A young Jewish woman is drawn into the splendor and corruption surrounding the court of the Borgia pope, Alexander VI, in Bower's debut, a slick historical soap opera. After Esther Sarfati is baptized and becomes a lady-in-waiting to the widowed Lucrezia Borgia, the pope's illegitimate daughter, she is attracted to Lucrezia's seductive and cruel brother, Cesare. Esther becomes ensnared in a web of deceit and betrayal as Lucrezia is sent in a political marriage to the powerful Alfonso d'Este, heir to the dukedom of Ferrara. Determined to pursue a romance with the elusive Cesare, Esther is increasingly drawn into the schemes and passions of the Ferrara and Borgia families. While Esther's blind love for the careless and usually absent Cesare strains belief, the sheer grandeur of the papal and Ferrara courts, and the spectacle of the Borgia and Ferrara siblings' rivalries and revenges form a glittering take on one of the most notorious families of the Italian Renaissance. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/24/2011 | Release date: 03/01/2011 | Details & Permalink

Environmental and consumer advocate Brockovich has created a protagonist in her own image in this highly melodramatic thriller, the first in a new series. Angela Joy "AJ" Palladino left Scotia, W.Va., population 867, as an unwed 17-year-old mother following a terrible accident that almost killed her. Ten years later, after success and fame in a battle against Capital Power that earned her the sobriquet "the People's Champion," she returns to Scotia, to assist lawyer Zachariah Hardy in a fight against Masterson Mining's new mountaintop removal project. When Hardy dies before AJ's arrival, she teams with Hardy's lawyer daughter, Elizabeth, to combat the company owned by dastardly Kyle Masterson and run by Kyle's son, Cole, father of AJ's son, David. As the two women wage an uphill battle against murderous opposition, Brockovich's environmental message gets buried in a sludge pile of clichés. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/24/2011 | Release date: 03/01/2011 | Details & Permalink

Near the outset of this gently haunting fantasy thriller from British author Joyce (Requiem), a freak avalanche buries Zoe and Jake, a couple on a skiing holiday near the Pyrenean resort town of Saint-Bernard-en-Haut. After digging out, they find themselves the only inhabitants of the unnaturally silent landscape. Back at their hotel, they discover they're still alone. All their efforts to leave for the next town only bring them back in a circle. Jake suspects that they've died—but then Zoe begins seeing furtive figures and hearing snatches of speech that suggest this likely explanation is more complex than it seems. Joyce brings freshness to this familiar supernatural scenario by emphasizing the humanness of his characters over the weirdness of the phenomena. By the time the tale sounds its final bittersweet note, readers will remember the passionate emotional bond the two have shared and self-sacrifices that are the hallmark of a love that can transcend death. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/24/2011 | Release date: 03/01/2011 | Details & Permalink

Considering the subject matter—the real housewives of Orange County—Patterson's debut novel (after story collection Drift) is surprisingly sophisticated and nuanced. In debt and unmarried, Esther Wilson works at a clothing boutique and lives with her wealthy grandmother, Eileen, whose financial generosity is orchestrated to "encourage dependence." Terrified of poverty, Esther is in the midst of securing a proposal from an unattractive but wealthy heir, but she blows it. Enter ex-boyfriend Charlie Murphy, who, though from a well-off family, is a liberal-minded sociology professor at the local community college, and therefore an object of Eileen's derision. Charlie takes it upon himself to emancipate Esther from the chains of vapid privilege, but with a huge inheritance imminent for him and nasty gossip circulating about Esther, Charlie's lefty enlightenment dims. As an acerbic commentary on mid-'90s Southern Californian excess, the novel walks a fine line between critic and unintentional participant—commentaries on the retrograde position of Orange County women jostle against overindulgent physical description—though Patterson's Southern California has echoes of Nathanael West and early Bruce Wagner. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/24/2011 | Release date: 03/01/2011 | Details & Permalink

MacDonald (From Cradle to Grave) offers a fresh, suspenseful spin on the vacation gone bad crime tale. Shelby Sloan, a well-to-do Philadelphia working woman, gives her daughter, Chloe Kenricks, and Chloe's husband, Rob, a Christmas treat—a Caribbean cruise to make up for the honeymoon the couple never had. Shelby even offers to care for their four-year-old son, Jeremy, while they're gone. Then Shelby receives a disturbing call from Rob, who tells her Chloe has fallen overboard and is missing off St. Thomas. Apparently, Chloe had been drinking. Shelby, unwilling to accept that Chloe had a drinking problem like Estelle Winter, Shelby's dying alcoholic mother, is sure that her daughter met with foul play. Shelby has further cause for alarm when Bud Ridley, a fellow Philly resident who saw Chloe the fateful night, kills himself after she questions him. The author nimbly reveals links to other murders—and to someone desperate to keep a secret. Fans of early Mary Higgins Clark will be rewarded. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/24/2011 | Release date: 03/01/2011 | Details & Permalink

