The Diviners is a maddening novel, brilliant, funny, annoying, over the top. Don’t think of it as a novel, not in terms of scene and sequel, storyline or plot. Don’t do that, because if you do, you might take the book back to the store and hit someone in the head with it.

The book is enjoyable once those expectations are held in abeyance, immensely rewarding at times. It is perfectly safe to skip the prologue and head for Chapter One, because the prologue sets up a dimension of the story you can probably take for granted, that we toil on this earth deaf, dumb, and blind to the majesty of nature. But you knew that.

Once the characters get rolling, there is no stopping them. Moody introduces tangent upon tangent, many of which are funny and insightful, all of which serve multiple masters, including ambition, wealth, fame, celebrity, colitis, driving directions, the fall of Rome, the cycle of failure in cultural dress, greed, envy, and good places to drink. He also presents Adam and Eve as both myth and screenplay material. Read the book in sections, front to back or the other way around, the writing is well worth the exasperation.

The heart of the story becomes the making of the movie on a shoestring budget. Lankford makes skillful use of his knowledge of filmmaking to produce a tense and enjoyable ride, the kind of story that gathers force as it progresses. I’ll skip the plot details to avoid spoilers, but this novel delivers the goods with a resolution of the Mark Hayes story as a cautionary tale.

The story’s disfigured beauty provides Mark with a sembalnce of a love life as well as central metaphor for the author’s view of the movie business. The cast of secondary characters is excellent, made plausible by the world they inhabit. My only complaint is that the book felt short. Lankford’s guiding sense of understatement leads to a number of summary paragraphs, perhaps a vestige of his days writing coverage for screenplays. His passion for the subject prevails, making this his finest novel to date.

Vanished is one of those ‘what if’ stories, what if a body in a morgue isn’t a body, but a living breathing woman? That’s a tough one for a writer to execute, great concept, but how do you bring her back from the dead? Tess Gerritsen pulls it off, largely by underselling the situation, by putting her character to immediate use, creating a hostage crisis in downtown Boston.

Thrillers need complications, and this one delivers them in a plausible and enjoyable barrage, until the immediate crisis is resolved. One of the principal charcaters, Jane Rizzoli, is a Boston homicide detective. Her husband, Gabriel, is an FBI agent. A visit to the hospital becomes a nightmare for Jane. She is nine months pregnant and is taken hostage by a pair of desperate fugitives.

The hostage takers are killed. Jane and Gabriel are disturbed by their memories of the take down. Jane is having nightmares, reliving the crisis, haunted by a phrase uttered by Olena, the mysterious woman from the morgue. Meanwhile Maura Isles, the ME, is forced to release the bodies of the doers to the Feds. To avoid plot spoilers, I’ll leave the set up description at that.

Tess Gerritsen takes many familiar elements of the genre and turns them a degree or two for good effect. Her structure and pacing are close to perfect, that is to say, to dissect the modern thriller, it would have to have the elements present here. She brings the backstory into focus just as the pace of events slows in the middle of the story. The characters are likable, with Jane Rizzoli the most developed and appealing. There are alot of secondary characters to meet, the dialogue sounds forced at times, and the villains of the piece are underrepresented, forcing archetypes into play to satsify plot requirements. Overall, Vanished is one of the better thrillers I’ve read. Tess Gerritsen is setting up series characters in this one and I hope she keeps them coming.

The setting is Los Angeles. Nick lives in Venice, canals and all. Like most Angelenos, Nick has maps in his head, freeway maps, primary and alternate routes, a matrix for navigational purposes. Nick has a cabin in the mountains, an ex-wife, a teenage son. He bought his house before prices soared, he’s got it made.

Any number of contemporary authors set their stories in LA. Michael Connelly, Barbara Saranella, Peter Moore Smith, Terrell Lee Lankford, Gregg Hurwitz, Pete Dexter, James Ellroy, just to name a few. Why not? Nowhere else does stunning beauty coexist with brutal ugliness with such panache.

Nick Petrov is smart, tough, successful, but flash bulbs are popping behind his eyes. Penny sized headaches, lost moments, blank spots. He has brain cancer, diagnosed after what he calls The Lost Weekend. The disease is nearly always fatal, and so is bad judgment. Nick is searching for a missing girl, at least that is what he thinks. What he is really looking for becomes the novel’s most compelling aspect, a tangled web of memory, history, passion, and betrayal.

