Library Journal

Baldacci, David. The Forgotten. Grand Central. Nov. 2012. 416p. ISBN 9780446573054. $27.99. lrg. prnt. CD: Hachette Audio. THRILLER
Last year’s first John Puller thriller debuted in the top spot on the New York Times best sellers list and so far has sold an impressive 237,000 copies in ebooks alone. So fans will be waiting for this second in the series. Here, Puller doesn’t believe that his Aunt Betsy’s drowning death in her backyard pool was an accident—she sent a letter before she died saying that something was scaring her—and starts investigating. Basic thriller premise, Baldacci writing, buy multiples.

Connelly, Michael. The Black Box. Little, Brown. Nov. 2012. 400p. ISBN 9780316069434. $27.99; lrg. prnt. CD: Hachette Audio. THRILLER
LAPD Det. Harry Bosch is back, smart enough to connect a current murder with the 1992 killing of a young female photographer during riots in Los Angeles. That killing, never solved by the Riot Crimes Task Force, now seems a whole lot more personal than anyone ever thought. Bosch must search for the “black box,” that one piece of information that will explain the link between the two deaths that’s just been proved by ballistics. Look for special promotions this year for Connelly, who’s releasing his 25th book in 20 years of publishing.

Haas, Derek. The Right Hand. Mulholland: Little, Brown. Nov. 2012. 288p. ISBN 9780316198462. $25.99; Downloadable: Hachette Audio. THRILLER
In this latest from Haas, a Hollywood screenwriter (e.g., 3:10 to Yuma) and author of the Silver Bear thrillers, Austin Clay does down-and-dirty deep-secret jobs for the government that would be disavowed if ever he were caught. Here, he starts by hunting for a missing American operative held somewhere outside Moscow and soon teams with a woman who’s convinced that a mole sits somewhere in the top echelons of U.S. government. Let’s see where that goes. Meanwhile, note that Haas is editor of PopcornFiction.com, a site the publisher runs for him that presents short stories by top novelists and screenwriters.

Littell, Robert. Young Philby. St. Martin’s. Nov. 2012. 288p. ISBN 9781250005168. $24.99; eISBN 9781250013651. CD: Macmillan Audio. THRILLER
The story of double agent Kim Philby is well known but little understood. What were his motivations and, finally, his ideals? Best-selling author and Gold Dagger winner Littell tries to answer those questions by reconstructing Philby’s early life, as told from the perspectives of 20 real-life characters. If truth is stranger than fiction, fictionalized truth can really shake you up. Look for excerpts at Scrib’d, Watpad, and Issuu.

Ochse, Weston. SEAL Team 666. St. Martin’s. Nov. 2012. 320p. ISBN 9781250007353. $24.99; eISBN 9781250013460. THRILLER
Cadet Jack Walker doesn’t know what he’s in for when he’s plucked from SEAL training and sent on a secret mission with four full-fledged SEALs and their dog (a Belgian Malinois?). SEAL Team 666’s members soon discovery that the enemy is literally out of this world, as they battle demons and possessed humans, animated by an ancient cult, who are intent on taking over not just the United States but the world. Since Ochse’s Scarecrow Gods won the Bram Stoker Award for First Novel, you might take a chance on this paranormal thriller; his Pushcart Prize nomination is added confirmation of his writing skills.

Patterson, James & Michael Ledwidge. Merry Christmas, Alex Cross. Little, Brown. Nov. 2012. 208p. ISBN 9780316210683. $19.99; lrg. prnt. CD: Hachette Audio. THRILLER
Wow, a Christmas thriller (and another Christmas book from Patterson after last year’s The Christmas Wedding, which is being reissued in November). On a cozy Christmas Eve, Alex Cross has just wrapped up a little case—someone robbing the church’s poor box—when he gets word of a hostage situation that could tie his holidays in knots. The last Alex Cross novel has sold over a million copies (so far).

“No matter how much za’atar you eat/ you still gotta work to be an/ Arab/writer/woman.” I love that line, actually a section title from Laila Halaby’s My Name Is on His Tongue, a poetry collection out this month from Syracuse University Press. You’ll soon see a starred review in Library Journal (and elsewhere, I bet), but one of my great frustrations as poetry editor is that I cannot manage to review all the good books that come my way. Hence my periodic poetry roundups, framing the possibilities for interested readers. This roundup covers summer titles (May 2012–September 2012); surely, pop fiction isn’t the only good beach reading around.

In the past, I’ve often divided roundups into core works and up-and-comers or standard categories like nature poetry, political poetry, and so forth. This time ’round, I was struck more by the idea of affect, or the experience of reading; some collections are obviously outer-directed, discussing a community or heritage; others more personal, unfolding layers of the self; still others almost philosophical meditations, delineating the life of the mind. Of course, as the Halaby quote shows, poetry doesn’t like to confine itself to such categories, and I expect that I will get emails protesting this or that category, this or that placement. But this is how I saw it—anything that gets more poetry delivered to you.

The World at Large
A Discover Great New Writers and PEN/Beyond Margins honoree for her fiction, Laila Halaby leaps genres with a debut poetry collection  (My Name Is on His Tongue. Syracuse Univ. May 2012. 136p. ISBN 9780815632948. pap. $17.95) that explores her dual reality as an Arab American woman, using vivid imagery (“My name rests in the mouth of a man on horseback”) to negotiate past and present, East and West. Pulitzer Prize winner Natasha Trethewey’s Thrall (Houghton Harcourt. Sept. 2012. 96p. ISBN 9780547571607. $23) considers the forces that have shaped her life as a mixed-race person. Trethewey won the first Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a first-book award for African American poets that most recently went to Nicole Terez Dutton’s lyrical, edgy If One of Us Should Fall (Univ. of Pittsburgh. Aug. 2012. NAp. ISBN 9780822962236. pap. $15.95).

Barton Sutter uses mostly formal structure and quietly unadorned language to chronicle village life on the Canadian border and the culture of ancient Siberian reindeer herders in The Reindeer Camps (BOA. May 2012. 126p. ISBN 9781934414842. pap. $16). Michael McGriff, a 2007 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize winner, brings alive the forests, wildlife, and blue-collar struggles of the Pacific Northwest in Home Burial (Copper Canyon. May 2012. 120p. ISBN 9781556593840. pap. $15). And in her first collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec (Copper Canyon. May 2012. 124p. ISBN 9781556593833. pap. $16), Natalie Diaz writes with heartfelt grandeur (and occasional needling wit) about the Fort Mojave Indian Reservation in Needles, CA, where she was raised.

In Murder Ballad (Alice James. May 2012. 80p. ISBN 9781882295937. pap. $15.95), a Beatrice Hawley Award winner, Jane Springer visualizes the complexities of her Southern heritage in rich, ropy lines. In A Night in Brooklyn (Knopf. Jul. 2012. 96p. ISBN 9780307959324. $26), D. Nurske uses personal memory to construct an image of his distinctive hometown. Michael Dickman and twin brother Matthew go nationwide with 50 American Plays (Poems) (Copper Canyon. Jun. 2012. 110p. ISBN 9781556593932. pap. $16), which aims for summing-up witticism about each state.

Bringing in History
In The Crossed-Out Swastika (Copper Canyon. May 2012. 210p. ISBN 9781556593796. pap. $16), multi-award winner Cyrus Cassells uses figures both historical and fictionalized to commemorate a group of young people who suffered during World War II. Eugene Gloria takes on the interesting task of reenvisioning 16th-century Japanese warlord Hideyoshi in My Favorite Warlord (Penguin Poets. Jun. 2012. 80p. ISBN 9780143121404. pap. $18).

In Rough, and Savage (Coffee House, dist. by Consortium. Sept. 2012. 114p. ISBN 9781566893145. pap. $16), Sun Yung Shin expresses her own sense of isolation through epic-style writing and an exploration of Korean history (“My fact a vast blank/ a half-savage nomad, I admit, I/ admire my advance”). Cofounder with Juliana Spahr of the literary magazine Chain and now coeditor with Spahr of the ChainLinks Book series, multi-award winner Jena Osman draws on a slide lecture to offer a meditation on public statuary in Philadelphia, particularly those bearing arms (Public Figures. Wesleyan Univ. Sept. 2012. 96p. ISBN 9780819573117. $22.95).

Up Front and Personal
One of our most courageous poets (and a James Laughlin Award winner), Brenda Shaughnessy makes us feel the anguish of traumatic childbirth and fractured faith in Our Andromeda (Copper Canyon. Sept. 2012. 130p. ISBN 9781556594106. pap. $16), even imagining an alternate world as she writes “with heart/ fighting fire with fire/ flightless.” Craig Morgan Teicher, a Colorado Prize for Poetry winner (and Shaughnessy’s husband) offers clear-eyed, blazing verse as he tracks a path from son (who lost a mother young) to husband and father in To Keep Love Blurry (BOA. Sept. 2012. 110p. ISBN 9781934414934.pap. $16).

