Mr. Peanut by Adam Ross has been hyped as a summer reading breakout since last March, when Stephen King recommended it in Entertainment Weekly as “the most riveting look at the dark side of marriage since Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.”

But in a dissenting review, Tina Jordan at Entertainment Weekly gave a lowly grade “C” to this story of a marriage that ends with the investigation into how the wife’s body ended up on the kitchen floor:

The book fails completely as a police procedural. . . It’s as if there 
are two books here when there should be just one.

The author is also interviewed today on NPR’s Morning Edition.

Holds are edging up, but the libraries we checked have only a few copies.

Mr. Peanut Adam Ross Retail Price: $25.95 Hardcover: 352 pages Publisher: Knopf – (2010-06-22) ISBN / EAN: 030727070X / 9780307270702

Other Major Fiction Titles on Sale Next Week

The Devil Amongst the Lawyers by Sharyn McCrumb (Macmillan) flashes back to Nora Bonesteeler’s first case, at age 12. Booklist says, “Loyal fans have been eagerly awaiting a new installment, so expect high demand. Discerning readers, however, will be sorely disappointed.” Holds are at 2:1 and higher, with more copies on order at several libraries we checked. McCrumb, a librarian favorite, will be speaking at the Altaff Tea at ALA.

Broken by Karin Slaughter (Delacorte) gets a rave from Library Journal:  “Move over, Catherine Coulter, Slaughter may be today’s top female suspense writer. Avid mystery and law-enforcement thriller fans as well as those who loved her series characters will devour Slaughter’s latest.” Slaughter also won some new librarian fans with her impassioned pitch for supporting libraries at the Random House Librarian Author Breakfast at BEA.

The Sisters from Hardscrabble Bay by Beverly Jensen (Viking) was also touted by Stephen King in Entertainment Weekly, who suggested that the author’s death of cancer at age 49, after writing her first and only book, was a greater loss than J.D. Salinger’s passing. PW was more equivocal about the book: “While the sisters troubled relationship rings true, the story-like chapters feel quite independent of one another, and the dialogue has a tendency to veer into forced colloquialisms and melodrama.”

Sizzling Sixteen (Stephanie Plum Series #16) by Janet Evanovich (St. Martin’s Press) is uneven, says PW: “Evanovich is at her best spinning the bizarre subplots involving Stephanie’s bail jumpers, but the larger story simply recycles elements from previous installments.”

Dark Flame (Immortals Series #4) by Alyson Noel (Griffin) is the latest installment in the YA vampire series.

Family Ties by Danielle Steel (Delacorte) follows a woman who raises her sister’s children after a tragic plane crash.

In My Father’s House by E. Lynn Harris (St. Martin’s) is about the bisexual owner of a modeling agency who is disowned by his rich father. PW says: “Harris’s wry tale about second chances highlights what readers have long loved about his work: his ability to depict the pursuit of love and self-respect, regardless of societal and family pressures.”

That’s what Entertainment Weekly dubs The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Unfortunately, Entertainment Weekly does not post its features, so we’ll have to grab the magazine, on stands tomorrow, to find out more.

An EW teaser blog post, however, says that speculation about who will play the main characters in the English-language movie is just that; speculation. Rumor has it that Brad Pitt and Daniel Craig could play Blomkvist, and some are betting on Kristen Stewart, Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson, or Carey Mulligan for Lisbeth. Producer Scott Rudin will only say that casting should be complete in a month or two.

Meanwhile, we’re wondering how long it’s been since a book appeared on Entertainment Weekly‘s cover.

Alan Furst, widely acknowledged as one of the best espionage writers today, appeared on NPR’s Morning Edition today to talk about his new thriller, Spies of the Balkans (listen here). As he notes, few people have written about Greece’s role in WWII; his research proved there was a good story to tell about Balkans Greece.

Holds are growing in libraries.

Spies of the Balkans: A Novel Alan Furst Retail Price: $26.00 Hardcover: 288 pages Publisher: Random House – (2010-06-15) ISBN / EAN: 1400066034 / 9781400066032

S&S Audio; UNABR; 9781442306059; $39.99

In the midst of slogging through an ARC of a touted fall “literary” title, I was struck by this comment in a NYT BR review,

To shape the everyday happenings of the world into a good story — isn’t that what novelists are supposed to do best? Yet readers must often choose between “literary fiction,” understood to be works of well-written but meandering prose about the “real world” of human relationships, and “commercial fiction,” fast-paced novels in which plot is everything.

