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• Main Page
• Hotlists & Notable Books
• Starred Review Lists
• Featured Titles

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• Booklists
• Author Connections
• Interactive Stuff
• Readers Advisory
• Genres

Hotlists 2008

Fiction | Zoho DB

Crime Fiction | Zoho DB

Crime Fiction - embedded

 

Seeing Stars

Lists of (mostly) hardcover books which received at least one starred review (indicating a work of unusual merit) from the following review sources: Booklist , Publisher's Weekly (PW), Kirkus and Library Journal (LJ).

The review journal assigns the star.

Out and About. . .

I'm playing around at Shelfari, LibraryThing, and Good Reads. I've set up links to my pages on these sites. And, yes, I have a hard time keeping up-to-date on these sites...

LibraryThing

GoodReads

Shelfari

I've set up "shelves" from these sites on Overbooked - here

Overbooked is spacing out: Myspace: Overbooked and Crime Space - and, facing out: Facebook profile.

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Overbooked specializes in providing timely information about fiction (all genres) and readable nonfiction. Overbooked has been online since 1994. Overbooked is a work in progress . . .

Overbooked is the winner of the 2008 Louis Shores - Greenwood Publishing Award: to recognize excellence in book reviewing and other media for libraries. The award recipient is selected for significant achievement related to a reviewing process that helps librarians make selection decisions.

Starred Reviews

Historical Fiction Stars

October 28, 2008

Lists of historical fiction titles receiving starred reviews.

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Annotations are from Advance, the Ingram Book Magazine, unless otherwise noted.

Historical fiction is loosely defined on this page - a book set 25 years ago may qualify for inclusion.

Categories on this page include general (period setting), and also worthy of note (time slip, alternate history, generational sagas, etc.)

Titles published after 2000 now have separate pages.
Titles published in 1999 and 1998 are located on this page.

2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 2000 | 1999 | 1998

1999

General Fiction

• Daughter of Fortune
  Author: Allende, Isabel
  Publisher: Harpercollins List Price: $ 26 ISBN: 006019491x
  PW
  Spirited Eliza leaves her home in Chile in search of her lover, who has set out for the California Gold Rush. What she finds instead is adversity and adventure and, through her own resourcefulness, an even more momentous journey to independence and freedom.
• The Long Firm
  Author: Arnott, Jake
  Publisher: Soho List Price: $ 25 ISBN: 156947169x
  PW Kirkus
  Club owner Harry Starks is a feared gangster in 1960s London. Five narrators tell the story of Harry's fall, and surprising resurrection, in this vividly imagined portrait of the sleazy London mobs ("firms") at the end of an era.
• Dreamland
  Author: Baker, Kevin
  Publisher: Harpercollins List Price: $ 26 ISBN: 0060193093
  PW BL LJ
  A literary tour de force in the tradition of E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime that delivers both a masterful, sweeping chronicle of an era of American history and an intimate portrait of a city, depicting it in all its garish, squalid, exuberant, frightening magnificence.
• Empires of Sand
  Author: Ball, David W.
  Publisher: Bantam List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 0553110144
  PW
  Two cousins from Paris meet on the Sahara's blazing sands, one as part of a foolhardy French expeditionary force, the other with the nomadic Tuareg, a majestic race of veiled warriors who live by the harsh desert code of honor.
• The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton; Or, a Memoir of Startling and Amusing Episodes from Itinerant Life - A Novel
  Author: Begiebing, Robert J.
  Publisher: Unv Press of New England List Price: $ 24.95 ISBN: 0874519470
  Library Journal
  Overbooked note: Begiebing, author of The Strange Death of Mistress Coffin, unveils the adventures of feisty Allegra Fullerton, an itinterant artist working in 19th century New England.
• City of Light
  Author: Belfer, Lauren
  Publisher: Dial List Price: $ 24.95 ISBN: 038533401x
  PW
  In the grand tradition of Ragtime and The Alienist comes a dazzling historical novel bursting with vibrant characters both real and imagined. At once a thriller, a love story, and a rich portrait of an American city poised for glory at the turn of the century, City of Light is a human drama wrought with remarkable depth and intelligence.
  
• The Catastrophist
  Author: Bennett, Ronan
  Publisher: Simon & Schuster List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0684863340
  PW
  In subtle, haunting prose, Bennett captures the ricochet between the personal and political in the 1960s Congo - a colonial paradise about to erupt into chaos, where a man struggles to hold on to his lover, his sanity, and his life.
• The Return of Little Big Man
  Author: Berger, Thomas
  Publisher: Little Brown List Price: $ 25 ISBN: 0316098442
  PW BL LJ
  In the long-awaited sequel to the bestselling classic Little Big Man, the foremost chronicler of the American West, Jack Crabb, continues his fabulous adventures.
• Fluke
  Author: Blinder, Martin
  Publisher: Permanent List Price: $ 22 ISBN: 1579620175
  PW
  A novel about President Harding.

  At the Full and Change of the Moon
  Author: Brand, Dionne
  Publisher: Grove List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0802116493
  Booklist Library Journal PW
  From acclaimed and award-winning poet and novelist Dionne Brand comes a saga of magnificent scope, spanning six generations of Africans in the Americas and beyond. Starting with a mass suicide of slaves on Trinidad in 1824, the epic follows a family over the years into the confusion, estrangement and violence of the late 20th century.

• Night Inspector
  Author: Busch, Frederick
  Publisher: Harmony List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0609602357
  Kirkus PW
  New York City, 1867: Repulsed by the revelation that the conversion of black souls into merchandise has not ceased after the Civil War, a veteran finds himself drawn into a steamy underworld of murderers, whores and sewer and slum dwellers.
  
• Voyage
  Author: Caputo, Philip
  Publisher: Knopf List Price: $ 26 ISBN: 0679450394
  Kirkus Library Journal
  On a June morning at the turn of the century, Cyrus Brathwaite orders his three teenage sons to sail away from their Maine home and not to reappear until September. Now, almost a century later, Cyrus's great-granddaughter, Sybil, is determined to know the heart of the story.
• Windward Heights
  Author: Conde, Maryse
  Publisher: Soho List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 1569471614
  Booklist
  Prize-winning Caribbean novelist Maryse Conde reimagines Emily Bronte's passionate novel as a tale of obsessive love between the "African" Rayze and Cathy, the mulatto daughter of the man who takes Rayze in and raises him, but whose treatment goads Rayze into rebellious flight. In Cuba, Rayze makes his fortune, but upon his return he discovers Cathy has wed the weak scion of a socially prominent Creole family. Rayze determines to be avenged for the Loss of his love. His vengeance continues into the next generation, haunting both Cathy's daughter and his son.

  In characteristic lush prose, Conde transposes Wuthering Heights to her native island of Guadeloupe, retaining the emotional power of the original while showing us Caribbean society in the wake of emancipation.

  First published in 1998 by Faber U.K. in Caryl Phillips's prestigious Caribbean series, Windward Heights is making its first appearance in the United States. - Soho marketing.

