There are certain terms critics trot out to describe good thrillers: riveting, packs a wallop, spine-tingling, crackling with suspense. In other words, Formosa Straits. Cao Dai, perhaps a former collaborator with the Japanese, maybe a spy for the Americans, without question Taiwan's underworld boss, is dead—and at a most inconvenient time for Nick Lamp, the San Francisco-born son of Chinese parents. The ambitious head of a small-time Taipei-based trading company, Nick had been seeking Cao's help on a big deal—Dai had known his father, he reminded the kingpin in a letter. He'd finally arranged the meeting, and now, no deal.
Worse than that, Nick found the bloody corpse, and suddenly, it seems, everybody's after him. Searching for the truth and running for his life, Nick embarks on a journey into the most remote reaches of China and to stunning revelations about his own family.
Rich in atmosphere, the film-noirish Formosa Straits works as more than just a page-turner. There are history lessons—Mao Tse Tung and his actress wife play roles in the novel—speculations about China's national character and canny references to old movies.
Hyde plays his clues close to his vest throughout the novel. That's fine—sort of. But part of the fun of a thriller is the chance to sort things out along with the protagonist. There's little such opportunity in Formosa Straits, which at times seems willfully convoluted. Hyde is thus left with an awful lot of business to take care of in the last few pages, and that's no way to treat a reader who has gone clear to Shanghai with you. (Knopf, $23)
by Lorenzo Carcaterra
Growing up in Hell's Kitchen on the West Side of Manhattan in the '60s, Lorenzo Carcaterra first met his three best friends over a lunch—which was being devoured by pro wrestlers. Klondike Bill, Bo Bo Brazil and Haystack Calhoun were at the Holiday Inn, and Lorenzo, Michael, John and Tommy were outside with their noses pressed against the restaurant window, watching them inhale slabs of pie.
"They don't even stop to chew," said John in wonder.
"Guys that big don't have to chew," Tommy explained.
The first part of Carcaterra's memoir is filled with such delicious exchanges. It depicts four high-spirited boys carving out a surprisingly idyllic childhood—swimming with the eels in the Hudson River, goofing on the nuns in church, tussling with a Puerto Rican girl gang—all while dodging beatings and beratings in their tenement homes in a notoriously tight-knit, Mob-controlled neighborhood.
Then in 1967 the boys' urban Eden comes to grief when one of their pranks backfires: pushing a hot-dog cart down a flight of subway stairs, they nearly kill a man and are sent to an upstate youth home. The story turns into a catalog of horrors, as the boys (known as sleepers because they are sentenced to more than nine months in the reformatory) are repeatedly beaten and raped by the vicious guards.
Carcaterra resumes his tale 10 years later. The time in prison has utterly changed the friends: Lorenzo is a copy-boy at the New York Daily News and Michael an assistant district attorney, but Tommy and John have both become hit men. One night in 1979 the leader of the sadistic guards chances to visit a Hell's Kitchen bar, and John and Tommy kill him.
But Carcaterra's saga does not end here. In the book's most dramatic and already controversial pages, Michael manages to get the D.A. to allow him to prosecute John and Tommy, and he conspires with Lorenzo to purposely lose the case. Some critics have accused Carcaterra, who is married to PEOPLE executive editor Susan Toepfer, of fictionalizing his tale—noting, for example, that all names but the author's have been changed and no assistant D.A. just six months on the job would prosecute a homicide. Carcaterra has angrily denied the charges. Fact or fiction, Sleepers is a compelling read. (Ballantine, $23)
by Stephen King
King doesn't waste any time establishing the mood or theme of his 29th novel, opening with a graphic scene that depicts a woman being beaten so badly that she has a miscarriage. Gruesome, certainly, but also a riveting start for the tale of Rose McLendon Daniels, a battered mouse-wife for 14 years until she breaks free from her monstrous husband, Norman.
Rose Madder's early chapters are packed with suspense as Rose starts a new life and stormin' Norman, a police detective whose "muscles popped like freshly risen bread rolls," begins to track her down. The reader should hear an alarm, though, the moment Rose wanders into a pawn shop and is powerfully attracted to a dusty oil painting of a woman on a hill. Rose swaps her engagement ring for the painting, which, of course, is no ordinary picture. It changes daily, and before long, "like Alice going through the looking glass," Rose simply walks right into it.
From that moment, the novel's structure turns unwieldy. The real-world action builds nicely to the inevitable confrontation between Rose and Norman, while the passages devoted to the world of the painting are tedious.