Reviewer Danielle Trussoni (who worked to achieve the elusive blending of literary and commercial her debut novel, Angelology, which appeared on the NYT fiction best seller list for six weeks and two more on the extended list) finds in Ted Mooney’s “nuanced literary thriller, The Same River Twice, that it’s possible to find a novel that ‘has it all’.”

Unfortunately, at the end of the review, she spends several paragraphs describing problems with some of the details which she finds “off”, but says that she is still “mesmerized by the storytellers gift.”

The Boston Globe has no such quibbles and flat out loves this “…philosophical entertainment doubling as a riveting, unconventional thriller. Largely set in a pre-European Union Paris and rendered with such painterly depth that the luminous city nearly becomes a character…”

The Same River Twice Ted Mooney Retail Price: $26.95 Hardcover: 384 pages Publisher: Knopf – (2010-05-11) ISBN / EAN: 0307272737 / 9780307272737

Adobe EPUB eBook from OverDrive

After months of buzz leading up to Book Expo, where The Passage was dubbed “the book of the show,” Justin Cronin‘s tale of a young girl who holds the power to save humanity from a plague of vampires arrives in stores next week. The media is giving it the full blockbuster treatment, while in most libraries we checked, holds are at about 10:1.

Was it worth the wait? Entertainment Weekly says yes, giving the novel an A-:

The Passage owes a substantial debt to both King’s [The Stand] and Cormac McCarthy’s [The Road], and he is not immune to some of the hoarier tropes of Armageddon fiction… but his bogeymen, the vampiric, blood-
hungry beasts known as ”virals,” are
 magnificently unnerving, and his power to compel readers to the next page seldom flags.

Time magazine’s Lev Grossman is all admiration, calling it a “magnificent beast of a new novel.” He gives Cronin props for combining his skills as a “literary” novelist (his first book, Mary and O’Neil, won the PEN/Hemingway award), his “extraordinary level of verbal craft and psychological insight” with strong pacing. “He lays out the ground rules, sets the initial conditions and then lets the machine run while you, the reader, claw helplessly for an off switch.”

People gives it the lead review, seconds the comparison to The Stand and adds The Andromeda Strain, but gives it only three out of four stars (review not online until next week):

“Unfortunately The Passage doesn’t quite live up to its forerunners. The first 200 pages are spectacular…Then the story jumps forward a century — and loses momentum… [the] books is bogged down by generic set pieces and color-by-numbers action sequences.”

The New York Times tells the backstory on how Cronin conceived the trilogy that begins wtih The Passage, which fetched a reported $3.75 million, and $1.75 for film rights. while USA Today offers snappy soundbites on the author and book, which was also selected by independent booksellers as the #1 Indie Next Pick for June.

The Passage Justin Cronin Retail Price: $27.00 Hardcover: 784 pages Publisher: Ballantine Books – (2010-06-08) ISBN / EAN: 0345504968 / 9780345504968

Other Major Fiction Titles on Sale Next Week

Vampire alert! In addition to The Passage, there are two other novels about the blood-loving breed landing next week. And let’s not forget the androids!

• Short Second Life of Bree Tanner by Stephenie Meyer (Little Brown Teens) features a character first introduced in Eclipse, and the darker side of the newborn vampire world she inhabits.
• Insatiable by Meg Cabot (Morrow) is a contemporary sequel to Dracula from the bestselling author of the Princess Diaries.
• Android Karenina by Leo Tolstoy and Ben H. Winters (Quirk Books) is the latest in the Quirk Classics series.