Peter Abraham is not try to bust any genre boundaries, in fact, he takes all the classic elements of noir, shakes them up, serves them cold. This book is right from the opening scene to the climax. If you are not familiar with Abraham’s work, this novel is a great way to get acquainted.

On the flip side, we have The Traveler, a book Kevin reviewed. Steve Rubin at Doubleday is convinced that “we didn’t need our author prepub.” I think you did, Steve. Mr. Twelve Hawks needed to be squeezing his mug into that 8:50 time slot when Katie Couric cannot drink anymore coffee and it’s time to talk books. Sure everyone has left the house, but the television is still on. Maybe the yard service guys might have pressed their noses against the family room slider and thought, ‘yeah, I’m gonna buy that book.’

But Twelve Hawks lives off the grid. He’s reclusive. He didn’t hit a home run, and just beat the tag for a double. Not bad for a guy who refuses to leave the house.

The heat wave in New York may be clouding editorial judgment. Ed has a link to an article in Newsday about creating buzz for books. Picture this: you’re in Central Park on a Sunday. A person approaches you with the first two chapters of a novel; stunned or alarmed, you accept those pages, if only to make the person go away. It’s harmless in the greater scheme of things. You’ve been buzzed. Curious, you begin to read. A new plan evolves. Why waste time in the park when you could be in a bookstore?

When I lived in New York, thousands of buzz agents approached me on a daily basis. Most wanted change, loose change, sometimes for a purpose, a subway token back then, or bus fare to Tampa. A solid third of these change agents held brochures for restaurants, coffee shops, cheap suits, discount shoes, designer eyeware, the Circle Line tour, shares in penny stocks. No one ever offered me a book. I never allowed the person to get too deep into their spiel.

Maybe I’m old fashioned, out of touch, behind the times. I don’t want perky street people buzzing me. Okay, maybe a star map of Beverly Hills, but that’s the only exception. Once I know where Eddie Murphy lives, I can settle down and read a book review, unless the book is by Brett Easton Ellis. Then I have to go the park.

When a three-year-old boy is brutally murdered, the jaded newsroom is stunned by the crime. Paddy is a Catholic kid from working class stock, living at home and engaged to Sean, another Catholic kid from a neighborhood much like Paddy’s. When Paddy learns that Sean’s cousin is one of the suspects in the murder, she confides in the only other woman available, Heather Allen. Heather betrays the confidence, reveals the boy’s identity in a syndicated story, and exposes Paddy to the wrath of her extended family.

Field of Blood is set in Glasgow in 1980-1. Denise Mina explores the sectarian rage of the Catholic-Protestant divide, using Paddy’s background to examine the social fabric of Scotland at the time. The bottom up view of society is not a pretty picture, a landscape of failed government housing, broken urban vistas, high unemployment and poor prospects. Paddy is determined to break the pattern of the life she feels predestined to live, her parents’ life. She wants to be a journalist and that drive propels much of the plot. Her impersonation of Heather has consequences beyond Paddy’s darkest fears, and leads her to confrontations she is not equipped to handle.

Some of the novel’s emotional impact is muted by the necessity to set up both stories. North American readers may not understand the references to the Paddy Meehan spy case or his subsequent imprisonment for murder. Yes, the words are on the page, but without the emotional pull of memory or experience, the injustice spelled out never intersects precisely with the primary story. This is a social novel with a crime hook and resolution. Field of Blood is the first of a series, always a tougher task for a writer, as the characters develop in Denise Mina’s meticulous way. Complex and beautifully written, the novel does the heavy lifting for the new series, one I am looking forward to reading.

Hello and welcome. Tell us whatever you’d care to share about your background.

I lived in Central and Eastern Europe during most of my twenties and during that time I was involved in some unique business opportunities: I ran Cuban rum between East and West Berlin, forged East Bloc visas and trafficked jewels and artwork out of the former Soviet Union. I was a smuggler and I loved my job.

I had some close calls. I’ve faced the barrels of Kalashnikovs and I’ve been chased by police. I’ve slipped across borders and I’ve talked my way through closed checkpoints. My phones have been tapped and my hotel rooms bugged. My friends have been questioned about me. In one very chilling experience, a friend disappeared at the hands of the Romanian secret police. And I’ve been recruited as a spy.

How did THE RIFT ZONE get started? Was being a novelist an early ambition?

