Continuing to wean his fans off legal thrillers, Grisham offers this 100 percent courtroom-free novel about an Arkansas farm boy in 1952. Like all Grisham characters, Luke Chandler, 7, finds himself in the eye of a plot hurricane. A boy with "lots of secrets but no way to unload them," he witnesses two murders, sees his first naked female, worships baseball great Stan Musial and learns to paint houses—all while his family's cotton farm is going through one crisis after another, including a devastating flood. Grisham is a native Arkansan, and the best thing about his fiction has long been his ability to evoke the feel of the South—the oppressive heat, the pervasiveness of people's ties to the land and the region's odd caste system. But he never quite succeeds here in drawing other characters into Luke's dilemmas. By the end hardcore Grisham fans will probably wish for a nice, familiar writ of habeas corpus or a motion to suppress. (Doubleday, $27.95)
Bottom Line: Middling departure from his standard fare
by Sophie Kinsella
If ever there were a candidate for Debtors Anonymous, it's Rebecca Bloomwood. Alas, this comic first novel's 25-year-old heroine—ironically, a financial journalist for a London magazine called Successful Savings—would sooner toss her overdue Visa bills into a Dumpster, dodge bank managers' calls or engage in a shopping frenzy at Dolce 6c Gabbana than face her own spiraling money problems. After her father advises her to "C.B. or M.M.M." (Cut Back or Make More Money), Bloomwood pitches herself headlong into a series of silly get-out-of-debt schemes, which include trying to snag the nerd who is England's 15th-richest bachelor. Though the secondary characters are thin and the plot line rivals a bounced check in excitement, Kinsella's Bloomwood is plucky and funny in spite of her selfishness. (Working as a salesclerk, she so covets a pair of zebra pants that she hides them from a customer.) You won't have to shop around to find a more winning protagonist. (Delta, $10.95)
Bottom Line: A few laughs for your money
by Lisa Jewell
As carefree 30-year-old Londoners who never stay in relationships for more than three months, lifelong pals Digby Ryan and Nadine Kite have not thought seriously about settling down with anyone—much less each other. But when Digby's first love, a poised, wealthy blonde who "smells like she bathes in the morning dew," comes back into his life, Nadine turns positively green. "Is that what Dig really wants?" she wonders. "A 'classy' woman? Someone who buys tailored suits from Escada?" Looking up her own first love, half out of retaliation, half out of desperation, Nadine is woefully disappointed. "This is what Keith Richards would have looked like if he'd left the Stones twenty-five years ago and become a bus driver," she muses. Digby, she realizes, has always been the man for her.
At first this witty British import appears to be little more than When Harry Met Sally on the Thames, but Digby and Nadine's circuitous path to happiness is not in the least predictable. Nor, despite all the funny bits—and there are dozens of laugh-out-loud moments—is their story without some very painful, even moving, bumps. (Plume, $13)
Bottom Line: Really something
by Evan Hunter and Ed McBain
Page-turner of the Week
STARS "1"
Author Evan Hunter (The Blackboard Jungle) has been slumming as celebrated crime novelist Ed McBain for more than 40 years. Now these two distinct voices have collaborated on a highly entertaining literary exercise. Hunter handles the first leg about successful but secretly perverse L.A. architect Benjamin Thorpe. In New York City on business, Thorpe dedicates the afterwork hours to an increasingly desperate search for female companionship. Ultimately he finds himself in an East Side whorehouse, where he gets beaten up and somebody gets murdered.
We learn this last detail from Ed McBain, who assumes the reins halfway through the book. The shift is deftly done. We are never told that McBain has stepped in. We are simply, suddenly and indisputably on his turf. It is the day after Thorpe's long and kinky night. Three detectives are at the XS Salon to investigate a prostitute's killing, sifting clues that will eventually point toward Thorpe. If Hunter provides a compelling psychological portraiture of a man falling down the rabbit hole of sex addiction, McBain easily matches his achievement with an inspired police procedural, topped off with a completely unexpected and satisfying twist at the end. (Simon & Schuster, $25)
Bottom Line: Double your pleasure
by Marilyn Yalom
"In domestic affairs, I defer to Katie," 16th-century Protestant Reformation leader Martin Luther said of his delightfully domineering wife. "Otherwise, I am led by the Holy Ghost." Modern women may think they're the first to grapple with the complexities of marriage. Hardly, as we are reminded by Stanford University historian Yalom in this scholarly yet delectably readable volume. We find, for instance, Cleopatra dallying with the very married Antony and the medieval heroine Héloïse declaring her preference for "love to marriage, liberty to bondage," while yearning for her hapless lover, Abelard. Then there's Puritan wife Anne Bradstreet, who defied stereotypes by writing impassioned poetry to her husband. Roles may have changed, but one thing has not: "Whosoever findeth a wife," Yalom writes, quoting a biblical proverb, "findeth a good thing." (HarperCollins, $30)
Bottom Line: Once-in-a-wifetime compendium
- Contributors:
- Ralph Novak,
- Victoria Balfour,
- Jennifer Wulff,
- William Plummer,
- Curtis Rist.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
