"Scorch"

New from from Five Star Mysteries: Marc Paoletti's Scorch.

About the book, from the publisher:

Hollywood special effects pyrotechnician and ex-Navy SEAL David Cole is forced to relive the horror of war when a trained killer from his past, hired by a ruthless film producer, tries to murder him by burning him alive. The killer isn't successful, but the attack does take the life of Cole's beloved son, and leaves Cole horribly burned. Framed for the crime and pursued by police, Cole must endure unspeakable pain while using his knowledge of pyrotechnic effects and urban warfare to hunt the men responsible and fashion his own brand of justice. But time is running out. As Cole's ravaged body deteriorates, so does his grip on reality. Soon, Cole becomes a threat to both friend and foe alike, which is nothing compared to the price he could ultimately pay in this edge-of-your-seat action-thriller.

Visit Marc Paoletti's website.

"Please Excuse My Daughter"

New from Riverhead: Please Excuse My Daughter by Julie Klam.

About the book, from the publisher:

A woman's hilarious, bittersweet account of growing up in a family of career-shunning, dependence-seeking women and her journey to a state of twenty-first-century self-reliance.

Julie Klam was raised as the only daughter of a Jewish family in the exclusive WASP stronghold of Bedford, New York. Her mother was sharp, glamorous, and funny, but did not think that work was a woman's responsibility. Her father was fully supportive, not just of his wife's staying at home, but also of her extravagant lifestyle. Her mother's offbeat parenting style-taking Julie out of school to go to lunch at Bloomingdale's, for example-made her feel well-cared-for (and well-dressed) but left her unprepared for graduating and entering the real world. She had been brought up to look pretty and wait for a rich man to sweep her off her feet. But what happened if he never showed up?

When Julie gets married to a hardworking but not wealthy man-one who expects her to be part of a modern couple and contribute financially to the marriage-she realizes how ambivalent and ill-equipped she is for life. Once she gives birth to a daughter, she knows she must grow up, get to work, and teach her child the self-reliance that she never learned.

Delivered in an uproariously funny, sweet, self-effacing, and utterly memorable voice, Please Excuse My Daughter is a bighearted memoir from an irresistible new writer.

Visit Julie Klam's website.

"The Deal"

New from Oceanview Publishing: The Deal by Adam Gittlin.

About the book, from the publisher:

Everything about Jonah Gray screams success –movie-star good looks, expensive clothes, a Park Avenue penthouse, and a seven-figure income. A cutthroat, rainmaking New York city commercial real estate broker, Jonah craves opulence and power. He beds models, romps the globe on the weekends and sees the world as his for the taking. Jonah Gray has it all. Or at least he had it all.

When a close family friend presents Jonah with the deal of a lifetime, Jonah jumps at the chance. All Jonah has to do is act quickly, invest half a billion dollars in prime NY office buildings, and collect a huge payoff.

But all that glitters is not gold and this golden opportunity is anything but. Within days of signing on, Jonah is mysteriously thrust into the epicenter of an international and personal scandal.

Forced to explore a whole new territory where he can trust no one, and where danger, death and deception lurk at every corner, Jonah will learn some painfully hard lessons about the quest for easy money.

For Jonah, closing this deal could mean losing everything.

Visit Adam Gittlin's website.

"The Hard Way"

New from Forge Books: The Hard Way by Julie Luongo.

About the book, from the publisher:

Lucy Venier changes careers and boyfriends as often as she changes her socks. Although gifted with wit and creativity, the one thing Lucy lacks is focus. While being someone she’s not, be it crime reporter or sleep-deprived law student, Lucy’s one constant is art. Her insatiable desire to create is fueled by her offbeat life experiences. But unfortunately by day Lucy must hide her creativity under her business suit.

As if figuring out her life isn’t hard enough, all of Lucy’s friends are getting married. But Lucy’s not sure if she’s capable of living happily ever after. With a string of loser former flames, giving up seems to be the best option. But then there’s Ben—Lucy’s Mr. Right who comes at completely the wrong time. But is he truly The One? Did Lucy miss her chance?