Ever capable of keen-eyed, keenly detailed chronicles of the everyday, Sharon Olds limns the end of her marriage in Stag’s Leap (Knopf. Sept. 2012. 112p. ISBN 9780307959904. $26.95). Lucia Perillo, whose Pulitzer Prize finalist, Inseminating the Elephant, treated her multiple sclerosis, examines her life more broadly in the viscerally dark and edgy On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths (Copper Canyon. May 2012. 120p. ISBN 9781556593970. $22).

Sandra Meek sends sharp-edged poems flying in Road Scatter (Persea. May 2012. 96p. ISBN 9780892554195. pap. $15.95) as she mourns her mother’s fall toward death yet remains acutely aware of the larger world. In Dorset Prize winner After Urgency (Tupelo. May 2012. 71p. ISBN 9781932195415. pap. $16.95), Rusty Morrison contemplates the death of both parents in still, deeply contemplative verse.

Jo Sarzotti’s debut collection, Mother Desert (Graywolf. May 2012. 72p. ISBN 9781555976156. pap. $15) captures an interior landscape by taking us through exterior ones, from the desert to the cold North (“Death was a kind of earth I walked on”). A multiple prize winner (e.g., National Poetry Series, Fence Modern Poets), Elizabeth Robinson also initiates a search for the self in Counterpart (Ahsahta. Sept 2012. ISBN NA. $NA.): “I, a hand, reached into the sea for a piece of the sea.”

Catherine Barnett, winner of a Whiting Writer’s Award, considers the unsteady light of love (family or passionate) in her second collection, The Game of Boxes (Graywolf. Aug. 2012. 88p. ISBN 9781555976200. pap. $15). Winner of the 2011 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry, Laura Cronk’s Having Been an Accomplice (Persea. Sept. 2012. 96p. ISBN 9780892554133. pap. $15) also considers love—especially as it is remade during times of war.

Francesca Abbate’s Troy, Unincorporated (Phoenix Poets: Univ. of Chicago. May 2012. 96p. ISBN 9780226001203. pap. $18) retells Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde as a story of shattered teenage love in contemporary, slightly grungy middle America (“I was a boy./ I believed what Beauty said”). The inaugural Aleda Shirley Prize winner in 2008, Paula Bohince looks back at nature’s enduring and defining cycles in her new collection, The Children (Sarabande. May 2012. 69p. ISBN 9781936747283. pap. $14.95), finally concluding “In the end, we were landmark,/ compass.” Catherine Wing’s Gin & Bleach (Sarabande. Jul. 2012. 72p. ISBN 9781936747306. pap. $14.95) aims to burn us clear (as only corrosives like gin and bleach can do) to a better understanding of our place in the world.

Leslie Adrienne Miller’s Y (Graywolf. Sept. 2012. 96p. ISBN 9781555976224. pap. $15) dares to explore motherhood, capturing the growth of her son (like the math’s unknown variable, y, he’s something  to be discovered). In An Individual History (Norton. Jul. 2012. 80p. ISBN 9780393082494. $25.95), National Book Critics Circle finalist Michael Collier forthrightly tells the story of a life with reference to family and the pop cultural iconography of the late 20th century. Katrina Vandenberg’s unusual second collection, The Alphabet Not Unlike the World (Milkweed. Jul. 2012. 96p. ISBN 9781571314468. pap. $16) names its poems for letters of the Phoenician alphabet while considering how we struggle to forgive.

“Finding My Elegy”
Hayden Carruth’s gentle and eloquent good-bye, Last Poems (Copper Canyon. May 2012. 120p. ISBN 9781556593819. pap. $16)—acknowledging “Loneliness and the absurd atrocities of/ Foreign policy”—include his last works plus the final poems of each of his previous volumes. Three poets taking the long perspective include Ursula K. Le Guin, doyenne of imaginative fiction, who offers 30 selected and 90 new poems encompassing her life (Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems. Houghton Harcourt. Sept. 2012. 208p. ISBN 9780547858203. $22). In his usual sparkling verse (cancer falling into one’s mouth “like stardust”), Stanley Plumly looks for reconciliation in Orphan Hours (Norton. Jun. 2012. 112p. ISBN 9780393076646. $25.95), while at 93 Lawrence Ferlinghetti stays enviably feisty in Time of Useful Consciousness (New Directions. Sept. 2012. 88p. ISBN 9780811220316. $22.95).

Meditation
Pressing language to its limit—not to mention image, as he evokes the monochromatic painter Yves Klein—Brooklyn Rail arts editor John Yau draws on art criticism and social theory to write engagingly cutting poetry in Further Adventures in Monochrome (Copper Canyon. May 2012. 96p. ISBN 9781556593963. pap. $15). As he says in these lines from “Exhibits”: “Signing up for Free Membership works best in a failing economy./ In case of emergency, please vacuum the premises.” Joyelle McSweeney’s Percussion Grenade: Poems & Plays (Fence. May 2012. 96p. ISBN 9781934200520. pap. $15.95) lands with a boom, challenging our notion of beauty and iamge while creatively deconstructing the world.

Looking closely at nature, two-time PEN Center USA Award winner Donald Revell continues his heartfelt search for the otherworldly in Tantivy (Alice James. Sept. 2012. 80p. ISBN 9781882295975. pap. $15.95): “starvation,/ Like a pack of dogs with jeweled mouths,/ Pauses a moment, howls, and the young woman/ Recites a poem to herself.” In Pity the Beautiful (Graywolf. May 2012. 80p. ISBN 9781555976132. pap. $15), former National Endowment for the Arts chair Dana Gioia reflects on our limits (“Blessed is the road that keeps us homeless./ Blessed is the mountain that blocks our way”).

Polish poet Jacek Gutorow’s bilingual The Folding Star: And Other Poems (BOA. Jun. 2012. 92p. ISBN 9781934414880. pap. $16), translated by Piotr Florczyk, captures our angst in sleek, chiseled verse (“Joy thinks I’m on its side/ when I run through a snowy field/ but death keeps its eyes open”). In calm, liquid language, Herder Prize–winning Romanian poet Nichita Stanescu tips beautifully over the edge, representing a real world that seems mystical (Wheel with a Single Spoke: And Other Poems. Archipelago. Jun. 2012. 265p. ISBN 9781935744153. pap. $18).

Two intellectually bracing works from Ahsahta: Dan Beachy-Quick (Circle’s Apprentice) and Matthew Goulish (39 Microlectures) join forces in Work from Memory (Sept. 2012. ISBN NA. $NA.), which reflects on the writings of Marcel Proust. David Mutschlecner’s Enigma and Light (May 2012. 96p. ISBN 9781934103289. pap. $17.50) shows us how ideas are born by juxtaposing Dante and Heidegger, American abstract painter Agnes Martin and the Gee’s Bend quilters.

Finally, Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize winner Marjorie Welish’s out-there In the Futurity Lounge / Asylum for Indeterminacy (Coffee House, dist. by consortium. May 2012. 112p. ISBN 9781566893022. pap. $16) is an experimental double-header. The first part is a matrix for works being constructed, while the second offers translations free-ranging from prior ones. Obviously, it’s a work to be grasped in the reading—and rereading.

So Surreal
The word surreal comes up freuqently with regard to three poets publishing this summer. Dean Young, whose vivid writing explores the enduring issues of life, death, and self, returns with an overview in Bender: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon. Sept. 2012. 300p. ISBN 9781556594038. $26). An American poet of Ethiopian, Arabic, Greek, Armenian, and Moorish ancestry, Sotère Torregian has a lot to say about current politics and culture, which he does with punchy, over-the-edge lyricism in On the Planet Without Visa: Selected Poetry and Other Writings (Coffee House, dist. by Consortium. Aug. 2012. 300p. ISBN 9781566893015. pap. $18.) National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Michael O’Brien treads thruogh astonishing dreamscapes in Avenue (Flood. Jun. 2012. 64p. ISBN 9780983889311. pap. $12.95).

The Contemporary World Is Insane
Selected for the National Poetry Series by Lucie Brock-Broido, Julianne Buchsbaum’s The Apothecary’s Heir (Penguin Poets. Jun. 2012. 80p. ISBN 9780143121411. pap. $18) focuses on the particular—microchips, gas stations, bomb shelters—to examine our contemporary lack of connectedness. Using different voices for context, ever-cheeky Cathy Park Hong’s Engine Empire (Norton. May 2012. 96p. ISBN 9780393082845. $24.95) portrays our current dislocation by ranging from the Old West to a fictionalized boomtown recalling contemporary Shenzhen, China, to a shattered far future world.

