist’s ability to evade capture, and “Lone Pine,” among the collection’s shortest stories but packing a horrific punch, in which a carefree holiday couple is murdered by a crazed young man. New stories include “The Valley of Lagoons,” about a young man’s searing coming-of-age when he’s allowed to join his peers on a tradition-rich hunt, and “Elsewhere,” which follows a sad rural father who ventures from the country to Sydney for his estranged daughter’s funeral. Readers won’t want to skim a single page of the 31 stories in this epic collection, a few of which are novella length. Together, they represent a quarter-century of a formidable craftsman’s career. (July)

Occupying a seat on a Riker’s Island–bound bus crowded with menacing, diamond-studded pimps is just another day in the life of Holly Mattox, the self-consciously attractive newlywed protagonist of Muske-Dukes’s fourth novel. Set in 1970s New York City, the novel follows Holly as she becomes increasingly, and perhaps dangerously, involved with the female inmates who attend her jailhouse poetry workshops. Undeterred by the catty disapproval of her literary contemporaries, Holly forges on, leading a class of bickering inmates, including mentally disturbed Billie Dee, transgendered Gene/Jean, God-fearing Darlene and fragile, heavily sedated Polly Lyle Clement, who claims to be the great-granddaughter of Mark Twain. (Twain also, Polly claims, speaks through her.) An affair with fellow scribe Sam Glass threatens Holly’s young marriage as Polly gets thrown into solitary for her possible involvement in another inmate’s jailbreak. The jail administration wants Holly to extract information from a delusional Polly, but Polly could be crumbling too fast for Holly to save her. Prisoners’ poems appear throughout and afford a sometimes hilarious, sometimes stark look beneath the inmates’ grizzled exteriors. Fiction with a political conscience often sacrifices craft in favor of driving home a message, but Muske-Dukes pulls it off. (July)

Violinist for the magnificent Emerson String Quartet, whose interpretations of Beethoven and Shostakovich are unparalleled, Drucker has written a haunting novel of the waning days of WWII. When a Kommandant orders him to play the violin for an audience of near-death concentration camp detainees, young musician Gottfried Keller is forced to participate in a ghastly experiment with hope. Repelled, Gottfried reluctantly complies: “it would have been easier to face a row of corpses in a morgue.” Over the four days he serves as camp musician, Gottfried reminisces about his treatment of his Jewish former girlfriend, Marietta, and of his Jewish schoolmate friend, Ernst, a violinist who fled as the Nazis took power. (Drucker’s own violinist father emigrated to the U.S. in 1938.) As the days wear on, Gottfried attempts to separate himself from the nightmare of the camp by trying not to comprehend what is taking place there, and it is here, Drucker intimates, that his culpability lies, especially as Gottfried begins to draw inspiration from his audience. Drucker writes lyrically about the music Gottfried plays (including Ysaÿe’s “L’Aurore”), and his morality tale has bite. (July)

First-time novelist Mitchell pulls off the dazzling trick of allowing readers to see through the eyes of art-photography pioneer Edward Steichen in her excellent reconsideration of his life and art. This would be merely impressive if the book confined itself to the stormy end of Steichen’s first marriage, a subtheme that gets its due and packs a psychological punch. Instead, Mitchell follows Steichen through his airborne reconnaissance work during WWI, providing a devastating portrait of the insanity of war in general and the Great War in particular. Throughout, individual photographs are described in detail, along with surprisingly rich narratives—some reconstructed, some imagined—filling in the stories behind the pictures. Most powerful are the descriptions of what Steichen saw from the air, such as his view of Americans chasing a group of Germans and killing them all, including one who tried to escape. The book offers up glimpses of Paris and the French countryside, including memorable scenes of Steichen’s visit to his good friend and mentor, sculptor August Rodin, but in the end, this commanding novel is about the images one can never quite burn from memory. (June)

David, who has written about celebrities for glossy mags, delivers the saga of Amelia Stone, who writes about celebrities for a trashy gossip magazine. Amelia’s on the L.A. merry-go-round of sex, booze and drugs, and she likes the ride and the A-list company. The patter is bubbly and witty, whether Amelia is getting in trouble at work, getting tangled up in another sexual exploit, snorting lines or puking on herself. Then her parents send her to a luxe rehab clinic after she ODs and gets fired, and on her last day there she learns she’s been tapped, on the basis of her wild reputation, to write a column for a major magazine. The hitch? She’s now sober, something she’s afraid to admit to her employer. Amelia’s deliberation on this point is drawn out, though David finds a steady supply of material in Amelia’s closet sobriety. Between fake vodka shots and interest from HBO to turn her column into a series (yes, really), Amelia finds her way to a happy, sober ending. There will be inevitable comparisons to Sex and the City (Amelia is certainly cast in the Carrie Bradshaw mold), but pink book jacket connoisseurs will likely prefer the original. (June)

