By Marjorie Preston
The Book of Love
By Kelly Link
2024, Random House
There is a disturbing, dreamlike quality to “The Book of Love”—a real/not real feeling where characters appear, disappear, and change shape, and memory and mystery collide.
It opens as three high school friends, Laura, Daniel and Mo, find themselves materializing—returning from some alternate existence—in the classroom of a favorite music teacher, Mr. Anabin. All are dirty, barefoot, and dressed in costumes from a production of “Bye, Bye Birdie.” Soon, they’re joined by a fourth lost soul, who decides to be called Bowie.
The high-schoolers learn they have been dead for about a year, but can’t remember the circumstances of their passing. Thanks to an agreement between Anabin and a menacing specter named Bogomil, all are permitted to fall back into their daily lives in small-town Lovesend, Massachusetts.
There’s a catch: according to a cryptic message on a blackboard, they know that “2 RETURN/2 REMAIN.” Link, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for short fiction, has written a magical, twisty first novel.
A Murder in Hollywood
By Casey Sherman
2024, Sourcebooks
In 1958, small-time hood Johnny Stompanato was stabbed to death in the home of his lover, film star Lana Turner. Turner’s daughter Cheryl Crane confessed, saying Stompanato had threatened her mother. But some say Cheryl took the fall for a murder Lana herself committed.
At the time, Turner was at a crossroads. Her best years were behind her, she had just been fired by MGM, and she couldn’t afford more scandalous headlines. Reportedly, she and her lawyer conspired to pin the killing on the 14-year-old girl, knowing she would suffer no repercussions (they were right: it was an open-and-shut case, and Cheryl was soon exonerated).
And far from destroying Turner, the notoriety of the crime actually jumpstarted her career; afterward, she went on to make some of her most successful films, like “Imitation of Life” and “Peyton Place.”
This is both Turner’s story and that of mob kingpin Mickey Cohen, who vowed to avenge Stompanato’s death. For old-time show-biz gossip with a dose of “The Godfather,” read “A Murder in Hollywood.”
Only the Brave
By Danielle Steel
2024, Delacorte
Danielle Steel has written some 170 books, sold a billion copies worldwide, routinely grinds out six new novels every year (!), and boasts that she works 20 hours a day.
But the proof is on the page, and her work has always had a slap-dash feel, with formulaic plots riddled with redundancies. When Steel sticks to her wheelhouse—romance fiction and generational sagas—this lightweight style is tiresome. When the subject is the Holocaust, it’s unacceptable.
“Only the Brave” begins in 1937 Berlin, with the understatement that “things in Germany had changed since the Nazis came to power.” Troubled by what she sees, a beautiful young surgeon’s daughter named Sophia Alexander joins the French resistance and collaborates with an order of Catholic nuns to shelter Jewish children.
When her father refuses to breach his physician’s oath by supporting the Third Reich, he is dispatched to Dachau. By association, Sophia, who is preparing to take her religious vows, is sent to Ravensbruck, where she looks for an opportunity to escape.
All this has the makings of compelling drama, but, like others from the Danielle Steel assembly line, it blends a handful of facts, a by-the-numbers plot, and characters who never quite come to life.
Shy: The Alarmingly Outrageous Memoirs of Mary Rodgers
By Mary Rodgers and Jesse Green
2022, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Mary Rodgers had a front row seat to Broadway in its Golden Age: her father, Richard, was the phenomenally successful composer of musical hits like “Pal Joey” (with Lorenz Hart), and “South Pacific,” “The Sound of Music,” “Carousel,” and others (with Oscar Hammerstein).
While his music suggests a generous, romantic spirit, in life Richard Rodgers was cool and critical, and his socialite wife, Dorothy, was just as remote. As Mary recalls, “I doubt either of my parents wanted to have children, at least not in the way children want to be had.”
Despite that uncertain start, and the bias that comes with being seen only as “someone’s daughter,” eventually Mary won success in her own right, as one of the few female composers of her time (she wrote the score for “Once Upon a Mattress,” the musical that made a star of Carol Burnett).
The author’s wry outlook and fun-loving spirit infuse every page of this freewheeling memoir, which is populated by legends like Leonard Bernstein, Hal Prince, and the boy Mary loved, Stephen Sondheim. Based on conversations with New York Times theater critic Jesse Green, and completed after Mary’s death, it’s a must-read for theater buffs.
Circle in the Water
By Marcia Muller
2024, Grand Central Publishing
Muller has published dozens of mysteries in the Sharon McCone series, but you don’t have to be a long-time reader to jump into the action.
In “Circle in the Water,” the San Francisco detective is hired by a group of property owners whose privately owned streets—yes, that’s a thing in the city—are under attack by vandals. Their modus operandi includes the usual (broken windows, graffiti) and the inventive (surreptitious deliveries of fertilizer).
The dutiful gumshoe sets out to find out whodunit, only to become the target of a killer—or killers. This breezy page-turner is marked by snappy dialogue and a likable heroine, who’s adept at getting in and out of danger, just in the nick of time.
Marjorie Preston is a business writer, editor, ghostwriter and compulsive reader, who gobbles up books like potato chips. For more information (and more book reviews), visit marjorieprestonwriting.com.
