Winter Study. Nevada Barr. Putnam. 370 pages. $24.95. For much of Barr's 14th Anna Pigeon mystery, it's not a question of who-, why- or howdunit, but of whether a crime has been committed. How can you hold a wild animal guilty?
NONFICTION
STORMING LAS VEGAS: How a Cuban-Born, Soviet-Trained Commando Took Down the Strip to the Tune of Five World-Class Hotels, Three Armored Cars, and Millions of Dollars.
SNIPPETS
Carl Hiaasen confesses to his madness right up front in The Downhill Lie: A Hacker's Return to a Ruinous Sport (Knopf, $22): He returned to golf because he is ``one sick bastard.''
TUESDAY Henry Winkler and Hank Zipzer. 7:30 p.m. Temple Beth Am, 5950 SW 88th St., Miami. For Books & Books. Aleksandar Hemon and The Lazarus Project. 8 p.m. Books & Books, 265 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables.
PERSONALITIES
Quail Valley, the Florida golf club where Miami Herald columnist and author Carl Hiaasen plays, looks like the kind of place where some of the creeps who populate his novels -- the environmental despoilers, glad-handing lobbyists and politicians on the take -- might belong.
FICTION | THE LAZARUS PROJECT
THE LAZARUS PROJECT. Aleksandar Hemon. Riverhead, 294 pages. $24.95. A policeman sees -- or thinks he sees -- a weapon in the hands of a dark-skinned, would-be assailant. Shot are fired. The assailant dies in hail of bullets. In the weeks that follow, the cop is found not guilty of any charges and is vindicated by the courts and in the press, and protestors take to the streets with charges of police brutality and unnecessary force.
ESSAYS
I WAS TOLD THERE'D BE CAKE. Sloane Crosley. Riverhead. 230 pages. $14 in paper. Butterflies, crazy neighbors, abusive bosses and overworked locksmiths -- none are safe from Sloane Crosley's wicked wit. In her first book, a droll collection of 15 essays, the Manhattan resident winkingly eviscerates bridezillas who ask their attendees to lose five pounds and wax their legs and rude houseguests who leave an unwelcome tidbit behind. But she saves the sharpest knives for herself.
MEMOIR
THE FILM CLUB. David Gilmour. Twelve. 256 pages. $21.99. A few years ago, Canadian novelist and film critic David Gilmour found himself in a decidedly unenviable position. His television career ''hosting a little documentary show that no one watched'' was on the skids, while his award-winning novel A Perfect Night to Go to China had yet to be written. Worse, his son Jesse was failing high school and experimenting with drugs.
FICTION
LAVINIA. Ursula K. Le Guin. Harcourt. 279 pages. $24. With her new novel, fantasy and science fiction virtuoso Ursula K. Le Guin vividly fills in some of the blanks in Vergil's Aeneid. She focuses this engaging novel on Aeneas' Latin wife, who is only sketchily depicted in the epic poem. In simple, stately prose that does no violence to Vergil's work, Le Guin presents the rough, unpretentious dignity of the ancient Latin pagans. She also portrays daily life in the Bronze Age, some...
NONFICTION
SANTIAGO'S CHILDREN: What I Learned about Life at an Orphanage in Chile. Steve Reifenberg. Texas. 250 pages. $24.95. In Chile's recent history the 1980s seem like a forgettable interlude. Gen. Agusto Pinochet's reign of political repression gave little indication of the democratic prosperity that would later ensue. But Steve Reifenberg's new book shows how the 1980s contained the seeds of regeneration.
MEMOIR
HOME: A Memoir of My Early Years. Julie Andrews. Hyperion. 352 pages. $26.95. In her new memoir, Julie Andrews recalls a February 1963 plane trip to Los Angeles. Walt Disney had seen the freckled actress in Camelot on Broadway and hired her to star in a lavish musical fantasy he was planning, Mary Poppins. Andrews, then-husband Tony Walton and baby daughter Emma hurtled across the country, Emma tucked into a bassinet. ''As it turned out,'' Andrews writes, ``I was going home.''
TUESDAY Arianna Huffington and Right is Wrong. 7:30 p.m. Coral Gables Congregational Church, 3010 De Soto Blvd., Coral Gables. For Books & Books.
