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Somebody killed Daddy, but who? That’s the big question in former attorney Tasmina Perry’s first novel, Daddy’s Girls. The man who’s been assisting Lord Oswald Balcon with his memoir thinks it was one of his four daughters. But why would one of the Balcon sisters want to kill the man behind all of their successes?

Serena, the youngest, is revered as London’s most beautiful actress. Cate recently co-launched her own travel-and-leisure magazine, Sand. Camilla is making a new path for herself in politics. And Venetia, the oldest, is married to the wealthy and reputable Jonathon von Bismarck and has just taken her career as an interior designer to a whole new level by introducing her own clothing line.

As Perry, recently deputy editor in chief of InStyle U.K., flashes back 10 months, you almost forget about Oswald’s foreshadowed death, and cease to care, as the scandalous lives of Serena, Catherine, Camilla and Venetia draw you in like a combination of “Sex and the City” and “Desperate Housewives”: steamy sexual rendezvous in parking lots, yacht parties peopled with only the Who’s Who of London, and fashion shows in New York City graced by names like Manolo Blahnik and Donna Karan.

But, as careers are lost, relationships ruined, and deception, heartache, and betrayal of the worst kind slowly creep into the lives of each Balcon sister, they begin to realize that ever since the death of their mother, they’ve been living as puppets in Huntsford Castle, with their father relentlessly pulling every string.

He was the one keeping Venetia from fulfilling her dream of opening a location for her designs in New York, and it was he who pushed away the love of her life, while pushing onto her a man she later realized didn’t just—as she’d suspected—love only himself.

Oswald was the reason Cate had such a difficult time raising enough funds to jump-start her magazine, and he constantly mocked her career choice—as he did that of Camilla, who left her job as a lawyer to pursue politics.

Not even Serena, Oswald’s favorite among the four—thanks to her porcelain beauty and constant media attention—was exempt from Daddy’s controlling ways.

Perry’s mystery slowly unfolds behind the ostensibly glamorous lives of these blondes whom everyone in London—and shortly in America—loves to hate. And the question changes to, “Why wouldn’t one of the Balcon sisters want to kill their father?”

Each has a motive, as David Loftus—the fellow helping with the memoir—is quick to remind them, especially Camilla, who shared with her father a haunting secret. Eager to prove Loftus wrong and free themselves from any speculation about what really happened the night Serena found Oswald lying face down in the moat outside their home on Christmas Eve, the Balcon sisters set out to find the truth.

Instead, they learn that their lives were even more of a mystery than they ever could have imagined, as they uncover the truth about their parents’ relationship, their father’s business transactions, and one another.

Perry’s novel is a glossy, first-class murder mystery. The odd thing about it, though, is that you become so wrapped up in the lives of Oswald Balcon’s daughters and their affection for one another that concern over their father’s murder diminishes with each chapter. [Amazon, Amazon UK]

Few would dispute that the seminal events of July 26, 1953, provided the catalyst for Fidel Castro’s rise to power in Cuba more than six years later. But it’s doubtful if anyone has ever told, or will tell, the tale of those events and their aftermath in such detail as Antonio Rafael de la Cova, in this exhaustively researched chronicle.

It was on that day that 160 ragtag rebels under Castro’s leadership simultaneously attacked two army posts in Eastern Cuba—the Moncada Fortress in Santiago and a Rural Guard unit in Bayamo—hoping to spark an island-wide uprising against President Fulgencio Batista.

Instead, they failed spectacularly. As de la Cova describes it, “The July 26 uprising was a botched, amateurish effort rather than a well-executed plan capable of mobilizing popular support and overthrowing a dictatorship. ... Fidel Castro’s leadership was deficient due to his micromanagement.”

Castro’s brother, Raul, currently Cuba’s acting president, was captured in the attack, in which he played a minor role. More than 50 other captured rebels were summarily executed. Castro escaped but surrendered a week later. Fifty-one of the 99 rebel survivors were indicted, put on trial, with several leaders found guilty and sentenced to 13 years in prison. Castro demanded, and was given, a separate trial in which he served as his own attorney.

As de la Cova recounts, “During the trial Fidel Castro began to achieve the prestige and stature that he had been unable to gain prior to and with the failed garrison attacks.” A large part of that notoriety came with his two-hour defense statement that “later would be expanded and revised into a published pamphlet titled History Will Absolve Me, which became the manifesto of the Cuban Revolution.” He was found guilty and sentenced to 15 years in prison on the Isle of Pines, served only 22 months as the result of an amnesty law approved by parliament and signed by Batista in May 1955.

