When a teenage boy turns up dead in a D.C. community garden, the discovery means different things to different people. To Gus Ramone, a straight-arrow police detective whose son knew the dead boy, it signifies all the threats swirling around his cherished middle-class family life. For Dan “Doc” Holliday, a boozy, womanizing ex-cop forced to resign during an Internal Affairs investigation conducted by Ramone, the murder stirs up a buried but never dormant longing to return to the work he loved so well. And to T.C. Cooke, a legendary retired detective now slowly decaying in a suburban ranch house, the boy’s death is a call to arms, the circumstances uncannily similar to a string of murders from the 1980s, the case Cooke never solved and has never forgotten.

On the parallel track, a parolee trying to stay clean gets entangled with his reckless nephew’s plans to become a street legend. “Brock liked the old stories about outlaws like Red. Men who just didn’t give a good fuck about the law or if and when they’d go down. Having other men talk about you in bars and on street corners, after you were dead and gone, that’s what made a life worth living. Otherwise, wasn’t anything about you that was special. ‘Cause everybody, straight and criminal alike, ended up covered in dirt.”

Brock is an idiot, but reputation has a powerful sway over the characters in “The Night Gardener.” Holliday’s is ruined, Cooke’s is fading and Ramone’s, due to his caution, has never really attained its full flower. The possibility of fixing this by finally solving the Night Gardener murders draws them together as improbable allies, and in the process they begin to rub off on each other. Holliday restores Cooke’s energy, Cooke renews Holliday’s pride and Ramone begins to understand that in a crooked system, playing it straight isn’t always the right thing to do.

How all this connects to a bunch of small-scale drug dealers and ambitious hoodlums, all conniving to relieve each other of either wads of cash or life itself, only becomes clear at the very end of the novel. Pelecanos, like his colleagues who work on “The Wire,” is far more interested in the influence of chance, luck and coincidence than most crime writers. His detectives are intelligent, but we readers get the bird’s-eye view and the opportunity to see everything they don’t, how close they come to the truth before missing it, and into the nooks and crannies of the story that they’ll never understand. One nice thing: Although “The Wire” stands firm in insisting that anyone who fights “the game” will be crushed by it, Pelecanos is more willing to let his smarter characters beat the system. A little less uncompromising, perhaps, but in the long months until the start of Season 4, it still hits the spot.

Our next pick: From the author of “Oblivion,” a gripping psychological suspense novel about a young aspiring writer who befriends a convicted killer

Of course, when we say fun, we don’t mean dumb. Quite the opposite. At Salon, we see no reason why the best books of the more strictly entertaining genres — thrillers, fantasies, crime novels, chick lit — shouldn’t be recommended with the same gusto as the best histories, biographies and literary novels. That’s why we’ve combed through the publishers’ catalogs and stacks of galleys to come up with this list of gripping reads. We’re sure they’ll keep you pinned to your beach chair, or make that long plane ride absolutely fly by.

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“The Historian” by Elizabeth Kostova
A band of intrepid historians hunt for the real-life Dracula — and visit plenty of far-flung European locales — in this hypnotic multigenerational mystery.
Reviewed by Laura Miller

“Bangkok Tattoo” by John Burdett
In this follow-up to “Bangkok 8,” Buddhist police detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep is back, exposing more corruption — and hilarity — in the Thai capital’s red-light district.
Reviewed by Laura Miller

“10 Men” by Alexandra Gray
In this smart and stylish debut, an unnamed heroine guides us through her personal history of love, one man at a time, as she searches for true happiness.
Reviewed by Hillary Frey

“Oblivion” by Peter Abrahams
Detective Nick Petrov confronts the case of a missing girl — and a life-changing brain tumor — in this sleekly written, suspenseful crime novel.
Reviewed by Laura Miller

“The Hidden Family” by Charles Stross
In this second novel in “The Merchant Princes” fantasy series, past, present and future collide as investigative journalist Miriam Beckstein navigates parallel universes — and alters the course of history.
Reviewed by Andrew Leonard

“Cast of Shadows” by Kevin Guilfoile
A father uses cloning technology and a video game to track down the man who killed and raped his daughter in this near-futuristic thriller.
Reviewed by Laura Miller

“Misfortune” by Wesley Stace
In this enjoyable 19th century potboiler with a twist, a boy is raised as a girl, and a balladeer plays a starring role in solving the mystery of her parentage.
Reviewed by Laura Miller

“In the Shadow of the Law” by Kermit Roosevelt
A terrifically idiosyncratic and colorful bunch of characters make this K Street thriller about corporate law a standout.
Reviewed by Laura Miller

Page turners can be smart, as in really smart, and not just the pseudo-intelligence of the reviewers’ current darling, “The Rule of Four,” by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason. With that novel, we were promised Donna Tartt meets Umberto Eco, and instead we got way too much turgid maundering on undergraduate life at Princeton and way too little of the fascinating real-life Renaissance book supposedly at the story’s center. Nowhere is it written that smart books must also be overwritten and difficult to follow, either. The hardest thing, after all, is to make it go down easy.

Determined to find unputdownable novels that didn’t make us wince or groan on every page, we plowed through publishers’ recent and forthcoming offerings for books guaranteed to shorten a long flight and make a sunbathing session even more pleasant. Some of these titles you may have already read about, others will be hitting the stores in a month or so. (They can also be ordered or pre-ordered from Powells.com.) All of them belong on the shopping list of readers who aren’t turning off their brains just because it’s June, but who don’t see a beach blanket as quite the right place to tackle a history of the Soviet gulags. We hope at least one of them makes your summer a little sunnier.