In the tradition of The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing, The Hard Way is a scrapbook of stories from Lucy’s life. As she discovers more about the people around her, will she finally begin to understand herself?

Visit Julie Luongo's blog and her MySpace page.

"Blue Smoke and Murder"

New from William Morrow: Blue Smoke and Murder by Elizabeth Lowell.

About the book, from the publisher:

Jill Breck was just doing her job as a river guide when she saved the life of Lane Faroe, son of two of St. Kilda Consulting's premier operators. But when a string of ominous events—including a mysterious fire that kills her great-aunt and a furor in the Western art world raised by a dozen Breck family paintings—culminates in a threat to her life, Jill reluctantly calls in a favor.

Zach Balfour works part-time as a consultant for St. Kilda. His expertise is gathering and analyzing information from unlikely and often dangerous sources. Though he's got the skills to be a highly effective bodyguard, being a bullet catcher isn't his preferred way to spend time.

Protecting Jill will take him into familiar territory—among a strange, savagely competitive bunch of collectors who'll do anything to stay at the top. But Jill is in deeper waters than she's ever known; as she soon discovers, the perils of running wild rivers are tame compared with the hidden dangers in the high-stakes game of art collecting.

From the cozy rooms of the Breck homestead cabin to the cold multimillion-dollar galleries of the Western art circuit, Zach and Jill must race against time to unmask a ruthless killer hidden in a blue smoke of money, threats, lies, and death....

Visit Elizabeth Lowell's website.

"A Good Indian Wife"

New from W.W. Norton: Anne Cherian's A Good Indian Wife.

About the book, from the publisher:

A clash of hearts and cultures set against the divergent backdrops of rural India and downtown San Francisco.

Handsome anesthesiologist Neel prides himself on his decisiveness, both in and out of the operating room. So when he agrees to return to India to visit his ailing grand-father, he is sure he’ll be able to resist his family’s pleas that he marry a “good” Indian girl. With a girlfriend and a promising career back in San Francisco, the last thing Neel needs is an arranged marriage.

Leila is a thirty-year-old teacher in Neel’s family’s village who has watched too many prospective husbands come and go to think her newest suitor will be any different. She is well past prime marrying age; her family has no money for a dowry; and then there’s the matter of an old friendship with a Muslim boy named Janni.

Neel and Leila struggle to reconcile their own desires with the expectations of others in this riveting story of two people, two countries, and two ways of life that may be more compatible than they seem.

"Breath"

New from Farrar, Straus and Giroux: Tim Winton's Breath.

About the book, from the publisher:

Tim Winton is Australia’s best-loved novelist. His new work, Breath, is an extraordinary evocation of an adolescence spent resisting complacency, testing one’s limits against nature, finding like-minded souls, and discovering just how far one breath will take you. It’s a story of extremes—extreme sports and extreme emotions.

On the wild, lonely coast of Western Australia, two thrillseeking and barely adolescent boys fall into the enigmatic thrall of veteran big-wave surfer Sando. Together they form an odd but elite trio. The grown man initiates the boys into a kind of Spartan ethos, a regimen of risk and challenge, where they test themselves in storm swells on remote and shark-infested reefs, pushing each other to the edges of endurance, courage, and sanity. But where is all this heading? Why is their mentor’s past such forbidden territory? And what can explain his American wife’s peculiar behavior? Venturing beyond all limits—in relationships, in physical challenge, and in sexual behavior—there is a point where oblivion is the only outcome. Full of Winton’s lyrical genius for conveying physical sensation, Breath is a rich and atmospheric coming-of-age tale from one of world literature’s finest storytellers.

Read Perry Middlemiss' round-up of the early coverage of Breath at Matilda.

