Summer reads

By David J. Foster

For adults with Attention Deficit Disorder
The book: The Apple's Bruise (Simon & Schuster)
Author: Lisa Glatt

What scares you most? Spiders, rats, or a story so long you fold before the first body drops? According to Lisa Glatt, it's abandonment, being tortured while a stranger looks the other way, or dumped like an unwanted pet onto a darkened road.

In The Apple's Bruise, Glatt offers the kind of short stories you can devour in short bursts, but when piled together form a morale about the evil that the most blasé men (and some really nasty women) do, like bruises hidden by an apple's skin.

Among them are a mom with some ghastly ideas about mixing a pinch of revenge and a dash of payback in her home cookin,' and a seven-year-old who learns to endure her brooding household by cozying up to a bully who can teach lessons on toughening up for survival.

And what happens when you choose to ignore what sure sounds like murder?

Glatt pummels the reader with short jabs, then the occasional roundhouse right that snaps your head. Then sometimes she lets us stew in her characters' grotesqueries, like those between a couple caught in a kinky ritual that tests their commitment and your stomach.

For the newly divorced woman The book: The Starter Wife (Simon & Schuster) Author: Gigi Levangie Grazer

Not being a divorced wife it's hard to gauge the uncontrolled anguish and fickle moments of sorrow.

But what if you've lived through your husband, a "Hollywood executive" longing to be the next Michael Eisner or Harvey Weinstein (without the girth)? What if your favorite transportation is a limo, you can drop 25 names before the salad arrives, and your cosmetologist is a dermatologist on your speed-dial?

Alimony will keep some of that going.

Then you meet her. Thighs firmed, breasts sculptured, nose shaved to a 45-degree angle, and cheeks implanted with acrylic. Damn! Her cosmetologist is plastic surgery. Starter Wife meet Trophy Wife.

Written with barbs dipped in acid, Grazer offers escape from your child custody fight by transporting to the world of the beautiful people where you would love to cut one in half and count the rings to see how old that saline balancing bimbo really is.

For the teen daughter of a showy mom
The book: Introducing Vivien Leigh Reid (St. Martin's Griffin)
Authors Yvonne Collins and Sandy Rideout

What's worse than living in the shadow of a flamboyant mother? Working with her. In Ireland. On a movie set where mom reigns as lead drama queen.

It's enough to make a teen pad her bra in competition. Why not? Dad's not around. It's just Leigh, her diva mom and striking Irish lads that circle movie set like sharks lured by the scent of stardom.

Coming of age novels are a right of passage, but this one, staged on a movie where the lead's thoughts and perspectives are conveyed as the pages of a script, is a snappy, buoyant tale that replaces gut-wrenching angst with an adolescent sense of wonderment at discovering the diva inside.

To be followed by a sequel next spring.

For the teen male brainiac
The book: Gods of Aberdeen (Simon & Schuster)
Author: Micah Nathan

At the opposite end is Eric Dunne, a 16-year-old living in a New Jersey slum who survives on his brain power. He's self-taught and specializes in Latin, which proves good enough to earn him a scholarship behind the spectral walls of Aberdeen University in Connecticut.

That's where he's thrust into the Medieval studies and games of the ancient instructors who are dabbling in the search for the powers of the gods. If he can locate the Philosopher's Stone, he will possess eternal life, or so he and his cohorts believe.

But there's still that dead body to contend with, and those sexual urges that somehow always complicate Eastern European jaunts to locate a mysterious alchemist guidebook.

It makes for a solid thriller for Harry Potter graduates not quite ready for The Name of the Rose.

For Wookiees and those who hate them
The book: Nerds Who Kill (St. Martin's Minotaur)
Author Mark Richard Zubro

Not we have anything against Star Trek, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings or the conventions where you can watch Commander Uhura marry a Wookiee at a faux "intergalactic" wedding.

Mark Richard Zurbo's newest mystery finds murder among the cultists. His best trick is in satisfying those who love the world of sci-fi and fantasy "let's-pretend" and those who'd like to drive a broadsword through a Hobbit just for making sit in a theater for nine spine-numbing hours.

Making the unusual seem common is Zurbo's skill. His protagonist, Paul Turner, is an opening gay Chicago detective whose rocky marriage produced two teen sons, one crippled by spina bifida. Both are fantasy film junkies who attend the Science Fiction and Media Convention that keeps turning up corpses and enthralls.

It's certainly more fun than a Wookiee wedding.

For those who love sex in the city, and the TV show, too
The book: Honk If You Love Real Men (St Martin's)
Authors: Carrie Alexander, Pamela Britton, Susan Donovan and Lora Leigh.

Here are four short stories about women's desires for male companionship. Not long-term companionship, exactly, but … yeah, technically, companionship.

In one, Raven (are women really named that?) reunites with her best friend's older brother, now a Navy Seal, who's shocked at how she's grown and attempts to make his quarry see him for more than a guy with six-pack abs who knows 32 ways to kill a terrorist with a turban.

In another, a screenwriter named Winifred (are women really named that?) heads for the Berkshires to crack her writer's block and discovers another distraction in her new neighbor. And she has a complaint! It's seems her "boy toy" doesn't laugh much, even after he "accidentally" stumbles onto Winifred wearing, eh … nothing. Could he be turned off by a woman whose nickname, "Winnie," conjures up images of Churchill and Pooh?

In the opener, Estrella (are women really named that?) takes over her boss's posh apartment and jets around in a jazzy sports car until she flashes by that construction worker she's been eying and you've got the familiar fantasy: Plush carpeting, a marble bathroom, huge walk-in closets and a ripped, slightly dense contractor secreting pheromones all over.

That's actually the book's strength. It plays off themes that have been adding a tangy snap to summer reading since we dumped Charlotte Bronte for Jacqueline Susann.