Fiction Book Reviews

Apr 06, 2009

A Fair MaidenJoyce Carol Oates. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $22 (160p) ISBN 978-0-15-101516-0

Sixteen-year-old Katya Spivak and elderly Marcus Kidder share a bizarre romance in Oates’s derivative and unpolished new novel. In bland Bayhead Harbor, N.J., Katya serves as a nanny to the Engelhardts’ two young children. Attractive Katya—unappreciated by her alcoholic mother, mistreated by the tyrannical Engelhardts—is intrigued by the attentions of wealthy Mr. Kidder, a former children’s book author and amateur painter. The courting is slow at first, but after Katya accepts Mr. Kidder’s money to help her mother pay off a debt, things accelerate. Soon Katya is posing for Mr. Kidder in lingerie and receiving payment upon each visit. She begins to feel used, but is thankful for the attention—until one evening when Mr. Kidder possibly drugs her, at which point something equally bizarre and predictable happens. Katya and Mr. Kidder’s final meeting reveals Mr. Kidder’s true intention for Katya, but the revelation isn’t worth the buildup. This is certainly one of Oates’s lesser works. (Aug.)

A Long, Long Time Ago & Essentially TrueBrigid Pasulka. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25 (368p) ISBN 978-0-547-05507-7

Pasulka’s delightful debut braids together two tales of old and new Poland. The old is the fairy tale love story of the Pigeon, a young man so entranced by village beauty Anielica that he builds her family a house to prove his devotion. When war comes to Poland, the Pigeon works for the resistance, guarding the town and his Jewish sister-in-law with creativity and bravery. After the war, he and Anielica get engaged and the Pigeon brings his family to Kraków, but the fabled promises of the golden city and the glories of communism prove hollow. The new tale is about Anielica and the Pigeon’s granddaughter, Beata, whose plainness has earned her the nickname Baba Yaga. Now living in a much-changed Kraków, Beata is a bar girl with no hopes of love or plans for the future. When tragedy strikes and Beata uncovers family secrets, she brings together the old and new to create her own bright future. Pasulka creates a world that’s magical despite the absence of magical happenings, and where Poland’s history is bound up in one family’s story. (Aug.)

Everything Matters!Ron Currie Jr.. Viking, $25.95 (320p) ISBN 978-0-670-02092-8

In Curie’s curious second novel (after NYPL Young Lion Award—winning God Is Dead), a young man nearly succeeds in his attempt to inject meaning into a doomed world. A mysterious voice has accompanied Junior Thibodeax all his life, having chosen the moment after Junior’s birth to tell him that a meteor will destroy Earth in 36 years. The voice also tells him secrets about his father, his girlfriend and his brother, as well as providing a cure for cancer and sage advice against bombing a federal building. From modest beginnings, Junior descends into violent insanity before finding himself lifted to a position of supreme importance. But even with his foreknowledge, the prophet cannot win every battle, and the ones he loses are more than sufficient to break his heart. Curie shows an appreciation for whimsical storytelling, leaning on unlikely chains of events and multiple perspectives to tell what could otherwise be a very dark tale, and though the omnisciently narrated portions come off as heavy-handed, the big decision he makes toward the end recasts the story in a strangely hopeful light and lends a pile of emotional currency to the book’s title. (July)

FloodmarkersNic Brown. Counterpoint, $14.95 paper (208p) ISBN 978-1-58243-506-0

In Brown’s hip, assured debut, a series of vignettes adds up to a keen portrait of a small North Carolina town. It’s September 21, 1989, in Lystra, N.C., and Hurricane Hugo is bearing down on residents and visitors alike, including shy Tennessean Cliff, in town for the wedding of his cousin, with whom he had a tender, confusing adolescent affair; high school girls Grier and Fletcher, best friends and rivals for the affection of Fletcher’s brother, the be-mohawked Mike; Evelyn Graham, for whom “funerals were social events whose invitations were printed in The News & Observer obituaries”; and Pat Doublehead, a Cherokee veterinarian with an eye for little boys. Brown, a former journeyman musician, slides easily between his characters, rendering them in believable relief, from Cliff’s romanticism to Fletcher’s calm competence in an emergency. Though none of the players gets much time on stage—the novel is short and the character list long—Brown makes the most of them, revealing their secrets and tragedies with careful, confident economy. Think Winesburg, Ohio simultaneously pared down and amped up, read to the sound of a jangly Strat. (July)

The Thing Around Your NeckChimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Knopf, $24.95 (224p) ISBN 978-0-307-27107-5

Adichie (Half of a Yellow Sun) stays on familiar turf in her deflated first story collection. The tension between Nigerians and Nigerian-Americans, and the question of what it means to be middle-class in each country, feeds most of these dozen stories. Best known are “Cell One,” and “The Headstrong Historian,” which have both appeared in the New Yorker and are the collection’s finest works. “Cell One,” in particular, about the appropriation of American ghetto culture by Nigerian university students, is both emotionally and intellectually fulfilling. Most of the other stories in this collection, while brimming with pathos and rich in character, are limited. The expansive canvas of the novel suits Adichie’s work best; here, she fixates mostly on romantic relationships. Each story’s observations illuminate once; read in succession, they take on a repetitive slice-of-life quality, where assimilation and gender roles become ready stand-ins for what could be more probing work. (June)

Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne DeceptionEric Van LustbaderGrand Central, $27.99 (432p) ISBN 978-0-446-53982-1

Shadowy master assassin Jason Bourne spends too much time offstage in bestseller Lustbader’s cliché-ridden fourth thriller in the Ludlum franchise (after The Bourne Sanction). Having pushed his latest archenemy, Russian Leonid Arkadin, off a tanker into the ocean, Bourne assumes his foe must be dead. Not long after, Arkadin ambushes Bourne, hitting him with a rifle shot that would’ve killed a normal man. Seriously but not mortally wounded, Bourne decides to keep his survival a secret. The duel between the pair gets submerged in a plot line about a corrupt U.S. defense secretary’s efforts to use the downing of a civilian airliner in Egypt by an Iranian missile as a casus belli. The action sequences and inevitable betrayals are old hat. Clumsy prose doesn’t help (“She was dead, but he could not forget her, or what she caused in him: the tiniest fissure in the speckled granite of his soul, through which her mysterious light had begun to trickle, like the first snowmelt of spring”). (June)

