A new pecking order

Weary of reading the same old authors and their formulaic plots? Today, we welcome some fresh faces

Patti Thorn, Rocky Mountain News

Published December 8, 2006 at midnight

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This year, while big-name authors were busy stealing the spotlight, scores of titles by unknowns were hatched. Many were superb reads. How do we know? Our critics spent 2006 screening nearly 60 debut novels that weren’t reviewed on the regular books pages. They read books of all stripes: futuristic tales, family sagas, suspense stories and more. And when it was all said and done, they had uncovered a wealth of fresh talent — in every genre.

Today, we offer 10 of the best, books of all types of plot and style. If you missed these titles when they were first released, here’s a hint: Don’t make the same mistake twice.

And a special thanks...

To those who have dedicated countless hours to this annual project. We owe a debt of gratitude to Joan Hinkemeyer, Christine Jacques, Justin Matott, Verna Noel Jones and Vicky Uhland.

And She Was

By Cindy Dyson (William Morrow, 288 pages, $24.95).

Author’s background: Dyson has written eight books for young adults, as well as articles for National Geographic World and Backpacker. She grew up in Alaska and now lives near Glacier Park, Mont.

Plot in a nutshell: Brandy, a blonde cocktail waitress, follows her latest fling to the Aleutian Islands, but the change of scenery isn’t enough to distract her from her dead-end life. She delves into Aleutian island history, learning about the women years ago who, like her, were stranded in this remote outpost. Dyson chronicles Brandy’s life in the Aleutians and introduces readers to successive generations of Aleut women who were charged with fulfilling their ancestors’ tragic obligations. Eventually, past and present combine to bring new meaning to Brandy’s life.

Sample of prose: "I was in a strange motel room, in a strange town. I was burning through men faster than Yolanda could change expressions. And I had no idea where I was going next, what I was going to do, or who I was going to do it with. I was thirty-one, the daughter of a bum and a slut, saddled with a liquor name."

Author reminds me of: A modern-day Jean Auel.

Best reason to read: This is a tightly plotted, multi-layered book: not only a chronicle of a young woman's awakening, but also a fascinating primer on Aleutian life, past and present.

Vicky Uhland

Disobedience

By Naomi Alderman (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 240 pages, $24).

Author’s background: Alderman, 32, lives in the Orthodox Jewish community in Hendon, London, where she was raised. A graduate of Oxford University, Alderman won the Asham Award short story prize for new women writers.

Plot in a nutshell: When she was 18, Ronit Krushka fled from her rabbi father and the suffocating culture of the London Orthodox Jewish community in which she grew up. Now 32 and living a decidedly nonorthodox life in Manhattan that includes married and lesbian lovers, she returns home for her father’s funeral to discover she is an outcast in a closed and devout society. After reconnecting with her cousin Dovid and a forbidden childhood sweetheart, Ronit realizes that she — and the people she grew up with — need to learn to balance not only tradition and modernity, but also personal desire with obedience to God.

Sample of prose: "Marriage is difficult. It is painful. And it was meant to be so. For in trying to approach more closely to a human being who is so different to us, we begin to understand the task before us in approaching the Almighty. This is our work upon the earth, and the work of marriage prepares us for it. And although marriage may, in slow and unexpected ways, bring us much joy and satisfaction, nothing of the sort has been promised."

Author reminds me of: Monica Ali, author of Brick Lane

Best reason to read: It’s a difficult task to describe a society many people don’t understand without sounding like a religious textbook, but Alderman pulls it off. She not only tackles hot-button topics like sex, religion and women’s rights, but she does it with humor and a vivid plot that makes the book entertaining in its own right.

Vicky Uhland

The Dressmaker

By Elizabeth Birkelund Oberbeck (Henry Holt, 306 pages, $23).

Author’s background: Oberbeck has written for numerous publications, including Cosmopolitan, Travel and Leisure, Glamour and Working Woman. She lives with her husband and four sons in Greenwich, Conn., and was introduced to the world of haute couture through her mother, who worked with Diana Vreeland at Harper’s Bazaar.