These three Indie Next picks for June are also getting mentions in various summer reading roundups or were featured at BEA:

• Backseat Saints by Joshilyn Jackson (Grand Central) is the #2 Indie Next pick after The Passage:  “Jackson writes like a woman on fire, hooking you in the very first sentence (‘It was an airport gypsy that told me I had to kill my husband’) and demanding total absorption straight through to the novel’s stunning conclusion,” says the blurb. Jackson was also one of the AAP Librarians Lunch speakers at BEA.
• A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (Knopf) is a collection of layered stories about an aging record exec and his passionate, troubled employee.
• So Cold the River by Michael Koryta (Little, Brown) is about a floundering filmmaker who, in the course of making a documentary about a self-made millionaire, discovers abilities in himself that draw him to a powerful source of evil. “Koryta’s prose is fluid and masterful, making this a delightfully eerie and mesmerizing read,” according to Indie Next.

And here are some of the usual suspects for  summer reading:

• The Lion by Nelson DeMille (Grand Central) is a followup to The Lion’s Game and stars John Corey, former NYPD homicide detective and special agent for the Anti-Terrorist Task Force.
• Death Echo by Elizabeth Lowell (HarperCollins) is the fifth St. Kilda Consulting thriller (after Blue Smoke and Murder). According to PW, “Lowell’s primary focus on espionage rather than on romance is a major change from earlier novels, albeit a pleasing one.”

Less than two years ago, Stieg Larsson’s first title in his Millennium series appeared in the US to some skepticism about how well this international best seller would do here. Sonny Metha, the head of Knopf, Larsson’s US publisher admits to NYT Magazine he “had nightmares that we would be the only country where the books didn’t work”.

Today marks the release of Larsson’s third title in the US and Mehta must be resting easier. As the NYT Magazine puts it, “Except for Harry Potter, Americans haven’t been so eager for a book since the early 1840s, when they thronged the docks in New York, hailing incoming ships for news of Little Nell in Charles Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop.” On NPR’s Web site today, Maureen Corrigan says,

The final verdict is in: Steig Larsson has posthumously proven himself to be one of the Greats of Mystery Fiction, taking his place in the pantheon along with other demi-Gods like Christie, Sayers, Hammett, Chandler, Robert Parker and his (still-breathing) fellow Swede, Henning Mankell.

Looking back, the prepub reviews of Dragon Tattoo were all fairly strong, but LJ‘s Wilda Williams showed the greatest enthusiasm, coming the closest to predicting its subsequent success. Libraries, however, ordered lightly.

The consumer press coverage began with a not-so-great review in the NYT BR. Alex Berenson liked the middle section, the investigation into the book’s central mystery, the 40-year-old murder of a young woman. He had many reservations about the rest of the book, however, any one of which could have signalled poor word of mouth;

• Readers will have trouble sorting through the cast of characters.

• The novel “offers a thoroughly ugly view of human nature.”

• The main player, Blomkvist “seems more a stock character than a real person.”

• The ending is a letdown; “boring and implausible, relying heavily on lazy e-mail exchanges between characters.”

When we wrote about Dragon Tattoo a few weeks before publication, holds were still light. By pub date, they had grown and we issued a heavy holds alert. Today, many libraries are still working through their lists (hint; it’s now available in both mass market and trade pbk) and the release of the final title is likely to bring even more new readers to the series.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest Stieg Larsson Retail Price: $27.95 Hardcover: 576 pages Publisher: Knopf – (2010-05-25) ISBN / EAN: 030726999X / 9780307269997

• UNABR CD from Random House Audio available May 25: $40; ISBN 9780739384190
• Large Print from Random House: $28; ISBN 9780739377710
• WMA Audiobook available from OverDrive

They’re not British, they’re Anglophiles in love with Scotland Yard, says USA Today‘s Carol Memmot about American mystery writers Martha Grimes and Elizabeth George (the latter’s character Inspector Lynely even inspired a series by the BBC). Memmot offers a quick analysis of each writer’s latest book in their long-running series (Grimes has the edge, with 22 Richard Jury titles to George’s paltry 16 in her Lynley series).