• Feeding the Ghosts
  Author: D'Aguiar, Fred
  Publisher: Ecco List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 088001623x
  PW LJ Kirkus
  A suspenseful, poetic novel, based on an actual incident about a disease-ridden slave ship, a female captive, and a shocking court case.
• Song of the Exile
  Author: Davenport, Kiana
  Publisher: Ballantine List Price: $ 24.95 ISBN: 0345425391
  BL
  From New Orleans to Paris to Shanghai, through the horrors of Pearl Harbor, Nazi occupation in Europe, Japanese prison camps, and beyond to Hawaii's struggle toward statehood, this stunningly original novel paints a mesmerizing portrait of the native Hawaiian peoples and their history.
• My Last Days as Roy Rogers
  Author: Devoto, Pat Cunningham
  Publisher: Warner List Price: $ 20 ISBN: 0446523887
  BL
  A new novelist makes a stunning debut with this exceptional tale of a young woman coming of age in Alabama during the last days of the 1950's polio epidemic.
• A Star Called Henry
  Author: Doyle, Roddy
  Publisher: Viking List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 0670887579
  Booklist PW Kirkus
  Doyle's new novel introduces Henry Smart, adventurer, IRA assassin, and lover, as he tells the story of his life and of the part he played in Irish history.
• The Fan Maker's Inquisition
  Author: Ducornet, Rikki
  Publisher: Holt List Price: $ 22 ISBN: 0805059261
  PW Booklist
  This brilliant new novel details a new perspective on one of history's most notorious figures: the Marquis de Sade. "Rikki Ducornet is a magic sensualist, a writer's writer, a master of language, a unique voice."- Amy Tan.
• Juneteenth
  Author: Ellison, Ralph (John F. Callahan, ed)
  Publisher: Random List Price: $ 25 ISBN: 0394464575
  PW
  It is Washington D.C., in the 1950's and a race-baiting senator has just been shot on the Senate floor by a young black man. On his deathbed, he summons an elderly Black minister from Oklahoma who comes to his side. Their remarkable conversation and the memories it sparks take them back to their deeply buried past, and finally to a tragic event that first brought them together.
  
• Thunder City: A Novel of Detroit
  Author: Estleman, Loren D.
  Publisher: Forge List Price: $ 22.95 ISBN:0312863691
  Kirkus
  When the 20th century was in its infancy, two things would be invented that would spawn the two biggest industries in history: the automobile and organized crime. Thunder City shows Detroit in the process of becoming the Motor City.
• Charlotte Gray
  Author: Faulks, Sebastian
  Publisher: Random List Price: $ 24.95 ISBN: 037550169x
  Kirkus
  During the darkest days of WWII, a young Scottish woman, falls in love with an RAF pilot. When she learns that his plane has been lost over France, she travels there to work for the Resistance. Soon she finds that the struggle for the country's fate is intimately linked to her own battle to take control over her life.
• Simon's Family
  Author: Fredriksson, Marianne
  Publisher: Ballantine List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0345434595
  Library Journal
  Twelve-year-old Simon has always felt apart from others but it is not until World War II erupts, dominating everyday life in his native Sweden, that he begins to understand why.
• The Journal of Mrs.Pepys: Portrait of a Marriage
  Author: George, Sara
  Publisher: St Martins List Price: $ 21.95 ISBN: 0312205546
  Kirkus
  This fascinating, fictional journal by the wife of celebrated 17th -century diarist Samuel Pepys is a portrait of a tumultuous marriage and a compelling era.
  
• Perlman's Ordeal
  Author: Hansen, Brooks
  Publisher: Soho List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0374230781
  Booklist Kirkus
  London, 1906: Dr. August Perlman - music lover, opium addict, and director of London Hospital's new department of "clinical suggestion" - is on his way to the symphony when an odd patient is brought to his office. Sylvie Blum is fourteen, catatonic, unwashed, dehydrated. It seems that another girl's personality is living inside her. Perlman returns from the symphony with the spiritualist Madame Helena Barrett, who gets Sylvie to talk. As her shadow self begins to tell her story, it bears astonishing resemblance to the myth of Atlantis. The girl within the girl says she once lived there. The doctor wants to suppress her story; the spiritualist wants it told. And so they battle for the soul of the girt. Their conflict is overshadowed by the ghost of Madame's late brother, a brilliantly imagined composer.

  Hansen's first novel, The Chess Garden, left the reader "grateful for and almost stupefied by the sustained effort of imagination" (The Boston Sunday Globe). In Perlman's Ordeal, he has taken the world of myth and brought it to life in a novel. - Farrar Straus Giroux marketing.

• Hitler's Niece
  Author: Hansen, Ron
  Publisher: HarperCollins List Price: $ 25 ISBN: 0060194197
  Booklist
  In this dazzling new novel, National Book Award-winning author Ron Hansen evokes the startling relationship between Adolph Hitler and his much younger niece, Geli Raubal, whose mysterious death at the age of 23 has never been fully explained.
• Dark Eagle: A Story of Benedict Arnold and the Amerian Revolution
  Author: Harr, John Ensor
  Publisher: Viking List Price: $ 27.95 ISBN: 0670887048
  Kirkus
  The story of Benedict Arnold's career, his heroism, his military exploits, and his May-September romance with Peggy Shippen, who became his wife and partner in treason.
• Hindenburg Crashes Nightly
  Author: Hrbek, Greg
  Publisher: Bard List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0380977419
  Kirkus
  In remarkably vivid and lyrical prose, this James Jones First Novel Award winner, set in 1947, tells the story of two lovers bound by shadowy secrets from their shared past.
  
• Stargazer
  Author: Jaffe, Michele
  Publisher: Pocket List Price: $ 18 ISBN: 0671027395
  LJ PW
  A rich and unforgettable new voice in women's fiction emerges with this lush, exquisitely sensual novel, set in Venice, the world's most intriguing and picturesque city, during the Italian Renaissance.
  
• Buckskin Line
  Author: Kelton, Elmer
  Publisher: St Martins List Price: $ 22.95 ISBN: 0312865228
  Booklist
  From a six-time Spur Award winner comes the story of a Texas Ranger who carries heavy burdens. The father and brother of the woman he loves have been lynched, and he is fated to meet the Comanche warrior whose band killed his family.
• Liar's Moon: A Long Story
  Author: Kimball, Philip
  Publisher: Henry Holt List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0805061487
  PW
  Spanning the years immediately before the Civil War through those immediately following Wounded Knee, Liar's Moon presents a subversive retelling of the story of the American West.
• Cracks
  Author: Kohler, Sheila
  Publisher: Zoland List Price: $ 21 ISBN: 158195008x
  Kirkus Library Journal
  A stunning tale of the passion and tribalism of adolescence, Cracks - set in a South African boarding school for girls in the 1960s - is reminiscent of Lord of the Flies and Picnic at Hanging Rock.
• A Gesture Life
  Author: Lee, Chang-Rae
  Publisher: Riverhead List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 1573221465
  Booklist Library Journal PW Kirkus
  From the acclaimed author of Native Speaker comes his second novel about a Japanese World War II veteran who becomes a proper man and upstanding citizen in New York.
• Fleur De Leigh's Life of Crime
  Author: Leslie, Diane
  Publisher: Simon & Schuster List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0684856956
  LJ
  A heartwarming, autobiographical debut novel about coming of age in late 1950's Hollywood. Featured on NPR's "Selected Shorts."
  
