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From The Corner of His Eye.  Amazon.com
Horrormeister Koontz looks heavenward for inspiration in his newest suspense thriller, which is chock-full of signs, portents, angels, and one somewhat second-rate devil, a murky and undercharacterized guy named Junior Cain who throws his beloved wife off a fire tower on an Oregon mountain and spends the rest of the novel waiting for the retribution that will surely come. But not before a series of tragedies ensues that convince Junior that someone or something named Bartholomew is out to exact vengeance for that crime and the series of other murders that follow.
Bartholomew's own troubles begin with his birth, which transpires moments after his father is killed in a traffic accident as he is taking his wife to the hospital, and continue with the loss of his eyes at the tender age of 3. Young Bartholomew has visionary gifts, though to his mother, a nice lady who's renowned for her pie-making abilities as well as her sweetly innocent nature, he's just a particularly smart kid who can read and write before his second birthday. Eventually, Bartholomew regains his sight, Junior Cain gets his comeuppance, and fate conspires to bring love into the Pie Lady's life, reward the faithful, and put a happy ending on this genre-bending tale. Koontz will no doubt rocket right to the top of the bestseller list with this inventive, if somewhat slower-paced, read. --Jane Adams

The Body Artist  Amazon.com
Don DeLillo's reputation rests on a series of large-canvas novels, in which he's proven to be the foremost diagnostician of our national psyche. In The Body Artist, however, he sacrifices breadth for depth, narrowing his focus to a single life, a single death. The protagonist is Lauren Hartke, who we see sharing breakfast with her husband, Rey, in the opening pages. This 18-page sequence is a tour de force (albeit a less showy one than the author's initial salvo in Underworld)--an intricate, funny notation of Lauren's consciousness as she pours cereal, peers out the window, and makes idle chat. Rey, alas, will proceed directly from the breakfast table to the home of his former wife, where he'll unceremoniously blow his brains out.

What follows is one of the strangest ghost stories since The Turn of the Screw. And like James's tale, it seems to partake of at least seven kinds of ambiguity, leaving the reader to sort out its riddles. Returning to their summer rental after Rey's funeral, Lauren discovers a strange stowaway living in a spare room: an inarticulate young man, perhaps retarded, who may have been there for weeks. His very presence is hard for her to pin down: "There was something elusive in his aspect, moment to moment, a thinning of physical address." Yet soon this mysterious figure begins to speak in Rey's voice, and her own, playing back entire conversations from the days preceding the suicide. Has Lauren's husband been reincarnated? Or is the man simply an eavesdropping idiot savant, reproducing sentences he'd heard earlier from his concealment?

DeLillo refuses any definitive answer. Instead he lets Lauren steep in her grief and growing puzzlement, and speculates in his own voice about this apparent intersection of past and present, life and death. At times his rhetoric gets away from him, an odd thing for such a superbly controlled writer. "How could such a surplus of vulnerability find itself alone in the world?" he asks, sounding as though he's discussing a sick puppy. And Lauren's performances--for she is the body artist of the title--sound pretty awful, the kind of thing Artaud might have cooked up for an aerobics class. Still, when DeLillo reigns in the abstractions and bears down, the results are heartbreaking:

Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don't know how to love the ones you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take.
At this stage of his career, a thin book is an adventure for DeLillo. So is his willingness to risk sentimentality, to immerse us in personal rather than national traumas. For all its flaws, then, The Body Artist is a real, raw accomplishment, and a reminder that bigger, even for so capacious an imagination as DeLillo's, isn't always better. --James Marcus --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
 

Gabriel's Story Amazon Com
                     David Anthony Durham makes his literary debut with a haunting novel which, in the tradition of
                     Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses, views the American West through a refreshingly
                     original lens.

                     Set in the 1870s, the novel tells the tale of Gabriel Lynch, an African American youth who
                     settles with his family in the plains of Kansas. Dissatisfied with the drudgery of homesteading
                     and growing increasingly disconnected from his family, Gabriel forsakes the farm for a life of
                     higher adventure. Thus begins a forbidding trek into a terrain of austere beauty, a journey
                     begun in hope, but soon laced with danger and propelled by a cast of brutal characters.

