CHILDREN

Collected by Jane Yolen and Andrew Fusek Peters; illustrated by Polly Dunbar. Candlewick Press, $21.99, ages infant to 5 years.

Yolen and Peters bring together some of the finest children's poets in this charming collection of verses about the joys and challenges of being small. Well-known greats like Margaret Wise Brown and lesser-known talents like Philip Waddell write about quintessential moments in growing up, from learning to dress yourself to tugging on Daddy's pants leg. "The parade is passing/But I can't see/With the forest of legs/Surrounding me./So up his trunk,/From the bough of his knee,/I climb my dad,/Who's as tall as a tree," Waddell writes.

But what sets this anthology apart are Dunbar's jubilant watercolors. With an expressiveness reminiscent of Maurice Sendak's line drawings in I'll Be You and You Be Me, Dunbar captures those sweet little looks, coquettish glances and nary-a-care movements of young children.

Final word: Such beloved verses deserve extraordinary artwork, and Dunbar more than pleases.

Jennifer Miller

THRILLERS

ScavengerBy David Morrell. Vanguard Press, $24.95.

Last year's Bram Stoker Award-winning Creepers was built around "urban exploration," the hobby of legally and illegally investigating condemned and abandoned buildings. Now Morrell reprises the novel's hero, former Special Forces operative Frank Balenger, and Amanda Evert, the woman he saved and now loves, for a "scavenger hunt" arranged by a megalomaniacal video game mogul.

The mad gamer has kidnapped Amanda and four others and dropped them in a desolate part of Wyoming. To survive, they must find a 100-year-old time capsule. A string of clues has been hidden in a ghost town and the surrounding wilderness. And back in New York, Frank has also been left clues he must follow to come to Amanda's aid. But in video game tradition, the clues and the capsule are beset with lethal traps, so there seems to be little chance of Amanda and her group surviving.

Final word: This is like being inside of a fast-action video game. Morrell's meticulous research into time capsules, video gaming and geocaching makes the book fascinating, as well as thrilling.

Mark Graham

FANTASY / HORROR

Daughter of Hounds

By Caitlin R. Kiernan. ROC, $14.

This is the fifth in Kiernan's saga of changelings, ghouls and demons set in the centuries-old neighborhoods of Providence and other Eastern Seaboard locales. Deacon Silvey, the protagonist of previous titles, is a minor character here, as Emmie, the precocious 8-year-old who may be his daughter, begins to learn the secrets behind her strange dreams and yellow eyes. In alternate chapters Soldier, a young woman who was stolen as an infant and raised by dog-like beings, becomes the target of several plots by demons, men and the ghouls who raised her. Eventually, Soldier and Emmie join forces to survive, but much blood is spilled along the way.

Final word: Kiernan brings the plots and themes of H.P. Lovecraft into the 21st century. Fans of his eldritch writings should be enthralled.

Mark Graham

MYSTERY

Priest

By Ken Bruen St. Martin's Minotaur, $23.95.

As dark and Irish as a rainy day, Bruen's novels just keep getting better. Former Galway cop Jack Taylor hasn't quite climbed out of the blackness that filled his life at the end of The Dramatist; now it's even harder to tell his friends from his enemies. A would-be partner gives him a thin slice of hope, which he greets with gruff cynicism, while an unexpected windfall helps him stay on his feet. Reluctantly investigating the murder of a priest, he finds there were lots of good reasons for this unloved cleric to die, but just as much reason for the Guards and the church to hush it up.

Final word: Spare and unforgiving, Bruen's novels are among the best. Skip the shamrocks and read a Bruen for St. Patrick's Day.

Jane Dickinson