Why can't Cornwell stay in the morgue? Her latest foray, the third in her Andy Brazil series, is another misguided attempt to marry oddball humor with a Kay Scarpetta-style murder mystery. In Isle, Brazil has expanded his duties as a Virginia state cop to include writing a Web column under the pseudonym Trooper Truth. His goal: "to put criminal behavior into the context of human nature and history." Right. Apart from slowing down the narrative, his essays—injected between chapters—are unbearably dull. Never mind that Brazil's energies might be better spent tracking down the brutal killer who calls herself Unique First or even riding herd on the state's loopy governor, whose plan for helicopter-monitored speed traps very nearly sparks a Virginia civil war. Cornwell being Cornwell, the book is a decent thriller (with a Scarpetta cameo!). But as dark comedy, it commits the worst offense of all: It ain't funny. (Putnam, $26.95)
Bottom Line: Cast away
By Laura Claridge
The avuncular beanpole whose Saturday Evening Post covers made him perhaps America's favorite painter suffered through plenty of blue periods. An adulterous first wife and a depressive, alcoholic second one strained his home life. Although he became famous by 25, critics pinned him to his canvases. He was, they said, no artist, merely an illustrator.
In a fascinating if sometimes stodgily written biography, Claridge reveals a man who could be as chilly as winter in Stockbridge, Mass., his hometown. His three children had to learn from a New Yorker interview that their mother was not his first wife. Still, he had kindness, generosity and humor. Taking a poetry course for adults, he became so exasperated by the blather about the meaning of a Robert Frost poem that he told the teacher, "I can just call up Bob myself and ask him." But there was as much affection as irascibility in that remark: The 66-year-old was just showing off for the teacher, who would become his third wife—and share some of his happiest years. (Random House, $35)
Bottom Line: Nuanced portrait
By Sebastian Junger
The incendiary title of this collection of essays pretty much says it all. Forest blazes in the Rockies, battlefields in Kosovo, whale hunting in the Caribbean—wherever there is action, combat or just a jolt of adrenaline, Junger, author of the 1997 blockbuster The Perfect Storm, has been there.
With the nation's appetite for hard news whetted by the events of Sept. 11, his timing could not be better. Among the 10 previously published magazine pieces, there is Junger's profile of Afghan rebel Ahmad Shah Massoud, the anti-Taliban leader who was mortally wounded hours before the attack on the World Trade Center. Although repeat customers will recognize the author's morbid curiosity (Wondering what it feels like to burn to death? Your answer is here), none of the stories carries the drama of the near-perfect Storm. (Norton, $23.95)
Bottom Line: Red-meat reportage for die-hard newshounds
By Robb Forman Dew
Rooted in the fertile farmlands of fictional Washburn, Ohio, Dew's quiet novel is as understated as its setting. Tracing the lives of brilliant Lily Butler and willful Agnes Claytor—both members of prominent local families—Dew (who is a woman) maps their intertwined love lives as well as the internal fissures created by their parents' own complex marriages. In the process Dew shows how families conspire, often unwittingly, to create emotional templates that can endure for decades.
Dew, whose story unfolds early in the 20th century, vividly captures the pastoral elegance of the region. The Ohio countryside shimmers "in that time of year...when just the outer leaves of the walnut trees gleam butter yellow."
The greatest pleasure here is the clarity of Dew's eye. "Lily," she writes, "was as brilliant with potential as the blade of the knife." This is an assured, graceful work. (Little, Brown, $24.95)
Bottom Line: Midwestern marvel
The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay
By Daniel Mark Epstein
Even those who rely on poetry to cure insomnia may reconsider after reading the desire-drenched verse of Edna St. Vincent Millay, who, Epstein argues, is "America's foremost love poet." Epstein uncovers the real-life love affairs that inspired Millay, a sensual redhead who sparked the passions of both men and women until her death in 1950 at age 58. As a Vassar undergrad, Millay pursued her sex life "with gusto, with ingenuity, with a vengeance," Epstein writes. Graduation only widened her horizons, and the resulting heat ignited her poetry. "Let us pour all our passion; breast to breast/ Let other overs lie, in rest; Not we," she writes in Second April.) Weaving Millay's works and private letters with his own insights, Epstein creates a rendering worthy of the poet's energetic life. (Holt, $26)
Bottom Line: A lust cause
A Catalogue of Their Virtues
By Susan Griffin
Page-turner of the week
"My dear, you can really have him—on three conditions," the beautiful courtesan known as Lantelme said to her lover's jealous wife in 1906. "I want the pearl necklace you're wearing, 1 million francs—and you." Such startling vignettes appear throughout this peek at the high end of the world's oldest profession as practiced from 15th-century Rome to 20th-century Hollywood.
Courtesans—whose patrons kept them housed and bejeweled in exchange for sexual favors—turned beauty into power: King Louis XV's courtesan influenced his cabinet appointments. And these cheeky gals kept the columnists supplied with enough gossip to rival Julia Roberts, Nicole Kidman and Madonna. Well, maybe not Madonna. (Broadway, $24.95)
Bottom Line: Naughty and nice
By Clive Barker
A botched plastic surgery is the least of movie hero Todd Pickett's problems. There's also the secluded Los Angeles mansion he currently calls home: It's haunted. And the former owner, one Katya Lupi, a silent-screen vamp, somehow hasn't aged a day since the advent of talkies. She soon draws Todd into a world of lurid sex where the Twenties still roar and the ghosts of Jean Harlow and Rudolph Valentino drop in at parties. Worse, the cellar contains a mural that turns out to be a gateway to hell.
Barker's vision is impressively bizarre—think Anne Rice meets Jacqueline Susann—but the weirdness eventually grows wearisome. In the end, Coldheart Canyon proves to be less than the sum of its many surreal parts. (HarperCollins, $27.95)
Bottom Line: Too many skeletons, too many closets
By Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg and William Broad
Suddenly, bioterrorism seems a danger worth taking seriously. This sober account of Washington, D.C.'s haphazard effort to find a lasting antidote to the threat is no balm for jumpy nerves. Beginning with a successful campaign by an Oregon cult to spread food poisoning in 1984, a team of journalists from The New York Times—including Miller, who endured her own well-publicized germ scare—details threats cooked up in labs from Iraq to the former Soviet Union. Fortunately, the authors note, the moral taboo against mass murder has largely spared innocents, but only a reenergized U.S. investment in public health, they argue, will keep us safe from superbugs. (Simon & Schuster, $27)
Bottom Line: Thoroughly chilling
- Contributors:
- Cynthia Sanz,
- Edward Karam,
- Patrick Rogers,
- Michelle Tauber,
- Michelle Vellucci,
- Bernard Welt.
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!