                     Durham's accomplishment is not solely in telling one man's story. He also gives voice to a
                     population seldom included in our Western lore and crafts a new poetry of the American
                     landscape. GABRIEL'S STORY is an important addition to the mosaic of our nation's
                     mythology.

Juggling The Stars Amazon.com

                     Morris Duckworth teaches English to the pmpered rich of Verona. Living a meager existence
                     in a squallid apartment, he regards his privileged students with envy and disdain. When one of
                     those students, a beautiful but vapid heiress, falls in love with him, Morris can almost smell
                     upward mobility. When, to his chagrin, the girl's mother unexpectedly forbids her from seeing
                     him, he does what any ardent suitor would do: convinces her to run off with him, then sends
                     ransom notes to her family. Following a frightening logic, Morris's subversions become deeper
                     and darker. Soon events are spiralling with eerie momentum into a nightmare of deception and
                     violence.

  Gob's Grief Amazon.com

Unlike many a novelist, Chris Adrian isn't intimidated by
                     history. Indeed, he treats historical events as raw material, to
                     be reshaped and reconfigured through the processes of the
                     imagination. It's an endeavor that would please Walt Whitman, one of the central characters in
                     this challenging debut, Gob's Grief. Nor is the good gray poet the only "real" character--both
                     Abraham Lincoln and radical feminist Victoria Woodhull put in appearances, giving an extra
                     twist of verisimilitude to Adrian's rendering of America circa 1863, where the Civil War rages
                     and the dead proliferate like weeds.

                     Gob's Grief opens with the story of Tomo, the fictional son of Woodhull. At age 11, he
                     dreams of escaping Homer, Ohio, to join the fighting. Unable to convince his twin brother,
                     Gob, to accompany him, Tomo finally sets out alone and is promptly killed by a bullet through
                     the skull. His twin never recovers from this loss. In thrall to his grief, Gob grows up to become
                     a doctor, dedicating himself to healing the war's wounded. And by night, he toils away at a
                     more unlikely corrective: a time machine that will eradicate death and bring back all the lost
                     soldiers. His sidekick in this project is none other than Whitman, who shares his desire to
                     resurrect those millions of departed souls: "Their marvelous passion would go out from them in
                     waves, transforming time, history, and destiny, unmurdering Lincoln, unfighting the war,
                     unkilling all the six hundred thousand."

                     Gob's Grief is an ambitious and occasionally convoluted story, which remains true to the
                     stubborn mysticism of thinkers like Whitman and Woodhull. Cutting back and forth between
                     characters and historical moments, Adrian never pretends to retrospective detachment.
                     Indeed, his novel will appeal to fans of John Dos Passos or E.L. Doctorow--writers who
                     borrow from history but repay their debt in the form of fictional insight. --Ellen Williams

  Heat of Lies Amazon.com

This tense, risky thriller, a second outing by the author of
                     The Cold Truth, sets up a love- hate relationship between
                     Julian Palmer, a police lieutenant in Troy, New York, and
                     Winston "Bear" Edwards, the former cop who was her teacher and mentor before he tried to
                     kill her and she testified against him in a murder trial. With the help of a good lawyer and the
                     complicity of fellow cops who protected their former chief, Edwards beat the murder rap but
                     served five years of hard time on a lesser charge. Now he's out of prison just as Julian finds
                     herself at a dead end in her efforts to solve a baffling murder that's eerily reminiscent of the still
                     unsolved slaying of her own father decades earlier.