Black Water RisingAttica LockeHarper, $25.99 (448p) ISBN 978-0-06-173586-8

Set in 1981, Locke’s compelling if unwieldy debut charts the moral struggles of Jay Porter, a black lawyer in Houston, Tex. Porter, who knows far more about a murder near one of the city’s bayous than do the police, doesn’t want to come forward largely because of his own criminal past as well as a secret relationship with Houston’s female mayor. Another reason is that Porter, having fought his way out of the ghetto, is now striving for a more comfortable lifestyle with his wife and new baby. Why get tangled up in a messy murder, even if it could mean preventing the conviction of an innocent person? Locke, a screenwriter with both film and TV credits (including a forthcoming HBO miniseries about the civil rights movement), steers a gritty drama to a satisfying end, though a sluggish subplot involving labor union issues undermines the novel’s grander ambitions. A leaner, meaner version was an opportunity missed, yet Locke remains an author to watch. (June)

You or Someone Like YouChandler Burr. Ecco, $25.99 (320p) ISBN 978-0-06-171565-5

With this academia-obsessed novel, New York Times perfume critic Burr branches out from his nonfiction scent-based books. Howard Rosenbaum is a Jewish powerhouse in Hollywood with an Anglo-Saxon wife, Anne, whom he met at Columbia University, where they both earned Ph.D.s in literature. Now they live among “pathologically narcissistic” people with an “utter disdain for the written word.” But when narrator Anne is solicited to compile a book list for Dreamworks CEO Stacey Snider (Burr weaves actual Hollywood bigwigs into the tale), the list becomes a small book club, then morphs into a huge gathering with Anne the literary guru to virtually all of Hollywood. Anne and Howard’s only child, Sam, travels to Israel, and Howard’s initial delight sours when Sam is rejected by a rabbi in Jerusalem for an intensive study “program” because he is not officially Jewish and therefore “unclean.” A true celebration of intellect, Burr’s tale does, occasionally, misstep into a pedantic bog, but ultimately examines the personal decision each of us must make to run from, or embrace, our identity. (June)

Woman Strangled—News at TenLaurie Moore. Five Star, $25.95 (318p) ISBN 978-1-59414-762-3

The marvelous first in a new romantic suspense series from Moore (Jury Rigged) sparkles with Janet Evanovich—style humor. Aspen Wicklow, a University of North Texas journalism grad down to her last $75, lucks out and lands a plum job on WBFD-TV’s Public Defender in Fort Worth, Tex. Tig Welder, a hotshot gunning for an anchor spot, reminds “Investigative Reporter Barbie” never to try scooping him, while station manager J. Gordon Pfeiffer warns her never to become part of the story. Following either tip isn’t easy after Aspen meets ruggedly handsome Spike Granger, a Johnson County sheriff who’s on a rampage about prison overcrowding. Even more alarming is researching a missing person report on Candy Drummond, who pledged at the same sorority as Aspen. Candy later turns up a strangled corpse. The action hurtles to a cliff-hanging close that includes more than one tantalizing twist sure to leave readers eager for the sequel. (June)

Skeleton JusticeMichael Baden and Linda Kenney Baden. Knopf, $24.95 (336p) ISBN 978-1-4000-4432-0

The middling second forensic thriller from eminent pathologist Baden and his attorney wife (after Remains Silent) finds their fictional alter egos, Jake Rosen, New York City’s deputy chief medical examiner, and his girlfriend, lawyer Philomena “Manny” Manfreda, both pursuing important cases. Jake is helping the police look into the attacks of “the Vampire,” who has rendered five victims, including an opera singer, unconscious before draining some blood from their arms. Later, the Vampire ups the ante to murder. Meanwhile, Manny is defending a young man charged with setting a bomb in a mailbox that almost killed a federal judge. Few will be surprised when these separate plot lines intersect. Weak characterizations, a predictable damsel-in-distress twist and a shot in the dark, rather than Jake’s scientific skill, that saves the day won’t satisfy fans of Kathy Reichs and other authors of first-rate forensic thrillers. Author tour. (June)

AwakeningS.J. Bolton. Minotaur, $25.95 (352p) ISBN 978-0-312-38114-1

Clara Benning, a reclusive vet who’s the narrator of Bolton’s solid second thriller (after Sacrifice), spends her days treating badgers, boars and other wildlife at the Little Order of St. Francis in an isolated Dorset, England, village. When a distraught mother calls on Clara to remove a venomous snake from her baby’s crib and another family’s home is overrun with snakes, including a deadly Australian taipan, Clara realizes there must be a human agency behind the snake attacks, at least two of which will prove fatal. With the help of Assistant Chief Constable Matt Hoare and eccentric herpetologist and TV star Sean North, Clara begins to unravel a tangle of long-kept village secrets stretching back generations. Bolton milks the myriad snakes, even the harmless ones, for all they’re worth, but falters with Clara, whose fraught family history (she bears disfiguring facial scars from a rarely discussed childhood accident) tends to undercut the suspense. (June)

The Beijing of PossibilitiesJonathan Tel. Other Press, $22.95 (208p) ISBN 978-1-59051-326-2

Tel (Freud’s Alphabet) spins a collection of dreamlike short stories out of the lives of Beijing’s residents, from crime-fighting, gorilla-costumed messengers to thieves, buskers and composers. The stories form an impression of Beijing on the eve of the 2008 Olympics, weaving in the culture, history and present reality of a city undergoing rapid change. In “The Book of Auspicious and Inauspicious Dreams,” a modern young couple attempts to return the souvenirs of a woman’s bourgeois past, hidden during the Cultural Revolution, which they discover while renovating their apartment. A musician in “Shadow of Candles Flickering Red” remembers picking up the ehru, a traditional Chinese instrument, while being “re-educated” in the Chinese countryside. In “The Most Beautiful Woman in China,” some of these characters reappear in a tale that combines everything from mythological traditions to the sayings of Deng Xiaoping to create a humming, ethereal image of the city and its culture. The collection, part W.G. Sebald and part Italo Calvino, provides a glimpse for the Western reader into the complicated, vibrant world of Beijing. (June)

Lucky EverydayBapsy Jain. Penguin, $14 paper (294p) ISBN 978-0-14-311535-9

Lucky Boyce flees to New York from Bombay after the breakup of her disastrous marriage to a glamorous but controlling husband in Indian author Jain’s overstuffed novel. Lucky’s lost her status, her self-confidence and her business; struggling to find a purpose in all this through yoga and meditation, she volunteers to teach yoga at the local prison. She soon runs into an old flame, now married but still in love with her, and an opportunity to turn a former business rival into an ally. As she moves toward enlightenment, Lucky’s thwarted by ever more bizarre roadblocks: she is mugged, framed for murder, robbed, gets pregnant, ad infinitum, all interspersed with descriptions of visions and prophetic dreams, putting her somewhere between Job and Bridget Jones. Though Lucky herself is a fully imagined, flawed but endearing character, the constant reliance on luck to shape the plot combined with a disappointing ending make this a mediocre read at best. (June)