Plot in a nutshell: Claude Reynaud is a shy yet skilled dressmaker working in the small town of Senlis outside of Paris. He and his chatty pet parrot Pédan live a contented life, where Claude diligently designs and stitches eye-catching gowns while humoring his nephews with puppet shows. The dressmaker’s life is turned upside down, however, when he becomes smitten at first glance with the lovely Valentine de Verlay, who has come to him to have her wedding dress made. Claude then sets out on a Don Quixote-like quest to lure Valentine away from her fiancé and into his own arms. Along the way, the author composes poetic visual pictures of dresses designed expressly to reflect an individual’s outer and inner beauty.

Sample of prose: "His greatest talent — and what he was becoming renowned for beyond the small town of Senlis — was his ability to match a client’s natural colors with enhancing hues and textures. He obsessed over color classifications and names. Inadequate descriptions frustrated him to the point of fury. He would yell across his studio to Pédant, ‘That is not the color pink! Non! That is the color of dawn reflected on the yellowing marble steps of the Trevi Fountain.’"

Author reminds me of: No one in particular; Oberbeck has a unique voice.

Best reason to read: This is the kind of story that sneaks up on you. It seems simple enough in the first 20 pages or so, but as you continue reading, it quickly develops into a rich fabric of sharply drawn characters with real complications in their lives that aren’t tied up so neatly at novel’s end. You’ll relish the complexity.

Verna Noel Jones

Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living

By Carrie Tiffany. Scribner, 240 pages, $23.

Author’s background: Tiffany has won numerous literary awards in Australia, and has worked as a park ranger. She currently lives in Melbourne, where she is an agricultural journalist.

Plot in a nutshell: Drought-plagued Australia in the 1930’s is the setting for this spare novel about the conflict between science and human emotions. As the Better Farming Train moves across the country offering the latest in domestic science and agriculture to sparsely populated rural areas, several characters emerge. Jean, the narrator and sewing instructor, allows herself to be courted by Robert Pettergree, the soil specialist who believes scientific methods should control life. He buys a farm in an impoverished wheat district where he attempts to apply his calculations to his land, neighbors and wife without any understanding of human beings and their emotional needs.

Sample of prose: "While the men work on the tank, Doris boils the kettle. I notice that she adds the milk to the cups before the tea. I think about my experiment with Robert in the cookery car. At the time I thought it was some sort of metaphor for us — to prove or disprove our partnership. It didn’t occur to me then how important a few cups of liquid could be — or the significance of the vessel in which the liquid is contained."

Author reminds me of: John Steinbeck in the depiction of Dust Bowl living and Ernest Hemingway in the lean, controlled prose that evokes such emotional power.

Best reason to read: Tiffany’s spare prose mirrors the dusty Australian landscape and highlights the quiet courage of the farm families with powerful, telling detail. A luminous debut.

Joan Hinkemeyer



Family and Other Accidents

By Shari Goldhagen (Doubleday, 259 pages, $23.95).

Author’s background: Goldhagen has been a fellow at Yaddo and at the MacDowell colony. She holds an MFA from Ohio State, and a journalism degree from Northwestern. She covers celebrities for a weekly women’s magazine.

Plot in a nutshell: Orphaned at age 25 and age 15, respectively, Jack and Connor Reed’s association is necessary — and tense. As Connor’s guardian, Jack raises his brother in a swinging bachelor style. Although the brothers care about one another, there are no heart-to-hearts here: Jack throws money at Connor’s problems, and Connor confides in his poster of John F. Kennedy.

Later, the Reed brothers repeat the cycle of dysfunctional communication in their own families, staying in contact only occasionally. The tension between the brothers is matched by the stress within their own families. Jack’s inamorata Mona is no match for Connor’s overachieving wife and her whiny daughters.

Sample of prose: "...for Laine’s entire twelve-hour delivery, her (recently and messily divorced) parents managed to put aside the things that made them crazy long enough to feed their daughter ice chips and go over potential names. Connor’s only living relative (Jack), on the other hand, took four months to pick up the phone because children made him uncomfortable. And it didn’t seem fair, because Connor had chosen Jack years ago."

