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This may not be progress (What do guys know about lipstick stains on teeth?). At any rate, the results are, as critics say while fishing for a coin to toss, mixed. The Final Judgment, by Richard North Patterson (Knopf; 437 pages; $25), is less than it should be, given the author's success with his earlier books Eyes of a Child and Degree of Guilt. These are tough, well-plotted legal thrillers, set in California, with a good mix of believable male and female characters. The new story takes one of the supporting actors from the earlier books, a judge...
...AMERICAN TABLOID by James Ellroy (Knopf). This big, brazenly entertaining novel begins in 1958 and ends seconds before the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas. In between, James Ellroy--a crime-noir cult writer making his mainstream debut--propels two rogue FBI agents and a former Los Angeles County deputy sheriff through a fictionalized, nightmarish tour of five tumultuous years in U.S. history. Life is seldom horrifying and hilarious at the same moment. On nearly all its 576 pages, American Tabloid manages to be both...
...LADDER OF YEARS by Anne Tyler (Knopf). Here's an almost perfect summer-weight, drip-dry, easy-care novel. Delia Grinstead is terminally comfortable, or nearly so, in her life as a 40-year-old wife and mother. The trouble is she has become all but invisible, even to herself. So, one day, on the faintest of whims, she wanders away from the family beach house and lights out for the territories. Such fantasies have grabbed all of us now and then, and Tyler writes her runaway's adventures not just as stylish comedy but as intriguing possibility...
...GAME by John le Carre (Knopf). Despite much prophesying to that effect, the end of the cold war did not mean the end of the moral and political murk in which spying and spy thrillers flourish. Le Carre continues to be the master of this shadowy genre, and he is near the top of his form in his latest novel. His hero is a middle-age intelligence operative put to pasture by bosses who decide (wrongly, as it turns out) that his skills and mind-set are obsolete. A bittersweet love affair winds through a landscape of modern menace, whose...
...SMITHSONIAN By James Conaway (Knopf; $60). This handsome volume commemorates the Smithsonian Institution's 150th anniversary. Ironically, the Smithsonian was founded with a financial gift from an Englishman who never set foot in the States. James Smithson was a noted mineralogist who, stung by the Royal Society's refusal to publish his scientific papers, bequeathed the U.S. government £100,000 to build "an Establishment for the increase & diffusion of knowledge." Today its trove ranges from the Wright brothers' airplane to a prototype of the Apple personal computer...