• Shadow-Box
  Author: Logue, Antonia
  Publisher: Grove List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0802116477
  Kirkus PW Booklist
  Based on one of the greatest and most unusual love stories of the 20th century, this literary novel explores the life of Arthur Cravan - semi-professional boxer, influential art critic, legendary bon vivant, and nephew of Oscar Wilde.
• The Crime of Olga Arbyelina
  Author: Makine, Andre
  Publisher: Arcade List Price: $ 24.95 ISBN: 1559704942
  PW Kirkus
  A Russian princess, a refugee from the Bolsheviks, abandoned by a faithless husband, flees with her child to France, where she is subsequently found half-naked on a riverbank next to a body of a man with a terrible wound on his head.
• Bone by Bone
  Author: Matthiessen, Peter
  Publisher: Random House List Price: $ 26.95 ISBN: 0375501029
  BL Kirkus LJ PW
  Although it stands alone, Bone by Bone is the conclusion and capstone of the Watson trilogy as well as a true tour de force. Matthiessen brings his anti-hero to life with a complexity of character and profound humanity that establishes the novel as a modern classic.
  
• The Queen's Bastard
  Author: Maxwell, Robin
  Publisher: Arcade List Price: $ 24.95 ISBN: 1559707456
  PW
  In this sequel to The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn, Maxwell writes of a young man named Arthur Dudley, the son of Elizabeth I and her lover, Robin Dudley. Earl of Leicester.
  
• Mr. Darwin's Shooter
  Author: McDonald, Roger
  Publisher: Grove/Atlantic List Price: $ 25 ISBN: 087113733x
  PW Kirkus
  Aboard the HMS Beagle, 15-year-old Syms Covington enters the service of Charles Darwin, shooting and collecting hundreds of specimens for his "gent", specimens that become fundamental to the formation of Darwin's theory of evolution.
  
• The Messenger
  Author: Montero, Mayra
  Publisher: HarperCollins List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0060192232
  PW
  Set in Cuba, this brooding novel tells the story of two star-crossed lovers, tenor Enrico Caruso and his mulatto mistress, whose destinies unfold to the rhythms of African and Chinese magic.
  
• Jem (and Sam)
  Author: Mount, Ferdinand
  Publisher: Carroll & Graff List Price: $ 25.95 ISBN: 078670649x
  BL
  How does Jeremiah Mount, a dealer in pornography and a failed farmer's son, come to be the lover of the Duchess of Albemarle and the colleague of the great Samuel Pepys? This novel of jealousy and envy evokes the London of the Restoration as it brings its dubious hero to life.
  
• Ahab's Wife or the Star-Gazer
  Author: Naslund, Sena Jeter
  Publisher: William Morrow List Price: $ 28 ISBN: 0688171877
  PW Booklist Library Journal Kirkus
  "Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last." An epic-scale, brilliant and compelling saga, inspired by a brief passage in Moby Dick, chronicles the life of Capt. Ahab's wife.
• The Late Mr. Shakespeare
  Author: Nye, Robert
  Publisher: Arcade List Price: $ 25.95 ISBN: 1559704691
  Kirkus
  Not since Anthony Burgess's Nothing Like the Sun has a novel bout Shakespeare been this rich, strange, and wonderful. Our guide to the life of the Bard in Robert Nye's dazzling new novel is an actor known as Pickleherring, who asserts that he was not only an original member of Shakespeare's acting troupe but the creator of the greatest female roles, from Cleopatra through Portia. In an attic above a brothel in Restoration London, Pickleherring, now ancient, sits down to write the story of Shakespeare's life. Gentle readers will learn much that will cause their eyes to pop open. Using sources both firsthand and far-fetched -- recounting the myths and rumors surrounding Shakespeare with as much glee as he does earthier realities -- Pickleherring gives us an outrageously bawdy, language-loving, and edifying romp through the life and times of the greatest writer in the English language. - Publisher's marketing.
  
• Blue at the Mizzen
  Author: O'Brien, Patrick
  Publisher: W.W. Norton List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0393048446
  PW
  The excitement of the Aubrey/Maturin series soars to new heights in this volume, as Jack, again the daring frigate commander of old, stakes all on a desperate solo night raid against the might of the Spanish viceroy in Peru.
• Fast Eddie
  Author: O'Connell, Robert L.
  Publisher: William Morrow List Price: $ 24.50 ISBN: 0688166903
  Booklist
  The author of Arms and Men: A History of War, Weapons, and Aggression returns with a highly original novel of Eddie Rickenbacker - a pioneer in the world of automobiles, America's World War I flying ace, and a major influence on on the aircraft industry.
• A Prayer for the Dying
  Author: O'Nan, Stewart
  Publisher: Henry Holt List Price: $ 22 ISBN: 0805061479
  PW BL LJ
  Dark, poetic, and chilling, A Prayer for the Dying asks if it is possible to be a good man in a time of madness as members of the town succumb to a fatal epidemic.
  
• Thunder on the Mountain
  Author: Poyer, David
  Publisher: Forge List Price: $ 25.95 ISBN: 0312864949
  PW LJ BL
  An ambitious novel of heroism and violence in the western Pennsylvania oil country at the nadir of the great Depression, in the tradition of Jack London and John Steinbeck.
• Mollie Peer: Underground Adventure of the Moosepath League
  Author: Reid, Van
  Publisher: Viking List Price: $ 24.95 ISBN: 0670886335
  Kirkus PW
  P.G. Wodehouse meets Mark Twain in the further rollicking adventures and comical quirks of those turn-of-the-century Yankees who captured hearts in Cordelia Underwood.
  
• The Jukebox Queen of Malta
  Author: Rinaldi, Nicholas M.
  Publisher: Simon & Schuster List Price: $ 25 ISBN: 0684856123
  LJ
  From the heralded author of Bridge Fall Down comes a lyrical, heart-wrenching story set amidst the chaos - and absurdity- of war-torn Malta during World War II.
• Why She Left Us
  Author: Rizzuto, Reiko
  Publisher: HarperCollins List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0060193700
  PW
  This powerful first novel weaves in and out of the personal tragedies and political persecution of three generations of a Japanese-American family.
• Mr. Wroe's Virgins
  Author: Rogers, Jane
  Publisher: Overlook List Price: $ 24.95 ISBN: 0879517026
  PW
  In Lancashire in 1830, when God told prophet John Wroe to comfort himself with seven virgins, his congregation offered him their daughters. Mr. Wroe's Virgins tells the story of the nine months of their life together, until accusations of indecency and the trial that follows bring Wroe's household to a dramatic end.
  
• Abyssinian
  Author: Rufin, Jean-Christophe
  Publisher: Norton List Price: $ 25.95 ISBN: 0393047164
  Library Journal
  A young French physician braves the wilds of Abyssinia to cure its king, then returns to France on an equally perilous mission to the court at Versailles. Along the way, he falls madly in love with the French consul's daughter and discovers the splendors of a great empire and civilization.
• Yellow Jack
  Author: Russell, Jack
  Publisher: Norton List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 0393047687
  PW
  An apprentice at a Paris studio credited with inventing the magic art of photography flees to New Orleans with his master's stolen camera and achieves fame. His success leads to his entanglement with a voodoo-adept mistress.
• Gardens in the Dunes
  Author: Silko, Leslie
  Publisher: Simon & Schuster List Price: $ 25 ISBN :0684811545
  BL PW
  From the acclaimed author of Almanac of the Dead - the smoldering, haunting, and incandescent story of an Indian girl orphaned by an act of white brutality and adopted by a proper Victorian family.
  
