BOOK WHORE >> 2.2.10

She's back, pimpin' out notable new releases to place on your radar! THE BOY WHO COULDN'T SLEEP AND NEVER HAD TO by DC Pierson — This is a debut novel about the typical high school experience: the homework, the awkwardness and the mutant creatures from another galaxy. When Darren Bennett meets Eric Lederer, there's an instant connection. They share a love of drawing, the bottom rung on the cruel high school social ladder and a pathological fear of girls. Then Eric reveals a secret: He doesn’t sleep. Ever. When word leaks out about Eric's condition, he and Darren find themselves on the run. Is it the government trying to tap into Eric’s mind, or something far darker? It could be that not sleeping is only part of what Eric's capable of, and the truth is both better and worse than they could ever imagine. CONFESSIONS OF A TEENAGE JESUS JERK by Tony DuShane — Gabe is a teenage Jehovah's Witness convinced God will kill him at Armageddon for masturbating. He's not alone: There's Peter, who writes swear words in the margins of his papers; Jin, the Korean kid who subsists on Ho Hos and Doritos; and Camille, who follows Gabe around, trying to be his girlfriend. There's also Gabe's mom, who sleeps 16 hours a day, and his dad, an elder who decides the fate of sinners. Luckily for Gabe, there is Uncle Jeff, who used to tour with Santana and now gives him the only valuable girl advice he ever receives. It's hard when school days are spent dodging questions about your weird religion and weekends mean preaching house to house. Life looks dreary until Gabe falls for Camille's beautiful older sister and begins to see her as the answer to his frustrations. POINT OMEGA by Don DeLillo — Richard Elster was a scholar — an outsider — when he was called to a meeting with government war planners, asked to apply "ideas and principles to such matters as troop deployment and counterinsurgency." We see Elster at the end of his service. He has retreated to the desert, "somewhere south of nowhere," in search of space and geologic time. There he is joined by a filmmaker, Jim Finley, intent on documenting his experience. Finley wants to persuade Elster to make a one-take film, Elster its single character. Weeks later, Elster's daughter Jessica visits, an "otherworldly" woman from New York. The three of them talk, train their binoculars on the landscape and build an odd, tender intimacy, something like a family. Then a devastating event throws everything into question. THINGS WE DIDN'T SEE COMING by Steven Amsterdam — These stories follow the narrator over three decades as he tries to survive in a world that is becoming increasingly savage as cataclysmic events unfold one after another. In the first story, “What We Know Now” — set in the eve of the millennium, when the world as we know it is still recognizable — we meet the then-9-year-old narrator fleeing the city with his parents, just ahead of a Y2K breakdown. The remaining stories capture the strange circumstances he encounters in the no-longer-simple act of survival; trying to protect squatters against floods in a place where the rain never stops, being harassed by a man sick with a virulent flu, enduring a job interview with an unstable assessor who has access to all his thoughts, taking the gravely ill on adventure tours. THE MAN OF MY LIFE by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán — Spain's most famous detective, Pepe Carvalho, is back in Barcelona and is swiftly embroiled in a murderous scandal amid the murky politics of 21st-century Catalonia. When the son of a rich financier is murdered, Carvalho is called upon to investigate his mysterious death. In his quest for the killer, Carvalho infiltrates the world of satanism and religious sects. RESCUING OLIVIA by Julie Compton — Anders Erickson has fallen for Olivia, who likes to live in the moment and doesn’t want to talk about her past. That’s fine with him, until a car runs their motorcycle off the road and causes an accident that puts her in a coma. Olivia’s estranged father blames Anders and denies his pleas to see her. When she mysteriously disappears from the hospital and Anders tries to learn what happened, her father stops at nothing to prevent him from discovering the truth. But Anders refuses to accept that she’s gone for good. Determined to find answers, he sets out on a dangerous path that exposes Olivia’s traumatic past and places him squarely in the way of her father’s plans. REBELS & TRAITORS by Lindsey Davis — Set against the terrible struggle of the English Civil War, this novel is the story of how this turbulent era effected everyone, from rich to poor, and the hopes and dreams that carried them through years of deprivation, bloodshed and terror. When Gideon Jukes and Juliana Lovell, who are on opposites sides of the struggle, meet during one of the era’s most crucial events, their mutual attraction brings the comfort and companionship for which they both have yearned. But the flowering of radical thought collapses; its failure leads to endless plots and strange alliances. And shadows from the past threaten them individually and together in their hard-won peace. CONSPIRATA by Robert Harris — On the eve of Marcus Cicero's inauguration as consul of Rome, the grisly death of a boy sends ripples of fear through a city already wracked by civil unrest, crime and debauchery of every kind. Felled by a hammer, his throat slit and his organs removed, the young slave appears to have been offered as a human sacrifice, forbidden as an abomination in the Roman Republic. For Cicero, the ill forebodings of this hideous murder only increase his frustrations and the dangers he already faces as Rome's leader: elected by the people but despised by the heads of the two rival camps, the patricians and populists. Buy them at Amazon.