In an endeavor similar to his debut novel, The Kitchen Boy, Alexander couples extensive research and poetic license, this time turning his enthusiasm toward perhaps the most intriguing player in the collapse of the Russian dynasty: Rasputin. This eyebrow-raising account of the final week of the notorious mystic's life is set in Petrograd in December 1916 and narrated by Rasputin's fiery teenage daughter, Maria. The air in the newly renamed capital is thick with dangerous rumors, many concerning Maria's father, whose close relationship with the monarchy—he alone can stop the bleeding of the hemophiliac heir to the throne—invokes murderous rage among members of the royal family.
No one loved the murdered Dame Myra Mason, long-ago plaything of now senile Benedict Cotterel. Myra's estranged, illegitimate daughter plans a scathing biography; Benedict's dangerously stupid legitimate daughter blames the woman for stealing her father; and Myra's new husband admits to marrying for career advancement. Tucked away upstairs in the Old Rectory, Maudsley, Benedict himself supposedly knows nothing. Barnard shows rare form as usual, investing his English village world with memorable class types, sly quirks, and supporting characters, all limned in masterfully efficient prose.
Paul Benjamin is a CPA in New York and lifelong liberal. However, his staid life is overturned when his daughter, Carol, and spouse, Esther, are attacked by muggers. His wife does not survive the attack, and his traumatized daughter is left in a vegetative state. Forced to reevaluate his views, Benjamin becomes paranoid and eager for vengeance. After a trip to Arizona, a friend gives him a revolver as a gift. Benjamin shoots a mugger who accosts him. Benjamin continues to take justice into his own hands, drawing would-be muggers into traps by using himself as the bait. In one case, he rents a car, pulls it over to the side of the road, and writes an "Out of Gas" sign on the vehicle.
At the start of DeWeese's engaging debut, Paul, a bank manager in the Pacific Northwest, loses his three-year-old daughter, Miranda, for a short time while trick-or-treating. After Miranda disappears 22 years later, on the day of her wedding, Paul begins a series of increasingly frustrating attempts to locate and talk with her. Unable to read relationship cues, Paul is often surprised or angered by the actions of those he thinks he knows well, including his now ex-wife, Sandra, and Grant, a friend who became his daughter's intended without his awareness.
Herself the daughter of a Canadian forest entomologist, Atwood writes in an autobiographical vein about Elaine Risley, a middle-aged Canadian painter (and daughter of a forest entomologist) who is thrust into an extended reconsideration of her past while attending a retrospective show of her work in Toronto, a city she had fled years earlier in order to leave behind painful memories.
