<B>Renaissance man’s Revolutionary tale</B> Like many prominent Revolutionary figures John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson former president Jimmy Carter is a Renaissance man, a person with a wide array of interests and expertise. A peanut farmer, a president and a Nobel Peace Prize winner, Carter is also a prolific writer who has published 16 books since leaving office in 1981. Now he has drawn on his keen interest in the American Revolution from the Southern perspective to produce the first novel by an American president. <B>The Hornet’s Nest</B> is a sweeping historical saga set largely in the Carolinas and Georgia. It begins in 1763 and ends some 20 years later, around 1783, when the main character, Ethan Pratt, returns to rebuild his life and what is left of his devastated homestead. Although Ethan emerges as the leading figure in the story, Carter enlists a whole regiment of characters, American, British and Indian, to tell his tale. This many-sided panorama of the Revolution reveals that every faction had legitimate motivations for its stance, but the thirst for revenge made them equally capable of unspeakably horrific acts. Raised in Philadelphia where their father is a shoemaker, Ethan and his brother Henry head south after each of them gets married. Henry, the eldest, has always been politically inclined, and early in the debate, he chooses to oppose British rule. He becomes part of the Regulator movement that meets its demise in 1771, and it is Ethan, the would-be pacifist, whose story takes us through the bitter battles and brings us doggedly back to pick up the pieces and begin the making of a new country. The narrative gets bogged down in historical data in places, but diligent readers will be rewarded with a renewed appreciation for the spirit of those early rebels who faced inconceivable losses but held on against all odds for the realization of one dream freedom.

<B>Gabaldon’s intriguing return</B> With <B>Lord John and the Private Matter</B>, best-selling author Diana Gabaldon launches a new series featuring a character well known to fans of her popular Outlander books. Lord John Grey was first introduced in <I>Dragonfly in Amber</I> as a 16-year-old soldier captured by Jamie Fraser during the Jacobite uprising. He was later administrator of the military prison where Fraser was confined. Which of the many private matters involving Lord John Grey are alluded to in the title sets the ambiguous tone for this period novel of deception and intrigue.

Set between June 1757 and August 1758, the novel opens as Grey is biding his time on the home front between military assignments. What he has seen in the confines of his London private club could inflame familial scandal if not handled discreetly. Grey suspects that Joseph Trevelyan the man engaged to Grey’s cousin, Olivia might have venereal disease. His inquiries about Trevelyan in London brothels are interrupted by his superiors, who appoint him to investigate the murder of a fellow soldier. Grey finds that his reputation, career and family could be irreparably damaged if he fails to be appropriately circumspect in this matter as well.

Gabaldon is known for her lengthy page-turners. This novel, which started out as a short story, is somewhat shorter than her previous work but just as packed with vivid description and detail. Gabaldon ably transports the reader to 18th century London, with all its reeking humanity and glitteringly elegant excess.

Grey’s sexual predilection and his relationship with Fraser are fleetingly mentioned throughout the book. These references might confuse those unfamiliar with the Outlander saga, but for the most part the book stands admirably on its own.

Fans are sure to snap up this volume. If you’ve not yet encountered Gabaldon’s earlier books but enjoy reading about spies and historic intrigue, this crafty tale of intertwined mysteries will surely please. <I>Linda Dailey Paulson is a Ventura, California-based freelance writer.</I>

A classical voice teacher isolated on the plains during the Depression tries to teach a black rodeo performer with one lung how to sing, drawing the wrath of the Ku Klux Klan. Not the stuff of your average novel, but then Ivan Doig does not write average novels. In Prairie Nocturne, with his usual idiosyncrasy, he brings back several characters from his highly applauded Montana Trilogy in a coda that opens up the 20th century and its achingly modern concerns.

Susan Duff, the endearing singing schoolgirl from Dancing at the Rascal Fair, reappears here as a mature, professionally talented freethinker. She is persuaded by her former lover, Wes, to take Monty of the gorgeous voice under her wing. In the process, she and Wes get back together again, and a whole new relationship develops between teacher and student as well.

Big Sky Country never had a better booster than Doig. Although the action swings to New York City for a while, the Two-Medicine territory he portrays so lovingly is not short-changed. Neither is Doig’s facility with words; his writer’s gait bucks a bit, but he keeps a sure hand on the reins. Although it would add to the reader’s enjoyment and understanding to have read the author’s earlier books, Prairie Nocturne stands amply on its own, dealing with Doig concerns in characteristic Doig fashion. As usual in his books, human beings who just barely fit into the jigsaw puzzles of each other’s worlds form the heart of the story. Even more typical are the unexpected perfect phrasings that litter his prose. One might quibble with certain plot turns, or with his portrayal of a career-conscious singer who relies so heavily on old songs his mother taught him. Still, any author who can remark on “the sort of person who would be fun on a picnic, if it was a short enough picnic,” and “the ancient impatience of water,” and “Montana’s long-legged miles” deserves a wide and loyal readership.

