Fiction Reviews: 1/25/2010
Reviews of New Fiction, Poetry, Mystery, Science Fiction and Comics

Jan 25, 2010

Private Life Jane Smiley. Knopf, $26.95 (320p) ISBN 978-1-4000-4060-5

The Pulitzer Prize—winning author of A Thousand Acres delivers a slow-moving historical antiromance in her bleak 13th novel. In the early 1880s, Margaret Mayfield is rescued from old maid status by Andrew Jackson Jefferson Early, an astronomer whose questionable discoveries have taken him from the scientific elite to a position as a glorified timekeeper at a remote California naval base. Margaret’s world is made ever smaller as the novel progresses, with no children to distract her and Andrew more excited by his telescope than his wife. Isolation and boredom being two dominant themes, the book is a slow burn, punctuated by detours into the larger world: the Wobblies, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and both world wars. The old-fashioned language can be off-putting, though it does make the reader feel like a reluctant second wife to Andrew as his failed scientific theories are revealed in tedious detail and the gruesome monotony of marriage is portrayed in a repellant but fascinating fashion. Thus, when Margaret finally realizes her marriage is “relentless, and terrifying,” it feels wonderfully satisfying, but the proceeding 100 pages offer a trickle of disappointment and a slackening of suspense that saps hard-earned goodwill. (May)

Witz Joshua Cohen. Dalkey Archive, $18.95 paper (824p) ISBN 978-1-56478-588-6

An extravagant poeticism combined with an unbridled imagination burst from each considerable page of Cohen’s futuristic biblical opus (after A Heaven of Others). Following his singular birth, Ben Israelien survives a peculiarly genocidal, apocalyptic plague, ends up the last Jew on the planet, and must contend with a new brand of religious fanaticism that hijacks the faith and perverts it into a form of Born-Again Judaism for overzealous converts. While these crusaders burn churches and transform roadhouses into synagogues, the secular Ben strives to escape his messiahlike status, eventually embarking on an odyssey across a kitchified, radicalized America in which his face adorns the new currency. A towering experiment, Cohen’s postmodern parable skewers the commodification of religion and decries a ballooning cultural bankruptcy, but navigating this doomsday picaresque’s nearly half-a-million words—many of them neologisms trapped inside labyrinthine, haphazardly punctuated sentences—is itself a taxing odyssey. Following in the tracks of James Joyce, Cohen strives to reinvent the English language, but the result is a kind of epic narrative poem that is only compelling in spurts. (May)

The Line Olga Grushin. Putnam/Marian Wood, $25.95 (304p) ISBN 978-0-399-15616-8

At one point in Grushin’s disappointing follow-up to The Dream Life of Sukhanov, it is observed that standing on a line is “a very efficient way of disposing of people’s time.” But however efficient, it’s never entirely enjoyable. The story, inspired by Igor Stravinsky’s 1962 return to Russia, begins in winter and follows Anna, a teacher, her musician husband, Sergei, and their son, Alexander, as the three take turns waiting on—and having their lives changed by—a line. While Anna theorizes that she is waiting for “something... to make her and her family happier,” she eventually discovers the line is for tickets to see the grand return concert of conductor Igor Selinsky, who had escaped Russia before the “Change” 37 years earlier. During the wait for the ticket kiosk to open, each family member is greatly affected by what happens on the line—romance, job loss, and arson all pop up—though, despite Grushin’s lovely writing and imagery, the narrative is hard to stick with. The twists are less than surprising, and despite the havoc that ensues, it turns out that people standing around in a queue isn’t the most exciting material. (Apr.)

Imperfect Birds Anne Lamott. Riverhead, $25.95 (288p) ISBN 978-1-59448-751-4

Rosie Ferguson, the young heroine of Lamott’s Rosie and Crooked Little Heart, almost succumbs to the drug culture in this unsparing look at teenagers and parents who walk the tightrope between all-encompassing love and impotent fury. The former tennis star is now a straight-A high school senior, living with her mother, Elizabeth, and stepfather, James, in Marin County. Elizabeth, still susceptible to emotional breakdowns and fighting lapses into alcoholism, is acutely aware of Rosie’s vulnerability, and she and James are vigilant in watching Rosie’s behavior, knowing, as everyone does, that drug deals go down in the town’s central square, and that the kids are drinking, sexually active, and aligned against their parents. Lamott captures this gestalt with her distinctive mixture of warmth, humor, and sensitivity to volatile emotional equilibrium, going laser-sharp into teen mindsets: the craving for secrecy and excitement, the thrill of flaunting the law and parental rules. Eventually forced to confront Rosie’s peril and its potentially marriage-destroying power, Elizabeth and James take decisive action and risk their family. Straddling a line between heartwarming and heartbreaking, this novel is Lamott at her most witty, observant, and psychologically astute. (Apr.)

Reckless Andrew Gross Morrow, $25.99 (352p) ISBN 978-0-06-165595-1

Former police detective Ty Hauck, now a partner in a worldwide security company, displays his usual bulldog tenacity in bestseller Gross’s sketchily plotted third Ty Hauck novel (after Don’t Look Twice). The murders of Marc Glassman, the chief equities trader at an old Wall Street firm, Glassman’s wife, and one of their children at their Greenwich, Conn., home affect Hauck deeply. Meanwhile, his boss asks him to investigate shadowy financier Dieter Thibault, who’s aroused the interest of a valued customer. Probing the connections among seismic disturbances in the financial markets, Glassman’s death, and Thibault’s actions, Hauck teams with Treasury agent Naomi Blum only to find their every action anticipated and countered. Against international conspiracies and financial institutions in freefall, Hauck and Blum have to go rogue. Thriller fans able to overlook clichés like “wet behind the ears” and “hit them like a truck” will enjoy the fast-flowing action. 6-city author tour. (Apr.)

Of Flesh and Blood Daniel Kalla. Forge, $25.99 (448p) ISBN 978-0-7653-2141-1

Emergency-room physician Kalla’s latest novel (after Cold Plague) is a medical, historical, and family drama set at the fictional Alfredson Medical Center, a world-class clinic outside Seattle. Founded in the 19th century by Marshall Alfredson and Evan McGrath, the hospital has relied on the founders’ families ever since, and it’s now approaching a crucial crossroads. William McGrath, the hospital’s CEO, must battle a nasty infection rampaging through the wards. His cardiologist daughter, Erin, struggles to keep a traumatic experience from affecting her job. Her oncologist brother, Tyler, faces a malpractice suit after a risky procedure goes awry, and Tyler’s medical researcher wife, Jill, discovers irregularities in her potentially groundbreaking study data that might spell the end of her academic career. All of this is brewing as the Alfredson family gathers for an unprecedented vote to determine the hospital’s future. Kalla’s medical experience doubtless informs the rigorous operating room scenes and the abrasive hospital politics, but while this should appeal to fans of medical TV dramas, the overdose of familiar coincidences, revelations, and personal demons makes this feel more like a rerun than a new episode. (Apr.)

Bite Me: A Love Story Christopher Moore. Morrow, $23.99 (320p) ISBN 978-0-06-177972-5

A vampire cat is stalking San Francisco in Moore’s serviceable latest comic horror adventure (after You Suck), and the only humans who can take him down are goth girl Abby Normal and her brainiac boyfriend, Stephen “Foo Dog” Wong. They, in turn, call upon Abby’s masters, vampiric lovers Jody and Tommy, who were on the verge of breaking up until Abby decided to bronze them posed as Rodin’s The Kiss. Also in pursuit of the vampire cat and his minions are the Animals, the night stock crew at the Marina Safeway who hunt vampires in their spare time; a lunatic homeless man who calls himself the “Emperor of San Francisco”; a Japanese printmaker who wields a mean sword; and homicide detectives Rivera and Cavuto. Things become even more complicated with the arrival of three ancient vampires intent on getting some payback. The narrative could use trimming, and much of the humor seems recycled from Moore’s previous vampire tomes, though this won’t matter to the legions of fans who crave Moore’s trademark low horror and high camp. (Apr.)

Horns Joe Hill Morrow, $25.99 (384p) ISBN 978-0-06-114795-1

In bestseller Hill’s compulsively readable supernatural thriller, his second after Heart-Shaped Box, dissolute Ignatius Perrish wakes up one morning to find a pair of satanic horns sprouting from his forehead. To the residents of Gideon, N.H., this grotesque disfigurement only confirms their suspicions that Ig raped and murdered his girlfriend, Merrin Williams, a crime for which he was held but soon released for lack of evidence. Ig is also now privy to the deepest, and often darkest, private thoughts of anyone he touches. Once Ig discovers through this uncanny sensitivity the true killer’s identity, he schemes to reveal the culprit’s guilt through natural means. Toggling between past and present, and incidents that range from the supernaturally surreal to the brutally realistic, Hill spins a story that’s both morbidly amusing and emotionally resonant. The explanations for Ig’s weird travails won’t satisfy every reader, but few will dispute that Hill has negotiated the sophomore slump. 6-city author tour. (Mar.)