Author reminds me of: Richard Ford, for her eye for details that communicate pressure in a character. Compare the Reeds with the househunting family in Independence Day.

Best reason to read: Goldhagen neatly sums up the worry and stress in this family-by-default.

Christine Jacques

Half Life

By Shelley Jackson (HarperCollins, 464 pages, $24.95). Author’s background: Jackson is a Pushcart Prize winner and author of a short story collection, The Melancholy of Anatomy; a hypertext work, Patchwork Girl; and a novel she claims to be writing in the form of tattoos applied to the bodies of thousands of volunteers, titled Skin.

Plot in a nutshell: In a world that resembles ours, radiation fallout from nuclear testing in the U.S. desert has created a growing and hip new minority group: conjoined twins, or as they’re known to activists, "twofers." Twenty-eight-year-old twofers Nora and Blanche Olney have moved from their small Nevada town to twofer-friendly San Francisco, but that’s not enough for Nora. After 15 years of behaving like a "singleton" because Blanche has been asleep, Nora suspects Blanche is waking up and demanding her half of their body. Nora travels to England to a doctor who surgically removes the heads of conjoined twins. But things go awry, and in an increasingly surreal plotline, Nora is forced to confront Blanche’s role in her life and the pair’s place in the world.

Sample of prose: "Government forces and no-nuke activists alike have misconstrued the purpose of nuclear testing, which was neither to atone nor prepare for war but to prevent it by engendering a mutant strain of homo sapiens with the capacity to see both sides of an issue at one time. The National Penitence Ground is the birthplace of a new age. We demand that this sacred ground, having served its purpose, be turned over to its children. We will make it a Jerusalem for the Twofer Nation."

Author reminds me of: Salvador Dali meets John Venn meets Jeffrey Eugenides, author of Middlesex.

Best reason to read: At times freakishly gruesome and perversely hilarious, this book is an incredible exercise in imagination, philosophical implications and overcoming our preconceived notions of what everything — including a novel — should be.

Vicky Uhland

Halfway House

By Katharine Noel (Atlantic Monthly Press, 368 pages, $23).

Author’s background: Noel lives in San Francisco and is a lecturer at Stanford University. Previously, she lived and worked on a farm for two years with a group of adults with mental illnesses.

Plot in a nutshell: In a small town in New Hampshire, Angie Voorster — high school senior, star swimmer, diligent student — suffers a psychotic break, is diagnosed with bipolar disorder and is placed in a mental institution. As she struggles to cope with her illness, her family mirrors her crisis, alternately coming together and falling apart. Her cellist father retreats into his music, her mother has an affair with a younger man and her brother teeters between being too close and too distant. Like Angie, they are eventually able to regather themselves in a new, fundamentally changed way.

Sample of prose: "The depression didn’t feel like the ones she’d gone through before. Those had been so blank and terrible it had felt like being wrapped in gray wool blankets, one after another, until she was choking on her own breath."

Author reminds me of: Sylvia Plath, family style.

Best reason to read: Halfway House is a powerful and eloquent book, and you won’t find many better descriptions of mental illness and how it affects a family.

Vicky Uhland



Icebergs

By Rebecca Johns (Bloomsbury, 320 pages, $23.95).

Author’s background: Johns has written for Cosmopolitan, Mademoiselle, Self and Seventeen and received the Michener-Copernicus Award for this novel while it was a work-in-progress.

Plot in a nutshell: Walt Dunmore and Alister Clark are the only two members of a military crew to survive a plane crash in Newfoundland during the winter of 1944. Walt alone lives long enough to be rescued. The story follows Walt and his young wife Dottie as they attempt to build a life, first in a small Canadian farming community and later in Chicago, and also tracks Alister’s widow and daughter as they interact with the Dunmores through the years. It is a story of ordinary people, coping with ordinary concerns of family life, until Vietnam poses new challenges of conscience and survival.

