• Blind Eye

John Morgan Wilson

St. Martin’s Minotaur

Since the publication of his Edgar Award–winning book Simple Justice, in 1996, John Morgan Wilson has earned a reputation as one of the more distinguished and controversial authors in the mystery field. • Simple Justice introduced the dark, character-driven Benjamin Justice mystery series, starring a washed-up investigative reporter ruined by scandal and seeking redemption by solving some of L.A.’s most baffling murders. Child abuse, political corruption, racism, economic injustice, and AIDS have been among the issues Wilson has tackled in his novels, with storylines that avoid pat and easy conclusions. • Justice is also HIV-positive. In addition to winning a coveted Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America, the Benjamin Justice series has also earned two Lambda Literary Awards for best gay men’s mystery. USA Today said the series was “as addictive as Sue Grafton’s, James Lee Burke’s, or Patricia Cromwell’s.” • Blind Eye is Wilson’s most controversial. Set against a backdrop of the sex-abuse scandal currently rocking the Catholic Church in L.A., with a sinister twist inspired by today’s headlines, it is a disturbing whodunit.

—Troy Carrington

• The Distant Echo

Val McDermid

St. Martin’s Minotaur

An intricate mystery that charts the course of the friendship between four college students at St. Andrew’s School in Scotland, The Distant Echo begins during a snowstorm as the young men stumble back to their dormitory, drunk after a night of partying. They take a shortcut through a graveyard and find the body of Rosie Duff, a bartender they all know. These four boys, covered in blood, are the only suspects. But the case is never resolved. • Twenty-five years later, the police are mounting a cold case review, and some young and eager detectives are looking at the killing. At the same time, one by one, the four former college boys are dying off—each death a bit more mysterious than the previous one. • Ultimately, it becomes clear that there is one person willing to do anything to make sure Duff’s killer is never found out. • Val McDermid’s gift for outlining the darkest parts of the human psyche can be startling. As the Times Literary Supplement points out, “Without flinching from the pain inflicted on murder victims and their families, or any of the manifold sorts of misery human beings can visit on each other, Val McDermid has used the crime genre to write a novel that, above everything else, celebrates life and loyalty.” • McDermid, who is openly lesbian, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anthony Award, the Dilys Prize, and was nominated for the Edgar Award for A Place of Execution.

—Suzie Lynde

• Lives of the Circus Animals

Christopher Bram

William Morrow (an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers)

In Lives of the Circus Animals, Christopher Bram explores contemporary New York theater, spending several days and nights with a wonderfully motley group of men and women. • There is Caleb Doyle, a hot new playwright whose newest play just bombed. His sister Jessie also loves theater but has no outlet for her gifts except to work as personal assistant to British actor Henry Lewse, the “Hamlet of his generation,” while he does a Broadway musical. Henry loves Shakespeare, money, grass, and boys. • Then there’s Frank Earp, an ex-actor who courts Jessie and is directing a pack of acting students in a homemade play. Among the students is Toby Vogler, a nice kid from the Midwest who has a whole other career at night. Toby was once Caleb Doyle’s boyfriend. • Overseeing this world like an unhappy god is Kenneth Prager, second-string theater critic for the New York Times. “I don’t want people to love me,” he tells his therapist. “I just don’t want them to hate me.” • And there’s Molly Doyle, Caleb and Jessie’s mother, who has never seen one of her son’s plays, even though she lives only an hour outside of New York. • Leaping from one life to another, one day to the next, the novel throws these people together in a serious comedy about love and work and make-believe. Lives of the Circus Animals is like a cross between a Mozart opera and a Preston Sturges movie. A look at theater people who are just like everyone else, only more so, it’s a comic celebration of how we all strive to stay sane while living in the shadow of those two imposters, success and failure.

—TC

• Please Don’t Kill the Freshman

Zoe Trope

Harper Tempest (an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers)

Whoever said that high school was supposed to be the best time of your life was a liar. Seventeen-year-old author and recent high school graduate, the pseudonymous Zoe Trope, speaks the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about high school in her new deeply affecting memoir Please Don’t Kill the Freshman. • As a freshman in high school, Trope started to e-mail her creative writing teacher journal entries. Those entries were the basis of her best-selling chapbook. Please Don’t Kill the Freshman is an expanded version of that chapbook and provides even more details about Trope’s high school experiences. The memoir is filled with her keen observations on self-discovery, sexuality, boredom, drugs, and thoughts about the future. • Zoe Trope exists. She was born in 1986 and graduated from high school with the class of 2003 in Oregon.

—SL

• Around the World with Auntie Mame

Patrick Dennis (pen name of Edward Everett Tanner III)

Broadway Books (a division of Random House)

In 1955, Auntie Mame spent 112 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Three years later, the film version appeared with a tour-de-force performance by Rosalind Russell. That same year (1958) also brought the book’s sequel, Around the World with Auntie Mame. • If you’ve seen the film, you won’t be able to read a word of this reprint without picturing Rosalind Russell and Coral Browne (Mame’s best friend Vera Charles). Not that that’s a bad thing. No, on the contrary, it’s like a seamless continuation of the outrageous life of Mame Dennis Beauregard Jackson Pickett Burnside. • Narrated once again by Mame’s fictional deadpan nephew Patrick Dennis, Around the World with Auntie Mame takes readers on a whirlwind tour of Paris, London, and Lebanon, all scenic backgrounds to Mame’s antics.

—Blase DiStefano

• The Sappho History

Margaret Reynolds

St. Martin’s Press (Palgrave Macmillan)

The Sappho History traces the story of the reception of Sappho’s poetry and her afterlife in literature and art from the Romantic period to the present day. For women writers in the Romantic period, she symbolized possibility. For the young Tennyson, she was a private ancestor, helping him make his own name as a poet. Author Margaret Reynolds demonstrates how Sappho’s themes of desire, loss, and the memory of desire are recovered and refashioned in her successors’ works. Richly illustrated, The Sappho History provides a new view of Western culture.

—SL

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