This Body of Death: An Inspector Lynley Novel Elizabeth George Retail Price: $28.99 Hardcover: 704 pages Publisher: Harper – (2010-05-01) ISBN / EAN: 0061160881 / 9780061160882

HarperAudio; UNABR; 9780061161216; $49.99
Books on Tape; 21 CD’s; 9780307715630; $49.99
Adobe EPUB eBook and WMA Audiobook from OverDrive

The Black Cat: A Richard Jury Mystery Martha Grimes Retail Price: $25.95 Hardcover: 336 pages Publisher: Viking Adult – (2010-04-06) ISBN / EAN: 0670021601 / 9780670021604

Penguin Audio; UNABR; 9 Hours; 7 CDs; ISBN 9780142427965; $29.95
MP3 Audiobook; WMA Audiobook available from OverDrive

Clearly, publishers have stayed away from releasing big adult titles next week, since all the air will be sucked up by the release of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, the third and final entry in Stieg Larsson‘s Millennium trilogy. It’s true that a John Grisham title is coming this week, but it is for kids. There is also a Stephen King title, but it was already released earlier in a limited small press edition.

And, indeed, the review media is all over Girl.

In today’s New York Times, Michiko Kakutani, the least populist of the NYT reviewers, tries to explain why the series is so popular, and decides it’s not the gore, but the tatooed main character, Lisbeth Salander,

…a heroine who takes on a legal system and evil, cartoony villains with equal ferocity and resourcefulness; a damaged sprite of a girl who becomes a goth-attired avenging angel who can hack into any computer in the world and seemingly defeat any foe in hand-to-hand combat.

Sarah Weinman in The Barnes and Noble Review has a more interesting theory, the appeal is about information,

…Larsson’s enthusiasm for the information he spills out, be it on the annals of his country’s darkest political crimes or the specs of the computer Salander works with, is infectious. Did you know how cool this is? he asks. We did not, but now we do—and yeah, it is pretty cool.

Entertainment Weekly gives it at B+, saying:

Fans of the first two books might miss the Hollywood-blockbuster action sequences and wish Salander — the series’ most compelling character — were more of a presence, but Hornet’s Nest is still a satisfying finale to Larsson’s entertainingly suspenseful trilogy.

USA Today is less impressed:

Hornet’s Nest lacks the narrative drive, energy and originality of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire. Those books, you inhaled. Reading this one feels like work. It’s more like a first draft than a polished novel.

Meanwhile, Time magazine delves into the intrigue surrounding Larsson’s estate, following his death in 2004.

The publisher is holding a Lisbeth Salander look-a-like contest.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest Stieg Larsson Retail Price: $27.95 Hardcover: 576 pages Publisher: Knopf – (2010-05-25) ISBN / EAN: 030726999X / 9780307269997

• UNABR CD from Random House Audio available May 25: $40; ISBN 9780739384190
• Large Print from Random House: $28; ISBN 9780739377710
• WMA Audiobook available from OverDrive

Other Major Titles On Sale Next Week

Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer by John Grisham (Dutton) is the first in a series of books targeted at 8- to 12-year-olds, and focuses on a 13-year-old who becomes interwined in a murder trial. Dutton is offering a sneak peek of first chapter. Unsurprisingly, reserves are as high as 3:1 or more at libraries we checked.

Blockade Billy by Stephen King (Simon & Schuster) was released in the Spring in a limited edition from small press Cemetary Dance Publications, which most libraries own. The book is set in the spring of 1957, as an offbeat baseball player achieves stardom. The Los Angeles Times was less than impressed: “Like all King’s work, it has momentum, but reading it, ultimately, is like watching a big leaguer sit in with a farm team: interesting, perhaps, but without the giddy excitement, the sheer, explosive sense of possibility, that marks the highest levels of the game.”

Sidney Sheldon’s After the Darkness by Sidney Sheldon and Tilly Bagshawe (Morrow) is a tale of a New York socialite who marries an elderly hedge fund manager.

Infinity: Chronicles of Nick by Sherrilyn Kenyon (St. Martin’s) is the author’s first novel for teens to feature the immortal vampire slayers of her bestselling Dark Hunter series.

The Necromancer by Michael Scott (Delacorte Books for Young Readers) is the fourth installment in the popular series about The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel.

Among the many series titles coming out this week, is a notable debut mystery. Holds are rising for The Poacher’s Son by Paul Doiron, about a son on a manhunt for his fugitive father, which arrives with four starred advance reviews.

Library Journal calls it “a richly imagined portrait of the vanishing wilderness in New England’s farthest reaches… a taut thriller and a thoughtful examination of the complicated relationship between father and son.”

Kirkus sums up: ” C.J. Box goes East. Like Box, Doiron will have his hands full trying to top his accomplished debut.”

