Entertainment Weekly gave it a middling “C” grade, but Elizabeth Kostova’s second book The Swan Thieves (after her 2005 blockbuster vampire-themed The Historian) gets more love from the Associated Press. The author was also interviewed on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday.

But the review that blows away the nay-sayers is from Laura Miller in the Barnes and Noble Review. Miller, a respected critic who writes for Salon, opens the review by marveling that The Historian was such a success; it’s “a vampire story without gore or brooding passions, a historical thriller without much in the way of action” but Kostova “…placed her faith in the conviction that readers are pleased to sink slowly into a novel, until the world it conjures has closed over their heads, submerging them entirely.” Miller feels she does the same with this book, even though the subject matter (Impressionist painting, rather than vampires) is quite different.

You can read an excerpt here. The book’s Web site offers information on the historical background of the novel.

The Swan Thieves Elizabeth Kostova Retail Price: $26.99 Hardcover: 576 pages Publisher: Little, Brown and Company – (2010-01-12) ISBN / EAN: 0316065781 / 9780316065788

Audio from Hachette:

• CD: $39.98; ISBN 9781600247453

Large Print:

• Little Brown: $28.99; ISBN 9780316043663

Playaway:

• $104.99; ISBN 9781607884828

The heaviest holds for fiction going on sale next week are on Robert Crais‘s thriller, The First Rule: A Joe Pike Novel, an IndieBound pick for January and a popular Amazon preorder.

The First Rule (Joe Pike Novels) Robert Crais Retail Price: $26.95 Hardcover: 320 pages Publisher: Putnam Adult – (2010-01-12) ISBN / EAN: 0399156135 / 9780399156137

Audio available from Brilliance Corporation:

• CD: $87.97; ISBN 9781423375494
• CD, MP-3: $24.99; ISBN 9781423375500

Large Print from Wheeler Publishing:

• $35.99; ISBN 9781410421418

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Elizabeth Kostova‘s The Swan Thieves – her second novel after her blockbuster 2005 debut, The Historian – has hold ratios of about four to one in libraries we checked.

Entertainment Weekly grades it a “C,” with the criticism that this literary thriller about a mentally ill painter obsessed with a dead woman doesn’t maintain a sense of urgency – “a desperate flaw for a story of passion and obsession.”

The Swan Thieves Elizabeth Kostova Retail Price: $26.99 Hardcover: 576 pages Publisher: Little, Brown and Company – (2010-01-12) ISBN / EAN: 0316065781 / 9780316065788

Read an Excerpt

Audio from Hachette:

• CD: $39.98; ISBN 9781600247453

Large Print:

• Little Brown: $28.99; ISBN 9780316043663

Playaway:

• $104.99; ISBN 9781607884828

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Beth Hoffman’s debut novel Saving Ceecee Honeycutt, which was acquired by the same editor as Sue Monk Kidd’s Secret Life of Bees, is getting a push from the publisher and many enthusiastic quotes from booksellers. It’s also the first pick in the new Sam’s Club Book Club, according to GalleyCat, and will be featured in all 600 of the chain’s big box stores.

Prepub reviews included a starred Library Journal review:

“Southern storytelling at its best, this coming-of-age novel is sure to be a hit with the book clubs that adopted Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees.”

Libraries we checked are showing modest holds.

Saving CeeCee Honeycutt Beth Hoffman Retail Price: $25.95 Hardcover: 320 pages Publisher: Viking Adult – (2010-01-12) ISBN / EAN: 0670021393 / 9780670021390

Penguin Audio

• CD: $39.95; ISBN 9780143145547

Large Print from Thorndike

• $34.95; ISBN 9781410422750

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Melanie Benjamin‘s portrait of Alice Liddel, Lewis Carroll’s muse in Alice I Have Been, is a big favorite of Random House’s library marketing team, who compare it to Nancy Horan’s reading-club favorite Loving Frank. In fact, the author invites reading groups to contact her and possibly arrange a phone-in.

Prepub reviews bear out the inhouse enthusiasm; Booklist says, “First-novelist Benjamin tells … a story that is a mixture of historically accurate fact and liberally imagined fiction, including her solution to the mystery of what actually happened to estrange Carroll … from his muse’s family.”

