Picks of the week, October 19

Friday, October 19, 2007

THRILLER

The Bone Garden

By Tess Gerritsen. Ballantine, $25.95.

A young woman named Julia Hamill finds that the old house she has just moved into has quite a history. Hamill unearths a skull belonging to a long-dead woman. It doesn't take long to determine the person had been murdered.

The tale then leaps back to 1830, when a penniless medical student in Boston has taken to grave robbery to pay his debts. Even as a student of the body, Norris Kingston is unprepared for the sight of a hideously murdered nurse on the hospital grounds. Now, along with a pretty young seamstress named Rose Connelly and a smart young man named Oliver Wendell Holmes, he must track the killer before he comes for Rose.

Final word: Mixing the gruesomely bloody with the scientifically compelling, this time-traveling tale never misses its mark.

MYSTERY

Walla Walla Suite

By Anne Argula. Ballantine, $12.95.

Menopause meets mystery in this story, with "human heat wave" private investigator Quinn warming up damp Seattle. A former Spokane cop, Quinn has exactly one client, a mitigation investigator who's also her neighbor and friend, Vincent Ainge. He makes a living looking for mitigating factors to keep convicted criminals off Death Row - anything to stop the system from taking the ultimate revenge.

When a young woman disappears from the building where both Quinn and Ainge work, her boss asks Quinn to investigate. To her disgust, the police arrest a suspect without her help. Meanwhile Ainge has fallen in love with the victim's mother, and in a series of laughably believable twists, winds up heading a group seeking the death penalty for the crime - against all he stands for.

Final word: Walla is a funny book that manages to avoid the manic, overwrought humor that ruins so many mysteries. Argula is a funny and original new voice.

SCIENCE FICTION

Axis

By Robert Charles Wilson. Tor, $25.95.

In Wilson's 12th novel, the Hugo-award-winning Spin, the Earth was saved from destruction and sent forward in time by a sentient race of machines called the "Hypotheticals." The Hypotheticals also opened a gateway to another Earth-like planet. Axis takes readers to that "world next door" - specifically, to the continent of Equatoria.

Just as they did on Earth, colonizers are raping the new world of its resources, and Equatoria is a desolate place. Lisa Adams is searching for information about her father, who disappeared a decade before under suspicious circumstances. She joins Turk Findley, a charismatic gypsy pilot, and soon they learn how alien and dangerous the new world is.

Final word: Although easy to read as a stand-alone novel, Axis is also a nice bridge between Spin and the last title in the trilogy.

CHILDREN

The Arrival

By Shaun Tan. Arthur A. Levine Books, $19.99, ages 10-18.

This wordless book about the immigrant experience is much more than a story told in comics. Each picture is a work of art, selected to make us acutely aware of what it would be like to leave everything for a better life for our family.

A man arrives in a surreal new world, undergoes rigorous questioning verging on interrogation, then is left to find shelter, food and a job with nothing but a suitcase and notebook to his name. He knows nothing of the language, yet soon finds companionship in an alien-like creature and meets other migrants with harrowing stories before being reunited with his family.Tan makes this land as strange and new to the reader as it is to the man: We watch him step out of an elevator shaft in the middle of an immense cityscape, and we feel just how alone he is.

Final word: The Arrival is astounding from an artistic standpoint but it's Tan's imagination that makes it spectacular. We are left awed, as we are after viewing films by legendary animator Hayao Miyazaki.

Peter Mergendahl Jane Dickinson Mark Graham Jennifer Miller