A few weeks later, Castro went to Mexico, where he began organizing the Granma expedition that landed in Cuba’s Oriente Province on Dec. 2, 1956, culminating in Castro’s takeover after Batista fled the country on New Year’s Day, 1959. Twenty of the 82 who sailed from Mexico on the Granma to begin the guerrilla campaign that toppled Batista had participated in the Moncada and Bayamo attacks.

While de la Cova’s book is the most definitive work to date on the events of July 26, 1953, and one that any Cubanologist would find of interest, its mind-numbing detail makes for tedious reading. An example comes when de la Cova describes “the total weaponry used at Moncada consisted of forty 12- and 16-gauge shotguns, costing fifty-eight hundred pesos; thirty-five .22 caliber Mosberg and Remington rifles, bought for eight pesos each; sixty handguns of various models; twenty-four rifles of different caliber, including eight 1898 Krag-Jorgensen rifles, three 1892 .44 caliber Winchester sawed-off rifles, and a .30-caliber 1903 model Springfield rifle; a 30-caliber M1 Garand rifle with a folding metal stock; and a malfunctioning .45-caliber Browning submachine gun.” It is only one of many such passages.

Also annoying is the practice of introducing individuals beginning with their age, i.e. “The Thirty-nine-year-old physician Dr. Mario Munoz Monroy. ... His thirty-one-year-old wife, Dinora Algarra Peralta served as his assistant. ...”

Let the reader be forewarned. [Amazon, Amazon UK]

Earlier this year, DC Comics started a new line of graphic novels called Minx in an attempt to attract young female readers. I wish they’d lose the smarmily sexualized name, but I’m still intrigued by the series—at least one previous Minx book, a collaboration between young-adult writer Cecil Castellucci and Jim Rugg, called “The Plain Janes,” has been interesting.

The newest title, Good as Lily, was created by two guy-type people—award-winning graphic novelist Derek Kirk Kim and underground cartoonist Jesse Hamm—but it features a young female protagonist, the smart and driven Korean American Grace Kwon.

The story opens on Grace’s 18th birthday. She’s sitting on a park bench fretting rather than celebrating. “By the time Mozart was 18, he had written two operas and a group of symphonies,” she berates herself. Like many ambitious teens, she’s worried that she’ll never amount to anything (even though she just found out she got into Stanford).

Her friends Jeremy and Rona bring her out of this overachiever’s reverie by surprising her with a party in the park. Jeremy, who’s plainly in love with Grace, gives her a special T-shirt that she accidentally leaves behind. She goes back after dark to look for it, but finds instead a little girl crying, a young woman splashing around in the lake who calls out to her for help, and an elderly woman in a quilted parka who grouses at everybody.

Once these four people orient themselves, they take a closer look and notice a surprising resemblance.

“What’s your name?” they ask each other. “When is your birthday?” They turn out to be not different people but different incarnations of Grace herself at age 6, 29, and 70.

And they won’t leave her alone.

She tries to focus on her regular life, at the forefront of which is the school play and—blush—her drama teacher, the floppy-haired, fresh-out-of-college Mr. Levon.

But her pesky other selves keep getting in the way.

They may be versions of Grace, but they have their own agendas. The old Grace drinks and smokes and seems to have little in her life but TV, which worries the present-day Grace. The almost-30 Grace is having a minor freak-out about her love life. Eventually, we learn who the Lily of the title is, and why she has cast a shadow over Grace’s life since she was a sad 6-year-old.

To get her life back on track, Grace must fix what’s troubling the other three, which requires summoning love and compassion—for herself, really. Her other selves—even the littlest—have some things to teach her, too. So the science-fiction-worthy theme proves an inventive way to look at the fears people, especially very young people, have about the future.

The paneled drawings are reminiscent of manga books aimed at girls, with attractive but realistic daily scenes occasionally punctuated by a comically overemotive facial expression. Also, Grace “has a butt,” which is a nice touch. As with most male-made comics, there’s a little too much attention given to the female characters’ bodies, but Grace’s appearance isn’t Lara Croft-crazy, and neither is she confined to any stereotypical “smart-girl” shape.

Another good detail is the footnote that tells us Grace’s parents’ speech was “translated from Korean.”

When talking with her family or Grace’s friends Rona and Jeremy, who are also Korean, her mother even slips in the occasional “ai-goo (Korean for “oh man, oy gevalt, OMG"). We are always mindful of the characters’ heritage because it plays a big role in their everyday lives.

This modern, imaginative story is a good choice for readers, male or female, who are looking for a book that has both brains and heart. [Amazon, Amazon UK]

It’s a rule of life that nothing is quite as wonderful as we remember it—Mom’s famous cake is good, but not great; the old vacation spot is pretty, but not idyllic; the “best movie ever” is entertaining, but nothing spectacular. Rules, however, are made to be broken, and it’s a thrill to see Jasper Fforde crush this one in his latest Thursday Next extravaganza, First Among Sequels.