• November 1916
  Author: Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr
  Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux List Price: $ 35 ISBN: 0374223149
  Kirkus
  A vivid and sweeping panorama of Imperial Russia at war on the eve of revolution, November 1916 makes readers experience the whole bubbling cauldron. With masterly and moving empathy, the author unforgettably transports us to that time and palace the last of pre-Soviet Russia.
• Fear
  Author: Spanidou, Irini
  Publisher: Knopf List Price: $ 21 ISBN: 0394580559
  PW
  The author of the much praised God's Snake takes readers to Greece in the 1950's, and into the spartan military world that has shaped a 13-year-old girl, as she moves fearfully yet with intelligence and nerve toward womanhood.
• Fatal Majesty: A Novel of Mary, Queen of Scots
  Author: Tannahill, Reay
  Publisher: St Martins List Price: $ 25.95 ISBN: 0312198817
  BL
  
• Mitt Man
  Author: Taylor, Mel
  Publisher: William Morrow List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0688160948
  BL
  Expertly evoking black life in the south in the late 1920's, The Mitt Man, set in a world of gospel choirs and chain gangs, explores the dodgy realm where grifters get religion, and a perfect scam just may pay off in salvation.
  
• Tipping the Velvet
  Author: Waters, Sarah
  Publisher: Riverhead List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 1573221368
  PW
  "Lavishly crammed with the songs, smells, and costumes of late Victorian England" (The Daily Telegraph), this delicious, steamy debut novel chronicles the adventures of a young girl whose fortunes are forever changed when she falls in love with a cross-dressing music-hall singer.
  
• The Shiloh Renewal
  Author: Woodruff, Joan Leslie
  Publisher: Black Heron List Price: $ 22.95 ISBN: 0930773500
  Kirkus
  When a girl falls into a coma after an auto accident that kills her sister, she meets people from another century - doctors, nurses, and soldiers, both Northern and Southern, who are on their way to Shiloh to fight a great battle. The girl's doctors expect her to die, but she fools everybody, and by witnessing the deaths of her Civil War era friends, she is able to come to terms with the loss of her sister.
  Read-alike suggestions: Civil War Fiction Stars reading list.

  Mystery

• River of Darkness
  Author: Airth, Rennie
  Publisher: Viking List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 0670885959
  Kirkus PW
  A powerful debut novel set in rural England just after World War I. Sent by Scotland Yard to investigate a murderous attack in a small Surrey village, Inspector John Madden sets out to identify and capture the killer--a demented former soldier with a bloody past.
• Lying With the Enemy
  Author: Binding, Tim
  Publisher: Carrol & Graf List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0786706570
  Kirkus
  In 1943 the skies over Guernsey darken, and the search for a killer unearths horrors shared by the British and the Nazis alike, in this heart-stopping novel that bares the human soul in a time of war.
• Murder in Marais
  Author: Black, Cara
  Publisher: Soho List Price: $ 22 ISBN: 1569471592
  PW
  It is November 1993 and the French prime ministerial candidate is about to sign a treaty with Germany that wilt severely restrict immigration, reminiscent of the Vichy laws. Aimee Leduc is approached by a rabbi to decipher a fifty-year-old encrypted photograph and place it in the hands of Lili Stein. When she arrives at Lili's apartment in the Marais, the old Jewish quarter of Paris, she finds a corpse on whose forehead is carved a swastika. With the help of her partner, a dwarf with extraordinary computer hacking skills, Aimee is determined to solve this horrendous crime. Then more murders follow. Her search for the kilter leads her to a German war veteran involved in the 1940s with a Jewish girt he was supposed to send to her death. It takes Aimee undercover inside a neo-Nazi group, where she must play a dangerous game of current politics and old war crimes. Many of the order Jews in the Marais are afraid and prefer to leave the past alone, but the horrible legacy of the death camps and the words "never forget" propel Aimee to find out the true identities of the criminals past and present. - Soho marketing.
• Majic Man: Nathan Heller
  Author: Collins, Max Allen
  Publisher: Dutton List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 0525945156
  PW
  It's 1949, and Nathan Heller, president of the A-1 Detective Agency of Chicago, has been called to Washington, D.C., by retiring Secretary of Defense James Forrestal. The man is fearful of his life, and it's up to Nate to find out who wants him dead.
• Kissed a Sad Goodbye
  Author: Crombie, Deborah
  Publisher: Bantam Doubleday Dell List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 055310943x
  PW Kirkus
  Crombie weaves a tale of two boys who become allies, then friends, into a story of trust and betrayal whose repercussions echo across six decades.
• The Reeve's Tale
  Author: Frazer, Margaret
  Publisher: Simon & Schuster List Price: $ 25 ISBN: 0684855135
  PW
  Two-time Edgar Award nominee Margaret Frazer's national bestselling medieval mystery series continues as the "strong and saucy" (Minneapolis Star Tribune) Sister Frevisse investigates a chain of unholy events in a town plagued by sin.
• Red Gold
  Author: Furst, Alan
  Publisher: Random List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 0679451862
  LJ PW BL Kirkus
  Within the fragmented French resistance, an intelligence officer decides to strike a deal with the devil in this rich and suspenseful part thriller, part love story spy novel.
• Thirteenth Night: A Medieval Mystery
  Author: Gordon, Alan
  Publisher: St Martins List Price: $ 22 ISBN: 0312200358
  BL
  In the 13th -century Europe, a secret organization - The Fool's Guild - existed to influence events behind the scene, and one such manipulation was recorded by Shakespeare, in altered form, in his play Twelfth Night. But now, may years later, the Duke of Orsino is murdered. Feste, a jester with the Fool's Guild, must return to once again match wits with his advserary Malvolio - agent of Saladin and sworn enemy of the Guild.
• Hart's War
  Author: Katzenbach, John
  Publisher: Ballantine List Price: $ 24.95 ISBN: 034542624x
  PW
  A breathtaking novel of murder and justice in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp, from the bestselling author of Just Cause. When a Tuskegee airman arrives at the camp, 2nd Lt. Tommy Hart is tapped to defend him in a murder trial rife with racial tension and raw conflict. The lines between ally and enemy blur and Hart soon realizes that nothing is what it seems.
• The Wanton Angel
  Author: Marston, Edward
  Publisher: St Martins List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 0312203918
  PW
  The tenth in an Edgar Award-nominated series set in the theaters of Elizabethan England. When court politics threaten to lower the curtain on Lord Westfield's Men, an anonymous benefactor emerges. Soon, one of the group's rising stars is found murdered.
• The Unburied
  Author: Palliser, Charles
  Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux List Price: $ 25 ISBN: 0374280355
  BL LJ PW
  Three separate tales are interwoven in this novel about Dr. Courtine, an unworldly academic, who is invited to spend the days before Christmas with an old friend. Doubly distracted, he becomes unwittingly enmeshed in the sequence of terrible events that follows his arrival.
• Faded Coat of Blue
  Author: Parry, Owen
  Publisher: Avon List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0380976420
  PW
  A riveting and original tale of crime, detection, and punishment set amid the blood and tumult of the American Civil War - for fans of such books as The Alienist and Cold Mountain.
• The Twisted Root
  Author: Perry, Anne
  Publisher: Ballantine List Price: $ 25 ISBN: 0345433254
  Kirkus
  The tenth novel in the riveting series featuring Victorian private eye William Monk. In stunning feats of imagination, Anne Perry brings to life the lost world of England's Victorian Age as she holds readers rapt with a chilling story of love, betrayal, and consummate evil.
• Bedford Square
  Author: Perry, Anne
  Publisher: Storey List Price: $ 24.95 ISBN: 0345432983
  BL PW
  In Perry's 21st novel of scandal and suspense in Victorian England, the detective duo of Thomas and Charlotte Pitt investigates the death of a shabbily dressed man, whose bloody body is found on the doorstep of General Brandon Ballantyne. They must tread lightly, however, lest their investigation triggers a tragedy of immense proportions, ensnaring honorable men like flies in a web of terror.
• Falcon at the Portal: Amelia Peabody
  Author: Peters, Elizabeth
  Publisher: Twilight List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0380976587
  PW
  1911: Amelia Peabody and her family arrive in Egypt for their annual excavation and for the wedding of Ramses' best friend David to Amelia's niece. However, when David is accused of selling ancient Egyptian artifacts that are really high-priced, almost undetectable fakes, Amelia must endeavor to clear his name.
• The Fencing Master
  Author: Perez-Reverte, Arturo
  Publisher: Harcourt Brace List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0151001812
  PW Kirkus
  Madrid, 1868: Don Jaime, a fencing master and man of honor, is approached by a beautiful and mysterious woman who asks him to teach her the secret of the unstoppable thrust. Soon the Maestro is involved in a plot that includes seduction, politics, secret documents - and murder.
• In a Dry Season
  Author: Robinson, Peter
  Publisher: Twilight List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0380975815
  PW Kirkus BL
  A playful child wandering in remains unearths a human skeleton that forensics determine to belong to a woman who appears to have been murdered and hidden beneath the floor of an old building.
• The Crook Factory
  Author: Simmons, Dan
  Publisher: Avon List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0380973685
  BL Kirkus
  For readers who loved The Alienist and Los Alamos, this stunning novel of historical suspense imagines Ernest Hemingway as a spy in Cuba in 1942.
• Peking Letter: A Novel of China's Civil War
  Author: Topping, Seymour
  Publisher: Public Affairs List Price: $ 25 ISBN: 1891620355
  BL
  A love affair between a CIA agent and a young Chinese revolutionary changes the turbulent course of the Chinese Civil War in this panoramic debut novel by renowned journalist Seymour Topping.