“The Narrows”
By Michael Connelly
405 pages
Little, Brown
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All the flaws of Michael Connelly’s writing are on display in “The Narrows”: the humorlessness, the sentimentality disguised as masculine stoicism, the moralistic attitude toward any vaguely disreputable pleasure. In other words, “The Narrows” is, for good and bad, representative of the current state of mainstream hard-boiled fiction in America.

But also on display are Connelly’s considerable talents as a plotter. Even that attribute is not without flaws. He has a tendency to go for one twist too many, pushing his stories over the line from ingenious to “Oh, come on.” Nowhere was that more evident than in “The Poet,” a genuinely creepy serial-killer thriller (as opposed to the showy Grand Guignol of the Thomas Harris school) and a brilliant piece of plotting — until Connelly went for that final twist that nearly made the entire book fall apart.

Still, “The Poet” was crafty enough for Connelly to guarantee a built-in audience for the sequel, which is what “The Narrows” is. It’s also the latest novel featuring Connelly’s now retired LAPD detective hero, Harry Bosch. And it’s the book that marks the end of Connelly’s tales of Terry McCaleb (who first appeared in “Blood Work”), the detective whose retirement was forced by his heart transplant. In other words, “The Narrows” is Connelly’s lollapalooza, a greatest-hits collection that is also a deck clearing, preparing the stage for the next portion of the Harry Bosch saga.

The parallel plots, which should be described as generally as possible, have to do with the return of the Poet and the female FBI agent who has been obsessed with catching him since he eluded her several years before, and with Harry’s investigation into the death of McCaleb, which appears to be from something other than McCaleb’s transplanted heart finally giving out. Connelly keeps a firm grip on the narrative even before the two stories converge, and through the book’s changing voice. Shifting from third-person to two first-person narrators (Harry and the Poet), Connelly doesn’t dilute his narrative drive or his ability to leave you hanging at the end of a chapter.

What is distracting and inescapable here are the patches of bad writing: “You can become unhinged and cut loose from the world. You can believe you are a permanent outsider. But the innocence of a child will bring you back and give you the shield of joy with which to protect yourself.” Ewwww. As Bosch readers know, Harry found he had a 4-year-old daughter at the end of his last case, “Lost Light.” But that’s no excuse. (Ross Macdonald often talked about innocence corrupted without falling into that sort of squishiness.) If you’re a Bosch fan, that passage — and worse — aren’t going to matter. If you haven’t tried Connelly, all I can say is that as a storyteller, he’s good enough so that even crap like that isn’t enough to keep you from turning the pages.

– Charles Taylor

“The Ghost Writer”
By John Harwood
384 pages
Harcourt
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You could label some elements of John Harwood’s ghost story hokey: It’s got veiled specters, accursed paintings, a big old deserted house with a sinister basement. But like one of those gifted cooks who can somehow turn a can of tuna and a handful of rice into a savory dish, Harwood knows how to spin shivers and nerves out of unpromisingly familiar material. “The Ghost Writer” is the first-person account of Gerard Freeman, who spends his 1960s boyhood in a remote Australian town plagued by millipedes and red dust, his father distant and his mother scared of her own shadow. The only time her apprehension lifts is when she’s telling Gerard tales about Staplefield, the stately English country house where she grew up with her beloved grandmother Viola, an exotic realm of chaffinches and hawthorn hedgerows. But even her stories dry up when she catches her son snooping in a secret drawer, where he discovers an old literary journal containing a ghost story written by someone called V.H. and a photograph of a beautiful, unnamed woman.

All this nostalgia and mystery pretty much guarantees that Gerard will get the yen to visit England, and when he becomes pen pals with Alice — an elusive English orphan whom he imagines to be a pre-Raphaelite-style beauty — the die is cast. After his mother’s death, when Gerard has become a quiet, recessive young man feeding off his own longings for faraway things, he heads back to the old country, searching for Staplefield and Alice. A series of short stories, written by Viola and published in various obscure reviews decades earlier, becomes part of the trail. At least one-half of “The Ghost Writer” is made up of Viola’s rich, supremely spooky yarns, all of which seem to involve young men who are martyrs to love and victims of supernatural forces. The stories are obscurely entwined with the fate of Gerard’s mother, whom he suspects of having been involved in a terrible crime. On her deathbed, when Gerard asks her about Viola’s stories, his mother will only tell him, “One came true.”

“The Ghost Writer” has a patchwork quality reminiscent of A.S. Byatt’s “Possession”; each of the several voices (Gerard, Viola, Alice) is entirely distinct, as if the novel were assembled from documentary evidence. Byatt is only the most subterranean of allusions, however, for Harwood weaves many overt literary references — most notably to Henry James’ “Turn of the Screw” — into his book. This isn’t just postmodern cleverness; in fact, it isn’t postmodern at all. Instead, the technique shows Harwood’s keen understanding of how alternating the prosaic with the unreal can create a pervasive creepiness. It’s as if by reading about James’ haunted (or mad) governess, Gerard invites a similar fate. The heady, story-drugged atmosphere of Viola’s tales melts into Gerard’s fairly rational account of his quest, and where the two blur together is exactly the sort of place ghosts come from, the borderline between dream and waking.

