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|  | Aciman, Andr EIGHT WHITE NIGHTS
January 15, 2010 - The "white" of the title could refer to the wintry landscape, or to the blazing lights of Manhattan, or perhaps to the learned, tormented crowd in which Aciman's intellectually inclined protagonist moves, a tribe of people with names such as Muffy
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| | Allen, Sarah Addison THE GIRL WHO CHASED THE MOON
January 15, 2010 - Raised by her selfless, politically active mother Dulcie in Boston, Emily has never met or heard about her grandfather until she comes to live with him in Mullaby, N.C., after Dulcie's sudden death. Emily immediately confronts unexplainable
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| | Bloom, Amy WHERE THE GOD OF LOVE HANGS OUT
January 15, 2010 - The first four chronicle the adulterous relationship, then the sad late-life marriage of 50-somethings Clare and William, who find amorous moments together during shared vacations and visits to and with each other's unsuspecting spouses. Bloom's
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| | Caldwell, Wayne REQUIEM BY FIRE
January 15, 2010 - In his debut, Caldwell traced the history of a homesteading community in the Appalachians from the 1830s to the 1930s, when the U.S. government bought—or, depending on how you look at it, seized—this land to create the Great Smoky Mountains National
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| | Chapman, Maile YOUR PRESENCE IS REQUESTED AT SUVANTO
January 15, 2010 - Suvanto, a hospital nestled in the wilds of Finland, is a house divided. The first floor serves mostly local Finnish women, and has, by the 1920s, become the ideal laboratory for Dr. Peter Weber's new surgical procedures for everything from
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| | Charyn, Jerome THE SECRET LIFE OF EMILY DICKINSON
January 15, 2010 - Well, for one thing, according to Charyn, throughout her life she was falling in love with a number of men who crossed her path. The recurring character who remains one of the great loves of Emily's life is Tom the Handyman, part-time laborer and
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| | Dallas, Sandra WHITER THAN SNOW
January 15, 2010 - By the end of the first chapter readers know the names of the children and that only four will survive, but Dallas's interest lies with their parents. There are sisters Lucy and Dolly. Dolly stole Lucy's fianc years ago, and Lucy, though married to
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|  | Dean, Anna BELLFIELD HALL
January 15, 2010 - When fair young Catherine's heart is broken by the disappearance of her fianc, she sends for her dear maiden aunt Dido to console her and find the missing Mr. Richard Montague. Neither Catherine nor Dido can explain why he vanished after their
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| | Delaney, Frank VENETIA KELLY'S TRAVELING SHOW
January 15, 2010 - A pop star, that is—or, in the case of Delaney's latest (Shannon, 2009, etc.), a star of the stage, Venetia Kelly. The story crosses the continents between Ireland and New York, along which route young Ben MacCarthy loses his father to the wiles of
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| | Dixon, Dianne THE LANGUAGE OF SECRETS
January 15, 2010 - Working in hotel management in London, Justin Fisher never thinks much about why he has lost contact with his family in California. Then in 2005 he accepts a job in Santa Monica. Taking his wife Amy and baby to visit his parents at the Fisher family
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| | Dorsey, Tim GATOR A-GO-GO
January 15, 2010 - Whenever he's off his meds, Serge is famously prone to urges. Now that he's hit mid-middle age, it suddenly seems sensible to him to join the running of the boys and girls in their annual fertility rite. This is the year Panama City Beach gets to
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| | Gžmez-Jurado, Juan THE MOSES EXPEDITION
January 15, 2010 - There's an echo of Raiders of the Lost Ark in the Nazi who opens the story, the "genocidal monster" who performed lethal experiments on Jewish children, one of whose brothers escaped to America. Years later in 2006, Raymond Kayn, now a reclusive New
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| | Hagy, Alyson GHOSTS OF WYOMING
January 15, 2010 - As the title suggests, few strange spirits appear in the fourth collection of short fiction by Hagy (Keeneland, 2000, etc.). But she's less interested in conjuring scares than in studying how fear and the feelings of isolation unique to Wyoming