The Poacher’s Son (Mike Bowditch Mysteries) Paul Doiron Retail Price: $24.99 Hardcover: 336 pages Publisher: Minotaur Books – (2010-05-11) ISBN / EAN: 0312558465 / 9780312558468

Macmillan Audio; ISBN:9781427208965; $29.99
Available as a WMA Audio Book from Overdrive
Large Print from Center Point; ISBN 978160285756; $34.95
———————-

Other Major Fiction Titles On Sale Next Week

61 Hours by Lee Child (Delacorte) is the 14th thriller with former military policeman Jack Reacher. In the NYT today, Janet Maslin calls it “the most highly evolved of Lee Child’s electrifying Jack Reacher books.” The new Entertainment Weekly gives it an A- and wonders why Reacher is not yet a household name. The review notes that, despite being part of a long series, the book stands on its own, “Everything you need to know about Jack Reacher is contained within its pages. And chances are you’ll want to seek out other Reacher adventures the moment you finish.”

Storm Prey by John Sandford (Putnam) is the 20th Lucas Davenport mystery.

Blood Oath: The President’s Vampire by Christopher Farnsworth (Putnam) is the first title in a new series featuring 160-year-old vampire Nathaniel Cade.

The Kings of Clonmel by John Flanagan (Penguin) is the eighth title in the Ranger’s Apprentice Series

Risk No Secrets by Cindy Gerard (Simon & Schuster) is the fifth romantic suspense novel in Gerard’s Black Ops, Inc. series

Young Adult series:

Spirit Bound by Richelle Mead (Razorbill) is book five of the Vampire Academy series. It’s already been in the Amazon Top 100 for 43 days and is currently at #23.

Love Bites by Ellen Schreiber (HarperCollins) is the seventh title in the Vampire Kisses Series.

Why did it take over years for Scott Turow to be ready to write the sequel to his huge hit, Presumed Innocent? The author answers that question in the  trailer for his new book, Innocent, below (gotta love that Chicago accent!).

Reviewers, naturally, have been all over it. Michiko Kakutani in the NYT gave it her usual grudging praise, “If readers can accept [the] dubious opening premise, however, Mr. Turow does manage to turn the remainder of the novel into a fast and absorbing ride.” Other reviewers have had their own reservations. Entertainment Weekly, disagreeing with Kakutani’s assessment that it’s fast paced, says it’s “…not a slam-bang thriller but an unusually introspective and elegiac book. You may wonder, of course, if that’s a nice way of saying it’s boring … Kinda.” and gives it a B.

Innocent Scott Turow Retail Price: $27.99 Hardcover: 416 pages Publisher: Grand Central Publishing – (2010-05-04) ISBN / EAN: 0446562424 / 9780446562423

Hachette Audio; UNABR;9781600249211; $39.98
BBC Audio: UNABR; 9781607885283; $114.99
LARGE PRINT; Grand Central; Hardcover; 9780446566872; $29.99
Adobe EPUB eBook and WMA Audiobook available from OverDrive.

The attention is bringing readers back to Turow’s first hit; reviews are building on Presumed Innocent. It was released in audio last month by Hachette Audio.

Presumed Innocent Scott Turow Retail Price: $14.99 Paperback: 512 pages Publisher: Grand Central Publishing – (2000-12-01) ISBN / EAN: 0446676446 / 9780446676441

Hachette Audio; UNABR; 9781607883760; $29.98
OverDrive WMA Audiobook

At last night’s Edgar Awards, one of our favorite mysteries, The Last Child by John Hart (Minotaur Books) won for Best Novel (the full list of winners is available here).

It’s now available in trade paperback.

The Last Child John Hart Retail Price: $14.99 Paperback: 432 pages Publisher: Minotaur Books – (2010-03-09) ISBN / EAN: 0312642369 / 9780312642365

Macmillan Audio; UNABR; 9781427206664; $39.95
BBC Audio; UNABR; 9780792763789 : 110.95

Best First Novel went to another Minotaur title, In the Shadow of Gotham by Stefanie Pintoff. The trade paperback edition will be available in a couple of weeks.