Land’s 2004 memoir, Goat, which told of his abduction and beating at the hands of two hitchhikers as well as the fraternity hazing he suffered at Clemson University, portrayed a powerless postadolescent male at odds with a violent culture. A similar theme informs his glum first novel, a plodding study of teenage angst featuring 15-year-old Terry Webber, who lives in a South Carolina textile factory town with his shift foreman father (his mother committed suicide when Terry was a toddler). Terry smokes a lot (cigarettes, pot), fights with his dad and ritually cuts himself. He falls for Alice Washington, an odd girl who, apropos of nothing, says things like: “Could you be still with me? When everything else is so loud I fall down?” The two light out for Colorado where Alice’s sister lives on a commune, but Alice abruptly dies in a car wreck. The death and a move to yet another crap town sends Terry spiraling. Without much narrative direction, attention is drawn to the spare prose, which has a Prozac flatness. (June)

Set in the remote Scottish Shetland Islands, Cleeves’s taut, atmospheric thriller, the first in a new series, will keep readers guessing until the last page. Det. Insp. Jimmy Perez investigates the murder of teenage Catherine Ross, found strangled on a snowy hillside shortly after New Year’s. While the police and citizens alike are quick to lay the blame on local eccentric Magnus Tait, who was not only the last person to see Catherine alive but also the prime suspect in the disappearance eight years earlier of another girl, Perez has his doubts. He’s soon drawn into an intricate web of lies as he unearths the long-buried secrets of everyone from a roguish playboy to Catherine’s only school friend. Cleeves, winner of the CWA’s Duncan Lawrie Dagger Award (formerly the Gold Dagger), masterfully paints Perez as an empathetic hero and sprinkles the story with a lively cast of supporting characters who help bring the Shetlands alive. When the shocking identity of the murderer is revealed, readers will be as chilled as the harsh winds that batter the isolated islands. (June)

Must Love Dogs author Cook returns with Ginger Walsh, 41, who has ditched her job in sales and moved above her parent’s garage with a cat she calls Boyfriend— despite (or because of) her casual relationship with alluring glassblower Noah. As big sister Geri gets anxious about her impending 50th, their parents decide to sell the house, and Geri’s second-grader Riley lands a small role in a horror movie being filmed in their quaint New England town. Ginger babysits Riley on the set and meets a gaffer who may be charming enough to make her forget all about Noah. Cook’s wit and unflagging heart save this moderately paced beach read from its anticlimactic ending. (June)

Bestseller Green (Swapping Lives, The Other Woman) injects a topical note into an otherwise paint-by-numbers work. After a terrorist attack on an Amtrak train kills 39-year-old Tom, his death serves as the catalyst for changes in the lives of four estranged schoolmates he left behind in England. Reuniting at Tom’s memorial service are Holly, a former free spirit uncomfortably forced into becoming a suburban matron by her workaholic, social-climbing husband; Olivia, a lonely director of an animal shelter; Paul, a writer whose blissful marriage with his fashionable wife is marred by their inability to conceive; and Saffron, a recovering alcoholic actress secretly involved with a married Hollywood megastar. Tom’s death reignites their friendship, causes them to reevaluate their lives and sends them marching toward a concluding warm fuzzy. Green’s writing is competent, though her characters feel more like embodiments of their problems than actual people. There are few surprises, but the fairy tale ending should appease Green’s many fans. (June)

Martin’s first novel leisurely unfolds in the manner of Southern tall tales and oral tradition, imparting magic and meaning into smalltown 1970s Georgia. Earl Mulvaney, a clueless but kindhearted high school dropout whose facility as a mechanic is nearly supernatural, is in love with the bookish girl next door, Ellen Raley. Their short-lived romance is interrupted when Ellen discovers she’s pregnant with her previous beau’s child. Ellen marries Troy, the lovable football player who subsequently becomes Earl’s best friend, and Earl goes to work for a used car dealer whose ideas about the evolution of cars makes him the ideal benefactor for Earl’s plan to build a Corvette out of leftover parts. Though Earl and Ellen remain in love, they content themselves with memories, daydreams and secret notes passed via books checked out from the library. Told from the perspective of the town librarian (whose reliability is questionable—he is convinced he once saw a brontosaurus), the novel has a folkloric patina of exaggeration that renders the characters’ quirks and foibles endearing rather than forced, though the pacing can grind to a halt. Martin’s debut novel is a grand if meandering charmer. (June)

After four months’ convalescent leave, MI5 spy Liz Carlyle, returning from her debut in Rimington’s At Risk, confers with her agent Marzipan, an Islamic bookshop clerk who has discovered a probable terror plot in the making. Soon after, Liz is charged with finding an IRA mole within the ranks of MI5. With the aid of fresh-faced co-worker Peggy Kinsolving, Liz goes about the task of ferreting out the mole, despite disappointment at being taken off the terror case, which she can’t quite let go—with, it turns out, good reason. Much is made of the authenticity of Rimington’s tradecraft (she was the first female head of MI5 in real life), and rightly so. But lots of writers get the details right, and for many readers, Rimington’s ratio of action to personal detail will seem skewed: every character, no matter how minor, gets heavily profiled, and it slows things down. Still, those interested in old school British intelligence thrillers will find much to like in the smart, enterprising Carlyle. (June)

