Rethink what you learned in Sunday school. In Edghill's intriguing first novel, the story of King David, the Bible's heroic giant slayer, is retold through the eyes of his queen, Michal. Her husband, it seems, is all too human. "Gold, land, women—all these he had in plenty, and still it seemed he must have more," says Michal, who also claims that David had her first husband murdered.
As David's kingdom and hubris grow, Michal—just a cameo player in the Bible—establishes herself as the power within the palace. With her vivid attention to historical detail, Edghill keeps readers captivated despite the familiar events. It's all about spin, and in Queenmaker the women of the Bible have the last word. (St. Martin's, $24.95)
Bottom Line: Majestic debut
By Marge Piercy
Cats can be clever, loving and—to their owners, at least—fascinating. Yet their activities are not the stuff of great yarns, despite Piercy's efforts to convey otherwise. Tracing her life from Detroit-born tomboy to free-love feminist to poet and novelist (1987's Gone to Soldiers), Piercy chronicles her journey—and the felines that came with her—in prose that is alternately chatty and sensual. For example, upon visiting Manhattan in the 1950s she writes, "I wanted to eat New York like a steak, close to raw and hot enough." The book could use more lines that juicy and fewer about her cats' grooming habits. (Morrow, $25.95)
Bottom Line: A snooze
By Kirk Douglas
"Don't be afraid," Douglas's mother told him decades ago when she was dying. "It happens to everyone." Those words didn't help when Douglas, 85, suffered a stroke in 1996. What started as a tickling sensation, "as if a pointed object had drawn a line from my temple, made a half circle on my cheek and stopped," became the most terrifying ordeal of Douglas's life—one that weakened his right side, temporarily robbed him of intelligible speech and nearly led him to suicide. This account of his recovery and the increased compassion and spirituality his stroke brought him is cliché-ridden (he compares old actors to the Energizer Bunny) and long on name-dropping (when he contemplated shooting himself, it was with the gun he used in 1957's Gunfight at the O.K. Corral with Burt Lancaster). But Douglas redeems himself with poignant musings on the deaths of old friends like Jack Lemmon and Anthony Quinn. And you have to hand it to him for never losing his sense of humor about himself. After accepting an award in less-than-flawless German at the Berlin Film Festival last February, he declares: "I think the German language sounds better with a stroke." (Morrow, $22.95)
Bottom Line: Too few moments of emotion
By Jean Thompson
Boredom can be a perilous thing for a 17-year-old salsa slinger at a Springfield, Ill., Taco Bell. Josie Sloan spends her summer vacation between junior and senior years of high school falling in love with a 25-year-old cop. She follows him around on his beat in the hopes of arresting his attention.
As Josie and the cop get involved, her divorced mother, Elaine, takes extreme measures to break things up. The clash between mother and daughter sends Josie edging toward disaster. Meanwhile, a serial killer creeps into the state and has Josie in his sights.
The Terms of Endearment-meets-Cops plot might seem odd, but Thompson's ability to create a swirl of the strange and the familiar is why the novel works on both heart and head. (Simon & Schuster, $24)
Bottom Line: Dangerous liaisons
By Jack Kelly
Page-turner of the week
Palookas packing heat, dames with daggers and cops with itchy palms can make life complicated for a small-time private dick. It's 1959, and when a mysterious stunner with gams up to here breathlessly begs for help, a gentleman has no choice but to match her cigarette, stare into those baby blues and lend a hand. Too bad P.I. Ike Van Savage doesn't know his quivering client is married to one of the most murderous Mob bosses this side of Sicily.
It's a fast-talking Humphrey Bogart world, but in the hands of a lesser writer, all the gun molls and tough guys—even names like Ike Van Savage—might run the story into a brick wall of clichés. The first-person narrative is heavy on plot and dialogue and light on superfluous atmospherics. Kelly's leading man is likable and even his rough-and-tumble pals have hidden hearts of gold. It's a book you can start and finish by the same fire-place log. (Hyperion, $23.95)
Bottom Line: Tough guys, easy read
By Jake Arnott
London, 1966. A cop murderer on the run. An officer on the take. A tabloid reporter on the story. Good guys are scarce. Verbs are scarcer.
Arnott nails every crunch and splatter of his dirty world. A newspaper photo is a "smudge." Police bust into a soccer mob "putting it about a bit lively with their truncheons." The reporter—with a few nasty secrets of his own—uses ink "the way an octopus does, to hide."
Rotating the points of view of three protagonists can be jarring, and the story has some flab (unlike Arnott's The Long Firm, which was as lean as a ferret and twice as sharp-toothed). Listening through Arnott's ears, though, remains a wicked delight. When the reporter mutters at a bar that he's working on a book, the next drunk over retorts, "Yes, neither am I." (Soho, $25)
Bottom Line: London brawling
- Contributors:
- Julie K.L. Dam,
- Michelle Tauber,
- Kim Hubbard,
- Erica Sanders,
- Sean Gannon,
- Kyle Smith.
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