Marisha Pessl Returns, and We're Glad She's Back: "Night Film"

Scott McGrath blew it. Big time.

Five years ago, the investigative reporter announced that his next subject would be an exposé of uber-reclusive film director Stanislas Cordova. After an anonymous source claiming to be Cordova’s chauffeur whispered, “There’s something he does to the children,” McGrath went all Tom-Cruise-on-Oprah’s-sofa on an episode of Nightline. Within days, he’d been served by Cordova’s lawyers and fired from his job; all that against the backdrop of a messy divorce and a highly unfavorable custody arrangement for his daughter Sam. Blew it. Big time.

Just last week Cordova’s 24-year-old daughter Ashley committed suicide. What better reason could there be to re-open his aborted investigation based on notes a half-decade old? Drawing heavily on a purloined case file (a cool three grand paid to his source at the cop shop), McGrath picked up the young woman’s trail through NYC. On his first two stops he collected his investigative team, much in the same sense that a dog collects burrs when running through tall grass. To his Woodward there came a Bernstein in the form of Nora, all of nineteen and freshly arrived in Manhattan from sunny Florida. Next, he added the Columbo-like Hopper, eternally clad in that gray overcoat and those dirty Converse sneakers. Hopper, he would discover, had his own secrets…

There's Just One Word to Describe Marcus Sakey's Brilliance: "Brilliant!"

Nick Cooper – just “Cooper” to his friends – might be considered a traitor to his kind. His kind is the gifted, also known as brilliants, abnorms, twists, freaks… the small segment of humanity born with special abilities. Not X-Man powers like teleportation or pyrokinesis, though: just a little tweak to the brain that makes them much, much, much better at one thing than “normal” people. Imagine an NFL running back who can see where the defense will be in two seconds instead of where they are now; or a savant who can predict to the microsecond when any stock will rise or fall. Get the picture?

Cooper’s gift is pattern recognition. He can look at a person’s face and instinctively know what they’ll do; what they’ll say. He can even look at a person’s cell phone bill or credit card charges and figure out precisely where they’ll be tomorrow. That ability makes him invaluable to his employer; the government agency charged with fighting a “silent” war against abnorm terrorists, terrorists like John Smith. For a decade, Smith has been killing innocent civilians and, for a decade, “Equitable Services” and Cooper have been on his trail.

That’s about to change: in a desperate move, Cooper goes underground, into the giant Wyoming compound of the abnorms. His cover story? He triggered a terrorist bomb that killed over a thousand; and now his old unit is on his trail – and they’ll shoot first and ask questions later.

What Cooper learns inside that compound, however, will change his life…

MaddAddam: Margaret Atwood Completes the Crake Trilogy... Maybe

Who is MaddAddam? Or, perhaps more to the point, who was MaddAddam? After all, the waterless flood (as the Crakers call it) is so “last year,” and already the kudzu has started to bury all that is left of mankind’s many wonders, not to mention its many failures.

Once the BlyssPluss plague engineered by Crake had run its course, the few survivors peeked out of the rubble of the compounds and the plebelands and began to scratch together a new life in a new world. MaddAddam picks up where The Year of the Flood left off; as a handful of former God’s Gardeners have started a post-apocalyptic commune of sorts at the cobb house in the abandoned parklands. They’ve fortified the grounds to keep liobams (lion-lamb crossbreeds) away from their flock of Mo’Hairs (sheep genetically engineered to grow human hair) and keep the piggoons (super-smart giant pigs modified to grow human body parts) out of the garden. As for the roving painballers – a soft of dehumanized killing machine – they can do little but stand guard.

Four Stars at Amazon? What Have Those People Been Smoking!? David Wellington, "Chimera"

1.5 Stars out of 5: Oops!

You really, really want to feel good for Captain Jim Chapel. After all, he's a bona fide hero, having returned from duty in one of our dirty little wars minus his left arm, but he's still in his country's service. You want to feel proud for him… though it's a little hard since he still occasionally wallows in self-pity.

That seems about to change, though, when Chapel is tapped for a super-secret mission by the head of his employer, the DIA (an admiral, not some weenie general). It seems a handful of super-dangerous… criminals? detainees? experiments? have escaped from a super-secret compound hidden deep in the Poconos (is it possible to hide anything in the Poconos? I mean, really…) Now these indefatigable balls of inchoate rage have fanned out across the country looking for a list of eight people. Never mind for now how the DoD (or was it the CIA) got their paws on the list of names.

Promise Me You'll Leave Us Alone: Harlan Coben's "Six Years"

Every romance novel on the face of the earth would have you believe that there is “one true love” out there somewhere, a fated meeting just waiting for two pairs of eyes to lock together across a crowded room. It didn’t quite happen that way for Jake Fisher – Natalie Avery was wearing sunglasses the first time he laid eyes on her – but it was damned close. The two spent a couple of delirious months together at adjacent artistic retreats in upstate Vermont, long enough for Jake to decide Natalie was the fabled “one.” And then she dumped him – dumped him hard one day and sent him an invitation to her wedding the next. When the ceremony was concluded, she made Jake promise that he would never, ever contact her and her new husband.