Through his urgent narrator, Matthew Pennock steps right up to examine war and surveillance, economic boom and collapse in his first collection, Sudden Dog (Alice James. Apr. 2012. 80p. ISBN 9781882295920. pap. $15.95). Sharon Dolin’s Whirlwind (Univ. of Pittsburgh. Sept. 2012. NAp. ISBN 9780822962212. pap. $15.95), which has just come to my attention, should expand on the Donald Hall Prize winner’s edgy examination of contemporary life.

Mekong Delta–born Hoa Nguyen’s As Long as Trees Last (Wave. Sept. 2012.  88p. ISBN 9781933517612. pap. $16.) gives an up-to-the-minute, street-smart take on being alive in the 21st century. (You have to love a poet who founded a literary magazine called Skanky Possum.) Finally, Lidija Dimkovska’s pH Neutral History (Copper Canyon. May 2012. 72p. ISBN 9781556593758. pap. $16), translated by Ljubica Arsovska and Peggy Reid,  shows us that life’s little snags and snares are the same anywhere, including in the ravaged Balkans: “I exorcise zombies professionally! Be free again!”

Collections
Collections can be tricky. Do you really need the collected works of a poet whose individual titles adorn your shelves? Just how interesting is the theme of a multi-author collection? Actually, The Open Door: One Hundred Poems, One Hundred Years of “Poetry” Magazine (Univ. of Chicago. Sept. 2012. 224p. ISBN 9780226750705. $20), edited by Don Share and Christian Wiman, sounds pretty invaluable. Poetry lovers should lso be intrigued by Sunken Garden Poetry: 1992–2011 (Wesleyan. Jun. 2012. 280p. ISBN 9780819572905. $24.95; pap. ISBN 9780819572912. $16.95), edited  by Brad Davis, which represents works from the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival at Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington, CT.

Three individual collections stand out. Recently deceased, National Book Award and Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize winner Lucille Clifton will be honored with The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965–2010 (BOA. Sept. 2012. 720p. ISBN 9781934414903. $35), essential for most poetry collections. Lew Welch, a noted Beat poet believed to have committed suicide in 1971, though his body was never found, is represented by a new and expanded edition of Ring of Bone: Collected Poems (City Lights. Jun. 2012. 256p. ISBN 9780872865792. pap. $17.95).  Still with us, Michael Heller, a veteran poet who often combines examination of the avant-garde with Jewish and post-Holocaust themes, gets the full-blown treatment with This Constellation Is a Name: Collected Poems 1965–2010 (Nightboat. Jun. 2012. 600p. ISBN 9781937658021. $22.95).

Cyrus, Billy Ray. Hillbilly Heart.  New Harvest: Houghton Harcourt. Oct. 2012. 288p. ISBN 9780547992655. $25. MEMOIR
Forget Miley Cyrus (aka Hannah Montana) and her screen ups and downs. Here’s a reminder that her dad broke out as a country singer and songwriter with “Achy Breaky Heart” and sold over 20 million copies of the album Some Gave All—the best-selling debut album to date of a solo male artist—before going on to a varied career in music and film. Here he writes a story of music, faith, and his travails once he and his family hit Hollywood. A ten- to 15-city tour featuring a new song, “Hillbilly Heart,” will help push this book; the 150,000-copy first printing suggests big-audience expectations.

Norman, Philip. Mick Jagger. Ecco: HarperCollins. Oct. 2012. 576p. ISBN 9780061944857 $34.99. BIOGRAPHY
Evidently, Jagger has proclaimed that he will never write a memoir, so we’ll have to depend on once-removed reporting from folks like Norman, author of the best-selling John Lennon: The Life. Norman interviewed many Jagger intimates, including some who have never spoken for the record, and promises to offer a larger, more complex picture of the star. We’ll see, but the book will surely be buzzing throughout 2012, the Stones’s 50th anniversary year. With a 150,000-copy first printing.

Rogers, Kenny. Luck or Something Like It. Morrow. Oct. 2012. 336p. ISBN 9780062071811. $27.99; eISBN 9780062071606. CD: Harper Audio. MEMOIR
The numbers certainly add up: In his 52-year career, pop/country singer Rogers has recorded more than 65 albums (so many it’s hard to count?), including one Diamond, 19 Platinums, and 31 Golds; he’s sold more than 120 million records worldwide and has nearly 250,000 fans on Facebook. His memoir will obviously touch on a lot of music making, plus those whose music making has touched him, from Ray Charles to Dolly Parton. And he’ll be promoting on his annual Christmas & Hits Tour.

Taylor, John. In the Pleasure Groove: Love, Death, and Duran Duran. Dutton. Oct. 2012. 304p. ISBN 9780525958000. $26.95. Downloadable: Penguin Audio. MEMOIR
Founded in Birmingham, England, in the late 1970s by bassist Taylor and Nick Rhodes, Duran Duran went on to define pop music in the 1980s; their vibrant music videos, seen repeatedly on the newly launched MTV, pushed them into the stardust. Taylor offers an account of the band’s music making (the history gets complicated) and his battles with his personal demons, cocaine and alcohol, as he tried to fathom it all. Hey, the band has sold 80 million records, and recent reviews of their reportedly sold-out concerts have a “they’ve-still-got-it” ring. So there’s an audience.

Townshend, Pete. Who I Am: A Memoir. Harper: HarperCollins. Oct. 2012. 608p. ISBN 9780062127242. $29.99; eISBN 9780062127266. lrg. prnt. CD: Harper Audio. MEMOIR
Townshend has reportedly been working on this memoir for a decade—without the help of a ghostwriter. (It says something to see that fact emphasized.) Here he is as a child, raised by a mentally incapacitated grandmother as his parents led an early version of countercultural life; an adolescent, obsessed with music and founding the forerunner of the Who with buddy Roger Daltrey; and a full-fledged rock star wrestling (as rock stars do) with drugs, sex, fame, fortune, and notoriety. With a one-day laydown on October 8 and a 400,000-copy first printing; line up for author appearances in New York, Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

Young, Neil. Waging Heavy Peace. Blue Rider: Penguin Group (USA). Oct. 2012. 416p. ISBN 9780399159466. $30. MEMOIR
Canadian-born singer/songwriter Young has successfully explored so many different musical styles in his solo and collaborative work that his career could serve as a map of rock music in the last 50 years. Not every musician could have moved so silkily from the gentler sounds of Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, & Nash to the hard-driving rock of Crazy Horse to experimentation that has led to Young’s being dubbed the godfather of grunge. A noncompromiser and an active environmentalist, too; here’s his story.

Abrams, David. Fobbit. Black Cat: Grove Atlantic. Sept. 2012. 384p. ISBN 9780802120328. pap. $15. LITERARY/MILITARY FICTION
A number of Iraq veterans have returned home to give us fiction explaining what the war was really like (see, for instance, Kevin Powers’s forthcoming novel, The Yellow Birds; and in poetry don’t miss award winner Brian Turner). Next in line is Abrams, who served in the U.S. Army for 20 years and was deployed in Iraq as part of a public affairs team. (He was named the Department of Defense’s Military Journalist of the Year in 1994.) His debut novel is set at a Forward Operating Base, where the battle-hardened sleep between missions and everyone else has a desk job; fobbits fear fighting more than anything. Abrams’s antihero is Staff Sergeant Chance Gooding, who writes white-washed press releases. Billed as dark humor in the vein of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.

Beckett, Samuel. Echo’s Bones. Grove. Sept. 2012. 128p. ISBN 9780802120458. $24. LITERARY
A new story from Beckett, one of the defining writers of the 20th century? Yes! In 1933, when Beckett was preparing for the publication of More Pricks Than Kicks, a collection of ten interrelated stories, his publisher asked for a final story to round out the collection. Having killed off the stories’ protagonist, Beckett found the writing hard going, and the piece was finally rejected for publication. Now, eight decades after he wrote it, here is “Echo’s Bones”—distinct from Beckett’s poem and collection of the same name. Mark Nixon, director of the Beckett International Foundation at the University of Reading, explains what this story has to tell us about all of Beckett’s work.

Brown, Brené. Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead. Gotham: Penguin Group (USA). Sept. 2012. 256p. ISBN 9781592407330. $25. SELF-HELP
Quoting Theodore Roosevelt in her title, Brown urges us to throw ourselves out there and take risks—that is, to be vulnerable. Okay, so I’m leery of anyone called a thought leader, but since Brown’s 2010 TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) talk has had 2.3 million views on TED.com (she was back for TED 2012)  and her book The Gifts of Imperfection, the basis of a PBS special, has sold 150,000 copies, she’s clearly got followers.

