THRILLERS

Poison Heart

By Mary Logue (Ballantine Books, $23).

Grade: B

Mary Logue couldn't have found a more bucolic and pleasant part of the country to feature in her fiction than the Mississippi bluff country of southwestern Wisconsin. She does a commendable job of evoking the atmosphere of small town and farm country, even as she peoples it with some unsavory characters.

Deputy Sheriff Claire Watkins lives in the town of St. Antoine with her daughter and boyfriend. It's a pleasant change from the depressing police work she left behind in the Twin Cities. But you can't escape entirely from evil.

In this case, it rears its head when a tame elk owned by a rich newcomer is shot but not killed after the newcomer's fence is cut. Then Claire is approached by an acquaintance who is looking for advice on how to handle her stepmother, who is keeping her from seeing her father.

Margaret Tilde's father has had a stroke, and Patti Jo, the younger woman who has recently married him, is planning on selling the family farm, auctioning off everything in it, taking every dime and high-tailing it to the Cities. Now all Patti Jo needs is for the old man to die, and she is running out of patience. No one knows that Patti Jo could have prevented the stroke damage to her husband - or how her first husband met his demise.

Claire gets a bad vibe off Patti Jo the first time she meets her, and when the Tilde barn burns to the ground, her suspicions increase. As more fires erupt over the next few days, Claire becomes more and more convinced that Patti Jo is behind them and worse.

The problem is proving it. Investigating her culprit's past turns up some interesting information, but Claire can't make anything stick to Patti Jo. That is, until Claire learns something that might allow her to unravel the whole of Patti Jo's plans.

It all adds up to a compelling story of greed and evil. My only complaint is that all the characters are interesting, except for Claire herself. The scenes with Claire and her daughter are contrived and forced. Patti Jo is much more interesting and watchable. Logue's descriptions of farm community life, though, are dead on and evocative. I'd visit St. Antoine again.

Peter Mergendahl

UNREAL WORLDS

Gil's All Fright Diner

By A. Lee Martinez (Tor, $24.95).

Grade: B+

In 1962, The Duke of Earl sold millions of copies and rose to No. 1 on both the Billboard R&B and Pop charts. Authors must remember the Vee-Jay hit fondly. The doctors who examined Forrest Gump in Winston Groom's cult classic were Dr. Duke and Dr. Earl (although they didn't make the cut in the Tom Hanks movie). And now we meet a werewolf named Duke and a vampire named Earl in A. Lee Martinez's humorous horror novel, Gil's All Fright Diner.

Duke and Earl only drive their dilapidated pickup at night, because, of course, Earl sleeps during the day. When they chance to stop at Gil's All Night Diner in isolated Rockwood County for a cup of coffee, Duke gets an unmistakable whiff of zombies in the midnight air. And sure enough, a shambling bunch of dead folks breaks down the door to the restaurant in their quest for a snack of human brains.

The vampire and the werewolf were only passing through and had no plans to spend any time in Rockwood, but they find zombies annoying, and Loretta, the proprietor of the diner, offers the pair $100 to dispatch her zombie problem.

It turns out the zombies are just the meringue on the homemade pie, because Gil's Diner is a gateway to all kinds of malevolent supernatural phenomena, including the Lovecraftian Old Gods, who, if they make it through, will end the world.

This wouldn't have bothered Earl so much before he spent some time in Rockwood, because he was tired of his century of vampire existence. But the second night, he meets a cute young ghost in the local cemetery and falls in love. Now he has something to live for, if you can count being undead living.

So Duke the werewolf and Earl the vampire decide to stay around to battle the forces of evil and save mankind.

While never laugh-out-loud funny like Forrest Gump or the works of Christopher Moore, which have become the standard for the horror/humor subgenre, Martinez's first novel is a fun diversion and shows promise. I look forward to his next effort.

Mark Graham

MYSTERY

Field of Blood

By Denise Mina (Little, Brown, $24.95).

Grade: A

The opening chapter of this book is so powerfully brutal and difficult to read that it took me a few tries over several days to get through it, and even then I found myself skimming. Be forewarned, Field of Blood is about the murder of a young child by two older boys, and Denise Mina's description of the crime doesn't avert its sorrowful and unsparing gaze from the crime.

The rest of the book is easier to take, although it's still strong stuff. Set in 1981, Field of Blood tells the tale of a young woman trying to work her way up in the newspaper business. Paddy Meehan, a copyboy - yes, that's her job title - at the Scottish Daily News, hails from an Irish Catholic neighborhood of Glasgow.

She recognizes one of the accused boys in an unpublished news picture as a relative of her fiance. When she confides her news to a young colleague, the reporter writes the story of his background that Paddy herself would never have revealed. Her family, fiance and community ostracize her even as Paddy senses something amiss in the police timeline of the crime and wonders if the children have been railroaded.

A parallel story set in the '60s tells of another Paddy Meehan, with whom the main character shares a name. Meehan was a real person who served prison time for a murder he didn't commit but was freed because of the work of a crusading journalist, spurring the fictional Paddy's interest in newspapers. The parallel doesn't seem to add much to the novel, although I suspect it will resonate more with Scottish readers familiar with the case.

Although Field of Blood's complexities deserve a longer review, suffice it to say that the beautiful writing alone makes it worth reading. Mina has quickly become one of the best mystery writers on either side of the Atlantic.

Jane Dickinson

YOUNG ADULT

Jailbait

By Leslea Newman (Delacorte Press, $15.95, ages 14 and up.

Grade: B

Andi Kaplan has a miserable teenage existence: At 16, she's "definitely soft and lumpy in certain places," has D-cup breasts that are the source of constant ridicule at school and considers a roadside farm animal her only friend.

Her menopausal mother is weight-obsessed and harangues Andi about her diet, while her father wants to take her for ice cream so he can sit a little too closely and rub her knee a little too often.

So when she's walking home from school one afternoon and a man in a brown Volkswagen Bug honks and waves at her, Andi gets pretty excited. "A stranger in a brown car waves at me and I get butterflies in my stomach - how pathetic is that? Now I'll have to wait until Monday to see if he honks at me again."

He does, and after a month of the friendly honks and waves, they begin a very troubling relationship. Frank's actual age is never divulged, but Andi guesses that he's at least 30.

And while their age difference is a huge factor, it's more what Frank convinces Andi to do that is unsettling. He brings lingerie for her to model in and toys with her emotionally until she's desperate to have sex with him and then things spiral out of control.

Andi narrates so truthfully that readers will be drawn to her and find her story haunting, understanding why she clings to Frank while at the same time being repulsed by him.

Natalie Soto

Back to Top