Caught Harlan Coben Dutton, $27.95 (416p) ISBN 978-0-525-95158-2

Bestseller Coben (Hold Tight) has a knack for taking everyday nightmares and playing with life’s endless “what ifs,” as shown in this stand-alone thriller, a tightly choreographed dance of guilt and innocence, forgiveness and retribution. Frank Tremont, a world-weary, near-retirement investigator for New Jersey’s Essex County, has to face his failure to solve his last case—the disappearance of a teenage girl. Meanwhile, Dan Mercer stands accused of being a sexual predator thanks to the ambush journalism of Wendy Tynes, a tabloid TV reporter, who must cope with her husband’s death caused by a drunken driver as well as reckon with the possibility of Mercer’s innocence. When Tynes finds a link between a father of one of Mercer’s alleged victims and others felled by scandal, she could become a killer’s next victim. If the wealth of characters dilutes the suspense, Coben gives readers lots to think about when judging rights and wrongs. 500,000 first printing; 12-city author tour. (Mar.)

Angelology Danielle Trussoni Viking, $27.95 (454p) ISBN 978-0-670-02147-5

A covert age-old war between angels and humans serves as the backdrop for Trussoni’s gripping tale of supernatural thrills and divine destinies. Sister Evangeline, the secretary who handles all inquiries concerning the archives of angel arcana at an upstate New York convent, receives a letter from researcher V.A. Verlaine inquiring about an unknown link between the convent and philanthropist Abigail Rockefeller dating to 1943. It turns out that the Rockefellers were interested in a legendary artifact associated with an order of fallen angels. That priceless artifact is coveted by Verlaine’s employer, Percival Grigori, a Nephilim—offspring of the union between mortal and angel parents—who will stop at nothing to retrieve it for the awesome power it will give his race over humanity. Trussoni (Falling Through the Earth) anchors this fanciful dark fantasy to a solid foundation built from Catholic church history, biblical exegesis, and apocryphal texts. Suspenseful intrigues and apocalyptic battle scenes give this complexly plotted tale a vigor and vitality all the more exciting for its intelligence. 9-city author tour. (Mar.)

Expiration Date Duane Swierczynski Minotaur, $13.99 paper (224p) ISBN 978-0-312-36340-6

In this workmanlike time travel thriller from Swierczynski (Severance Package), 37-year-old Mickey Wade, a struggling journalist who’s lost his job with an alt-weekly newspaper, the Philadelphia City News, accepts his mother’s suggestion to move into his grandfather’s apartment in the city’s seedy Frankford neighborhood. After popping some long-expired Tylenols for a hangover, Wade is transported back to February 22, 1972, the day he was born. Wade’s time-traveling self proves vulnerable to light, as shown by his losing two fingers. On returning to the present, Wade finds those fingers restored but without feeling. Subsequent deliberate trips into the past give Wade some background on the great trauma of his life, the apparently motiveless stabbing murder of his father, a musician known as the Human Jukebox. Predictable complications follow from Wade’s efforts to prevent the killing. This one will appeal mainly to Swierczynski fans. (Mar.)

No More Heroes: A Cal Innes Novel Ray Banks Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25 (272p) ISBN 978-0-15-101459-0

Cal Innes matches wits (and fists) with a nasty bunch of neo-Nazis in British author Banks’s solid third novel featuring the down-on-his-luck Manchester PI (after Sucker Punch). When one of slum lord Donald Plummer’s properties gets torched, Cal, who evicts families who can’t pay the rent for Plummer, risks his life to save a child trapped inside. This heroic act brings both Cal and Plummer unwanted media attention. When Plummer receives an anonymous threat on his remaining buildings, he suspects the English National Socialists, who are up in arms because Plummer rents to immigrants. Cal, who reluctantly agrees—for a hefty fee—to look into the group, soon discovers that the ENS may not be the only instigators. Angry student demonstrators stir up the already volatile situation by protesting Plummer’s unfair leasing practices. Prone to popping pills and knocking heads, Cal is a rough-and-tumble but strangely empathetic hero. (Mar.)

False Mermaid Erin Hart Scribner, $26 (336p) ISBN 978-1-4165-6376-1

As in Hart’s Haunted Ground and Lake of Sorrows, the bittersweet Celtic otherworld haunts her outstanding third tale of family sorrows centered on the ancient mystery of what keeps a woman in a bad relationship. After three years of studying Irish “bog people,” corpses preserved in peat fields, Nora Gavin realizes she has to leave Ireland for Saint Paul, Minn., her childhood home, to prove that her architect brother-in-law, Peter Hallett, who’s about to remarry, murdered her sister, Tríona, five years earlier. A desire to protect Tríona’s 11-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, from Peter’s savagery also motivates her. Woven deftly into Nora’s real-world mission are the old Irish selkie stories, tales of seals who shape-change into women, marry for love, and find themselves tragically caught between two worlds, a duality Hart suggests is deeply embedded in humanity. Many readers will find this passionate, complex novel almost impossible to put down. (Mar.)

What Is This Thing Called Love? Gene Wilder. St. Martin’s, $19.99 (176p) ISBN 978-0-312-59890-7

The much beloved star of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory delivers less than his best in his third work of fiction (after The Woman Who Wouldn’t), a collection of 12 forgettable stories. Wilder dedicates the book to his late cousin Buddy Silberman, whose romantic adventures are fictionalized in “The Birthday,” “My Old Flame,” and “The Hollywood Producer.” Each of Wilder’s stories sketches an infatuation or love affair, and many seem to channel the winsome, golly-gee quality of television from a more innocent era, in which it might have been conceivable for a sexually inexperienced, “tortuously” bashful 21-year-old to lament, “I wish I wasn’t such a shy nincompoop.” Dialogue is voiced at an unvarying pitch, and characters feel generic, while sexual encounters are described so blandly and awkwardly as to make one cringe. But readers seeking a little treacle may find a saving grace in the book’s humble aspirations to give “a little pleasure and a laugh.” (Mar.)

Burial Neil Cross Forge, $24.99 (300p) ISBN 978-0-7653-2587-7

British author Cross’s smooth U.S. debut, a novel of psychological suspense, offers a familiar setup. One summer night in 1993, Nathan Redmond, a research assistant for a radio talk show, and an acquaintance of his, Bob Morrow, each have sex in Bob’s car with a stoned 19-year-old, Elise Fox, whom Nathan picked up at a party. Elise dies while doing the deed with Bob, who tells Nathan he’s sure she suffered a seizure. In a panic, the two men decide to bury the body. They manage to avoid suspicion by the police, who settle on Nathan’s sleazy boss, another party attendee, as the prime suspect in Fox’s disappearance. Fifteen years later, Bob calls on Nathan, now a greeting card salesman, with some bad news—developers have begun to dig in the area of Elise’s grave. Readers will feel little sympathy for Nathan as he tries, perversely, to make belated amends for his crime. The story flows, but the main character’s lack of depth is a reminder that Cross (Always the Sun) is not yet in the modern masters league. (Mar.)

The Queen’s Lover Vanora Bennett. Morrow, $25.99 (592p) ISBN 978-0-06-168986-4

It might seem foolhardy to dig into the treasure trove of English history and yank out one of its least illustrious characters for a revisionist makeover, yet Bennett (Figures in Silk) pulls it off in this dishy historical set against the violent backdrop of 15th-century England and France. The high drama of pitched battles, palace intrigue, and cutthroat politics are mere scene setters for the romance between timid French princess Catherine de Valois, wife of Henry V, and Welsh soldier-poet Owain Tudor. While the English begin their invasion of France, and France falls into civil war, Bennett describes the young Catherine growing up neglected and impoverished in the midst of royal family dysfunction—and seeing a way out through a marriage to England’s Henry V, as “she wanted not to live on the edge of fear, with everything so sad and out of control.” But it’s exactly those hurdles that make Catherine’s story so remarkable, and Bennett’s retelling is so riven with tension—including a haunting portrait of Catherine’s father, King Charles—that readers will be hard-pressed to put this down. (Mar.)

Still Midnight Denise Mina Little, Brown/Reagan Arthur, $24.99 (352p) ISBN 978-0-316-01563-9

At the outset of Mina’s stellar first in a new series, two men in army fatigues, Pat and Eddy, break into the suburban Glasgow house of the Anwars, a Muslim family, demanding to speak to a man none of the family has ever heard of. The pair abduct the father, Aamir, after Pat shoots Aamir’s attractive teenage daughter in the hand. Det. Sgt. Alex Morrow wonders if religious bigotry prompted the crime, but she soon realizes that money is the key when Pat and Eddy demand a £2 million ransom, an exorbitant sum for a family of modest means. As Morrow and her partner, Det. Sgt. Grant Bannerman, dig deeper into the lives of the Anwars, particularly middle child Omar, they begin to untangle a complex web of intrigue. Meanwhile, the frantic kidnappers realize too late they’re out of their depth. Mina (Slip of the Knife), who’s as much at ease with cops as she is with the people they chase, laces this potent crime thriller with colorful Scottish slang and delivers a sucker-punch climax. (Mar.)