My early ambitions were about adventure, academics and escaping the confines of rural life, not about writing novels. This changed because of the collapse of the Berlin Wall. I was in Berlin the following year in the winter of 1990-91 on a Fulbright researching my dissertation. East Berlin was a mess. The euphoria of the collapse of the Wall had descended into a deep depression among the East Germans. The social structures of that people had lived with for forty years were ripped away and there was nothing to replace it. There was a big void in everyone’s life. Awful as many aspects of communism were, people missed the good parts. I missed them. Gone was the tension of two incompatible political systems at war with one another, but forced to coexist in the same city. No more spy vs. spy. Pan Am no looped over downtown on approach just to remind the East German regime that they didn’t control their own skies. The West Berlin subway no longer slowed down when it passed through those eerie stations in the East that had been boarded up since 1961. And you didn’t hear those familiar sonic booms of MIGs reminding West Berliners they were surrounded. And one night in my cramped Berlin apartment I realized I could capture some of that amazing time now lost to history. Over ten years later, I finally got around to it and wrote RIFT ZONE.

Because of Faith Whitney’s unusual occupation it’s tempting to assume she’s based on your experiences. To what extent is the novel autobiographical?

It’s not a memoir, but it’s very much informed by my own life. The first chapters when Faith is recruited to spy for the East Germans is lifted almost directly from my life, but toned down to make believable fiction. I was living in West Berlin in the mid-1980s and one day I got a call from the East – and those were very rare because there were less than a dozen phone lines between both halves of the city of 3 million. It was Egon from the League for International Friendship, the Stasi-front organization that was sponsoring me to study in the East that fall. (Think CIA-USIA.) Egon wanted me to help the League by lugging an allegedly broken Xerox machine from the East through Checkpoint Charlie to his special repairman in the West. He wasn’t asking me to smuggle it West, but to openly transport it there. After that, he was sure he’d be able to help me get the special visa I wanted that would allow me to cross freely between East and West. His request raised more red flags than a May Day parade on Red Square, particularly since to use a copier or even work near one you had to have a security clearance. Somehow Egon managed to get through to West Berlin via phone almost every day and at almost the same time. The man clearly had connections.
We went through a crazy dance for months. My visa would get approved, then mysteriously revoked. I stalled. And I stalled. The Stasi was not an organization that took rejection well, so I figured it was best to play hard to get. I came up with every possible reason that I wanted nothing to do with that darn copier. For every excuse, Egon had a work-around: Repairs too costly? No problem. Egon offered Western cash to foot the bill-forget that West German Marks were forbidden to him. Forget that no organization was allowed to keep petty cash in Western currency-not that they could ever get a hold of the scare resource. Too heavy? Not an issue. Egon would personally drag it to the border. Too heavy on the Western side? Egon knew just what to do, even though he had never been allowed to travel to the West: cross at Checkpoint Charlie instead of my usual Friedrichstrasse because there was a taxi stand just across the Western side. Hmm…Worried the guards would think I was stealing State property? No worries. Egon would to write a note to the border guards (as in Stasi border guards) explaining that I wasn’t really stealing state property, but doing the League a favor.
Yeah, right.

I managed to dodge them until they took a new approach with me, however, in RIFT ZONE, Faith isn’t so lucky.

Every writer follows a unique path to publication; how did you go about yours?

One day my former agent faxed me a half-dozen rejection letters from editors with two words scrawled across the page: looks grim. I was crushed. The market was and still is incredibly bad for first fiction and no one was willing to take a chance on a Cold War thriller.After a few days of sulking, I realized nothing would happen if I didn’t take things into my own hands. I cruised the internet as I tried to figure out my angle of attack. I learned that an editor who was still considering the manuscript was scheduled to be at a conference that weekend in San Diego. He had lived in post-communist Prague for several years, so I figured this guy was my best shot. The only problem was that I was finishing up production of a multi-million dollar contract proposal for my employer – due the next day – and I’d have to leave Hawaii for the Mainland the next morning to get to the conference in time. I didn’t get much sleep that night.

The editor had read the first half of the manuscript on his flight to San Diego and loved it, but I knew it took a lot more than that to make a sale. Evenings I hung out with him along with some other editors. He was a very heavy drinker and I rarely touch alcohol nowadays, but fortunately I’m Russian-trained.

He bought the book.

You’ve chronicled some of your promotional efforts for the novel on Publishers Marketplace. What was the highlight of the tour?

The hardcover of RIFT ZONE came out around the 15th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Every year the German embassy in DC hosts a banquet for former American spies and soldiers who defended West Berlin during the Cold War. It was amazing to walk into the embassy, see copies of RIFT ZONE on every table and to autograph books for people who had played such key roles in what I was writing about. Particularly fun was collecting business cards from the CIA guys-they were always from some bland cover organization like, “Tennis Courts, International.”