Most large libraries have ordered modestly, with 2:1 holds. However, one library clearly expects strong demand, ordering 80 copies.

Alice I Have Been Melanie Benjamin Retail Price: $25.00 Hardcover: 368 pages Publisher: Delacorte Press – (2010-01-12) ISBN / EAN: 0385344139 / 9780385344135

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Elena Gorokhova‘s memoir of  growing up in 1960s Leningrad, A Mountain of Crumbs, has already received positive reviews in Elle and More magazines. Libraries are showing holds of three to one on modest orders.

A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir Elena Gorokhova Retail Price: $26.00 Hardcover: 320 pages Publisher: Simon & Schuster – (2010-01-12) ISBN / EAN: 1439125678 / 9781439125670

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Also on sale next week:

• John Lescroart’s new mystery, Treasure Hunt
• Amy Bloom’s new story collection, Where the God of Love Hangs Out. Her novel, Away, was a bestseller. People gives the new collection 3.5 stars and makes it a People Pick. Bloom’s subject is love. Several of the stories are interlinked and People says they “hit harder than the stand-alones: mapping passion’s fallout takes time.”

Despite the reduction in book review staffs and pages in the consumer media over the past few years, there is no dearth of best books lists, as you can see from the links at the right.

We’ve rounded up the major general lists, but there are dozens of other specialty lists, especially for mysteries. Fortunately, Janet Rudolph has rounded up the lists on her blog Mystery Fanfare.

• Mystery Roundup — Part One — Mystery Fanfare
• Mystery Roundup — Part Two — Mystery Fanfare

With the press of thousand of new books released each week, the consumer media rarely reaches back to cover titles that came out months earlier. But on NPR’s Weekend Edition yesterday, Liane Hansen featured the debut title in a new detective series that came out back in July.

Since it is set in Africa, you might be tempted to think of a certain Scottish writer, but Kirkus said of it,

Quartey’s approach to detective work is less charming and more sociological than McCall Smith’s, his setting more rural and susceptible to the ways of magicians. There’s plenty of room for them both, and the newcomer is most welcome.

The title refers to girls who are “given over to a type of priest to atone for the crimes of their families.” Says Quartey, “They do a lot of hard work for him and once they’ve reached puberty, he has sex with them.”

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Wife of the Gods Kwei Quartey Retail Price: $24.00 Hardcover: 336 pages Publisher: Random House – (2009-07-14) ISBN / EAN: 1400067596 / 9781400067596

Audio: Tantor

What books get the fewest consumer reviews?

No, not midlist titles — books by bestselling authors. Most reviewers feel they don’t need the attention (with the notable exceptions of People and Entertainment Weekly).

The Daily Beast is jumping into the breach. William Book has begun a new column that sorts through the bestsellers to identify “which, if any, are readable” (I guess that assumes people buy the books, but don’t read them?)

Here’s how he describes his brief:

I’ll render the kind of blunt verdict you get when reading about toasters in Consumer Reports. I’ll tell you which of the bestsellers, if any, are readable. If they’re semi-readable, I’ll tell you which pages to skip. With any luck, you’ll know which one to pack for the flight to Jakarta. If you want a different approach, try The New York Review of Books.

The first up is Sue Grafton’s U is for Undertow. True to his word, he recommends that if you want to “cut straight to the whodunnit … skip over pages 25-26, 226-233, and 253-260,” although, “that’s not recommended, because U is for Undertow isn’t much of a mystery.”

Does he recommend reading it, “Absolutely,” although he doesn’t present a convincing case for doing so.

It’s a good idea for a column, but, generally, the prepub reviewers, who are not allergic to covering potential bestsellers (all four reviewed this one), were more articulate in their recommendations.

U is for Undertow (Kinsey Millhone Mystery) Sue Grafton Retail Price: $27.95 Hardcover: 416 pages Publisher: Putnam Adult – (2009-12-01) ISBN / EAN: 039915597X / 9780399155970

Random House Audio, UNABR CD; 9780739323212; $45
Large Print; Thorndike; 9781410420374
Book and audio downloadable from OverDrive

Number one on Stephen King’s Top Ten Books of the year is Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger, which has appeared on several other lists and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize this year.

