Amazon.com: The Significant Seven--Editors' Picks for May 2007

Spotlight Title: In the Woods by Tana French

In the Woods is a top-notch literary thriller that will seduce you with its lush and lyrical language, as it draws you into a dark tale full of complex characters with shady pasts and unclear motives. As enthralling as Donna Tartt's The Secret History, and told in the lyrical language of Maeve Binchy, Tana French's rich, multi-layered debut follows the investigation of a murder of twelve-year-old Katy Devlin, in a suburb of Dublin called Knocknaree. The story is relayed to readers by detective Rob Ryan, a fascinating and unreliable narrator who warns readers in the first few pages, "What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this--two things: I crave truth. And I lie." Ryan is hiding a doozy of a past--twenty years ago, he and two of his closest friends disappeared into the very same woods of Knocknaree where Devlin's body was found. The police searched the woods and found a catatonic Ryan, wearing blood-filled sneakers, unable to recall anything from that day, including what might have happened to his friends. No one knows that Detective Ryan is that "found boy" of Knocknaree, even when he begins his investigation of a case that has chilling similarities to his own. French brilliantly weaves the stories of Ryan and his partner (and closest confidant) into the investigation, and we see both detectives unravel under the weight of secrets and lies. Gorgeous and gripping, In the Woods is a perfectly delicious summer read, and our spotlight favorite for May. --Daphne

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Throw Like a Girl by Jean Thompson	The Devil in the Kitchen by Marco Pierre White
Not only does this latest collection of short stories from Jean Thompson have one of the best book titles I've come across in recent years, it's also a resonant and refreshingly unromantic portrait of women in every sort of role--ranging from the unpopular girl at school to a woman stuck in traffic to a modern-day Bonnie Parker. Throw Like a Girl is the kind of rare reading experience that makes you catch your breath with recognition as you meet each of these remarkable women, and Jean Thompson's taut, effervescent prose wakes you up to their most intimate details. --Anne	Marco Pierre White made history as the most decorated chef in the UK and still holds the honor as the youngest chef ever to win three Michelin stars. Billed as a "brooding Byron" of the kitchen, MPW brought a punk-rock sensibility to his craft, shattering centuries-old rules of fine-dining tradition (and bruising many egos in the process) in his pursuit for perfection. He remains a searing influence on a generation of chefs who survived tours-of-duty in his kitchen brigade and those inspired by White Heat, his modern-classic cookbook (and now high-priced collector's item). In his absorbing culinary memoir, The Devil in the Kitchen, MPW offers intimate insights into his storied career presenting a larger-than-life portrait of a living legend and a culinary genius. --Brad
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The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano	The Book of Air and Shadows by Michael Gruber
The late Chilean writer Roberto Bolano has been called the Garcia Marquez of his generation, but his novel The Savage Detectives is a lot closer to Y Tu Mama Tambien than it is to One Hundred Years of Solitude. Hilarious and sexy, meandering and melancholy, full of inside jokes about Latin American literati that you don't have to understand to enjoy, The Savage Detectives is a companionable and complicated road trip through Mexico City, Barcelona, Israel, Liberia, and finally the desert of northern Mexico. It's the first of Bolano's two giant masterpieces to be translated into English (the second, 2666, is due out next year), and you can see how he's influenced an era. --Tom	There's nothing quite like a good treasure hunt, especially if the find is nothing less than a lost play by William Shakespeare. When a fire at an antiquarian bookshop in Manhattan leads to the discovery of a seventeenth-century letter describing a hidden manuscript from the hand of the Bard, himself, the hunt begins. And, so begins Michael Gruber's literary thriller, The Book of Air and Shadows, which offers a double thrill ride through the twenty-first century world of code-breaking and manuscript authentication, and the political intrigues of Shakespeare's England. With a nod to Shakespearean drama, Gruber's plot is complete with double-crosses, family conflict, murderous intrigue, and memorable rakes and femme fatales. This is a real page-turner that leaves you convinced that another Shakespeare masterpiece is out there just waiting to be discovered. --Lauren
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Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games by Tennent H. Bagley	Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army by Jeremy Scahill
Utterly compelling from page one, Tennent H. Bagley’s Spy Wars documents the strange case of Yuri Nosenko, a KGB agent who approached the CIA in the early 1960s (apparently) ready to divulge a treasure trove of secrets, including information on Soviet intelligence operations, KGB surveillance tactics, and even Lee Harvey Oswald’s time in Russia. But was Nosenko a source of legitimate information, or a KGB loyalist sent to misdirect CIA efforts? It’s a controversial question to this day, but one that Bagley, as a scion of a storied Navy family and then supervisor of the CIA’s operations against the KGB, is uniquely qualified to dissect. Along the way, he vividly recounts the chess match between the rival intelligence agencies during the opening salvoes of the Cold War, and it’s as cloak-and-dagger as any LeCarre fan could hope--double-agents, miniature cameras hidden behind neckties, microfilm, and other trappings of the spy game abound in this fascinating and fast-paced real-life thriller. --Jon	Though author Jeremy Scahill's left-leaning perspective can be distracting at times, overall Scalli's book, Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army is a powerful expose of one of the more mysterious elements of the Iraq war--private military contractors. Scahill dives deep into the right-wing origins of Blackwater and how it evolved into one of the largest military and security contractors, or just "mercenaries," in the business. From the blood-soaked streets of Falluja to the hurricane ravaged gulf, Blackwater is omnipresent with little oversight, and ready to supply brigade-sized forces for humanitarian purposes, peacekeeping and low-level conflict, writes Scahill. --Pat
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