One of the elements of THE RIFT ZONE is Faith’s sense of humor. A lot of writing professionals fear humor lessens tension. Did you have to battle your editor to retain the wit?

There were no battles. Humor is one way that people use to deal with a stressful situation. When it’s done well, it doesn’t detract from the tension, but rather shows the nervousness of the character as and at the same time reveals something about that character.

Given all that’s happened since the Berlin wall came down, do you see THE RIFT ZONE as a historical novel? Many of the icons of the era, from Erich Honeker to the Pan Am Clipper no longer exist.

It’s very much a historical novel which meant like in good science fiction, I had to create the experience for the reader of being in a very alien world. I couldn’t assume any background and I had to be very subtle in how I introduced the reader into this world. And I was a stickler for accuracy – particularly with cultural icons like Pan Am. I consulted with a former Pan Am pilot to make sure I got everything accurate.

In what way has the experience of being published met or exceeded your expectations?

It’s been a rollercoaster with incredible peaks and other times when I’ve had to hold on for dear life while screaming my lungs out on the plummets. As I write this I’m in Hollywood where a top TV packager is pulling together a TV series based on my life. Several networks are interested and I just came out of meetings with, among others, Mel Gibson and Jennifer Lopez’s production companies. This is light years beyond my expectations, but I know Hollywood well enough to know more often than not things don’t come together. My gut feels the rollercoaster climbing higher and higher, so listen for the screams. Whatever happens, it’s been a hell of a ride.

Can you tell us anything about your next book?

OUTSOURCED is about a Pentagon operative who infiltrates a for-profit private military corporation suspected of selling seized arms caches to terrorists and who becomes a target in the multi-billion dollar War on Terror. The only one he can trust is his ex-fiancee who’s been hired to kill him. It comes out with Forge in early 2007.

Any thoughts you’d care to share about the state of the book business? I think V.S. Naipaul has predicted the imminent demise of the novel; what’s your take?

Let’s see who has the earlier demise – VS Naipaul or the novel. I know where I’m placing my wager…

Thanks for being with us.

Eric Maisel has written A Writer’s Paris to be released by Writers Digest Books. If you’re not an aspiring writer, the book is an interesting tour of Paris through the eyes of an artist. Maisel addresses the whole person in his books about writing. Part drill instructor, part philosopher, he wants to train his novitiates to write, write, write. There is a continuum to his writing, easily recognized if you’ve read his stuff before. Courage, fear, commercialism, bad drafts, Maisel describes the experience of producing fiction while leading a life, complete with budget worries, relationships, and the root causes of procrastination.

He’s tough on Jean Paul Sartre, literary agents, and sexy ideas for book proposals. Maisel understands the dilemma that to write quality fiction, to add something meaningful to the world, is the fastest way to lose an agent’s interest in your project. If you cannot afford to spend six months in Paris, this book is the next best thing.

Belly’s reentry ordeal rivals anything NASA might offer a returning astronaut. Belly cannot and will not accept the diminished state of his life, his prospects, or his hometown. His daughter, Nora, his probation officer, grandkids, ex-wife, and mysterious mistress Loretta form an archipelago of failure, living reminders of Belly’s shortcomings as a person, a father and husband. Through epic bouts of drinking Belly darkly pursues the ghost of his third daughter long since dead. He is certain that Loretta will return to him, flush with their loot from the bookmaking, lifting him from the grasp of big box employment, the straight life, a nightmare of routine and regimen too harrowing to consider.

The author lets Belly run, but always keeps the hook in his mouth, his hopes and schemes, and the rage that fuels him. “Are you through ruining my party yet?” his grandson asks after a disaster at a confirmation party. The boy asks the question that everyone wants the answer to, certainly Nora whose house is the eye of the storm. Though exiled to the attic Belly prefers passing out on the living room couch, where he is discovered by family members the morning after. Belly is as startled as they are by the dimensions of his predicament. Only Loretta, the woman of his dreams, can release him from delusions of restoration, from the notion that time has stood still pending his release from jail. Equipped with memories both vivid and highly suspect, Belly weaves a universe of possibilities. When reality intrudes, he is forced to acknowledge that the idealized past was not much better than the dismal present.

Ms. Davis wraps things up with a metaphorical reference to a childhood trauma, one that is appropriate to the circumstance. Belly is a superb novel, one I highly recommend.