Hallie Elliot spent her childhood intrigued by her half-sister, Portia, the product of her mother's first marriage to an Italian prince. But Hallie's life in San Francisco—where she has the perfect successful boyfriend and a brilliant career—has turned out just as well as those of her Italian kin, or so she thinks, until she finds her boyfriend in a suspicious embrace with her boss, Kendra. Hallie flees to her sib-lings' family estate on Lake Como to sort out her feelings. There, Portia is caught between a crum-bling marriage and the scandal of divorce. At the idyllic Tesoro villa, with each other's support, the sisters are able to contemplate moving on. In the meantime, there's glorious scenery, gourmet food, and designer shopping galore. While Portia falls for a new man, Hallie finds a dream job designing a reclusive billionaire's home and connects with her client's business manager, Angus. But two big se-crets complicate Hallie's happiness—and one of them will make her wonder if she can ever trust enough to love again. Portia's engaging subplot and a few shocking revelations lend complexity and depth to Hughes's third novel (after Market Street), but the plot is bogged down by lackluster love scenes, a too-perfect heroine, and a distracting preoccupation with designer goods. Agent: Melissa Flashman, Trident Media Group. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 05/17/2013 | Details & Permalink

Originally published in the U.K. in 2000, Lock's solid first mystery featuring Det. Sgt. Ernest Best centers on the historic 1874 Regent's Park disaster. When the explosion of a London canal barge caus-es widespread death and destruction, Best tries to identify a young woman whose body turns up amid the debris. Her death appears unrelated to the blast, and her face is damaged beyond recognition. Best's investigation sends him from the gritty world of the canal workers to the upscale artistic haven of St. John's Wood. His task is complicated by his attraction to the unconventional Helen Franks, whose sister disappeared around the time of the disaster. Lock leaves the relationship between Helen and widower Best nicely unresolved. Lovers of the Victorian era will appreciate the author's attention to the details of period life, while recent headlines give her depiction of the explosion and its aftermath fresh poignancy. (July)

Reviewed on 05/17/2013 | Details & Permalink

At the start of Dunn's intelligent but convoluted third thriller featuring MI6 agent Will Cochrane (after 2012's Sentinel), rogue U.S. and Russian military leaders sign a secret pact in 1995 that could lead to a devastating attack on an enemy country, though the details of why and how remain vague. To ensure the lifelong silence of the signatories, conference leader Kurt Schreiber (a former Stasi official now working for Russia) has ordered a "deep-cover sleeper agent" (code name "Kronos") to kill anyone who talks about the plan ("Slingshot"). Fast-forward to the present, when Cochrane uncovers evidence of the document—and an enormous multilateral effort to ensure it doesn't go public. Schreiber un-leashes Kronos to assassinate the whistleblower, while American, British, and Russian intelligence services engage in all manner of intrigue, double-crossing, and violence. Dunn, a former MI6 agent, clearly knows his tradecraft, but the secret plot is never credibly convincing and most characters never rise above stereotypes, particularly the evil mastermind Schreiber. Agent: Luigi Bonomi, Luigi Bonomi Associates (U.K.). (July)

Reviewed on 05/17/2013 | Details & Permalink

This contemporary reworking of The Scarlet Letter centers on the struggles, shame, sin, and strength of Rachel Stoltzfus. Born into an Old Order Mennonite community in Pennsylvania, Rachel moves to the Copper Creek community in Tennessee to help her sister Leah and brother-in-law Tobias with their new baby boy. Shortly after her move, Rachel's life takes an unexpected turn as she is forced to deal with her own pregnancy. Feeling morally trapped, she declines to ask for forgiveness and disclose the name of her child's father, and is judged harshly by residents of Copper Creek and her own family. She is torn between a life she has always known and her desire to separate herself from a world that no longer accepts her. As Rachel makes an effort to rise above her circumstances and their complications, including her child's health issues, Petersheim's emotional story leaves readers intrigued by the purity of Rachel's strong will, resilience, and loyalty. Agent: Wes Yoder, Ambassador Agency. (July)

Reviewed on 05/17/2013 | Details & Permalink

A Connecticut man loses his high-paying job and takes up drunk-jogging, drug-peddling, and commu-nity center crafting in Kennedy's mid-life revival novel. After peeing on the carpet of his own private office, 40 year-old Matthew Harris is fired and forced to re-examine the tragedies of his childhood and recent past: the death of his parents in a plane crash, his subsequent orphan hood, and the devastating end of his first marriage. But instead of mourning his bad fortune and lack of health insurance, Mat-thew turns to living in his leased car, illegally buying a gun for self-esteem and/or protection, and fre-quenting programs at the community center. There, with a jaded sense of enlightenment, Matthew be-gins making aphoristic coffee mugs in craft class with the original logos "NOT ZEN, INC." and "MADE IN MY CAR". The humor and struggle of within contain a healing brand of cynicism, a won-der borne from hallucinogenic highs that decides, "Maybe whatever life one gets is more than we were ever owed to begin with." Kennedy (Rock On), host of The Moth storytelling series, has far surpassed the creation of character and conjured an entity so alive in its knowledge of impending death that we're captured in a new idea of what it's like to live. (June)