Maude McDaniel writes from Cumberland, Maryland.

William Faulkner did it. Thomas Hardy did it. Robb Forman Dew does it. Each of these authors invented imaginary geographical places and made them seem so real that literary tourists are often disappointed to find them not listed on the map. Robb Forman Dew accomplishes this feat with an imaginary town in Ohio.

The characters in Dew’s new novel, The Evidence Against Her, live in the invented town of Washburn, Ohio. The year is 1888, and so little happens in this sleepy hamlet that the birth of three children on a sunny day in September passes for big news.

Within a 12-hour span, the children are born into an enclave of friends and family on the prosperous side of the tracks in Washburn. The family of Leo Schofield gains their first child, a daughter; Leo’s brother John Schofield acquires a son, and their friend Daniel Butler, pastor of the Methodist church, also becomes the father of a son. These three children Lily Schofield, Warren Schofield and Robert Butler come into the world together through the accident of their mothers’ almost simultaneous labor pains, but the ties they forge are of their own making. Their alliance lasts a lifetime and grows richer and more complicated with the passage of the years.

In this story of an extended family and its town, nothing is as simple as the bucolic setting implies. Lily Schofield and Robert Butler marry, to no one’s surprise. The fact that Lily happens to be in love with her first cousin Warren Schofield is a pain she hides as best she can. When Warren falls in love with Agnes Claytor, a younger woman and outsider to the clan, the lives of the triumvirate of Lily, Robert and Warren undergo changes that none of them could have anticipated.

In this beautiful, moving novel, the life of a small town at the turn of the century is transformed through the wonder of the author’s sure grasp of her characters. Each character, each relationship is developed with such grace and intimacy that the Schofields, the Claytors and the Butlers come to seem like old friends. The relationship between Agnes Claytor and her mother, Catherine, an unwillingly transplanted Southern belle, is as memorable a portrait of the struggle between generations and cultures as any found in modern fiction.

The Evidence Against Her is an intricately constructed novel, as deceptively effortless as a stroll through Washburn’s Memorial Square on an early summer afternoon. Author Robb Forman Dew is the granddaughter of poet John Crowe Ransom and the goddaughter of novelist and poet Robert Penn Warren, and she does credit to her literary heritage. Like Eudora Welty, Caroline Gordon and Edith Wharton, Dew’s stories evolve magically out of place and time in response to her uncanny talent for fleshing out the abstract patterns of existence to the point where poetry and life converge.

Mary Garrett reads and writes in Middle Tennessee.

The famous photos of abolitionist/feminist Sojourner Truth show a dignified old lady with strong African features wearing a lace cap and an immaculate shawl. It’s hard to imagine her as a child, or even a young woman, but Jacqueline Sheehan does this skillfully in her novelization of Sojourner’s long and eventful life, Truth. Lucid, suspenseful and bitterly humorous, the book traces Sojourner’s life from an early 19th-century childhood spent in slavery in upstate New York to her emergence as an abolitionist itinerant preacher renamed Sojourner Truth in 1843 by God Himself.

Born in 1797 and named Isabella after the Spanish queen by her master, Sojourner is blessed to spend some of her childhood with her deeply spiritual parents, Bomefree (meaning tree in low Dutch, because he stood so straight and tall as a young man) and Mau Mau Bett, who love each other and their children as best they can. While Sheehan tweaks some of the facts surrounding Isabella/Sojourner’s life, the descriptions of the family’s experience as slaves are stunning.

After her master’s death, Isabella and her younger brother are sold, and neither she nor her parents ever hear from him again. Sheehan follows the young girl as she endures a cruel, English-speaking master who won’t even give her boots for the winter. Her mistress, Sally Dumont, takes the unhappiness of her own life out on Isabella. Yet few people are irredeemably evil in Sheehan’s reckoning, and the complexities of the characters are another attractive element of her book. Eventually, Sojourner redeems her son from slavery in Alabama, makes the famous “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech in Akron, Ohio, meets with Frederick Douglass and a beleaguered Abraham Lincoln to end up, to the reader’s relief, living a comfortable old age in Battle Creek, Michigan. Truth is an intriguing book about a woman of towering strength and integrity. Arlene McKanic writes from Jamaica, New York.

It’s summer vacation time again, when both parent and child try to wile away the hours while they’re getting where they’re going. We’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating: travel in cars, planes and trains can be turned into real fun in the sun if you and your about-to-be-bored offspring listen to any of the wonderfully entertaining tapes that are yours for the picking.