Echols, Damien. Damien Echols. Blue Rider: Penguin Group (USA). Sept. 2012. 384p. ISBN 9780399160202.  $26.95. Downloadable: Penguin Audio. MEMOIR
With Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley Jr., Echols is one of the West Memphis Three—young men accused of killing three Arkansas boys in 1993. After a trial burdened by hearsay and public hysteria, Baldwin and Misskelley were given life sentences and Echols, considered the ringleader, was sentenced to death at age 18. In 2007, new forensic tests of crime-scene evidence found no genetic material belonging to the men, and finally they were released in August 2011. Echols here recalls a painful childhood, his teenaged outsider status, and his 18 years on death row. An attention getter; the case remains controversial, and many famous musicians and actors (Eddie Vedder, Johnny Depp) have supported the West Memphis Three.

Fancher, Hampton. The Shape of the Final Dog and Other Stories. Blue Rider: Penguin Group (USA). Sept. 2012. 288p. ISBN 9780399158230.  $25.95. SHORT STORIES
You can expect the original screenwriter for the cult classic Blade Runner to write off-the-wall, over-the-line stories, and it seems that he has. One of his characters is an escaped lab rat that bats about philosophical ideas with a wakeful man, another a failed actor reincarnated as garden snail out for revenge. Watch.

Geragos, Mark & Pat Harris. Mistrial: An Inside Look at How the Criminal Justice System Works . . . and Sometimes Doesn’t. Gotham: Penguin Group (USA). Sept. 2012. 304p. ISBN 9781592407729. $27. LAW
Big trials are media events, but do we really know how the justice system works? Absolutely not, say the authors, who are here to offer an insider’s look at what really happens in the courts, some of it disheartening. Since Geragos has represented the likes of Michael Jackson and Winona Ryder and Harris regularly serves as his cocounsel, this could be interesting.

Johnson, Steven. Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age. Riverhead: Penguin Group (USA). Sept. 2012. 208p. ISBN 9781594488207. $26.95. Downloadable: Penguin Audio. SOCIAL SCIENCE
A best-selling author (e.g., Where Good Ideas Come From) and the guy most likely to tackle your precious assumptions, Johnson here proclaims that we’re undergoing a period of rapid political change, facilitated by the Internet but not high-tech in nature, that obviates terms like liberal and conservative. A great nonfiction title for book clubs; imagine the arguments.

Koryta, Michael. The Prophet. Little, Brown. Sept. 2012. 432p. ISBN 9780316122610.  $29.95. lrg. prnt. Downloadable: Hachette Audio. THRILLER
Two brothers, one a popular high school football coach and the other a long-suffering bail bondsman, live separate lives in a small Midwestern town—but not for the reasons you might think. When they were teenagers, their sister was raped and murdered, and the trauma has driven them apart. Now a similar crime rocks their town, forcing the brothers together again. From a perennially rising star in the thriller firmament with a couple of nice movie deals under his belt.

LaVette, Bettye with David Ritz. A Woman Like Me. Blue Rider: Penguin Group (USA). Sept. 2012. 320p. ISBN 9780399159381. $26.95. MEMOIR
R&B great LaVette had a hit single as a Detroit teenager, then subsided into poverty, turning tricks in New York to survive. A tough few decades followed until her recent starburst comeback, which has included CDs, appearances on the Jay Leno and David Letterman shows, and performances at the Kennedy Center and President Obama’s inauguration. Anyone who’s worked with a rafter of stars from Cab Calloway to the Rolling Stones has got to be cool.

Lelic, Simon. The Facility. Penguin. Sept. 2012. 352p. ISBN 9780143120681 pap. $15. THRILLER
Lelic has been gathering steam since the 2010 publication of his first novel, A Thousand Cuts, a Betty Trask Award winner that was also shortlisted for a Crime Writers’ Association New Blood Dagger Award. Here, he offers a chillingly plausible near-future Britain where antiterrorism laws allow the police to “disappear” anyone they choose. But when mild-mannered dentist Arthur Priestley vanished, his estranged wife swings into action.

Norfolk, Lawrence. John Saturnall’s Feast. Grove. Sept. 2012. 416p. ISBN 9780802120519. $25. LITERARY
You can bet that the author of the Somerset Maugham Prize winner Lemprière’s Dictionary will serve up a lusciously detailed feast with his new novel—12 years in the making. After his mother starves to death, having been driven with him from their village because she is deemed a witch, John sees her starve to death, then becomes kitchen boy at Buckland Manor. He ends up a master chef—but not before becoming entangled with Lady Lucretia, the lord’s daughter, for whom he must cook meals meant to break the fast she’s declared so that her father will call off her engagement to her ridiculous fiancé. Love, food, and a riveting historical setting—it’s the English Civil War, and Cromwell’s Roundheads are descending; essential for literate readers.

Slinkachu. Little People: The Global Model Village. Blue Rider: Penguin Group (USA). Sept. 2012. 120p. ISBN 9780399160745. $16.95.  HUMOR/ART
A pseudonymous London-based street artist, Slinkachu roams the city, setting up vignettes with hand-painted figurines for passersby to discover. His first book, Little People in the City, sold 150,000 copies in the U.K. and 11,000 copies here in an export edition. This new book features his “little people” in settings worldwide, from Greece, Israel, and South Africa to China, Qatar, and the United States. This is billed as humor, though I understand the vignettes can be quite poignant. An artist who’s getting hot; the publisher will use this book to push him to the U.S. media.

Smilevski, Goce. Freud’s Sister. Penguin. Sept. 2012. 288p. ISBN 9780143121459. pap. $16. Downloadable: Penguin Audio. LITERARY Winner of the European Union Prize for Literature and sold to 23 countries, Macedonia-born Smilevski’s novel is all the more remarkable—and unsettling—because it’s based on fact. When Freud was granted an exit visa from Vienna in 1938 and asked to list those he would take with him, he named his entire household, including the maids and the dog, but left off his four sisters. They ended up in the Terezín concentration camp. This novel ranges over the life of Freud’s sister Adolfina, a sweet, sensitive soul who was close to her brother, dreamed of marriage, and spent time with Gustav Klimt’s sister in a psychiatric hospital. A hardcover-worthy paperback original.

Prepub Alert is heading into fall coverage, but there’s still plenty of time to discuss great spring titles. Please join me for an April 10 webcast, Spring Adult Book Buzz, as library reps Virginia Stanley (HarperCollins), Ali Fisher (Macmillan), Elenita Chmilowski (Perseus), and Jennifer Child and Erica Melnichok (Random House) share their top picks. Among them: Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Ford’s Canada, his first novel in six years. Beautiful Ruins from the popular Jess Walter. Chelsea Cain’s Kill You Twice, next in the New York Times best-selling Archie Sheridan series. The Red House, a new novel of family rapprochement from Mark Haddon, author of the Whitbread/Commonwealth prize winner The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Gone Girl by the always scary Gillian Flynn. And award-winning broadcast journalist Lynn Sherr’s Swim: Why We Love the Water. That’s Tuesday, April 10, at 3:00, EDT. Register now!

Buckley, Fiona. Queen’s Bounty. Crème de la Crime: Severn House. Aug. 2012. 240p. ISBN 9781780290249. $28.95.
Ever glad to help her queen, Elizabeth, Ursula Blanchard has uncovered the treasonous plotting of Anne Percy, Countess of Northumberland. Now the exiled countess has sent Ursula a threatening letter, which she dismisses until odd mishaps start plaguing her household. Then Ursula is accused of witchcraft. Not the best way to start off her third marriage.

Gordon-Smith, Dolores. Trouble Brewing. Severn House. Aug. 2012. 256p. ISBN 9780727881694. $28.95.
Appropriate title: Mark Helston has made a success of himself at Hunt Coffee Limited. Then, in January 1925, he vanishes after leaving his Albemarle Street flat, and, Scotland Yard’s shoulder shrug be damned, his uncle asks series regular Jack Haldean to find him. Instead, Jack finds trouble—and we’re not talking competition from Starbucks.

Morris, R.N. Summon Up the Blood. Crème de la Crime: Severn House. Aug. 2012. 224p. ISBN 9781780290256. $28.95.
Morris takes a break from his popular Porfiry Petrovich series with a mystery set in 1914 London. Scotland Yard’s Detective Inspector Silas Quinn is stymied by a serial killer who leaves his victims drained of blood, and it probably chills his blood that clues are leading him to an exclusive gentleman’s club.

Nickson, Chris. The Constant Lovers. Crème de la Crime: Severn House. May 2012. 224p. ISBN 9781780295183. $28.95.
Near 1732 Leeds, a well-dressed young woman is found murdered amid the ruins of Kirkstall Abbey, a mysterious love note crumpled in her pocket. Richard Nottingham, Constable of the City of Leeds, has no leads—and not a lot of cooperation when he finally locates her family.