Do Not Deny Me: StoriesJean Thompson. Simon & Schuster, $14 paper (304p) ISBN 978-1-4165-9563-2

National Book Award—finalist Thompson (for Who Do You Love) delivers a deeply affecting collection that elevates the quotidian to the sublime. In the title story, Julia, a young woman “embarrassed” for “people [who] talked about guardian angels or spirit guides,” visits a psychic after her boyfriend dies. Faced with the ability to access the world beyond, she recoils sharply. The collection goes on to explore a bewildering array of experience, from a young wife denying her husband’s white-collar crimes in “Liberty Tax” to the concerned neighbor of “Little Brown Bird” who is powerless to help a little girl being molested by her father. In “Escape,” a man who has suffered a stroke finds himself at the mercy of his increasingly abusive wife. Determined to get away from her, he’s pleasantly shocked when she solves his problem in a way he never counted on. Thompson immerses readers in details and emotions so consuming and convincing that the inane vagaries of modern life can take on near mythic importance. This collection shows the confidence and power of a writer in her prime. (June)

NightwalkersP.T. Deutermann. St. Martin’s, $24.95 (320p) ISBN 978-0-312-37241-5

A cast of eccentric Southern characters, several of whom could have escaped from the pages of Gone with the Wind, lifts Deutermann’s winning fourth novel to feature PI Cam Richter (after The Moonpool). Cam, tired of suburban life, is buying Glory’s End, a rundown plantation in Rockwell County, N.C. First, he must deal with a modern-day “ghost”—in cop parlance, someone just released from prison who decides to get revenge on the person who put him in jail. Then it’s on to an even deadlier, more mysterious malefactor who’s trying to kill him for reasons unknown. Cam’s next door neighbors are Valeria Lee and her mother, Hester, who along with their lunatic relative, Maj. Courtney Woodruff Lee, dress and live in a strange antebellum past. The major likes to wear Confederate gray while spending his nights riding horseback around the countryside looking for Yankee spies. Cam’s German shepherds, Frick, Frack and Kitty, help propel the action to an electrifying conclusion. (June)

Seven Mile BeachTom Gilling. Grove/Black Cat, $14 paper (224p) ISBN 978-0-8021-7059-0

Australian author Gilling (The Adventures of Miles and Isabel) explores the perils of remaking oneself in this beguiling, darkly humorous tale. Nick Carmody’s status as a scholarship student and Danny Grogan’s wealthy background bonded them as “an alliance of outsiders” at boarding school. Nick’s now a journalist on a Sydney tabloid; Danny’s a drug-addicted nightclub owner. When Danny wrecks his sports car, Nick accepts a hefty sum from Danny’s father to claim he was the driver. But this was no ordinary accident—a man who may have been Danny’s drug dealer was killed. Rather than face jail, Nick flees, assuming the identity of a stranger. His new life has a good start, complete with a dog and a girlfriend, until he learns that other men who share his new name are ending up dead. Coincidence? Or is Nick being hunted by the drug dealer’s pals or Danny’s father? Gilling delivers a taut, suspenseful reflection on identity that never pauses for a breath. (June)

All in the MindAlastair Campbell. Overlook, $25.95 (304p) ISBN 978-1-59020-224-1

Campbell, Tony Blair’s former spokesman and director of communications and strategy, has crafted a skillful and compelling debut novel about Martin Sturrock, a psychiatrist whose simmering meltdown informs him that he may be in need of treatment of his own. The novel weaves together the stories of Sturrock’s patients—a woman victimized by sex traffickers, a philandering lawyer, an alcoholic MP, a depressed factory worker, an Albanian refugee raped during a home invasion—on the streets of contemporary multicultural London. With their many flaws, Campbell’s characters are fully formed people—sharply observed and nicely nuanced—and while plenty of time is spent in sessions, no prescriptions are ever issued, keeping Campbell away from clumsy aphorisms or magic pill answers to the problems that ripple out into the patients’ (and shrink’s) families and the wider world around them. Interestingly, Campbell takes a few swipes at his former political life, depicting it as full of backstabbing treachery and cutthroat competition. Despite the sometimes brutal subject matter, the many moments of kindness and hope make this a strong first novel providing much catharsis in its own right. (June)

The CheaterNancy Taylor Rosenberg. Forge, $24.95 (320p) ISBN 978-0-7653-1902-9

Lily Forrester, the edgy California crusader for justice who got away with killing the criminal she thought raped her daughter in Mitigating Circumstances (1993) and whose daughter took care of the real rapist in Buried Evidence (2000), tangles with a female serial killer in this unsettling thriller from bestseller Rosenberg. Now a Ventura County judge, Lily becomes friends with lawyer Anne Bradley, an attractive single woman new in town. Lily, whose marriage to her second husband, Bryce Donnelly, has been showing signs of strain, has no idea Bryce is a philanderer and a potential victim of Anne’s Alibi Connection, a referral club that helps Anne find and kill adulterers. Mary Stevens, the likable FBI profiler who gets on the trail of unsolved homicides leading to the mysterious Anne, provides relief from the angst-ridden Lily and the book’s villain, a man-hating sociopath whose portrait Rosenberg at times sketches with too heavy a hand. (June)

Between the AssassinationsAravind Adiga. Free Press, $24 (288p) ISBN 978-1-4391-5292-8

This short story collection, teeming with life in the small Indian city of Kittur between the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and that of her son Rajiv in 1991, serves as a prelude to Adiga’s Booker Prize—winning The White Tiger. Loosely based on a tourist itinerary, the stories meander through the lives of a motley array of hoykas and Brahmins, Muslims and Christians. We meet Xerox, the peddler of illegally copied books who doesn’t mind having been arrested 21 times, as this seems a step up from his father’s work as an excrement shoveler. Then there is Jayamma: the eighth of nine daughters, she is sent out to work because her father had only enough money to marry off six daughters. Her only comfort is getting high on DDT fumes and rubbing the buttocks of a tiny idol of baby Krishna. Adiga’s India is a place of wildly disparate fortunes, where a 500-rupee meal at the Oberoi Hotel in Bombay scandalizes a construction worker who marvels at the sight of a 20-rupee note. It’s a gruesome picture of existence, and the small epiphanies hit like bricks from heaven. (June)

