TO ORDER All titles may not be immediately available. . . . . . . . . . . . . RECENT REVIEWS: 8/04/97: Halfway Heaven: Diary of a Harvard Murder Melanie Thernstrom Fiction 8/01/97: Soul Kiss By Shay Youngblood Fiction 7/31/97: I Know You Really Love Me: A Psychiatrist's Journal of Erotomania, Stalking, and Obsessive Love By Doreen Orion Nonfiction 7/30/97: The Wishbones By Tom Perrotta Fiction 7/29/97: The Triumph of Meanness Nicolaus Mills Nonfiction . . . . . . . . . . . . SEARCH BOOK ARCHIVES BY: title of book author publisher reviewer . . . . . . . . . . . . ALSO IN SALON: Wasted Youth Novels By Andrew Hultkrans Three new novels take you to the throbbing pulse of decadent youth culture -- yawn. . . . . . . . . . . . . RECENT BOOK FEATURES

the death and life of bobby z ++BY DON WINSLOW | KNOPF +++++259 PAGES | FICTION BY CHARLES TAYLOR | Don Winslow's brisk, nifty debut, "The Death and Life of Bobby Z," is good enough to make you hope that he works out the kinks in his style, and it's accomplished enough to make you believe that he will. Winslow has obviously taken a look at the work of Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiassen. Like them, he constructs a plot that plays like a Rube Goldberg contraption gone haywire. One action sets so many gears whirring and bucking and shaking that, at moments, you really have the sense that all hell is breaking loose. Winslow's hero is Tim Kearney, a three-time loser about to become a lifelong resident of California's correctional institutions, if he can survive retribution from the comrades of the Hell's Angel he killed in self-defense. He's given a deal by the DEA: Impersonate Bobby Z, a legendary drug dealer to whom Tim bears a striking resemblance and who happens to be inconveniently dead. The DEA needs Bobby to swap for one of their agents who's been kidnapped by a Latino drug lord. Tim takes the deal and does a first-rate acting job. Trouble is, the open arms the drug lord plans to greet Bobby with are firearms. The pleasure of reading a Leonard or Hiassen novel isn't just the farcical plotting, but the way the humor undercuts the macho swagger that hampers most mysteries. Winslow (who's worked as a private investigator) isn't immune to that swagger. His sex scenes veer perilously close to Penthouse Forum fare and you can sense him flexing his cojones in the violent scenes (there's a lot of them). He needs to develop the cool, sardonic disengagement that would lend a greater sense of control to his already considerable command of plotting. But he's already on his way to developing the talent of slipping into the voices of his characters. Here's a DEA agent attending a Hell's Angel's funeral: "Under normal circumstances, Tad Grusza would have considered attending Raymond 'Boom-Boom' Boge's wake a pleasure trip. Few things would have improved a soft California evening better than seeing that slimy bag of guts laid out in a cheap casket while his mourning brethren drank, smoked and fucked around him." There's no reason to think that "The Death and Life of Bobby Z" isn't the start of a first-rate entertainer's career. Aug. 5, 1997 Charles Taylor lives in Boston. He is a regular contributor to Salon. BOOKMARK: http://www.salonmagazine.com/sneaks/sneak.html