Peacock, Caro. Keeping Bad Company. Crème de la Crime: Severn House. Jun. 2012. 240p. ISBN 9781780290201. $28.95.
Private investigator Liberty Lane can’t help but get involved when her brother, an employee of the East India Company, returns to 1840s London, where he’s asked to give evidence in the murder of a wealthy merchant’s assistant who was on his way to Bombay. Does it have something to do with the booming opium trade?

Rowe, Rosemary. A Whispering of Spies. Severn House, Jul. 2012. 256p. ISBN 9780727881632. $28.95.
Volus: he’s rich, he’s powerful (having served as the lictor of to the Imperial Governor of Gaul), and he’s retiring to Gelvum, which worries Libertus’s patron, local magistrate Marcus Septimus Aurelius. But when he’s asked to check up on Volus, Libertus attracts the unwanted attentions of a bunch of spies.

Saylor, Steven. The Seven Wonders: A Novel of the Ancient World. Minotaur: St. Martin’s. Jun. 2012. 336p. ISBN 9780312359843. $25.99.
Here’s some backstory for Saylor’s acclaimed protagonist, Gordianus the Finder. It’s 92 BCE, and a teenaged Gordianus sets out on a tour of the Seven Wonders of the World with his tutor, Antipater of Sidon. Strange that Antipater fakes his death before leaving—but maybe not so strange, with rebellion in the air. As he travels, Gordianus learns all about the art of crime-solving—and love.

Sedley, Kate. The Tintern Treasure. Severn House. Jul. 2012. 208p. ISBN 9780727881649. $28.95.
In autumn 1483, while taking refuge in Tintern Abbey after having been dragged into the Duke of Buckingham’s rebellion against nasty Richard III, delightfully rough-and-ready Roger the Chapman takes refuge in Tintern Abbey. The night he’s there, a priceless treasure is stolen from the abbey, and trouble follows him home to Bristol.

Wortham, Reavis Z. Burrows: A Red River Mystery. Poisoned Pen. Jul. 2012. 250p. ISBN 9781464200052; pap. 348p. ISBN 9781-590588222.
It’s the late 1960s, and Ned Parker has retired as constable of Center Springs, TX. But he has to help nephew Cody Parker, the newly elected constable, when a dead body in Red River leads to a decaying Cotton Exchange warehouse packed with trouble.

Bell, Elana. Eyes, Stones. Louisiana State Univ. Apr. 2012. 72p. ISBN 9780807144640. pap. $17.95.
In tight-knit language, matter of fact yet deeply lyrical, Bell examines Israeli-Palestinian tensions by telling stories of the Jews who “named the land in blood and ink” and of Palestinians who’ve long tilled the same land to bursting. Bell, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, won the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of America Poets for this book.

Brimhall, Traci. Our Lady of the Ruins: Poems. Norton. Apr. 2012. 96p. ISBN 9780393086430. pap. $15.95.
Chosen by Carolyn Forché for the 2011 Barnard Women Poets Prize, this book gathers the voices of women traveling together as pilgrims in a world enduring apocalypse. Incantatory and dispassionate, the voices are sometimes first person singular (“I began to understand I was promised/ a second life but not a better one”) and sometimes, unusually and effectively, first person plural.

Choffel, Julie. The Hello Delay. Fordham Univ. Apr. 2012. 85p. ISBN 9780823242290. $45; pap. ISBN 9780823242306. $18.
Staccato and interior, the poems in Choffel’s first collection—which Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge liked well enough to pick for the 2011 Poets Out Loud Prize—examine the very act of language (“She is like her voice is and like the statements/ she is making in a bowl/ not ‘howling’/ or ‘timing herself’ ”).

Clay, Adam. A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World. Milkweed. Apr. 2012. 96p. ISBN 9781571314413. pap. $16.
Whether the narrator of these sprawly poems is fishing up north, sitting in a Chinese restaurant, or “riding backward through Michigan toward Chicago,” one senses immediately his solitude, not desperate but contemplative, the way any of us might feel in “a hotel lobby at the edge of the world.”

Christle, Heather. What Is Amazing. Wesleyan Univ. Apr. 2012. 80p. ISBN 9780819572776. $22.95.
Christle’s third collection (after The Trees The Trees) can be offhandedly dark and spikily funny (“Was that a gunshot or/ was it a look of temerity”). Swans are murderers, some husbands so small one must lie down to chat. Then come the epiphanies.

Donnelly, Patrick. Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin. Four Way. Apr. 2012. 108p. ISBN 9781935536215. pap. $15.95.
If “every gesture triggers/ a cascade of ghost-futures,” then every gesture here also triggers ghost-pasts, told in language both tough and lovely and with an unsentimental regard for mortality and “this cup/ of tears and fire and gall.” Donnelly’s second book (after The Charge) is also cut through with some elegant translations of Japanese poems (done with Stephen D. Miller).

Fisher-Wirth. Dream Cabinet. Wings. Apr. 2012. 85p. ISBN 9780916727932. pap. $16.
“Oh to dive into an unmade bed and sleep,/ and sleep and sleep.” The lushness and comfort of those lines, which open this new book from the author of Blue Windows, suggests the personal, quietly reasoned poems to follow.

Frank, Patrick Ryan. How the Losers Love What’s Lost. Four Way. Apr. 2012. 80p. ISBN 9781935536208. pap. $15.95.
A character actor (“I play an unlovely face/ for laughs”). A hunter (“dawn, like sickness, starts/ slowly”). A vet (“I was happy in the war./ Just one great thing”). A one-handed peeping tom (“All he wanted was that little thrill/ of seeing people happy”). In his first book, winner of the Four Way Books Intro Prize in Poetry, Frank draws portraits of startling forthrightness.

Motika, Stephen. Western Practice. Alice James. Apr. 2012. 80p. ISBN 9781882295913. pap. $15.95.
Publisher of Nightboat Books, Motika offers gorgeously fractured poems that spread like starfish over the pages of his first book. He’s concerned with culture, and, yes, the West: from “Pacific Slope”: “in long stocking/pearlescent, feasting/ salty heat of abalone.” Energized.

Nadelberg, Amanda. Bright Brave Phenomena. Coffee House, dist. by Consortium. Apr. 2012. 133p. ISBN 9781566893039. pap. $16.
So sometimes the speaker in Nadelberg’s second collection (after Slope Editions Book Prize winner Isa the Truck Named Isadore) has tense personal moments: “I looked out/ the big windows and you/ were there too and all/ there was to see was elephants/ and angry elephants at/ that.” With inimitable everyday sparkle she also says “I/ make horses whenever/ I want.”

Novey, Idra. Exit, Civilian. Univ. of Georgia. Apr. 2012. 88p. ISBN 9780820343488. pap. $16.95.
The prisons, courthouses, and hideaways featured in Novey’s National Poetry Series winner are very real, but we don’t encounter so much bars, barbs, and barbed wire as metaphysical shrinkage and change: “Whisper at the door/ of the little prison/ and your voice will become a coin.” Startling.

Robbins, Michael. Alien vs. Predator. Penguin Poets. Apr. 2012. 70p. ISBN 9780143120353. pap. $18.
Willfully defiant and in your face (“You homicidal bitch. I killed the boar/ ’cause boar’s the game I came here for”), Robbins will appeal to those who like their poetry angry, darkly funny, and stirred up. And he can be wistful: “I feel like a discarded Christmas tree./ Thanks for sharing.”

Rybicki, John. When All the World Is Old. Lookout. Apr. 2012. 120p. ISBN 9780984592265. pap. $16.95.
This tender collection captures both the 16-year battle Rybicki’s wife waged against cancer (“I’m trying to smuggle her/ out of a burning city”) and her death (“There’s a river of light inside my lass/ and I’m hauling it out of her/ veins like rope. Even if she’s in the dirt”). Since the publisher’s first book was Edith Pearlman’s Binocular Vision, a 2011 National Book Critics Circle winner and National Book Award finalist, you can trust its taste.

Webster, Kerri. Grand & Arsenal. Univ. of Iowa. Apr. 2012. 94p. ISBN 9781609380915. pap. $18.
If the poet seems so anxious to locate herself, perhaps it’s because the world is so dizzyingly rich—as are her poems, displaying both detailed physicality (“Objects/ pile on my work-bench: a flame. A seed. A heart”) and unfettered repetition (“Having gone looking for the smoothest stones/ having seen the herons pterodactyl-ancient in the cottonwoods…”). An exciting spill of words that won the 2011 Iowa Poetry Prize.

Award-Winning Authors
In Edgar Award winner Thomas H. Cook’s The Crime of Julian Wells (Mysterious Pr: Grove Atlantic. Aug. 2012. ISBN 9780802126030. $24), a celebrated true-crime writer could be his own next topic—he’s found dead in a boat drifting about a Montauk pond. Winner of the Agatha, Anthony, and Barry awards, plus multiple Lefty and Bromberg awards for best funny mysteries, Donna Andrews sets out to prove herself again with Some Like It Hawk (Minotaur: St. Martin’s. Jul. 2012. ISBN 9781250007506. $24.99), set in “The Town That Mortgaged Its Jail.” All employees have been evacuated from the town’s public buildings by the mortgage holder but for one holdout clerk, Phineas Throckmorton, who needs blacksmith Meg Langslow’s help when he’s framed for murder.