At the start of bestseller Coulter’s gripping 11th FBI thriller (after Point Blank), Julia Ransom is enjoying a liberating stroll on San Francisco’s Pier 39 after having been suspected of the brutal murder of her renowned psychic husband, Dr. August Ransom, six months earlier and hounded by the media. When an unknown assailant throws Julia off the pier, FBI Special Agent Cheney Stone rescues her. Stone later senses a link between the attack and the death of Julia’s husband. Meanwhile in Virginia, Sheriff Dixon Noble is finally feeling his life is getting back to normal after his wife went missing three years earlier. When Noble comes to San Francisco to pursue a lead into his wife’s disappearance, he gets involved in a harrowing investigation with Stone into both mysteries. As usual, the author conjures strong visual images, particularly a wild car chase through the streets of San Francisco. Credible characters and a fascinating look at the world of psychics and thieves help make this one of Coulter’s best. (June)

This engaging novel from Argentinian Kaufmann (1969–2006) traces the life and times of the Belle of Amherst through the eyes of her mostly forgotten younger sister, Lavinia Dickinson, or Vinnie. It opens with Vinnie contemplating the 10-year anniversary of her sister’s death, then leads us into a reminiscence of the unusual childhoods of the three Dickinson children (including the eldest, brother Austin), marked by the rigidities and detachment of both parents. As for the agoraphobia and eccentricities that marked Dickinson’s later years, including her insistence on wearing only white clothes and refusing to see anyone outside of family or close friends, Kaufmann’s Vinnie suggests that some of Dickinson’s oddities may have been purposely adopted. The final third is devoted to an examination of Vinnie’s legal entanglements with her brother’s mistress, Mabel Loomis Todd, who famously co-edited the first collection of the poems. Although Kaufmann’s prose does not rise to the magnificence of Dickinson’s poetry—what could?—she writes lovingly about the poetry itself, describing the poems as “wild children raised in a wild garden.” Her book is a must-read for Dickinson fans, exploring the motives and secret desires of one of our most mysterious literary artists. (June)

Meyer (Battlefield of the Mind), a Christian motivational speaker and bestselling nonfiction author, and inspirational fiction’s Bedford (Remember Me) are the newest inspirational one-two punch with this novel that pairs Bedford’s solid writing with Meyer’s popular ministry messages. Set in St. Louis in the racial hotbed of the mid-1950s, the story’s protagonist is the sexually abused adolescent, Jenny Blake. “All my life has been shaped by other people’s hands. Daddy slapping me, Mama never hugging me, Jean pointing a finger of criticism at me....” When Jenny picks up a penny in the street, she sets off a chain of events that results in her working for the mysterious Miss Opal Shaw, who teaches her the importance of unconditional love, grace, patience and forgiveness. Bedford has a penchant for similes, but crafts some memorable phrases, such as when Jenny’s best friend teaches her how to dance: “Move like you’re writing cursive on the wall with your backside.” The penny motif is used throughout in believable and sometimes less believable ways, as is a Grace Kelly metaphor. Meyer fans will easily recognize her themes of overcoming difficulties and shame through God’s love and positive thinking. A film version’s late 2007 release should help ensure that this book receives plenty of attention. (June)

In Eisler’s predictable sixth thriller to star half Japanese, half American assassin John Rain (after 2006’s The Last Assassin), Rain’s longtime rival, rogue CIA agent Jim Hilger, kidnaps Rain’s sniper friend Dox and threatens to kill Dox unless Rain murders three people Hilger wants dead. Despite his ambivalence about his chosen trade, Rain carries out the hits with little remorse. Rain’s adventures take him to the usual glamorous locales—Paris, London, Amsterdam—while throughout he remains nostalgic for his Japanese heritage. In a subplot, Rain’s Mossad agent lover, Delilah, enlists some Israeli colleagues in an attempt to foil a major terrorist plot. The revelation of why the three murder victims were selected comes as the book’s one real surprise. 150,000 first printing; author tour. (June)

Goldman’s engrossing romantic suspense debut centers on the explosive secrets within the diary of Annie Williams, which charts her enduring friendship with high school classmate Lindsey Wilson that began in 1950s Dallas and is tested by unwed pregnancies and broken hearts. Lindsey grows up to become the unhappy wife of U.S. senator James “Buddy” Mitchell and the secret lover of Frances Zacchoias, a Greek entrepreneur who owns a popular downtown eatery. Lindsey’s sudden death shocks Dallas, and her funeral reunites David Matthews, Lindsey’s ex-boyfriend and prominent criminal lawyer, with Annie and Dallas socialite Roberta “Butter” Duplissey, both of whom he also dated. David, recently married to his third wife, Taylor, receives another jolt when Butter shows up at his office with Annie’s stolen diary and says, “Read, it David... read it and weep.” Butter’s subsequent murder in David’s office marks Taylor as a prime suspect. All the major players in this tautly plotted thriller must cope with life-changing discoveries. A clever “uh-oh” ending promises a sequel. (June)

