Baker writes amusingly and insightfully about his obsession with John Updike, telling us in the process a great deal about himself. Updike himself, in a review, calls Baker's book "a close and self-pitiless examination of his relationship with a mental figment derived from a fractional perusal and a few personal glimpses of the author John Updike," and comments, "[O]ut of the books of others we sift a book of our own, wherein we read the lessons we want to hear."

Drawing on his own family's Puritan history, Dean Burgess writes about Thomas Burge, who arrives on Cape Cod from England during the 17th century. Succumbing to an arranged marriage, Thomas eventually converts to Quakerism, which allows him to divorce his first wife--an unprecedented act--and marry the woman he really loves.

Judge Deborah Knott travels to the countryside of the North Carolina Piedmont to mediate a divorce, but when the husband, potter James Nordan, is killed, she finds herself pursuing a murderer instead.

When the Seventh Cavalry murders the inhabitants of a Cheyenne Indian settlement in 1868, George Armstrong Custer--then a Lieutenant Colonel--tries to paint the event as a battle rather than a massacre. He attempts to enlist on his side a woman who was kidnapped by Indians, but she refuses to testify against her captors, and Custer sets out to blacken her name.

Mairead O'Clare and her boss, Sheldon Gold, are two idealistic lawyers with flaws that make each seem endearingly human and real: Mairead suffers from the skin condition hemangioma (commonly referred to as "port-wine stains"); and Sheldon is a middle-aged, occasionally impotent man with a lot of family tragedy in his past. In this grittily realistic crime thriller, the two of them defend a homeless man named Alpha who has been accused of murder.

Stephen Ambrose's long fascination with the journey of Lewis and Clark led him to write this book. He chronicles the expedition and shares his knowledge of and passion for the landscape of the trail followed by the two captains, and he also tells the story of Meriwether Lewis's life after the expedition. Captain Lewis was a celebrity in the first decade of the nineteenth century, but despite the patronage of his mentor, President Thomas Jefferson, and the admiration inspired by his trailblazing journey, he was unable to parley his fame into any successful career, and his life ended violently while he was still in his thirties.

In Walker's second 'Molly Cates' novel, a school bus driver and 11 of his young charges are kidnapped by a cult of religious fanatics and held underground at the group's highly fortified compound. Crime reporter Molly Cates steps in to help the authorities, and her ex-husband, negotiate with Samuel Mordecai, the cult's iron-willed leader.