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A Summer Getaway Awaits

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By KEVIN WALKER

The Tampa Tribune

Published: June 29, 2008

Let's face it: This isn't the sort of summer when you decide to finally take that trip to Italy. This is the sort of summer when you spend your vacation reading a good book in the backyard. Take a trip with your mind. Save some cash. You get the picture. Here are some new choices this week.

First on the list (mine, anyway) is Joyce Carol Oates' "My Sister, My Love" (Ecco, $29.95), in which the multiple award-winning writer takes on the JonBenet Ramsey case. Well, sort of. This fictional tale is narrated by Skyler Rampike, the only surviving member of an "infamous" American family. Oates begins the story with a modern take on the famous opening line of Leo Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina": "Dysfunctional families are all alike. Ditto 'survivors.'"

As the story unfolds, we discover Rampike's family was destroyed a decade earlier with the murder of Bliss, a 6-year-old ice-skating champion. Oates uses this story to delve into the media's coverage of the murder, lost childhoods and "a corrosively funny expose of the pretensions of upper-middle-class American suburbia," according to the news release accompanying the book.

I didn't say it was light reading.

There's some of that, though, too. James Rollins, who I credited last year for providing relentless action and thrills in "Black Order," is back with "The Last Oracle" (William Morrow, $26.95). This one again features SIGMA Force, the elite military unit that has been featured in Rollins' other books, and its director, Painter Crowe, and commander, Gray Pierce.

As usual, Rollins' books have about six things going on at once, with the threads eventually coming together. Some of the threads include a man with a high radioactivity level for no discernible reason, a group of autistic children groomed by scientists for a diabolical purpose in Russia, and another young autistic girl who is gifted with the ability of "remote viewing" - seeing locations far from her physical location. Oh, and there's also a terrorist attack possible at the site of Chernobyl.

Of course, W.E.B. Griffin (with William E. Butterworth IV) has already released his book for the summer, "Death and Honor" (Putnam, $26.95), his fourth novel in the "Honor Bound" series about World War II espionage in Germany and Argentina. That's some good escapist reading, too, especially if you enjoy fiction based in historical events that includes a lot of talk about military strategy.

If fiction doesn't grab you, and you would prefer having the stuffing scared out of you, then by all means reach for Sylvia Browne's "End of Days: Predictions and Prophesies About the End of the World." That's if you believe that sort of thing - that Browne can read the future.

You don't, do you?

Kevin Walker can be reached at (813) 259-7975.

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