Books

Check out this month's top reads.

Check out our picks of this month's page turners

Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World

David Maraniss (Simon & Schuster, 496 pages, $27)

With the Beijing games beginning next month, an Olympiad of almost 50 years ago would seem to have receded deep into the past. Yet David Maraniss-a Pulitzer-winning journalist and author of more than half a dozen books revolving around politics and sports-has prodigiously researched the 1960 Rome chapter in the annals of the global competition, which took place just 15 years after the end of World War II.

Fisherman's Bend

Linda Greenlaw (Hyperion, 256 pages, $25)

There are "whodunits," and then there are "wheredunits"-mysteries in which the setting itself is a character. This longstanding tradition harks back to Raymond Chandler's portrayal of LA and continues this summer.

Linda Greenlaw, a bestselling author who recently broke out of nonfiction with the thriller Slipknot, brings back her frugal, fortysomething heroine, Jane Bunker. The onetime Miami homicide detective is now a marine insurance investigator in small-town Maine. The plot (with a few too many twists at the end) revolves around a missing-ostensibly dead-lobsterman. Enveloped in aquaculture and territorial issues, Indian lore and Down East rites, the book is quick and quirky, and reflects a fashion-free, denim-and-cotton world.

Swan Peak

James Lee Burke (Simon & Schuster, 402 pages, $26)

James Lee Burke is a master of the leisurely narrative rollout in his Dave Robicheaux epics, in which he famously considers mindsets and psyches in trying to determine motivation. This time, Robicheaux is not on his home turf of Louisiana. Rather, he's on vacation in the mountains of western Montana with his wifeand bull-in-a-china-shop friend and partner Clete Purcel. Robicheaux's geographical course correction is rooted in a search for a simpler, more innocent time in America, but it's sidetracked by a handful of homicides, assaults and other nefarious happenings that draw the two men in. Burke's plot engrosses the reader, adorned by his word paintings of the milieu-its sunsets, punishing weather patterns, and scenes as simple, blissful and pure as "the trout dimpling the surface of the lake like raindrops."