Gerard’s investigation of his mother’s past takes him deep into a thicket of fact, fiction and lies that might be someone’s attempt to hide her guilt, but might also be a trap. Harwood’s plot is intricate — it may leave you puzzling out the finer points of the various twists on your own after you follow it breathlessly to its conclusion — but what lingers are Viola’s tales. Some are more inventive than others, particularly a story set in the Reading Room at the British Museum that gives a whole new meaning to the expression “a foggy day in London town.” But all of them have a hypnotic quality that oozes out beyond the solid structure of Harwood’s plot and in the end envelopes it. By the last page, all the loose ends have been tied up, but that aura of the uncanny still clings to everything. As with all the best ghost stories, you’re left feeling that the truth about what happened can never finally be pinned down.

– Laura Miller

“The Shadow of the Wind”
By Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Translated by Lucia Graves
Penguin Press
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The cover of Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s “Shadow of the Wind” sports an atmospheric photograph of a foggy European street at night, and the spine is made to suggest a leather-bound, gold-stamped volume from some venerable library. So you might reasonably guess that this novel is either 1) an evocation of “Casablanca”-style intrigue à la Alan Furst or 2) a bookish thriller in the mode of Arturo Pérez-Reverte. (Ruiz Zafón is Spanish, like Pérez-Reverte, and “The Shadow of the Wind” was a bestseller in his homeland.) It’s neither; Ruiz Zafón has revived the kind of full-blooded story of romance and mystery perfected by Victor Hugo.

“The Shadow of the Wind” has an innocence that doesn’t prevent it from being thoroughly enthralling; at heart, the novel is a story of star-crossed lovers, bold young heroes, their lovably eccentric sidekicks and a cruel, dastardly villain. There are no fiendishly clever twists or secret codes, but Ruiz Zafón doesn’t need them. He sweeps you along with the sheer riverine force of his sincerity and passion.

It’s 1945 in Barcelona, and the brutality of Spain’s recent civil war dominates everyone’s mood. (It’s fascinating to read a European novel in which World War II is a relatively distant conflagration.) The city hasn’t lost its beauty and charm — at least a dozen scenes take place in its famous cafes — but everyone is a little wobbly on their feet. “Wars have no memory and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened,” as one character puts it. A young boy, Daniel Sempere, is taken by his widower father, a book dealer, to a secret library called the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, and allowed to select one title to adopt and preserve. Daniel picks “The Shadow of the Wind,” by Julian Carax, and falls in love with the novel. He decides to find out more about its obscure author, and thereby hangs the tale.

Despite this bibliographic premise, “The Shadow of the Wind” isn’t really about books. Yes, Daniel does fend off a sinister disfigured man who covets his copy of the Carax novel, and later learns that someone using the name of a character in the book — an alias, in fact, of the devil — has been systematically burning Carax’s books. But we learn next to nothing about novel’s plot or about any of Carax’s other works. The secrets that Daniel seeks as he grows to adolescence all concern Carax himself, a dashing, handsome and intelligent young man whose history includes murky parentage, a generous patron, a doomed love affair, a flight to Paris, an artist’s garret and an ignominious death in a Barcelona alleyway. A sociopathic police inspector hovers over the proceedings, threatening the usual dire consequences for lads who stick their noses where they don’t belong.

The past tugs obscurely at the fabric of Daniel’s life; the further he immerses himself in Carax’s story, the more his own experiences seem to follow a similar pattern. Ruiz Zafón’s novel is elegantly constructed, but not self-consciously so, and there isn’t a speck of real cynicism in it, a refreshing change from the average thriller’s knee-jerk attempts at worldliness. “The Shadow of the Wind” believes in the power of youth to rebuild hope on the bitter, ash-strewn ground of history, and so powerful is the sway of this author’s storytelling, that, for 550 pages at least, he makes you believe it, too.

– Laura Miller

“Emma Brown: A Novel From the Unfinished Manuscript by Charlotte Brontë
By Clare Boylan
437 pages
Viking
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There is a strain of literature, both high and low, which can be summed up by the remark Thelma Ritter makes in “All About Eve”: “Everything but the hound dog yappin’ at her rear end.” Multiply the hound dog into a pack and reduce the rear end to a small one and you have an idea of the relentless misfortune at work in “Emma Brown.”

Clare Boylan’s novel is described as based on an “unfinished manuscript” by Charlotte Brontë. This is generous. What Brontë left behind amounts to 19 pages, the book’s first two chapters. Though Boylan has clearly attempted a work in the Brontëan spirit, incorporating lines from the writer’s letters, it’s Boylan who deserves credit for the heavy lifting here. She’s fashioned a gothic orphan saga from what amounts to a suggestion, one that gives no hint of the complications she has envisioned from it.

The orphan whose posterior proves so tempting to the literal and figurative hounds is Matilda. Left at a boarding school run by two respectably poverty-stricken sisters, the withdrawn child is favored and pampered in expectation of her tenure providing a steady income. When the sisters find out that the man who left her is not her father, and their dreams of financial security evaporate, Matilda, like Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Princess, is cast into the attic. She’s rescued temporarily by a local widow, Isabel Chalfont (who narrates part of the tale) and Isabel’s friend Mr. Ellin, a local gentleman who proves to be almost as mysterious as Matilda herself. The rescue is temporary, however, and Matilda is soon cast upon the cruelties of 19th century London.

At times Boylan writes as a retrospective muckraker, outraged at the treatment of women and the poor in this time, and at times she overdoes it, as when the doll that a street urchin plays with turns out to be an infant’s discarded corpse. That detail also suggests the perversity that is one of the strongest parts of “Emma Brown.”