The secret demons of globe-trotting journalist Nadine, 35, form the core of this contrived but earnestly observed third novel from Ward (How to Be Lost). Badly injured by thugs while pursuing a story outside of Mexico City, Nadine wakes up at her estranged father and stepmother-to-be’s Cape Cod B&B, under the care of the perhaps too interested Dr. Duarte. The unhappily confined Nadine reads a story about a local couple who are traveling to Cape Town, South Africa, for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings: testifying will be the young, black woman who killed their white son, a visiting American teacher, in 1988. Told to rest by her bureau, Nadine decides to cover the story on her own. On a flight from Nantucket to Cape Town, Nadine finds herself next to the local couple, who furtively give Nadine their son’s boyhood journal. It’s not Nadine’s first trip to Cape Town: she spent years there as a fledgling journalist, and lost her one love, Maxim, there; the soul-wrenching revelations of the murdered man’s diary bring Nadine face-to-face with her own personal and professional pasts, and force her to make difficult decisions about her future. A disjointed narrative, stilted dialogue and contrived plot mechanics make hard work of what is otherwise an ambitious morality play. (June)

Bestseller Clark, a CBS News writer and producer for many years, does only a superficial job of portraying the behind-the-scenes backstabbing and intrigue at a major network in this first of a new series, a sequel of sorts to her KEY News thrillers (Lights Out Tonight, etc.). When Constance Young, a Katie Couric–like mega–news star, is found dead in her pool, New York evening news anchor Eliza Blake, producer Annabelle Murphy and cameraman B.J. D’Elia join forces with psychiatrist Margo Gonzalez to investigate. Young died on the eve of her debut as morning host on a rival network, and her selfish, abrasive personality made her many enemies, ranging from her former boss to a nerdy millionaire who stole a rare Arthurian ivory figurine in an effort to win her heart. Others have evoked this world more convincingly, notably the late Bill DeAndrea in his Matt Cobb series, and the sleuths miss an obvious clue that “any six-year-old” could have figured out, as one character concedes at the end. (June)

In a fun specimen of Christian chick lit, popular novelist Carlson (Homeward; Finding Alice) introduces a charming new protagonist, Cassidy Cantrell. As the novel opens, Cassidy is having a disastrous week: first she gets fired, and her beau of three years dumps her for a sweet young thing he met in church. Next, Cassidy’s neighbor steals her credit card and runs up thousands of dollars on it. Pretty soon, Cassidy has no choice but to give up her swanky apartment and move back home to rural Black Bear, Wash. She finds a surprise there, too: her 55-year-old mother, who used to be frumpy and overweight, got a new look after Cassidy’s dad flew the coop and is now dating men half her age. Gradually, Cassidy comes into her own, joining a gym and finding a new job and romance. Indeed, before she knows it, eligible men are chasing her. She’s a terrifically likable character, and readers will enjoy following her exploits. Cassidy’s Christian faith plays a significant yet refreshingly subtle role in this novel. And if the overarching plot—the transformation from plump, unemployed and depressed urbanite to svelte, desirable hometown princess—is predictable, Carlson manages to keep readers guessing about which man Cassidy will pick. (June)

Actors David Niven and Peter Ustinov, along with James Bond creator Ian Fleming, all of whom actually served Britain in WWII, help the heroes of Griffin’s Men at War series deceive the Germans in this solid sixth installment (after 2006’s The Saboteurs) from the bestselling author and his son, Butterworth. In 1943, the OSS’s William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan spearheads a disinformation effort to trick the Nazis into believing that the western Allies won’t invade the European continent through Sicily. One of Donovan’s most accomplished operatives, USAAF Maj. Richard Canidy, devises a clever scheme (albeit one familiar to readers of Ewen Montagu’s The Man Who Never Was) to plant phony plans on a corpse, along with love letters drafted by the requisite attractive female spy. Some fans may find the prominent role of the real-life celebrities a distraction, but all will enjoy the suspenseful ride. (June)

A stroke-impaired former PI, Steve Babe, struggles to solve a murder in Beres’s muddled second thriller (after The President’s Nemesis). Steve is recuperating in a Chicago rehab facility known to its patients as Hell in the Woods when an elderly fellow patient, Marjorie Gianetti, dies after apparently slipping and falling in a hallway late one evening. Suspecting foul play, Steve starts to investigate, despite his mental confusion. His efforts attract the attention of both the killer and a shadowy pair of intelligence agents who may be attempting to cover up an old political scandal. Predictable action sequences, including an abduction and numerous gun battles, follow. The revelation of the motive for the conspiracy, improbably centering on Jimmy Carter, may cause some unintended chuckles. A convoluted plot and awkward prose combine to undercut the author’s sensitive portrait of his hero coping with his disability. (June)

Irish actress-turned-novelist Carroll (He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not) draws on her experience as a soap opera star to trace the checkered romantic history of a successful Dublin television producer. Amelia Lockwood, 37 and unmarried, is haunted by a recurring vision of herself in a Vera Wang dress accompanied by a headless groom. To find love, she resorts to a seminar that requires her to revisit old boyfriends and do a kind of “exit interview” to find out what she’s been doing wrong. Her stable of college friends (“the Lovely Girls”) mock her, but Amelia settles in for a jaunty ride through a rogue’s galley of exes. Carroll works the work vs. love trade-off with outrageous comic detours and gives Amelia a sincere but sharp-witted voice. (June)