The Silver Swan. Benjamin Black. Read by Timothy Dalton. Macmillan. 9 hours. Unabridged. Dalton, best known for his portrayal of James Bond, quickly wins us over reading this dark and ugly story by Black, a pseudonym of Booker Prize-winner John Banville. A beauty salon owner has been murdered in 1950s Dublin. Who did it? Her overly needy and possessive husband? Her sleazy lover and business partner? His jealous, frustrated wife? The doctor who dabbles in drug dealing and pornography? Quirke cares...
BOOKS
With the publication of his third memoir in six years, Augusten Burroughs has had plenty of time and more than enough reason to contemplate the nature of perception.
FICTION | THE STORY OF A MARRIAGE
The Story of a Marriage. Andrew Sean Greer. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 208 pages. $22. The haunting questions in Andrew Sean Greer's exquisite new novel resonate with us all: ''What do you want from life? Could you even say?'' We might be able to articulate a general idea -- say, that reliable old standby I want to be happy. But such plainspoken desire may wobble in light of the awful but undeniable truth: ``We think we know the ones we love. . . . But what we love turns out to be a poor translation...
NONFICTION
NIGHT FIRE: Big Oil, Poison Air, and Margie Richard's Fight To Save Her Town. Ronnie Greene. Amistad. 288 pages. $24.95. Ronnie Greene's compelling new book has all the drama of a classic David-and-Goliath tale, with Margie Richard of Norco, La., as David and the Shell Oil Co. in the role of the menacing Philistine.
FICTION
THE THIRD ANGEL. Alice Hoffman. Shaye Areheart. 288 pages. $25 . Alice Hoffman has given love a bad name in more than a few of her novels, and she has done it again, skillfully and smartly, in The Third Angel. Characters reel from love, lust and misdirected devotion, and the consequences are dire. Against this dark backdrop, though, comes wisdom borne from love gone wrong.
SUSPENSE
THE FINDER. Colin Harrison. Sarah Crichton. 322 pages. $25. Colin Harrison's brilliant, deeply cynical new literary thriller is a panoramic look at the linked lives of perhaps a dozen characters, from billionaire financiers to Mafia thugs, from Mexican teenagers with forged green cards to society matrons who gossip about a ''wheelchair gigolo.'' (''Yes, he only -- you know -- does it with women in wheelchairs.'') As a study of a decadent, rapidly declining New York, The Finder somewhat recalls Tom...
BIOGRAPHY
Shakespeare's Wife. Germaine Greer. HarperCollins. 406 pages. $26.95. Readers familiar with the ardent feminist Germaine Greer, author of 1970's provocative international bestseller The Female Eunuch, might not be aware that Greer spent much of her academic career as a Shakespeare scholar. In her fascinating new book on the Bard's wife, she attempts to portray Ann Hathaway in a fresh, fair and far more balanced way than she has seen before.
FICTION
CERTAIN GIRLS. Jennifer Weiner. Atria. 386 pages. $26.95. As the author of a smash debut novel, Candace ''Cannie'' Shapiro Krushelevansky doesn't revel in her success. She writes teen science fiction under a pseudonym, dodges media attention, refuses to update her website and resists pleas to write another novel.
RELIGION
Basic Instinct director Paul Verhoeven has written a book that contradicts biblical teaching by suggesting that Jesus might have been fathered by a Roman soldier who raped Mary.
TUESDAY Lisa Daily and Fifteen Minutes of Shame. 6 p.m. Books & Books, 265 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables. Alexander McCall Smith and The Miracle at Speedy Motors. 8 p.m. Books & Books, Gables.
FICTION | THE PLAGUE OF DOVES
THE PLAGUE OF DOVES. Louise Erdrich. Harper. 320 pages. $25.95. To read Louise Erdrich's thunderous new novel is to leap headlong into the fiery imagination of a master storyteller. By turns chilling, funny, astonishing, wild, wrenching and mournful, The Plague of Doves is a rich, colorful mosaic of tales that twist and turn for decades around tiny Pluto, N.D., their secrets whispered through generations of French, German, Indian and mixed-blood families. Did snake handler Marn Wolde murder her preacher...
MEMOIR
THE SUM OF OUR DAYS. Isabel Allende. Harper Collins. 301 pages. $26.95. noweb At a cocktail party, a guest asked Isabel Allende, ''What do you do?'' The author, Chilean by birth but well settled in northern California, responded: ``I am a novelist.''
