A dead wife. A tentative new love. A secret that could destroy everything. For his fifth romance, Sparks returns to the plot elements that made his previous efforts (The Notebook; Message in a Bottle) so successful. This time it's New Bern, N.C., deputy sheriff Miles Ryan, who is devastated when his beloved wife is killed by a hit-and-run driver. Then he meets his son's first-grade teacher, Sarah Andrews, who is mourning her own lost marriage. Love blooms until a twist of fate threatens to tear them apart. The connect-the-dots plot is too predictable to offer much drama, but Sparks fans have never seemed to mind sacrificing suspense for sentiment. (Warner, $23.95)
Bottom Line: Haul out the hankies
By Robert Morgan
One brother is a bootlegger. The other wants to be preacher. And their widowed mama is just tryin' to make ends meet in the mountains of North Carolina during the 1920s.
Muir Powell, the future man of the cloth, is a sensitive soul who tries, and fails, at trapping both muskrats and a bride. His congenitally bitter brother Moody is there to laugh at every stumble—or, if necessary, to sabotage things. Their feud, and the story, trudges along until Muir, drunk and depressed, has a vision: Build a church.
Morgan, bestselling author of the Oprah fave Gap Creek, writes about rural life in great detail. At last, all of your questions about how to turn sorghum into molasses will be answered. (Algonquin, $24.95)
Bottom Line: Soft Rock
The Private Diaries, Memos and Letters
By Richard Hack
History has been unkind to Howard Hughes, but then the Old Man, as his greedy retainers liked to call him, was pretty hard on himself. Younger readers think of him as The Simpsons' Mr. Burns with even fewer social graces: a germ-obsessed recluse who, despite unfathomable wealth, nearly starved to death on a punishing diet of candy bars and nuts. He became so fearful of human contact that, during one two-year period toward the end of his life, when he was living in a Las Vegas hotel, he had his bed linen changed only five times.
Often missing from that account, but now restored in this showstopper biography, is the story of a life as robust (and occasionally as sordid) as 20th-century America itself. As a pilot, America's first billionaire broke aviation records and built the world's largest aircraft, the Spruce Goose; as a producer in Hollywood, he discovered Jean Harlow (for whom he coined the term platinum blonde). As a playboy, he was even more prodigious, counting Katharine Hepburn and Ava Gardner among his many conquests. Hack, a biographer (Michael Jackson) whose reporting compensates for sometimes stagnant prose, traces Hughes's creepy decline to his contagion-conscious mother and a 1941 bout of syphilis that pierced his armor of invulnerability. From there and until his death as a codeine-addled hermit in 1976, it was all, slowly but spectacularly, downhill. (New Millennium, $28)
Bottom Line: A billionaire recluse is richly exposed
By Antonia Fraser
She never said, "Let them eat cake." Her husband, Louis XVI, did not make love to her for the first seven years of their marriage. And she had to watch the head of one of her dearest friends, the Princesse de Lamballe, being carried past her window. It was a long, strange road to the guillotine for this Austrian empress's daughter who was married off at 14 to a man she had known for only days. Antonia Fraser's sympathetic, deeply satisfying biography confirms that the young queen was a nitwit shopaholic who had jewels sewn into her wardrobe as France starved. But there were no orgies or lesbian affairs; perhaps her only true love was Axel Fersen, a dashing Swedish count.
This is a tender but thorough examination of a flower in a hurricane. The story is slow going in the early pages, but once the destitute housewives storm Versailles, it becomes a thrilling—and sobering—game of cat and mouse. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $35)
Bottom Line: A royal treat
By Anne Perry
Page-turner of the week
The fog is rolling in, the kettle is boiling, and the corpses are piling up. Once again we're in the capable hands of Anne Perry, reigning monarch of the Victorian mystery. This go-round, private investigator William Monk and his unofficial partner—his resourceful, protofeminist wife, Hester—must solve the murder of the fiery Elissa Beck before her husband, a brilliant surgeon and a colleague of Hester's, is wrongly convicted. Unless, of course, he really is guilty after all.
The plot, while engaging, is less than riveting. And the left-field solution is downright unsatisfying. But Funeral in Blue won't disappoint Perry's fans, who know that the real fun in her books is never the whodunit but the immersion therapy of a visit to 19th-century Britain. Funeral guides us over London's slick cobblestones from artists' studios to gambling dens to alehouses and finally across the Channel to Vienna, where Monk discovers coffee with chocolate in it and hopes to uncover the truth about Elissa Beck's death in the Continental swirl of revolutionary politics and virulent anti-Semitism. At the same time, the novel cracks Victorian social codes. The clashing of genders, classes and nationalities lends Funeral just enough weight to keep it anchored as the pages fly. (Ballantine, $25)
Bottom Line: Very Perry
Photographs by Ken Duncan
We could probably use another fjord or two, and we're a little light in the jungle department, but this whole country is a site for sore eyes when you're a photographer. Bellying up to the buffet of the American landscape (Amber waves of grain? Check. Fruited plains? Got 'em), Duncan, an Australian, chooses well in this beautifully printed 200-page collection of panoramic images taken across the nation.
There is a sterility to the book, since the all-color pictures—culled from a crop of 10,000 stills—include very few people or animals. (You may have to squint to see the beach jogger in Hawaii or the perching pelicans in Alabama.) It's an understandable approach—Duncan got his start shooting landscapes in Australia—but the book can be as lonely as an Edward Hopper painting.
Nonetheless, while Ansel Adams is still the master of this kind of thing, if you want to bask in the glory of our beaches, forests, mountains and deserts, this is a fine place to do it. (Ken Duncan Photographs, $45)
Bottom Line: America, the beautiful
By Tracy Chevalier
Kitty Coleman enters the new century depressed and hoping for a reawakening. But when she goes to bed with a man who is not her husband, her first thought in the morning is the fear that "nothing has changed but a number"—the date. It's 1901 in London, the day after Queen Victoria's death.
Visiting family graves, Kitty's 5-year-old daughter Maude befriends two children whose families might not otherwise interact: an apprentice gravedigger and a middle-class girl who selected the sentimental angel adorning the tombstone of a family member.
Over the next nine years, Chevalier shifts among the viewpoints of these Victorians dying to break free: of their classes, their genders and especially of their era. But as Kitty's hunger for change takes her into the women's suffrage movement against her husband's wishes, the characters' fates intertwine tragically.
The mix of personal and historical drama is not as convincing as in Chevalier's beloved novel about Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring. Still, Chevalier offers a thoughtful exploration of the ways people misread each other by being trapped in their own perspectives. (Dutton, $24.95)
Bottom Line: Gravely appealing
- Contributors:
- Cynthia Sanz,
- Pia Nordlinger,
- Patrick Rogers,
- Anne Moore,
- Daniel Radosh,
- Ralph Novak,
- R.G. Sheinkin.
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!