Like many 19th century tales of the downtrodden, “Emma Brown” is a masochistic wallow. Only the masochism is so aggressive that the book feels like anything but a chronicle of passivity. Boylan’s tone combines the hot spiel of the pamphleteer with the slight distance of the social historian, all in the guise of crack storyteller. The result has a slightly guilt-inducing fascination (should we be hungry for stories that deal in misery the way this one does?). In “Emma Brown” Boylan speaks simultaneously from the soapbox and the easy chair in front of the fire.

– Charles Taylor

“Kings of Infinite Space”
By James Hynes
362 pages
St. Martin’s Press
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A cubicled office in a mid-level civil service agency in a featureless central Texas town may sound like an odd place to set a supernatural thriller, but it’s part of the genius of James Hynes’ “Kings of Infinite Space” that he makes you see that it is, in fact, the perfect setting for such a story. Very few novels can manage to be both hilarious and creepy, but this one does. Fewer still can show off their smarts without slowing down the plot, but this one does that, too. Hynes manages to combine an overblown comic-book conspiracy plot with the excruciating social satire of the BBC sitcom “The Office,” and if you think that hybrid sounds unliterary, well, guess again.

Paul Trilby is a former literature postdoc (“almost a Fulbright,” he keeps telling himself) turned temp typist in the General Services Division of the Texas Department of General Services, or GSD of TxDoGs, for short. The services provided by this department are, er, general. That is, they are vaguely delineated but have something to do with trucks. Paul lives in a residential motel and drives a decrepit Dodge Colt with no air conditioning, a purgatorial experience in a town where it hits 85 degrees by 8 a.m. He lives in dread of coming under the authority of Olivia, the ex-cheerleader occupying the cubicle across the aisle; as a vivid warning of what Olivia and TxDoGs can do to man, there’s the pitiful wretch one cube down, whom Paul thinks of only as “the dying tech writer.”

Paul’s fall from grace can be attributed to a single fact: He is a louse. He blew his academic career when he got caught cheating on his rising-star professor wife. Then the grad student he two-timed with left him for a TV weatherman, and two other women he was juggling found out about each other. Then he lost his job at a textbook publisher when he was discovered dropping racy literary allusions like “Vita showed Virginia a thing or two” into grammar exercises to mock his ill-read supervisor. He has hit bottom. And to top it off, he’s being haunted by his ex-wife’s dead cat, a phantom that bites his toes in the middle of the night, restricts his TV reception to cat-related programming, and stinks up his apartment with spectral piss.

Hynes’ previous novels have been academic satires, and at a time when postdocs and adjuncts are forced to flee the shriveled university job market, “Kings of Infinite Space” almost belongs in that category, too. Paul all too believably clings to his education as the last, flimsy shred of superiority he can claim over his co-workers, even the pretty mailroom staffer he discovers poring over the “Norton Anthology of English Literature” in the cafeteria. But the final challenge to Paul’s battered ego and chronic selfishness comes from a strange, pasty, Dilbert-like homeless guy who keeps popping up in unlikely places asking, “Are we not men?” and from a bunch of good ol’ boys from the office who manage to get a lot done without actually working. There are strange noises coming from behind the ceiling panels, Post-it notes that appear out of nowhere, and an aluminum-can recycling bin that periodically becomes bottomless. Something weird is going on at TxDoGs.

It gets a lot weirder, too, with secret societies and subterranean grottos, but bizarre as the main plot gets, Hynes keeps one foot on the ground. There’s a delicate romance kindled between Paul and Callie the mail girl, and some wicked philosophizing occasioned by a visit to a Hooters-style restaurant by the guys at the office. The big mystery, really, is whether Paul will ever grasp what a jerk he’s been and take a few halting steps in the general direction of decency. Years spent reading the cream of English literature couldn’t achieve such an enlightenment, but if a cannibal cult and some major turnover at the Texas Department of General Services can pull it off, that’s all in a day’s work.

– Laura Miller

“The Jane Austen Book Club”
By Karen Joy Fowler
304 pages
G.P. Putnam’s Sons
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Any novel titled “The Jane Austen Book Club” has enough intimations of tweeness without some reviewer making matters worse by calling it civilized. But there’s no escaping the adjective in describing Karen Joy Fowler’s novel. It’s not the thought of Jane Austen that might make some of us flee from what sounds like an unbearably homey premise — a group of women and one man in Central California meeting to discuss the novels of Jane Austen. It’s what some people have done with Austen, ignoring her sharpness and turning her into the literary equivalent of warm milk. Fowler, to her credit, has instead made a perfect glass of lemonade; every time you fear the concoction is turning too sweet, there’s a trace of tartness to keep things in balance.

You can read “The Jane Austen Book Club” for that balanced and sustained tone, or you can admire the book as a piece of comic structure so firm yet so submerged that it isn’t fully apparent until the end. Each chapter, in which the members of the club meet at someone’s house to discuss one of Austen’s novels, is Fowler’s jumping-off point for the backstory of that meeting’s host. These funny, shrewdly observed and sometimes surprisingly wounding segments might form a first-rate short-story collection (that is, if Fowler often didn’t leave you wanting more). But like her beloved Austen, Fowler uses the seemingly self-contained stories to lay the groundwork for the characters to form new alliances. When those alliances become clear, the effect is akin to seeing someone choreograph a comic ballet merely by twirling her fingers.

I must confess that part of the pleasure I took in “The Jane Austen Book Club” is because I’ve almost entirely given up on contemporary literary comedy. There are plenty of novelists who can make me laugh — but usually not the ones who are called comic novelists. Their comedy seems to require a fondness for coyness, or magic realism rendered as deadpan absurdist farce, or just pomo wiseass showing off. Just reading the flap copy exhausts me.

