THE HORROR! THE HORROR!
Plug in that night-light, as a gaggle of mystery/thriller specialists are weaving fresh tales of mayhem for the coming year. In April Putnam releases Hugger Mugger, Robert B. Parker's follow-up to 1999's hit Spenser novel, Hush Money.... For warm-weather chills, Peter Straub delivers a short-story collection starring, among others, a serial killer, a ghost, and a torturer in Magic Terror (Random House, July), and Robin Cook follows two female grad students as they discover what really happens to their donated eggs, in his medical suspense novel Shock (Putnam, July).... Kathy Reichs churns out her latest (Deadly Decisions, Scribner, Aug.) and romance novelist-turned-thriller chick Catherine Coulter serves up a tale about a female political speechwriter on the run in Riptide (Putnam, July).... Caleb Carr, author of The Alienist, departs from his usual historical fiction and looks forward in Killing Time (Random House, Sept.).
MANGIA!
Just in time for New Year's resolutionists: The suspiciously non-medically titled Matthew J. Bayan offers the appealing Eat Fat, Be Healthy (Scribner, Feb.), while Sanford Siegal, D.O.,M.D., asks, Is Your Thyroid Making You Fat? (Warner, March). Model/actress Lauren Hutton hawks shakes and sensible dinners in The Slim-Fast Body-Mind-Life Makeover (ReganBooks, April). One renegade book tells us to forget diet and exercise altogether. T.S. Wiley and Bent Formby, Ph.D., claim in Lights Out: Sleep, Sugar, and Survival that we are eating ourselves to death because we are tired. Sleep on that.
--Clarissa Cruz
THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY Michael Chabon
"I realize that I sound like Grady Tripp, but I really am almost done," says Michael Chabon, who, after four years, is still "tinkering" with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, his novel about a duo of mid-20th-century comic-book artists. (For the uninitiated, Tripp is the protagonist of Chabon's 1995 Wonder Boys, about a pothead novelist unable to finish a book that bulges upwards of 2,600 pages.) At least the 36-year-old author hasn't been holed up in his office the whole time: "I interviewed a lot of the old guys--[comics legends] Stan Lee, Will Eisner. I'd never done anything like that before." Like Wonder Boys (the film version will be released next month), Kavalier & Clay has been bought by producer Scott Rudin. "I've never had the temerity to ask Scott why he likes my work," says Chabon, who'll earn seven figures for the rights. "I'm just glad he does." (September)
THE TRUMPS: THREE GENERATIONS THAT BUILT AN EMPIRE Gwenda Blair
"The tabloids have already done their work," says author Gwenda Blair, 56. So, instead of scandal, her new book The Trumps: Three Generations That Built an Empire (Simon & Schuster) offers a Horatio Alger tale for an Andy Warhol age. Blair, who exhaustively scrutinized another archetype of ambition in 1988's Almost Golden: Jessica Savitch & the Selling of Television News, has done over 700 interviews for her "entrepreneurial history," including a few with the Donald himself. "At first, he wasn't sure what to make of what I was doing," she says. "This isn't someone who thinks in historic terms." But with the tycoon eyeing the White House for acquisition, it's an ideal time for history to consider him. (September)
