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Blood Horses
By John Jeremiah Sullivan

FSG

"I was never a fan. I was something else: an ignoramus." That's how Sullivan describes his attitude toward sports as a kid, even though his father was a veteran sportswriter named Mike Sullivan. Before his father's death, Sullivan asked what he remembered most from his 30-year career. Mike replied that it was watching the 1973 Kentucky Derby, when Secretariat overtook Sham on his way to a glorious Triple Crown. "That was just beauty, you know?" he said. Sullivan's boyhood and his relationship with his father are laced through this profile of horses and racing, although if it weren't for that personal thread it would very much resemble the books of New Yorker writer John McPhee. Like McPhee, Sullivan comes at his subject from all sides, discussing everything from the limestone of central Kentucky to Saudi Prince Ahmed bin Salman's speedy exit from a yearling auction after the Sept. 11 attacks to Sullivan's hilarious encounter with two drunks after the 2002 Kentucky Derby. It's an engaging book that ends with Funny Cide's bid for last year's Triple Crown.

The Body of David Hayes
By Ridley Pearson

Hyperion

Pearson is one of those novelists (there are many) whose success isn't the result of talent or storytelling prowess, but of his belief at the start that he could attempt to write bestsellers and actually pull it off. He's industrious, persistent and brave enough to take characters off the beaten path, although seldom with much finesse. Liz Boldt, wife of Seattle police Lieutenant Lou Boldt, has survived cancer, embraced religion (which didn't sit well with Boldt), had two kids and become a bank executive. Now she's revisited by David Hayes, who had an affair with her six years ago and has just spent four years in prison for the electronic theft of US$17 million from Liz's bank. Police never found the money, never figured out how Hayes hid it and never uncovered the identity of the shady millionaire who was robbed. After lots of computer mumbo jumbo (and some stiffly rendered jealousy on Boldt's part), we are treated to blackmail and torture by the Russian mob. Pearson will appear in Scottsdale next month. Watch the books calendar for details.

The King of America
By Samantha Gillison

Random House

This atmospheric novel is based on the life and death of Michael Rockefeller, son of Nelson Rockefeller and heir to the family fortune, who disappeared off New Guinea in 1961 while doing anthropological fieldwork. Through her character, Stephen Hesse, Gillison explores the power that wealth bestows upon people who have done nothing to deserve it, as well as the familial politics that might swirl around an incredibly rich man. The young Stephen and his mother, low-born first wife of Nicholas Hesse, are relegated to a limbo of invisibility when the senior Hesse divorces her and has a new family with a woman of better social standing. It's only later that Stephen gets to know his father, and as he struggles to impress Nicholas he must also deal with the ways people respond to his name. His trip into the wilds of New Guinea (Gillison lived there as a child and describes it vividly) ends with the mysterious fate of the young Rockefeller, whose body was never found, giving rise to rumors that he was murdered and eaten by angry islanders.

Art Against the Odds
By Susan Goldman Rubin

Crown

This is an interesting book for older kids about people who have created art in anonymity, often under difficult circumstances. They include Chicago janitor Henry Darger, an eccentric who grew up in an asylum for "feeble-minded" children and later, in secret, created a body of wondrous paintings and drawings that were discovered after his death in 1973; Mine Okubo, who made pen and ink drawings of things she saw in a Japanese internment camp during World War II; Helga Weissova, a teenager whose watercolors depicted life in the German concentration camps where she lived from 1941 to 1945; American slaves who sewed elaborate quilts in the years before the Civil War, as well as the descendents of slaves who make quilts "the old way" in Gee's Bend, Alabama; and Ronnie White, Arthur Keigney and Crystal Stimpson, prison inmates who made stark, revealing paintings of life behind bars. Their stories show that artistic expression produces flickers of defiance even in the most hellish places.

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