Dan Brown's "Inferno": Bleeayahhhh...

It looks like Robert Langdon is at it again. The Harvard professor of symbology (and, apparently, art history [and medieval literature, too]) awakens to find himself in an Italian hospital, a bullet wound in his scalp, and two days missing from his memory. Rattling around his addled brain are a sense of foreboding and a snippet of memory of a beautiful woman with silver hair. When a black-clad assassin bursts into the hospital room and murders a doctor before his eyes, he escapes into the night with another doctor - a beautiful bald-headed English polyglot genius - only to realize he's in his favorite city in the whole wide world, Florence. Firenze. Whatever.

A hidden pocket in his Harris Tweed jacket yields a strange device that projects an image of Botticelli's La Mappa dell'Inferno, a map of Hell as envisioned by Dante. What follows next should be no surprise to those who devoured Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons, and The Lost Symbol. I mean it: no surprise...

The image has been subtly altered to... well, it's Dan Brown and Robert Langdon, so of course it's been subtly altered to provide clues to... who knows? We know: an evil genius has set some arcane plan in motion, a plan that only Langdon and his latest sexy sidekick, Sienna, can prevent. Maybe. Maybe not.

Joe Hill, NOS4A2 -- All I Want for Christmas is Three Rows of Teeth

Victoria "Vic" McQueen discovered she had an unusual talent at the ripe old age of eight, discovered it the first time she rode her too-large bicycle through that abandoned covered bridge in Haverhill, Massachusetts, her home town. What she discovered when she popped out the other end of the bridge wasn't the opposite bank of the Merrimack River -- it was the place where her mother had lost her favorite bracelet that same morning. Vic, she learned, had a talent for finding, and that Shorter Way Bridge was her route from lost to found.

Other people had their own talents and their own means for short-circuiting the journey from then to now; now to then. When she was 13, Vic met another one; Here, Iowa, librarian Maggie Leigh; whose supernatural Scrabble tiles foretold Vic's future... "THE BRAT COULD FIND THE WRAITH." The Wraith?

Robert Sawyer's Red Planet Blues: Neither Fish nor Fowl

 Robert J. Sawyer - Red Planet Blues

It’s hard to track a person if you don’t know what body he’s in. He could look like anyone –his own self, a movie star, your best friend… Alex Lomax, greatest private eye in all of New Klondike, Mars (in large part because he’s the only private eye in all of New Klondike, Mars) pretty much has a system, however. He kills ‘em all and lets God sort ‘em out. 

No, to be fair, he doesn’t kill them all: if they’re female, he beds them and then kills them (or tries, anyway). In the finest noir detective tradition, Lomax chases every skirt that comes his way and whips out his other rod for the men. Mike Hammer on Mars? Maybe… 

Owen Laukkanen, Criminal Enterprise: The Sophomore Slump Strikes Again

Criminal Enterprise - Owen Laukkanen

Like many a man, Carter Tomlin defined himself by his profession - a profession in which he was successful; so successful that he and his gorgeous wife and two daughters could live in a St. Paul mansion and he could tool around in an $80K Jaguar. When the middle-aged accountant was handed a pink slip, however, life took a turn for the worse. As weeks turned into months and the bills mounted, Tomlin started getting desperate. 

The reason bank robbers get caught, some claim, is that they're stupid: they make mistakes, they brag to the wrong people, they flash the cash in the wrong place. Carter Tomlin, however, was smart. He robbed again. And again. And after a year or so, he'd assembled a crew of three and perfected his method - a method that, naturally, brought him to the attention of the local office of the FBI.

Enter Carla Windermere... the day Windermere showed up on his doorstep was the day the wheels started to come off Carter Tomlin's little Criminal Enterprise. It would only get worse... 

That's when he robbed his first bank. 

Snow White Must Die? Kill the Bitch Already!

Tobias Sartorius spent a decade in solitary confinement in a German prison, convicted at seventeen for  murdering two seventeen-year-old classmates in his home town, the  village of Altenhain near Frankfurt. Unlike most convicted murderers, Tobi never claimed innocence: he didn't know if he was the killer, since he'd been in a drunken stupor. He was awakened by the police investigating the simultaneous disappearances of Laura and Stefanie - the first his ex-girlfriend, the second his current sweetie. Without bodies, the case was entirely circumstantial, but there was plenty of  evidence and enough witnesses to send the manchild away for a decade.

Life Among Giants: Bill Roorbach's Giant of a Novel

You probably wouldn't expect the Hochmeyer kids to be anything unusual. They seemed just two more garden-variety suburban baby-boomer bedroom-community kids from Connecticut, fated to grow up to work in the financial district or as a nurse. But then life dealt them a different hand.

Meet David "Lizard" Hochmeyer, former third-string quarterback for the Miami Dolphins, now a wildly successful restaurateur; and his sister Kate, at one time eighteenth-ranked women's tennis player in the world, now a bipolar mess. From the day English rocker Dabney Stryker-Stewart and his ballerina wife, Sylphide, moved into the mansion across the lake from the Hochmeyers' home, the siblings' lives changed forever; changed from ordinary lives to Life Among Giants.