The Last WarAna Menéndez. Harper, $24.99 (240p) ISBN 978-0-06-172476-3

In her third work of fiction, Pushcart Prize—winner Menéndez (In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd) pits an ambivalent American expatriate photojournalist, nicknamed Flash, against everything she thought was real. While her war-correspondent husband, nicknamed Wonderboy, waits for her in Iraq, Flash wanders the streets of Istanbul, gazes from her apartment balcony and drinks bitter Turkish wine rather than deal with a marriage crippled by personal ambition and possible betrayal: early on, an anonymous letter arrives informing Flash of Wonderboy’s infidelities abroad. From there, one scene blends into the next as Flash reconsiders her once-dependable husband; his occasional phone calls from Iraq puncture Flash’s dream state with spikes of resentment, guilt, adoration and desperation. An old friend, beautiful Alexandra, plays the role of ideal expat; Flash has always “tried, without success, to emulate” Alexandra’s “worldly looseness” and “calm assurance.” Focusing on modes of suppression, the internal politics of memory and the tension between guilt and independence, Menéndez produces a story that slips by quickly, but leaves behind the resonant idea that it’s human nature to “fear return” and “loathe the familiar,” rather than the other way around. (June)

Back to the CoastSaskia Noort, trans. from the Dutch by Laura Vroomen. Bitter Lemon, $14.95 paper (240p) ISBN 978-1-904738-37-4

Maria Vos, the narrator of Noort’s taut psychological suspense novel, is a bit of a mess. The mother of two children from two different lovers, she decides to terminate her latest pregnancy without telling the father, with whom she performs in a local Amsterdam band. Following the procedure, Vos begins to receive hate mail, complete with graphic images of aborted fetuses. After an undertaker appears at her door to claim her corpse, she takes the kids to stay with her sister on the Dutch coast. While Vos is away, someone burns down her house, destroying the letters that are the only independent evidence of her nemesis. The police, aware of Vos’s family history of mental instability, suspect she set the fire herself and imagined the threats. Noort (The Dinner Club) does a splendid job of leaving the reader unsure whether or not to trust Vos’s account. Those who appreciate intelligent writing and emotionally plausible characters will be rewarded. (June)

Hoppla! 1 2 3Gérard Gavarry, trans. from the French by Jane Kuntz. Dalkey Archive, $12.95 paper (164p) ISBN 978-1-56478-536-7

Gavarry’s grim novel recounts a rape and murder in a Parisian suburban slum from three slightly different perspectives and in different styles. The stories center on Ti-Jus, a quiet and unpredictable young man, and his friends the Whistler, the Smoker and the “hulk with the comb” as they skulk and fight their way through a glum Paris, as well as Ti-Jus’s family going about their daily lives. Eventually these story lines converge (three times if you count each retelling) in a vicious and brutal climax. There’s a Clockwork Orange feel to the sexualized violence and the colorful slang that comes across as the novel’s centerpiece, though it does present its challenges as a work-in-translation—such slangy French linguistic practices as the shortening of a word or the playful blending of others doesn’t always work in English. It’s a decent if dark effort that’s probably better in French. (June)

A Monster’s NotesLaurie Sheck. Knopf, $28 (544p) ISBN 978-0-307-27105-1

Respected poet Sheck delivers a classic poet’s first novel, a long, polyphonic, often directionless sprawl of unconventional narrative. In her poetry, Sheck has striven to mimic the kinesis of the modern mind: an entrapped being, self-consciously at odds with its literary predecessors. But in the shift to fiction, much of her trademark momentum is lost and her fervent brilliance stretched thin. The book takes the perspective of Frankenstein’s monster and interweaves his “notes” on the human race with fictionalized letters of his creator, author Mary Shelley. (Sheck imagines Shelley to have met the monster as a little girl, sitting by her mother’s grave.) It’s an unwieldy project that, like the monster’s body, feels off-kilter and ill-proportioned, while its organizational scheme (by topics of the monster’s interest, such as John Cage’s prepared piano or the ethics of genetic privacy) can make the reading experience feel rather encyclopedic. Still, Sheck’s effulgent, elegant wisdom is impossible to deny. She may not yet be a storyteller, but she is a superb lyricist, and in this new work, she comes across as a fearless philosopher for our times. (June)

Sworn to SilenceLinda Castillo. Minotaur, $23.95 (352p) ISBN 978-0-312-37497-6

“A gun-toting, cursing, former Amish female chief of police” stars in this excellent first in a new suspense series from romance veteran Castillo (Fade to Red). When a serial killer strikes bucolic Painters Mill, Ohio, the killer’s signature—Roman numerals ritualistically carved into each victim’s abdomen—matches the MO of four unsolved murders from 16 years earlier. Police chief Kate Burkholder, who’s reluctant to dredge up the past, must keep secret that she knows why the old murders stopped. Not satisfied with the case’s progress, local politicos set up a multijurisdictional task force to assist, including a law-enforcement agent battling his own demons. The added scrutiny and the rising body count threaten to push the chief over the edge. Adept at creating characters with depth and nuance, Castillo smoothly integrates their backstories into a well-paced plot that illuminates the divide between the Amish and “English” worlds. (June)

Last Night in MontrealEmily St. John Mandel. Unbridled, $24.95 (256p) ISBN 978-1-932961-68-3

A young woman with a habit of running away runs away yet again in Mandel’s competent if unremarkable debut. As Eli finishes another grim day of work on his thesis (its topic: dead and dying languages) in his Brooklyn apartment, he realizes his girlfriend, Lilia, never returned after going out for the newspaper that morning. About a month later, Eli gets a postcard from someone named Michaela in Montreal telling him that Lilia is there, so he heads north, leaving (thankfully) his insufferable friends behind to natter on about art without him. His quest is interspersed with flashbacks to Lilia’s childhood: her father kidnaps her at age seven from her mother’s house, and the two go on the lam. Back in present-day Montreal, Eli meets Michaela, who happens to be the daughter of the detective who years ago worked on Lilia’s abduction case, and together they try to fill in the blanks of Lilia’s past. While the plot is interesting enough, the prose often feels forced and the characters sometimes amount to accumulations of quirks, whimsies and neuroses. An intriguing idea, but the delivery isn’t quite there. (June)