The Silent Sea Clive Cussler with Jack Du Brul Putnam, $27.95 (416p) ISBN 978-0-399-15625-0

In the winning seventh entry in the Oregon Files nautical adventure series from bestseller Cussler and Du Brul (after Corsair), Juan Cabrillo, the heroic skipper of the Oregon, a state-of-the-art warship disguised as a tramp steamer, faces a multitude of difficulties and challenges. A fabulous pirate treasure may lie at the bottom of a deep well on Pine Island in Washington State. In Argentina, a junta of generals has seized power and turned the country into a police state with designs on the rest of South America. The discovery of the remains of a WWII-era blimp in the Argentine jungle ups the ante. At the bottom of the sea off Antarctica, where the Argentines have opened a secret oil field, lies a huge, ancient Chinese vessel, which could help the Chinese, who are in league with the Argentines, in any legal claim to Antarctic territory. The action seesaws from subtropical jungles to the bitter cold of the Antarctic as Juan leads his band of intrepid scientist warriors into battle against a host of nefarious enemies. A cliffhanger ending will leave fans panting for more. (Mar.)

From the Four Winds Haim Sabato, trans. from the Hebrew by Yaacob Dweck. Toby, $24.95 (160p) ISBN 978-1-59264-240-3

Sabato (Adjusting Sights) draws upon his personal history in this reflective novel about an indefatigable Hungarian Holocaust survivor. The story is narrated by a boy named Haim whose Jewish family is expelled from Egypt after the 1956 Sinai conflict. Haim, a precocious five-year-old when his family resettles in a Jerusalem housing project, knows nothing about the Holocaust and is puzzled by the somber Europeans who stay shut up in their homes. Only a charismatic Hungarian, Mr. Farkash, has close relationships with both the Jewish Egyptians and his own community. Farkash guides and protects the meek of both worlds, ensures that both the Sephardic and the Ashkenazi have places to worship, and, over time, becomes Haim’s mentor and entrusts Haim with his family’s tragic story. Sabato skillfully mimics the nonlinear processes of human discovery as Haim learns about the world wars and the Holocaust, and though occasional clumsiness in language may be due to the difficulties of translation (and suggest that subtleties of meaning may also be lost), the vivid images of life in the projects of the new Israel underscore the story’s power. (Mar.)

The Bone Thief: A Body Farm Novel Jefferson Bass Morrow, $24.99 (352p) ISBN 978-0-061284-76-2

Those looking for a mystery in this so-so sequel to Bones of Betrayal, the fifth forensic thriller from bestseller Bass (the pseudonym of Bill Blass and Jon Jefferson), may be disappointed to find the solving of an embalmer’s murder relegated to a subplot. Bill Brockton, the chair of the University of Tennessee’s anthropology department and head of the human decomposition research facility known as the Body Farm, is still preoccupied with the fallout of the previous book’s events, which left his emotions in turmoil and a close friend maimed. The woman Brockton had fallen for, who turned out to be the killer he was seeking, escaped after Brockton confronted her. The present book largely focuses on Brockton’s efforts at undercover work after the Feds involve him in a case against an unscrupulous tissue bank. No less than two deus ex machinas at the end undercut the realism. (Mar.)

Down to the Wire David Rosenfelt Minotaur, $24.99 (304p) ISBN 978-0-312-37394-8

Near the start of Rosenfelt’s dynamite thriller, his second stand-alone after 2008’s Don’t Tell a Soul, reporter Chris Turley from the Bergen News, is about to meet an anonymous tipster at a Teaneck, N.J., park to discuss “corruption by a high-level government official” when an explosion rips through an office building opposite the park. Chris makes headline news by saving five people from the wreckage. Chris’s source, who calls himself “P.T.,” soon starts to brag about a killing spree (using remotely detonated bombs and poison darts), which won’t end unless Chris kills himself. Aided by his entertainment editor girlfriend, an FBI agent, and a homicide detective, Chris embarks on a wild hunt for the slippery psycho. Might P.T. be embittered Peter Randolph, who blames Chris’s late father, a famed journalist, for his own father’s suicide? Rosenfelt’s sly humor, breathless pacing, and terrific plot twists keep the pages spinning toward the showdown on New Year’s Eve in Times Square. (Mar.)

As If We Were Prey: Stories Michael Delp. Wayne State Univ., $15.95 paper (120p) ISBN 978-0-8143-3477-5

Delp (The Last Good Water) finds dark inspiration for these loose stories in the complicated transformations of boys to men. In “Commandoes,” set in a post-WWII American suburb, some neighborhood boys teach a lesson to the meanest kid on the block, neighborhood terror Daryl Hannenberg, whose stepdad was hauled off to prison and who has a Hitler poster in his room. Delp obliquely implies Daryl’s anger has a lot to do with the expectations society heaps on boys. Subsequent tales explore these assumptions, such as a bloody-minded sense of honor assumed by a sixth-grade boy in “The Trees Growing Up Around Us,” who repeatedly takes beatings by his more practiced boxing partner. Delp’s boys and adolescents grow into overweight, hard-drinking middle-aged men, such as Inky Sewell in “We Are Living in the Future,” a star high school football player turned unemployed, self-pitying beer guzzler. Delp is very at home in places where there’s little hope amid the self-perpetuating ordeals of failure and defeat. It’s not for everyone, but readers who cut their teeth on Jesus’ Son will want to take a look. (Mar.)

Hold Up the Sky Patricia Sprinkle. NAL Accent, $15 paper (416p) ISBN 978-0-451-22914-4

In her latest, Sprinkle (Carley’s Song) abandons mystery for pure melodrama, following two down-on-their-luck sisters reconverging on their father’s farm in Solace, Ga. When the bottom falls out of Maggie Baxter’s safe upper-middle-class family life, she takes her sons and moves back to daddy’s farm, where her sister, Billie, and Billie’s disabled daughter, live hand-to-mouth following the disappearance of Billie’s husband. The two sisters spend sweltering summer days in their father’s kitchen with elderly friend Mamie Fountain, who is dying of congestive heart failure, and Mexican immigrant Emerita Gomez, who has lost her family. The only respite from these characters’ gloom-and-doom circumstances is the reappearance of Billie’s good-hearted high school heartthrob. Sprinkle has a gift for developing a full, rich world, but her narrative spends far too long spinning its wheels, considering and reconsidering each woman’s miseries without moving beyond them. (Mar.)

The Last Fix K.O. Dahl, trans. from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett Minotaur, $24.99 (576p) ISBN 978-0-312-37571-3

Intense police inspector Gunnarstranda and his easygoing aide, Frank Frølich, tackle the murder of recovering drug addict Katrine Bratterud in Dahl’s entertaining third crime thriller featuring the Oslo cops to be made available in English (after The Man in the Window). Bratterud’s nude, raped body turns up the morning after a party given by Annabeth Ås of the Vinterhagen Rehabilitation Centre and her husband, Bjørn Gerhardsen. It seems Bratterud came to the party with one boyfriend, left the party to meet another boyfriend, then went off on her own. Everyone has secrets to hide, and the two detectives have to contend with planted evidence, false confessions, red herrings, and, perhaps, a spurious connection to an unsolved murder decades earlier. Despite modern forensics, Gunnarstranda and Frølich rely on old-fashioned interview techniques, dogged comparisons of stories and time lines, to unravel the lies in a whodunit full of psychological insights. (Mar.)

Take Your Pleasure Where You Find It J.D. Mason. St. Martin’s, $23.99 (320p) ISBN 978-0-312-59856-3

Mason (That Devil’s No Friend of Mine) sets three former best friends on a collision course with the secret that shattered their friendship in her commendable latest. When the former “Tres Amigas” reunite at their 30-year high school reunion, they’re unaware that the baby girl they abandoned at an emergency room in 1979 is now grown and eager to confront them. Although Tasha Darden, the abandoned baby, loved Miss Lucy, her recently deceased foster mother, she wonders about her birth mother, and a private detective has winnowed the suspects down to three potential women. Was it Renetta Smith, now married to an abusive husband? Or Phyllis Neville, a driven career woman whose first marriage gave her a lovely daughter before it ended in divorce? Or Freddie Palmer, who has a fulfilling if boring marriage and three grown children? The day of reckoning is unavoidable for all four women in this fast-moving and fascinating look at friendship, the repercussions of keeping secrets, and the power of forgiveness (Mar.)