---

1998

General Fiction

• Conversion
  Author: Appelfeld, Aron
  Publisher: Schocken List Price: $ 22 ISBN: 0805241531
  PW Kirkus
  From the internationally acclaimed author of Badenheim 1939 and The Iron Tracks comes a haunting love story set in turn-of-the-century Austria.
  
• Master Georgie
  Author: Bainbridge, Beryl
  Publisher: Carroll & Graf List Price: $ 21 ISBN: 0786705639
  PW Kirkus
  Booker Prize short list title.
  The magnificent new novel by the acclaimed author of The Birthday Boys and Every Man for Himself goes back to the mid-19th century to accompany the travels of a group of Liverpool characters to the Crimea, bringing the horrors of a significant battle shockingly to life.
  
• The Hours
  Author: Cunningham, Michael
  Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux List Price: $ 22 ISBN: 0374172897
  PW Kirkus BL
  The author of At Home at the End of the World and Flesh and Blood draws inventively on the life and work of Virginia Woolf to tell the story of a group of contemporary characters struggling with the conflicting claims of love and inheritance, hope and despair.
  
• The Poisonwood Bible
  Author: Kingsolver, Barbara
  Publisher: Harpercollins List Price: $ 27.50 ISBN: 0060175400
  PW LJ BL Kirkus
  In her first novel since Pigs in Heaven, Kingsolver offers a compelling exploration of religion, conscience, imperialist arrogance, and the many paths to redemption. The Poisonwood Bible tells the story of an American Family that travels to the Congo in 1959, a time of tremendous political and social upheaval.
• Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae
  Author: Pressfield, Steven
  Publisher: Doubleday List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 0385492510
  PW LJ Kirkus
  With an epic vision and a dynamic cast of characters, this literary page-turner, set in 480 B.C. , brings the Homeric tradition into the 21st century with the tale of the historic battle between the Greeks and the two-million-man strong Persian army.
  
• The Riddle of the Lost Lover
  Author: Veryan, Patricia
  Publisher: St Martins List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 0312193246
  BL
  The dashing hero of The Riddle of the Alabaster Royal, Veryan's "best effort yet" (Publishers Weekly) returns in a spirited novel mixing romance and mystery.
• The Anatomist
  Author: Andahazi, Frederico
  Publisher: Doubleday List Price: $ 22.95 ISBN: 0385491328
  LJ
  Published to critical acclaim in his native Argentina, Andahazi's sensational #1 bestseller transports readers to Venice in the 16th century, telling the story of Colon - a man of science and reason - who is on the verge of making a most earthshaking discovery.
  Read-alike suggestions: Casanova in Love and The Love that Binds by Julian Rios.
• The Tonto Woman and Other Western Stories
  Author: Leonard, Elmore
  Publisher: Delacorte List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 0385323867
  Kirkus
  Etching a harsh, haunting landscape with razor-sharp prose, Elmore Leonard shows in these 19 brilliant stories why he has become the American poet laureate of the desperate and the bold.
  Read-alike suggestions: Incident at Twenty Mile by Trevanian, The Smiling Country by Elmer Kelton and Deadville by Robert F. Jones.
• Casanova in Love
  Author: Miller, Andrew
  Publisher: Harcourt Brace List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0151004099
  PW Kirkus
  A seductive, witty, psychologically acute rendering of the extraordinary man who seduced and conquered his way into history. In 1863, at the age of 38, Casanova arrives in England seeking a respite from his restless travels and liaisons. Before long, his pursuit of young Marie Charpillon drives him from exhilaration to despair.
  Read-alike suggestions: The Love that Binds by Julian Rios and The Anatomist by Frederico Andahazi.
• I Married a Communist
  Author: Roth, Philip
  Publisher: Houghton Mifflin List Price: $ 26 ISBN: 0395933463
  BL
  Iron Rinn, born Ira Ringold, is an idealistic American Communist, a self-educated ditchdigger turned popular performer, married to the nation's reigning radio actress. Fierce and funny, eloquently rendered and politically accurate, the story of Rinn's denunciation and disgrace during the time of McCarthy's "witch hunts" brings to harrowing life the human drama that was central to the nation's betrayal, blacklisting, and naming names.
  
