Booklist Review

Fischer's St. Ben was popular several years back, and his amusing, at times almost wild, Ashes on the Wind is likely to be, too. It's about a laconic old fellow named Sam Dunn who has his wife cremated and her ashes cast to the winds of Florida Bay, much to the chagrin of his righteous daughter-in-law, Bobbi, who never really approved of Sam. There's a mix-up: the ashes are actually those of a traveling evangelist's wife, a plain woman but an indispensable part of the act, since she handled snakes. A snakebite killed her, but the evangelist may have planned the death because of his lust for a younger woman. A warrant is issued for the evangelist's arrest even as Sam hunts him for the right ashes and Bobbi follows, all parties converging in Fischer's vivid, hilarious revival service. Somehow, even though the evangelist is a charlatan, faith prospers. Hicks' An Unlikely Prince concerns a beautiful young woman, Suzie Wyatt, who starts a day-care facility in her parents' house as they embark on a missionary assignment. Suzie longs for life to be like a fairy tale, and, sure enough, a prince arrives in the person of a shy history professor, Harrison Hunt. Harrison has rented the house next door in hopes of a quiet summer in which to write his book, but, of course, the kids are noisy. This brings the lovers together in mild conflict and provides the only complication in a resolutely lightweight story, though Hicks writes some amusing dialogue, and her insights into Harrison's awkwardness around women are interesting. A construction worker named Tom Waring finds out what heaven is like in Kenny Kemp's I Hated Heaven. Tom dies suddenly of pancreatic cancer in the midst of a full, more or less happy life. He goes to "Paradise," not a purgatory but a sort of staging area for Heaven--and where Kemp works out his rather imaginative theology. Trouble is, Waring left a lot of bills, a trusting young son, and a loving wife whose agnosticism is only strengthened by the sorrows thrust upon her. What kind of God, in other words, would call away a good man leading a worthwhile and vital life? Thus Tom spends his time in Paradise trying to return to Earth in this original, comic novel. Moore's Land of Empty Houses tells of the wanderer, Daniel, an Army Ranger who went AWOL into the abandoned U.S. interior when the army came under UN command. A plague has fallen upon the earth, leaving the world in ruins and largely unpopulated. Various malcontents wander the wasteland, most of whom are dangerous, crazy, or both. A missionary named simply Deborah seeks out Daniel, and he guides her through the wastelands so that she may bring a new gospel to fractured, and fractious, humanity, and the West may be settled again. Moore, author of the fine contemporary western The Breaking of Ezra Riley, is on sure ground when he describes western landscapes, and often his characters, such as the "babbler" who survives by eating prairie dogs, are appealing. Some readers will respond to his broad satire of New Age philosophy, which here descends into cannibalism. But his dystopia, like David Brin's (and Kevin Costner's) The Postman, is never quite plausible. Morris, with collaborator Ferguson, begins yet another series, Chronicles of the Golden Frontier, with Riches Untold. It's about Nevada in the gold-strike years of the Civil War. Our heroine is Jennifer Hamilton, who elopes with a dashing Union soldier who, naturally, turns out to be no good. He's killed, leaving Jennifer to fend for herself and her children as a newspaperwoman in Nevada. There she meets a well-researched but rather flatly rendered Mark Twain, bringing to mind a better tale mining the same territory: Bodie Thoene's witty The Legend of Storey County. Still, Morris and Ferguson are dealing with wonderful material and turn in a respectable job. Rivers undertakes yet another departure with The Last Sin Eater about troubled 10-year-old Cadi Forbes, growing up in the Smoky Mountains in the 1850s. Rivers' title refers to the practice of certain hill people, recent immigrants from Wales, of calling in a "sin eater" upon the death of a relative. The sin eater's task was to take up, like Jesus, the sins of the deceased, thus easing passage to the afterlife. After her grandmother's death, unable to talk to her inconsolable mother, Cadi looks for the sin eater, but her search is really a search for Jesus, and eventually she leads the community away from the notion of a sin eater and toward a fundamentalist faith in Jesus the redeemer. Rivers writes in a convincing Welsh dialect and makes a marvelous character of Cadi, not least because of her imaginary childhood playmate, Lilybet, who becomes a kind of angel. A deeply felt novel, sorrowful and distinctly odd, but with passages of real beauty. Yanow's The Nolan is a closely researched biographical novel about ex-monk and scholar Giordano Bruno. Bruno, or "the Nolan," was executed in 1600 for refusing to recant his belief in an infinite universe with numerous inhabited worlds. Yanow tells the Nolan's story from the point of view of Pietro Guidotti, a shrewd peasant who is the life-suffering servant of the noble and learned priest, Robert Bellarmine. Bellarmine is enjoined by forces of the Inquisition to argue the Nolan's heresy, and in 1597 sends Guidotti on a kind of spy mission to discover the truth about the Nolan. This brilliant and meticulously researched meditation is narrated in a lively manner, though Yanow never quite escapes the obscurity of his subject. Series updates: from Zondervan, fourteenth in Jane Peart's Brides of Montclair series, Courageous Bride (paper, $9.99, 0-310-20210-8), and the second in Athol Dickson's charmingly southern, almost gothic, Garr Reed mysteries, Every Hidden Thing (paper, $12.99, 0-310-22002-5). From Bethany, the fourth in Lauraine Snelling's superior Red River of the North series, about immigrants on the prairie, The Reaper's Song (paper, $9.99, 1-55661-579-5) and the third in Beverly Lewis' Heritage of Lancaster County series, about the Amish, The Reckoning (paper, $9.99, 1-55661-868-9). From Revell, sixth in Gilbert Morris' American Odyssey series, A Time to Build (paper, $10.99, 0-8007-5645-2), and fifth in Brenda Wilbee's Sweetbriar series about pioneer women in Washington State, Sweetbriar Autumn (paper, $11.99, 0-8007-5661-4). From Waterbrook, Angela Elwell Hunt's The Golden Cross (paper, $11.95, 1-57856-053-8), second in the Cahira O'Connor series.