Bill Pronzini, winner of the Edgar, Macavity, and inaugural Shamus awards, brings back the Nameless Detective, whose wife goes missing in the Sierra foothills (Hellbox. Forge. Jul. 2012. ISBN 978076532565. $24.99).  In Macavity Award winner Rebecca Cantrell’s A City of Broken Glass (Forge. Jul. 2012. ISBN 9780765327345. $25.99), journalist Hannah Vogel, in 1938 Poland for a festival, rushes to cover the story when she learns that 12,000 Polish Jews have been deported from Germany. Loren D. Estleman, winner of a Shamus Award for his debut novel, Sugartown, and several for his short stories, returns with Burning Midnight (Forge. Jun. ISBN 9780765331205. $24.99), another Amos Walker mystery set in Detroit.

Two other authors who have won awards for their stories (this time Agathas) have full-length works to offer this summer. In Simon Wood’s Hot Seat (Crème de la Crime: Severn House. Jul. 2012. ISBN 9781780290232. $28.95), Aidy Westlake, Pit Lane magazine’s Young Driver of the Year, has it made—until he discovers the mechanic of a rival team with his throat neatly slashed. Marcia Talley, who has also won an Anthony for her short fiction, returns with The Last Refuge (Severn House. Jun. 2012. ISBN 9780727881533. $28.95), set during the filming of a reality show called Patriot House, 1774. The young widow cast as a maid receives a text message from her Navy SEAL husband, presumed dead—and then disappears.

Winner of Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine’s Barry Gardiner Award, and Edgar and Anthony nominees as well, mother-and-son team Charles Todd temporarily forsakes Det. Ian Rutledge to write another Bess Crawford mystery (An Unmarked Grave. Morrow. Jun. 2012. ISBN 9780062015723 $24.99). Intrepid nurse Bess finds a murdered British officer hidden among victims of the 1918 Spanish influenza and goes after the killer. Barbara Cleverly, who’s claimed the Ellis Peters Historical Dagger Award, moves the action up to 1933, as Scotland Yard detective Joe Sandilands investigates a teacher’s murder at a Sussex boarding school where students have an odd way of disappearing (Not My Blood. Soho Crime. Aug. 2012. ISBN 9781616951542. $25).

You have to love an award named Dagger in the Library, won by Jim Kelly. In his new work, Death’s Door (Crème de la Crime: Severn House. Jul. 2012. ISBN 9781780295190. 28.95), all 75 holiday travelers who saw one of their number murdered back in 1994 are summoned when new evidence surfaces—and one of them ends up dead. Linda Castillo, winner of a Daphne du Maurier Award for Excellence in Mystery/Suspense, gets appropriately atmospheric in Gone Missing (Minotaur: St. Martin’s. Jun. 2012. ISBN 9780312658564. $24.95), featuring Chief of Police Kate Burkholder’s efforts to locate a vanished Amish teenager.

Three authors whose first works received special attention are publishing this summer. Since winning the Edgar and Shamus awards for Best First Novel a decade ago, Steve Hamilton has written numerous Steve McKnight best sellers; now we get dumped with McKnight on an empty Upper Peninsula airstrip with five dead bodies in Die a Stranger (Minotaur. Jul. 2012. ISBN 97803120640217. $25.99).

Gerrie Ferris Finger, who aced the 2009 Malice Domestic/St. Martin’s Minotaur Best First Traditional Novel Competition, returns with the tale of a recovering-addict mother and missing daughter in The Last Temptation (Five Star: Gale Cengage. Jul. 2012. ISBN 9781432825898. $25.95). Finally, librarian Eleanor Kuhns has won 2011’s Mystery Writers of America/Minotaur Books First Crime Novel Competition. Set in 1796 Maine, A Simple Murder (Minotaur: St. Martin’s. May 2012. ISBN 9781250005533. $24.99) features soldier turned traveling weaver Will Rees, accused of murdering a Shaker woman.

Finally, don’t forget Vengeance (Holt. Jun. 2012. ISBN 9780805094398. $26), a tale involving a businessman’s suspicious suicide that stars Quirke, consultant pathologist at the Hospital of the Holy Family in Dublin. Author Benjamin Black, whose Quirke novels have been big hits, is of course the Man Book prize winner John Banville.

Two Scandinavian Queens
In The Stonecutter (Pegasus. May 2012. ISBN 9781605983301. $25.95), the latest from Sweden’s best-selling female author, Camilla Läckberg, a little girl’s body is found caught in a fisherman’s net in the isolated resort town of Fjällbacka. And as local detective Patrik Hedstrom realizes, she didn’t just drown. Drowning also features in Danish author Sara Blaedel’s Only One Life (Pegasus. Jul. 2012. ISBN 9781605983509. $25). When an immigrant girl from Jordan is found in the Hollbraek Fjord, with concrete tied around her neck and strange marks on her back, Inspector Louise Rick suspects an honor killing, but then the girl’s best friend is found battered to death. 

Set in Foreign Lands
In lovely St. Denis in the Dordogne, Martin Walker’s beloved chief of police, Bruno Courrèges, has his hands full when a contemporary corpse is dug up by archaeologists looking for Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal remains (The Crowded Grave: A Mystery of the French Countryside (Knopf. Jul. 2012.  ISBN 9780307700193. $28.95). In Janet Hubbard-Brown’s Champagne: The Farewell (Poisoned Pen. Aug. 2012. ISBN 9781464200779. $22.95; pap. ISBN 9781590588222. $14.95), NYPD detective Max Maguire is attending friend Chloe’s wedding in France when Chloe’s widowed aunt turns up dead. Alas, Max is barred from the case when it’s assigned to juge d’instruction Olivier Chaumont, with whom she had just shared a star-dusted evening,

In Mario Vichi’s Death in August (Pegasus. Jul. 2012. ISBN 9781605983516. $25), the first in a new crime series, Inspector Bordelli is whiling away his time during a hot, sticky Florence summer in 1963 when he’s called to investigate the death of a wealthy signora—apparently from an asthma attack, but Bordelli is not convinced. In contemporary Milan, as seen in Conor Fitzgerald’s The Namesake: A Commissario Alec Blume Novel (Bloomsbury USA. Jun. 2012. ISBN 9781608198450. $25), magistrate Matteo Arconti’s namesake is found dead near a court building in what turns out to be a threatening message to Rome.

In 1992 Warsaw, former democracy activist Julian Krol refuses to believe that his sister has committed suicide, as the police claim in Steven Owad’s Hard Currency (Five Star: Gale Cengage. Jun. 2012. ISBN 9781432825799. $25.95). Meanwhile, international best seller Roberto Ampuero, currently Chile’s ambassador to Mexico and a creative writing professor at the University of Iowa, finally gets English publication with The Neruda Case (Riverhead: Penguin Group (USA). Jul. 2012. ISBN 9781594487439. $26.95).

Surprise. Bernard Knight has turned away from his Crowner John and Dr Richard Pryor books to write Dead in the Dog (Severn House. Jul. 2012. ISBN 9780727881618. $28.95), a Fifties murder mystery set in Malay and starring pathologist Tom Howden, who investigates an attack on an English planter’s home (maybe it wasn’t a local bandit?). In Martin Limon’s Joy Brigade (Soho Crime. Jul. 2012. ISBN 9781616951481. $25), it’s 1972, and word has it that North Korea is planning to storm the DMZ and take South Korea. Sgt. George Sueño’s assignment? Stop the invasion.

When two Gypsies are found burnt to death in an olive grove on the near-sacred isle of Tinos, no one cares except Andreas Kaldis, the ominous head of Greece’s special crimes division. Target: Tinos: An Inspector Kaldis Mystery (Poisoned Pen. Jun. 2012. ISBN 9781590589762. $22.95; pap. ISBN 9781590588222. $14.95) should demonstrate author Jeffrey Siger’s feel for the Greek islands; a former Wall Streeter, he now lives much of the time on Mykonos (and who wouldn’t?).

Tarquin Hall’s The Case of the Deadly Butter Chicken: A Vish Puri Mystery (S. & S. Jul. 2012. ISBN 9781451613155. $24) brings us to Delhi, where the father of a leading cricket player from Pakistan is felled by butter chicken that’s been poisoned. In Susan Oleksiw’s The Wrath of Shiva: An Anita Ray Mystery (Five Star: Gale Cengage. Jun 2012. ISBN 9781432825911. $25.95), Anita’s cousin fails to arrive home as expected, and a maidservant who falls into a trance proclaims that she will never return. And what’s this about missing heirlooms?

