Tyler, the fiance she jilted at the altar as a pregnant 18-year-old, has become the still besotted if bitter lawyer in charge of Fin’s financial estate; handsome, not-too-bright jock Jack’s appeal lies in his preppy shallowness; then there is Fin’s choice, Biffi, a Hungarian Jew who survived World War II to become an art dealer of genuine kindness and wit. But the deep-seated sorrow peaking up through Biffi’s charm scares Lady off. Loved by all three men, she’s unable to love anyone except Fin and their black housekeeper, Mable, a character who defies conventional stereotypes and thus personifies the upheavals in the decade’s civil rights movement. Then she returns to Capri and discovers the joy and danger of being in love herself. Schine offers up a bittersweet lemon soufflé of family love and romantic passion.
THE ROSIE PROJECT
Simsion, Graeme Simon & Schuster (304 pp.) $24.00 | $10.99 e-book | Oct. 1, 2013 978-1-4767-2908-4 978-1-4767-2910-7 e-book Polished debut fiction, from Australian author Simsion, about a brilliant but emotionally challenged geneticist who develops a questionnaire to screen potential mates but finds love instead. The book won the 2012 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript. “I became aware of applause. It seemed natural. I had been living in the world of romantic comedy and this was the final scene. But it was real.” So Don Tillman, our perfectly imperfect narrator and protagonist, tells us. While he makes this observation near the end of the book, it comes as no surprise—this story plays the rom-com card from the first sentence. Don is challenged, almost robotic. He cannot understand social cues, barely feels emotion and can’t stand to be touched. Don’s best friends are Gene and Claudia, psychologists. Gene brought Don as a postdoc to the prestigious university where he is now an associate professor. Gene is a cad, a philanderer who chooses women based on nationality—he aims to sleep with a woman from every country. Claudia is tolerant until she’s not. Gene sends Rosie, a graduate student in his department, to Don as a joke, a ringer for the Wife Project. Finding her woefully unsuitable, Don agrees to help the beautiful but fragile Rosie to learn the identity of her biological father. Pursuing this Father Project, Rosie and Don collide like particles in an atom smasher: hilarity, dismay and carbonated hormones ensue. The story lurches from one set piece of deadpan nudge-nudge, wink-wink humor to another: We laugh at, and with, Don as he tries to navigate our hopelessly emotional, nonliteral world, learning as he goes. Simsion can plot a story, set a scene, write a sentence, finesse a detail. A pity more popular fiction isn’t this well-written. If you liked Australian author Toni Jordan’s Addition (2009), with its math-obsessed, quirky heroine, this book is for you. A sparkling, laugh-out-loud novel. 28
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ANGEL CITY
Steele, Jon Blue Rider Press (528 pp.) $27.95 | Jun. 4, 2013 978-0-399-15875-9 Series: Angelus, 2 What if they gave an apocalypse and everybody came? Steele’s sequel to The Watchers (2012), the middle volume in his Angelus Trilogy, is rather less neatly constructed than its predecessor. It opens with a tossed-off episode within the walls of Montségur fortress, HQ of the Cathar uprising, the haunt of armor-clad fellows who talk less like John Cleese than Humphrey Bogart: “Can’t blame them. The King offered safe passage to all who promise to become good little Frenchmen.” The Cathars figure in the tale all the same for some neat little reliquary gadgetry that falls into the way of supercop Jay Harper. Readers of the inaugural volume will remember that Jay and high-ticket fille de joie Katherine Taylor only recently whispered sweet nothings to each other within earshot of Lausanne Cathedral while attempting to keep assorted demons and their earthly minions at bay. Katherine’s now across the pond back home, but Jay’s not far from her mind, especially since they’re both under the aegis of the elite Swiss Guard, whose boss is given to growling at Jay such tendernesses as, “If you’d prefer me to remind you that you are not a creature of free will, then I’ll be more than happy to do so.” It’s predestination, then, it seems, that sends a bateau full of bad guys down the Seine into the middle of Paris with a nuclear device and a threat to turn the City of Lights into a bonfire—an eventuality that, naturally, only Jay has the wherewithal to deal with. Does he succeed? Only the sewer rats beneath the city streets can say—and, oh, yes, a weird wraithlike chap named Astruc, and his boon companion, and all those Swiss Guards, and the terrorists, and Katherine, and.... If you read only one supernatural thriller with Albigensian overtones this year, this ought to be it.
THE ENGAGEMENTS
Sullivan, J. Courtney Knopf (400 pp.) $26.95 | Jun. 11, 2013 978-0-307-95871-6
Is a diamond really forever? So Sullivan (Maine, 2011, etc.) asks in her third novel, which explores the familiar territory of people who can’t quite find the old connections but keep looking for them all the same. Frances Gerety, a real person whom Sullivan enlists at the outset of her tale, had a daunting task way back in 1947: She had to cook up an advertising tagline for De Beers that would convince Americans to purchase diamond engagement rings, hitherto “considered just absolutely money down the drain.” Sullivan’s story takes off