
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, July 1, 1993                   TAG: 9306300044
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: By MIKE MAYO BOOK PAGE EDITOR
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

A BOOK, A VACATION AND THOU

As the dog days approach, it's time to think about summer vacation, and vacation books. Whether you're heading for the beach, the pool or the front porch, here's a quick look at some of the new hardbacks, paperbacks and trade papers in bookstores and libraries.

Initial reviews have said that with "The Night Manager" (Knopf), John leCarre returns to the high standard that made him so successful in years past. This post-Cold War thriller is based on the business of arms sales and drug cartels.

Stephen Birmingham has turned out another big novel about New York high society, "Carriage Trade" (Bantam). Setting his sights on the other coast, Michael Covino takes on Hollywood with an ambitious novel, "The Negative" (Viking). Dominick Dunne traces the fortunes of a politically powerful but fictional - remember, that's fictional - Irish-Catholic clan in "Season in Purgatory" (Crown).

"Where There's Smoke" (Warner) is the newest from Sandra Brown, a rising star in the heavy-breathing romance genre. Whitley Strieber turns to straight Lovecraftian horror with "The Forbidden Zone" (Dutton).

The John Grisham publishing juggernaut continues to plow ahead. In hardback, "The Client" (Doubleday) is still high on the bestseller list and in paperback, "The Firm," "The Pelican Brief" and "A Time To Kill" (all Island/Dell) occupy three of the top five spots on the New York Times list.

Mysteries continue to be summer favorites. North Carolina writer Margaret Maron's Edgar Award-winning novel "Bootlegger's Daughter" has just been published in paperback, and the sequel, "Southern Discomfort" (both Mysterious), is new in hardback. (Both are highly recommended.) The same is true for Michael Connelly. His "The Black Echo" (St. Martin's) won an Edgar for best first novel and is now out in paper, along with the hardback sequel "The Black Ice" (Little Brown).

James Lee Burke's "In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead" (Hyperion) looks like it may be the most popular of his Dave Robicheaux novels, and the earlier ones have just been reprinted in handsome new paperbacks. Also new to paperback from Virginia writers are Sharyn McCrumb's "MacPherson's Lament" and "Zombies of the Gene Pool" (both Ballantine) and Patricia Cornwell's "All That Remains" (Avon).

In nonfiction, self-help books are still riding high. With "Ageless Body, Timeless Mind," (Harmony) it appears that Deepak Chopra, M.D., will show us how to find virtual immortality, great sex and a good five-cent cigar. (Novelist T. Coraghassan Boyle satirizes our obsession with such matters in his new book "The Road To Wellville" [Viking].)

Daniel Pool's "What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew" (Simon & Schuster) looks to be a much more interesting piece of nonfiction. It's a popular history of daily life in 19th-century England. For the political junkie, Tom Rosentiel's "Strange Bedfellows" examines the role that network television news played and did not play in the 1992 presidential campaign.

Picture books are represented by Richard Gutman's "American Diner: Then and Now" (Harper Perennial, trade paper), a fascinating photographic history of diners, and "Chesapeake: The Eastern Shore Gardens and Houses" (Simon & Schuster), photographs by Taylor Lewis, text by Catherine Fallin. It's a coffee-table sized collection of idealized nature and architectural photographs. It's a wonderful book to leaf through simply to smell the rich, thick ink of the pictures.

Of more immediate use to active vacationers in this part of the world are three new trade paperbacks: "North Carolina Beaches: A Guide to Coastal Access" (Chapel Hill) by Glenn Morris; "Bicycling the Atlantic Coast: A Complete Route Guide, Florida to Maine" (The Mountaineers) by Donna Ikenberry Aitkenhead; and "Blue Horizons" (Down Home) by Jerry Bledsoe. The last book is a journal of Bledsoe's bike trip along the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Finally, for "real-life" detective stories, take a look at Bryan Burrough's "Vendetta," (Harper), new in paperback, about dirty dealing at American Express, and Graham Hancock's "The Sign and the Seal" (Touchstone, trade paper), about his search for the Ark of the Covenant. It's a fast-paced, readable piece of pop archaeology-speculation-adventure; just the thing for those of us whose summer trips are going to be close to home.

by CNB