One Thing Missing (Grove Press, 272 pages, $24), Luis Manuel Ruiz's riveting English-language debut, may be the year's most complex psychological thriller. Set by turns in the white-hot plazas of present-day Seville and the dark underworld of medieval Lisbon, the plot focuses on Alicia, consumed by grief after the accidental deaths of her husband and daughter. Alicia finds herself taking refuge nightly in a dream of a mysterious city in which stand four statues of angels with maimed right feet. Elements of her recurring dream begin to manifest themselves in Alicia's waking life; she must choose between tranquilizing herself or putting the pieces together to find a way out of her madness.
In Ruiz's stunning novel ,crimes and punishments intermingle: Three parts fellow-Spaniard Arturo Perez-Reverte, two parts Catholic mysticism and one part Julio Cortazar make for a thrilling whole. Don't be lulled by Ruiz's languid style; plot and characters (notably Esteban, Alicia's love-struck brother-in-law and sidekick who waits for her with the same patience with which he waits for his father's perpetually broken heirloom watch to be repaired) grip the imagination and turn the page. One Thing Missing is an intellectual tour de force replete with tragedy, torment and, oh yes, Satan himself.
A longtime journalist and commentator for PBS, NBC and CNN, Anne Taylor Fleming's fiction debut runs short but sweet. Marriage: A Duet (Hyperion, 176 pages, $20) is a sharply drawn treatise on the twin institutions of marriage and infidelity and what happens when seemingly perfect liaisons sunder from within.
In the exceptionally poignant "A Married Woman" Caroline sits deathwatch at the bedside of William, her husband of 40 years, aching at the prospect of losing him and their lushly sensual relationship, whispering the pornographic language of their bedroom in tandem with his ventilator. Caroline also revisits William's one infidelity with a friend of their daughter which shattered their idyllic life together 15 years earlier.
A Married Man proffers a deft counterpoint as young up-and-coming businessman David cannot get over a one-night stand his wife Marcia has with a dinner companion. Set in Los Angeles in highly different milieus with intensely believable characters and elegant prose, these novellas portend yet another stellar oeuvre for Fleming.
Korean-born Suki Kim's dark debut novel, The Interpreter (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 288 pages, $27), finds 29-year-old Suzy Park adrift in New York, estranged from her sister as she was from her parents before they were shot to death five years earlier in their green grocery.
The virtually friendless Park, sexual pawn of two married men, works as a Korean interpreter for the court system. While translating for a case, Park accidentally uncovers information on her parents' unsolved murder. The information both propels and devastates her; leads take her into a demi monde of Korean gangs, political violence and grim realizations.
A stark present-tense narrative in distinctively noir style, Kim's novel is vivid and ambitious: urban thriller, immigrant treatise, identity novel. Not entirely successful in achieving its many goals, The Interpreter and its gut-wrenching plot nevertheless compels despite its bleakness. Kim is unquestionably a writer to watch.
Irish poet Kerry Hardie makes keen use of the quintessential Irish tradition in her incendiary debut novel, A Winter Marriage (Little Brown, 400 pages, $24.95). At 52, Hannie Bennet can best be described as a serial wife, having divorced three husbands, buried one and loved none. Marriage is Bennet's profession, thus when prospect number five, aging writer Ned Renvyle, seeks a companion for his winter years; Bennet obliges.
To paraphrase Sartre, hell is a small town. The newlyweds retire to his farm in the Irish countryside where Bennet's emotional cool wreaks havoc in a town known for intimacy and gossip. The arrival of Bennet's disturbed and perhaps criminal teen-age son escalates the tension. Blackmail and violence ensue.
Though the Russians and South Americans love them, anti-heroines are infrequent in English-language fiction. Hardie elucidates Bennet's cynicism with elegance and executes her plot with the bittersweet raconteurism for which the Irish have so long and famously been known.
Does history repeat itself? How much do genetics and cultural imprinting carry from generation to generation?
Can the experiences of slave women filter through the lives of their descendants?
So queries Hilda Gurley-Highgate's debut novel, Sapphire's Grave (Doubleday, 352 pages, $23.95). Beginning in Sierra Leone in 1749 with an unnamed African slave and her American-born slave daughter, Sapphire, the novel chronicles generations of African-American women from 19th-century slave quarters in North Carolina to New York City.
Well-crafted and deeply emotional, Sapphire's Grave is by turns a heart-rending and uplifting trek through women's history. Gurley-Highgate writes with a crisp, unsentimental style and captures regional cadences as succinctly as the poetry of the inner self. Attention, Oprah: time to reopen that book club.
After 12 novels, four books of short stories and more than a few literary prizes, William Hoffman can be depended upon for workmanlike plotting, stylish prose and baroque characters, all of which he provides in Wild Thorn (HarperCollins, 308 pages, $24.95).
Wild Thorn brings Charley LeBlanc back to Virginia from Montana with his tough-talking sex-kitten of a girlfriend, Blackie (oh, she reads, too). Once there, he finds his old friend, mountain woman Aunt Jessie Arbuckle, has been murdered and another woman he knows a tad too well, the mad Esmerelda, has been taken into custody. LeBlanc goes hunting for the truth and finds Aunt Jessie's land may have been sought by the new poachers: resort real estate mavens. The somewhat strained mystery is offset by engaging characters and flint-sharp dialogue.
Victoria A. Brownworth is the author and editor of numerous books. Her weekly column on TV and politics, "The Lavender Tube," appears in newspapers throughout the United States. She teaches writing and film at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.