Reviewed on 05/17/2013 | Details & Permalink

Bullets fly, intrigues abound, and the Great Wall of China serves as a picturesque backdrop for this pulp adventure first published in the February 1935 issue of the magazine Five Novels. Feisty Betty Sheldon, who's determined to recover the mysterious "Black Chest" that her archeologist father was killed for digging up, teams with American soldier-of-fortune Mike Stuart, known throughout China as "the Red Dragon," for a pell-mell expedition to war-torn Manchuria. Despised by his enemies as "a white thief in a yellow land," Mike has a price on his head from the invading Japanese army, and is also in the gun sights of George Blakely, a conniving treasure hunter in cahoots with the Japanese who will stoop to kidnapping, and even murder, to get his hands on the Black Chest. Hubbard (The Devil with Wings) delivers a tidy finale that shows why he was one of the most popular genre writers of his generation. (June)

Reviewed on 05/17/2013 | Details & Permalink

The wait has been worth it for Terry Fallis fans: his third novel has already earned a well-deserved spot on the shortlist for the 2013 Leacock Medal, Canada's most prominent award for humor writing. The book's narrator David Stewart has left his comfy job in Ottawa in order to support his sister and help care for his terminally ill mother. He is able to parlay his experience working with the Ministry of Science and Technology into a position with "TK," an edgy Toronto Public Relations firm with its head office in Washington. On his first day on the job, much to the annoyance of his new colleagues, David blurts out an off-the-wall idea that eventually wins a public relations contract with NASA. The space agency is looking for a way to "rekindle the public's passion for space flight." David's idea of running a contest to send a citizen up to the space station to be a part of the mission is a hit, but then there is problem of actually making it happen. Along the way, David shares his hilarious observations as he leads readers through the mystifying worlds of public relations, government procedure and polit-ical doublespeak. Distribution: Random House (June)

Reviewed on 05/17/2013 | Details & Permalink

In his newest collection, surrealist storyteller Lock (Pieces for Small Orchestra & Other Fictions) ob-sesses over the dreamscape of the past, composing stories that are enticingly and enigmatically rele-vant for the present. Lock focuses on where the popular lore and the technological anxieties of the Gilded Age interweave: Edward Hyde's voice recorded on Edison's phonograph, the Mummy invited to California to oversee the technical details of a horror movie, a steward lost on ship laying the trans-atlantic cable. For a reader in the digital age, these moments may seem familiar: a crowd cheering the appearance of the director of railroads parallels our own pop culture adoration for pioneers in mobile technology. Although by the end Lock catches up to the 21st century, the majority of this collection seems an experiment to help him come to terms with the digital age, a motif he confronts in the final three narratives. Regardless of motive, these humorous, imaginative meditations on the nature of dreams, time, and space shimmer in their own darkness. There is some danger in Lock's prose as it nears ponderousness in its extreme patience, but reminiscent of the plays of Samuel Beckett, there is a wealth of insight here. (May)

Reviewed on 05/17/2013 | Details & Permalink

In Rossiter's latest novel (after Words Get in the Way), 44-year-old Beryl Graham has been looking after her mother Mia, who is slowly deteriorating from Alzheimer's disease. After Mia's death, Ber-yl's sisters Isak and Rumer return home to New Hampshire to help with the funeral arrangements and the sale of Mia's home. Each sister must deal with her own issues as they prepare for the burial: Isak no longer feels the spark in her marriage and believes her husband may be cheating; Rumer has sepa-rated from her husband; and Beryl is attracted to Micah Coleman, but fears he has not yet gotten over his deceased wife. Rossiter pays particular attention to detailing quotidian activities, such as the sisters eating their meals or sorting through Mia's belongings. The story starts to generate momentum when papers are found chronicling Mia's secret relationship with a well-known artist, forcing the sisters to realize their mother was not the person they thought her to be. Rossiter's patient, deliberate pacing makes this one a perfect bedtime read. (May)

Reviewed on 05/17/2013 | Details & Permalink

In his final novel Roth retreads much of the narrative and thematic ground covered by his earlier works, notably Radetsky March. An elegy to the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, this novel follows Franz Ferdinand Trotta, a young Viennese fop, from the eve of one World War to the eve of another. As often happens in this era's stories, Trotta watches his life of leisure and promise slowly disappear: trusted servants die, friendships dissolve, marriages become strained, and financial and po-litical instability topple an entire class of Viennese society. As Trotta says in one of his pithier mo-ments, they came to call it the World War not because "the whole world was involved in it, but be-cause as a result of it we lost a whole world, our world." While the novel checks all the marks of an interwar narrative, it does so by rote. Even translator Hoffmann admits that this is a minor work, "a canny valedictory repertoire of Rothian tropes and characters, done fast, glancingly and sometimes approximately." It's difficult to argue with Hoffman's assessment; Roth was a 20th-century master of the quixotic and melancholy, but this novel, though glimmering with his talent, lacks command and depth. (May)

Reviewed on 05/17/2013 | Details & Permalink