BRIEFLY NOTED.(The Iliad)(The Devil's Feather)(Strangers in the House)(Sex Collectors)(Book review)

An Iliad, by Alessandro Baricco, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (Knopf; $21). This retelling of the Homeric epic is defiantly modern: it excises the gods and supplants the omniscient narrator with alternating voices, as one character after another--hero and bit player alike--is granted the opportunity to speak and shed light on the decade-long siege of Troy. Alluding to our current time of "battles, assassinations, bombings," Baricco's text lingers on the futility of an unending war, and casts the arrival of the thousand-odd ships as an invasion by an overwhelmingly superior force, met by young recruits throwing stones. Still, in substance, his version cleaves closely to the original. As in Homer, the lesser-known foot soldiers come to life only at the moment of their death, when they enter history; each killing is singular, and almost lovingly detailed--a sword pierces a skull and a man falls, "teeth biting the cold bronze."

The Devil's Feather, by Minette Walters (Knopf; $24). In this uneven but scary thriller, Connie Burns, a white Zimbabwean war correspondent for Reuters, investigates five gruesome murders in Sierra Leone and follows a hunch, convinced that a British mercenary is using the mayhem of war zones to disguise his taste for raping and killing women. After a mysterious assailant kidnaps her and holds her prisoner for three days in Iraq, she becomes convinced that her quarry is now hunting her. She flees to Dorset, rents an isolated house that turns out to have a troubled history, and is befriended by a reclusive neighbor who, some years before, lost her entire family in a car crash. Given the ultra-contemporary world of the early part of the novel, the scenes in Dorset, where the author herself lives, seem parochial, but this does not lessen Walters's ability to use ...