Cities of the Plain, the final volume of Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, binds together the separate tales of John Grady Cole from All the Pretty Horses and Billy Parham from The Crossing to create a more realistic Billy and a more mythic John Grady. Within the confines of a relatively spare 293 pages, the classic "all-american cowboy" John Grady devotes himself to saving every hurt or wounded creature that crosses his path, a noble and impossible task that leads ultimately to his own destruction.
A series of well-publicized gentle deaths are the work of self-appointed angel of mercy Dr. Eldon Mate, who attends to the terminally ill in cheap hotel rooms or in the back of his van. Now Mate himself is dead, carved up and found by two joggers and their dog on a high road above Los Angeles.
Patera Silk, a young priest aboard the generation ship known as the Whorl, finds himself both the unwitting leader of a band of revolutionaries and the pawn of godlike forces trying to reshape a stagnant society. The latest installment in Wolfe's "Book of the Long Sun" series offers tantalizing hints of an ancient history lost to the Whorl's inhabitants. The author continues to prove himself one of the genre's most literate writers and luminescent thinkers. A familiarity with earlier series books is helpful but not absolutely necessary. Most libraries should own this title.
Samurai sleuth Sano Ichiro has a very personal motive in determining who killed the shogun's heir apparent with a hairpin: he's trying to save himself from being executed for the crime.
David Marin risks his career to defend Wade Trask, a scientist being tried for sedition, but when Trask switches their brains, Marin finds himself branded an enemy of the state.
