THRILLERS

Seven Lies

By James Lasdun (Norton, $23.95).

Grade: A

It's amazing how some authors can pack so much life, death, fate and tragedy into 200 pages without making the font size small enough to cause headaches. Author James Lasdun manages to fill his pages with such vibrant storytelling that a short book becomes something much larger.

Stefan Vogel's life takes a turn from the mundane when he visits a party hosted by an old acquaintance that he hasn't seen in years. A woman he doesn't recognize asks him if he is Stefan Vogel, and after he replies in the affirmative, she throws her glass of wine at him. From this point on, the book unravels in a flashback that ultimately leads full circle, back to this moment and beyond, as Stefan's life begins unraveling.

In fact, Stefan's life has never been very solid in the first place: He was born in East Germany, which, in the '70s and '80s, is a dreary, stifling and morbid existence. Referred to as a sloth by his classmates, Stefan slowly begins to think of himself that way. He's sexually abused by the caretaker of the apartment building in which Stefan's family lives, and suffers a sad and pathetic existence that seems inescapable.

Stefan and his literary friends see America as the shining city on the hill. With Inge, his beautiful actress girlfriend, he eventually gets out, but not without being party to multiple layers of betrayal.

Once there, the life he has led and the betrayals he has made do not lead to that idyllic life he had once imagined. It is only with the fall of the Berlin Wall that, like Pandora's box, evil truly appears in Stefan's new world.

Lasdun writes with a spare acuity and keen eye for tragedy. Seven Lies recalls the classic Cold War novels of Robert Littell, where betrayal and the suspension of morals is as common as breathing. This is one of those rare books that will be remembered, with a shudder, for life.

Peter Mergendahl

MYSTERY

Bitter End

By Christine Kling (Ballantine, $24.95).

Grade: B

Bitter End is your classic girl-meets-boat story: Set in the Fort Lauderdale area, it's about a tugboat operator named Seychelle Sullivan (her brothers are Pitcairn and Madagascar). Sey's just trying to mind her own business, which is moving other people's boats around, but keeps running across dead bodies on and around the waters of Florida.

On her way down the river through the middle of town one morning, she falls in behind the fancy yacht owned by Nick Pontus, a big-bucks developer who used to be married to Sey's former best friend. As she watches, a black car wheels across a bridge, someone inside shoots Pontus and then the car takes off. Sey's there to pick up the pieces when the boat goes aground.

Sey starts investigating when the former best friend, now up on murder charges in her ex's death, asks her to take her 13-year-old son Zale to his great-grandmother's home on the Seminole reservation. The family's Indian gambling connections may have had a vested interest in Pontus' death, as did the Russian mobsters with whom Pontus was doing business. Snooping around on a gambling cruise ship, Sey narrowly avoids being tossed overboard, and when Zale's life is threatened, the stakes climb.

Christine Kling provides a glimpse of the old Florida of the early 20th century as well as Seminole life then and now. But she's at her seaworthy best when the story involves boats and boat handling, the waterways of Florida and the people who navigate them, making Bitter End a fun read for landlubbers as well as landlocked sailors who yearn for sea air.

Jane Dickinson

UNREAL WORLDS

Anansi Boys

By Neil Gaiman (Morrow, $26.95).

Grade: A

Neil Gaiman's amazing and expansive American Gods is the only novel ever to win Hugo, Nebula and Bram Stoker awards. The book was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award and deserved to win that one, as well. Now Gaiman, of Sandman comic-book fame, looks at the old gods from a more humorous viewpoint in Anansi Boys.

Gaiman's own description of the novel is hard to beat: "It's a scary, funny sort of a story, which isn't exactly a thriller, and isn't really horror, and doesn't quite qualify as a ghost story (although it has at least one ghost in it) or a romantic comedy (although there are several romances in there, and it's certainly a comedy, except for the scary bits). If you have to classify it, it's probably a magical-horror-thriller-ghost-rom- antic-comedy-family-epic, although that leaves out the detective bits and much of the food."

Fat Charlie Nancy wasn't fat anymore. He'd been pudgy as a boy, and his father had gifted him with the awful nickname. When Mr. Nancy gave someone a name it stuck, because, in addition to being Charlie's dad, Mr. Nancy was a god. More specifically, he was Anansi, the trickster god who first brought stories to earth. Sometimes Anansi is a spider, sometimes a man and, sometimes, something in between.

The story opens as Fat Charlie attends his father's funeral. There, he learns that he has a brother he never knew who inherited all of his father's magic, and if Charlie ever needs his brother, to tell a spider.

Sure enough, on his return to England, Charlie's life becomes so complicated that he tells a spider, half in jest - and when the brothers get together, the fun begins.

What follows is Gaiman at his best, with the Anansi boys falling in and out of love, running from the law, visiting with all the old gods their father has tricked in the past and learning what family is all about.

I hope the author's trophy case has an empty shelf, because, at the end of the year, the awards should come rolling in again.

Mark Graham

YOUNG ADULT

Flush

By Carl Hiaasen (Knopf, $16.95).

Grade: A

Carl Hiaasen has been successful for more than two decades writing formula fiction. The recipe is simple: He finds something that ticks him off about the way folks are messing with Florida's ecology. Then he has rich, powerful and stupid people do the messing.

His protagonist is always a mild, unassuming Galahad willing to skirt the law to protect his home state. Add sex, violence, a few quirky characters, a helping of poetic justice and one secret ingredient (Hiaasen's inimitable satiric style), and you have a best-seller.

Hiaasen proved the formula works just as well (minus some of the sex and violence) for young adults with 2003's Newbery Honor Book, Hoot. Now with Flush, the Miami Herald columnist has done it again, and added something youngsters can't resist: a steady stream of bathroom humor.

The story opens on Father's Day as 10-year-old Noah Underwood visits his father in his jail cell in the Florida Keys. Paine Underwood has been incarcerated for sinking the Coral Queen casino boat.

Paine is positive that the boat's owner, Dusty Muleman, has been illegally dumping the raw sewage from the boat into the ocean. And to prevent the pollution of the local beaches, ". . . he'd opened the seacocks and cut the hoses and disconnected the bilge pumps and then dived overboard." Then he sat on the dock and waited to be arrested.

Paine occasionally compares himself to Nelson Mandela, which even Noah knows is wacky. Problem is, this isn't the first time Paine has let his crazy sense of justice get the best of him, and Noah's mom has just about had it, even mentioning the dreaded "d-word" (divorce) to the family lawyer and her parents.

The only hope is that Noah can prove his father's allegations. And, with the help of his plucky younger sister Abbey, a mysterious old pirate and a beautiful and scary ex-bartender, who has barbed wire tattooed around her arm, he just might succeed.

Along the way, Noah has to face Muleman's bullying son, swim in a pool of poop and see his early plans go awry. But like Hiaasen's older heroes, the boy doesn't know how to quit, and he finally comes up with "Operation Royal Flush," which just may solve the problems.

Carl Hiaasen will appear at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Tattered Cover in LoDo, 1628 16th St. Free tickets for the booksigning will be available at 6:30 p.m. Information: 303-436-1070.

Mark Graham

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