John the BaptizerBrooks Hansen. Norton, $24.95 (416p) ISBN 978-0-393-06947-1

In fictionalizing the life of John the Baptist, Hansen (The Brotherhood of Joseph) reveals the messy humanity behind the saint. Even readers with a passing knowledge of Christianity will find John’s fate laid out on the first page—his head is brought to King Herod upon a platter. Hansen’s meticulously researched narrative sets John’s life in a wide context, omitting little, for better or for worse: from John’s childhood lessons to his emergence as a prophet and his capture and execution, readers find themselves immersed in the biblical world. The visceral descriptions of suffering, such as the death of Herod’s father or the cistern in which John is held captive, bring religious figures into the gritty realm of the grotesque. Yet Hansen still retains a sense of wonder in his subjects: when John’s mother gives birth after a lifetime of barrenness, or when John baptizes his Messiah-cousin, the flesh-and-blood characters step back into their familiar stained-glass poses and become larger than life. The juxtaposition of stark realism and religious loftiness has its perplexing moments, but it’s precisely what will keep the pages turning. (June)

Let’s Get It OnJill Nelson. Amistad, $24.99 (320p) ISBN 978-0-06-076330-5

Now playing: the second verse of Nelson’s wildly popular debut (Sexual Healing), with Marvin Gaye again providing the thematic backup for the over-the-top sexual shenanigans and ribald politics embraced by the proprietors of A Sister’s Spa. This time out, Yale-educated lawyer LaShaWanda P. Marshall, and fellow spa founders Lydia Beaucoup and Acey Allen recreate their successful unorthodox Reno, Nev., spa on a boat moored off Martha’s Vineyard. As Wanda puts it: “We were offering women multiorgasmic sex without the complications or mating, dating, or a relationship, and they were hungry for it,” In Martha’s Vineyard, the crew appeals to the established black community to open its arms to the new business while battling a mobster trying to shake them down, a racist madman in their midst and a president who aims to outlaw anything but sex-for-procreation with a bill called “No Child, No Behind.” It’s a dopey mix of overbroad sexual and racial politics, but the sisters still manage to sizzle—and elicit smiles with their insatiable appetites for love, social justice and the sex trade. (June)

Silver BirchesAdrian Plass. Zondervan, $12.99 paper (192p) ISBN 978-0-310-29203-6

Bestselling British author Plass (Bacon Sandwiches and Salvation) offers an intentionally offbeat story of bereaved widower David Herrick, who suffers intensely following the loss of his beloved wife, Jessica. Herrick, a popular Christian speaker, finds it sadly ironic that the very words and pat phrases he offers to listening audiences aren’t doing him much good in his personal sorrow. With the arrival of a letter and an invitation from an old friend, Herrick travels to a former haunted bed-and-breakfast and rejoins classmates from years earlier; during their gathering, they eventually expose their deepest longings and struggles. Keenly attentive to his own skewed view on life at present, Herrick finds himself strangely moved by his former friends’ individual plights and begins to glimpse small slivers of hope in the cracks of brokenness. No matter how he tries to shut out the divinely orchestrated lessons, Herrick finally surrenders and what he discovers surprises him most of all. Finely tuned and sensitively written, this moving story reminds readers that everyone bleeds the same on the inside. (June)

The Jump ArtistAustin Ratner. Bellevue Literary (Consortium, dist.), $14.95 paper (256p) ISBN 978-1-934137-15-4

In his debut, Ratner fictionalizes the story of Philippe Halsman, a renowned photographer who, as a young man in interwar Austria, had his life forever changed by an anti-Semitic kangaroo court. In the novel, “Philipp Halsman” and his father, Max, were hiking when, as Philipp looked away, Max fell off the lip of a cliff and died. The locals testified that Philipp murdered his father, whipping up an anti-Semitic frenzy. After time in prison and his banishment from Austria, Philipp attempts to build his life abroad with the burden of having been believed a murderer; only his mother and a small faction of intellectuals are convinced of his innocence. Ratner’s recreation of Philipp’s tortured psyche can be wearying, and Philipp’s awkwardness—from his jailhouse fixations to the guilt and self-loathing that play so heavily in his life—serve to make him more of an enigma for the reader than probably intended. But, in a broader context, the story has tremendous resonance, given what had yet to come. (May)

Mystery

The Magician’s Death: A Hugh Corbett Medieval MysteryPaul Doherty. Minotaur, $24.95 (320p) ISBN 978-0-312-56562-6

British veteran Doherty makes conveying the daily life of 14th-century England look easy in this sterling entry in his long-running series that features Hugh Corbett, keeper of the secret seal for Edward I (Corpse Candle, etc.). In 1303, a delegation of French scholars arrives at Corfe Castle to help decipher the secret writings of Roger Bacon, whose coded book is rumored to contain blueprints for inventions whose development could shift the balance of power in Europe. Corbett’s men have recently stolen a copy of Bacon’s book from France, despite the efforts of an unknown person to thwart them. Meanwhile, a killer armed with a crossbow has dispatched a number of young women connected with the castle. Those crimes may be connected with the apparently accidental deaths of several members of the French delegation. Doherty keeps the reader guessing even after one of the book’s major mysteries is resolved. (July)

Winter in JuneKathryn Miller Haines. Harper, $13.99 paper (336p) ISBN 978-0-06-157956-1

Actress Rosie Winter, the narrator of Haines’s lively third WWII-era mystery (after 2008’s The Winter of Her Discontent), sets sail from San Francisco for the Solomon Islands in the spring of 1943, though a woman’s body found floating in the water nearby delays the ship’s departure. Rosie, whose ex-boyfriend is missing somewhere in the Pacific theater, is part of a USO troupe that includes adventurous friend Jayne Hamilton, who’s walking away from her mobster boyfriend, and Gilda DeVane, a former MGM player. Once on the island of Tulagi, Rosie and her pals mostly have fun performing their song-and-dance routines and consorting with friendly servicemen, until a deadly sniper attack prompts the military authorities to move the entertainers to WAAC barracks for their protection. Full of evocative period detail (a sailor is called Spanky after the kid in the Our Gang comedies), this entry, for all its humorous and lighthearted moments, builds to a dramatic and sobering conclusion. (June)

The Baker Street LettersMichael Robertson. Minotaur, $24.95 (320p) ISBN 978-0-312-53812-5

