'Not in the Flesh'
By Ruth Rendell (Crown $25.95)
Ruth Rendell published "From Doon With Death," the first of her Chief Inspector Wexford novels, in 1964. So it is not surprising that the old boy finds himself in codgerly company these days.
Rendell has ghoulish fun with the assorted elderly, eccentric characters who bedevil him in "Not in the Flesh," which is only the third of her Wexford books to appear in this present century.
When not chronicling the exploits of this unflappable police detective, Rendell has written vigorous, clever stand-alone fiction (most notably "The Water's Lovely" last year). But the Wexford books, while more restrained, amount to reunions with an old chum. Like any vintage British detective worth his afternoon tea, Wexford regales the reader with opinions, complaints, catty observations and droll underestimates of his own crime-solving abilities. "It's just a hunch," he remarks about one point made during this new investigation. "But I do have these hunches and often they're right."
People are also reading…
The title here amounts to vintage Rendell humor. It is the answer to the question "You never saw him again?" And it is a reminder that, in the mortality-minded world of the Wexford stories, alive and well is not the condition in which the missing are usually recovered.
— New York Times
'The Garden of Last Days'
By Andre Dubus III (W.W. Norton, $24.95)
In a Sarasota, Fla., strip club, a young woman who calls herself Spring slithers onstage late. Usually she can shift into smiling oblivion as she dances, but tonight she's distracted because her baby sitter is ill and her little daughter is backstage.
The sitter, Spring's landlady Jean, is so worried about the child spending her mother's shift in the club that she sneaks out of a hospital bed to try to rescue her.
In the club's parking lot, a drunken customer named A.J. seethes over being kicked out because he got too friendly with a stripper, and he just knows she really, really likes him.
Inside, a tall, quiet bouncer named Lonnie keeps watch on all of the women, but he watches Spring a little more carefully.
And in the audience another man watches Spring too, an unlikely customer with his pockets full of $100 bills. He calls himself Mike, but in a few days people all over the world will know his true name.
The date is Sept. 6, 2001.
In his stunning new novel "The Garden of Last Days," Andre Dubus III begins with a historical enigma that several of the 9/11 hijackers spent time and money in Florida strip clubs in the weeks leading up to the attacks and creates a richly imagined novel driven by an almost unbearable sense of dread.
Dubus is the author of "House of Sand and Fog" (a finalist for the National Book Award) and the son of the late short-story writer Andre Dubus.
Speaking at the BookExpo America convention in Los Angeles in May, Dubus said his first inkling of this book came in the days just after 9/11. "I had this image in my head of cash on a bedroom bureau. I didn't know why."
He came to realize that the image was "planted in my brain as the smoke cleared and we found out these guys had gone to strip clubs" despite their fundamentalist religious beliefs.
Dubus said he began to wonder about the women who had danced for them, "what it would be like when they found out."
"The Garden of Last Days" is the stunning result. Dubus masterfully weaves together the stories of Spring, Jean, A.J., Lonnie and Mike, aka Bassam, with alternating chapters from their various points of view. Dubus makes every character, no matter how despicable, intensely real, taking us inside their heads and hearts even when it is painful to be there.
— St. Petersburg Times
'The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company'
By David A. Price (Knopf, $27.95)
In "The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company," author David A. Price does something surprising: He makes a biography of a computer company interesting.
There's the expected techno-babble, but not as much as in some computer-company bios. The geek-speak is explained in manageable terms.
Anyone who's watched a Pixar film knows the company is partnered with Disney.
"The Pixar Touch" goes back to the beginning, to a soft-spoken former missionary named Ed Catmull, who wanted to use computers to make movies. He joined the staff of the New York Institute of Technology in the early 1970s, a diploma mill that had a rich patron who was willing to buy the Computer Graphics Laboratory whatever its teachers and students wanted.
There are a few details missing, mostly nerd stuff, such as the fact that since Pixar films are entirely digital, they can easily create widescreen and full-screen versions without losing (as much) detail as conventional films do for home video release.
Still, "The Story of Pixar" is a fascinating look at a creative company that not only revitalized the field of animation; it revolutionized it.
— San Antonio Express-News
Bill Odenkirk, Emmy-winning writer and co-executive producer for "The Simpsons," joins authors Nicholas Christopher, Billy Collins, Tom Zoellner, Elmore Leonard and J.A. Jance as headliners for the Tucson Festival of Books March 13-15 on the University of Arizona campus. To see the list of nearly 200 authors who will appear, as well as more book news, reviews and events, go online to Tucsonfestivalofbooks.org.