Are we there yet? Fortunately, Lemony Snickett’s Series of Unfortunate Events, now up to Book the Seventh, is beginning to come out in audio versions. These darkly quirky, humorous tales that follow the misfortunes of the three orphaned Baudelaire siblings, who are constantly moving from one disaster to another, are a fine way to take up the slack as we totter between Potters. The disarmingly honest Mr. Snickett warns the listener from the get- go that “the audiobook you are holding in your hands is extremely unpleasant.” But kids (ages 8-12) are not put off by these dire warnings, and neither should their elders be. The curious appeal is infectious and audiences are growing rapidly. The first two in the series The Bad Beginning and The Reptile Room are read by Tim Curry. The next two, The Wide Window and The Miserable Mill, are read by the inimitable Mr. Snickett (aka Daniel Handler) himself.

The Amber Spyglass, the final book in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, will keep you all enthralled for more than 14 hours. Performed by the author and a full cast, the extraordinary adventures of Lyra and Will continue as they travel to a strange, dim world where no living soul has ever gone. The first two parts of this highly acclaimed series, The Golden Compass and The Subtle Knife, are also available on cassette (ages 11 and up).

For sheer charm, and a little nostalgia for the grown-ups, listen to Ludwig Bemelmans’ timeless tales of the mischievous Madeline in the Madeline Audio Collection, read by the timeless, mischievous Carol Channing. And for the younger crew there’s The Babar Audio Collection, read by the divine Louis Jourdan. You might also want to check out the contemporary, hip Chet Gecko Private Eye (ages 5 and up) as he stars in Bruce Hale’s The Chameleon Wore Chartreuse and The Mystery of Mr. Nice.

For older ears New as an audio presentation, but not as a book, The Monkey’s Raincoat introduces Robert Crais’ smart-mouthed, tai chi-trained, Vietnam-scarred, tough-but-tender Elvis Cole and his consummately cool, armed-to-the-hilt, Rambo-esque partner Joe Pike. Elvis, a private investigator who can quip with the best of them, even when someone is holding a gun to his temple or knife to his neck, keeps the flip talk flowing while he and Joe confront a very nasty, heavily guarded, drug-dealing ex-Matador, who has probably done in the husband and kidnapped the son of a sweet, seemingly inept Encino housewife. Amid much violence and over-the-top dialogue (well delivered here by David Stuart), Elvis and Joe, with a little help from the LAPD, attempt to find Hubbie, free the boy and see that justice is done, one way or another. Fast-paced, fun and convincingly plotted, the Elvis Cole thrillers make great travel listening. The bad, the beautiful, the betrayed Elegant historical whodunits (a growing genre) are a multiple treat you have the fun of figuring out who the culprit is while soaking up the atmosphere and ambiance of another time. Elizabeth Redfern’s debut novel, The Music of the Spheres, read with great style by Tim Curry, takes us to the teeming turmoil of London in 1795. At war with Republican France, England is filled with master spies of every stripe, royalist refugees fleeing the bloody aftermath of the French Revolution and a serial killer with a predilection for young, redheaded women. Jonathan Absey, officially a clerk in Whitehall and unofficially a Home Office agent, is in the thick of it, quietly gathering intelligence on French spies. But his true obsession is finding the man who murdered his own Titian-haired daughter. In the moist, heavy heat of July, his obsession and job meet, as spy mutates to murderer, Royalist to Republican and Jonathan from frustrated functionary to avenging father.

Is she or isn’t she?Ê Harlan Coben’s Tell No One, faultlessly read by Stephen Weber, is a race-paced, pulse-pounder if ever there was one. When Dr. David Beck’s young wife, Elizabeth, was brutally killed eight years ago, something died in him too. Then his world turns upside down and inside out. In three short days, Beck goes from being a dedicated doctor, sleepwalking through his own life, to a man who has seen a ghost, received e-mails from the dead, become a suspect in two murders, assaulted a police officer, is on the run from the law and has enlisted the aid of a known drug dealer. And if that’s not enough, he’s being hounded by a cool FBI agent on one side and a strange Asian-American with cement-hard hands that torture for the fun of it on the other. What’s driving Beck, and all the others, is the shaky possibility that Elizabeth is still alive and if that’s true, what’s false? Summer sizzle Eric Jerome Dickey’s latest, Between Lovers, read by Richard Allen, is hot stuff and X-rated! The mystery here is how three hip, smart 30-somethings will sort out their complicated, interconnected love lives, not to mention their sensibilities and sexuality. There’s a lot of searching, soul and otherwise, as the best-selling Dickey tells a good story and adds his special brand of wisdom. Definitely not for the kids.

Sukey Howard reports on spoken word audio each month.