Robertson’s engaging debut, the first in a projected series, offers one of the more original premises involving the Sherlock Holmes character. London solicitor Reggie Heath, who’s just leased office space on Baker Street, finds his obligations include making sure letters addressed to Sherlock Holmes at 221B are answered, if with formulaic replies. After a senior clerk is bludgeoned to death and Heath’s younger ne’er-do-well brother disappears, the lawyer suspects both events are connected to a letter an eight-year-old girl, Mara Ramirez, sent nearly 20 years earlier asking the great detective to locate her missing father. Heath follows the trail to Los Angeles, where he succeeds in tracking down Mara and learns current crimes may be connected with her father’s disappearance. Readers will want to spend more time with the appealing Heath and company, but the conceit of having future mysteries to solve based on letters to Baker Street may be hard to sustain. (June)

A Talent for Murder: A Polly Pepper MysteryR.T. Jordan. Kensington, $22 (304p) ISBN 978-0-7582-2937-3

At the start of Jordan’s bubbly third sleuth-a-thon to feature Hollywood actress Polly Pepper (after 2008’s Final Curtain), Polly becomes a judge on a cheesy reality TV show, I’ll Do Anything to Become Famous. When someone plunges a knife into a fellow judge, nasty Brit Thane Cornwall, Polly flips into Miss Marple mode. The prime suspect? Thane’s ex-lover, Lisa Marrs, the producer’s secretary, found at the crime scene with the murder weapon. Aided by housekeeper Placenta, gay son Tim and her current amour, Beverly Hills detective Randal Archer, Polly uncovers some surprises involving such show contestants as rapper Ped-Xing and Miley Cyrus clone Amy Stout. Dotted with delicious observations on America’s obsession with celebrity, this entry should win new fans for Polly, who, as the body count rises, tells the exasperated Archer that she’s “a death magnet. And there’s nothing you can do about it.” Fans of comic whodunits will be rewarded. (June)

The ExtraElizabeth Sims. Minotaur, $24.95 (400p) ISBN 978-0-312-37729-8

In Sims’s entertaining second Rita Farmer misadventure (after 2008’s The Actress), Rita, a struggling single mom, is taking bit acting roles to help pay for law school. On break from a location film shoot, Rita, costumed as a police officer, manages to scare off a pair of muggers attacking a black boy, who turns out to be the grandson of Amaryllis B. Cubitt, the well-respected founder of an ambitious homeless mission in South Central Los Angeles. When a Rita—look-alike cop is gunned down soon after, Rita suspects there’s something sinister going on at the mission. Some secret from Cubitt’s past has turned the formidable woman into a puppet for a merciless drug kingpin. Disguised as street desperadoes, Rita and her ex-lover, PI George Rowe, infiltrate the mission, where their very lives depend on Rita’s acting ability. After a slow liftoff, the action builds to a satisfying conclusion. Appealing characters, amusing subplots and the steamy L.A. setting are a plus. (June)

Bangkok Dragons, Cape Cod Tears: A Cape Islands MysteryRandall Peffer. Bleak House (www.bleakhousebooks.com), $24.95 (320p) ISBN 978-1-60648-037-3; $14.95 paper ISBN 978-1-60648-038-0

In this frenetic follow-up to Peffer’s Provincetown Follies, Bangkok Blues (2006), New Bedford, Mass., lawyer Michael Decastro travels to Bangkok at the request of his exotic hermaphrodite friend, Tuki Aparecio. Tuki, who’s under suspicion for the murder of a wealthy Thai man and the theft of an $11 million ruby from a Buddhist temple, is on the run not only from the police but also from nak-lin—gangsters or mafia. Determined to return the ruby to the temple to remove the bad karma from the stolen gem, Tuki enlists Decastro’s help and that of Marcus Aparecio, her African-American father. Against a backdrop of sexually confused tension, Decastro and Tuki try to sort out their feelings for one another. Covering a lot of territory, literally and figuratively, from the Vietnam War to Thailand’s notorious Bangkwang prison and many gender-bending clubs around the world, Peffer offers an unusual and intriguing version of star-crossed lovers beset by evil enemies. (June)

Death Wore WhiteJim Kelly. Minotaur, $24.95 (400p) ISBN 978-0-312-57081-1

Twists pile on twists in Kelly’s superb whodunit, the possible first in a series. Soon after Det. Insp. Peter Shaw and Det. Sgt. George Valentine, who had been the partner of Shaw’s disgraced policeman father, stumble on a corpse on an inflatable raft on a Norfolk beach, the pair are stuck in a blizzard, their car one of many vehicles blocked by a fallen tree. During this mishap, someone kills Harvey Ellis, the driver nearest the obstruction, with a chisel blow to the eye and manages to escape without leaving traces in the snow. Other bodies surface after the police extricate themselves from the scene of Ellis’s murder. While Shaw and his team try to untangle the lies told them by every witness they encounter, he also tries to redeem his late father’s reputation by reopening the child murder case that brought his father down. Kelly (The Skeleton Man), winner of the CWA Dagger in the Library Award, maintains the suspense throughout. (June)

Little Lamb LostMargaret Fenton. Oceanview (Midpoint, dist.), $24.95 (264p) ISBN 978-1-933515-51-9

Fenton puts her experiences as a social worker to good use in her promising debut. After toddler Michael Hennessy dies of a drug overdose, Claire Conover, of the Birmingham, Ala., Department of Human Services, doesn’t believe the boy’s mother, Ashley, spiked his sippy cup. Ashley, who has a history of hardcore drugs and booze, had been working too hard to get clean in order to regain custody of Michael. Determined to find the real killer, Claire sets out on a course that could cost her career or even her life. Fenton paces her straightforward plot well, but her real strength is in the way she develops her characters’ relationships. A number of secondary players—an investigative reporter and a guy who knows his way around a computer—pave the way for a sequel. With her fine ear for regional speech, Fenton may do for Birmingham what Margaret Maron has done for rural North Carolina. (June)

Pythagoras’ Revenge: A Mathematical MysteryArturo Sangalli. Princeton Univ., $24.95 (224p) ISBN 978-0-691-04955-7

Math geeks will best appreciate this uneasy mix of higher mathematics and Dan Brown—style intrigue, the fiction debut of science journalist Sangalli (The Importance of Being Fuzzy and Other Insights from the Border Between Math and Computers). The Order of the Beacon, a “Neo-Pythagorean sect” that believes the ancient Greek philosopher has been reincarnated, is seeking Pythagoras’ current incarnation. The conspiracy ropes in mathematician Jule Davidson and his twin sister, Johanna, a computer security specialist. Pages of academic prose devoted to such concepts as random numbers as well as unnecessary chronological jumps interrupt the narrative flow. Those who enjoyed Tefcros Michaelides’s Pythagorean Crimes (Reviews, July 21, 2008) will find more of the same. (June)