Bone Dogs Roger Alan Skipper. Counterpoint, $15.95 paper (256p) ISBN 978-1-58243-563-3

Set amid the hardscrabble hills of West Virginia, Skipper’s third novel is a tour of trailer parks, lonely roads, and lost souls centering on Tuesday Price, a nom de guerre for downward-spiraling drunk Andrew Price. A brilliant outsider, Tuesday can’t hold a job or his life together, seeming determined to drink himself into an early grave. Constantly in the bag, Tuesday learns that Linda, his wife and sometimes trailer cohabitant, is unexpectedly pregnant, leading to his attempt to dry out and finally face a troubled past that includes a manic-depressive mother and a strict Pentecostal minister father. After another round of trouble, Tuesday lands in his deserted childhood home, intent on rebuilding it and himself. Skipper (The Baptism of Billy Bean) moves easily in dark terrain, but he’s also conversant with redemption; the novel bears an odd sense of charm that has roots in authentic characters and Skipper’s ease of language. This is a flinty novel of troubled times for these troubled times. (Mar.)

Invisible Boy Cornelia Read Grand Central, $24.99 (432p) ISBN 978-0-446-51134-6

Set in 1990, Read’s superb third Madeline Dare novel (after The Crazy School) finds the acid-tongued ex-socialite and her blue-collar husband, Dean, in Manhattan. A chance encounter with distant cousin Cate Ludlam introduces Madeline to Queens’ Prospect Cemetery, where Cate is in charge of the volunteer cleanup effort. While helping to clear weeds, Madeline unearths a small skeleton, which turns out to be that of three-year-old Teddy Underhill, reported missing months earlier. Accustomed to snooping around police investigations, Madeline hounds the lead detective in charge for answers, and soon learns that Teddy was a victim of regular physical abuse at the hands of his mother and her boyfriend. Read expertly evokes the New York City of the period, from the nearly palpable grime of Chelsea to disturbing undertones of racism and classism in the justice system. Equal parts toughness and vulnerability, Madeline is always a bracing heroine. (Mar.)

The Secret of the Glass Donna Russo Morin. Kensington, $15 paper (384p) ISBN 978-0-7582-2692-1

The latest inspiring historical romance from Morin (The Courtier’s Secret) celebrates the eternal charms of Venice, Murano glass, and Galileo, with the story of a courageous 17th-century woman glassmaker forced to work in secret (like other female artisans) under Venetian law. Sophia Fiolario is the eldest daughter of Zeno Fiolario, one of Venice’s glassmaking maestri, a talented protégé who must give up her art to marry Pasquale da Fuligna, a middle-aged nobleman whose family hopes to acquire the wealth of the Fiolarios’ glass factory. After her father falls ill, Sophia begins a secret lens project for Galileo, resulting in a binocular-type device; once involved with Galileo, however, Sophia finds herself the target of a papal crackdown that ensnares her family and the impoverished man with whom she’s fallen in love. Luckily, Morin conjures an unlikely upbeat destiny for these rebel hearts, making for a decidedly dulce ending. (Mar.)

If You Were My Man Francis Ray. St. Martin’s Griffin, $14.99 paper (336p) ISBN 978-0-312-57369-0

The sixth and final installment in Ray’s Invincible Women series (And Mistress Makes Three) explores a lonely widow’s second chance at love with a lifelong bachelor in Myrtle Beach, S.C. When rugged Officer Rafael Dunlap, a hostage negotiator for the city police, meets the gorgeous Nathalyia Fontaine at the seafood restaurant she owns and manages, it seems like love at first sight for the commitmentphobic cop. Fortunately, the gorgeous African-American restaurateur is also struck; unfortunately, she’s got complicating issues of her own, including a troublemaking sister, Theresa, who shows up suddenly and begins stealing from the restaurant after Nathalyia gives her a job. Another charming subplot follows a feisty waitress (Nathalyia’s best friend) getting close to her bartender, an older gentleman; an unexpected pregnancy also adds to the drama. Ray, a prolific storyteller in the mode of Nora Roberts, demonstrates a veteran’s skill for crafting fascinating, soulful characters with believable motives and mishaps. (Mar.)

The Colony Jillian Weise. Soft Skull, $15.95 paper (352p) ISBN 978-1-5937-6267-4

Ambitious, provocative, and wildly inventive, this debut novel from Texan poet Weise features sharp North Carolinian Anne Hatley, born with a genetic mutation that stunted her bone growth and left her with just one leg. In 2015, 25-year-old Anne (sporting a robotic limb) joins four others with gene deficiencies at the Colony, a Long Island research station, where for three months the five colonists will be paid to stay on site and provide stem cells for research efforts headed by geneticist Engel Deeter (whom Anne refers to as “The Gee”). With her free time, Anne keeps in touch with her boyfriend back home in Durham, gets to know her fellow colonists (including a country-singing bartender with the suicide gene), and wonders over the possibility of new treatments—in particular, her ambivalence over the opportunity to grow a flesh-and-bone leg. Though wry and funny, with thoughtful points about the relationship between modern-day gene therapy and 19th-century eugenics, Weise’s narrator often keeps the reader at a distance, and the cleverly fragmented structure falters under the weight of its denouement. (Mar.)

Dark Secrets of the Old Oak Tree Dolores J. Wilson Medallion (IPG, dist.), $24.95 (348p) ISBN 978-1-60542-106-3

Wilson’s melodramatic novel of suspense chronicles the deadly impact of secrets and lies on the people of a small Southern town. After Evie Carson’s marriage to a high-powered attorney unravels in Chicago, she returns to her hometown of Hyattville, Ga., where she opens a fashion boutique. While sitting one day in her childhood tree house, Evie sees mentally challenged Jake Harley emerge into a clearing from the underbrush carrying a nude female body. Jake digs a grave for what Evie recognizes to her horror is the body of her high school friend Denise Farrell. After she reports Denise’s murder to the police, someone kills Jake. As more bodies pile up, Evie takes solace in her budding romance with state trooper Lyle Dickerson. Wilson (Little Big Heart) balances an intricate plot with credible character development. (Mar.)

A Corpse at St. Andrew’s Chapel Mel Starr. Monarch (Kregel, dist.), $14.99 paper (288p) ISBN 978-1-85424-954-8

History teacher and author Starr (The Unquiet Bones) pens a second medieval mystery featuring Master Hugh de Singleton, surgeon and bailiff of Lord Gilbert Talbot’s manor at Bampton, England. The discovery of a corpse at St. Andrew’s Chapel—that of Alan, the manor’s beadle—poses a mystery that Master Hugh must unravel. A subsequent second murder deepens the mystery. Master Hugh is nothing if not deliberate; the narrative proceeds slowly and methodically, adding complications and characters. The story is detail driven rather than character driven, with a groaning board of medieval touches: diet, clothing, calendar with feast days. Starr helpfully provides a glossary for readers who want to tell their beadle from their bailiff. In an era in which religion and culture were synonymous, there’s also a goodly helping of theological asides, chubby clergy, and a sympathetic portrait of John Wyclif, the Reformation’s “morning star” and a mentor to Master Hugh. Starr pens a competent, albeit slow-moving, medieval tale. (Mar.)

Somewhere to Belong Judith Miller. Bethany House, $14.99 paper (384p) ISBN 978-0-7642-0642-9

Amish fiction is so big it’s spawning offshoots. Miller sets her historical in 1877 in the Amana Colonies in Iowa. The Christian inhabitants of Amana’s seven villages lived cooperatively and simply by strict rules, and centered their life and work around God. Like the Amish, the Amana also say gut (good) a lot. Miller (The Carousel Painter) creates two heroines who are on the surface opposite numbers, but have more in common than is apparent. Johanna Ilg has lived her young life in Amana, but feels the pull of the outside world, particularly because her brother Wilhelm has left the villages to marry and live in big-city Chicago. Berta Schumacher and her family arrive from Chicago to live a simpler life, and rebellious teenage Berta has trouble adjusting, to put it mildly. Family secrets and misunderstandings drive the plot. Miller creates likable heroines, has done her historical homework, and develops credible tension because her characters are so flawed. The Amana lifestyle is also sufficiently different (starting with the bonnets) that bonnet fiction fans will be pleased by this variation on the theme of simple living and lots of gut food. (Mar.)

A Dead Hand Paul Theroux Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26 (288p) ISBN 978-0-547-26024-2

The prolific and well-traveled Theroux follows Ghost Train to the Eastern Star with a crime novel set in India. Jerry Delfont, a middle-aged travel writer, has ended up in Calcutta with no stories, no ideas, and no clear direction until he receives a letter from Mrs. Merrill Unger asking for his help. Rajat, a friend of Mrs. Unger’s son, woke up in a cheap hotel with the dead body of a boy on the floor of his room and fled, rightly untrusting of the police. Jerry meets the Mrs. Unger and falls under her spell, his obsession fueled by her beauty and her skill at tantric massage. Mrs. Unger, who runs a children’s charity, came to India to work with Mother Teresa, but soon joined “the temple across the street” dedicated to Kali and is a practicing priestess who doesn’t shirk at the goddess’s requirement of animal sacrifice. While it’s all good light fun, the real pleasure is Theroux’s talent for rendering place and his irreverent comments on everything from the British royals to pop culture, aging, and yes, the venerable Mother Teresa. (Feb.)