Fowler may succeed not only because she’s squarely in the mode of comic social novelist, but also because “The Jane Austen Book Club” is the work of someone who understands the mixture of surprise and recognition that novel readers crave. We want stories to surprise us and to confirm our experience, or nudge us to confirm what we may never have experienced but which is true. That’s what her Austen acolytes are looking for, and for all the fun she has with them, Fowler understands it’s not a sign of shallowness or of being literary lowbrows. She’s taken exactly the kind of characters it would have been easy to condescend to (or to flatter) and made what they want from novels — a simultaneous sense of comfort and adventure — seem something like a code all fiction readers share. How many novels have used the old phrase “gentle reader” to satirical effect? Reading “The Jane Austen Book Club,” you feel as if Fowler could use it and mean every syllable.

– Charles Taylor

“The Queen of the South”
By Arturo Pérez-Reverte
Translated by Andrew Hurley
438 pages
G.P. Putnam’s Sons
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Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s new novel is a literary narcocorrido, the name given to popular Mexican songs celebrating the exploits of drug traffickers. What lends his subject to a 400-page book rather than a broadsheet ballad set to a polka beat is his protagonist, Teresa Mendoza, who at the peak of her power controls 70 percent of the drug-transport business in the southern Mediterranean. Teresa is no simple macho outlaw, braced to go out in a blaze of glory with an AK-47 in one hand and a bottle of tequila in the other — although she knows her way around both. Her story is necessarily a more complicated and contradictory one than can be squeezed into a song.

Pérez-Reverte, a journalist turned bestselling writer, takes leave of his usual fictional forte here. Instead of a Byzantine plot built around some evocative bit of historical arcana — rare books, nautical charts, fencing — “The Queen of the South” is a straightforward contemporary crime thriller with a reflective, moody soul. It begins with a ringing cellphone, the sound that marks the dividing line in Teresa’s life, between the relatively simple (though never innocent) girl she once was — a former money-changer from the Mexican state of Sinaloa who catches the eye and heart of Güero Dávila, a brash, handsome pilot running shipments for the local drug lords — and the woman she becomes — tough, smart and perpetually on the run. Güero has told her that if that phone ever rings, she should understand that he’s been killed, and that she is next.

Teresa flees to Spain, where she finds a different man who pursues a similar line of work around Gibraltar, where North Africa and Europe almost meet, separated by a narrow strip of water on which a guy with a very fast boat can make a very nice chunk of change. Teresa will learn the hard way, through a process that includes a stint in a Spanish prison, that she’s better off not depending on such men. She’s clever, with a good head for numbers, a knack for mechanics, and a hollow place deep inside her where most other people keep whatever it is they have to lose. These are the makings of a kingpin — make that a queenpin. Eventually she becomes fabulously wealthy and elegant, and is named one of the best-dressed women in Spain.

“The Queen of the South” proceeds according to an unusual rhythm; passages of gasping suspense alternate with brooding psychological rumination and meticulously detailed descriptions of how Teresa’s empire is built and run. Pérez-Reverte returns to his reportorial roots on the last count; he knows so much about drug running it’s gotta be illegal. (Several of the characters Pérez-Reverte portrays are real people, including the Mexican drug lord César “Batman” Güemes.) Then there’s a framing device that probably works better in the original version, in which a journalist putting together a book on Teresa’s life describes his interviews with her past associates. The contrast between his Castilian account and Teresa’s own story — written in a slangy Mexican idiom — has to be more evocative in Spanish.

If “The Queen of the South” were about a man, perhaps it would seem less distinctive; Teresa has many of the dissociative, isolated qualities of the stereotypical noir hero. But because she’s a woman, Pérez-Reverte can use her yearning for wholeness to scrutinize everything that’s stunted about this particular macho ideal. Yes, “The Queen of the South” is a kind of narcocorrido, but it’s also an anti-narcocorrido, an outsider’s inside account of a world in which people are all too willing to sacrifice their humanity for the kind of immortality embodied in a four-minute song.

– Laura Miller

You can have it all — if by “it all” you mean great writing about believable, interesting people with plenty of exotic or historical color and terrific plots. Romance. Sex. Adventure. We’ve put together a collection of reviews spotlighting new literary titles in which you actually care what happens next. It’s true, crime and detection play a predominant role in many of these novels, but their authors know how to inject new life into what might at first seem like familiar setups — from a gang war in 1890s Alabama to a Buddhist policeman tracking a murderer through modern Bangkok. So go ahead, have some fun this summer. We promise you’ll still respect yourself in the fall.

Our first pick: A Bangkok thriller featuring a police detective narrator who has some sharp observations on the Western obsession with sex

No matter where you plan to lug your pile of beach books this summer, there’s an unusually good supply of lively, literate, engrossing titles. Below are recommendations, culled from a handful of Salon’s editors and regular critics, of some of the best hardcovers published thus far in 1998. Before we get to that, however, here’s an (admittedly personal) look at some of the most interesting paperbacks that have recently landed in stores.

In the nonfiction category, it’s hard to ignore Jon Krakauer’s “Into Thin Air” and Sebastian Junger’s “The Perfect Storm” — they’re tightly wound, and surprisingly humane, narratives about how men and women react in the face of nature’s extremes. Both writers had remarkable stories to tell, and it’s genuine praise to say that both books are better than they had to be. Another fine book, Steven Biel’s “Down With the Old Canoe,” takes a broader and more distanced view of another tragedy — the sinking of the Titanic. Biel’s book came out well before James Cameron’s film, and it will appeal even to those who’d rather drink sea water than hear another word about Leonardo DiCaprio. It’s a nuanced look at the Titanic disaster’s multiple meanings — how the sinking affected its era’s art, politics and culture.

