5 Fantastic First Novels

By Lev Grossman

Every summer a small, elite group of first novels break out and become best sellers. Something in them hits that summer sweet spot between brainy and beachy, causing readers to ditch the Grishams and Pattersons and turn to new voices. Here are five of this summer's most promising debuts. Later you can say you knew them when.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE LAW -- KERMIT ROOSEVELT

It wouldn't be wrong to call In the Shadow of the Law a legal thriller, but it would sell the book short. There are suspenseful, devious plots aplenty--one about a last-minute death-row appeal, another about a corporation's dodging blame for an industrial accident--but it's Shadow's cast of characters, largely overworked junior lawyers, that will keep you up at night. Roosevelt (a descendant of Theodore and a former Supreme Court clerk) writes about the law more passionately and entertainingly than anyone since Scott Turow.

FASHION VICTIM -- SAM BAKER

Annie Anderson is a serious, investigative journalist who goes to work for Handbag, a fashion magazine. When the designer she's profiling takes two slugs in the chest, Annie is plunged into two surefire plots: a whodunit and a satirical fashion-world expose. Baker is the editor of Britain's Cosmopolitan, so she knows whereof she writes--and she actually writes well. Annie and her colleagues have real inner demons to nip at the heels of their Manolos. By the end of Fashion Victim, you may even believe that models have feelings.

THE TWINS OF TRIBECA - RACHEL PINE

It has become fashionable to take a menial job--nanny, say, or assistant to Anna Wintour--and then snitch about it in a thinly veiled novel. Anyone have a problem with that? Pine used to do publicity for Miramax, and she puts the grade-A material she gathered there to excellent use in the tale of Karen Jacobs, a young woman who leaves a dignified but dull job for a terrifying, exhausting--but occasionally glamorous--one at the fictional Glorious Pictures, where even the office dog gets its teeth bleached. The plot is gossamer thin, but the dirt is deep, dark and delicious.

THE TRAVELER -- JOHN TWELVE HAWKS

Open mouth, insert red pill. The world you know isn't the real world. It's not the Matrix, either. Beneath the surface of our pedestrian daily life a war is being waged. In one corner is a secret alliance of powerful mystics (called Travelers) and badass sword-wielding ninjas (known as Harlequins) who protect the Travelers; in the other is that shadowy organization the Tabula. At stake? The fate of civilization. Of course, this is all completely nuts--but it's also the stuff that first-rate high-tech paranoid-schizophrenic thrillers are made of.

THE HISTORIAN -- ELIZABETH KOSTOVA

How do you bring Dracula back to life after years of Count Chocula--cartoon cliches have sucked all the scariness out of him? Take him back to his roots. In The Historian, a humble academic and his child become caught up in a maze of mysterious documents that lead them to the original Dracula. Stuffed with rich, incense-laden cultural history and travelogue, The Historian is a smart, bibliophilic mystery in the same vein (sorry) as A.S. Byatt's Possession--but without all that poetry. --Lev Grossman