• Incident at Twenty Mile
  Author: Trevanian
  Publisher: St Martins List Price: $ 24.95 ISBN: 0312192339
  Kirkus
  The author of such bestsellers as The Eiger Sanction and Shibumi returns with a brilliant foray into a new genre. Set at the turn of the last century, Incident at Twenty Mile tells a compellingly dark and dirty story of the Old West, but packed with all the chills, thrills, and improbable coincidences readers love.
  Read-alike suggestion: The Tonto Woman and Other Western Stories by Elmore Leonard, The Smiling Country by Elmer Kelton and Deadville by Robert F. Jones.
• The Elusive Flame
  Author: Woodiwiss, Kathleen
  Publisher: Avon List Price: $ 14 (trade paper) ISBN: 0380766558
  BL
  In the long-awaited sequel to Woodiwiss's groundbreaking classic love story The Flame and the Flower, the saga of the bold and adventurous Birmingham family continues. This time it is Beauregard Birmingham, son of Brandon and Heather, who is the focus of the action, as he comes to the aid of a beautiful childhood companion who is in need of passage to the Carolinas.
• The Voyage of the Narwhal
  Author: Barrett, Andrea
  Publisher: W.W. Norton List Price: $ 24.95 ISBN: 039304632x
  PW Kirkus
  A major novel by the author of Ship Fever, winner of the 1996 National Book Award for fiction. Part adventure, part love story, this unforgettable novel captures a crucial moment in the history of exploration. Combining fact and fiction, the story focuses on Erasmus Darwin Wells, a 19th-century scholar/naturalist and his expedition to search for an open polar sea.
• The Farming of Bones
  Author: Danticat, Edwidge
  Publisher: Soho List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 1569471266
  PW LJ
  From the acclaimed author of Krik? Krak!. 1937: On the Dominican side of the Haiti border, Amabelle, a maid to the young wife of an army colonel falls in love with sugarcane cutter Sebastian. She longs to become his wife and walk into their future. Instead, terror enfolds them. But the story does not end here: it begins.
• Into the Wilderness
  Author: Donati, Sara
  Publisher: Bantam Doubleday Dell List Price: $ 22.95 ISBN: 0553107364
  BL
  In December of 1792, Elizabeth Middleton leaves England to join her father and brother in the remote mountain village of Paradise, New York, and falls in love with a man who's different from any she has ever encountered.
• I Can't Wait on God
  Author: French, Albert
  Publisher: Doubleday List Price: $ 22.95 ISBN: 0385483643
  BL LJ
  Told over the course of five summer days and nights in 1950, I Can't Wait on God pursues the themes of beauty, humility, and what is truly precious in our lives, with a story of crowded joys and familiar despair set in post-World War II Pittsburgh.
• Lenoir
  Author: Greenhall, Ken
  Publisher: Zoland List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0944072933
  PW
  The deftly imagined story of the unknown African model who posed for Reuben's famous Four Heads of a Negro - in part, a deeply serious exploration of 17th- century white European society as seen through the eyes of a slave.
• Almost Heaven
  Author: Wiggins, Marianne
  Publisher: Crown List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0517707624
  LJ
  One of today's most critically acclaimed authors presents an intellectually dazzling, emotionally incandescent story of memory and the redemptive power of love - a whirlwind love story and a personal letter to the South.
• The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty
  Author: Barry, Sebastian
  Publisher: Viking List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 0670878286
  PW LJ Kirkus BL
  An acclaimed playwrights novel - the heartbreaking epic of a fugitive everyman. When a Irish romantic innocent signs up to fight with the British in World War I, he is branded a traitor by his countrymen - and the IRA orders his assassination to be carried out by a childhood friend.
• Visible Worlds
  Author: Bowering, Marilyn
  Publisher: Harperflamingo List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0060191481
  PW
  A haunting tale about the effects of war on personal lives, this extraordinary novel tells the mesmerizing story of twin brothers born into an eccentric family led by a father drawn to the magic of "personal magnetism", and a German-immigrant mother obsessed with the ghosts of the past.
• The Silent
  Author: Dann, Jack
  Publisher: Bantam Doubleday Dell List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 0553097164
  LJ
  The internationally bestselling author of The Memory Cathedral now renders an extraordinary novel about a boy coming of age during the civil war.
• A Soldier's Book
  Author: Higgins, Joanna
  Publisher: Permanent List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 1579620094
  BL
  Ira Cahill Stevens, a young Union soldier taken captive by Confederates during the Battle of the Wilderness in May of 1864, finds himself fighting a new battle as the novel opens. One waged within the head and heart against the "dead nothingness of despair".
• The Museum Guard
  Author: Norman, Howard
  Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0374216495
  Kirkus
  When the famous Dutch painting Jewess on a Street in Amsterdam arrives at a museum in Halifax, a disturbed young woman abandons her life in favor of the one she imagines for the painting's subject --even as being a Jew in Amsterdam becomes more perilous as the clouds of World War II gather in Europe.
• Excalibur: A Novel of Arthur (Warlord Chronicles #3)
  Author: Cornwell, Bernard
  Publisher: St. Martins List Price: $ 24.95 ISBN: 0312185758
  PW BL
  The Winter King and Enemy of God established Bernard Cornwell as the writer capable of taking the beloved King Arthur legend and making it fresh and new for our time. In this riveting final volume of Cornwell's trilogy, Arthur and his warriors must face their Saxon enemies - now allied with Arthur's betrayer Lancelot - for the throne of all Britain.
• On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon
  Author: Gibbons, Kaye
  Publisher: Putnam List Price: $ 22.95 ISBN: 0399142991
  BL
  The author of Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman does it again with a powerful new novel that invites readers to experience a long-gone South, through the life of Emma Garnet, a fascinating woman who lived from 1842 to 1900.
• Mrs. Einstein
  Author: McGrail, Anna
  Publisher: Norton List Price: $ 24.95 ISBN: 0393046117
  Kirkus LJ
  When Albert Einstein was a young man, his wife-to-be gave birth to a daughter, Lieserl, whom they soon gave up for adoption. Beyond this, all knowledge of her is lost to history. A tour-de-force of the literary imagination, this novel of breathtaking audacity constructs Lieserl's fierce quest for revenge.
• A World Away
  Author: O'Nan, Stewart
  Publisher: Holt List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0805057749
  PW
  Set at a remote beachfront cottage in the Hamptons one summer during World War II, this rich, romantic story follows the fortunes of the Langer family, whose eldest son is missing in action in the Pacific theater.
• Deadville
  Author: Jones, Robert F.
  Publisher: Dunne List Price: $ 22.95 ISBN: 031285642
  BL
  
• After Dunkirk
  Author: McGraw, Milena
  Publisher: Houghton Mifflin List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0395868858
  LJ BL
  
• Service of Clouds
  Author: Falconer, Delia
  Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0374261059
  Kirkus
  In 1907, in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, Eureka Jones, a young pharmacist's assistant with "historical eyes", falls in love with Harry Phillips, a man from elsewhere who photographs clouds and the shadows they cast on the land. Australian writer Delia Falconer's first novel tells the story of their romance, which unfolds in a small town of colorful eccentrics.
• Quarantine
  Author: Crace, Jim
  Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0374239622
  Kirkus PW
  The brilliantly imagined story of Christ's forty days in the wilderness - a tale of three men, a woman, and a curious wanderer whose peculiar fate is transformed into legend - Quarantine is a work at once timeless - and timely- a parable for the ages. Short-listed for England's Booker Award.
• Black Ajax
  Author: Fraser, George MacDonald
  Publisher: Carroll & Graf List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0786705531
  PW
  