In the Shadow of Gotham Stefanie Pintoff Retail Price: $14.99 Paperback: 400 pages Publisher: Minotaur Books – (2010-05-11) ISBN / EAN: 0312628129 / 9780312628123

Potential winners were treated to a harsh dose of reality from the Wall Street Journal yesterday in an article that points out “the first Edgar is often the last” (somewhat amelioriated by the fact that John Hart proved them wrong this time. It’s his second win, after 2008 for Down River);

A perusal of the group’s online database found little overlap between debut authors who have won best first novel (including Patricia Cornwell, Michael Connelly, James Patterson and Richard North Patterson) and seasoned mystery writers who have won best novel (among them Dick Francis, Tony Hillerman, Elmore Leonard, John le Carre, Donald E. Westlake and Raymond Chandler).

Nonetheless, not bad company to be in.

Three much buzzed-about novels will be released next week.

As we’ve written before, Brady Udall’s The Lonely Polygamist was the book of the show at the ABA’s Winter Institute. Daniel Goldin, owner of Boswell & Books in Milwaukee observed, “not only did every person who read this novel become overwhelmed with emotion, but the line for getting this book signed at the author reception had to be three times the size of anything else.”

Udall first became a bookseller favorite with The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint nine years ago, and wrote the article that inspired the TV series “Big Love.” Libraries we checked had holds of about 2:1 on substantial orders.

The Lonely Polygamist: A Novel Brady Udall Price: $26.95 Hardcover: 602 pages Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company – (2010-05-03) ISBN-10: 0393062627 ISBN-13: 9780393062625

———————

Julie Orringer’s first novel, The Invisible Bridge, may also be poised for a breakout. The author of the much-praised story collection How to Breathe Underwater has already been singled out as the first writer to be interviewed for the Daily Beast Writers to Watch list.

PW’s starred review calls it a “stunning first novel” that “illuminates the life of Andras Lévi, a Hungarian Jew of meager means whose world is upended by a scholarship to the École Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris” during WWII.

Libraries we checked show modest holds on modest orders, but that may change as more media chimes in.

The Invisible Bridge Julie Orringer Retail Price: $26.95 Hardcover: 624 pages Publisher: Knopf – (2010-05-04) ISBN / EAN: 1400041163 / 9781400041169

———————–

Jean Kwok‘s tale of a Hong Kong girl’s coming of age in 1980s Brooklyn, Girl in Translation, was also an EarlyWord Galley Chat title (reminder; our next Galley Chat is Wednesday, May 12th, 4 p.m. EST). Libraries we checked have solid reserves, with some libraries just catching up to demand. The author will appear at the ALTAFF program at ALA in June.

Entertainment Weekly gave it a B+: “Kwok takes two well-trod literary conceits — coming of age and coming to America — and renders them surprisingly fresh in her fast-moving, clean-prosed immigrants’ tale.

Girl in Translation Jean Kwok Retail Price: $25.95 Hardcover: 304 pages Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover – (2010-04-29) ISBN / EAN: 1594487561 / 9781594487569

Major titles on sale next week

Dead in the Family (Sookie Stackhouse / Southern Vampire Series #10) by Charlaine Harris (Ace) gets a mixed review from PW: “Though the action often builds too slowly, the exploration of family in its many human and undead variations is intriguing, and Harris delivers her usual mix of eccentric characters and engaging subplots.”

Savor the Moment (Nora Roberts’ Bride Quartet Series #3) by Nora Roberts (Penguin) is set in a wedding business run by four BFFs, and according to PW is “a tart fairy tale romance [that] offers few surprises, but it’s impossible to deny Roberts’s flair for sketching likable couples.”

Innocent by Scott Turow (Grand Central) is a sequel to his breakthrough courtroom thriller, Presumed Innocent, set 20 years later. Reviewers are already lining up. In the NYT, the tart-tongued Michiko Kakutani tackles it, rather than Janet Maslin, who usually handles popular titles. Kakutani, in a “on the one hand, but then on the other” review, seems to like the book despite herself.  In yesterday’s USA Today, Dierdre Donahue praises the book without reservation; “In the jaded world of best-selling authors, Turow has always seemed refreshingly uncynical. He’s not just cranking out formulaic moneymakers.” Donahue adds, “Turow is the rarest of writers: one who can write seriously and insightfully about sex. It’s not an easy task … [he] is at his best conveying what hasn’t changed since 1987 or, really, since the beginning of time: the darkness of the human heart.”