A riveting interior monologue by Lebanese novelist al-Daif (This Side of Innocence) penetrates the deep-seated anxiety of a middle-aged Beirut-based literature professor after he hears about his father’s tribal murder. First-person narrator Rashid prides himself on being “a contemporary person,” educated in French, learning English (it is “the language,” according to Rashid) and happily removed from the primitive customs of his hometown, Zgharta. However, the shocking news he hears secondhand of his father’s murder by “blood revenge” plunges him into his family’s shameful history and draws into question his own paternity. Over the course of a day spent at home awaiting more news from Zgharta, Rashid sifts through his memories of his mother and father’s troubled marriage: his father’s cruelty toward his mother when he discovered she had lost her virginity to his rival, the role of scheming uncles and his mother’s love for and abandoned plans to escape with the other man. Narrator Rashid dredges these conundrums without resolution, while feeling pulled to return home as his father’s son and make order of the chaotic household. The Haydars’ pristine translation captures Rashid’s conflictedness and leaves intact al-Daif’s wordplay, making this a fine introduction to Arabic fiction. (June)

Edgar-finalist Abbott (Die a Little) delivers a sharp, slender, hardboiled tale of a protégé’s schooling by a notorious, been-there-done-that moll. The first time the unnamed 22-year-old female narrator lays eyes on Gloria Denton, her first thought is “I want the legs.” The setting is the Club Tee Hee, an indeterminate Las Vegas–L.A. nowhere where “the kid” is doing the mobbed-up books, and Gloria comes in every few weeks to count “Jerome’s vig.” The kid absorbs very entertaining lessons in how to dress, move, behave, and how to pick up, transport and distribute payoffs and winnings—until she falls for sweet-talking gambler Vic Riordan. Abbott is pitch-perfect throughout: Gloria Denton, still turning heads in her 40s, is as hard a moll as any, and the kid is a beautiful combination of foil and tool as she strives to emulate her role model. The collision, violent and inevitable, rips away the facade of glitz and glamour, and leaves their low-end edifice starkly exposed. (June)

Admissions counselor Eugenia “Genie” Michaels has dated professor-turned-author Hugh Spencer for four years, patiently waiting him out. When Hugh’s bestselling novel lands him on TV, Genie’s loved ones tuning in are surprised to see him make an on-air proposal to “the love of his life.” All assume it’s Genie, but off camera, Hugh confesses to an affair, escapes to England for the summer and leaves Genie to do the explaining. Best friend Patty proposes that, rather than moping, Genie keep her mouth shut and enjoy being “engaged” while it lasts. Soon, Genie’s sporting a giant, self-purchased cubic zirconia ring, and masses of wedding gifts begin to arrive at her office. As the inevitable approaches, there’s plenty of opportunity for sticky situation comedy, including handsome, charming carpenter Nick, and Strohmeyer nails it at every unpredictable turn. (June)

Prolific novelist Hunt knows how to hold a reader’s interest, and her latest yarn is no exception. As Hurricane Felix races toward Tampa, three women’s paths unexpectedly converge when they’re marooned in an elevator. The action takes place over the course of one tension-packed day. Michelle Tilson is a smart, 33-year-old headhunter who is apt to fudge the truth in the interests of more business. She’s in a passionate relationship with a widower, who’s reluctant to introduce her to his three children. Michelle’s biological clock is ticking, and when she discovers she is pregnant, she’s ready to press for a commitment. When Michelle boards the elevator to give her lover the news—instead of fleeing the impending disaster—she’s joined by office cleaner Isabel Suarez, who has a frightening secret, and Gina Rossman, who is on her way to confront her workaholic husband about his extramarital affair. Trapped, the women discuss relationships and faith, and make some startling discoveries. Although the idea of characters stuck in an elevator is nothing new, Hunt packs the maximum amount of drama into her story, and the pages turn quickly. The present tense narration lends urgency as the perspective switches among various characters. Readers may decide to take the stairs after finishing this thriller. (July)

Bestseller Koontz (The Husband) delivers a thriller so compelling many readers will race through the book in one sitting. In the Hitchcockian opening, which resembles that of the cult noir film Red Rock West (1992), Timothy Carrier, a quiet stone mason having a beer in a California bar, meets a stranger who mistakes him for a hit man. The stranger slips Tim a manila envelope containing $10,000 in cash and a photo of the intended victim, Linda Paquette, a writer in Laguna Beach, then leaves. A moment later, Krait, the real killer, shows up and assumes Tim is his client. Tim manages to distract Krait from immediately carrying out the hit by saying he’s had a change of heart and offering Krait the $10,000 he just received. This ploy gives the stone mason enough time to warn Linda before they begin a frantic flight for their lives. While it may be a stretch that the first man wouldn’t do a better job of confirming Tim’s identity, the novel’s breathless pacing, clever twists and adroit characterizations all add up to superior entertainment. (May 29)

