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SEVENTH HEAVEN By Alice Hoffman Putnam, $19.95 Fiction
Late in August, three crows took up residence in the chimney of the corner house on Hemlock Street. In the mornings they set up a racket that could wake the dead. They picked up stones in their beaks and tossed them down at picture windows; they plucked out their feathers, which would surface all day long in odd places, in bowls of Cheerios, in the pockets of shirts drying on laundry lines, inside glass milk bottles delivered at dawn. This corner house was the only one to have been vacated since the subdivision was carved out of a potato farm, six years earlier. Before the builders began working, the town was nothing more than a post office up on Harbey's Turnpike, surrounded by farms. All that first spring renegade potatoes were unearthed when the men on Hemlock Street put down their lawns and planted mimosas and poplars; on trash day there would be heaps of potatoes alongside the aluminum cans.
ETCHINGS IN AN HOURGLASS By Kate Simon Harper & Row, $19.95 Autobiography
There's a man goin' roun' takin' names''; the spiritual sings of death, long an acquaintance. Several years before my biblically allotted three score and ten he begins to become an intimate, sitting tired and drooping in unlit corners of my rooms; exhausted, senile, he shakily marks down the names of the myriad he must list. I first heard him scratching mine when a vomiting ulcer painted my bathroom walls with blood. A year or two later he put a second check against my name because my heart became tired of me. Now he has made a sharp little third check.
THE CAT WHO LIVED HIGH By Lillian Jackson Braun Putnam, $17.95 Fiction
The news that reached Pickax City early on that cold November morning sent a deathly chill through the small northern community. The Pickax police chief, Andrew Brodie, was the first to hear about the car crash. It had occurred four hundred miles to the south, in the perilous urban area that locals called Down Below. The metropolitan police appealed to Brodie for assistance in locating the next of kin. The victim, they said, had been driving through the heart of the city on a four-lane freeway when the occupants of a passing car, according to witnesses, fired shots at him, causing him to lose control of his vehicle, which crashed into a concrete abutment and burned. The driver's body was consumed by the flames, but through the license plates the registration had been traced to James Qwilleran, fifty-two, of Pickax City.
DUEL OF EAGLES The Mexican and U.S. Fight for the Alamo By Jeff Long Morrow, $22.95 History
The earth froze tight that People's day-March 4, 1829-when Old Hickory took the oath. Frontiersmen, slaves, war vets, office seekers and just plain curious folk, maybe twenty thousand of them, gathered in the cold mist wrapping the Capitol building to watch Andrew Jackson take power. The assemblage reminded one Washingtonian of ''the inundation of northern barbarians into Rome .Strange faces filled every public place, and every face seemed to bear de ance on its brow.'' Jackson spoke the inaugural words, each syllable a burst of frost. He kissed the Bible. And then they mobbed him.
