Special Summer All-Fiction Edition
Evening News
by Marly Swick, '71
Little, Brown and Co., 1999; $23.
Swick's second novel opens with a wrenching scene in which 9-year-old Teddy accidentally shoots and kills his half-sister, Trina. The rest of the story focuses on how a grieving mother's loyalties are stretched between her husband, who has just lost his only child, and her son from a previous marriage, who pulled the trigger. The rift opens as Giselle and Dan are driving home from the hospital after their 23-month-old daughter is pronounced dead: "Already she sensed an ominous difference between them: he wanted to know everything, and she didn't want to know anything." At the same time, Giselle wavers between feeling angry with Teddy and wanting to protect him. "It had never occurred to her that what accident meant was unintentional," Swick writes. "It didn't mean blameless."
Harmful Intent
by Baine Kerr, '68
Scribner, 1999; $25.
Peter Moss is a burned-out lawyer determined to put his life in order after a devastating courtroom defeat. He vows never again to take on a medical malpractice case and to keep some emotional distance from his clients from now on. Then along comes Terry Winter. She's a victim of the same doctor Moss has just failed to bring to justice; he can't turn her away. The facts of the case seem plain: her physician willfully ignored a breast tumor until the cancer became terminal. But why? Kerr, a malpractice lawyer himself, spins the story around a runaway client, discredited witnesses, a crusty judge and a hero dismissed from his firm for refusing to drop the case. But Moss fights on in a plot that perplexes up to its surprising finish.
The Freshour Cylinders
by Speer Morgan, PhD '72
MacMurray & Beck, 1998; $23.
Morgan, a creative writing professor at the University of Missouri, blends ancient Indian lore with Depression-era political corruption in his fifth novel, a mystery set in the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma and Arkansas. At the center is a part-Choctaw prosecuting attorney, Tom Freshour, who becomes entangled with sexy archaeologist Rainy Davis. Together they probe the death of a collector of pre-Columbian artifacts and uncover the true origins of a feathered cape that has turned up in a local Indian burial mound. It's a suspenseful story -- part Philip Marlowe, part Indiana Jones -- involving ritual sacrifices, a car explosion, Mayan ruins and a rash of arsenic poisonings.
Chocolate Lizards
by Cole Thompson, '87
St. Martin's Press, 1999; $22.95.
Recent Harvard grad Edwin Vanderveer is on his way home to Boston from Los Angeles aboard a Greyhound bus when he loses his last $100 to a one-eyed swindler. He ends up penniless in Abilene, a West Texas oil town that seems to have more tumbleweeds than residents. So begins this fish-out-of-water story that leads Edwin, an aspiring actor who has just given up his dream of Hollywood stardom, into the employ of Merle Luskey, a hapless oil prospector running a whiskey-fueled race to strike oil before the bank forecloses on his drilling equipment. Edwin muddles through a crash course in petroleum geology and roughnecking while helping Merle secure an oil lease with the assistance of a buxom prostitute named Tex-Ann. In the end, he embraces Merle's philosophy of life: "Don't quit on yer dream. You'll go sour inside."
