Michael Prager

Think of "Eat Fat," Richard Klein's screed about what's wrong with fat in America, as a deceiving devil's food cake. The first glance is enticing, but a few bites reveal an unpalatable concoction whose good ingredients have been compromised by the unhealthy ones.

Eric Burdon is just the sort of chap you'd want to write a memoir of the rock 'n' roll life. As lead singer of the Animals, he was a key soldier in the British invasion of the '60s, he was present at several key junctures in pop history, and he somehow remembers them despite a 40-year binge on drugs and alcohol.

Here's another reason: He's alive. It's absurdly obvious, but it stands out in increasing relief as Burdon ticks off story after story of famous pals who didn't survive: Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon, Jim Morrison, and Steve McQueen.

Iran in the '70s was a nation populated by Muslims but led by a secularist whose power derived, in part, from state repression and US backing. When fundamentalists led by a charismatic cleric overthrew the shah, the US government lost an important friend and gained a committed enemy overnight.

Readers of Newtonian Laura Zigman's second novel, "Dating Big Bird," have had reason to anticipate her third, "Her." Well, the wait has ended, and so should the anticipation.

Michael Palin has found success in many places: He made his name almost three decades ago as a founding member of the Monty Python comedy troupe, and he arguably has gone farther in the aftermath than any of his mates.

This is the literal truth, considering his public-TV travelogues that have taken him "From Pole to Pole" and "Around the World in Eighty Days." But he was terribly amusing also as the stuttering fool in "A Fish Called Wanda."

In the beginning, Hadrian Coleman's walls existed only in his mind.

His dad, the local vet, was the most respected man in Shepherd County, a corner of East Texas where iniquity was winning out over equity. Doc Coleman was the most popular guy around, too, and the most righteous. Before the doc died, when Hadrian was only 14, Hadrian heard his father curse only twice, once on the night the Klan came to threaten him for treating a black man's mule.

Isaac Asimov once said that writing a mystery is simple: Devise a situation that can be explained in more than one way, build a case for one of those ways, and at the end, reveal the "truth" to be different.

Simple, perhaps, but not easy, because each scenario, especially the feint, has to be believable, or there's no sale. Therein lies the difficulty in Boston writer Dennis Lehane's fourth novel. Lehane is clever with words and can paint a good scene, but too often in "Gone, Baby, Gone," the reader is left with the sense that it wouldn't have gone that way.

In the Empire Falls of Richard Russo's clever and knowing fifth novel, the empire has all but fallen. Led by the mighty Whitings, its textile mills had powered the fictitious central Maine town for generations, but now only tatters remain.

The most visible remnants are the two old factories that stand hard by the Knox River, but there are plenty of others, including the clan's flinty, calculating matriarch, and memories woven deeply into the fabric of the community.