King’s list appears in the new issue of Entertainment Weekly. Since King draws from the books he read during the year, it includes older titles, like Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road (#2), Salman Rushdie’s Midnights Children (#4) and last year’s literary superstar, 2666 by Roberto Bolano (#5).

At #6 is a title that hasn’t appeared on other lists, a book that King says is “The most suspenseful book I read all year,” Michael Robotham’s Shatter.

Kirkus said of the Australian author’s fourth thriller, “Robotham sharpens the conventional horrors with his unerring eye for psychological detail, his mastery of pace and his spooky villain, a manipulator as monstrous as Hannibal Lecter.”

Shatter Michael Robotham Retail Price: $24.95 Hardcover: 448 pages Publisher: Doubleday – (2009-03-17) ISBN / EAN: 0385517912 / 9780385517911

Audio; Recorded Books

• UNABR CD; 9781436174541; $123.75
• UNABR Cass; 9781436192651; $64.75

Book downloadable from OverDrive.

TWO national newspaper stories came out this week about Americans who can’t wait for the third volume in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series, Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, not due here until the end of May. They are buying the UK editions, which came out in October of this year.

The New York Times writes about some independent bookstores that have imported the British editions and are selling them for as much as $45.

Of course, this violates territorial rights agreements. Other booksellers quoted by the NYT, such as Powell’s in Portland, OR, say they plan to stick to the rules and wait for the American edition.

Ignoring territorial rights, the Wall Street Journal suggests Americans buy Hornet’s Nest through Amazon, UK, as well as four other “hot titles” (sorry, we don’t see these titles as being quite so heavily sought-after by Americans):

• Anne Tyler, Noah’s Compass, US pub, Knopf, (January 5, 2010)
• William Boyd, Ordinary Thunderstorms, US pub, Harper, (January 26, 2010)
• John Banville, The Infinities, US pub, Knopf, (February 23, 2010)
• Sebastian Faulks, A Week in December, US pub, Doubleday, (March 9, 2010)

Why is the Hornet’s Nest available in the UK so far ahead of the US edition? Both articles quote responses from the US publisher Knopf, but Sarah Weinman offers a more plausible theory on her mystery-focused blog, Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind.

One library we checked already has over 500 holds on the 46 copies they’ve ordered of the Knopf edition.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest Stieg Larsson Retail Price: $26.95 Hardcover: 480 pages Publisher: Knopf – (2010-05-25) ISBN / EAN: 030726999X / 9780307269997

Simultaneous unabridged audio; Random House Audio; 9780739384190; $40.

It seems a famous name on the cover doesn’t always win over readers.

Al Roker, book lover and Today Show‘s seemingly irrepressible weatherperson, releases his first work of adult fiction today; The Morning Show Murders. Library users are not jumping on it; holds are light. Selectors have also been cautious; the systems we checked ordered just one per large branch, despite strong prepub reviews. PW called it “solid and exciting”; Kirkus, “a crisp puzzler”; Booklist reveals a bit of anti-celebrity prejudice by calling it “surprisingly engaging.”

Of course, Roker can expect to get more publicity than your average first-time mystery author. He is interviewed in USA Today, in a story that gives more ink to how various Today Show staffers feel about the book (even though none of them have read it yet), than the book itself.

He is also featured on the Today Show, but most of the segment is taken up by an odd, not particularly funny, fake book trailer.

Fortunately, mystery maven Sarah Weinman treats Roker like an author in The Daily Beast, delving in to his writing process with coauthor Dick Lochte and the book’s tone (unlike Roker’s on-air personality, his book has its dark moments).

The main character, Billy Blessing, is a chef and restaurant owner, who also does segments on a TV morning show and has just begun filming a reality show. There’s no love lost between Blessing and the show’s executive producer, who inconveniently dies after eating poisoned coq au vin in Blessing’s restaurant.

The book is the first of a planned series. Roker and his coauthor are working on the second one, which is scheduled for release in fall 2010.

The Morning Show Murders Al Roker, Dick Lochte Retail Price: $26.00 Hardcover: 320 pages Publisher: Delacorte Press – (2009-11-24) ISBN / EAN: 038534368X / 9780385343688

Random House Audio; 9780307577375; $35