Another Thing to Fall
By Laura Lippman (William Morrow, $24.95)
In the 10th novel of Lippman's series about Baltimore private detective Tess Monaghan, our heroine's latest assignment is to bodyguard a Hollywood starlet filming a TV show in her hometown.
The production has been rattled by a series of small fires, a power outage and, most disturbing, the suicide of a local man who was apparently stalking the show's 20-year-old rising star, Selene Waites.
But when an ambitious, young assistant is beaten to death, Tess' job becomes much more complicated than simply baby-sitting a spoiled celebrity. It doesn't help that Tess is surrounded by performers and storytellers, and that most of them have a secret.
Lippman is an authoritative guide to the behind-the-scenes action at a television production, which is not surprising given that her husband, David Simon, is the creator of HBO's "The Wire." The police drama, also based in Baltimore, just completed its fifth and final season.
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Lippman clearly has fun pitting her prickly, wry heroine against the egotistical Hollywood transplants, particularly Selene, whose bad-girl behavior and ditsy malapropisms spoof a number of today's Hollywood tartlets.
Monaghan's adventures in "Another Thing to Fall" is a welcome addition to and an insightful look at the desperation that drives those grasping for a shot at fame and those who will do anything to keep it. Lippman's fans will be anxious for the next installment.
– The Associated Press
Mistress of the Revolution
By Catherine Delors (Dutton, $25.95).
Raised in an impoverished aristocratic family by her penny-pinching mother and lascivious brother, Gabrielle de Montserrat is forced into a brutal marriage at 15.
When a lucky heart attack strikes her husband during a hunting excursion, Gabrielle finds herself a penniless widow at 17. She takes refuge with a family friend in Paris in 1787, as momentum is beginning to build toward revolution.
Gabrielle becomes the mistress of a wealthy count to survive and provide for her daughter. The relationship gives her notoriety that puts her in danger when Paris revolts. Desperate, she pleads for help from her childhood sweetheart, who has become a powerful judge.
First-time author Catherine Delors comes from a family of French aristocrats who lived in the same area where her heroine grew up. Gabrielle's love and savior, Pierre-Andre Coffinhal, was a real person with a street named after him in the town where Delors spent part of her childhood.
Delors, who lived in Los Angeles for nearly two decades and wrote the novel in English, said she hoped to make the French Revolution — "often perceived as an utterly confusing mess of events and characters" — understandable and appealing to readers without a background in French history.
Delors' fine use of historical events to drive the plot and her skillful weaving of truth and fiction have produced a historical romance that's a cut above much of the genre.
In terms of entertainment value, "Mistress of the Revolution" holds up well against best-selling historical novels such as Tracy Chevalier's "Girl With a Pearl Earring" and Philippa Gregory's "The Other Boleyn Girl." Delors keeps the plot moving, and her leading male characters have all the sex appeal required for a hot romance. This is definitely a contender for one of the best reads of the year.
– The Associated Press
Mudbound
By Hillary Jordan (Algonquin, $22.95)
Any Southern writer worth her fatback is compared to William Faulkner or Flannery O'Connor, but Hillary Jordan doesn't get bogged down in the giant footsteps of either over the course of her absorbing debut novel.
Is it too early to say, after just one book, that here's a voice that will echo for years to come?
That said, Jordan's opening sentence, "Henry and I dug the hole seven feet deep," is pure O'Connor. And characters like Pappy, the cantankerous family patriarch, overpopulate Yoknapatawpha County. "Southern" is tough to scrub off.
But Jordan has chosen to divide her book into chapters told in six distinct voices, allowing the reader to see the same events from varying points of view, and that is what sets "Mudbound" apart. Jordan is skillful enough to make each voice unique, allowing us to shine a lantern into the dark corners of each character's mind.
Set just after World War II in the Mississippi Delta, "Mudbound" begins with that hole, two diggers lashed by wind and rain, struggling to get the coffin in before the mud fills it back up.
Halfway down they find a shackled leg bone, a skull with a bullet hole in the back. It's a slave's grave. The diggers are brothers and they're burying their father. Jamie, the younger brother and narrator of the opening chapter, smiles. "Henry was right," he thinks, "there's nothing our father would have hated more."
Two families — black and white, physically and metaphorically — are at the center of "Mudbound," a novel of injustice, betrayal — and, perhaps, a little bit of hope.
Jordan, who was raised in Dallas and now lives in New York, won the Bellwether Prize for "Mudbound," an award founded by novelist Barbara Kingsolver that promotes literature of social change and is given to an unpublished manuscript.
– San Antonio Express-News
