Mike Shea on the month’s new releases
Ben Rehder
St. Martin’s Minotaur
(Read an excerpt)
Buy this at BookPeople.com
Word is that Ben Rehder might drop the curtain on his snarky Blanco County mystery series with Holy Moly, the sixth novel featuring square-jawed Johnson City game warden John Marlin. If so, the Austinite goes out on a high note with this screwball tale about “pastorpreneur” Peter Boothe, whose plans to build a 1,600-acre church compound on the banks of the Pedernales are interrupted when Hollis Farley, a backhoe operator, unearths a $2 million Alamosaurus fossil on the construction site. (True fact: The Alamosaurus takes its name from the Ojo Alamo Sandstone, in New Mexico, where its fossils were first uncovered. Sorry, San Antonio.) Pastor Pete is chafed enough that his creationist teaching has come face-to-face with evolution; he’s even more incensed when his wife, Vanessa, comes cheek-to-cheek with Farley. A murder and the dino skull’s disappearance follow, and Marlin is left to solve the head-scratcher of a case. Rehder has a sharp edge, skewering the sleazy preacher and a relatively benign (if fetishistic) paleontologist with equal relish. But he’s about the caper, not the social commentary, and for those suffering Carl Hiaasen withdrawals (the master of comic crime last put out a novel in 2006), Holy Moly might be the perfect poolside fix come summer. St. Martin’s Minotaur, $24.95
Steven Saylor
St. Martin’s Minotaur
(Read an excerpt)
Buy this at BookPeople.com
Just ten pages into The Triumph of Caesar, I had learned more Roman history from Steven Saylor than from all my high school and college professors combined. “Haruspicy was the Etruscan science of divination.” “Cato [was] leader of the opposition’s last stand against Caesar in Africa.” Indeed. In this twelfth book of the acclaimed Roma Sub Rosa series, Gordianus the Finder (whose partnership with wife Bethesda is very much a tunic-clad version of Nick and Nora Charles’s) is persuaded by Caesar’s wife, Calpurnia, to investigate a possible conspiracy to assassinate her husband. Calpurnia’s haruspex confirms her fear that the attack will happen during one of the four upcoming citywide “triumphs,” or massive celebrations of Caesar’s victories in Gaul, Africa, Egypt, and Asia. Phone and Internet service being sorely lacking in ancient Rome, the nearly retired 64- year-old sleuth trudges the city’s streets to gather information the old-fashioned way—usually over a cup of wine in a shady villa. Saylor is no slouch—he whips up more than enough plot, character, and suspense to carry the mystery to a satisfying conclusion—but it’s the historical backdrop and detail that set The Triumph of Caesar apart. Veni, vidi, legi. St. Martin’s Minotaur, $24.95
Bill Bishop
Bill Bishop
Photograph by Lauren Jaben
In The Big Sort, the Austin political blogger and Pulitzer finalist for editorial writing addresses America’s tendency to segment itself into tiny, like-minded groups (a phenomenon he calls “clustering”).
How did the “big sort” notion come to be, and what does it signify?
[Sociologist] Robert Cushing and I began exploring why some places produced technology and patents while others seemed to stagnate. We found that the country was sorting: The places where educated people moved got richer; the places where young people moved produced more patents; basic beliefs varied place to place. The sort was cultural, economic, and political. What surprised us was that we live in a time of incredible choice in where and how to live, and yet we were constructing increasingly isolated lives. I think it signifies a retreat from our country’s early democratic promise, that diversity is an asset if we can find a way to talk to each other and listen.
What cluster does Bill Bishop belong to?
When I went to the polls in 2006, I took pictures for a Web site that was collecting photos of American precincts. I snapped some shots of a brown Lab with voters in the background, then asked the owner the dog’s name. “Che,” she said. When a dog chosen at random at a polling place is named for a Marxist revolutionary, odds are that the precinct skews blue. Houghton Mifflin, $25 (Read the full interview.)
The Big Sort: Bill Bishop, published by Houghton Mifflin.
