Last lullaby

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Richard Price

A white woman, her hands gashed and bloody, stumbles into an inner-city emergency room and announces that she has just been carjacked by a black man. But then comes the horrifying twist: Her young son was asleep in the back seat, and he has now disappeared into the night. So begins Richard Price's new novel, a tale set on the same turf - Dempsy, New Jersey - as Clockers. Assigned to investigate the case of Brenda Martin's missing child is detective Lorenzo Council, a local son of the very housing project targeted as the scene of the crime. Under a white-hot media glare, Lorenzo launches an all-out search for the abducted boy, even as he quietly explores a different possibility: Does Brenda Martin know a lot more about her son's disappearance than she's admitting? Right behind Lorenzo is Jesse Haus, an ambitious young reporter from the city's evening paper. Almost immediately, Jesse suspects Brenda of hiding something. Relentlessly, she works her way into the distraught mother's fragile world, befriending her even as she looks for the chance to break the biggest story of her career. As the search for the alleged carjacker intensifies, so does the simmering racial tension between Dempsy and its mostly white neighbor, Gannon.

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Joan Didion

This is a story that begins when Elena McMahon, estranged from her powerful husband in California and covering the 1984 primary campaign for the Washington Post, makes her way to Florida to see her father, Dick McMahon, who does deals. Tracing Elena's fevered trajectory, the narrator makes it clear that this is her version of what happened, not the version offered by the F.B.I. interviews or by Senator Mark Berquist or by the late Ambassador-at-Large Treat Morrisson. What happens is a story that shifts quickly from Elena's well-mapped life expensive people and political fund-raisers to a journey without maps, an investigation into the randomness of history, into intentions spun out of control and gone wrong, arms dealing, covert action, assassination. As connections are made between November 22, 1963, and Iran-Contra and Castro and Cuba, we begin to see what the narrator/author calls history's subtext. Joan Didion has given us an exploration of menace and ellipsis charged with irony, exciting in its storytelling and intellectual reach - a story that clicks into place only in the final pages.

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Jan Burke

Investigating an attempt on the life of his mentor, reporter Jack Corrigan, young Conn O'Connor struggles to find a connection between a bloodstained car, a missing yacht, and a stolen infant heir, a mystery that deepens years later when fledgling reporter Irene Kelly explores a young man's claim that he is the missing baby.

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James W. Ziskin

"February 1962: Tony Eberle has just scored his first role in a Hollywood movie, and the publisher of his hometown newspaper in upstate New York wants a profile of the local boy who's made good. Reporter Ellie Stone is dispatched to Los Angeles for the story. But when she arrives on set to meet her subject, Tony has vanished. The director is apoplectic, Tony'sagent is stumped, and the producer is found murdered. Ellie is on the story, diving headfirst into a treacherous demimonde of Hollywood wannabes, beautiful young men, desperately ambitious ingenues, panderers, and pornography hobbyists. Then there are some real movie stars with reputations to protect. To find the killer, Ellie must separate the lies from the truth, unearthing secrets no one wants revealed along the way. But before she can solve the producer'smurder, she must locate Tony Eberle"-- "Ellie Stone, a young newspaper reporter in 1960s' upstate New York, is sent to Los Angeles to cover the story of a local boy about to debut in his first Hollywood movie. But when he disappears and Ellie investigates, she puts her life at risk by asking too many questions that make the Hollywood elite uncomfortable"--