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| | Hartley, A.J. WILL POWER
January 15, 2010 - Will Hawthorne, witty ex-actor, dramatist and con man in a medieval world similar to Elizabethan England, is still with the band of sword-wielding adventurers he fell in with in Act of Will. This book opens with them on the run from soldiers of the
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| | Horan, Ellen 31 BOND STREET
January 15, 2010 - Emma Cunningham, a widow with two daughters, has recently settled at 31 Bond St. as head housekeeper to the mysterious Dr. Harvey Burdell, a dental surgeon with a penchant for making crooked real-estate deals. Her "housekeeping" duties are fairly
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| | Karp, Larry THE RAGTIME FOOL
January 15, 2010 - Scott Joplin died on April Fool's Day, 1917, but his legacy blazes brightly within Brun Campbell, once known as The Ragtime Kid and working, 34 years later, as a barber in Venice, Calif. A fan letter from Alan Chandler, an aspiring young musician in
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| | Kavenna, Joanna THE BIRTH OF LOVE
January 15, 2010 - Kavenna (Inglorious, 2007) creates an unusual structure for the book, establishing four different narrative strands and visiting each twice as she traces the urges, dangers, mythologies, moods and supreme force of childbirth across time. In a
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| | Lamott, Anne IMPERFECT BIRDS
January 15, 2010 - Lamott, best known for nonfiction, including popular books on writing (Bird by Bird, 1994) and spirituality (Traveling Mercies, 1999), returns to the novel with a sequel of sorts to one of her earliest and best, Rosie (1983). A child in that novel with an alcoholic mother, Rosie is now 17 and her mother, Elizabeth, is generally sober through Alcoholics Anonymous, though not without the occasional relapse
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| | Lichtenstein, Alice LOST
January 15, 2010 - There is no mystery here. In the first pages, 11-year-old Corey, mute since he accidentally set the house fire that killed his older brother, finds a dead body in the snowy woods and protectively covers it with pine. The dead man is Christopher, an
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| | Meier, Diane THE SEASON OF SECOND CHANCES
January 15, 2010 - Partnerless and all but friendless, 48-year-old Dr. Joy Harkness seems to have sleep-walked through much of her life, including a four-year marriage and another 12 teaching literature at Columbia University. But all that's about to change after she
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| | Mosley, Walter KNOWN TO EVIL
January 15, 2010 - Alphonse Rinaldo, special assistant to the City of New York, wants information he can't be seen to want. He needs discreet inquiries made about Angelique Tara Lear so that he can rest assured that she's doing all right. Through his legman, Sam
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| | Nelson, Pete I THOUGHT YOU WERE DEAD
January 15, 2010 - Paul Gustavson doesn't lack for woes. He's newly divorced, and half a continent away his father has suffered a stroke that will require him to relearn every basic skill. Paul's long-distance girlfriend, Tamsen, splits her time and affections between
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| | Palmer, Dexter THE DREAM OF PERPETUAL MOTION
January 15, 2010 - This reads like a science-fiction update of The Tempest as rewritten by Jonathan Lethem. It takes place in the early years of the 20th century, though this is a past reimagined by a futurist, filled with mechanical men who have brought the age of
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| | Parker, Robert B. SPLIT IMAGE
January 15, 2010 - The execution-style shooting of Petrov Ognowski, a soldier in the pay of allegedly retired North Shore mob boss Reggie Galen, would be a routine murder if it weren't for two complications that swiftly follow. One is the execution-style shooting of
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| | Perry, Drew THIS IS JUST EXACTLY LIKE YOU
January 15, 2010 - Writing teacher Perry (English/Elon Univ.) makes good on his short stories, which appear in publications like New Stories from the South, with a striking debut novel about a man whose responsibilities haven't yet overcome his ambitions. The
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| | Perry, Thomas STRIP
January 15, 2010 - Joe Carver came to Los Angeles with a lot of cash and a profligate determination to throw it around. That's why his name came up when Manco Kapak's thugs began asking questions about recent arrivals too dumb to realize that Kapak wasn't the ideal