Sample of prose: "Walt’s hands were heavily bandaged by then with strips of parachute material and some cotton they’d found in the first aid kit, but underneath they had swelled bluish-white, forzen hard, deep down in the skin. Blisters formed on his palms and down to his wrists, but those didn’t worry him as much as the white blocks of ice at the ends of his fingers, the parts that didn’t hurt anymore because they were dead."

Author reminds me of: Jennifer Haigh, whose Baker Towers also focused on the struggles and dynamics of ordinary families through war and peace.

Best reason to read: Johns is totally in control of her craft, skillfully weaving the threads of two families while exploring the many faces of love, survival, parenting and loneliness. The story is filled with vibrant prose and keen observations.

Joan Hinkemeyer

The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets

By Eva Rice (Dutton, 352 pages, $24.95).

Author’s background: Londoner Rice is a young mother and the daughter of Tim Rice, who wrote the lyrics to Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita and The Lion King.

Plot in a nutshell: In 1950s England, college student Penelope lives a quiet life in her crumbling ancestral mansion with her Elvis-mad brother and her mother, a legendary beauty who has never recovered from her husband’s death in World War II. While waiting for a bus, Penelope meets free-spirit Charlotte, a member of the London young society set. They quickly become involved in intrigues ranging from an unsuitable romance to fulfilling the wish of a dying relative — all while attending glamorous parties and living the high life in nave, decadent postwar Britain.

Sample of prose: " ‘I thought we should ask Johns to build some sort of outdoor hutch for your rodent," she said. "It really isn’t on, keeping her upstairs. Not in a house like Magna, darling. Queen Victoria herself slept a night in your room, you know. December 1878, I think.’

"The roof is falling off and you’re worried about a guinea pig in my bedroom? I wanted to scream.

" ‘I bet she froze to death," I said sulkily.

" ‘I shouldn’t think so. She was a plain woman. Plain women don’t tend to feel the cold.’"

Author reminds me of: Nancy Mitford’s comedies of manners.

Best reason to read: This book could have so easily been chick lit, 1950s style, but instead, it’s a wonderfully complex, stylishly satirical, lushly written coming-of-age novel that transports the reader to a time when life seemed simple, daring and fun.

Vicky Uhland

The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre

By Dominic Smith (Atria, 304 pages, $24).

Author’s background: Smith grew up in Australia and now lives in Texas, where he received an MFA from the James A. Michener Center for Writers. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Plot in a nutshell: Louis Daguerre, a pioneer in photography, is so poisoned by the mercury fumes used in his daguerrotype process that he becomes delusional. By 1874, believing the world will end in a year, he becomes obsessed with his "Doomsday List" — ten subjects he feels he must photograph before the final days — and with finding Isobel Le Fournier, whom he has loved since childhood but has not seen for nearly 50 years.

Sample of prose: "If he angled the exposed image above the hot mercury, passing it back and forth, he obtained the best result. He watched the mercury vapors draw line and edges onto his plates. The air thickened around him, a metallic brume that watered his eyes. It had an elusive smell, something acrid but fleeting, like iron railings in the rain. It caught in the back of his throat and sometimes he felt faint. But the images themselves made this discomfort inconsequential — here was time stolen, wafered and pressed onto silvered copper; here were nature’s blueprints..."

Author reminds me of: Smith might easily have written in 19th century Paris; his style and images are reminiscent of Balzac and Flaubert.

Best reason to read: This is a remarkable narrative of a man singlemindedly pursuing his dream to capture the essence of everything, especially beauty, for posterity.

Joan Hinkemeyer

Now You See It ... Stories from Cokesville, PA



By Bathsheba Monk (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 240 pages, $23.95).

Author’s background: Monk began her writing career on her high school newspaper, in the economically depressed Pennsylvania-part of the Appalachian coal seam. She joined the Army, and after being discharged, lived in Europe, where she supported herself as a painter. She now lives in Allentown, Pa., where she is writing her second book.