Poetry

Phantom Noise Brian Turner. Alice James (Consortium, dist.), $16.95 (80p) ISBN 978-1-882295-80-7

Turner’s debut, Here, Bullet (2006) was likely the most discussed debut of the decade: its sharp, accessible verse reflected Turner’s U.S. Army service in wartime Iraq. It’s a hard act to follow, but Turner manages well, alternating poems about his uneasy return to civilian life in California with attempts to understand Iraq and Iraqis from the very recent past to the long sweep of Arabic poetry and history. Turner the veteran sees war everywhere—plywood “At Lowe’s Home Improvement Center” cracks like mortars; a flight in a small civilian plane reminds him of a troop transport, “my view a distorted globe,/ my reflection in it moonless, culpable.” Poems on his childhood and on American places emphasize undercurrents of violence, premonitions of military life. But Turner also displays his anguished interest in Arab experience. “Ash blackened the sky in 1258, blood/ ran in the rivers of Dajla and Farat.” At their best, his poems feel like personal essays, driven by reminiscence or reportage. Yet the epic past cannot obscure the troubled present—not in the “Mosul airbase” where Turner guarded a huddle of blindfolded prisoners, not in Iraqi cities with their distressed children, not even in the Pacific forest where the volume concludes: “there is not one thing I might say to the world,” Turner says, “which the world does not already know.” (Apr.)

American Rendering: New and Selected Poems Andrew Hudgins. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $24 (240p) ISBN 978-0-547-24962-9

Hudgins’s eighth collection and first retrospective confirms him as one of the few poets of the American South who can be both solemn and sidesplitting in a single poem. “All griefs,” he writes, “...I would rank them top/ to bottom”: “Mom dies. You lose/ a winning Lotto ticket./ A Peterbilt pancakes your cat.” Elsewhere, Hudgins demonstrates his formal skill in tandem with historical reverence: “The Names of the Lost,” a villanelle on the 1964 struggle to register black voters in Mississippi, begins, “The nights burned all night long that Freedom Summer.” Hudgins is his most astonishing when he allows himself to write outside his own experience, as when he channels Jonathan Edwards in 1749 or narrates as a confederate soldier at the Battle of the Wilderness. This is when Hudgins’s humor, as it must, disappears, leaving the poet the room he needs to wrestle—and reconcile—with all aspects of his heritage, both the Southern and the American. (Apr.)

The Living Fire Edward Hirsch. Knopf, $27 (256p) ISBN 978-0-375-41522-7

Hirsch, a longtime poetry teacher and now the president of the Guggenheim Foundation, is an accessible and widely beloved poet and advocate for poetry. His work combines a playful, tender sense of humor, awareness of Jewish heritage, love for and identification with Central European and Russian poetry, and an intimate American voice that seeks to elucidate what mysteries it can. This, his first retrospective collection, selects from each of his seven previous collections, published between 1981 and 2008. The early poems attempt to characterize people in terms of and against the everyday world that surrounds them, and the art that depicts that world, as in “Still Life: An Argument”: “the knife/ keeps falling and falling, but never/ falls. That knife could be us.” Middle poems pay homage to and learn from classical culture and world religions: “...I believe the saint:/ Nothing stays the same/ in the shimmering heat.” More recent poems confront aging and family (“My father in the night shuffling from room to room/ is no longer a father or a husband or a son,// but a boy standing on the edge of a forest”), while the newest wonder about the poet’s own mortality, and track love lost and found. Hirsch has many wise things to say; this book is a trove of them. (Mar.)

Pierce the Skin Henri Cole. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25 (144p) ISBN 978-0-374-23283-2

Cole has been called a “major poet” by no less an authority than Harold Bloom, and his work has been consistently lauded throughout his closely watched career. This slim (perhaps too slim) selection from Cole’s six previous books offers the first bird’s-eye view of Cole’s body of work, and it will most likely leave readers wanting more. Cole is nothing if not constantly intense on the page—his verse is always melancholy, but also carries a kind of religious weight, as if sadness itself were a ticket out of Hell. Cole is unafraid to embarrass himself (“After the death of my father,” begins one poem, “I locked// myself in my room, bored and animallike”) if it will lead him to his particular brand of skinned clarity, as when, at the end of the same poem, he seeks his father in “a little room in which glowing cigarettes// came and went, like souls losing magnitude,// but none with the battered hand I knew.” In Cole’s poems, the stakes are always impossibly high, and every insight is deeply costly. But perhaps that’s the price for being able to say, “I can feel my heart beating inside my heart.” (Mar.)

We Don’t Know We Don’t Know Nick Lantz. Graywolf, $15 (96p) ISBN 978-1-55597-552-4

Exotic facts, “Ancient Theories” (one poem’s title), memorable quotations and familial griefs collide and mingle throughout this striking first collection from the Wisconsin poet Lantz. Lantz takes his title, and many epigraphs, from Donald Rumsfeld (“there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know”), but few of the poems pursue political causes. Instead, Lantz seems driven by quirky and quotable phrases, those he finds and those he creates—”As you know, the human head is the most/ commonly stolen body part”; “The whip/ makes a pleasing/ sound when it strikes.” Some pages suffer from gimmicks (“blank” lines, or words blacked out in a poem about secrets), and many others feel like collections of wonderful sentences, rather than like whole poems. Lantz’s best poems have traditional strengths and narrative surprises: “Thinking Makes It So” records a shockingly callous act, and “Of the Parrat and other that can speake” (another title from Pliny) reacts to the death of a parent, first with controlled humor, then with grief, and finally with sharpened irony—in a just world, anthologies would snap it up. (Mar.)

Like a Sea Samuel Amadon. Univ. of Iowa, $17 (100p) ISBN 978-1-58729-860-8

Amadon’s memorable debut displays a rare combination of avant-garde technique with down-to-earth, up-to-the-minute subjects: flat diction, impossibly long or cut-up sentences, and catchy repetitions portray lives, cities, and landscapes full of dejection, failed promise, and half-built hopes, especially in and around Amadon’s native Hartford. “Comfort is what burned exactly where/ you were, then left/ guessing that you would like your rest/ to mean take less,” reads a representative sentence: syntactic difficulty resolves to show how hard, how comfortless, the places in Amadon’s viewfinder remain. Disappointment stalks the urban core, but also the faceless suburbs: “Here’s a street looks/ like other streets & I have no idea what/ fills trees,” he admits, and, elsewhere, after a flood “there will be nothing// but to build a replica of where we were/ when we did not keep worthwhile worthwhile.” Expert technique, small words, and bitter moods bring Amadon’s aims close to those of Graham Foust, or even to Robert Creeley. If the most personal poems seem paradoxically abstract, the poems about places stand out, in their forbidding emotions and in their serious interest in geography, in what gets built—and what gets allowed to decay: “this is what we have/ chosen, to value this/ looks like we have chosen before.” (Mar.)

The Intricated Soul: New and Selected Poems Sherod Santos. Norton, $25.95 (192p) ISBN 978-0-393-07216-7

At one point in this retrospective, Santos inadvertently describes his own poems as a “soft susurrus/ of myriad whispered conversations/that after all is said and done/ still keep the painful sum of things.” This collection draws from Santos’s five books and includes a significant body of previously unpublished work. Santos is a storyteller, creating vignette-like poems that draw the reader completely into an alien moment. He is unabashedly intimate (”I fear I’m growing less able to answer: Who was she/ whose death now made her a stranger to me?”) and often manages to strike the note between anecdote and maxim: “Was I, / I wondered, spilling over into the world, / or was the world spilling over into me?” The new poems, perhaps written in concert with his recent translation of Greek lyric poetry, draw on the god Pan, Aeneas, and Thucydides to deal with mourning, genocide, and uncertainty. These poems make strong points, but are somehow less compelling than the older ones that confide in us: “that was the dream,/ that was the beginning, when I got/ out of bed on a warm spring morning/ in the middle of June.” (Mar.)

A Little Middle of the Night Molly Brodak. Univ. of Iowa, $17 (82p) ISBN 978-1-58729-858-5

In her Iowa prize-winning debut, Brodak unveils a ductile yet confident use of language and a penchant for formal experimentation. Stark natural description sets the dreary mood in a world haunted by “a steady massacre of clouds.” Her poems vacillate between hermetic and accessible, often unveiling pleasurable surprises as the fog clears: “Wet licks of an animal on my ankle, oh say/ it’s a good thing. Take us out of here./ War begins inside of one person, imagine that.” Brodak often borrows language from writers old and new: one series includes quotes from poet Jorie Graham; there is also a “Melville novel, as abridged by me”; and even a cento entitled, “Joseph Conrad’s Last Novel (Which is Comprised Entirely of Face Color Used in His Previous Novels)”. Intertextual, funny, sharp, often elliptical yet surprisingly intimate, this is a strong debut. (Mar.)

Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty Tony Hoagland. Graywolf, $15 (100p) ISBN 978-1-55597-549-4

Hoagland’s fourth collection finds him cynically observing America during and after the Bush presidency. The speaker of these poems is deeply disheartened by his country and his own complacence, though far from unable to churn up good-natured jokes out of the mess. “After I heard It’s a Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall/ played softly by an accordion quartet/ through the ceiling speakers at the Springsdale Shopping Mall,/ I understood there’s nothing/ we can’t pluck the stinger from,” opens “Hard Rain.” Near the end of the same poem, Hoagland admits, “I used to think I was not part of this,/ that I could mind my own business and get along,// but that was just another song.” Hoagland has much in common with the popular Billy Collins—a sharp, if deadpan, wit; accessible, almost prosey lines; a penchant for self-consciously drawing the reader’s attention to the artifice of the poem—but with a more musically attuned ear and a darker outlook: “I was driving home that afternoon/ in some dilated condition of sensitivity/ of the kind known only to certain poets/ and more or less everybody else.” At his best, Hoagland is capable of showing us how truly marvelous “our marvelous punishment” can be. (Feb.)

When You Say One Thing but Mean Your Mother Melissa Broder. Ampersand (SPD, dist.), $13.95 (68p) ISBN 978-0-984-10254-9

This debut from Broder, editor of the online poetry magazine La Petit Zine, and a publicist at Penguin, is as funny and hip as it is disturbing. Poems with titles like “Where Is Your Vampire” and “Not Quite Ready for the NRA” feature jumpy, accessible lines about love and lust in a drug- and media-fueled world. “You’re nobody,” Broder only half-sarcastically proclaims, “ ’til some sweet-faced junkie/ with a Dixie cup of juice// and methadone loves you/ more than his drugs.” These poems are also quirkily compassionate (“Faith is a muscle// like the rotator cuff./ After the matinee// she saved soiled tissues—/roses in her coat—//remember that sadness won’t make you explode”), sexy, and at times even gross: “I’m wearing sunglasses// in the supermarket,/ mourning follicular fallout,/ getting pus on all the towels.” Throughout, Broder searches for a place to stand, and for an object for her considerable sympathies. This is a bright and unusual debut. (Feb.)

Personationskin Karl Parker. No Tell Books (SPD, dist.), $17 (136p) ISBN 978-0-578-01872-0

Parker is one of the oddest poet’s you’re likely to meet. With a hyperactive sense of humor and an irreverence to match, Parker creates poems that push so hard at their own boundaries, they’re likely to explode at any moment. “REJOICE EVERYTHING IS TRUE,” says Parker, and he almost means it—this debut is full of unsustainable assertions: “LOAFING IS NOT JUST AN ARTFORM,/ IT IS ARTFORM”; “I sit in my window, a talking monkey”; “Night’s nothing but a low hum from the wiregrid of goodbyes/ and getwells we are.” No poet has had this kind of simultaneous reverence for and disregard of the poetic tradition since Bill Knott. Many of Parker’s poems take the form of little disjunctive stories (“My name is Regina I wear glasses// and sometimes only one shoe./ This is my house”), while others are frustrating and entertaining lists of mostly capitalized blips and stream of consciousness observations: “PLAYING TO THE PEANUT GALLERY// TAKING A PISS ON A PILE OF URINAL ICE IN DUBLIN.” Some readers will slam this book shut as soon as they open it; others will keep it open in their heads forever. (Jan.)

A Mouth in California Graham Foust. Flood (SPD, dist.), $14.95 (100p) ISBN 978-0-9819520-1-7

Foust has achieved a wide reputation in and beyond experimental poetry circles for his clipped, breathless poems, often no longer than one or two haiku, but packing an intimate punch that belies their length. In this, his fourth collection, he often lets his poems go on for a page or two, but sacrifices none of their power and concision. Here again are Foust’s startling one-liners, just this side of nonsense, yet hauntingly accurate: “Money belongs together,” “There should be more works of art like those/ on which I wrote no dissertation,” “They don’t give trophies for frenzy,/ do they?” Here, too, are quiet self-characterizations: “What takes place in me stays there,” says the excellent, three-page “Poem Beside Itself.” And, too, there are the 20-word poems for which Foust is known: “You don’t lust/ for what you/ want. You lust/ for what you/ can get. I’ll/ carve you your/ hankered-for/ chemical/ oath. I’ll show/ you the badge/ in my mouth,” reads, in its entirety, “Poem with Rules and Laws.” Commenting on contemporary American life without explicitly describing it, Foust (Necessary Stranger) remains a poet to watch. (Jan.)

Mystery

The Ragtime Fool Larry Karp Poisoned Pen, $24.95 (314p) ISBN 978-1-59058-699-0; $14.95 paper ISBN 978-1-59058-716-4

American obsessions with race and glory dominate Karp’s lively conclusion, set in 1951, to his Ragtime trilogy (after 2008’s The King of Ragtime). Decades earlier, Brun Campbell was ragtime genius Scott Joplin’s only white pupil. Now an elderly barber in Venice, Calif., Brun frantically publicizes Joplin, ragtime, and himself. In Hobart, N.J., Alan Chandler, a 17-year-old piano student, has fallen in love with ragtime music. Both Brun and Alan are excited to hear that a journal Joplin kept may soon be published. In Sedalia, Mo., Joplin’s home for many years, diehard Klansmen are plotting to bomb an interracial ceremony honoring the composer. Brun and Alan race to Sedalia, where they find themselves caught in a confused swirl of various characters who want to steal the valuable journal—or stop its publication. Karp handles the intricate plot well, but the best part of the book is its picture of people torn between what they want to forget and what they need to remember. (Apr.)

Known to Evil Walter Mosley Riverhead, $25.95 (336p) ISBN 978-1-59448-752-1

Bestseller Mosley scores a clean knockout in his excellent second mystery featuring New York City PI Leonid McGill (after 2009’s The Long Fall). Still striving to atone for some of the lives he’s ruined, the 54-year-old McGill laments that there are “no straight lines in the life or labors of the private detective.” Instead, crises crowd him at every turn. A powerful, shadowy city hall official wants McGill to locate and protect a young woman named Tara Lear, a task complicated by a murder. Older son Dimitri is involved with a Russian hooker whose pimp doesn’t want to let her go. Younger son Twill, trying to help his brother, risks violating parole restrictions. Relations with wife Katrina and lover Aura Ullman, “with her Aryan eyes and Ethiopian skin,” are in flux. The ex-boxer has an eclectic group in his corner, including computer whiz Tiny “Bug” Bateman, but McGill is the one taking the blows and meting out punishment in this contemporary noir gem. Author tour. (Mar.)

Blood Hina: A Mas Arai Mystery Naomi Hirahara Minotaur, $24.99 (256p) ISBN 978-0-312-54555-0

Edgar-winner Hirahara once again provides a sensitive insider’s view of the Japanese-American subculture in her fourth Mas Arai mystery (after 2006’s Snakeskin Shamisen), though series fans may find this entry less strong than some. When Mas, a Los Angeles gardener who as a boy survived the atom bomb attack on Hiroshima, accidentally drops the gold ring he’s supposed to hand to his closest friend, Haruo Mukai, into a fish pond, this is just one of many little disasters plaguing the wedding rehearsal in which Mas is the best man. Haruo’s elderly bride, Sumako Hayakawa, later calls the nuptials off, accusing Haruo of stealing two hina dolls used in purification ceremonies belonging to her family. Mas’s inquiry into the theft leads him to drug runners and several murders. The author’s simple, expressive prose and her gift for creating memorable characters, notably her unusual detective, elevate this above most other contemporary puzzlers. (Mar.)

Cook the Books Jessica Conant-Park and Susan Conant Berkley Prime Crime, $23.95 (256p) ISBN 978-0-425-23246-0

Conant-Park and Conant’s cookie-cutter fifth Gourmet Girl mystery with recipes (after 2009’s Fed Up) finds foodie Chloe Carter heartbroken. Her boyfriend, Josh Driscoll, who’s left Boston for a job as a private chef in Hawaii, has invited her to join him there, but Chloe can’t desert friend Adrianna, who recently had a baby, or drop out of her master’s program in social work. In need of money, Chloe becomes the assistant to a cookbook writer, Kyle Boucher, who wants her to visit Boston area restaurants and collect recipes from their chefs. Kyle’s unpleasant father, a celebrity chef, will lend his name to the book. When Chloe arrives for a meeting with Digger, an up-and-coming chef who happens to be a friend of Josh’s, she discovers Digger has died in a fire in his Somerville apartment. Cats provide comfort. Some readers may wish Chloe fretted less about her love life and did more sleuthing. (Mar.)

Blackout in Precinct Puerto Rico Steven Torres Minotaur, $23.99 (192p) ISBN 978-0-312-32111-6

A heinous crime that rocks the small Puerto Rican town of Angustias scars far more than victim and perpetrator in Torres’s searing fifth Precinct Puerto Rico novel (after 2006’s Missing in Precinct Puerto Rico). When Luisa Ferré, “a delicately beautiful high school girl,” wakes up the town with her screams late one night, Sheriff Luis Gonzalo is the first to reach her on the street. At the town clinic, the naked, traumatized girl is treated for assault. Aided only by 70-year-old deputy Emilio Collazo, Gonzalo hunts for clues while Luisa remains silent and sedated, unable to describe her attacker. Luisa’s father, whom Collazo finds in a drunken stupor with bloody knuckles, becomes a prime suspect, though Torres is quick to tell the reader the man had nothing to do with his daughter’s injuries. Gonzalo struggles with a paucity of evidence and overwhelming emotions as the ripples of the crime reach every corner of Angustias. Fans of downbeat slice-of-life mysteries will be most rewarded. (Mar.)