                     There are no clues in the gunshot death of Frank Ryan, the current victim, but Julian takes a
                     special interest in one of his children, with whom she fosters a personal, emotional bond.
                     Unable to gain closure in her own tragedy, she vows to bring Ryan's killer to justice for the
                     sake of his daughters. Then Edwards turns up, and with one glance at the murder scene he sets
                     Julian on a new and unexplored trail, which will eventually lead to the one person she never
                     suspected. Edwards has his own reasons for getting involved with Julian again. He believes he
                     can solve the riddle of her father's murder. Whether it's to expiate his own guilt or prove to
                     Julian that he's innocent of the crime she believes he committed isn't spelled out until the last
                     page, but long before that the unlikely alliance between the tough but vulnerable Julian and the
                     former cop who taught her everything she knows captivates the reader's interest and drives this
                     strong, confident, and utterly engrossing mystery to its powerful conclusion. --Jane Adams

  Sister India Amazon.com

Book Description
                     The exotic and suspenseful story of an eccentric guest-house keeper in Varanasi, India, and
                     the passions evoked by her sacred city along the Ganges.

                     The Lonely Planet recommends the Saraswati Guest House, and meeting Madame Natraja,
                     "a one-woman blend of East and West," as well worth a side trip. Over the course of a
                     weekend, several guests turn up, shocked to encounter a three-hundred-some-pound, surly
                     white woman in a sari. Then a series of Hindu-Muslim murders leads to a citywide curfew, and
                     they unwittingly become her captives. So begins a period of days blending into nights as
                     Natraja and her Indian cook become entangled in a web of religious violence, and their guests
                     fall under the spell of this ancient kingdom-at once enthralled and repelled by the begging
                     children, the public funeral pyres, the holy men bathing in the Ganges at dawn.

                     This is a traveler's tale, a story about the strange chemistry that develops from unexpected
                     intimacies on foreign ground. And Peggy Payne's extraordinary talent vividly conjures up the
                     smells of the perfume market, the rhythms of holy men chanting at dawn, the claustrophobic
                     feel of this ancient city's tiny lanes, and the magic of the setting sun over the holy Ganges. For
                     anyone who has harbored a secret desire to go to India and be transformed, Sister India
                     takes you on this journey without ever leaving home.

                     "This story is an immersion in a particular square mile of Varanasi, an ancient city and
                     pilgrimage site. With the Ganges shoreline of old maharajah's palaces, swarming monkeys,
                     continuously burning funeral pyres, and maze of shadowy lanes, it is the most exotic place I've
                     been in all my travel writing." Sister India, in the words of the author

Kingdom of Shadows

                    The thrillers of Alan Furst
                     usually take place in the dark days preceding World War II,
                     but while the main participants in that war are of course portrayed, Britain, France, Germany,
                     and the United States do not usually star in Furst's novels. He prefers instead to focus his
                     stories on the citizens of those countries whose allegiances and roles in that particular theater of
                     operations are much more contradictory and conflicted.

                     Kingdom of Shadows is set in Paris during 1938 and 1939. It is unclear at that time what the
                     fate of Hungary will be if Hitler has his way, but a small group of expatriates would like to
                     insure that events turn out in their country's favor. Nicholas Morath is an Hungarian aristocrat
                     who fought bravely in the Great War. He is now part owner of an advertising agency in Paris,
                     while his uncle, Count Janos Polanyi, is a minor diplomat stationed in Paris. Polanyi calls on
                     Nicholas to take part in missions against the Hungarian Fascists: carrying letters or bringing
                     individuals back across the border in the course of his business trips.

                     As Nicholas's dinner parties, business deals, and dalliances with his mistress start to take a
                     back seat to the escalating crisis in Europe, his tasks become more complicated, dangerous,
                     and bewildering to him. He knows far less than the reader, who understands that his actions
                     will have far-reaching consequences even beyond the fate of Hungary. Nicholas just does what
                     he can without the luxury of historic hindsight.

                     Furst has fashioned here an elegant gem that vividly portrays the city of Paris during the last
                     peaceful days of 1938 and the menace of Hitler's ambitions in the Sudetenland and beyond.
                     Nicholas Morath is a charismatic and sympathetic figure who will come to understand, as the
                     war progresses, the consequences, both good and bad, of his smallest actions during that
                     turbulent time. --Otto Penzler