Plot in a nutshell:This is a collection of interrelated short stories about residents of Cokesville, Pa., a fictional coal and steel town. Plots revolve around characters both in their native element, and in other locations, where the transition between worlds isn’t very smooth. Theresa Gojuk, for example, thought she needed just one break to become Tess Randall the soap opera queen, but no such luck. Monica Kusiak is dating a WASP, but really doesn’t fit in with his family. And these are the lucky ones, with a ticket out.

As for those who stayed in the dying town, they tend to live dull lives. Monk punctuates their days with black comedy, and unexpected kindness. For instance, Mrs. Szewczak, a lonely widow who has "spun a cocoon around her misery" rides out a blizzard with a (gasp) black man of questionable character who saves her feet from frostbite in his snowbound car. The police assume the worst when they rescue the stranded pair, and Mrs. Szewczak tries her best to keep her savior out of their hands.

Sample of prose: Mrs. Wojic is consulting Mrs. Szilborski about a troubling question. It seems her husband told her that, after his death, he would return to her as a yellow dog. Sure enough, a stray dog has appeared: "It was just the sort of dog she thought Mr. Wojic would look like, and when it was still there at suppertime, Mrs. Wojic let it inside. Everything was just fine, she said, until this other yellow dog showed up. Now she didn’t know which one was Mr. Wojic."

Author reminds me of: Mona Simpson, in her gift for depicting tension between mothers and daughters.

Best reason to read: Monk’s dark sense of humor dovetails with her characters’ genuine grief and loneliness. These are stories to revisit.

Christine Jacques

Poppy Shakespeare

By Clare Allan (Bloomsbury, 341 pages, $23.95).

Author’s background: ClareAllan, who won the first Orange/Harpers short story prize, spent 10 years as a patient in England’s psyciatric system. Poppy Shakespeare is not autobiographical, however, she has said. "I didn’t want to focus on the experiences themselves, I wanted to explore how words cope with extremes of emotion and experience. I wanted to write from the point of view of someone a deal more interesting than myself." She lives in London.

Plot in a nutshell: N has been going to the Dorothy Fish, a day hospital for mental patients, for 13 years. Patients’ days revolve around maintaining their place in the hospital hierarchy, as getting better means losing your public funding (MAD money), something no patient wants. As the book opens, one recently discharged patient has committed suicide.

Enter Poppy Shakespeare, who knows she’s not crazy and only needs a solicitor to help spring her. But in a catch-22, insolvent Poppy needs MAD money to fund her legal advice, and must prove that she is indeed over the edge. Assigned to help Poppy adjust to her new life, N coaches her through the process of getting a diagnosis, down to the muttering and poor hygiene. "You get rated Low Low Low just for being here," N assures her charge. The book chronicles Poppy’s slow descent into hell, against the backdrop of changes to the mental health service delivery system.

Sample of prose: N describes how one longtime patient voices her concerns about a doctor to the patients’ rights council: "Carmel’s complaint had been building for fifteen years. No one knew what it was sparked it off, not even Carmel no more. Carmel’s complaint was a great-grandma at least. It had been married, had kids and the kids had had kids and half of them was divorced and remarried or living together or living alone and all the stepchildren, half-brothers and sisters, and foster kids too; her complaint had great nieces and their nephews had cousins and their cousins had more cousins four-times removed, and to find the complaint what started it all, do you know what I’m saying, was like trying to find Eve at the top of a family tree.

Author reminds me of: Charles Dickens, in her gift for describing the bleak house and its inmates in such a way that you want to vacation there.

Best reason to read: N’s voice is fresh and full of black humor. Her coping skills rival those of the so-called functioning members of society, particulary in light of her strategizing towards the goal of MAD money. Take a bow, Poppy.

Christine Jacques

Secondhand World

By Katherine Min (Knopf, 275 pages, $23).

Author’s background: Min, a resident of New Hampshire, was born in Champaign, Illinois, and raised in Virginia and New York. She attended Amherst College and the Columbia School of Journalism and has worked as a journalist in Boston; Seoul, South Korea; Virginia and New Hampshire.