That’s right, Thursday’s back. For those who might have forgotten—as if anyone could—we met our heroine first in The Eyre Affair. This fifth novel in Fforde’s brilliant series begins a new chapter in Thursday’s life.

It’s been 14 years since Thursday protected her own world—a fictional but parallel England—and the literary universe from evil in Something Rotten. Since then, LiteraTec, her division of Spec Ops, has been officially closed and forced to go undercover as Acme Carpets; Thursday has continued her work in Bookworld’s Jurisfiction department (quite literally, the policing agency that keeps order within the world of fiction); and she and her husband, Landen, have produced three children. Topping her list of worries, however, is her son, Friday, now 16, who is supposed to be taking over as chief of the time-traveling Chronoguard and, instead, sits around his room like a lump.

Then there are crises like the stupidity surplus the government has built up by constantly taking reasonable action, and all the carpets that her ostensible job demands she install. Jurisfiction issues include the death of Sherlock Holmes (via a waterfall), the sudden absence of humor from Thomas Hardy novels, and the potential war between the Racy Novel genre and the Ecclesiastical and Feminist. To top it all off, due to her own great fame, Thursday has been featured in many novels (fictional versions of Fforde’s own) and now must deal with her doubly-fictional counterparts, who exist in Bookworld.

It all sounds massively confusing, but the magic of Fforde’s writing is that it actually isn’t. With skill and a grin, he welcomes the reader into the crazed, madcap world that is Thursday’s, and suddenly it becomes easy, even irresistible, to accept time-travel paradoxes and jumps into and out of fiction.

Partly, this is due to the fun in Fforde’s writing. Time travel is explained by references to Saturday Night Fever, and favorites like the footnoterphone and the Cat Formerly Known as Cheshire are back. Partly, it’s because Fforde is able to mask clever satirical jabs, particularly political ones, as ridiculous fictional issues, such as the stupidity surplus and the ineptitude of the Council of Genres. Mostly, though, it’s because, even after all this time, Fforde still obviously delights in literature.

Whether he’s dropping a piano into Emma (Frank Churchill has to take the blame) or revealing the dangers of oral tradition (for the characters and the storyteller), his excitement and creativity are constantly evident. He even brings in some modern fiction in this latest book, instead of sticking entirely to classics—Harry Potter is a Bookworld celebrity, and Temperance Brennan, the forensic anthropologist of Kathy Reich’s mystery series, makes a special guest appearance.

Occasionally, Fforde’s writing does become a little disjointed. On his Web site, he explains that he initially began the book with six very disparate ideas, which he wrote in chunks and then dropped into the larger narrative. Fun as Fforde’s book is, such disconnected writing shows. Many sections, while delightful, appear tangential to the larger narrative.

Then again, as the novel’s ending reveals, this book is meant to be followed by a sequel (and probably many more after that). This makes it difficult to label something as unnecessary, since it could prove essential in a later book. After all, a few seemingly throwaway ideas provide the linchpin of this novel’s conclusion (and a clever conclusion it is). Perhaps the strange and unforeseeable plot twist involving Thursday’s children, or the idea of cheese so strong it has to be chained down, neither of which matters much here, will become essential in future books.

In the meantime, we’ll just have to enjoy Thursday and her world as Fforde gives them to us—exciting, eccentric, and exceptional. [Amazon, Amazon UK]

William Gibson inspects the present, and it is just as weird and wired as you suspect. He sees into the future, and it looks somewhat like the present, except the technology and the paranoia are cranked up even higher.

Spook Country, like Pattern Recognition in 2005, takes on our Sept. 11 attitudes and woes. You have to pay attention when reading Gibson, and if you do, you will find Spook Country an up-to-the-second thriller that also encompasses a fine joke about our unrelenting fear of the rest of the world (when what we should most fear is ourselves).

Hollis Henry, a former rock star with the Curfew, is trying to make a living as a free-lance journalist. She has been invited to write about virtual artwork for Node, a magazine that does not yet exist (and might not ever).

Alberto, the first artist she interviews, is “concerned with history as internalized space. He sees this internalized space emerge from trauma.” Alberto depicts the famous and dead, visible only in virtual reality: River Phoenix in front of the Viper Room, Helmut Newton in the driveway of the Chateau Marmont.

Hollis has been chosen for this task by Hubertus Bigend, a very, very, very rich man who appeared as a marketing guru in “Pattern Recognition.” Hubertus reveals the actual task is pursuing Bobby Chombo, an oddball who assists the virtual artists.