NONFICTION
THE LIBRARY AT NIGHT. Alberto Manguel. Yale. 373 pages. $27.50. Alberto Manguel's new book is a vivaciously erudite justification for society's inexorable efforts to collect, order and store information. Inspired by the library he built in his French home, he explores the myriad levels on which a library functions and how readers interact with and in them.
BOOKS
The book signing lasted for hours, an indication that the locals hold no grudges against author Donald Ray Pollock for depicting life here as a grotesque blend of drug abusers, wife beaters and sex fiends.
STORIES
THE DAY I ATE WHATEVER I WANTED: And Other Small Acts of Liberation. Elizabeth Berg. Random. 242 pages. $23. If these short stories were dresses, and if you complimented Elizabeth Berg on them, you get the feeling she'd answer, ''Oh, this old thing? I've had it for ages!'' When, in fact, she would have picked out the finest material, designed her own pattern and stitched every seam by hand.
MUSIC
GIRLS LIKE US: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon -- and the Journey of a Generation. Sheila Weller. Atria. 560 pages. $27.95.
SUSPENSE
THE AMATEUR SPY. Dan Fesperman. Knopf. 367 pages. $24.95. In Dan Fesperman's new thriller, two married couples, strangers to one another, are caught up in the intrigue and violence of the war on terror.
TUESDAY Jack Prelutsky and My Dog May Be a Genius. 10 a.m. Temple Judea, 5500 Granada Blvd., Coral Gables. Charles R. Lipcon and Unsafe on the High Seas. 6 p.m. Books & Books, 265 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables.
Joyce Newman has considered what qualities she shares with more than a dozen other women who are subjects of a new book called Women Conserving the Florida Keys by Susan Nugent. She has come to this conclusion:
BOOKS
The installments of Peter Matthiessen's Florida trilogy -- Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man's River, Bone by Bone -- were already considered heroic efforts and even, perhaps, masterpieces.
BOOKS
Her latest obsession began with the discovery of the penis camera. Reading an issue of Film Quarterly, journalist Mary Roach was startled to learn that researchers Masters and Johnson had created such a device in order to record female physiological responses during sex from a new, interior perspective. Roach had a vague idea who Masters and Johnson were, but the image of the thrusting mechanical camera seduced her.
FICTION | SHADOW COUNTRY
SHADOW COUNTRY. Peter Matthiessen. Modern Library. 892 pages. $35. The news of it, this peculiar amalgamation called Shadow Country, washes up against wary skepticism in Florida.
NONFICTION
McMAFIA: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld. Misha Glenny. Knopf. 384 pages. $27.95. There is no end to the unsavory characters in Misha Glenny's eye-opening tour of the world's ''shadow economy'' of organized crime that has grown for two decades.
STORIES
DICTATION: A Quartet. Cynthia Ozick. Houghton Mifflin. 192 pages. $24. In the title story of Cynthia Ozick's new collection, the Polish-born English novelist Joseph Conrad reflects on the ''glorious lavishness'' of Henry James' prose. Ozick cut her teeth on James, and in a half century of fiction writing she has never forgotten the lessons of the master. The four stories in this slim volume would have probably met with his finicky approval. Grounded in expressive detail, they follow James' admonition...
MEMOIR
FROM HARVEY RIVER: A Memoir of My Mother and Her Island. Lorna Goodison. Amistad. 288 pages. $24.95. Internationally known Jamaican poet Lorna Goodison's family memoir covers some generic colonial matters: how white men, both respectable and disreputable, came to the island a couple of hundred years ago to make their fortunes and find new lives; how masses of the ''native'' (i.e., African) population were in one way or another uprooted from their land and ended up in the inhospitable but fascinating...
AUTHOR! AUTHOR!
''Hear her roar'' screamed the cover of last month's Newsweek, emblazoned just above the forehead of -- who else? -- presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Clinton.
The Hidden City. Michelle West. Daw. 615 pages. $24.95. The Hidden City reveals itself one flesh-and-blood character at a time. Rath and Jewel come to know each other as tentatively as two people should in the slums of Averalaan, alive with its magics. Rath fancies himself many things through the half-truths one tells to oneself, but he's a businessman first, prowling the undercity to find valuables for resale. Jewel Markess is an orphan, and she fancies some coin Rath has, so she steals from him...
TUESDAY Jim Sheehan and Law of Second Chances. 6 p.m. Books & Books, 265 Aragon Ave., Gables. Also 7:30 p.m. Wednesday Murder on the Beach, 273 NE Second Ave., Delray Beach.