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| | Picoult, Jodi HOUSE RULES
January 15, 2010 - Jacob, now 18, first exhibited signs of Asperger's syndrome at three, shortly after his first vaccination series. Highly verbal and analytical, but flummoxed by the most ordinary social interactions, Jacob negotiates a world fraught with terrors by
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| | Plantagenet, Anne THE LAST RENDEZVOUS
January 15, 2010 - While Marceline married relatively late—she was in her 30s—she had no compunction about falling in love early and often. She wound up marrying Prosper Valmore, a handsome fellow actor seven years her junior, but when her talent and reputation began
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| | Shaw, Dash BODY WORLD
January 15, 2010 - Looking for the linear narrative of conventional storytelling in the latest from critically acclaimed artist Shaw (Bottomless Belly Button, 2008, etc.) is like trying to drive on LSD. In fact, the riot of color seems hallucinogenic, befitting this
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| | Shriver, Lionel SO MUCH FOR THAT
January 15, 2010 - We open with a bank-account figure: $731,778.56, which is how much 50-something Shep Knacker has squirreled away for retirement. That's a decent nest egg for a professional handyman like him, but he wants to make his savings let him live like a
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| | Simmons, Dan BLACK HILLS
January 15, 2010 - Among the Lakota (Sioux), conventional wisdom has always held that Paha Sapa's life experience was likely to be unconventional. His very name attests to this. Paha Sapa means Black Hills (South Dakota), and Lakota kids don't often get named for real
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| | Smiley, Jane PRIVATE LIFE
January 15, 2010 - Bookish, shrewdly observant Margaret Mayfield discomfits most men in turn-of-the-20th-century Missouri, but she needs to get married. Her father committed suicide when she was eight, shortly after one of her brothers was killed in a freak accident
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| | Tallman, Shirley SCANDAL ON RINCON HILL
January 15, 2010 - Sarah is that rara avis in 1881, an unmarried professional woman. Her brother Samuel, a crime reporter who writes under an assumed name in order to conceal his job from their judge father, is covering a case that claims her attention. When several
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| | Thomson, Keith ONCE A SPY
January 15, 2010 - A cartoonist for Newsday, Thomson (Gus Openshaw's Whale-Killing Journal, 2006) gets the reader chuckling after his first two sentences and keeps him amused, at least until a standard violence and explosion-filled finish ends this comic chase with a
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| | Wilder, Gene WHAT IS THIS THING CALLED LOVE?
January 15, 2010 - There is no answer to the question posed by the title of this collection of stories by Wilder (The Woman Who Wouldn't, 2008, etc.). In fact, many of the narrators seem more confused in the aftermath of their romantic misadventures than they had been
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| | Woodruff, Nancy MY WIFE'S AFFAIR
January 15, 2010 - Woodruff (Someone Else's Child, 2000) fails to offer a convincing explanation for the scenario that underpins her entire slender story. Georgie Connolly and Peter Martin have recently relocated to London with their three young sons, an especially
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| | Wright, Kim LOVE IN MID AIR
January 15, 2010 - With a successful dentist husband, adorable young daughter and close-knit group of female friends, Elyse, like so many heroines who have it all, could not be more miserable. She's stifled by her suburban life, and she cannot communicate with her
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| Online Exclusive
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| Talk Like a Man: Robert B. Parker Tribute
January 15, 2010 - I still remember the first time I heard Spenser's voice ring out in the opening chapter of The Godwulf Manuscript (1973), as he razzes the college president who's trying to hire him. What's this guy's problem? I thought. Why does he have such an attitude? The attitude, I soon learned, had deep roots...Part of it was a temperamental similarity to Spenser's creator, Robert B. Parker, who died on Jan. 18th at age 77.
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