Merry Olde England
In Judith Cutler’s Guilt Trip (Severn House. May 2012. ISBN 9780727881427. $28.95), antiques dealer Lina Townend accepts a role in an amateur production of Curtain Call, whose title has an uncomfortably prophetic ring. Amy Myers’s Classic Calls the Shots (Severn House. Jun. ISBN 9780727881502. $28.95) also has an actorly twist, as car detective Jack Colby investigates the disappearance of a 1935 Auburn speedster on a film set in Kent—and encounters something more dangerous.

In Pauline Rowson’s A Killing Coast (Severn House. May 2012. ISBN 9780727881441. $28.95), Detective Inspector Horton decides that a body found off Portsmouth harbor got there accidentally, then must change his mind and prove that his judgment is up to snuff. Lots going on in Peter Guttridge’s The Thing Itself (Severn House. Aug. 2012. ISBN 9780727880819. $28.95), as best-selling thriller writer Victor Tempest is found dead, his disgraced chief constable son tries to crack a cold-case murder from 1934, DS Sarah Gilchrist investigates a massacre, and Balkan gangsters cause trouble in Brighton. Guttridge is the Observer’s crime fiction critic.

In Linda Regan’s Street Girls (Crème de la Crime: Severn House. Jun. 2012. ISBN 9781780290218. $28.95), a man is stabbed to death in South London while soliciting an underage prostitute, and DI Georgia Johnston is understandably alarmed when it’s suggested that her partner’s teenage daughter go undercover to help solve the crime. Sara Foster’s Beneath the Shadows (Minotaur: St. Martin’s. Jun. 2012. ISBN 9780312643362. $24.99) is set in North Yorkshire, where Grace and Adam move to escape London. And then Adam vanishes.

American Tough
In Kirk Russell’s Counterfeit Road (Severn House. May 2012. ISBN 9780727881458. $28.95), homicide inspector Ben Raveneau of San Francisco’s Cold Case Unit receives a videotape of the murder of former Secret Service Agent Alan Krueger, which took place beneath the unfinished Embarcadero Freeway 20 years. Jon Talton’s Powers of Arrest (Poisoned Pen. May 2012. ISBN 9781590589991. $24.95; pap. ISBN 9781590588222. $14.95) takes us to Cincinnati, where homicide detective Will Borders hobbles along with a cane but is still determined to find the killer of star cop.

Billed as country noir, Brad Smith’s Crow’s Landing (Scribner. Aug. 2012. ISBN 9781451678536 pap. $12) sets Virgil Cain to fishing on the mighty Hudson River, where he pulls up a battered cylinder containing pure cocaine. Paul Doiron’s Bad Little Falls (Minotaur: St. Martin’s. Aug. 2012. ISBN 9780312558482. $24.99) puts registered Maine guide Mike Bowditch on remote Canadian border, where a drug dealer has apparently been murdered in the midst of a blizzard.

In William Kent Krueger Trickster’s Point (Atria. Aug. 2012. ISBN 9781451645675. $24.99), Cork O’Connor is bow hunting in the Minnesota wilderness when his companion, the state’s first Native American governor-elect, is shot through the heart—with one of O’Connor’s own arrows. And you’d think that Ken Hodgson’s Tombstone Blues (Five Star: Gale Cengage. Aug. 2012. ISBN 9781432826031. $25.95) was a cozy, since it features a historic Tombstone bed-and-breakfast. But the owners are two gay hit-men (plus one elderly mom), working to rid America of scumbags in the name of national security, and new employee Samantha must join in the family business—or else.

Al Lamanda’s Sunset (Five Star: Gale Cengage. May. ISBN 9781432825843. $22.95) stars former police detective John Bekker, a drunken wreck after his wife’s murder in front of their young daughter by thugs working for mobster Eddie Crist. But now a dying Crist says he wasn’t responsible for the crime and hires Bekker to find the real murderer. In Mark de Castrique’s The 13th Target (Poisoned Pen. Jul. 2012. ISBN 9781590586150. $24.95; pap. ISBN 9781590588222. $14.95), Russell Mullins quits the secret service after his wife’s death and goes to work for a private protection company, guarding Federal Reserve exec Paul Luguire—whose apparent suicide sets a lot in motion.

In Jeanne Matthews’s Bonereapers (Poisoned Pen. Jun. 2012. ISBN 9781590586181. $24.95; pap. ISBN 9781590588222. $14.95), Dinah Pelerin is doing work at the all-important Doomsday Seed Vault in Norway when she finds herself caught up in the marital troubles of an American presidential candidate—and murder. Memoirist Joy Castro’s mystery debut, Hell or High Water (St. Martin’s. Jul. 2012. ISBN 9781250004574. $25.99), features a go-getting young reporter at the Times-Picayune whose search for a missing tourist in New Orleans leading to something more. Finally, Judy Clemens continues her “Grim Reaper” mysteries with Dying Echo (Poisoned Pen. Aug. 2012. ISBN 9781464200212. $24.95; pap. ISBN 9781590588222. $14.95).

American Cozy
In Frederick Ramsay’s yummy-sounding Scone Island (Poisoned Pen. Aug. 2012. ISBN 9781464200533. $24.95; pap. ISBN  9781590588222. $14.95), Sheriff Ike Schwartz of Picketsville, VA, and his fiancée, president of the local university, look for a little peace and quiet on Scone Island. But no such luck. Glen Ebisch’s Breaking the Rules (Five Star: Gale Cengage. May 2012. ISBN 9781432825829. $25.95) stars intrepid advice columnist Laura Magee, who’s investigating rumors that some local construction is interfering with a historic site. Too bad the architect in question is so attractive—and that Laura doesn’t approve of his best friend, the new beau of Laura’s girlfriend.

In Jeanne Glidewell’s Haunted: A Lexie Starr Mystery Novel (Five Star: Gale Cengage. Jul. 2012. ISBN 9781432825942. $25.95), so cozy there are holiday recipes, Lexie thinks that turning her boyfriend’s bed-and-breakfast into a haunted house for Halloween is a good idea—until people start turning up dead. People also start turning up dead in Flo Fitzpatrick’s Serenade to a Cuckoo: A P.L. McGinnis Mystery (Five Star: Gale Cengage. Aug. 2012. ISBN 9781432826017. $25.95). Poor P.L., she’s enjoyed playing Detective Jocelyn Girard on television, but this is different.

Finally, in Mary Daheim’s The Wurst Is Yet To Come: A Bed-and-Breakfast Mystery (Morrow. Jul. 2012. ISBN 9780062089830 $23.99), Judith McMonigle Flynn works the state bed-and-breakfast booth at Oktoberfest to assuage critics of her own bed-and-breakfast, where a dead body or two has been known to surface. But dead bodies show up at Oktoberfest, too. Charles Atkins’s Vultures at Twilight (Severn House. May 2012. ISBN 9780727881410. $28.95), a series starter, features two female sleuths in Connecticut said to be of a certain age. They might want to head down Miami way to meet Harry Lipkin, proclaimed the world’s oldest detective, who tracks a trinket thief in Barry Fantoni’s Harry Lipkin, Private Eye (Doubleday. Jul. ISBN 9780385536103. $24.95).

Coming next time: Historical Mystery

“I’m not a political person,” proclaimed Stephen Dau at the packed Public Library Association panel “Meet This Season’s Best in Debut Authors,” a new event initiated by Penguin library rep Alan Walker, to whom we can all be grateful. At first, it seemed like a surprising assertion, as his debut, The Book of Jonas, features a 15-year-old in an unnamed Muslim country orphaned when American troops decimate his village. But as Dau went on to explain, his real aim was to speak hopefully of individual responsibility, particularly in the face of daunting moral choice. It was a theme common to all four books featured on the panel, which would make them especially good book club selections. Here’s a rundown of the titles, which I was fortunate enough to introduce.

Charlotte Rogan, The Lifeboat. April 2012. Regan Arthur Bks: Little, Brown.
As Rogan commented, the lifeboat is an apt metaphor for our troubled world today, which makes her book an especially bracing read. It sets sail in the early 1900s, when a ship traveling from England to New York is sent to the ocean bottom by a fire—but not before Henry has managed to shove new bride Grace into a lifeboat and then vanish in the crowd. Unsentimental and even a bit of a go-getter, Grace is already the survivor of family tragedy, and the dead-on account of her ordeal will leave readers as shivering and conflicted as the lifeboat passengers themselves.
The book has two sources—the author’s growing up in a family of competitive sailors and a law case dating to 1841 concerning the “Custom of the Sea,” which included using lotteries to determine the fate of survivors on an overcrowded boat. Sometimes, it seemed, the weakest always got the short (and unlucky) stick in that draw, and the 1841 case involved charges of  murder, which surface here, too. Yes, Grace’s lifeboat is carrying too many passengers, and for some to live, others must die. Would one kill in order to live or consent to die so that others can go on? The challenge to the reader’s conscience is as stinging as it is inevitable.