• Kalimantaan
  Author: Godshalk, C.S.
  Publisher: Holt/Wood List Price: $ 25 ISBN: 0805055339
  PW
  One hundred and fifty years ago, a young Englishman founded a private raj on the coast of Borneo. The world that resulted eventually encompassed a territory the size of England - its campaign paid for in human heads. Kalimantaan is the story of Victorian social mores superimposed on one of the most violent cultures on Earth and a remarkable tribe of fugitives, missionaries, and romantics drawn to this remote outpost.
• 1916: A Novel of the Irish Rebellion
  Author: Llywelyn, Morgan
  Publisher: Forge List Price: $ 24.95 ISBN: 031286101x
  PW
  The Easter Rising of 1916 was a major turning point in Irish history. Peopled by patriots and poets, fueled by a common cause, and played out in the historic streets of Dublin, it is a story everyone knows and no one will ever forget. Now Morgan Llywelyn offers a stirring and powerful novel set against the backdrop of this life-changing event.
• Jacob's Ladder: A Story of Virginia During the War
  Author: McCaig, Donald
  Publisher: Norton List Price: $ 25.95 ISBN: 039304629x
  PW
  A novel that resonates with the bitter glory and deep human shame of the Confederacy. Against the epic canvas of the Civil War, the people, black and white, of one Virginia plantation fulfill their unforgettable destinies.
• This Side of Brightness
  Author: McCann, Colum
  Publisher: Holt/Metropolitan List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0805054418
  PW
  In the early years of the century, Nathan Walker leaves his native Georgia for New York City and the most dangerous job in America - as a sandhog, burrowing beneath the East River, digging the tunnel that will carry trains from Brooklyn to Manhattan.
• The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton
  Author: Smiley, Jane
  Publisher: Knopf List Price: $ 26 ISBN: 0679450742
  PW BL
  Four years after her Pulitzer Prize-winning A Thousand Acres, and two years after her hilarious novel of Academe, Moo, the brilliantly protean Jane Smiley once again demonstrates the variety and range of her talent. In her new books Smiley gives readers the wonderfully observed memoirs of a woman who marries an abolitionist from New England and with him settles in Kansas in the fateful year of 1855 to help ensure that the territory will enter the Union as a free state.
• Cloudsplitter
  Author: Banks, Russell
  Publisher: Harper Flamingo List Price: $ 27.50 ISBN: 0060994606
  PW LJ
  This brilliant recounting of the events surrounding John Brown's legendary raid on the armory at Harper's Ferry is a masterpiece of modern American storytelling that will be remembered as the crowning achievement of Banks' celebrated career.
• Saints and Villains
  Author: Giardina, Denise
  Publisher: Norton List Price: $ 25 ISBN: 0393045714
  PW Kirkus
  An astonishing novel in the tradition of Schindler's List, Saints and Villains dramatizes the painful dilemma of acting morally in a time of great evil through the fictional recreation of the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. This emblematic figure risked his life - and finally lost it- through his participation in the failed plot to assassinate Hitler.
• Shadows of a Childhood: A Novel of War and Friendship
  Author: Gille, Elisabeth
  Publisher: New Press List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 1565843886
  PW LJ
  
• Riven Rock
  Author: Boyle, T. Coraghessan
  Publisher: Viking List Price: $24.95 ISBN: 0670878812
  BL Kirkus LJ
  In his most fully realized and compassionate novel to date, T.C. Boyle transforms two characters straight out of history into rich, mythic creations whose tortured love and epic story is intimate enough to break our hearts. Wed to Stanley McCormick, a schizophrenic sexual maniac, Katherine Dexter struggles to cure him while he is locked up in his Santa Barbara mansion and forbidden the mere sight of a woman- above all, his wife.
• Jack Maggs
  Author: Carey, Peter
  Publisher: Knopf List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0679440089
  PW BL LJ
  From the prize-winning author of Oscar and Lucinda comes a novel of Dickensian London - filled with mystery, science, and passion. After he is deported to Australia for stealing, Jack Maggs returns to London, under threat of execution, where he inveigles his way into a handsome household and is quickly embroiled in various emotional entanglements.
• Unicorn's Blood
  Author: Finney, Patricia
  Publisher: St Martin's Price: $ 25 ISBN: 0312182015
  LJ
  From the author of Firedrake's Eye comes a masterpiece of voice, historical detail, and psychological insight to rival Peter Ackroyd and A.S. Byatt. Narrated by a defrocked nun, a poignant victim of Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries, Unicorn's Blood tells of the existence of a secret diary kept by Queen Elizabeth I as a young princess.
• People of the Mist
  Author: Gear, Kathleen & W. Michael
  Publisher: Tor/Forge List Price: $ 26.95 ISBN: 031285854x
  BL
  
• Cubra Libre
  Leonard, Elmore
  Publisher: Delacorte $ 28.95 ISBN: 0385323832
  PW Kirkus LJ
  Set in Cuba just before the Spanish-American War, Elmore Leonard's latest novel is filled with high adventure, history, romance, and, of course, nefarious undertakings. Circumstance, nonchalance, and a remarkable streak of bad luck have turned Ben Tyler from cowboy to bank robber to convict, without ever changing his genial disposition. On yet another crooked attempt to return to the straight and narrow, Tyler finds himself in Havana agreeing to complete a series of deals that will completely turn his luck around.
• The Magician's Wife
  Author: Moore, Brian
  Publisher: Dutton Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 0525944001
  PW LJ BL Kirkus
  From the bestselling author of The Statement comes an ambitious novel of action, suspense, and twisted complexity. Summoned to the country estate of Napoleon III, the famed illusionist Henri Lambert and his wife, Emmeline, are drawn into an elaborate plot to further the French imperialist drive into North Africa and subdue the rebellious Arab tribes threatening jihad.
• Booth
  Author: Robertson, David
  Publisher: Anchor Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 0385487061
  PW LJ
  A gripping novel set amidst the confusion and chaos of the Civil War, Booth tells the story of the only conspirator in the plot to kill Abraham Lincoln who was not killed or executed - a young man who falls under the spell of the charismatic and captivating world-famous stage actor, John Wilkes Booth, and is gradually sucked into the vortex of his insidious plans.

  Mystery & Suspense

• Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades
  Author: Hall, Oakley
  CCPL Control #
  Publisher: California Academy of Sciences List Price: $ 22.95 ISBN: 0520215559
  BL Kirkus
  In a fast-paced novel that is a combination of murder mystery, historical fiction, and quirky biography, Oakley Hall draws the reader into 1880's San Francisco and the changing world that was California in the latter part of the 19th century.
• Drinker of Blood
  Author: Robinson, Lynda S.
  CCPL Control #
  Publisher: List Price: $ ISBN:
  BL
  The highly celebrated Lord Meren mystery series featuring historical intrigue during the reign of Pharaoh Tutankhamen continues with the investigation of the murder of Queen Nefertiti.
• Jitterbug
  Author: Estleman, Loren
  CCPL Control #90175109
  Publisher: Forge List Price: $ 22.95 ISBN: 0312863608
  PW BL
  Wartime Detroit is dazzlingly recreated in Loren Estleman's latest tour de force crime novel. Great auto manufacturers labor mightily; blacks struggle for an economic toehold; whites strive for decent lives in the chaos. The climax, during America's nastiest race riots, is unforgettable.
• A Breach of Promise
  Author: Perry, Anne
  CCPL Control #90174212
  Publisher: Fawcett List Price: $ 25 ISBN: 0449908496
  BL
  The ninth novel of murder and detection in Victorian England featuring sleuth William Monk. As Monk and barrister Oliver Rathbone scour the city in search of clues to help the defendant in a sensational breach-of-promise suit, the case comes to a tragic end. An outcome that no one - except a ruthless murderer - could have foreseen.
• Mannequin
  Author: Janes, J.
  Publisher: Soho List Price: $ 22 ISBN: 1569471290
  PW
  
