Frederick Busch's 18th work of fiction, Girls , is a novel whose roots lie buried in an earlier short story. In "Ralph the Duck," Busch introduced Jack and Franny, a young couple trying to recover from the recent death of their baby daughter. In Girls Busch expands Jack and Franny's lives beyond this single personal tragedy to encompass a greater the disappearance of a 14-year-old girl, daughter of the town minister and his dying wife, from the community. Propelled by his own loss, Jack, a security guard at a local college, begins investigating the disappearance, and thus Busch's novel becomes a literary detective story. In the course of solving the mystery, Jack must grapple with his attraction to a professor at the college, the disintegration of his marriage, and the impossibility of outrunning the past.

The subject of Frederick Busch's extraordinary fiction, The Mutual Friend, is Charles Dickens. First published in 1978, Busch's portrait of the Chief (or the Inimitable, as Dickens calls himself) was immediately hailed as a lively, accurate, and brilliantly imagined novel of the great Victorian and his age. Busch's guide to Dickens' world is George Dolby, the Chief's factotum in his last years. The reminiscence begins with the Great American Tour of 1867-68, Dickens is ill and crotchety but ever eager to dazzle the New World with his dramatic readings. Through Dolby we come to a circle of characters around Dickens, among them his long-suffering wife Kate and the actress Ellen Ternan, mistress to the Inimitable --

Returning from his Carolina coast security job to upstate New York, Jack, haunted by memories of his dead wife and child, is hired to search for a lawyer's missing nephew, a search that leads into the dark underworld of his hometown.

Product Description Marcus Brennan is a successful small-town lawyer on the verge of a breakdown. His wife, Schelle, thinks it’s post-traumatic stress disorder from his years as a POW in Vietnam. Planning the dedication of a memorial for Vietnam soldiers, she asks Marcus to say a few words at the ceremony, hoping the experience will help to exorcise his demons. But after agreeing to defend Estella Pritchett, a social worker accused of murdering her lover, Marcus begins a downward spiral into the murky depths of his own past–where sex is violent, where love means betrayal, and where his own memories have the power to destroy him. . . . From Publishers Weekly The author of Harry and Catherine and Absent Friends , among other distinguished literary works, Busch has reached a new level of achievement with this taut and gripping novel. Former Marine Phantom pilot Mark Brennan is a small-town attorney in upstate New York. He has a devoted wife who was active as an anti-war demonstrator, a high-school-age son who seems to be on the edge of big trouble, a daughter in New York who may have made a fatal romantic liaison, and his own demons--memories of Vietnam. Code-named Goblin, Brennan was shot down and captured by the Viet Cong. After several soul-crushing months enduring diabolical torture, he managed a bloody escape. Uncomfortable with his local-hero status and his wife's determination to perpetuate it, Brennan has an uneasy and distant relationship with his family; he lives inside his head most of the time, trying to suppress almost hallucinatory flashbacks to his desolate childhood and his later torments as a POW. But when he takes a pro bono murder case, defending a woman accused of killing her lover during rough sex, the past starts to intrude. Layer upon layer of lies and unbearable truths are peeled away as the trial progresses and Brennan succumbs to his own despair. In his disturbing, thrilling, imaginative exploration of some of the darkest sides of human experience, Busch has deftly transmuted rage and anguish into an extraordinary novel, one that packs a visceral wallop. Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal Mark Brennan was a Marine pilot who became a prisoner of the Vietcong. Now a lawyer in upstate New York, he confronts a failing marriage, a troubled son, and a dangerously seductive client on trial for murdering her lover in a motel bed. Both attorney and client suffer a dark legacy of past violence, and in both cases post-traumatic stress disorder leads to further destruction. As first-person narrator, Brennan observes that "the best defense is a good story," and his carefully wrought closing argument becomes a moving apology for his own life. Although the subplot involving Brennan's daughter (whom we encounter only via long-distance telephone) is not entirely convincing, the central narrative remains powerful. Busch's two previous works are Harry and Catherine (LJ 3/1/90) and Absent Friends (LJ 4/1/89), a collection of short stories. - Al bert E. Wilhelm, Tennessee Technologi cal Univ., Cookeville Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Kirkus Reviews ``The best defense is a good story,'' Vietnam vet/lawyer hero Mark Brennan obsessively tells himself. The disintegration of Brennan's own ``story'' through his involvement with a sex killing makes a painfully focused one for Busch (Harry and Catherine, 1990, etc.). Brennan's client, tiny Estella Pritchett, is accused of strangling almost-divorced radio-station owner Larry Ziegler during a bout of rough sex. Brennan plans to defend Estella by arguing that Ziegler's abusive behavior caused her to flash back to her abused childhood and strike out to defend herself. But he knows that Estella wasn't really defending herself: she'd already tied Ziegler to the bed at the Stone's Throw Motel--the same bed she's begun to use for her increasingly dangerous liaisons with Brennan. Drawn as he is to Estella, Brennan--already

Psychologist Alexander Lescziak savors a life of quiet sophistication on Manhattan's Upper West Side, turning a blind eye to the past of his Polish émigré parents. Then a new patient declares that he is the doctor's half-brother, the product of a union between Lescziak's Jewish mother and a German prisoner of war. The confrontation jolts Lescziak out of his complacency: suddenly, his failing marriage, his wife's infatuation with his best friend, and the disappearance of his young lover and suicidal patient, Nella, close in on him. Lescziak escapes into the recesses of his imagination, where his mother's affair with the German prisoner comes to life in precise, gorgeous detail. The novel unfolds into a romance set in England's Lake District in wartime, as Busch shows how our past presses on the present.

Set in rural New England, Busch's powerful yet subtle second novel explores the collapse and renewal of a contemporary marriage.

In artfully crafted interlocking flashbacks set against a vividly drawn scrim of New York City, Busch lets his hapless hero tell his story of the angst-driven complications of both licit and illicit love. It was Greenwich Village in the Sixties, and Zimmer was writing copy for a sleazy PR agency. Rhona was a voluptuous Nazi-hunting librarian who taught him introductory love and guilt and drove him into the arms of the tall blonde shiksa Lillian.