At age 33, in search of a man, a second novel and a life, Manhattan writer Rebekah Kettle occupies the singleton’s circle of hell. Having defaulted on her book contract, she’s reduced to working as a physician’s assistant for her eccentric dad, her only meaningful relationship with a senile old woman with whom she wallows in Little House on the Prairie reruns. And she’s plagued by a bitchy, big-breasted gossip columnist who wants her to blurb her book. One bright spot: her brain tumor isn’t fatal. The unlikely catalyst for Rebekah’s recovery is her obsession with Woody Allenesque director Arthur Weeman. She begins dating a sympatico young Weeman look-alike and rekindles her creative spark by writing the filmmaker flirty letters in the voice of a 12-year-old girl. When she spies Weeman in a compromising position, she reexamines her own romantic history with much older men, beginning with her middle-school defloration and subsequent abortion. Belle (High Maintenance; Going Down) sometimes loses the story amid a swirl of wisecracking, madcap moments, and the tone she uses on her more intense psychosexual material doesn’t always work. Still, she’s in fine form, and her sensibility sparkles with offbeat humor. (May)

The latest engaging, indefinable work from Markson (Vanishing Point) proves to be something between a writer’s commonplace book and La Rochefoucauld’s satirically aphoristic Maxims. A set of absorbing factoids and musings—from and about a variety of literary and historical notables—comprise his narrator’s “last novel.” With a delight in experimentation, Markson manages to insinuate a sober narrative voice between and among the words of the greats. After a quote from Eugene V. Debs (“Nobody can be nobody”) comes a telling moment of clarification about his own text’s aim: “Novelist’s personal genre. For all its seeming fragmentation, nonetheless obstinately cross-referenced and of cryptic interconnectivity syntax.” Indeed, the quotations, separated by a poetic amount of white space, read smoothly one after the other. Most are only a few lines long, and they range from bons mots by famous writers (Rousseau: “The man who eats in idleness what he has not earned is a thief”) to the writerly non sequitur (“Napoleon was five feet six inches tall”). Old age, defeat and death emerge as leitmotifs, underscored by statements of the places and dates of various authors’ deaths, and, slowly, of the narrator’s own poverty and loneliness. Markson’s dark fragments are, paradoxically, a joy to sift and ponder. (May)

Welsh legends, ghosts, a Cherokee artifact, a valuable portrait—all combine in unexpected but ingenious ways in Shamus-finalist DePoy’s fourth Fever Devilin mystery (after 2005’s A Minister’s Ghost), set in the Georgia Appalachians. In past adventures, the folklorist and failed academic has helped Sheriff “Skid” Skidmore investigate murders involving strangers, but this time trouble directly involves Fever’s family and heritage, which makes it worse for him and better for the reader. A phone call about an unusual silver medallion purchased from someone in the town of Blue Mountain prompts Fever to invite the caller to visit. When the caller ends up dead in Fever’s cabin, Fever has no choice but to untangle the twisted origins of the medallion even when it leads deep into his own family’s somewhat sordid past. Adept at clever word play, DePoy has a comfortable command of his characters, their land and their history. (July)

Spiegelman, the ideal editor for the Wall Street entry in Akashic’s noir anthology series, assembles a stellar cast of 17 crime genre luminaries, many with financial backgrounds. Standouts include Peter Blauner’s “The Consultant,” in which a pregnant business coach discovers La Donna within as she maneuvers a Bensonhurst-bred Don Corleone wannabe into a war he can’t win; Twist Phelan’s “A Trader’s Lot,” in which commodities traders strategize on how to profit off a hurricane due to strike the Gulf Coast; and John Burdett’s “The Enlightenment of Magnus McKay,” in which a lawyer representing a crooked Thai-Chinese businessman falls in love with a beautiful prostitute in Bangkok and slips into an opium dream from which he may never wake. Mark Haskell Smith, Jason Starr, Jim Fusilli and Reed Farrel Coleman also contribute fine stories. As this volume demonstrates, Wall Street is no longer restricted to lower Manhattan, but has become a worldwide theater in which greed, volatility and desperation often lead to crime. (June)

A bestseller in France, this mystery from Chattam (The Soul of Evil) is unlikely to repeat that success in the U.S. After stumbling across a political coverup, Marion, a clerical employee at a Paris morgue, takes refuge in remote Mont-Saint-Michel. There, while inventorying some books, Marion discovers bound within the covers of Poe’s Narrative of A. Gordon Pym the diary of an English detective, Jeremy Matheson, describing his probe into a series of sadistic child murders in 1928 Cairo. Marion becomes obsessed with the diary and in finding the solution to the old case. Strangely, the third-person diary selections include the thoughts of characters who could not have conveyed them to Matheson. This oddity will raise the suspicions of astute readers, who will be less than shocked by the twist ending. In that subgenre featuring a modern character who seeks the truth about a past crime through study of a secret document, this effort comes up short. (June)

Edgar-finalist Thompson’s eye-opening ninth Gaslight mystery (after 2006’s Murder in Little Italy) examines the culture clash in early 20th-century New York City between Chinese and Irish immigrants, whose poverty prompted many of them to intermarry. While midwife Sarah Brandt is attending pregnant Cora Lee, “a strapping Irish girl” whose husband is a successful Chinese merchant, Cora’s teenage half-Chinese niece, Angel, bursts into Cora’s Chinatown flat and asks Cora to save her from an arranged marriage to Mr. Wong, an elderly Chinese restaurant owner. When Angel later disappears, Sarah investigates and learns the missing girl had a secret lover, a young Irishman. After Angel winds up dead in an alley, Sarah turns to her detective friend, Frank Malloy, for help. The action of this thought-provoking novel with its vivid portrait of the miseries of tenement life builds to an unexpected climax. (June)