Three other worthwhile (and deeply idiosyncratic) nonfiction books are Ellen Ullman’s “Close to the Machine,” David Sedaris’ “Naked” and Alain de Botton’s “How Proust Can Change Your Life.” Ullman is a San Francisco computer programmer (and NPR commentator) who writes with luminous, streaming ease about the ways that humans and machines interact. Her memoir is one of last year’s best. Sedaris is also well-known to NPR listeners; his elfin monologues have a bristly, cerebral charm that translates perfectly to paper. (The title, by the way, comes from his misadventures at a nudist colony.) Alain de Botton’s book is a charmingly erudite tour of Proust’s world, a tour that distills the great author’s work into an unusually provocative self-help book.

The fiction list is even stronger. Here are seven recommendations: Diane Johnson’s “Le Divorce,” a novel about what happens when American families bump into French social mores, is as sparkling as a bottle of Veuve-Clicquot; Victor Pelevin’s “Omon Ra,” translated from the Russian, is a satire about the Soviet space program that’s as funny as “Catch-22″ and as moving as J.D. Salinger’s best work; Allegra Goodman’s “The Family Markowitz” is a series of linked stories, from a precocious young writer, about an intellectual (and squabbling) Jewish family.

Denis Johnson’s “Already Dead” is a Northern California noir
that has a perfect ratio of brawn to brains; Alex Garland’s “The Beach” is a highly literate page-turner, about
thrill-seeking Westerners adrift in Thailand, that reads like an
updated version of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”;
Donald Antrim’s “The Hundred Brothers” is — quite literally
— about a gathering of 100 brothers, and it has wit and style to
burn; and Robert Stone’s “Bear and His Daughter” is a
collection of stories, from a master of the form, about men
and women who move at the margins of society.

Take them to the beach, if you must. I’ll be that guy in the shade, swinging between a couple of sturdy palm trees.

Here are some recommendations, from Salon’s editors and critics, about 1998′s best hardcovers:

STEPHANIE ZACHAREK

In summer, the next best thing to taking a road trip is reading about one. In “Lone Star Swing: On the Trail of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys” (Norton), Scottish writer Duncan McLean treks across Texas in a rented car (having gotten his driver’s license just months earlier, on the other side of the road, no less) in search of clues to the life and music of his idol, Western swing superstar Bob Wills. McLean is a game and trustworthy guide: He’s genuinely interested in meeting and chatting with Texans, especially the musicians who actually knew and worked with Wills, and the result is an earnest, off-beat, sometimes touching travelogue.

In his fast-moving, tough-talking and devilishly inventive novel “Bunny Modern” (Little Brown), David Bowman escorts us to the year 2020, showing us a world from which electricity has mysteriously vanished and fertility has taken a powder. It shouldn’t be a particularly happy place, yet Bowman’s book is cheerful in a sick sort of way. His sense of humor is breezily sophisticated and sufficiently cracked, but there are always real feelings lying beneath his sometimes goofy veneer.

And in his second novel, “Starting Out in the Evening” (Crown), Brian Morton builds a subtle, engaging story around three central characters: an aged novelist, the eager, shallow student who’s hoping to write a thesis about his work and the novelist’s daughter, who isn’t much interested in reading her father’s books but who loves him with fierce tenderness. Morton’s style is refreshingly straightforward. Instead of bundling his prose in heavy-duty metaphors and flowery language, he shapes emotional contours for his characters out of simple, light layers. It’s the kind of book that effortlessly makes you think and feel at the same time.

LAURA MILLER

In hot weather, give me the slim volume, where the sentences are so carefully sculpted that it doesn’t matter how long I space out between reading each one. Restrained books seem cooler somehow. I’d recommend Jonathan Lethem’s “Girl in Landscape” (Doubleday) to readers seeking something strikingly original, a combination of adventure, imagination, piercing domestic realism, intelligent wrangling with the mythos of the American West and one of the best 13-year-old girls ever written by a man (or anyone for that matter). It’s the story of Pella Marsh, whose family relocates to a frontier planet where she faces off against a charismatic but domineering rancher and slowly shapes an adult self around the loss of her mother to cancer. Jo Ann Beard’s autobiographical stories, in the collection “Boys of My Youth” (Little, Brown), mostly don’t tackle weighty topics (except for a piece about the day a lone gunman killed several of her co-workers), but they have an easy, slangy, cantankerous charm that’s nearly irresistible. Beard has uncanny powers of recollection, particularly when it comes to early childhood. Her memories of her 3-year-old self, a personality forming itself as raw drives collide bruisingly with the world, are refreshingly unsentimental — tart as a glass of iced lemonade.

CHARLES TAYLOR

“Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-65″ by Taylor Branch (Simon & Schuster), the second volume of Branch’s projected biographical trilogy about the life of Martin Luther King Jr., is equal to the narrative, emotional and moral complexity of the Civil Rights Movement. Alternating between 1983 and 1996, “The
House of Sleep” (Knopf), British novelist Jonathan Coe’s labyrinthine tale of coincidence, missed connections and unexpected reunions, combines the farce of Wodehouse with the rage and compassion of Dickens. Smart, engaging and possessed of a becoming light touch, Laurence O’Toole deftly knocks every anti-porn argument on its head in “Pornocopia” (Serpent’s Tail). What separates him from academics and social critics who’ve done the same thing is he’s a fan and not ashamed to admit it. Slacker noir sounds like a genre invented by some young sharpie on the make. In her first novel, “Like a Hole in the Head” (St. Martin’s Press), Jen Banbury doesn’t feel the need to impress us with toughness, and she isn’t ashamed of the emotion and fear behind her heroine’s tough exterior. Banbury gets the mixture of comedy and thrills just right. Read it before the movie version slated to star the new patron saint of the terminally insecure, Calista Flockhart.