Plot in a nutshell: Isadora Myung Hee Sohn, Isa for short, is a Korean-American teen who knows what it’s like to be in a country (the U.S.), but not of the country. Though she was born in America, her parents still grasp tightly to Korean customs. At school, Isa is taunted for being different, and at home she has trouble understanding her own parents. Her father, a scientist and professor, is often irritable and uncomfortable in his daughter’s presence. Her mother, once a beauty from Seoul, is reticent and secretive. Isa rebels when she realizes her parents have more concern for her dead younger brother Stephen than for her. At one point, she runs away with friends. After her forced return home, she discovers her mother’s affair with a professor and plots a way to use it against her. However, it’s what Isa doesn’t know about her parents’ haunted past that brings on deadly consequences.

Sample of prose: "In neither Korean nor English was my father voluble. The language of science was his mother tongue, the silver-voiced siren call to mathematical formulation. It was a language I had no ear for, its jargon so much gobbledygook. My father would grow frustrated as he tried to explain to me the second law of thermodynamics, or the concept of cold fusion. ‘Look,’ he would say, his hands raised in a gesture that was half threat and half entreaty, ‘it’s not hard.’ And I’d try to follow him, his English as barbed as concertina wire, the concepts entering my head and leaving it unprocessed, like baggage down a conveyor belt."

Author reminds me of: No one in particular

Best reason to read: In the beginning, Min skillfully captures the angst and rebelliousness of this self-indulgent teen. Then, through vivid description, graceful language and a startling plot twist, the story evolves to show how choices made by Isa and her family have a greater impact on one another than they could ever imagine. In all, a remarkable achievement.

Verna Noel Jones

The Thrall’s Tale

By Judith Lindbergh (Viking, 446 pages, $25.95).

Author’s background: Lindbergh’s work has appeared in Archaeology Magazine and in connection with a Smithsonian exhibition on the Vikings. She spent 10 years researching this book.

Plot in a nutshell: In this compelling saga of the Viking settlement of Greenland in the late 10th century, Katla is a thrall, or slave. When her beauty brings the attentions of the jealous son of her owner, she is brutally raped and disfigured, setting the plot in motion.

Katla is then sold to Thorbjorg, a healer and seeress, who nurses her back to health, and she eventually gives birth to the product of her rape: Bibrau, a child she despises from birth. Although Thorbjorg fosters and apprentices Bibrau, the child becomes embittered toward her mother and obsessed with revenge.

When Leif Eriksson brings Christian settlers to Greenland and creates a culture clash, Bibrau sees a way to pervert Thorbjorg’s healing spells and ceremonies to punish her mother and disrupt the close-knit community.

Sample of prose: "While the sun set not upon the far horizon but hovered low and shed bare warmth, the fires burned in the Althing booths, but my foster-daughter stood above. I felt her eyes ... that burned. Burned with a kind of passion ...Now I knew for certain: it was hate. Hate that I did feed with skills for something greater. Yet she took them from my hands and churned them with her hunger, then spat them back with but a fiery rage."

Author reminds me of: Jean Auel, in her ability to transport the reader into an unfamiliar time and place filled with authentic characters.

Best reason to read: Lindbergh’s prodigious research, blended with a lively plot and full-dimensional characters, makes for a positively engrossing read. The three female narrators propel the story forward and also represent the conflict between the old paganism and the new Christianity.

Joan Hinkemeyer

Tomorrow They Will Kiss

By Eduardo Santiago (Little, Brown, 320 pages, $13.95).

Author’s background: Eduardo Santiago was born in Cuba but grew up in Los Angeles and Miami. He was a PEN Emerging Voice Rosenthal Fellow and currently writes for a Los Angeles TV station.

Plot in a nutshell: Six Cuban women carpool together to their job in a New Jersey doll factory. They reminisce about the lives they were forced to leave in Cuba, discuss the telenovelas they so avidly watch each night and gossip about Graciela, one of their group. As the story unfolds, Santiago alternates the views of several of the women, especially about the beautiful and defiant Graciela — a woman who claims the future by trying to better herself in America, while the other women stay mired in the past and their petty grievances.