Though this is an engrossing story of a battered woman, its supernatural elements are neither super nor natural. And that's what's the matter with Rose Madder. (Viking, $25.95)
by Francine Prose
It's a self-loathing Labor Day at the beach for skinny, miserable Martha, who has been picking at the scab of a freshly failed romance when she spots a gathering of women at water's edge. It's a Goddess group—latter-day devotees of an ancient matriarchal figure—and when they open their arms to her after she saves their accident-prone priestess from drowning, Martha, a 30-year-old magazine fact checker and misfit, succumbs; why not choose their faintly ridiculous company over loneliness and men who are bound to break your heart?
Turns out the women are, like Martha, damaged souls seeking asylum. Plagued by petty rivalries, they are all too human, visiting their pain and sins upon each other and their children. Prose is sharp with dialogue and detail; her satire is cutting but never cruel. By the time her story concludes—somewhat abruptly—in the Arizona desert, the author redeems the male species in the form of T-Bone, a sensitive hunk of a meat-truck driver. You might wish Prose had stayed prickly to the end; then again, she does just fine turning sentimental—and sage. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $20)
by John Hockenberry
I cannot reach the cornflakes in my cupboard," writes Hockenberry. "I cannot use most revolving doors." What Hockenberry, an ABC correspondent can do, with verve, grit and unflinching candor, is transport us into a world of wheelchairs, catheters and the occasional unkindness of strangers.
The author, now 39 and a paraplegic since 19, was hitchhiking with his college roommate when a driver who had picked them up fell asleep at the wheel, sending the car over an embankment. "The most powerful sensation I have ever felt," he writes of that moment, "is of no sensation at all."
Moving Violations is most moving when Hockenberry retraces his inward journey from the cocky kid who bounced back from nine months in two rehab hospitals to the National Public Radio correspondent who ventured where no disabled journalist had gone: along a steep mountain road to interview Kurdish refugees in the Gulf War while clinging to the back of a donkey.
Among the human jackasses he encounters is the flight attendant who asks, "Are you able to do it with a woman?" Hockenberry is, as he explains—graphically and whimsically—in other chapters. But he is also aware of his own foibles, such as the need to prove himself in danger zones. "I was drawn to...the places that I was most afraid to think of going," he admits. In this brave memoir, Hockenberry may have reached his ultimate destination. (Hyperion, $24.95)
by James Lee Burke
Beach Book of the Week
It's a good thing that Sheriff Dave Robicheaux is from Iberia Parish in Louisiana. That's where Tabasco sauce comes from. In his most complex tale to date, the author stirs up for his hero a peppery blend: the Mob, government mercenaries and dirty money—all set to a simmer by a piquant interracial love affair. Why does patrician lawyer Moleen Bertrand want Bertie Fontenot and her clan to vacate a worthless strip of land on his estate that was once inhabited by slaves? The answer leads Robicheaux into a deadly shadowland. Burke is perhaps the only mystery writer to bring magical realism to his prose, calling up the pained history of the South. A moralizing ghost floats through Burning Angel: the dog tags of someone Robicheaux knew in the war turn up on his doorstep, and a slave's rusted leg iron appears on his car seat. "If you ever doubt the proximity of the past," writes Burke, "you only have to look over your shoulder at the rain slanting on the fields...just a careless wink of the eye, just that quick, and you're among them...in step with the great armies of the dead." Angel proves Burke a master of the march. (Hyperion, $22.95)
>Anthony Hyde
RAKING UP THE GLOWING COALS
THE IDEA FOR FORMOSA STRAITS, THE story of skeletons in Mao Tse Tung's closet, came to Anthony Hyde almost 25 years ago in an otherwise deserted restaurant of high booths and mediocre food in Ottawa, where he lives with his wife and cat. "Two men came in and sat well away from me, but I could hear them perfectly," says Hyde, 49. "It was obvious after a few minutes that one guy was an official from the U.S. embassy, and he was talking about an attempted coup against Mao. Nothing had been in the papers yet. Either I was hearing a couple of madmen or I was hearing some real secrets. I didn't want to reveal myself, so I stayed there until they left and kept working at the story in my mind."
The novel bespeaks a great familiarity with China. Did you do a lot of research there?
No. I usually go to the places I write about and spend time there. But the Far East is so turbulent, you end up being overwhelmed by the surfaces of things. I wanted to write the book out of the characters and out of history.
You fashion a pretty unsavory past for Madame Mao. Do you think the book would be banned in Beijing?
I think it would be a marvelous behind-the-cover read, but officially people would be a little nervous. I've raked up too many old coals, pointed to too many loose ends about Madame Mao and the whole regime.
Does that make you worry about being in that part of the world now?
Not really. The crowds in China are always so big, you can get lost in them.
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