Related: Tim Winton's Cloudstreet was the best novel I read in 2005.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Personal Days"

New from Random House: Personal Days by Ed Park.

About the book, from the publisher:

In an unnamed New York-based company, the employees are getting restless as everything around them unravels. There’s Pru, the former grad student turned spreadsheet drone; Laars, the hysteric whose work anxiety stalks him in his tooth-grinding dreams; and Jack II, who distributes unwanted backrubs – aka “jackrubs” – to his co-workers.

On a Sunday, one of them is called at home. And the Firings begin. Rich with Orwellian doublespeak, filled with sabotage and romance, this astonishing literary debut is at once a comic delight and a narrative tour de force. It’s a novel for anyone who has ever worked in an office and wondered: “Where does the time go? Where does the life go? And whose banana is in the fridge?”

Visit Ed Park's website.

"Hospital"

New from the Penguin Press: Hospital: Man, Woman, Birth, Death, Infinity, Plus Red Tape, Bad Behavior, Money, God and Diversity on Steroids by Julie Salamon.

About the book, from the Penguin Press catalogue, Summer 2008:

The hospital in Borough Park did not fit Gregorius’s blithe vision of work hard, play hard. His memories of his first foray into the Maimonides emergency room were vague: Crowded. Really crowded. Stretchers with patients were lined up two-and three-deep, with the lucky ones semi-secluded behind curtains that barely closed. He noticed that the melting-pot-mayhem--Hasids, Chinese, Pakistanis, Haitians, Russians, Bulgarians—did not seem to include anybody like him, a tall, skinny, white surfer-ski-boy from the Midwest. The visual overload was matched by the audio: Tower of Babel at top volume, accompanied by the constant beeping of monitors, pagers, telephones. The usual E.R. smells of antiseptic and bodily stink, but also strange spicy odors he couldn’t place.

Had he landed in the Third World, or a developing nation, whatever the correct terminology of the moment was? Before he could panic, he came across evidence that he was, indeed, firmly situated in the First World, 21st century: Maimonides had HealthmaticsED, a very cool, very tomorrow, computer system that, among other things, allowed doctors and nurses to track on a patient in real time. The computer monitors were stationed like beacons of sanity throughout the room. For Gregorius, they made the chaos seem almost comprehensible.

Overcrowding had become commonplace in American emergency rooms which had, for people without medical insurance, become the doctor’s office. In June, 2006, almost a year after Gregorius began his residency, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies would publish a report that warned: “A national crisis in emergency care has been brewing and is now beginning to come into full view.” The emergency department at Maimonides, which would process more than 84,000 patients in Gregorius’s first year, was not the busiest E.R. in the country or in New York City. But it was arguably the most intense.

Maimonides—make that Brooklyn, early 21st century—was an epicenter of the cultural forces that had been rocking and roiling the American experiment for a generation. The hospital, by necessity and tradition, remained a DMZ zone, where patients dragged in not just their wounds, fevers and malfunctions, but their accents and customs, their immigration and insurance problems, their feelings about being outsiders. Hope and heart-ache in 67 languages. Sick and scared, they yearned for kindness and prayed for competence from the doctors, nurses, floor cleaners, lab technicians, paper pushers and social workers, who had their own troubles, and were often newcomers themselves. At Maimonides, cross-cultural forces made for one big surf tide.

Visit Julie Salamon's website.

"Shakedown"

New from Pinnacle Books: Shakedown by Joel Goldman.

About the book, from the publisher:

The lives of three people collide over mass murder at a Kansas City residence that Special Agent Jack Davis has carefully staked out for weeks. Kate Scranton, whose job is spotting lies for high-priced courtroom lawyers, is convinced that mild-mannered Latrell Kelly knows something about the crime. But Latrell is hiding far more than Kate can guess. And with Jack half-blinded by an imploding personal life, and someone on his own side leaking crucial information, they’re headed straight for the ultimate danger zone…

Visit Joel Goldman's website.