The Red Pyramid (Kane Chronicles Series #1) by Rick Riordan (Hyperion) is the beginning of a new YA series that Kirkus gives a mixed review: “The gods sure are busy in New York City. Manhattan was the site of the climactic battle of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. Now, Brooklyn is the base for Riordan’s new series involving Egyptian gods. Similar story, different gods.”

Blue-Eyed Devil (Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch Series #4) by Robert B. Parker (Penguin) is an “excellent posthumous western from bestseller Parker that continues the saga of gun-slinging saddle pals Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch (after “Brimstone”) as they trade wisecracks and hot lead with back-shooting owlhoots and murderous Apaches in the town of Appaloosa.” according to PW.

In the current issue of Library Journal, Wilda Williams talks to Barbara Peters of Poisoned Pen as well as several other mystery editors about what’s on the horizon.

It looks like South Africa is the next Scandinavia (although the Nordic wave has not crested).

Partial proof is that a movie of Roger Smith’s Mixed Blood is set to shoot in Cape Town later this year, starring Samuel L. Jackson.

Mixed Blood: A Thriller Roger Smith Retail Price: $15.00 Paperback: 320 pages Publisher: Picador – (2009-12-22) ISBN / EAN: 0312429509 / 9780312429508

Lots of major fiction arrives next week, as publishers prepare for the lead-up to Mother’s Day in bookstores. Here are the highlights of next week’s crop, all of which have strong holds in libraries we checked.

Deliver Us from Evil by David Baldacci (Grand Central): Holds are huge for this one, but unfortunately, PW says it “lacks the creative plotting and masterful handling of suspense that marked his earlier thrillers.”

Deliver Us from Evil David Baldacci Retail Price: $27.99 Hardcover: 416 pages Publisher: Grand Central Publishing – (2010-04-20) ISBN / EAN: 0446564087 / 9780446564083

This Body of Death (An Inspector Lynley Novel) by Elizabeth George is “richly rewarding,” according to PW, with “an intricate plot that will satisfy even jaded fans of psychological suspense.”

Burning Lamp by Amanda Quick (Penguin). Library Journal says: “With quirky humor and typical flair, Quick has penned another riveting, fast-paced adventure that… will leave readers anxious for the final installment, Jayne Castle’s Midnight Crystal, coming in September.”

Lucid Intervals (A Stone Barrington Novel)  by Stuart Woods (Penguin). “Woods mixes danger and humor into a racy concoction that will leave readers thirsty for more,” PW declares.

The Double Comfort Safari Club (The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency Series #11) by Alexander McCall Smith (Pantheon) gets a positive review from PW, which notes that the tale’s resolution many seem “unduly fortuitous, but it makes sense within the framework of these books, which are more about humanity than logic.”

Eight Days to Live by Iris Johansen (Macmillan). “Think The Da Vinci Code crossed with an Anne Stuart romantic suspense novel, and you’ll have a sense of the plot and tone,” says Library Journal.

Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey (Knopf). Reviews in PW and Booklist are enthusiastic, along with Library Journal, which sums up: “Written by a two-time Booker Prize winner, this engaging book will be particularly appreciated by readers interested in early 19th-century American history, the French aristocracy, and emerging democracy.” It’s also reviewed in the current NYT BR.

USA Today‘s review of Jacqueline Winspear’s mystery, The Mapping of Love and Death, begins with an experience familiar to fans of any series, “Sometimes when you adore a series, you’re terrified to crack open the next installment, fearing disappointment.”

Far from it, this seventh installment in the author’s Maisie Dobbs series is dubbed “excellent” (the understated headline of the review, Jacqueline Winspear’s Mapping of Love and Death doesn’t disappoint, seems the fitting tone for a series set in WWI Britain).

Several libraries are showing holds ratios of 5:1 on 40 copies.

The Mapping of Love and Death (Maisie Dobbs, Book 7) Jacqueline Winspear Retail Price: $25.99 Hardcover: 352 pages Publisher: Harper – (2010-04-01) ISBN / EAN: 0061727660 / 9780061727665