Failed-novelist-turned-professor Arthur Pfefferkorn has long been jealous of his oldest friend, William de Vallee, who married the only woman Pfefferkorn ever loved and became a fabulously successful writer. But when de Vallee disappears at sea with his latest manuscript unfinished, Arthur is given the chance to take his place both on the bestseller lists and in the bedroom. However, there's a dark side to the deal, one that thrusts Pfefferkorn into a perilous, twisted adventure oddly similar to those of de Vallee's books. Satire works best when served with subtlety and that's just how narrator Kirby Heyborne handles it, letting the book's humor stand on its own, while also deftly rendering moments of genuine suspense. His Pfefferkorn sounds alternately passive and fussy, reluctant and eager, pretty much the kind of aimless, over-educated naif who'd allow himself to be drawn into a mess from which he can't escape. A Putnam hardcover. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Arthur Pfefforkorn is a middle-aged sad sack of a college professor and washed-up literary novelist, having published one novel decades ago. In contrast, his best friend, the international best-selling thriller writer William de Vallee, has sold millions of copies and garnered enthusiastic reviews. Pfefferkorn holds his friend in secret disdain because the writing, well, isn't very good. But when de Vallee (a nom de plume, of course) is lost at sea and Pfefferkorn reunites with the widow and his former flame at the funeral, his life suddenly gets a little complicated. Intrigue and political machinations ensue. Really. VERDICT This satire-heavy novel works well in the first half. There are truly funny observations about publishing, what merits good writing, and the excesses of the thriller genre. However, the second half descends into the political intrigue of a made-up country, Zlabia, and the joke feels more than a little old by the end. Some thriller readers will pick this up on the strength of Kellerman's (The Executor; The Genius; Trouble; Sunstroke) name and will be confounded, but a few will actually love this odd hybrid of a book. [See Prepub Alert, 12/5/11.]-Andrea Y. Griffith, Olympia, WA (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Creative-writing instructor Arthur Pfefferkorn published his only novel decades ago, but no one noticed. Arthur is morose, wallowing in his failure as a writer. He thinks often about his lifelong friend, Bill, who not only gained wealth and fame as the author of a slew of best-selling thrillers, he also married Carlotta, the woman Pfefferkorn loved. Envy has kept him from seeing Bill and Carlotta, but when Bill is lost at sea, Arthur decides to attend the memorial service. That decision changes Arthur's life forever and tosses him into a bizarre world of duplicity and danger. Kellerman (The Executor, 2010) plays this one largely for laughs, casting Pfefferkorn into the murky animosities that animate two tiny Eastern European countries, East and West Zlabia; said animosities are rooted, delightfully, in a 400-year-old literary dispute. But Kellerman is simply too interesting a writer to leave it at that. He also ruminates on the practice of writing, the experience of sudden literary success, the nature of friendship, and the contrasts between the lives of writers and spies. Potboiler is very funny and insightful.--Gaughan, Thomas Copyright 2010 Booklist

Seldom, if ever, have the cloak-and-dagger folk--of any stripe, ours or theirs--appeared so omniscient, so omnipotent and so perfectly awful as they do in Kellerman's mordantly funny latest. If you put the question to him--and he was of a mind to answer it--Arthur Pfefferkorn would probably acknowledge that, yes, he'd led one of those gray lives up to now, a life without much in the way of accomplishment. He was what he was--a middle-aged English professor at an undistinguished university, whose courses were neither flocked to nor fled from. True, there was that long-ago novel: respectful reviews, bleak sales figures. This, of course, is in marked contrast to the performance of internationally famous William de Valle, who pumps out bestsellers as if they were pellets from a shotgun and who happens to be Arthur's oldest and best friend. But then suddenly, Bill is lost at sea, occasioning in Arthur's life what amounts to a sea change. Deeply involved in this are the luscious Carlotta, Bill's not-so-grieving widow, and a certain unfinished thriller, the completion of which implies Arthur's acceptance of that old fictional standby: the Faustian bargain. Turns out that Bill wasn't just an internationally famous, bestselling author. He was also a highly effective American spy, whose loss has created an intolerable vacuum. He has to be replaced. "Tag," says the satanic superagent who explains all this to Arthur. "You're it." And just like that, Arthur Pfefferkorn's life goes from gray to incandescent. Another brilliant performance from Kellerman (The Executor, 2010, etc.). Potboiler? Hardly. Kellerman has fun here, and so will his readers.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

