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The Burning Season The Murder of Chico Mendes and the Fight for the Amazon Rain Forest By Andrew Revkin Houghton Mifflin, $19.95 Nonfiction At six-thirty on a Thursday evening in the Amazon town of Xapuri, the bell in the spire of the yellow stucco church on the town square began to ring. It was three days before Christmas, 1988, and the bell was the first call to a special mass for the children who were graduating from elementary school. The cicadas began their nightly drone, enfolding the town and the surrounding rain forest in a blanket of sound that resembled an orchestra of sitar players tuning their instruments. Although it was well into the rainy season, the regular torrential downpours had held off for a day. Bicycles and pickup trucks rattled along the uneven, cobbled brick lanes. In the darkness, bats began to feast around the streetlights, swooping in time and again, sending out shrill, curt chirps of sonar and snatching moths and winged ants from the whirling clouds drawn to the bulbs. An occasional dugout canoe passed the shabby bars and shops that overhung the muddy, crumbling embankment of the Acre River. The staccato popping of the boats' single-cylinder diesel motors echoed against the steep sandstone cliff on the opposite shore. Until the night of December 22, there was little to distinguish Xapuri from many of the other river towns of the Amazon.
Sea Lion By Franklin Allen Leib NAL, $18.95 Fiction The Kawasaki motorcycle hurtled south across the Johor Causeway between Malaysia and Singapore. The night was black and starless, blanketed by a thick cloud cover that promised rain. The bike bounced and skidded on the mist- slicked concrete as the driver continued at speed. From his seat on the pillion behind the driver, Holden Chambers saw the flashing amber lights of the Singapore immigration checkpoint approach. The driver wore riding leathers and a black plastic helmet, and he was hunched over his handlebars. Chambers clung to him grimly, nauseated and afraid. He felt woozy and disoriented, certain he had been drugged earlier in the evening. His thin safari suit flapped open at his chest in the rushing air, and he was chilled despite the liquid heat of the night.
Delta Time A Journey Through Mississippi By Tony Dunbar Pantheon, $19.95 Nonfiction , It is an odd piece of land, shaped like the elliptic leaf of, say, a pecan tree, with the stem in Memphis and the tip in Vicksburg. On the west is the Mississippi River. The eastern boundary is made by a convex formation of hills where the Coldwater, the Tallahatchie, and the Yocona rivers begin and flow down into the Delta to join the Yazoo and finally the Mississippi. This is not the true ''delta'' of the Mississippi (which is at the river's mouth in Louisiana). It is properly the flood plain of the Yazoo, and regularly over the centuries, of the muddy Mississippi itself.
The Scarlet Thread By Evelyn Anthony Harper & Row, $18.95 Fiction It was dark and cool inside the church. It smelled of incense and candle grease; there were statues of the Virgin with the Christ Child nestling in her arms, and of saints in ecstasy. The images were painted and gilded, with crowns and paste jewels glimmering in the dim light. It was the last place in the world she would have imagined in picturing her wedding day. She held on to his arm as they walked up a side aisle, close to the altar. Marble and gilding surrounded a writhing Savior on his cross. He said, ''Sit down and wait here, sweetheart. I'll go nd the priest.'' She sat on a rickety wooden chair. There were no pews. A woman was on her knees, polishing the oor.