The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag: A Flavia de Luce Mystery Alan Bradley Delacorte, $24 (384p) ISBN 978-0-385-34231-5

Bradley’s endlessly entertaining follow-up to 2009’s The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie finds precocious 11-year-old Flavia de Luce once again indulging her curiosity about corpses. Wandering near her threadbare ancestral home in early 1950s England, Flavia bumps into famed TV puppeteer Rupert Porson and his pregnant wife, who have been marooned by an ailing van. While they wait for repairs to be completed, they agree to put on a performance for the village of Bishop’s Lacey—but Rupert’s sudden death ends the show. Feigning an innocence entirely at odds with her shrewdness about adult doings, Flavia uses her skills in chemistry and questioning to puzzle out which of the many possible suspects murdered Rupert and why. The author deftly evokes the period, but Flavia’s sparkling narration is the mystery’s chief delight. Comic and irreverent, this entry is sure to build further momentum for the series. (Mar.)

The Intrigue at Highbury: Or, Emma’s Match: A Mr. & Mrs Darcy Mystery Carrie Bebris Tor, $22.99 (320p) ISBN 978-0-7653-1848-0

At the start of Bebris’s agreeable fifth Mr. & Mrs. Darcy mystery (after 2008’s Matters at Mansfield), the couple are on their way to visit cousins of Darcy’s in Sussex when outside the Surrey village of Highbury they stop to assist a young woman in distress. When Elizabeth and Darcy get back in their coach, they discover some valuable heirlooms missing. Meanwhile, “Miss Jones” has vanished. They inform the nearest magistrate, Mr. Knightley, whose wife, Emma, has just hosted a party where a guest has died. Elizabeth and Emma take an active role by interviewing local residents about the theft and the death, while the gentlemen play smaller parts further afield in Surrey and London. Close questioning and careful thought, rather than magic as in earlier books, help solve the Highbury conundrums. The main characters behave more like Austen’s originals than they did in Matters at Mansfield, helping make this perhaps the most faithful sequel to Austen in this beguiling series. (Mar.)

Death of a Wine Merchant David Dickinson Soho Constable, $25 (336p) ISBN 978-1-56947-622-2

Dorothy Sayers fans may enjoy seeing how closely Dickinson follows the plot of a well-known Lord Peter Wimsey novel in his ninth early 20th-century historical featuring aristocratic English sleuth Lord Francis Powerscourt (after 2009’s Death of a Pilgrim), not one of the better entries in an uneven series. A wedding-day tragedy in Norfolk results in Powerscourt’s being retained by the defense attorney representing a man arrested for murder. The prosecution case appears clear-cut—Cosmo Colville was found sitting in a chair, holding a gun, a few feet away from the bleeding body of his older brother, Randolph, the father of the groom. Cosmo’s refusal to speak about what happened leads to speculation he’s shielding another family member. The uphill investigation plunges Powerscourt into the world of wine selling, the Colville family business. At the resolution, some readers may feel the author has unfairly withheld an important clue to the killer’s identity. (Mar.)

SF/Fantasy/Horror

Chasing the Dragon Nicholas Kaufmann Chizine (Diamond, dist.), $10.95 paper (134p) ISBN 978-0-9812978-4-2

Kaufmann (Hunt at World’s End) delivers gore, mayhem, and the occasional explosion in this novella, which is equal parts belabored metaphor and road trip from hell. Georgia Quincey is the latest in a line of dragon slayers, bound by destiny to battle the beast that has plagued her family for centuries. She’s also acquired a heroin addiction, which, paradoxically, may be the only thing keeping her alive and strong enough to meet her fate. Kaufmann weaves the two conflicts together skillfully, though with an excess of foreshadowing, until it is hard to tell where one issue begins and the other ends. The tale is fast paced and technically well crafted, but hints of a grander backstory leave the reader wanting far more than this slim volume delivers, and Georgia herself is emotionally flat and almost impossible to like. (Mar.)

The Taborin Scale Lucius Shepard Subterranean (www.subterraneanpress.com), $35 (104p) ISBN 978-1-59606-288-7

Master literary fantasist Shepard (Vacancy) makes a grim return to the world of his classic surrealist short story “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule.” Philandering antiquities dealer George Taborin travels to the city of Teocinte, which rests in the very shadow of Griaule, an immobile dragon the size of a mountain. There he discovers a tiny dragon scale in a jar of old coins. When he rubs the scale it transports him to a hot, unpleasant alternate reality where a smaller but equally malevolent version of the dragon holds him and others captive for unknown reasons. George saves a teenage girl from sexual slavery, comes to terms with his own nature, and eventually bears witness to terrible destruction. Beautifully written and intensely ironic, this tale will strongly appeal to connoisseurs of sophisticated adult fantasy. (Mar.)

Gardens of the Sun Paul McAuley Pyr, $16 paper (412p) ISBN 978-1-61614-196-7

In the outstanding second half of 2009’s The Quiet War, McAuley shows humans forced past their limitations. Armies from feudalistic, eco-fanatic Earth have overwhelmed freethinking settlements on the moons of Saturn and Jupiter, forcing refugees to flee to the outskirts of the solar system. Vistas of wonderful, desolate new worlds are populated by familiar, driven characters: Sri Hong-Owen, the brilliant but cold-blooded researcher obsessed with Outer genetic manipulation; a cloned, nameless spy seeking identity and love; hotshot space pilot Cash Baker, brainwashed and betrayed by his commanding officers; unscrupulous diplomat Loc Ifrahim, who will exploit any situation for personal profit; and renegade Earth ecologist Macy Minnot, who joins the Free Outers’ pilgrimage. Their interactions, struggles, and choices sketch a grand and sometimes appalling picture of human possibility. Together, these two books tell a magnificent story. (Mar.)

Chimerascope Douglas Smith Chizine (Diamond, dist.), $16.95 paper (332p) ISBN 978-0-9812978-5-9

Smith’s second collection (after 2008’s Impossibilia) delivers an entertaining selection of 17 stories that deftly span multiple genres, often milking surprisingly original tales out of tired tropes. The Zelazny-inspired “The Boys Are Back in Town” nicely toes the line between quirky humor and pathos. “State of Disorder,” featuring a classic mad scientist out for revenge, is a neat twist on time travel and quantum physics. “Jigsaw,” a young adult tale, is a fun romp involving aliens and continental drift. The best of the bunch, “By Her Hand, She Draws You Down,” is a haunting variant on the vampire legend with an understated and brutal ending. Even the occasional subpar story is worth reading for Smith’s innovative use of classic genre concepts. The introductions all provide nice context, though Smith occasionally overexplains in afterwords. (Mar.)

Don’t Kill the Messenger Eileen Rendahl Berkley Sensation, $15 paper (336p) ISBN 978-0-425-23256-9

A strong and sassy heroine shines in this exciting, sexy, and hilarious debut. Melina Markowitz has unusual powers, leading her to a career as a Messenger, a sort of postal carrier for the supernatural creatures that normal people can’t see. Now 26, Melina is delivering a package when a pack of ninjas ambush her and steal it. She follows them and finds grotesque zombie vampires called kiang shi ripping apart local gang members on behalf of the Chinese mafia, who want a stake in the Sacramento drug trade. Officer Ted Goodnight is concerned about the sudden rise in gang violence, and he wonders why he keeps running into Melina. As sparks fly between Ted and Melina, the danger soars. Melina’s charisma and wit, interesting side characters, and dashes of hot romance will keep readers wanting more. (Mar.)

The River Kings’ Road: A Novel of Ithelas Liane Merciel Simon & Schuster/Gallery, $26 (384p) ISBN 978-1-4391-5911-8

Choices are at the heart of this impressive epic fantasy debut. Brys Tarnell, recently knighted, must decide whether to take on a company of murdering warriors or run and survive a massacre. When Brys tells Odosse of Willowfield that her village has just been razed, she must decide whether to travel with him, far from all she knows. Kelland, a holy knight of Cailan, and his companion, Bitharn, are given the choice of helping to foil an impending war or keeping vows of neutrality. Leferic the Mouse has already made a choice and now must deal with entirely unexpected consequences. Mercial has constructed an inspired new world where unexpected plot twists bedevil strong, clearly visualized characters, in a story that glints with intelligence and hums with life. (Mar.)