LAURA GREEN

1998 has been a good year, so far, for the pleasures of the traditional novel: imaginary worlds made solid by detail; characters and landscapes sympathetic in their familiarity and provocative in their particularity. I loved Anna Quindlen’s “Black and Blue” for the wry voice of its damaged but courageous heroine, a battered wife on the run, although I wish Quindlen hadn’t abandoned her to a damsel-in-distress plot at the end. Toni Morrison’s “Paradise” offers her characteristic strengths: lush (if occasionally overinflated) prose; vivid re-creation of often hidden chapters of American history; and characters whose iron determination is beaten into strange shapes on the anvil of suffering. “Paradise” is also a page-turning psychological thriller, carefully woven of potentially disparate elements — the interlocking narratives of women fleeing from the traumas concealed by the benign words “home” and “love”; the unusual setting of a historically black Middle-American utopia; the inevitable conflict between a carefully nurtured ideal of black self-sufficiency and the changing political realities of the 1970s. The fundamental mystery of “Paradise,” however, is one that “Black and Blue” also addresses: How do our dreams of creation turn into nightmares of destruction?

PETER KURTH

Six months into the year and with dozens of new titles now safely in the dumpster, I can recommend three splendid books for summer reading — two novels and a case history, each of them providing the kind of sweeping, enthralling read that’s perfect for lazy days. Start with T. Coraghessan Boyle’s “Riven Rock” (Viking), the novelized history of Chicago millionaire Stanley McCormick, heir to the “Reaper” fortune, and his feminist wife, Catherine, whose tortured marriage survived McCormick’s incarceration with schizophrenia and gave them both whatever they knew of passionate, consummate love. Boyle is a wizard of word and detail, turning what might otherwise have been a grim study of madness and loss into a delightful valentine to the McCormicks and their circle. Similarly, in “A Widow For One Year” (Random House), John Irving trots out the best he has to offer in a rollicking family portrait that revolves mainly around love, sex and the nature of creative writers. It’s familiar Irving territory but beautifully told — wide, magisterial and, through the prism of Irving’s black humor, deeply moving. Finally, I vastly enjoyed Philip Hoare’s “Oscar Wilde’s Last Stand” (Arcade), an account of the notorious “Billings Trial” in England in 1918, when the “Salome” dancer Maud Allan brought suit for libel against Member of Parliament and right-wing fire-breather Noel Pembleton Billings, whose wartime scare-tactics alleged that the Germans had a “secret list” of 47,000 prominent Britons who were secretly — and not so secretly — homosexual, and that Allan herself was a leading devotee of the “Cult of the Clitoris.” A wonderful social history, chronicling the first of many “Trials of the Century” it demonstrates yet again that sexual hypocrisy knows no particular time, place or nationality: It is permanent and universal.

SCOTT ROSENBERG

In a strange publicity stunt for his new saga of Internet-industry back-stabbing, “Burn Rate” (Simon & Schuster), Michael Wolff decided not to include an index in the book — an index is only available on the Web site. Wolff claimed that he didn’t want people just pulling the book off store shelves to look up their own names and find what he said about them. After reading “Burn Rate’s” accounts of Web entrepreneurs’ devious tactics — including Wolff’s own — you might fairly assume that the no-index move is instead a ploy to build traffic on the book’s site. In any case, “Burn Rate” is a lot better at storytelling than at name-dropping. For all the author’s self-importance and dubious sincerity, and despite the book’s failures of analysis and insight, it’s a genuine page-turner. And its vision of an industry built on a sheer determination to incinerate investors’ money is one that will keep a lot of executives awake at night, long after they’ve located their own names in its pages.

KATHARINE WHITTEMORE

“I had rediscovered my saline psyche,” is how Jimmy Buffett puts it. He means the sea. When he’s not looking for that lost shaker of salt, it seems, he’s out on the bonefishing flats of the Keys, or getting mystical about the rips off Nantucket, or examining, as the song says, “that Caribbean soul I can barely control.” His nice ‘n’ lazy newest work is “A Pirate Looks at Fifty” (Random House). It really is the perfect beach reading; yes, there’s decent biographical stuff, but really the book is about beaches, or at least the water that laps upon them and the moods that produces. We’re talking phrases like “paradise” and (don’t go there) “mental Tiger Balm.” The man’s boat is even named Euphoria. Now, I’d bet Mr. Margaritaville himself would pick Peter Fonda’s “Don’t Tell Dad” (Hyperion) to imbibe this summer. In “Pirate,” Buffett recalls how much “Easy Rider” influenced him, especially the scene where “Peter and Dennis [Hopper] are quickly pounced upon by a harem of hippie chicks, who get naked, give them dope, and …” Fonda’s book is better. But the two men are of a piece. There’s the repressed childhoods (Buffett is a Catholic school victim, Fonda is wrecked by his demanding dad and suicidal mom), the drug years (“mushroom salads” for Pete, “Marley-sized spleefs” for Jim), the therapy, the fierce love of sailing. They’re both beach bums, really, who made enough green to stay out on the blue. Lucky for us, they can even write.

