new fiction, 3.26.08

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The Shooters (Presidential Agent Novel), by W. E. B. Griffin
Still in Argentina tying up loose ends from his investigation into the UN oil-for-food scandal, Castillo is startled when a young man is marched into his office at gunpoint, caught trying to sneak through the fence. It turns out he's an American officer, a lieutenant assigned to the embassy in Paraguay. A key agent for the DEA has disappeared while trying to interdict drugs and very little is being done about it, for phony diplomatic reasons. The lieutenant's heard of Castillo, knows what he's done, and wants his help in getting the agent back. More than that, he's got an innovative plan for dealing with the drug lords themselves. Intrigued, Castillo gets permission to try it, but the President has just one warning for him: Don't get caught. Charley couldn't agree more-but it might turn out to be something easier said than done....

Irish Tiger: A Nuala Anne McGrail Novel, Andrew M. Greeley
Wife, mother, lover, celebrated singer, and problem solver Nuala Anne McGrail has a tender side that she often shows to her devoted friends and family. But when those under her protection are in danger, she becomes a veritable Irish Tiger, akin to the fierce warrior women of ancient Erin. With Dermot, her loyal husband, in tow, there are few mysteries she can’t untangle.The couple will need all their resources when they come to the aid of two loving senior citizens, whose unexpected romance has been targeted by an unknown enemy. John Patrick Donlan and Maria Angelica Connors were both grandparents when they met, and their passionate connection took them each by surprise. But Donlan’s daughters and in-laws bitterly oppose the match…and someone will stop at nothing to destroy their marriage, their thriving careers, and maybe even their lives.

Kyra, Carol Gilligan
Kyra is an architect, involved in a project to design a new city. Andreas, a theater director, is staging an innovative production of the opera Tosca. Both have come through political upheaval and personal loss. Neither wants to fall in love. Yet when she asks him, “What is the opposite of losing?” and he says, “Finding,” it galvanizes a powerful attraction, and they risk opening themselves to love once again. When their love affair leads to a shocking betrayal, Kyra’s fierce determination to see under the surface, to know what was true and real, brings her to Greta, a remarkable therapist. As the therapy itself repeats the themes of love and loss, Kyra challenges its structure, and the struggle that ensues between the two women opens the way to a larger understanding.

The Whistling Season, Ivan Doig
"Can't cook but doesn't bite." So begins the newspaper ad offering the services of an A-1 housekeeper, sound morals, exceptional disposition that draws the hungry attention of widower Oliver Milliron in the fall of 1909. And so begins the unforgettable season that deposits the noncooking, nonbiting, ever-whistling Rose Llewellyn and her font-of-knowledge brother, Morris Morgan, in Marias Coulee along with a stampede of homesteaders drawn by the promise of the Big Ditch — a gargantuan irrigation project intended to make the Montana prairie bloom. When the schoolmarm runs off with an itinerant preacher, Morris is pressed into service, setting the stage for the several kinds of education — none of them of the textbook variety — Morris and Rose will bring to Oliver, his three sons, and the rambunctious students in the region's one-room schoolhouse.

Shavetail, Thomas Cobb
Shavetail" traces the brutal coming of age of a boy soldier stationed at a remote U.S. Army outpost in the harsh Arizona desert, and his companys search to save a young woman captured by a band of Apaches.


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A Person of Interest, Susan Choi
From an acclaimed novelist, an emotionally complex and riveting story of suspicion, innocence, and regret. When a mail bomb explodes in the campus office next door, Lee, an Asian American math professor at a second-tier university in the Midwest, comes under suspicion. The authorities believe he may be the infamous brain bomber, an elusive terrorist whose primary targets are prominent scientists and mathematicians. In the midst of campus tumult and grief over the star computer scientist who was killed by the bomb, Lee receives a disturbing letter from a figure in his past. Certain he is being targeted for revenge, he begins confronting key events in his life. Misunderstood by the people around him, Lee is not conscious that his behavior has begun to heighten suspicion in the minds of his colleagues, students, and neighbors, leading the FBI to designate him a person of interest and pushing his life and reputation to the verge of ruin.

Johnny One-Eye: A Tale of the American Revolution, Jerome Charyn
This comic masterpiece reimagines the American Revolution with a one-eyed spy, a heroic whorehouse madam, and a cunning George Washington.
Praised for one of the most singular and remarkable careers in American literature (Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World), Jerome Charyn now delights with this picaresque tour de force. He reanimates a war-torn Manhattan overrun by Redcoats and deserted by all but the Loyalists — and Mrs. Gertrude Jennings, the tempestuous, redheaded queen of Manhattan's most spectacular bordello. When the novel opens, young double agent John Stocking is being interrogated by Washington, a rebel commander far removed from the dour, silent man of most history books. As Johnny seeks to unlock the mystery of his birth and grapples with his allegiances, he falls in love with Clara, a gorgeous, green-eyed octoroon, the most coveted harlot of Gertrude's house. The wild parade of characters he encounters includes Benedict Arnold, the Howe brothers, Sir Billy and Black Dick, and a manipulative Alexander Hamilton.

Theft, a love story, Peter Carey
Michael — a.k.a. "Butcher" —Boone is an ex-"really famous" painter: opinionated, furious, brilliant, and now reduced to living in the remote country house of his biggest collector and acting as caretaker for his younger brother, Hugh, a damaged man of imposing physicality and childlike emotional volatility. Alone together they've forged a delicate and shifting equilibrium, a balance instantly destroyed when a mysterious young woman named Marlene walks out of a rainstorm and into their lives on three-inch Manolo Blahnik heels. Beautiful, smart, and ambitious, she's also the daughter-in-law of the late great painter Jacques Liebovitz, one of Butcher's earliest influences. She's sweet to Hugh and falls in love with Butcher, and they reciprocate in kind. And she sets in motion a chain of events that could be the making — or the ruin — of them all.

Life Class, Pat Barker
It is the spring of 1914 and a group of young students have gathered in an art studio for a life-drawing class. Paul Tarrant and Elinor Brooke are two parts of an intriguing love triangle and, in the first days of war, they turn to each other. As spring turns to summer, Paul volunteers for the Belgian Red Cross and tends to wounded, dying soldiers from the front line. By the time he returns, Paul must confront the fact that life and love will never be the same for him again.

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Split Estate, Charlotte Bacon

Split Estate opens with devastating scenes of a family at a horrific juncture: the wife of Arthur King and mother of his two teenage children, Celia and Cam, has recently committed suicide, jumping out the window of their New York apartment. Charlotte Bacon’s luminous new novel tracks the King family as it struggles to survive in the months that follow. Arthur, an attractive lawyer who has always been edgy about city dwelling, decides they must move back to his home state of Wyoming for the summer, where his mother, Lucy, welcomes her orphaned grandchildren and her wounded son to her much loved but diminished ranch. From the perspective of each protagonist in turn, we watch shy Celia and handsome Cam, distraught Arthur and brave Lucy face themselves and their future in a Wyoming that is beautiful and consoling, yet beset by new threats of destruction.