'A Certain Somewhere'
Edited by Robert Wilson
Random House, $24.95.
This is a fascinating collection of 30 essays from Preservation magazine, each one about a place that means something to a particular writer. The writers are diverse: poets, novelists, essayists and literary critics. This is "a sophisticated armchair-travel experience" with many fine writers acting as tour guides.
They include Ann Beattie, writing on Key West; Madison Smartt Bell, writing on Haiti; James Conway on western Massachusetts; Michael Dirda on Lorain, Ohio; Morris Halle on MIT; Noel Perrin on Vermont; Paul Mariani on the Brooklyn Bridge; Thomas Mallon on The New York Public Library; and Malcolm Jones on Grand Central Station.
Good stuff.
One of the best essays is written by Phyllis Rose on the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York:
"It's fitting that the Metropolitan Museum should sit inside Central Park, which sits inside the city: a nesting doll of human creativity, like the wooden matryushkas sold by Russian immigrants on the sidewalk in front of the museum. For inside the Metropolitan, (inside Central Park, inside New York), there are little nuggets of other cultures, the ultimate treasures of the nesting doll, other enterable spaces — the Temple of Dendur, the studiolo, the Astor Court, the Frank Lloyd Wright Room, the Shoin Room, the Nur Al-Din Room — places I return to again and again, both to explore time and space and to escape from them." — Dennis Lythgoe
'Dead Aim'
By Thomas Perry
Random House, $24.95.
The author's conspicuously successful career continues with his newest in a long series (13) of crime novels.
It focuses on Robert Mallon, a man of independent means who lives in Santa Barbara, Calif. While walking on the beach, he has a surprise encounter with a young woman who kills herself. He becomes obsessed with finding out why she would be brought to suicide — and in the process he gets involved in a sinister underworld.
His opposite is a hunter named Parish, who is credited with the full understanding of evil. Perry demonstrates in this book that his talent is strong and healthy — and that he writes as convincingly about women as he does about men.
Perry, whose novel "Pursuit" was a best-seller last year, appeared last autumn at the Great Salt Lake Book Festival. His first two novels, "The Butcher's Boy" and "Metzger's Dog" are soon to be republished to celebrate his 20-year career. — Dennis Lythgoe
'Unhinged: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery'
By Sarah Graves
Bantam, $19.95.
When "Jake" Tiptree abandoned his Wall Street life for a charming "fixer-upper" in the tiny town of Eastport, Maine, she thought she had left the dangers of big-city life behind. Instead, the town's resident "snoop," Harriet Hollingsworth, disappears, something Tiptree can't quite believe. The police chief is hesitant to launch an investigation. As Jake starts doing some detective work, an accident almost kills her teenage son, Sam, and her husband, Wade.
Finally, a New York cop she knows shows up and makes things worse. Soon, she discovers she is chasing a homicidal maniac. This book is not nearly the caliber of a Tom Perry novel, but Graves has written eight of these formula mysteries set in Maine — and they have been quite successful.
And the hero is a woman. — Dennis Lythgoe