At the start of Giménez-Bartlett’s gripping second police procedural to star Barcelona inspector Petra Delicado (after Dog Day), Delicado and her perennial sidekick, Sgt. Fermin Garzón, are thrown into a high-profile case—the murder inquiry into a much reviled gossip columnist, Ernestos Valdés—after the investigators originally assigned to it are pulled off to tackle a politically more sensitive assignment. Valdés did not lack for enemies, ranging from his ex-wife to the countless celebrities and politicians who had been excoriated in his column. When more murder victims turn up, Delicado suspects a connection with the politically more sensitive case. Engagingly human, the quirky Delicado has the sort of complex personality one associates with more familiar male sleuths such as Morse and Peter Diamond. Though the whodunit aspect proves less than compelling, readers who like their mysteries to provide a window into another society should be pleased. (June)

The affection of prolific fantasy author Lupoff (Marblehead: A Novel of H.P. Lovecraft) for Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson lifts this collection of five previously published tales, one of which, “The God of the Naked Unicorn,” has a new ending. The strongest entry is “The Adventure of the Voorish Sign,” in which the great detective and his Boswell pursue a cult planning to liberate H.P. Lovecraft’s monstrous Old Ones. “The Adventure of the Boulevard Assassin,” written in the style of Jack Kerouac, is a curiosity perhaps best appreciated by Kerouac fans. The volume concludes on a light note with a recipe for “Giant Rat of Sumatra Stew” (chicken is an acceptable substitute). While these stories may fall short of the standard set by such masters of the Holmes pastiche as Denis Smith and Donald Thomas, Lupoff, as ever, consistently entertains. (June)

Nebula-winner Asaro offers a tasty mix of love, action and intrigue in this romantic fantasy set in the same world as The Misted Cliffs (2005). Ginger-Sun, an innocent young priestess in the Dragon-Sun temple outside the village of Sky Flames, finds her loyalty to her people torn when a mysterious stranger is found badly injured outside of town. Using the fire opal gem her foreign grandfather gave her long ago, she’s able to heal the stranger, a handsome soldier named Darz Goldstone who comes from the “splendorous city of Quaaz.” But because such magic is taboo, Ginger-Sun is found guilty of witchcraft. Rescued from a terrible death by fire, Ginger-Sun must leave everything she knows and, with the guidance of a vision of the Dragon-Sun, trust that marrying Darz—and learning to accept her magical ability—is the right thing to do. Once again, Asaro skillfully blends romance with a solid fantasy scenario. (July)

The new space opera shares with the old the interstellar sweep of events and exotic locales, but Dozois and Strahan’s all-original anthology shows how the genre’s purveyors have updated it, with rigorous science, well-drawn characters and excellent writing. Many of the 18 stories play with the scope that characterizes classic space opera. In Greg Egan’s “Glory,” creatures embody themselves as aliens to perform archeological research, only to get caught up in a struggle between two worlds. Robert Reed’s “Hatch,” limited in locale to the hull of a giant ship, proves that the scope of the struggle for life is always epic. Stephen Baxter’s “Remembrance” walks a line between the personal and the global as resisters against Earth’s conquerors remember one man’s struggle against the alien invaders. Kage Baker’s humorous “Maelstrom,” in which an acting troupe on frontier Mars puts on a Poe story for the miners there, tells a personal story in an epic setting. The new space opera teaches us that despite the bizarre turns humanity may take to conquer these outré settings, a recognizable core of humanity remains. (June)

At the start of bestseller Hamilton’s solid 15th adventure to star vampire hunter Anita Blake, Malcolm, the priggish head of the Church of the Eternal Life (the vampire church), is so desperate for help in dealing with the Harlequin, a troop of vampire enforcers and spies so feared vampires are forbidden to speak its name, he turns to those he considers sinful and corrupt—Anita and her sweetie, Jean-Claude, St. Louis’s Master of the City. The Harlequin may have targeted Anita and the powerful triumvirate she has forged with Jean-Claude and Richard Zeeman (aka Ulfric of the werewolves). According to the rules, the Harlequin must make contact through delivery of a mask—white to indicate they are watching, red for pain, black for death. Anita receives a white mask, but the members of the Harlequin aren’t playing by the rules. Shorter and more tightly structured than the previous entry in the series, Danse Macabre (2006), Hamilton’s latest should prove more satisfying to longtime fans with its straightforward supernatural politics and steamy (but not extreme) sex. (June)

Set in the same far-future universe as Crystal Rain (2006), in which the ruling alien Satrapy has confined humanity to the fringes of a confederation of worlds linked by wormholes, Buckell’s second SF novel provides plenty of gun play and close calls for his heroes. The Satraps now seek the all-out destruction of the Raga, descendants of an Earth island culture. A young Raga woman, Nashara, attempts to evade capture from a determined pursuer, just as the wormhole to her home, Nanagada, mysteriously reopens. Meanwhile, the aliens who control Nanagada struggle for power, Teotl against Loa, while humans play them against each other, hoping to break their iron control. As the political situation destabilizes, Nashara and her friends appear, and total war for the right of humanity to live free becomes inevitable. Buckell plays with Caribbean and Aztec cultures, bending their exotic flavor to technology-flavored ends. Though the ending is never in doubt, the twisty ride getting there is a lot of fun. (June)