SF/Fantasy/Horror

The Spy Who Haunted MeSimon R. Green.Roc, $24.95 (400p) ISBN 978-0-451-46272-5

Green’s bright, fast-paced third Eddie “Shaman Bond” Drood adventure (after 2008’s Daemons Are Forever) opens with rumors of a traitor undermining the Drood family’s efforts to guard humanity against paranormal and mystical threats. Complicating matters, legendary agent Arthur King is dying without an heir. Eddie joins a group of other agents in tackling King’s challenge: solve five of mankind’s greatest mysteries and learn King’s secrets, including the traitor’s name. Engaging, well-crafted quests take the team from Loch Ness to Roswell, where Eddie is forced to choose between saving humanity and recovering the information his family desperately needs. Though some supporting characters are clearly meant to be disposable, Eddie makes a likable hero, and fans will enjoy following him through this surprisingly complex mystery. (June)

HylozoicRudy RuckerTor, $25.95 (336p) ISBN 978-0-7653-2074-2

Surfing across the transfinite dimensions, this giddy sequel to 2007’s Postsingular chronicles the fight to keep Earth “gnarly” in the face of aliens who want to steal the quantum chaos that makes the planet interesting. Metanovelist Thuy and her husband, JayJay, who’s addicted to the global groupmind called Gaia, maneuver between worlds to fend off chaos-diverting Peng real estate developers and flying manta-ray Hrull. Math prodigy Chu, who mitigates his autism with telepathy, and a parallel universe Hieronymus Bosch join Thuy and JayJay as they escape from modern-day fundamentalists and Renaissance witch-hunters and try to keep Gaia from going volcanic. Rucker’s plotting can be as loopy as his time lines, and the ending is so confusing that even his characters complain, but his wild imagination never slows down. (June)

Unhappy EndingsBrian KeeneDelirium (www.deliriumbooks.com), $16.95 paper (326p) ISBN 978-1-934546-10-9

Two-time Stoker-winner Keene includes 19 stories, many of which were previously only available in limited edition collections or numbered editions of his novels, in his gleefully gory fourth collection. His trademark zombies appear in five tales linked to 2003’s The Rising, as well as in “The Resurrection and the Life,” which features an undead Lazarus. When Keene stops relying so heavily on carnage, he pens standouts like “An Appointment Kept,” which concludes with a clever twist, and the powerful, dread-inducing “Stone Tears.” Fans will especially appreciate “Tequila’s Sunrise,” a fable about the origin of tequila that sneakily touches on all of Keene’s creations, and chatty afterwords offering insight into his creative process. Those new to Keene or bored of zombies will find less to love, but any horror reader will get some delightful scares. (June)

Santa OliviaJacqueline CareyGrand Central, $13.99 paper (352p) ISBN 978-0-446-19817-2

Departing from epic fantasy (Kushiel’s Dart, etc.), Carey sets this powerful near-future tale in Outpost 12, a small town trapped in a “buffer zone” shielding Texas from pandemic-stricken Mexico. Two half-siblings chafing under General Argyle’s military rule make very different plans to beat the status quo. Tom, the son of a soldier, lives at the gym, where he trains in boxing and hopes to win his freedom from the town by defeating the general’s boxing champion. Loup, who has inherited her escaped father’s oddly engineered genes, joins a group of church wards called the Santitos, a tight gang of vigilantes who masquerade as the local saint, Santa Olivia. Carey’s fans will enjoy meeting another strong, fearless heroine with special powers, while new readers will appreciate the tight focus that intensifies the depth of character and emotion. (June)

Wild Thyme, Green MagicJack VanceSubterranean (www.subterraneanpress.com), $40 (360p) ISBN 978-1-59606-226-9

The “spun-silver” prose of fantasy grand master Vance (Lurulu) illuminates 12 delightful stories, some with intriguing afterwords by the author. Insightfully introduced by editors Terry Dowling and Jonathan Strahan, this showcase follows Vance’s career from his very first publication, 1945’s “The World-Thinker,” through 1961’s fast-paced novelette “The Augmented Agent” and 1974’s Dying Earth story “The Seventeen Virgins” to “Wild Thyme and Violets,” the outline for an Italy-inspired gothic romance that reads like a surreal flash fiction novel and was first published in 2005. Most of the focus is on Vance’s work from the 1960s and 1970s, which ranges from dramatic fantasy (“Green Magic”) to classic science fiction parables (“Ullward’s Retreat”). Two charming biographical essays by Vance’s late wife, Norma, round out the collection on a tender note. (June)

Shivers V Edited by Richard Chizmar. Cemetery Dance (www.cemeterydance.com), $20 paper (330p) ISBN 978-1-58767-201-9

Chizmar’s fifth Shivers compilation, the best to date, features 24 stories and poems notable for their thematic breadth. In Steve Vernon’s lyrical “The Forever Long Snake of Olan Walker,” a superbly creepy period gothic, an imprisoned conjure man gets his nasty revenge against an Alabama chain-gang work farm boss. Dark suspense offerings range from Sarah Langan’s gritty and gruesome “The Burn Victim” to Scott Nicholson’s wryly macabre “Good Fences.” Other standouts include a fractured fairy tale from Al Sarrantonio (“The Cookie Man”), a dark riff on Dickens from Chet Williamson (“Marley’s Cat”) and a disturbing look into a murderously unhinged mind by Stewart O’Nan (“Summer of ’77”). The variety of the contents ensures that there is something for every horror lover, and for the most part these tales deliver the shivers they promise. (June)

Mass Market

Dangerous LiesAnna Louise LuciaMedallion, $7.95 (370p) ISBN 978-1-934755-08-2

A late-blooming British tourist visiting Morocco falls for a blond courier spy in Lucia’s scattered desert romance. Marianne Forster’s vacation takes a dangerously erotic turn when Alan Waring rescues her from some Rabat protestors. After worldly 35-year-old Alan makes love with virginal 24-year-old Mari, he’s so distracted that he accidentally takes her flight bag home to England. The bag he leaves behind contains a vital smart card. Terrorists wanting the smart card kidnap Mari and take her to Algeria, where she struggles to escape while Alan searches for her. Lucia (Run Among Thorns) pens some laughable prose (“She was pretty and she was afraid. Was she still afraid?... Was she still pretty?”) and scants the real world details that should bolster a tale of international intrigue, but her solid romantic plotting mostly manages to carry the book. (June)

