RISING SUN, FALLING SHADOW
In 1870, Lucinda Carter steals away (steal being the operative word) from the Fort Worth brothel where she’s worked in semi-slavery as a prostitute. But do not expect her to have a heart of gold. Despite the occasional seizures she hides from most of her clients, she is tough, conniving and deadly when necessary. Having procured a teaching position under false pretenses, she heads to Middle Bayou, Texas, where legend has it that the pirate Lafitte buried his gold and where she hopes to meet up with her secret lover. Meanwhile, young Oklahoman Nate Cannon joins the Texas police force and is assigned to work with veteran Rangers George Deerling and Tom Goddard. As Lucinda manipulates her way into the hearts of her new employers, a community of former land and slave owners from the Deep South, Nate and the Rangers track ruthless killer William McGill. Goddard, a former medical student with an intellectual bent, takes Nate under his wing, but Nate finds he needs to prove himself to the more coldblooded Deerling. Shortly after Deerling finally accepts Nate and confides that he once had a daughter he mistreated, the experienced Ranger is killed by one of McGill’s henchmen. Goddard tells Nate that he loved and married Deerling’s daughter, although, as a child, she was permanently damaged by her father’s decision to place her in an asylum for her epilepsy. She ran off while pregnant, and Goddard does not know what happened to their child, but his wife has become Lucinda. After McGill and Lucinda’ Middle Bayou plans go awry and Nate and Goddard close in, all hell breaks loose. A cinematic but refreshingly unsentimental take on the classic Western, starring a woman who is no romantic heroine, but a definite survivor. (Author tour to Houston, Dallas, Austin, New Orleans and Jackson, Miss.)
Kalla, Daniel Forge (352 pp.) $27.99 | Sep. 24, 2013 978-0-7653-3764-1
Kalla (The Far Side of the Sky, 2012, etc.) continues the saga of Dr. Franz Adler and Soon Yi Mah, who are trapped in World War II Shanghai. In 1943, Shanghai, the Paris of the East, suffers under Imperial Japan’s iron boot. Allied refugees are relegated to detention camps called “Civic Assembly Centers.” Stateless Jews like Adler are confined to Hongkew—Designated Area for Stateless Refugees—a ghetto by any other name. Food is scarce, and Adler worries about his sister-in-law and his young daughter, but the surgeon continues to treat those he can in a ramshackle building converted to a hospital in spite of the scarcity of medicines and only sporadic access to anesthetics. With solid descriptions of the exotic setting, Kalla offers a dramatic narrative in an obscure WWII battlefield. Kalla does his best work in drawing believable characters. There’s the new Mrs. Adler, Soon Yi, known as Sunny, a doctor in all but degree. She is half-Chinese and can move freely throughout Shanghai. Spurred into action by a summary execution, Sunny maneuvers her way into underground forces with the reluctant help of Wen-Cheng Huang, another doctor who has always loved her. Sunny finds herself trapped by double deceptions, betrayals and the sacrifices of bystanders. The exotically beautiful Jia-Li, Sunny’s childhood friend and much-soughtafter courtesan, herself is drawn into the bloody intrigue when she falls in love with Bao Chun, “The Boy General.” Badly wounded and seeking treatment from expert surgeon Adler, Chun’s been smuggled from a guerilla camp into Shanghai by Ernst Muhler, expatriate artist considered persona non grata by the Imperial Japanese Army. Muhler later disguises himself, takes residence among German expatriates and befriends Baron Von Puttkamer. The baron, a rabid Nazi, launches a plan to mass murder Jews in the ghetto, with the complicity of the dreaded Kempeitai, Imperial Japan’s gestapo, an effort that Adler must confront. Drama-filled historical fiction, with a denouement promising another installment. (Agent: Henry Morrison)
DOCTOR SLEEP
King, Stephen Scribner (544 pp.) $30.00 | Sep. 24, 2013 978-1-4767-2765-3 He-e-e-e-r-e’s Danny! Before an alcoholic can begin recovery, by some lights, he or she has to hit bottom. Dan Torrance, the alcoholic son of the very dangerously alcoholic father who came to no good in King’s famed 1977 novel The Shining, finds his rock bottom very near, if not exactly at, the scarifying image of an infant reaching for a baggie of blow. The drugs, the booze, the one-night stands, the excruciating chain of failures: all trace back to the bad doings at the Overlook Hotel (don’t go into Room 217) and all those voices in poor Dan’s head, which speak to (and because of) a very special talent he has. That “shining” is a matter of more than passing interest for a gang of RV-driving, torture-loving, soul-sucking folks who aren’t quite folks at all—the True Knot, about whom one particularly deadly recruiter comments, “They’re not my friends, they’re my family...And what’s tied can never be untied.” When the knotty crew sets its sights on a young girl whose own powers include the ability to sense impending bad
THE OUTCASTS
Kent, Kathleen Little, Brown (336 pp.) $26.00 | Oct. 1, 2013 978-0-316-20612-9 After two novels re-imagining the history of her own New England ancestors (The Heretic’s Daughter, 2008; The Traitor’s Wife (originally entitled The Wolves of Andover, 2010)), Kent turns her attention to post–Civil War Texas, where law and morality are far more elastic. 12
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1 september 2013
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fiction
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kirkus.com
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