Newly Released Books

By AMY VIRSHUP

Women are front and center on this month’s list of new books, as authors and as characters. Tracy Chevalier (“Girl With a Pearl Earring”) tests whether fossil hunters are as appealing as Dutch painting, while Elizabeth Kostova has left vampire tales for the realm of art. Another female character is on the lam from her husband, a small man in many ways. But not to worry, Ozzy Osbourne is on hand to supply the testosterone.

THE SWAN THIEVES
By Elizabeth Kostova
564 pages. Little, Brown & Company. $26.99.

Elizabeth Kostova’s first novel, “The Historian” (2005), jumped to the top of the New York Times best-seller list in its first week on sale. (A much publicized $2 million advance and a $500,000 marketing budget probably helped.) In this new novel Andrew Marlow, a psychiatrist and painter, takes on a new patient, the painter Robert Oliver, who has tried to attack a canvas in the National Gallery of Art. Oliver won’t talk, and Marlow becomes increasingly obsessed with understanding what drove the man to attempt violence. And who is the beautiful woman that Oliver keeps drawing? The story shifts narrators and moves from the present day to the 19th century on its way to solving the mystery.

I AM OZZY
By Ozzy Osbourne with Chris Ayres
391 pages. Grand Central Publishing. $26.99.

Ozzy Osbourne, the reality TV star and former Black Sabbath frontman, offers what might be the most honest disclaimer ever from a memoirist: “Other people’s memories of the stuff in this book might not be the same as mine. I ain’t gonna argue with ’em. Over the past 40 years I’ve been loaded on booze, coke, acid, Quaaludes, glue, cough mixture, heroin, Rohypnol, Klonopin, Vicodin, and too many other heavy-duty substances to list in this footnote. On more than a few occasions I was on all of those at the same time.” Nonetheless, he goes on to recount how John Michael Osbourne from the working-class city of Aston became the bat-beheading rock and roller named Ozzy.

REMARKABLE CREATURES
By Tracy Chevalier
312 pages. Dutton. $26.95.

As in earlier books like “Girl With a Pearl Earring,” Tracy Chevalier mixes fact and fiction in this new novel. The remarkable creatures of the title are both the “monsters” pulled from the cliffs of the British seaside town of Lyme Regis and the real-life women who hunt them, Mary Anning, an impoverished girl, and Elizabeth Philpot, a gentlewoman and a spinster exiled to Lyme with her sisters. They share a passion for what Mary calls “curies” — Elizabeth sticks with “fossils” — but are divided by their social class. By whatever name, Mary’s discoveries challenge the prevailing religious orthodoxy — that God created everything in the world at a point some 6,000 years in the past — and are made more challenging by the fact that a woman has done the discovering. Anning’s finds, now known as ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs, are on display at the Natural History Museum in London.

THE MURDERER’S DAUGHTERS
By Randy Susan Meyers
310 pages. St. Martin’s Press. $24.99.

One hot summer afternoon in Brooklyn, on the day before her 10th birthday, Lulu Zachariah opens the apartment door to her father. Drunk and angry at his estranged wife, he kills her and attacks his younger daughter, Merry. For the rest of their lives the girls will carry the wounds of that day — physical and psychological. Lulu grows up to be a doctor. She tightly controls her life, hiding her past from everyone except her husband, vowing never to see her father again. Merry, who works as a parole officer, continues to visit their father in prison but can’t get traction in her own life. Together they have to face the one thing they both dread: the day of their father’s release.

WATCHLIST
Based on an idea by Jeffery Deaver
404 pages. Vanguard Press. $25.95.

In an act of collective creation, 22 thriller writers — among them best sellers like Lee Child, Lisa Scottoline and Mr. Deaver — collaborated to create the pair of “serial thrillers” in this book. In both tales Mr. Deaver sets things in motion and then, in a variation on “exquisite corpse,” the other writers take up the story. Their shared main character is Harold Middleton, a retired Army colonel turned war-crimes investigator. The book began life in 2007 as an audiobook serial to publicize International Thriller Writers, an industry group (if people who sit at keyboards creating mayhem can be called an industry).

THE MELTING SEASON
By Jami Attenberg
289 pages. Riverhead Books. $25.95.

“I did not mean to take the money. Well, not all of it,” is how Jami Attenberg begins her new novel. But Catherine Madison, her protagonist, has taken it — $178,000 in cash stuffed in a suitcase — leaving her estranged husband, pregnant teenage sister and small-town life behind in Nebraska. She lands in Las Vegas and soon falls into the company of a faster crew, including the cast of a rock ’n’ roll impersonators show (especially Prince) and a cancer survivor named Valka — “All of her was this mix of being beautiful and strong” — to whom Catherine tells the story of her failed marriage and with whom she works out a way forward.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/books/21newly.html?ref=books