Here is where you will find what's new at St. Thomas' well-known, well-read Dockside Bookshop at Havensight Mall. Every week you will find new titles to peruse. Look for updates of our "picks" for fiction and nonfiction and, at the end of the reviews, a list of new paperback fiction.
"Two Trains Running," by Andrew Vachss, Pantheon Books, fiction hardcover, 447 pp. $25
Electrifying, compelling, and ultimately terrifying, "Two Trains Running" is a galvanizing evocation of that moment in our history when the violent forces that would determine America's future were just beginning to roil below the surface.
Once a devastated mill town, by 1959 Locke City has established itself as a thriving center of vice tourism. The city is controlled by boss Royal Beaumont, who took it by force many years ago and has held it against all comers since. Now his domain is being threatened by an invading crime syndicate. But in a town where crime and politics are virtually indivisible, there are other players awaiting their turn onstage. Emmett Till's lynching has inflamed a nascent black revolutionary movement. A neo-Nazi organization is preparing for race war. Juvenile gangs are locked in a death struggle over useless pieces of "turf." And some shadowy group is supplying them all with weapons. With an IRA unit and a Mafia family also vying for local supremacy, it's no surprise that the whole town is under FBI surveillance. But that agency is being watched, too.
Beaumont ups the ante by importing a hired killer, Walker Dett, a master tactician whose trademark is wholesale destruction. But there are a number of wild cards in this game, including Jimmy Procter, an investigative reporter whose tools include stealth, favor-trading, and blackmail, and Sherman Layne, the one clean Locke City cop, whose informants range form an obsessed "watcher" who patrols the edge of the forest, where cars park for only one reason, to the madam of the county's most expensive bordello. But Layne is guarding a secret of his own, one that could destroy more than his career. Even the most innocent are drawn into the ultimate-stakes game-like Tussy Chambers, the beautiful waitress whose mystically deep connection with Walker Dett might inadvertently ignite the whole combustible mix.
In a stunning departure from his usual territory, Andrew Vachss gives us a masterful novel that is also an epic story of postwar America. A searing portrait of corruption in a small town, this is Vachss's most ambitious, innovative, and explosive work yet.
"Secrets of the Kingdom," by Gerald Posner, Random House, non fiction hardcover, 272 pp. $24.95
In its final report, the 9/11 Commission called the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia "a problematic ally in combating Islamic extremism." To Gerald Posner, the bestselling author of "Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11," this is a huge understatement. In his new book, "Secrets of the Kingdom," Posner exposes the truth about U.S. Saudi relations: how the Saudis used billions of petrodollars to influence the American power elite, inducing corporations and politicians to sometimes put access to oil and profits above America's own best interests and security.
The result of an intensive two-year investigation, Secrets of the Kingdom penetrates the innermost layers of the shielded House of Saud and presents evidence of complicity and deceit at the highest levels-evidence that the 9/11 Commission failed to consider. Using previously undisclosed records, and obtaining information from still-secret intelligence files, Posner has unearthed many groundbreaking revelations about the ties that bind the Saudi and Bush governments, including:
— The never-before-revealed fail-safe system the Saudis have created in the event of a ntional crisis in their country, a program that could send the West in to a decades-long economic tailspin similar to the Great Depression
— Why the 9/11 Commission failed to tell the full story of the first flight of Saudis from the united States only tow days after the terror attacks
— How the Saudi government has turned a blind eye to the role some Saudi charities-including many controlled or supported by Kingdom officials-have played in bankrolling al-Qaeda and Islamic terror groups
— How the Saudi government has turned a blind eye to the role some Saudi charities-including many controlled or supported by Kingdom officials-have played in bankrolling al-Qaeda and Islamic terror groups
— How the Saudis furtively established a Wahhabi lobby to successfully influence American lawmakers on military sales to the Kingdom, and their covert efforts to counterbalance what they saw as a powerful pro-Israel lobby in the United States
— The Saudi monarchy's courting and support of Islamic extremists in order to distract them from their demand for reforms in the royal family while creating the basis for terrorist cells against Western countries
— The startling extent to which prominent Saudi businessmen are buying up America
— New revelations about how the Saudi monarchy has squandered much of the country's wealth over decades through corruption, extravagance, and lavish personal excesses unrivaled since the Byzantine emperors
"Secrets of the Kingdom" is an explosive study that will have a profound impact on both U.S. policy and Americans' perception of their government and its dangerous dependence on a foreign power with whom it shares little to nothing in common values. Posner uncovers a disturbing picture of how tow nations, despite their differing agendas, have become inextricably entwined, with potentially disastrous consequences for America.
"The Courage Consort," by Michel Faber, Harcourt, fiction hardcover, 232 pp. $23
These three novellas by the bestselling author of "The Crimson Petal and the White" display the dazzling range and depth of this masterful writer. Each of the novellas creates a unique, self-contained world, where the perennial human drama plays out in all its passion and ambiguity.
In the title novella, "The Courage Consort," the eponymous a cappella vocal ensemble is given two weeks in a Belgian Chateau to rehearse their latest commissions, the monstrously complicated Partitum Mutante. Clashing artistic temperaments and escalating sexual tensions create as much discordance as the music.
In "The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps," a lonely woman joins an archaeological dig at Whitby Abbey and unearths a mystery involving a long-hidden murder, a fragile manuscript in a bottle, and a rather attractive dog called Hadrian.
"The Fahrenheit Twins" ingeniously transposes Hansel and Gretel to the icy zenith of the world. Tainto'lilith and Marko'cain, identical in all but gender isolated from the world by their parents' research on polar aborigines, create their own ritual civilization.
As "The Scotsman" said of "The Courage Consort, " the most striking aspect of the book, and the one which perhaps most characterizes Faber's writing, is his honesty and compassion. He is fiercely inventive, his plotting is wholly unpredictable, but he pulls not tricks."
"Kallaloo! A Caribbean Tale," by David and Phillis Gershator, Marshall Cavendish, children's hardcover, $16.95
Can a shell really make soup? It might, if it's a brown-and-white West Indian shell, fresh from the sea. All it needs is a master soup-maker, like Granny, to stir the pot-and a little help from the folks in a Market Square. Who wouldn't be willing to lend a hand to cook up some kallaloo, a soup famous from Jamaica to Trinidad? But there's one final ingredient missing-and event he magic shell forgot to mention it!
We will gladly order any books you want. E-mail us at
dockside@islands.vi, or call 340-774-4937.
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Phone: 340-774-4937
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