Why spend thousands on a fancy vacation when you can escape into a world where the men and women are beautiful, well-connected and accomplished, and everyone is rich? After 17 bestsellers, Bradford has the formula down so well it's hard not to get pulled in.
Four friends part on bad terms and are forced to confront one another at the 85th-birthday party of their beloved mentor in Paris. Bradford's real interest, though, is in describing women in their designer clothes and the men who disrobe them. Highbrow she isn't, but Bradford can spin a story, and she balances the requisite lust scenes with an appropriate dollop of mystery. (Doubleday, $24.95)
Bottom Line: A literary éclair
By Lorna Sage
Deeply affecting and beautifully written, Bad Blood is more restrained than some grisly sagas of parental abuse. Sage, a literary critic who died at 57 from lung disease last year after this memoir hit U.K. bestseller lists, grew up in a repressive family on the Welsh-English border following World War II. Her grandparents despised each other; her father was memorable mostly for the vigor of his spankings. Following "a bruising kind of bliss mostly made of aches," Sage gets pregnant at 16 but continues her education as her parents raise her daughter. Sage's wry honesty and low-key style are so engaging that by the time she and her husband graduate from college and reclaim their child, their ordinary success seems miraculous. (Morrow, $24.95)
Bottom Line: Brit with grit
By Robert B. Parker
In the world of noir, dangerous dames are usually smart cookies. Not this time. The latest client to hire Spenser, the private eye of 28 previous Parker escapades, has the IQ of Oreo filling, making for delicious fun. The sharp-tongued Boston shamus takes on the case of Mary Smith, a social-climbing dummy whose millionaire husband has turned up with a bullet hole in his head. Police suspect the widow of ordering a hit, and so does Spenser at first—until his investigation uncovers a more complicated plot that stretches from the underworld to high society.
After his somewhat half-cocked western adventure, last year's Potshot, Spenser is back in his element out-punching and out-quipping adversaries in Beantown. An entertaining supporting cast—from loyal enforcer Hawk to gay buddy Race Witherspoon (gotta love Parker's ever-more-outré names)—puts this one on the top shelf of recent Spenser mysteries. It's also one of the author's wittier outings, with Spenser's brainy, brawny charm undiminished in the face of so much ditziness. "Whom? What kind of private detective says 'whom'?" marvels one interviewee. Replies Spenser: "Handsome intrepid ones." (Putnam, $24.95)
Bottom Line: A merry Widow
Reconstructing a Careless Life
By Samantha Dunn
In this memoir of a gruesome 1997 horseback-riding mishap in which the author's left leg was nearly sliced in two, Dunn, 36, a California journalist and novelist, provides a nearly bruise-by-bruise tour through her decades of escalating physical and emotional self-destructiveness. While Dunn's clear prose and lively recall of her calamities make for an effortless read, her story grows tiresome with ponderous self-psychoanalysis and airy praise for the power of yoga. More interesting are her drug-abusing, TV-writer-turned-rock-musician husband and her loving but tough mom, an ER nurse. The most memorable words come from a pal of Dunn's, who remarks of the author's foolishness, "God touches us with a feather to get our attention. Then if we don't listen, he starts throwing bricks." (Holt, $23)
Bottom Line: Benign navel-gazing
By Tim Green
Page-turner of the week
A young Secret Service agent is murdered. His father, Kurt Ford, an ex-Secret Service man himself, thinks the President ordered the killing. Ford, unbeknownst to his beautiful young fiancée, Jill Eisner, plots his revenge: If he can penetrate "the fourth perimeter" of agents closest to the President, Ford plans to assassinate the big guy.
Green's take on the familiar President-in-peril genre has ample twists, and he deftly braids two strands of suspense: Will the President survive a father's wrath, and what will happen to poor Kurt and Jill? The answers satisfy in a thriller that doesn't tax the brain. (Warner, $24.95)
Bottom Line: Capital caper
- Contributors:
- Debby Waldman,
- Francine Prose,
- Samantha Miller,
- Melissa Stanton,
- Scott Nybakken.
CELINE’S INFERTILITY STRUGGLE: MY PRIVATE HEARTBREAK
Daily injections, painful tests and four failed IVF attempts: The singer, 41, reveal her dreams for a second baby. ‘I’ll try until it works’
