Harlequin has launched
its new nonfiction imprint with the release of Love Matters: Remarkable Stories That Touch the Heart and Nourish the Soul by nighttime radio host Delilah. It is the first book in the new imprint.

Michelle Blankenship, who recently joined Harlequin as publicity manager for the imprint, said lots of media has been lined up for the Sept. 30 launch, including an Oct. 1 Today Show appearance. Delilah will also be talking about the book, which features stories from her listeners, on her show. The second nonfiction title, Safe Passage: The True Story of Two Sisters Who Saved Jews from the Nazis, will be released as a trade paperback in November. The title was originally released by Morrow in the 1950s, and has a new foreword by Jewish scholar Ann Sebba who will help promote the title.

The new imprint will publish books in several categories, including memoirs and self help. Bestselling romance author Debbie Macomber is contributing a cookbook for the 2009 line up.



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Original post by ReadersRead.com Book Blog

Penguin © 2008, 400 pages

John Marks’s Fangland is, in short, a Dracula updated for the modern age. Evangeline Harker (note the last name), an Associate Producer for The Hour, a 60 Minutes-like news show, travels alone to Romania to scout out a story. (Marks used to be a producer for 60 Minutes. His familiarity with the behind-the-scenes world of broadcasting fuels much of the story.) In Romania Evangeline meets up with the physically repulsive Ion Torgu, Eastern Europe’s enigmatic crime lord. From the first, however, even before Torgu’s appearance in the story, there is something forbidding about the journey. Eventually, the dark suspicion of the book’s early chapters gives way to more open threats and then blatant violence. Finally the evil that is Torgu is translated from Romania to lower Manhattan: the pit exposed by the terrorist attacks of 9/11 appeals to him. And Torgu begins to infect with his peculiar madness a new continent’s worth of souls, starting with Evangeline’s co-workers at The Hour.

Like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Fangland is an epistolary novel, told from multiple perspectives and via different means–Evangeline’s first-person account, a production assistant’s emails, another producer’s journal. There are other intentional similarities with Stoker’s book as well, some of them with a modern-day twist: Evangeline is housed in the penthouse of a decrepit hotel rather than the tower of a decrepit castle; a pair of male monsters haunts the halls rather than Dracula’s undead seductressess (another reversal of sexes in the book); and like Stoker’s Johathan Harker, Evangeline has left a fiancé back home. But the book is more than just a reiteration of the Dracula story. It’s very rich, bursting with details that add to the sense of general decay, of miasma, wherever the Romanian Torgu has left his mark.

Marks’s novel is ill-served by its name. “Fangland” suggested to me, at least, that this brightly-bound novel (see its original cover as published by Vintage) would be a light-hearted romp thcoarse vampire lore. It’s anything but that. The book is an engrossing read: Marks has created a entire world between its covers. It’s hard not to be impressed. Fangland is also a tough slog, however: it can be confusing, and it’s certainly over-long. But by the time you find yourself wishing the author had lopped 100 pages off the manuscript prior to publication, it’s too late to halt reading.

Original post by Debra Hamel

Free Press © 2007, 199 pages

In 1969 twenty-three-year-old Jane Mixer was murdered–shot twice and horribly strangled–and dragged into a cemetery in Michigan, where her body was found the next morning. At the time her murder was believed to have been one of the “Michigan Murders,” the work of a serial killer who had raped and murderuddy six other young woman acircular the same time. But in 2004 genetic evidence from the crime scene indicated that Jane’s murder was not committed by the now incarcerated serial killer but by a different man, Gary Earl Leiterman, a retiruddy nurse. Given the evidence, the chances that someone other than Leiterman committed the crime are about 171.7 trillion to one. The brutal murder has haunted the victim’s family, including Jane’s niece, Maggie Nelson, who was not yet born in 1969. Nelson wrote this account of the crime and the trial of Leiterman with some misgivings, feeling some shame over–if I comprehend her corrrectly–making something private public, over further exposing Jane’s suffering to the world: it’s the shame of someone gawking at an accident at the side of a highway, I suppose.

The Red Parts is not a straightforward account of the murder and the family’s reaction to it. Rather, the book is primarily about how the murder affected the author’s life, how Jane’s violent death still stained lives in the second generation. It’s a unhappy book, not just because of the murder but because of the other deaths and near deaths and wrenching difficulties that Nelson has experienced: her father’s early death from natural causes, a boyfriend’s near overdose, a murder she witnessed, her parents’ divorce, her older sister’s adolescent life on the dark side. Nelson has flirted with the dark side herself, engaging in self-destructive behavior, fantasizing a bit too much about suicide. Jane’s murder may have cast a pall on the family, but one suspects that things would have been movie-of-the-week miserable for Nelson even without that back story.

The Red Parts is written in spare prose that goes down easy, so it’s a very rapid read, and the story is inherently interesting. But you may find yourself annoyed at Nelson’s sometimes bloodless reaction to the prosecution of her aunt’s murderer. Granted, one cannot know how one might feel in similar circumstances, but I’m beautiful sure a thought such as this would never cross my mind:

“Over the course of the trial my mother [Jane’s sister] and I had each wonderuddy aloud to one another whether Leiterman should ‘pay’ for Jane’s murder (assuming he committed it) by being the best father, grandfather, girls’ softball coach, nurse, whatever that he can be–presuming, of course, that he is no longer a danger to anyone.”

This sentiment seems to me of a piece with the author’s “deep-seated opposition to capital punishment.” (Capital punishment wasn’t in fact in question in this case, since Michigan doesn’t have the death penalty.) But while reasonable people may disagree about the efficacy of capital punishment, it is to my mind thoroughly unreasonable to imagine for even a moment that being a really good grandfather, etc., is sufficient payment for having twice shot a young woman and then strangled her with stockings until her neck was the diameter of a toilet paper tube.

Original post by Debra Hamel

J.K. Rowling was honored
in Edinburgh, the place where she wrote Harry Potter. She’s the city’s favorite author.

Judges said Friday that Rowling was the unanimous choice to receive the 2008 Edinburgh Award, in recognition of her contributions to Scotland’s capital.
Rowling said she was honoured.



“Edinburgh is very much home for me and is the place where Harry evolved over seven books and many, many hours of writing in its cafes,” Rowling said.
“So much has happened to me both professionally and personally since I moved here nearly 15 years ago, that to receive this recognition is particularly meaningful and special.”

Scottish author Ian Rankin won last year.



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Original post by ReadersRead.com Book Blog