Newly Released
By AMY VIRSHUP
Recent list of new books comes weighted with accolades, from within publishing and without. One of this month’s authors has been declared a genius; another is one of the year’s most influential people, according to Time magazine (for writing, of all things, a series of teen-theme vampire novels). Others have just received very, very good reviews. Will such distinctions sell copies? That remains to be seen.
THE CALLING By Inger Ash Wolfe 371 pages. Harcourt. $24.
Since the commanding officer of the Port Dundas detachment of the Ontario Police Services retired in 1999, Detective Inspector Hazel Micallef has been running the office on an acting basis. Port Dundas is not exactly a high-crime area, as she admits: “Heart attacks, cancer, strokes, a suicide every other year, car crashes: These were death’s stock in trade in the county.” But Hazel, divorced, with a fondness for painkillers and whiskey, is not exactly a crime-fighting powerhouse. Then the mutilated body of Delia Chandler is discovered in town, followed a few days later by the body of a man in Chamberlain,
THE LAZARUS PROJECT By Aleksandar Hemon 294 pages. Riverhead Books. $24.95.
Aleksandar Hemon’s novel is another entry in the growing genre of the immigrant picaresque, following a path blazed by the likes of Gary Shteyngart (though with fewer wisecracks) and Junot Diáz (without the ghetto-nerd slang). Mr. Hemon and his narrator, Vladimir Brik, are Bosnians who have ended up in Chicago more or less by accident. Brik is trying to write a book about Lazarus Averbuch, a real-life Jewish immigrant who in 1908 was killed by the police in what was claimed to be an anarchist attack on the chief of police, George Shippy. Lazarus’s story is also told in Mr. Hemon’s book, intertwined with the tale of Brik’s trip through Eastern Europe with his friend Rora, another Bosnian émigré, storyteller and photographer. “He had finished the work of becoming himself, long before any of us could even imagine such a feat was possible,” Brik notes as he sees Rora coming towards him on a Chicago street. “Needless to say, I envied him.” Mr. Hemon was awarded a fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation in 2004.
HEAD WOUNDS By Chris Knopf 310 pages. Permanent Press. $28.
“Head Wounds,” the third in Chris Knopf’s series of Sam Acquillo mysteries, is set not among the glittering parties of Gin Lane, but in the barrooms and construction sites of the Hamptons. The acerbic Acquillo has a fondness for Absolut as well as a bad temper. (See the book’s set piece about his revenge on his estranged wife and her new lover.) Once a corporate executive, he is now a carpenter. When Robbie Milhouser, a builder and the scion of a Southampton family, turns up dead after he and Sam have had a public run-in, Acquillo is the most likely suspect. (Robbie’s head has been bashed in by Sam’s construction stapler.) Mr. Knopf’s last book, “Two Time,” was named one of the 100 best books of 2006 by Publishers Weekly.
THE HOST By Stephenie Meyer 619 pages. Little, Brown & Company. $25.99.
Stephenie Meyer made her name as the author of the “Twilight” series, vampire-romance novels for the young adult market that have sold more than three million books in the United States, according to their publisher. “The Host” is her first book for adults. In it Earth has been occupied by an alien race, known as souls, who take over the bodies of humans.
Melanie Snyder, one of the few people still resisting the invaders, is captured, and a soul named Wanderer is given her body. “I’d bound myself securely into the body’s center of thought, twined myself inescapably into its every breath and reflex,” Wanderer says at the book’s beginning, “It was me.” But Melanie — and her love for her fellow holdout, Jared — refuses to fade away. Ms. Meyer was recently selected one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people for 2008.
WE ARE NOW BEGINNING OUR DESCENT By James Meek 295 pages. Cannongate. $24.
James Meek’s previous novel, “The People’s Act of Love,” was set in the extremity of the Russian Revolution and was one of the best-reviewed books of 2006, according to Metacritic, an online compiler of criticism. Mr. Meek’s new novel follows Adam Kellas, a British novelist and war correspondent, who finds himself among the international press corps covering the post-Sept. 11 invasion of Afghanistan: “In the clothes they wore, the things they carried and their actions, the journalists were explicitly transient. The Brits played soldier-explorers; the Americans doubled up as missionaries and prospectors. The French were buccaneering scientists,” he notes. Kellas is increasingly tired of his own role, and when he falls in love with the enigmatic and unpredictable American magazine writer Astrid Walsh, he thinks she may offer a way out. But when he pursues her to the United States, he discovers she has secrets of her own.
CARELESS IN RED By Elizabeth George 626 pages. Harper. $27.95.
In her previous two novels the mystery writer Elizabeth George has played fast and loose with the genre’s rules, killing off a main character (Helen, the wife of her aristocratic New Scotland Yard detective Thomas Lynley) and then spending a book examining the motivations of her killer (“What Came Before He Shot Her”). “Careless in Red” begins with Lynley deep in mourning, walking alone down the coast of Cornwall. Near a small resort called Casvelyn, he discovers the body of a young man who has fallen to his death while climbing the cliffs. The body turns out to be that of Santo Kerne and, as a procedural demands, there seem to have been a number of people who might want him dead, including, perhaps, the mysterious Daidre Trahair, at whose cottage Lynley winds up after finding the body.
www.times.com
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