Sample of prose: "Those of us who had even the tiniest bit more than others became their targets. Poor families trained their children to sneak into our homes during the day and hide. Then, at night, they quietly unlocked the front door while we slept, and the adults then tiptoed in and cleaned us out. Many families woke up to empty houses; everything that could be taken had been. Fear took hold. There were serious reports and investigations, but olvidate, forget it. Once you were ransacked, you stayed that way."

Author reminds me of: Julia Alvarez, who also creates a strong sense of time and place through the telling detail and light touches of humor.

Best reason to read: Through full-dimensional characters and carefully crafted prose, Santiago vividly conveys both pre- and post-revolution Cuba and the desperate lives the new immigrants faced in the U.S.

Joan Hinkemeyer

Two Harbors

By Kate Benson (Harcourt, 312 pages, $14).

Author’s background: Benson’s short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines. She teaches English in Massachusetts.

Plot in a nutshell: Casey’s mother, a former high school prom queen, abruptly abandons her husband and her only child, Casey, for a chance at stardom in Hollywood. Throughout her adolescence in the desolate Minnesota town of the title, Casey, still suffering from her mother’s abandonment, rejects all overtures of love and affection until she meets Dex. When he dies in a plane crash, his California family invites Casey to Hollywood for the funeral. As Casey discovers the truth about her mother, she finds her own voice and sense of self.

Sample of prose: "I think of home, its thickness and density: the coarseness of stone and bark, the rich, dark smell of soil, of pine and a wider landscape rolling forcefully along the horizon. Dex told me once he felt REAL there, that he’d found in Minnesota a stability he’d never had before — and I can feel, for the first time, why he might have wanted that beneath his feet."

Author reminds me of: Ellen Gilchrist and Pat De Voto, in her ability to probe the psyche of a young woman coping with loss and seeking personal identity.

Best reason to read: For it’s fine, sensitive portrayal of a small town girl and her search for herself.

Joan Hinkemeyer

What is Mine

By Anne Holt (Warner Books, 400 pages, $24.99).

Author’s background: Holt is a former minister of justice, a lawyer and journalist, and popular Scandinavian crime writer. This is her American debut.

Plot in a nutshell: Norway is frozen in fear as someone begins to steal its children off the streets, leaving no trace of evidence, accomplishing possibly the "perfect crime." Johanne Vik, a divorcee and mother of a mentally handicapped six-year old daughter, professor of psychology and former FBI criminal profiler is called in to help investigate by Detective Inspector Adam Subo. Subo has recently lost both his wife and daughter, fueling his desire to return the children safely to their parents.

Meanwhile, Vik is trying to unravel a decades-old case involving the abduction and murder of a young girl, which inevitably gets tangled up in the present day case in ways that send the tale twisting and turning.

The story alternates cleverly between the points of view of the victims and perpetrator as Vik and Subo desperately work to find them both.

Sample of prose: "Sigmund sucked air through his teeth again. Adam offered him a box of toothpicks. ‘Could there be two people involved?’ asked Sigmund Berli. ‘Could Laffen be some kind of ? henchman for someone else, someone who’s smarter than him? No thanks.’ He waved away the toothpicks.

"‘Of course, it’s not impossible,’ Adam admitted. ‘But I don’t think so. I get the feeling that the real criminal, the real killer that we need to catch, is someone who operates alone. Alone against the world, if you like. But the combination would be nothing new. Smart man with a stupid helper, I mean. Well-known concept.’"

Author reminds me of: Early James Patterson, with Thomas Harris’s psychological profiling of characters and John Grisham’s story movement.

Best reason to read: This involved tale will pull readers in immediately and keeps them in its grips until the very last page. There are twists, red herrings, and turns, and Holt is satisfied to refer to abduction and murder, while sparing readers the gruesome, twisted details of a maniac’s methods that authors in this genre tend to indulge in. The team of Vik and Subo is supposed to return for several more books and should be just as addicting as Patterson’s popular Alex Cross series.

Justin Matott

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