Summer reading

Seven Up
By Janet Evanovich
St. Martin's Press, 309 pages

Stephanie Plum, the bond enforcement agent heroine of Janet Evanovich's series of bestselling novels, bears little resemblance to the hardboiled female detectives created by Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton and other contemporary crime fiction writers. Steph's not particularly brave, has no expertise in the martial arts and she sure doesn't jog. Dragged out on the sidewalk by her boyfriend, Joe Morelli, for a morning run, she observes, "I can walk three miles in four-inch heels and I can shop Morelli into the ground, but I don't do running. Now if I was running to a sale on handbags, maybe." Most of all, Steph couldn't be a brooding loner if she tried; she's too deeply, if grouchily, entwined with the neighborhood she grew up in, a Trenton, N.J., neighborhood called the Burg.

Even if Steph were cut out to be an action heroine, the Burg keeps getting in her way. In the latest Plum adventure, "Seven-Up," Steph spots Eddie DeChooch, the bail-skipper she's after -- an 80-ish, semiretired mob hit man caught trafficking contraband cigarettes -- at a funeral and she contemplates slapping her cuffs on him. In the end, though, she chickens out: She doesn't want to "create a scene and upset people who were grieving. More to the point, Mrs. Varga would call my mother and relay the whole gruesome incident." Like the protagonists in most detective yarns, Steph gets beat up in the course of her investigation, but it's by a purse-wielding little old lady in a fight over a parking place.

DeChooch manages to elude Steph at least a half-dozen times in the course of "Seven-Up," partly because she's distracted by a worry-wart mom, a thrill-seeking grandmother, a prim sister who's just arrived back home after the breakup of her "perfect" marriage and a stoner pal who likes to dress up as a superhero. Then there's her sexy police detective boyfriend/fianci (the idea of marriage is freaking Steph out) and an even sexier bounty-hunter colleague who promises to help land her aged quarry if she'll agree to a little trade. Like I said, this girl is no loner.

The mystery in "Seven-Up" is pretty incidental, if pleasantly silly. What makes Evanovich irresistible are charms of a different order: her snappy Jersey dialogue, the daffy supporting characters and all the hilarious scrapes Steph gets into in her quest not to end up moving back in with her parents.

-- Laura Miller

Terrible Lizard: The First Dinosaur Hunters and the Birth of a New Science
By Deborah Cadbury
Henry Holt, 374 pages

A book about the blossoming of paleontology in the early 19th century might not strike you as light summer reading, but this wonderfully written account filled with eccentric characters, gigantic reptiles and a war between science and religion makes Michael Crichton's dopey, dull "Jurassic Park" seem like cereal box copy. Better yet, the story begins at the beach.

It's 1812 in Dorset, England, and Mary Anning, "scarcely more than twelve or thirteen," is wandering along the seashore at the town of Lyme Regis. Anning, who often helped her recently deceased father collect giant bones of "Crocodiles, Angels Wings, Cupid's Wings, Verteberries and Cornemonius" from the beach cliffs to sell to tourists, discovers several large fossilized vertebrae -- retrieved after "around the clock" work with her little hammer and some help from the locals -- which turns out to be a "fantastic creature ... seventeen feet long."

Anning had just found the first entire connected skeleton of what would later be named "Ichthyosaurus," a prehistoric, seagoing fish-lizard -- sort of a google-eyed crocodile with flippers. In so doing she launched the science of modern paleontology (she continued to find fossils for decades) and a battle royal between those committed to a literal interpretation of the Bible's creation story and those who saw the chain of life -- from primordial ooze to primate -- as one unbroken progression.

Cadbury has crafted a spirited, compelling story, and the cast of strange and exotic creatures matched by strange and exotic people makes this the kind of book that keeps Coppertone in business. There's Reverend William Buckland, the "undergroundology" enthusiast whose fossil-crammed quarters are also home to five free-roaming guinea pigs and a jackal -- until one evening when Buckland is entertaining friends and the jackal is heard "munching up something under the sofa," reducing the guinea pig population to one. Buckland also keeps a "tame and caressing" bear named Tiglath Pileser who enjoys wine parties. There's the brilliant, devious anatomist Richard Owen, who dissects a rhinoceros in his living room, brings a stinky elephant brain into the house and coins the word "dinosaur." There's the great and hapless Gideon Mantell, an overworked village doctor who, in his nearly nonexistent spare time, creates an extraordinary fossil museum and makes breakthrough discoveries against all odds. And those are just three of the players -- in addition to the monumental stars of the Age of Reptiles -- who make this true tale of fascination fascinating and entertaining.

-- Douglas Cruickshank

Ghost Soldiers: The Forgotten Epic Story of World War II's Most Dramatic Mission
By Hampton Sides
Doubleday, 336 pages

This story of a daring U.S. raid on a nightmarish Japanese POW camp in the waning days of the Pacific War is the kind of narrative writers dream about -- a tale so powerful, dramatic, perfectly shaped and heartwarming that it's almost ridiculous. No screenwriter is needed -- the damn thing is a blockbuster script as written. (And yes, Hollywood has optioned it.)

In January 1945, a series of defeats across the Pacific had pushed Japan's back to the wall. The American invasion of the Philippines was another decisive blow, but it triggered hideous deeds: Japanese troops (acting with the tacit approval of the War Ministry in Tokyo) massacred helpless American prisoners. As the U.S. Army prepared to take Manila, its top brass knew about these atrocities. They also knew that another POW camp, at a place called Cabanatuan, held 500 American troops who were likely to be killed by the Japanese. These prisoners were the survivors of the infamous "Death March," the ordeal that followed the fall of Bataan and Corregidor, the largest surrender in U.S. military history.

The Army decided to try to rescue these emaciated prisoners, the "ghosts of Bataan." The problem was, they'd have to go deep behind Japanese lines to do it. The troops chosen for the task were 120 strapping soldiers, mostly farm boys who had originally enlisted as mule skinners, who made up a new, elite Army unit called Rangers. They were supported by Filipino guerrillas. Their orders: sneak through 30 miles of enemy territory, kill the Japanese guards, bring out every prisoner alive and make their way back to the American lines.

I will not reveal the story that Sides eloquently tells -- a story celebrated in Life Magazine just weeks after it took place, but that had long since been forgotten. Suffice it to say that it is one of the great stories of World War II.

Sides researched "Ghost Soldiers" deeply, including interviewing many of the men involved: He brings the personalities of the ravaged prisoners and their rescuers to life in a way that's as low-key, decent and unpretentious as the men themselves. Skillfully weaving together vivid narratives about the Death March and life in the POW camps with a taut account of the raid itself, "Ghost Soldiers" is destined to become a classic of its genre. The "heartwarming World War II book" is becoming a tiresome cliché, but you'd have to have a heart of stone not to be moved -- and inspired -- by this book.

-- Gary Kamiya

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