• Mr. White's Confession
  Author: Clark, Robert
  CCPL Control #90173902
  Publisher: Picador List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0312192177
  LJ Kirkus
  Heading a police investigation into the brutal murder of a showgirl, Lt. Wesley Horner zeroes in on Herbert White, and eccentric recluse who spends his days writing gushing fan letters to Hollywood starlets.
• Ghostly Murders: The Priest's Tale of Mystery and Murder As He Goes on Pilgimage from London to Canterbury
  Author: Doherty, P.C.
  CCPL Control #90173836
  Publisher: St. Martins List Price: $ 21.95 ISBN: 0312194188
  Kirkus
  
• The Ape Who Guards the Balance: Amelia Peabody
  Author: Peters, Elizabeth
  CCPL Control #90172899
  Publisher: Avon List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0380976579
  Kirkus
  In 1907 Egypt, Egyptologist Ameila Peabody, along with her sexy yet irascible husband Radcliffe Emerson and their handsome son Ramses, investigates the mystery of an extraordinary papyrus Book of the Dead that may be connected to some recent murders.
• Whacking Jimmy
  Author: Wolf, William L.
  CCPL Control #90174448
  Publisher: Villard List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 0375501738
  Kirkus
  The Freshman meets Carl Hiaasen in this hip and hilarious crime novel of an unwilling mafia heir's introduction to the ways of his family.
• Flying Blind
  Author: Collins, Max Allan
  CCPL Control #90173114
  Publisher: Dutton List Price: $ 24.95 ISBN: 0525943110
  BL
  
• Fever Season
  Author: Hambly, Barbara
  CCPL Control #90172165
  Publisher: Bantam List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 0553102540
  PW
  With a seductive prose style and period detail reminiscent of The Alienist, bestselling author Hambly continues the "magically rich and poignant" story of a free man of color in 1830's New Orleans.
• Masquerade
  Author: Satterthwait, Walter
  Publisher: St. Martins List Price: $ 22.95
  ISBN: 0312186290
  PW
  Set in le jazz hot Paris of 1923, the sequel to Escapade finds resourceful Pinkerton Phil Beaumont and ladies' paid companion Jane Turner investigating the death of a rich American publisher - along the way, running into such literary notables as Hemingway and Gertrude Stein.
• Salamander
  Author: Janes, Robert
  Publisher: Soho List Price: $ 22 ISBN: 1569471193
  PW Kirkus
  A tale of missing persons in Paris. Set in German-occupied France, 1942-43. The detectives are Jean-Louis St-Cyr, or the Surete Nationale, and Hermann Kohler of the Gestapo.
• Invitation To A Funeral
  Author: Brown, Molly
  Publisher: Dunne List Price: $ 22.95 ISBN: 0312185987
  LJ
  For her first novel (after the publication of some twenty short stories) Molly Brown has chosen one of the most colorful periods in recent English history - the Restoration. And she has coopted as her detective a real-life character just as colorful, the woman playwright and sometimes spy, Aphra Behn. When one lord of the realm bets another that he can turn a woman of negligible talent into the best actress on the London stage, Behn shares his optimism and will share his winnings. But more serious events intervene, and it falls on Aphra to move with lightening speed to avert yet another civil war in a newly pacified England. From Murder at the Flatiron Building.
• The Problem of the Missing Miss
  Author: Rogow, Roberta
  Publisher: St. Martin's List Price: $ 21.95 ISBN: 0312185537
  PW Kirkus
  When the daughter of a lord is kidnapped, the unlikely pair of Charles (aka Lewis Carroll) and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle join forces to save her. This first novel by a children's librarian makes wonderful use of the two 19th century British authors and gives us a good story enhanced by the quirky characters of the two famous literary men. From Murder at the Flatiron Building.
• The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon
  Author: Zimler, Richard
  Publisher: Overlook List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 0879518340
  BL
  A gripping literary mystery in the tradition of The Name of the Rose, set among the secret Jews living in Lisbon in the 16th century. A marvelous read, a challenging mystery and a telling tell of the evils of intolerance. The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon compels and entertains.
• An Instance of the Fingerpost
  Author: Pears, Iain
  Publisher: Riverhead Price: $ 27 ISBN: 1573220825
  PW BL Kirkus LJ
  Deserving comparison to the works of John Fowles and Umberto Eco, Iain Pear's stunning new novel is an ingenious tour de force. In England in the 1660's, a young woman is accused of the murder of a New College fellow, who has been found dead under mysterious circumstances. Four extremely diverse witnesses give their accounts of the events - but only one reveals the extraordinary truth.
• Wings of Fire
  Author: Todd, Charles
  Publisher: St Martin's Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 0312170645
  PW
  Inspector Ian Rutledge, the World War I hero of A Test of Wills, makes his second appearance, investigating the mysterious deaths of three members of the same family in Cornwall. Accompanying Rutledge is his constant "companion", Hamish, the young Scot whom he had to execute on the battlefield and whose tormenting voice in Rutledge's head forces him to face unpleasant truths.
• Thrones, Dominations
  Author: Sayers, Dorothy L. and Jill Paton Walsh
  Publisher: St. Martin's List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 0312181965
  PW Kirkus
  Announcing the long-awaited return of newly weds Lord Peter Whimsey and Harriet Vane in Dorothy L. Sayers never-before-published final mystery. Set in 1939, during the short-lived reign of King Edward VIII, Thrones, Dominations is based on Sayers' original outline, and has been completed in Sayers' voice and style by Jill Paton Walsh, the celebrated Booker Prize-winning author of Knowledge of Angels.
• The Moor: A Novel of Suspense Featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes
  Author: King, Laurie R.
  Publisher: St Martin's Price: $23.95 ISBN: 03121694345
  Kirkus BL
  

  Also worthy of note...

• Making History
  Author: Fry, Stephen
  Publisher: Random List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0679459553
  BL
  An extravagantly imaginative, funny, and troubling supposition, Making History is based on a deceptively simple premise: What if Hitler had never been born? The most ambitious work yet by British actor/writer Stephen Fry, soon to star in the leading role in a film about Oscar Wilde.
• Paradise
  Author: Morrison, Toni
  Publisher: Random List Price: $25 ISBN: 0679433740
  BL PW Kirkus LJ
  Morrison's eagerly awaited new novel - her first since she was awarded the Nobel Price for Literature in 1993 - is extraordinary for its breathtaking drive, stylistic panache, and enlivening moral gravitas. Spanning the time from the Reconstruction to the 1970's, this powerful work deftly manipulates past, present and future as it reveals the interior lives of the citizens of a fictional, all-black town called Paradise.

  To Say Nothing of the Dog
  Willis, Connie
  Publisher: Bantam Spectra List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 0553099957
  PW BL
  PW Best Books of '97
  In the grand tradition of her bestselling Doomsday Book, Connie Willis once again takes on the subject of time travel, this time to Victorian England, with a sweeping tale of romance, history, and misadventure that combines everything Willis's readers have come to know and love.

LINKS:

American Historical Fiction Book List
BookBrowser - Reviews
Historical Fiction for Children & Adults
Historical Fiction Bibliography
Historical Mysteries
Soon's Historical Fiction Site
Uchronia: Alternate History
Yahoo - Historical Fiction

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