Linda Castellitto
Border Crossing
by Pat Barker
Ooh, this one's good. The story opens with Tom Seymour, a child psychologist whose marriage is about to end, taking a walk along the river Tyne with his wife...and then rescuing a young man from drowning. It turns out that said young man was once young boy Danny Miller, who, at age 10, was convicted of murder -- not least because Tom testified at his trial as an expert witness. Danny asks Tom to sift through his past with him, and Tom can't resist. I read this book in two sittings, alternately fascinated, horrified, creeped out, and saddened by the twists and turns of the characters' lives and choices. The story does end on an up-note, but not one that rings false; I believe realism and optimism can exist side by side, and here, they do. This book is well-written, and well worth reading!

Eric Wallenstein
Miss Lonelyhearts & Day of the Locust
by Nathaniel West
Okay, so both of these tales are about as dark and devastating as they come (especially Miss Lonelyhearts), but you can snap your fingers to 'em all the way through ... and, when you're done with this two-fer, you'll have read all the West you need to (which is probably a good thing, seeing as how he's considered one of America's greatest novelists). Miss Lonelyhearts tells the story of a guy who, for a laugh, takes a job as an advice-columnist for a tabloid newspaper, only to find himself unable to cope with the outpouring of suffering that fills his mailbox daily. The Day of the Locust, on the other hand, is Tod Hacket's story. He's an aspiring scene designer who gets caught up in a seedy Depression-era Hollywood underworld that's filled with bizarre characters -- most of whom engage in drugs, crime, and/or perversion -- that are way more intriguing than the characters in most novels that claim to be populated with a bizarre cast of characters. Also, the whole thing ends with an apocalyptic bang that's legendary -- a fitting last act for a book that's considered, along with Fitzgerald's unfinished The Love of the Last Tycoon, to be a top candidate for the tag "The best Hollywood novel ever written." Actually, in a freaky coincidence, Fitzgerald and West died on the very same weekend in 1940 (West was only 37). Of course, West's acclaim and his status as one of the American Dream's greatest naysayers came posthumously. Ain't that always the way?

Gavin J. Grant
Ghost of a Flea
by James Sallis
Ghost of a Flea is the final book in a mystery series (and how often do you get to say that?) that began 10 years ago with an amazing novel, The Long-Legged Fly. New Orleans detective Lew Griffin's son is missing. Someone is poisoning pigeons at a local park. One of Griffin's best friends is in the hospital after being shot. From these disparate strands, Sallis weaves a tale that travels some of the roads taken by Paul Auster in his New York Trilogy and heads out into the territory laid out in Remembrance of Things Past.

Griffin's early reputation as a tough guy still surrounds and pushes out around him. While still physically a big man, his insistent physicality does not define him. When not on a job, this self-created detective reads and reads, soaking up everything from pulps to literature and back, so that scattered throughout these books are allusions, quotations, and notations, and Griffin's thoughts and realizations about those books.

The detective form is often tired and worn, with lonely policemen ploddingly following procedure, series that are go on and on forever, or scary serial killers providing sensationalistic thrills. Within the Lew Griffin series Sallis takes each of these problems and, through the lens of one man's life, eschews and reinvents each. He combines the resonances and depths of the traditional noir story with an incredible richness of language that surpasses all considerations of genre and makes his Lew Griffin series one of the densest, most satisfying stories I've ever read.