Mike Shea on the month’s new releases

Richard Cox

Rift

Ballantine

"Spooky action at a distance" was Albert Einstein's delightfully nontechnical description of quantum entanglement, the complex subatomic phenomenon that has been in the news of late and could someday enable matter to be teleported from here to there and back again à la Star Trek. Odessa native RICHARD COX imagines the potential problems of this futuristic process in his debut sci-fi thriller, RIFT (Ballantine). Corporate baddies (NeuroStor) coerce Cameron Fisher, an unhappy mid-level accountant in their Houston office, to be their human-transmission guinea pig. When it goes badly, they desperately need to shut him up, and the chase is on. Cox shows promise—he has a deft touch with action sequences—but his plot is full of gimmicks and bogs down long before the story has run its course.

Bejamin Alire Saenz

Sammy and Juliana in Hollywood

Cinco Puntos Press

UT­El Paso professor BENJAMIN ALIRE SAENZ's author bio dubs him a fronterizo, "a person of the border," and his sweetly gritty novel SAMMY AND JULIANA IN HOLLYWOOD (Cinco Puntos Press) is indeed a loving tribute to Chicano culture in the Mexican-American borderlands. Sixteen-year-old Sammy Santos lacks street savvy but wields enough brainpower to earn his place in the pecking order of Hollywood, a rough-and-tumble barrio outside Las Cruces, New Mexico. Against a sixties time-warp tableau, Sammy loves and loses the soulful Juliana while he and his pals act out as bored kids are wont to do—smoking, drinking, and test-driving their brand-new hormones. Sammy and Juliana is the kind of grit lit teens love, a young-adult novel that might give the genre a good name.

Michael Simon

Dirty Sally

Viking

DIRTY SALLY (Viking), the full-throttle detective noir from onetime Austin probation officer MICHAEL SIMON, transforms Texas's famously laid-back capital city into a dank pit of crack, prostitution, and murder. This fictional walk on Austin's seamy side circa 1988 opens with Sergeant Dan Reles investigating a traffic accident on the east side and finding a headless, limbless torso beneath an underpass. The victim turns out to be a well-connected hooker whose sordid escapades the city's movers and shakers would rather keep under wraps. Reles pursues. The bad guys fight back. The body count is fearsome and the gore factor is gut-churning. Simon's writing crackles with smarts and throbs with suspense. There's nothing tentative about this explosive debut novel.