Wiley Cash, A Land More Kind Than Home. April 2012. Morrow.
Though Cash was not raised among the wide-eyed snake-handling true believers at River Road Church of Christ in Signs Following featured in his first book, he was raised Southern Baptist, which helps to explain the sensitivity of his debut novel in both tone and content. With deft musicality and a pitch-perfect ear, he tells the story of small-town tragedy and complicity in three different voices. First, there’s Jess, a precocious boy who watches over his mute older brother, Stump, witness to something he should not have seen and subject to creepy Pastor Chambliss’s efforts to wrestle the demon out of him.
Then there’s upright, no-nonsense Adelaide, midwife in this tiny North Carolina town and brave enough to stand up to Chambliss; and Sheriff Clem Barefield, who says “people out in these parts can take hold of religion like it’s a drug” and who must in the end deal with the terrible consequences, even as he deals with his own sorry past. Never condescending to his characters, Cash (utterly sincere but very funny in person) explores the power of faith for good and for evil.

Kira Peikoff, Living Proof. February 2012. Tor Books.
It’s 2027, and the Department of Embryo Preservation (DEP) zealously oversees fertility clinics; if the destruction of a single embryo is discovered, if there’s even a hint of something as egregious as stem cell research, the doctor is charged with first-degree murder. Sound implausible? A quick look at the news today says that it’s not. In fact, Peikoff, a journalist writing for venues like Newsday and New York magazine, was inspired to write this book after covering President George W. Bush’s veto of funding for stem cell research.
At the panel, Peikoff spoke passionately about the importance of such research, pointing to recent advances it has prompted that restored sight to two legally blind women—especially telling to Peikoff, who recently came close to losing the sight in one eye. Her heroine, fertility specialist Arianna Drake, also has personal as well as science-based reasons for conducting her illegal research. The story is at once a thriller (a DEP agent goes undercover to uncover Drake’s suspected illegality), a love story (what about that DEP agent?), and a completely accessible discussion of both the scientific and the moral issues involved.

Stephen Dau, The Book of Jonas. March 2012. Blue Rider: Penguin Group (USA).
Dau has worked in postwar reconstruction and international development, including time spent in Sarajevo, so he understands the consequences of war for everyone involved. He was inspired to write this book when, back in 2003, he heard President George W. Bush respond to a question about civilian deaths in Iraq by saying offhandedly, “around 30,000,” as if it were a bowling score. Dau felt compelled to tell their stories, which he does here by focusing on 15-year-old Younis, who escapes the slaughter in his village with the help of an American soldier named Christopher.
Why did Christopher save Younis? And what happened to Christopher? These are pieces of a puzzle that comes together affectingly even as Younis—now called Jonas, seemingly well adjusted and living in America—starts coming apart. In the end, we see that both Christopher and Younis/Jonas have faced choices and taken responsibilities we can’t imagine. Brave, heartrending, and expertly written—and featuring three libraries, something the author didn’t even realize until after he was done—this book is a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick and maybe a pick in your library, too.

Badman, Keith. Marilyn Monroe: The Final Years. St. Martin’s. Jul. 2012. 352p. ISBN 9780312607142. $25.99; eISBN 9781250012388. BIOGRAPHY
Having disposed of the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and the Stones, Badman goes after another celebrity icon. Among his putative revelations: the identity of Marilyn Monroe’s biological father, what really happened with JFK, and her exploitation by mobsters at a hotel owned by Frank Sinatra. Another on the Monroe bandwagon.

Gemmell, Nikki. With My Body. HarperPerennial: HarperCollins. Jun. 2012. 480p. ISBN 9780062122636. pap. $14.99; eISBN 9780062122643. POP FICTION
Gemmell follows up her sensationalist best seller, The Bride Stripped Bare, with another fictional exploration of female sexuality. Here, a woman who feels suffocated by marriage and children recalls the one love affair that really did something for her. With a 100,000-copy first printing and a reading group guide—for those, I guess, who don’t blush easily.

Joyce, Rachel. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. Random. Jul. 2012. 286p. ISBN 9780812993295. $25. LITERARY FICTION
A leading actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company, then an award-winning author of plays for the BBC, Joyce is taking on another role: novelist. And a successful one at that, it seems, with rights for this debut sold to more than 25 countries. When cranky retiree Harold Fry gets a letter from an old friend he’s not seen in two decades, revealing that she’s in hospice, he decides to visit her. And he decides that to do so he’ll walk the 600 miles from Kingsbridge to Berwick upon Tweed. Refreshing premise; let’s all watch.

Lepore, Jill. The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death. Knopf. Jun. 2012. 320p. ISBN 9780307592996. $27.95; eISBN 9780307958501. HISTORY
Okay, grand subtitle, but Lepore—Harvard historian, New Yorker staff writer, and author (e.g., New York Burning)—has something focused in mind and will likely pull it off. Here she explores how ideas about life and death have shaped American history and politics. For your thoughtful readers.

Locke, Kate. God Save the Queen.(Immortal Empire, Bk 1.). Orbit: Hachette. Jul. 2012. 352p. ISBN 9780316196123. $16.99. STEAMPUNK
It’s called the steampunk debut of the year, and it opens in 2012 with an undead Queen Victoria still ruling and the aristocracy made up mostly of vampires and werewolves. Elite Guard Xandra Vardan goes looking for her missing sister and starts doubting everything she once believed. Meanwhile, conspiracy brews. From best-selling YA author Kady Cross (like Kate Locke, a pseudonym); should be big.

Mantel, Hilary. Bring Up the Bodies: A Novel. Holt. May 2012. 432p. ISBN 9780805090031. $28. HISTORICAL FICTION
Deservedly a winner of both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Mantel’s best-selling Wolf Hall is audaciously good historical fiction portraying Thomas Cronwell’s rise to power as Henry VIII’s adviser. In this follow-up, Henry is ready to get rid of Anne Boleyn, a job that falls to Cromwell—which means that he must ally himself with his archenemies, the papist aristocracy. We’ll all been waiting for this one.

Mawer, Simon. Trapeze. Other Pr. May 2012. 352p. ISBN 9781590515273. pap. $15.95. HISTORICAL THRILLER
Only 19, native French speaker Marian Sutro is trained as an agent by the Special Operations Executive and parachuted into wartime France. Her mission, to join the WORDSMITH resistance network, has been hijacked by yet another secret organization, which wants her to persuade a research scientist in Paris to join the Allied effort. Mawer’s The Glass Room was both a New York Times best seller and a Man Booker Prize shortlisted title, so this looks promising indeed.

Sharpe, Katherine. Coming of Age on Zoloft: How Antidepressants Cheered Us Up, Let Us Down, and Changed Who We Are. Harper Perennial: HarperCollins. Jun. 2012. 336p. ISBN 9780062059734. pap. $14.99. SOCIAL SCIENCE
In 2005, antidepressants surged past blood-pressure medication as the most frequently prescribed drug in America, with an astonishing ten percent of the population using them (and that was then). The former editor and community manager of Seed magazine’s ScienceBlogs.com, Sharpe has the background to understand this phenomenon, but she also has personal experience; she was prescribed Zoloft in college after a panic attack. Here she explores the consequences of antidepressant use by increasingly younger patients, whose self-understanding and coping skills are thus distorted. Important information to consider; with a 50,000-copy first printing.

Solomon, John. DSK: The Scandal That Brought Down Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Thomas Dunne Bks: St. Martin’s. Jun. 2012. 304p. ISBN 9781250012630. $25.99; eISBN 9781250013057. CURRENT EVENTS
Director of news and investigative reporting at The Newsweek/Daily Beast Company, Solomon aims to get to the heart of the case involving a New York hotel maid’s accusation that she was sexually assaulted by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former managing director of the International Monetary Fund—a case that saw the media gunning first on the accused and then on the accuser.

Zafón, Carlos Ruiz. The Prisoner of Heaven. Harper: HarperCollins. 416p. Jun. 2012. ISBN 9780062206282. $27.99. lrg. prnt. CD: HarperAudio LITERARY THRILLER
As entertainingly twisted as Gaudi’s architecture, only darker, Zafón’s best-selling fiction (e.g., The Shadow of the Wind) inhabits a distinctive Barcelona. At Christmas in 1957, Daniel Sempere and his wife are enjoying their new son and the prospect of their friend Fermín’s marriage when a stranger arrives at their bookshop, prepared to reveal a dark secret harking back to Franco’s early days. With a 200,000-copy first printing and a seven-city tour to Boston, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, and Washington, DC; don’t miss.