In Over Her HeadJudi FennellSourcebooks Casablanca, $6.99 (352p) ISBN 978-1-4022-2001-2

A New Jersey marina owner finds adventure and romance while conquering her fear of the sea in this playful but uninspired debut. When Erica Peck is forced overboard into shark territory by an ex-boyfriend who wants her to recover his lost diamonds, Reel Tritone, the “spare” second son of an undersea king, swims up to save her. Reel gives Erica the ability to breathe water and introduces her to talking fish, sea monsters and strange landscapes. Reel’s growing interest in Erica’s “shell-fillers” and hers in his “gono” lead to a night of island lust (conveniently, Reel has legs rather than a tail). Fennell’s sincere wit is overshadowed by stilted writing full of fishy wordplay, and Erica’s self-consciousness turns her visit to an exotic undersea fantasy world into pretty window dressing on a thoroughly traditional romance story. (June)

The Confessions of a DuchessNicola CornickHQN, $7.99 (384p) ISBN 978-0-373-77377-0

Cornick (Deceived) introduces the small village of Fortune’s Folly in the nondescript launch of her Brides of Fortune Regency romance series. When unscrupulous Sir Montague Fortune, jilted by a rich woman, reinstates the medieval Dames’ Tax, the population soars with impoverished men seeking wealthy spinsters and widows who would rather marry than pay half their money to the odious squire. Sent to the village by the Home Secretary to investigate a murder and determined to find a well-dowered wife, Dexter Anstruther encounters his feisty ex-lover Laura, the dowager duchess of Cole. While Dexter follows clues to the murder mystery and Laura unites the single women in a humorous war against Sir Montague, the two are distracted by lust and endless opportunities for verbal sparring. Witty but lacking historical depth, this romance is neither disappointing nor outstanding. (June)

Comics

Far ArdenKevin Cannon. Top Shelf, $19.95 paper (400p) ISBN 978-1-60309-036-0

In this fanciful tale set in arctic Canada, disparate characters struggle to find a mythic paradise island, Far Arden. Despite far-fetched aspects like the evil, bureaucracy-controlled Royal Canadian Arctic Navy, a half-man/half—polar bear and a conniving university professor of psychology, the story becomes mundane through the intertwining character relations and attention to detail in constructing the world. The protagonist, a stoic, rugged arctic pirate, Army Shanks, searches for the island to reunite with his mentor, Simon Arctavis, but is hindered by old acquaintances and ill-fortune. Slowly, the reader becomes immersed in this alternate arctic world. Commonplace and strange are fused, as rants on the dangers of global warming transition into a battle with a polar bear. The thick crosshatched backgrounds and simple fluid characters further ground the story. As the entwined pasts of Army, his ex, her current husband, a college couple and an orphan bent on revenge for his father’s murder are revealed, entwining pasts become clear and the full range of this engrossing story is revealed. (May)

Ikigami: The Ultimate Limit Vol. 1Motoro Mase. Viz, $12.99 paper (216p) ISBN 978-1-4215-2678-2

The government is randomly selecting one person a day to die so that citizens will value life more. The victims are told 24 hours ahead of time with an ikigami, a “death paper.” Fujimoto, the main character, is tasked with delivering these messages, a job which brings him into contact with various lives and causes him to question the plan. The art is clear, gritty and direct, presenting the disturbing stories plausibly. Shadowing makes the expressions, often aimed directly at the reader, more powerful. Ikigami recipient Yosuke was abused as a kid by his peers, which made him resentful. At first glance, he seems like no loss, but how much of his lack of potential is his fault? Who made him a victim, and shouldn’t they be the ones to die? Is revenge any comfort? The question of how you’d live your last day if you knew ahead of time is a powerful one; to put the question within the context of building a more obedient, productive society is devilishly clever. This must-read manga is especially recommended for fans of Death Note ready to move on to a less fantastic exploration of the idea of predicting one’s demise. (May)

A Drifting LifeYoshihiro Tatsumi. Drawn & Quarterly, $29.95 paper (854p) ISBN 978-1-897299-74-6

Tatsumi revolutionized manga in the 1950s, inventing gekiga—seething, slice-of-life stories about emotional crises. In this elephantine memoir (in which he barely disguises himself as “Hiroshi Katsumi”), he tells the story of his early years in the comics business, from his teenage obsession with entering postwar magazines’ reader-cartoon contests and poring over Osamu Tezuka’s comics to the brief late-’50s heyday of the gekiga workshop over which he presided. It’s also a history of Japan in that era, filtered through Tatsumi’s own experience—the sound of cicadas is a recurring symbol of portentousness—and packed with digressions on cartooning technique, the movies and prose fiction that inspired him, and his nervous flirtations with women; the passage of time is marked by illustrated factoids about each year’s headlines. Tatsumi’s visual technique is very much a product of an earlier generation—his characters’ faces are simple, broad caricatures—but the mastery he’s gained in half a century of cartooning comes through in his immaculate staging and composition. Readers curious about Japanese comics history may find the book’s wealth of detail fascinating; for the most part, though, Tatsumi’s vivid, graceful dramatizations of the period’s shifting business and creative alliances don’t quite justify the tedious, repetitive hybrid of bildungsroman and industry time line he’s created. (Apr.)

NG Life: Vol. 1Mizuho Kusanagi. Tokyopop, $10.99 paper (224p) ISBN 978-1-4278-1445-6

Fans of Kusanagi’s Mugen Spiral may be perplexed by this gender-bending love story that follows high school student Keidai through confusing love tribulations unlike any other love triangle: he shares a past life in Pompeii with love interest Yuuma and best friend Serizawa—unfortunately, their genders in the present switched: Yuuma is a boy, and Serizawa a girl. It’s problematic enough that his former drinking pal is now a beautiful girl, but when his beloved wife from the past turns up as a young boy, it’s almost too much for Keidai to handle. As Yuuma tries to win Serizawa’s affections, Keidai tries to cope with the realization that his long-lost love is now a man and he cannot shake his affection for the person. Though slightly clunky when working through the characters lives in Pompeii, the story is more engaging than other shojo series that rely too heavily on misdirected affections as a plot device. The art style is sweet and the characters are pretty, but without being overly romanticized. Kusanagi has created an interesting and compelling story, and the yaoi (boy love) undertones are thankfully lighthearted. (Mar.)