DAVID ULIN

For me, 1998 has so far been a year of brevity. One of the books I’ve most enjoyed has been among the shortest, while the other wholeheartedly embraces the aesthetic that less is more. The first is Abigail Thomas’ “Herb’s Pajamas” (Algonquin), a collection of four loosely linked short stories that revolve around loss — the common currency connecting all of Thomas’ characters, whether they know it or not. Spare, elegant and eschewing any hint of false resolution, these narratives share only the most fleeting moments of intersection, which imbues them with the touching serendipity of real life. Equally powerful is Grace Paley’s “Just As I Thought” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a volume bringing together nearly four decades of essays and journalism that becomes a moving record of the author’s political times. Paley is one of our national treasures, renowned for her exquisitely rendered fictional miniatures, and the pieces here operate with similar subtlety and, er, grace. Still more riveting, however, is Paley’s hard-headed, and unreconstructed, radicalism; even at 76 — and unlike too many of the lefties with whom she came of age in the 1950s and 1960s — she refuses to back down.

SALLY ECKHOFF

Gayl Jones had such a terrible time last winter — her volatile husband committed suicide, and she’s been in a psychiatric hospital — that people forgot to talk about her new novel, “The Healing” (Beacon Press). Jones is said to be shy, but her book is brightly colored and simmering with energy. She can write talking-to-yourself sentences like J.P. Donleavy, jingling chains of speech about sardines, racehorses, just about anything.

Then, how about this: Two rubes decide to bag a huge fat hibernating rattlesnake so they can sell the venom. The heat inside their truck revives Mr. Snake. Ow. Gordon Grice’s “The Red Hourglass” (Delacorte), about mean nasty predators, is crawling with similar surprises. Grice comes off like a horror nerd, but you have to be weird to keep a tarantula on your kitchen table.

And here’s the sleeper of the year: “Rhonda the Rubber Woman” (The Permanent Press). Norma Peterson, bless her, died of leukemia before her only book came out. Her 1940s tale of a teenage contortionist and her promiscuous mom is warm and inventive, yet has lots of bleak, lonely spots that give it wonderful tang and balance. Reading this feels like reaching through a yellow fog of years and grabbing a carnival prize.

ALBERT MOBILIO

Sun too bright for you this summer? Longing for dark shadows, dank recesses? You should crawl between the covers of Andrew Klavan’s eerie thriller “The Uncanny” (Crown). Big-time Hollywood producer Richard Storm has made a string of movies based on classic English ghost tales, but when he comes to England to hunt down evidence of “one lousy uncanny thing” he finds himself plummeting through the black hole between fact and fiction. Klavan echoes 19th century Gothic masters like Edgar Allen Poe (M.R. James’ ghost shows up for a cameo) to produce a speed-of-falling narrative whose plush cinematic visuals dizzy you even further. The whole gang’s on board — Nazis, witches, Norse gods, Arthurian legends — and the ride is wicked good. In “Green Sees Things in the Waves” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), August Kleinzahler scores the rough jangle of everyday talk for poems whose music recalls the peppery bounce of Poulenc or Thelonious Monk’s missing notes. Read slowly and listen to how he plunks and plinks the keys in “Tanka-Toys: A Memoir”: “The clues to my being–/the bloody windsprint/the mashie niblick hanging/from a willow/the retreating aria/… Oh, I was freed/freed, I say/kneeling, teething/chopchopchopping/like a tractor piston/like an outboard coughing up lake.” This new book is full of off-kilter yet dead-on observations that hover just above our recognition until their very sound trips the brainwire and the “little truth” falls into place; it’s something you’ve always known, but now, as Keats said, it’s been “proved upon the pulse.” Kleinzahler’s wiry tunes are what happens to unheard melodies when some smart cookie finds the volume switch.

DWIGHT GARNER

Ian McEwan’s new novel, “Enduring Love,” (Doubleday) has the most gripping opening passage you’re likely to read in a serious novel this year — a hot-air balloon is plummeting into an open field, and a series of onlookers rush toward it, hoping to rescue its two occupants. What none of these onlookers know is that this moment, and its tragic aftermath, will alter their lives forever. McEwan, one of literature’s true black magicians, spins out this story with his enormous skill, and as always his writing is full of the kind of small pleasures (perfect sentences, acid observations) that poke you happily awake. By its close, “Enduring Love” has become a striking meditation on rationality and religion, on love’s wilder states and on the nature of selfishness. How much do we give others? How much do we keep for ourselves? McEwan writes slim, interior novels; Richard Price writes sprawling, exterior ones. What links them is the ability to ensnare you with the sheer force of their narrative skills. Price’s new novel “Freedomland” (Broadway), told in neon-lit prose, is an urban spin on the Susan Smith kidnapping case; it’s about what happens when a woman is carjacked while her young son is sleeping in the backseat. The child goes missing, and a series of shrewdly drawn characters is sucked into the tale — notably an affable community-based cop named Lorenzo and an aggressive local journalist named Jessie, who fights to get the woman’s story. Price is known for the reporting he does before putting words to paper, and all the details here feel exactly right. Even better, “Freedomland” reads like a comet. Finally, I’d recommend Calvin Trillin’s wry and self-deprecating new memoir, “Family Man” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Trillin claims that the sum of his childrearing advice is: “Try to get one that doesn’t spit up. Otherwise you’re on your own.” But he’s just, of course, being modest. This meandering book is stuffed with insight about how the Trillin family did manage to stay so close — close enough that Trillin likes to joke that his apartment may someday become a stop on the Gray Line Tour of New York City as a place that houses “the last nuclear family in lower Manhattan.”