"A luxuriously comic novel in which three awesome women of different generations raise Armageddon tempests in otherwise mild and humble familial teapots. Oldest of the volcanic trio is Malka--born in Russia and never popular ("no one would rise up to call her blessed") in New York, where she's discovered dead by her despised daughter Helen only after a half-hour of the usual one-sided conversation. And, alas, years later in California, Helen finds the spirit of Malka "Here she was back again"--in her own first-born, Marilyn: the grandmother's interior lava pit of fierce frustrations, her intelligence, scorn, and madness, "had been handed down intact and unmistakable." After all, Marilyn is horn screaming, swings the whip over her two sisters--good-natured Phyllis and meek Natalie and says she hates Helen (and means it); she's the kind of child who wouldn't clap for Tinker Bell. Marilyn is instead Daddy Lenny's girl--and with the keen aim of a stalking cheetah, she claims his total adoration. She even marries gentle CPA Ira merely because Daddy likes him, but later she shrugs off hubby and kids, pursuing her own law career. All this infuriates mama Helen, and after Lenny dies of cancer (a torment that nearly kills Marilyn too), full-scale war breaks out. Helen brings off a mating of Ira and dear, unprepossessing Natalie just when recuperating Marilyn is thinking of reacquiring him: Marilyn retaliates by ripping to pieces every one of Helen's plants. A cease-fire follows, true, yet at the close there are tiny inklings of revived sniper activity. . . Kohan's dialogue crackles; there are some marvelous originals (including a shrewd, Yiddish-accented Greek chorus in Lenny's mother); and there's a breadth of scale which admits both irony and hilarity, as giant passions are forced to play on a stage of Muppets Kohan (Save Me a Seat, 1979) is gaining in control and stature."--Kirkus

Boris Akunin has been hailed as Russia's answer to both Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for his beloved Fandorin mystery series. After five years spent abroad building up a business as something of a private investigator, the handsome, stuttering Fandorin is back in Moscow--and in for a case that entangles him with the highest echelons of Romanov royalty. Grand Duke Georgii Alexandrovich arrives in Moscow with three of his children for the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II, who is fated to become the last Emperor of Russia. During an afternoon stroll in the park, Georgii's daughter Xenia is dragged away by bandits, only to be rescued by an elegant gentleman and his Japanese sidekick. The passing heroes introduce themselves as Erast Petrovich Fandorin and Masa, but panic ensues when the party realizes that four-year-old Mikhail has been snatched in the confusion. A ransom letter arrives from an international criminal demanding the handover of the Count Orlov, an enormous diamond on the royal scepter which is due to play a part in the coronation. Can the gentleman detective find Mikhail in time? The Coronation is a fantastically entertaining and deftly plotted take on the hostage novel, not to be missed.

"Now I am going to tell the story of something that happened one night years ago, and the events of the morning and afternoon that followed." The Incompletes begins with this simple promise. But to try to get at the complete meaning of the day's events, the narrator must first take us on an international tour-from the docks of Buenos Aires, to Barcelona, until we check in at the gloomy Hotel Salgado with the narrator's transient friend Felix in Moscow. From scraps of information left behind on postcards and hotel stationery, the narrator hopes to reconstruct Felix's stay there. With flights of imagination, he conjures up the hotel's labyrinthine hallways, Masha, the captive hotel manager, and the city's public markets, filled with piles of broken televisions. Each character carries within them a secret that they don't quite understand-a stash of foreign money hidden in the pages of a book, a wasteland at the edge of the city, a mysterious shaft of light in the sky. The Incompletes is a novel disturbed by this half-knowledge, haunted by the fact that any complete version of events is always just outside our reach"--