Bobby once worked on GPS technology and now uses his high-level skills to assist artists, but also to track a container with something in it, likely headed America’s way.

Bigend wants to know who and what and where and when. Paranoid readers are sure to be sure they know the what: something very bad.

Gibson jerks the readers around initially, as very short chapters dart to and fro among Hollis and other mysterious characters: Tito, a Cuban grandson of a Communist Santeria priest, an athletic genius who delivers to someone known only as the old man; uptight Brown, who is trying to catch Tito in a delivery; Milgram, hooked on anti-anxiety drugs and kidnapped by Brown to translate Tito’s somewhat-Russian secret code; the elusive old man, who is very quick and very sly; and Inchmale, from the Curfew and still Hollis’s good friend.

Along the way Gibson, as always, astutely sums up our state of affairs:

Hubertus tells Hollis that she, as pop star, was an “artifact of preubiquitous media,” or a state in which mass media existed in the world, rather than, as now, are the world.

Milgram lectures Brown that a terrorist “uses terrifying threats to induce you to degrade your own society,” the tactic based on “the same glitch in human psychology that allows people to believe they can win the lottery. ... Statistically, terrorist attacks almost never happen.”

Inchmale tells Hollis “America had developed Stockholm syndrome toward its own government, post 9/11.” (Stockholm syndrome describes the identification, even fondness, a captive develops toward the captor.)

It takes quite awhile for the characters to begin converging in a meaningful way; it takes the entire book to answer those basic questions or explain the title, which, like all Gibson does, operates on multiple levels.

But that’s one reason we keep reading, isn’t it?

Gibson is almost genial and therapeutic as he takes us there.

In a Q&A on his Web site, Gibson explains his decision to write about our present times. He notes that books previous to Pattern Recognition felt “more like `alternate presents’ than imaginary futures,” and that he believes, “Science fiction is always, really, about the period it’s written in, though most people don’t seem to understand that.”

Born in Conway, S.C., Gibson grew up in the South and an Arizona boys’ school, but has spent much of his adult life in Canada, interpreting what in this book he refers to as the “secret history.”

It might all make more sense—what’s known and suspicion of secrets—if you sit down with a Gibson book or two. [Amazon, Amazon UK]

Here’s an obvious double-meaning in the title of Stephen L. Carter’s latest novel.

New England White refers to the snowy landscape where the story of a high-achieving university couple—President Lemaster Carlyle and his wife, Julia—takes place in an Ivy League-inspired but unnamed college somewhere in New England.

But what’s also clear is the title speaks to the consciousness of the main characters living supremely privileged lives difficult to separate from their black roots.

Lemaster is arguably “the most powerful black man in the country,” a towering intellect with influential friends in the highest levels of academia and government, evidenced by his close personal friendship with the president of the United States (also unnamed, but eerily close to George W. Bush). Julia is the daughter of a flamboyant mother raised among black bourgeoise who teach their children to stay away from less sophisticated members of what is constantly referred to as “the darker nation.”

As he did in his first novel, The Emperor of Ocean Park, Carter, a Yale law professor with several well-regarded non-fiction books to his credit, has set a stylishly written detective story and thriller in the rarefied environment of black socialites, ministers, university professors, lawyers and politicians.

First identified by W.E.B. Dubois as “the talented tenth,” these are blacks with backgrounds envied by most Americans, the children of privilege who maintain that privilege by keeping close watch over who is allowed into the club.

Carter has found a way to educate readers about this “secret” class without boring them with historical footnotes or explanations about the source of their wealth.

Just as in his earlier novel, he does it by presenting a page-turning yarn that reads like a movie script and races through a finely plotted tale filled with surprises.

New England White begins with a murder mystery, the shooting death of Kellen Zant, a talented black professor who also happened to be Julia’s former lover.

As the plot thickens with various developments, Julia is dragged into a web of deceit and interference from the noisiest members of her social club and various university types, who suspect Zant’s death may be tied to research he was doing about a decades-old murder of a white girl.

Carter ratchets up the suspense by introducing a snooping reporter, a hard-boiled black detective who works security at the college and Julia’s daughter as a possible suspect.

That’s a lot even for a 500-plus-page novel. But Carter keeps it going, relying on the formula he perfected in Emperor: an intriguing writing style that keeps the suspense taut with surprise after surprise.

The flaws are also echoed.

Carter continues to turn his ordinary heroes into action-movie caricatures at inappropriate times.

Even Julia, depicted for most of the book as a genteel university president’s wife, ends up in a shoot-out with a menacing interloper. And there’s a maddening tendency for main characters to get a “Eureka!” flash.

Still, New England White holds its center, mainly due to Carter’s familiarity with his chosen core group and his imaginative plotting devices. [Amazon, Amazon UK]