It took Karl Marlantes 30 years to write Matterhorn, an exhaustive and unsparing war novel. Walter Mosley takes up a new detective case in Known to Evil. Also: Dog Boy, fiction inspired by the true story of a feral child, and a new novel about gossipy parents in Brooklyn Heights.
Matterhorn
A Novel of the Vietnam War
By Karl Marlantes
As Matterhorn opens, we're introduced to 2nd Lt. Waino Mellas, a Marine Corps reservist who has been sent to Vietnam to lead the First Platoon of Bravo Company in 1969. Mellas is a kid, suddenly charged with leading a group of Marines at war not only with the North Vietnamese army but also with each other and, at times, with themselves. As Mellas adjusts to life in the jungle and the politics of war, racial strife and the Marine command hierarchy, he becomes witness to acts of selfless heroism and episodes of unspeakable violence. He learns a great deal about himself and about brotherhood, but he never really learns what he and his platoon-mates are doing in Vietnam. Marlantes, himself a decorated Marine Vietnam veteran, took 30 years to finish this epic, exhaustive and unsparing novel.
Hardcover, 592 pages; Atlantic Monthly; list price, $24.95; publication date, March 23
Known to Evil
A Leonid McGill Mystery
By Walter Mosley
This second installment of Walter Mosley's new detective series opens at the dinner table. He gives you a quick look around the room — walnut cabinet, Blue Danube china, old quart pickle jar doing duty as a flower vase — then takes you inside the protagonist's head. That's how a great portion of the story unfolds: through private detective Leonid McGill's inner musings. If you thought Easy Rawlins was a complicated character, spend a little time with McGill as he tries to find a missing woman, avoid police determined to jail him, deal with his imploding marriage, protect his sons from themselves, fend off a move to evict him from his offices and heal from a broken heart administered by an ex-lover.
Hardcover, 336 pages; Riverhead; list price, $25.95; publication date, March 23
Dog Boy
A Novel
By Eva Hornung
People have long been fascinated by stories of children raised by animals. Some of these stories are works of pure fiction: Think Mowgli of The Jungle Book, or Tarzan of the Apes. But Dog Boy was inspired by a real story. Author Eva Hornung read a news item about a young boy who had been living with a pack of wild dogs in Moscow. In her novel, that boy becomes Romochka, a 4-year-old abandoned by his mother just as Russia's harsh winter is approaching. He finds shelter, warmth, nourishment and companionship with a pack that has built a den in the ruins of an old church. The story is told almost entirely from Romochka's perspective. And though his life with the dogs is brutal and, at times, violent, the most horrifying parts of this story prove to be his encounters with humans.
Hardcover, 304 pages; Viking; list price, $25.95; publication date, March 18
The Heights
A Novel
By Peter Hedges
Peter Hedges has long had one foot in cinema and the other in literature. He adapted his novel What's Eating Gilbert Grape into a successful film, and Hedges received an Oscar nomination for his screenplay of About a Boy. The Heights is his first novel in a decade, and it takes place in a less provincial setting than the Iowa countryside of his earlier books. Brooklyn Heights, just across the river from Manhattan, is a place where, as one of the protagonists puts it, "You can't be bored because of the view." Hedges tracks the unfolding lives of gossipy parents known to the book's protagonists as "Mom with Moxie," "Mom Who Knows More About You than You Do" and even "Mom with a Beard." He bounces the narrative voice back and forth between Tim and Kate, husband and wife, as a glamorous newcomer moves into the Heights and pulls the Brooklynites into her orbit.
Hardcover, 304 pages; Dutton; list price, $25.95; publication date, March 4
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