This conspiracy thriller from the pseudonymous Carter opens in 1937 with a rousing Siberian prison camp escape, but the present-day action soon turns predictable. After the murder of Katya Orlova, the grandmother of San Francisco lawyer Zoe Dmitroff, a letter written by Katya reaches Zoe informing her that she's now the "Keeper" of an ancient secret involving a Siberian cave known as the Altar of Bones. Many people try to wrest the secret from Zoe, including her own mother, a mysterious business tycoon, and the Russian mob. Ry O'Malley, a hunky tough guy, signs on to protect Zoe, and soon they're on the run. Zoe and Ry prove to be amazingly lucky, to the point that by the time the unsurprising ending rolls around, all suspense has been drained from the action. Readers should be prepared for prose typical of erotic romance fiction (e.g., "He tried to gentle his kiss, but then she tangled her fingers in his hair and sucked on his tongue, pulling it deeper into her mouth, making love with their mouths, sucking, tonguing, and he was lost"). (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/24/2011 | Release date: 03/01/2011 | Details & Permalink

Aboulela's third novel, inspired by the life of her uncle, the poet Hassan Awad Aboulela, offers a delightfully quixotic view of northern Sudan in the 1950s on the brink of its independence from Britain and Egypt. Nur is the favored son of the wealthy Abuzeid family, destined to take over the family business, until he is severely injured in an accident. Mahmoud, Nur's father, is both optimist and pragmatist, eager to embrace contemporary mores yet firmly rooted to his homeland. Mahmoud's two wives—Nur's deeply traditional and veiled mother, Waheeba, and Nabilah, a young and homesick Egyptian—have conflicts that swell and erupt in both predictable and surprising ways. The characters are lovingly and precisely rendered, and Aboulela (The Translator) describes the impact of Nur's disability with keen detail and noteworthy empathy. Though the novel offers few glimpses into life outside the Abuzeid's sheltered enclave, paying scant attention to the history and turmoil of an era that left Sudan in a lengthy civil war, Aboulela provides fine insight into the practice of Islam, especially through the children's tutor's thoughts and words, as well as a thoroughly engaging if romanticized exploration of the universal tensions between modernity and tradition, commerce and art, faith and doubt. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/24/2011 | Release date: 03/01/2011 | Details & Permalink

A sadist targets young women in O'Donovan's derivative second novel, a step down from his debut, White Lion, shortlisted for the CWA's Debut Dagger. When Insp. Mike Mulcahy returns to Ireland after a prestigious antinarcotics posting in Madrid, the contacts he made in Spain make him valuable to the police detectives assigned to identify the brute that assaulted Jesica Mellado Salazar, the Spanish interior minister's 16-year-old daughter, who was found in a Dublin road early one morning with severe burns on her genitals. Before the inquiry can make much progress, Jesica's father has her spirited away to recover at home. When the object used to burn her is identified as a gold crucifix, the target of the probe becomes known as "the Priest." As the fiend claims more victims, Mulcahy's love interest, reporter Siobhan Fallon, hypes the Priest as a national menace. The police follow all too familiar procedural lines, while Mulcahy needs to be a more distinctive lead if he's to sustain a series. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/24/2011 | Release date: 03/01/2011 | Details & Permalink

Set in a near-future Japan, Isaka's remarkable thriller adroitly shifts between the extended pursuit of handsome Masaharu Aoyagi, a former deliveryman accused of killing Prime Minister Sadayoshi Kaneda by dropping a bomb from a remote-control toy helicopter onto the official motorcade, and several other characters associated with Aoyagi, who's been mercilessly set up by high-placed persons unknown. As Aoyagi runs for his life from trigger-happy security forces in the city of Sendai, constantly under observation by recently installed "Security Pods," he finds unexpected allies in the few people—the young, the homeless, the criminal, and even former girlfriend Haruko Higuchi—who have awakened from the daze a corrupt government fosters among its people so that it can "make laws and rearrange taxes and health care, start a war somewhere." Isaka cuts perilously close to the bone of today's politics in this elegant, intricate, enormously satisfying parable of good and evil. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/24/2011 | Release date: 03/01/2011 | Details & Permalink

Juan Cabrillo and his crew of mercenaries engage in one daring rescue operation after another with progressively higher stakes in Cussler's high-octane eighth Oregon Files novel (after The Silent Sea), his sixth collaboration with Du Brul. The rescue of a kidnap victim, an Indonesian teenage boy, from an Afghan village, yields a bonus in the form of MacD Lawless, a former U.S. Army Ranger, who proves of immediate value. Betrayals, more rescues, and escapes follow as one mysterious man seeks world domination using a discovery linked to 13th-century China. Cabrillo's handpicked team members, who operate from their state-of-the-art ship, the Oregon, are the only chance to stop a plot that threatens to bring the U.S. government to its knees. The frenetic action moves from Afghanistan to Singapore and the Burmese jungle with lots of derring-do at sea before climaxing in a surprising locale in a fashion sure to delight series fans. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/24/2011 | Release date: 03/01/2011 | Details & Permalink