Trade of Queens Charles Stross Tor, $24.99 (304p) ISBN 978-0-7653-1673-8

In the meandering sixth and final book in Stross’s Merchant Princes series (after 2008’s The Merchants’ War), the war within the Clan Corporate fully spreads to our dimension. In the summer of 2003, Clan defectors attack Washington, D.C., killing President Bush and members of the Supreme Court and installing a barely disguised Dick Cheney, code-named WARBUCKS, as president. Meanwhile, Miriam, a Boston-area reporter and long-lost member of the Clan, is dealing with the fallout of the previous conflicts, including her unwanted pregnancy. The plethora of character deaths fails to resolve any plot lines, and while Stross’s breezy style makes pages of pedantic background go by quickly, they still feel like filler. The unsubtle political satire is dated and juvenile, and readers drawn in by inventive world-building earlier in the series will be sorely disappointed by its absence here. (Mar.)

Warriors Edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois. Tor, $27.99 (736p) ISBN 978-0-7653-2048-3

For this mammoth collection, 20 award-winning, bestselling authors (including the editors) were commissioned to write original stories about warriors, with no other parameters. The result is an unpredictable assortment, where SF and fantasy rub elbows with mystery, historical, and military fiction, and even a western. The Vikings of Cecilia Holland’s “The King of Norway,” the secret community in Howard Waldrop’s WWI tale, “Ninieslando,” and the rogue AIs in Dozois’s own “Recidivist” provide a little something for everyone. Urban fantasy author Carrie Vaughn turns in “The Girls from Avenger,” a straight historical piece about female WWII pilots, while historical fantasist Naomi Novik’s “Seven Years from Home” is pure SF. There are a few clunkers, but on the whole, the editors succeed admirably in their mission to break down genre barriers and focus on pure entertainment. (Mar.)

Mass Market

Live to Tell Wendy Corsi Staub Avon, $7.99 (400p) ISBN 978-0-06-189506-7

Staub (Dead Before Dark) follows an innocuous stuffed animal into a widening spiral of intrigue in this absorbing series launch. Newly single mom Lauren Walsh asks her ex, Nick, to look for their daughter’s toy rabbit in the lost and found at Grand Central Station. In the heart of Manhattan, Congressman Garvey Quinn is riding a popularity wave that could carry him to the White House—but only if he can keep a certain dark secret from bubbling into public view. And in a small Connecticut town, Elsa and Brett Cavalon are still grieving 14 years after their son was kidnapped from their backyard. The connections among these troubled families are slow to reveal themselves, but once Staub’s brilliant characterizations and top-notch narrative skills grab hold, they don’t let go. (Mar.)

A Local Habitation Seanan McGuire DAW, $7.99 (400p) ISBN 978-0-7564-0596-0

McGuire follows 2009’s Rosemary and Rue with a fast-paced cross between a murder mystery and a slasher film, liberally spiked with magic and technology. Half-faerie PI October “Toby” Daye leaves San Francisco for the nearby County of Tamed Lightning to check up on her patron’s niece, January, who’s uncharacteristically fallen out of contact. Toby soon realizes that ALH Computing, the county’s secret seat of power, has big problems. Someone doesn’t want outsiders snooping around, and as the body count rises, Toby will risk life, limb, and soul to find out what’s really going on. While most of the deaths could have been prevented with a little less plot-mandated stupidity, the world-building is solid, the storytelling energetic, and the atmosphere sinister as mythological creatures face off against mad scientists. (Mar.)

Lessons from a Younger Lover Zuri Day Dafina, $6.99 (352p) ISBN 978-0-7582-3871-9

Day (The Lies Lovers Tell) spins an erotic but slow-moving tale of love in unexpected places. Beautiful, talented, and ambitious, 40-year-old divorcée Gwen Smith never thought she would be moving back to her California hometown to care for her aging mother, much less falling in love with a much younger man. Though Gwen is a likable, sympathetic character, 26-year-old single dad and “black Fabio fantasy” Ransom Blake is too inconsistent to justify her passion for him. Crude and awkward language undermines the love scenes. Day hints at conflicts, but few real troubles arise, and not even the return of Ransom’s former girlfriend will make readers truly doubt that Gwen and Ransom will get their happy ending. The story is only redeemed by a thoughtful examination of single fatherhood and some entertainingly over-the-top secondary characters. (Mar.)

Chill Elizabeth Bear Spectra, $7.99 (336p) ISBN 978-0-553-59108-8

Having survived the events of 2007’s Dust, the crew of the generation starship Jacob’s Ladder, marooned for centuries, find themselves once more racing though space. Unfortunately, the ship is badly damaged, large sections are out of communication with the central computer, and the highly augmented Exalt who rule the ship and its merely human occupants have lost the knowledge of how to select a destination. Antagonist Arianrhod is still alive, free, and a potential threat. Dealing with these problems involves epic journeys across a massive, poorly mapped spacecraft and confrontations with forgotten and suppressed relics of the past. Bear enhances the usual generation ship themes—social amnesia, decaying infrastructure, and mission-threatening grand calamities—with enough new flourishes, including a biotechnology-based class system and cruel experiments based on misapprehensions of Darwin, to keep readers happily engaged. (Mar.)

Comics

Northlanders, Vol. 3: Blood in the Snow Brian Wood, Dean Ormstson, Vaslish Lolos, et al. DC/Vertigo, $14.99 paper (144p) ISBN 978-1-4012-2620-6

From examining a shattered future America in DMZ, Wood turns to life in an even more disturbing time: the Viking Age. The four pieces gathered here fall between longer story arcs in the monthly comic; together, they form a mosaic showing how children, warriors, women, and families fared when sharp weapons were the sum total of law and order. No one had it easy. Wood isn’t unsympathetic to the Vikings, who started raiding because life in their native land was so brutal. However, he is unsentimental about their own brutality, as they raped and robbed anyone vulnerable and as they turned on themselves in self-destructive violence. The scripts are taut, historically well researched without being pedantic, and the four artists respond to them well. Most striking is “The Viking Art of Single Combat,” in which Lolos’s dynamic style complements Wood’s coolly distant analysis of dueling champions. As a picture of human behavior in extreme conditions, these stories are moving and memorable. (Mar.)

Zombie Tales: Good Eatin’ Various Boom! $15.99 paper (112p) ISBN 978-1-934506-59-2

The third volume in Boom!’s anthology series (containing 12 short stories) capitalizes on the zombie trend, but it transcends the monster genre to make strong points about human nature and the will to survive. The comics cover belief, redemption, love, hope, and compassion in creative and eye-opening ways, punctuated by brain eating and gut rending. From the start, this is something special, with a surprising piece about the power of faith by William Messner-Loebs and Matt Cossin. It’s not all high aspiring and inspirational, though; Monty Cook and Jeremy Rock illustrate how those who preach the survival of the fittest are generally not part of the best group, while Michael Alan Nelson and Cossin (again) show how badly jealousy can play out at the end of the world. The writers are generally better known than the artists, but the work overall is highly professional and wide-ranging in style, adding to the diverse feel. Unlike many anthologies, this one has no additional information about its contributors, so there’s no way to easily find more of their work, which is worth seeking out based on this assemblage. (Feb.)

She Writes, He Writes, Too

Add “compare Amazon rankings” to the things husband and wife Frank Delaney and Diane Meier will be doing this spring.

Venetia Kelly’s Traveling Show Frank Delaney. Random, $26 (448p) ISBN 978-1-4000-6783-1

A digressive story set in 1930s Ireland, Delaney’s latest (after Shannon) chronicles the travels and travails of 18-year-old Ben as he is dispatched by his mother to track down his wayward father, who left the family to pursue a mysterious actress. Ben enters into the search with trepidation, but he perseveres, driven by his love for his father and his wish to restore his parents’ heretofore loving marriage. Following Venetia’s show from town to town, Ben gets an education—about his father as a person in his own right, about Irish politics and society, about love and evil, and, inevitably, about himself. Threaded throughout are digressions into Irish history and politics as well as explorations of Irish folklore. This hybrid quest saga, bildungsroman, and grassroots view of Ireland in its post—civil war era is immersive and enjoyable, and it showcases Delaney’s talent for inventive metaphor, which he manipulates with an expert hand. (Mar.)

The Season of Second Chances Diane Meier. Holt, $25 (304p) ISBN 978-0-8050-9081-9

An out-of-touch Columbia professor gets a new lease on life in Meier’s unconvincing debut when she takes on a fixer-upper house and some equally messy relationships. Forty-eight-year-old Joy Harkness loves teaching, but hates the campus politics and her lonely Manhattan life. So when she’s invited to be part of a new program at Amherst College, Joy jumps at the chance and buys a nearly condemnable Victorian with no clue of how much work will be involved in making the house livable. Enter Teddy Hennessy, a younger handyman with a domineering mother. Inevitably, Joy and Teddy date, and Joy fixates on liberating him from his mother and on finding him more prestigious employment. Meanwhile, Joy’s female friendships and their respective crises redefine who Joy is and what she values. Unfortunately, Meier focuses too much on surface matters and has a tough time making Joy come to life; her relationship with Teddy, meanwhile, carries uncomfortable maternal overtones. There are too many cracks in the foundation on this one. (Apr.)