In the exciting 12th military SF novel to feature the Confederation Marine 34th Fleet Initial Strike Team (FIST) from Sherman and Cragg (after 2006’s Starfist: Flashfire), former gunnery sergeant and now ensign Charlie Bass and his platoon of Devil Dogs are pulled out of the quarantine to which their knowledge of the alien Skink menace condemned them, to participate in a campaign against a coalition of worlds that wishes to secede from the Confederation. Bass and his platoon have the misfortune to end up in a situation similar to the U.S. Civil War’s Peninsula Campaign, under a Marine-hating army general who makes McClellan look like Rommel. The authors continue to excel both at showing the cruel randomness of war and at affectionately portraying the military subculture and ethos. Readers looking for accounts of futuristic combat that depict realistically the psychology of men in battle need look no further. (June)

Part paranormal whodunit, part urban fantasy, Weldon’s lively debut introduces Zoë Martinique, a professional snoop based in Atlanta, Ga., with the ability to project herself out of body and spy on illicit activities. Things get complicated after Zoë becomes an astral witness to murder, and the killer, who can not only see her but also touch her, leaves her branded with a red hand print and a shock of white hair that just keeps getting thicker. Zoë teams up with sexy cop Daniel Frasier, who thinks infamous televangelist Theodore Rollins is somehow behind the murder, but Zoë’s also pretty sure that the dead man’s boss, Koba Hirokumi, president of Visitar Inc., knows a lot more than he’s telling. Before long, what began as an apparent case of industrial espionage turns into a battle against evil from another dimension. Weldon keeps Zoë and her readers off balance with brisk pacing and brain-wrenching plot twists, drawing the story to a satisfying close while leaving enough loose ends to set up Zoë’s next adventure. (June)

If Shakespeare had written an 18th-century romantic comedy, it might look something like this novel. In her latest, veteran James offers a larger-than-life portrait of Georgian England, complete with oversexed aristocrats, posturing courtesans and a feuding duke and duchess. At the heart of it all is Roberta St. Giles, an ingenue who’s intent on marrying the duke of Villiers, a chess player and notorious womanizer. Roberta, the daughter of the poetry-addicted “Mad Marquess,” wants nothing more than an unsentimental husband like Villiers. But in her quest to become the sort of woman who would attract the duke, she finds herself falling for Damon Reeve, her tutor in the art of pleasure. James embellishes her tale with a number of characters, each with their own desires, vices and schemes. At times, the profusion of people and plot threads overwhelms the primary romance. Roberta, in particular, pales next to the vivacious but unhappily married duchess of Beaumont, who begs for her own story. Despite this lack of focus, James pulls everything together in the final third, making for a colorful, spirited romance that will leave readers desperate for a sequel. (June)

Freelance insurance investigator Jack Carlson is looking into a rash of accidental deaths in the rural town of Winship. When he reaches the Norman Rockwellesque community, he finds that people there aren’t just dying, they’re disappearing as well. Soon Carlson is awash with more questions than he can handle: who murdered the town’s insurance salesman and his secretary? why did the town doctor commit suicide right in front of him? who, or what, is the mysterious Order of St. Michael? And what’s with the town’s unearthly, late-night glow? Carlson is an appealing creation, and Tessier has dropped him into the middle of an intriguing twilight zone scenario. Unfortunately, once Tessier sets his world spinning, he’s unable to hold it all together, and he ends the story without revealing answers to any of the questions he’s so painstakingly raised. Included is an unrelated novella, Scramberg U.S.A.; it tells of a young hoodlum’s revenge against the town that done him wrong, another interesting tale that gets away from its author in the end. The result, Tessier’s first original novel in almost 10 years, makes for an addictive but unsatisfying read. (June)

Vincent’s debut, an urban “werecat” fantasy, is a good story that suffers from about 200 pages of bloat. Faythe Sanders is a Texas grad student with a secret: she’s a shape-shifting werecat. After she’s attacked by a Stray—a werecat without ties to any pride—Faythe’s father, the Pride Alpha, orders her to return to the family compound. As it turns out, two other werecat “tabbies” have gone missing, indicating an organized effort by the formerly go-it-alone Strays. The author’s world building is intriguing but overly narrow, reducing the range of jungle feline behavior to a keen territorial instinct. Secondary characters abound, including Faythe’s intended, formerly human werecat Marc; five years earlier, she escaped the pride on what was supposed to be the eve of their wedding. Unfortunately, they both have frustrating character tics that are only exacerbated by the novel’s length: Faythe is more often too-stubborn-to-live than kick-ass, and all the tears Marc wells up over Faythe don’t forgive his insufferable jealousy. A polished tale may hide within this one, but Vincent needs to rein herself in a bit if she wants to build a readership. (June)