ON SHELVES

May 11, 2008 12:29 am

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'Fidelity'

By Thomas Perry, 357 pages, $25

Emily Kramer bolts awake in her eerily silent house. Her husband, Phil, is not in the bed beside her. He never came home last night.

Her dread building, she calls his friends, then drives to the office of the little detective agency he runs. The secretary and the three investigators Phil employs have straggled in. They don't know where Phil is either. They don't even know what case he has been working on. Phil, always reticent, has been downright secretive lately.

As they ponder what this might mean, the police call with the news. Phil is dead, shot down in his car on a dark city street.

In the days ahead, the official investigation leads nowhere, and the police move on to more promising cases. But Emily can't let go. She's convinced that Phil's job got him killed. With help from her husband's operatives, she sets out to learn what he'd been keeping secret.

For Jerry Hobart, shooting Phil Kramer was just another job. Pull the trigger, collect the blood money and don't ask questions. But now his wealthy client wants Emily Kramer whacked, too. Hobart can't help but wonder why.

Had Phil uncovered a dark secret the wealthy man wanted to keep hidden? Did Emily have it now? If Hobart could get his hands on it, would the client pay more for it than he would for would for a hit? So Hobart, too, sets out in search of Phil's secret.

With that beginning, Thomas Perry sets the determined widow and the cold-blooded hit man on a collision course in a book he ironically titles "Fidelity." It's a concept nearly every character in the book struggles with, most of them in more ways than one: fidelity to a wife or lover, to a friend, to a child, to one's job, to the truth, and ultimately to one's self.

— Bruce DeSilva, Associated Press

'A Good Indian Wife'

By Anne Cherian, 320 pages. $23.95

In parts of traditional India, casual dating is still almost unheard of. When children come of marriageable age, generally about their mid-20s, parents and matchmakers collaborate to arrange a wedding for the "boy" and "girl."

But what happens when an Indian man, long assimilated into American culture, is confronted by fiercely traditional parents who insist he marry a woman of their choosing? It's a story that has played out countless times — in real life, in Bollywood and now in fine literary form by fiction newcomer Anne Cherian.

Cherian tells the story of Neel, a Stanford University-educated doctor who is proud of the American life he has carved out for himself. He never told his parents about the blond vixen he dated in school, nor of the white secretary he's been seeing for the past three years.

His mother frets half a world away, bowed under by social pressure from a community that wonders why she and Neel's father are shirking their parental obligation to marry off the boy. So they lure Neel back home on the pretense of a family illness and then insist he meet one of their marriageable acquaintances. Neel grudgingly agrees.

The "girl," Leila, is beautiful and well-educated. But suitors have repeatedly rejected her, put off when her destitute family can't offer a lavish dowry. So she's unsure what to expect from Neel.

Cherian tells the story with quiet strength. Her scenes are less action-packed than laced with a hint of suspense that keeps the tale intriguing. She also endows her characters with a depth that renders both as likable figures — even Neel, whose cheating ways a reader might overlook given the sudden manner in which he was thrust into a marriage he never wanted.

— Dinesh Ramde, Associated Press