For a long time, bullheaded Mick hardly seems the ideal narrator for this delicately nuanced nightmare of a story. But he becomes far more interesting once French turns a rather plodding procedural into what it really wants to be - a psychological suspense story about the dangers of suppressing unthinkable thoughts. Like other young couples swept up in Ireland's economic miracle, the Spains couldn't face the shambles the recession had made of their lives. Instead, they focused their fears on a feral animal thought to be moving about in the attic and a silent intruder suspected of slipping into their home. Mick's own personal demons also awaken in this seaside village, once known as Broken Harbor, where his family spent their summer holidays. Something awful happened on their last vacation that traumatized the young Mick and shaped his values as a hard-nosed cop. His mantra - "Murder is chaos. . . . We stand against that, for order" - is the perfect definition of police work, which Mick describes with unexpected eloquence: "What I do is what the first men did. They built walls to keep back the sea. They fought the wolves for the hearth fire." In most crime novels, good cops and decent people court tragedy by disobeying the rules of society. But the stories French tells reflect our own savage times: the real trouble starts when you play fair and do exactly as you're told. It's always a pleasure to watch a keen mind absorbed in a difficult puzzle, which is how Dave Gurney distinguishes himself in John Verdon's tricky whodunits. In "Think of a Number," the retired New York police detective unscrambled data codes. He solved another improbable riddle in "Shut Your Eyes Tight." Now, in LET THE DEVIL SLEEP (Crown, $25), Dave is bedeviled by a psychopath who has resumed the killing spree he began a decade earlier. This time the so-called Good Shepherd is targeting the survivors of his original victims, who have agreed to appear in a TV documentary about the impact of homicide on their own lives. It takes a lot of cajoling on the part of the annoying young woman making this documentary to rouse Dave from the depression he fell into after his last case, which isn't the romantic funk Verdon seems to think it is. Nor is his exhaustive dissection of Dave's dull marriage worth all the verbiage. And while Dave loves to go mano a mano with the F.B.I., points are deducted when the agent is as thick as two planks. You have to admire an author with the guts to make fun of his chosen genre. POTBOILER (Putnam, $25.95) is Jesse Kellerman's parody of the offbeat thrillers he normally writes about clever young men whose sense of adventure draws them into dangerous situations. Arthur Pfefferkorn, his current protagonist, is neither young nor adventurous, having written one novel and then settled into a boring existence as a college professor. But when an old friend, an obscenely successful author of junky thrillers, dies with an unpublished manuscript on his desk, Arthur seizes his chance to co-opt his rival's career. All the air goes out of this satire once Kellerman maneuvers Arthur into a clumsy international espionage plot - but it was fun while it lasted. Print journalists are an endangered species, so it's nice to come across two new sleuths drawn from their thinning ranks. In Joy Castro's first novel, HELL OR HIGH WATER (Thomas Dunne/ St. Martin's, $25.99), a young reporter named Nola Céspedes almost passes up the chance to write an investigative series on the 800 or so sex offenders still on the loose in New Orleans, years after the chaos of Hurricane Katrina. (Ding ding! Here's the first clue that Nola is an amateur at heart. Who would turn down such a sensational assignment?) Once it dawns on her that whoever kidnapped a tourist from the French Quarter might be found among these same "creeps," Nola pursues the story with more passion than professional savvy, and with a soulful affection for her battered yet still beautiful city. On the other hand, Willie Black is all business - newspaper business. In OREGON HILL (Permanent Press, $28), Howard Owen's world-weary crime reporter covers the night beat for a hardpressed daily in Richmond, Va. When Willie's number comes up for downsizing, he wins a reprieve by chasing the terrific story he's working on here - about a headless corpse tossed in the South Anna River. Owen has recruited his sick, sad and creatively crazy characters from a rough neighborhood cut off from the rest of the city when the expressway was built. If anyone is watching out for the forgotten citizens of Oregon Hill, it's Willie, who grew up there and speaks the local language, a crisp and colorful urban idiom we can't wait to hear again. 'What I do is what the first men did. They built walls to keep back the sea. They fought the wolves.'