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Beach essentials: Sunscreen, sunglasses - and a sumptuous reading list.
Beach book champ Susan Isaacs scores again with Any Place I Hang My Hat(Scribner, $14), the story of a funny, tough journalist whose work on a political scandal causes her to revisit her hardscrabble beginnings. In Anita Shreve's A Wedding in December (Back Bay Books, $14.95), old friends gathered for the title nuptials can't escape the regrets of spent youth, while Veronica Henry's An Eligible Bachelor (Three Rivers Press, $13.95) concerns an English heir torn between his snooty, TV-hostess fiancée and the humble caterer at his estate.
Wesley Stace, known to pop music fans as John Wesley Harding, shows his skill as a novelist in Misfortune (Back Bay, $14.95), a narrative set in 19th-century England, about a foundling rescued by a rich man and raised to replace his dead sister - no matter that the foundling is a boy.
The estimable Valerie Martin's The Unfinished Novel and Other Stories (Vintage, $13) is a sextet of tales about the vagaries of artistic effort.
Medford Lakes author Jeffrey Ford, already a winner of the Nebula Award for science fiction, won the Edgar Allan Poe Award last month for his thriller The Girl in the Glass (Dark Alley, $13.95), a tour de force about a band of con-artist spiritualists caught up in murder in Depression-era Long Island.
Another local Edgar-winner, Lisa Scottoline, takes on the Philadelphia drug trade in Devil's Corner (Harper Torch, $7.99), in which a federal prosecutor hits the street to find her partner's killer. Spenser's usually indestructible partner, Hawk, is in a bad way in Robert B. Parker's Cold Service (Berkley, $7.99), while in George Pelecanos' Drama City (Warner Books, $6.99), a tough ex-con goes to war after his parole officer is stabbed. In spy master Robert Littell's Legends (Penguin, $14), a Brooklyn P.I. begins to wonder if he's really an amnesiac CIA creation.
Buzz Bissinger's 3 Nights in August (Mariner, $13.95) takes a close-up look at St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa's moves in a 2003 series against the Chicago Cubs.
In Guns, Germs and Steel (Norton, $16.95), Jared Diamond examines the influence of that trio on human history. Bob Dylan typically reveals everything and nothing in Chronicles: Volume 1 (Simon and Schuster $14), his memoir of his beginnings in the pop genius game, and Vivien Goldman's The Book of Exodus: The Making and Meaning of Bob Marley & the Wailers' Album of the Century (Three Rivers Press, $14.95), looks at a reggae high point.
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