Crimes Of The Heart.(fiction books)(Book review)

Byline: MEGAN O'GRADY editor: Valerie Steiker

This month's best fiction solves the mystery of what to read this spring.

In Isabel Fonseca's fearless first novel, Attachment (Knopf), an American writer on a tropical sabbatical intercepts a letter intended for her English ad-executive husband, leading her to question everything that she knows to be true. Fonseca--journalist, nonfiction author, and wife of Martin Amis--shows off a vicious humor and an unsparing prose style in this ink-dark foray into marriage's murkier precincts. The more inscrutable aspects of womanhood are laid bare in Elena Ferrante's slim, masterly The Lost Daughter (Europa)--the third of the enigmatic, outspokenly feminist Italian author's works to be translated--which follows a chic divorcee on a seaside holiday, where a seemingly benign encounter involving a raucous Neapolitan family sparks a harrowing confrontation with her own psyche. In Marisa Silver's eerily metaphoric, Southern California desert--set The God of War (Simon & Schuster), a teenager's burgeoning independence runs counter to his sense of responsibility for a needy younger brother, with lethal results. And from long-lost mothers to tyrannized sons, the deceptively quiet, interconnected lives in Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge (Random House) reveal that even in small-town Maine, the misdemeanors of love can have felonious consequences.

A trio of unconventional mystery novels finds contemporary echoes in past transgressions. An unsolved 1911 murder that provoked a lynching in North Dakota drives Louise Erdrich's The Plague of Doves (HarperCollins)--her thirteenth novel and ...