Novels

When Pink Floyd first took its concept album "The Wall" to the concert stage more than three decades ago, even lead singer and chief songwriter Roger Waters couldn't imagine a day when rock music might get any bigger. But 32 years later, his magnum opus about the battle between individual freedoms and authoritarian oppression has magnified beyond Waters' own expectations of yore. Now the man who once excoriated the voluminous expansion of the rock concert experience has helped institutionalize it. "I famously hated playing to large numbers of people and playing in stadiums," Waters, 68, said from a tour stop in Austin, Texas, earlier this month.

WASHINGTON - An ambitious effort to launch a third-party presidential ticket this fall has foundered, done in by its inability to attract a top-tier candidate and the grass-roots support necessary to power its novel online nominating process. Despite the backing of heavyweight political and business leaders and a $15-million effort to get on the ballot across the country, Americans Elect announced Tuesday that none of its potential candidates mustered the minimum support needed to qualify for the group's primary.

Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Kurt Wallander? Don't worry, the peerless Swedish police detective, the pride of the force in rural Ystad, doesn't get ruthlessly gunned down like Edward G. Robinson's Rico Bandello in "Little Caesar. " It's that author Henning Mankell has let it be known that "The Troubled Man," his 10th mystery featuring the dour investigator, and one of his best, will probably be his last. Which is a terrible shame. Not that fans of this exceptional series haven't seen it coming.

AGA, Egypt - After an unfriendly journalist was tossed off, Amr Moussa's campaign bus headed north to the Nile Delta, where barefoot boys and peasants greeted him with horns, drums and two dancing horses. Moussa arrived as both novelty and sensation, a front-runner in Egypt's first freely contested presidential election. The former diplomat who once negotiated with world leaders walked roads strewn with hay and spotted with manure, giving speeches on dignity and chatting with elders near herds of sheep and sheds full of broken farm equipment.

It is a world of bleak twilights and tortured souls. A world of cold dawns and dour sleuths. A world of frozen lakes and repressed detectives. A world of winters and losers. Yet as grim, glum and downright depressing as a Scandinavian setting for a mystery novel can be, something remarkable is afoot: Such novels continue to be fabulously popular in the United States and internationally. In the next few months, major new whodunits set in places such as Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway and Iceland will be released, including "The Man From Beijing" (Knopf)

OK, so apart from those genuinely saintly souls sent by Providence as examples to the rest of us, is there anyone with a pulse in this country who wouldn't like to see Osama bin Laden dead? Should he yet fall into our hands, even this writer ? an implacable opponent of capital punishment ? sees no reason to take the evil SOB alive. That's the animating fantasy at the heart of Tom Clancy's sprawling but propulsive new thriller, "Dead or Alive," his 15th novel since he exploded like a cluster bomb onto bestseller lists with "The Hunt for Red October" in 1984.

BOOKS Heidi Julavits and Vendela Vida , two novelists who are also both founding co-editors of the Believer magazine, will read, discuss and sign their books. Julavits is the author of "The Mineral Palace," "The Effect of Living Backwards" and "The Uses of Enchantment. " Vida is the author of "And Now You Can Go," "Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name" and, most recently, "The Lovers. " Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., L.A. Thu. 7 p.m. Free. (310) 443-7000. hammer.ucla.edu.

Belva Plain, who wrote more than 20 bestselling novels during a literary career that spanned several decades, has died. She was 95. Plain died in her sleep Tuesday at her home in New Jersey, said her daughter, Barbara. No cause of death was given. Plain, known for epic novels of family and forgiveness, never owned a computer and wrote in longhand on a yellow pad. She had written short fiction for women's magazines but didn't start writing novels until after she became a grandmother.

Dora Saint, a prolific and gentle chronicler of English village life who wrote a popular series of novels under the pen name Miss Read, died April 7 at her home in Great Shefford, west of London, British media reported. She was 98. Attention to the small details of ordinary life marked her fictional works, which appeared almost annually between 1955 and 1996. Her mother's maiden name was Read, and she adopted it to write of the small conflicts and quiet excitements of life in the fictional villages of Fairacre and Thrush Green.

Harry Crews, a rough-hewn Southerner who drew a keen following with novels that describe a Hieronymus Bosch landscape of grotesques — characters who are tossed into rattlesnake pits, walk on their hands, croon lullabies to a skull and literally eat a car — died Wednesday in Gainesville, Fla. He was 76. The cause was neuropathy, according to his former wife, Sally Crews. The word "original" only begins to describe Crews, whose 17 novels place him squarely in the Southern gothic tradition, also known as Grit Lit. He emerged from a grisly childhood in Georgia with a darkly comic vision that made him literary kin to William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor and Hunter S. Thompson, although he never achieved their broad recognition.

In One Person A Novel John Irving Simon & Schuster: 426 pp., $28 Late in John Irving's 13th novel, "In One Person," the narrator, an aging writer named William Abbott, recalls visiting a high school friend dying of AIDS. It's the early 1980s, the beginning of the AIDS crisis, and Irving evokes the deathly terrors of that period, a time when people seemed, literally, to evaporate, to become, in the words of the late David Wojnarowicz, "a dark smudge in the air that dissipates without notice … glass human[s]

Home A Novel Toni Morrison Alfred A. Knopf: 148 pp., $24 I've long admired Toni Morrison as a moral visionary, but her fiction, not so much. Of her nine novels, three - "Song of Solomon" (1977), "Beloved" (1987) and 2008's "A Mercy" - are masterpieces, yet the others, particularly the post-Nobel books "Paradise" (1997) and "Love" (2003) can be so stylized as to veer dangerously close to self-parody. Anyone who's read her in any depth may understand what I'm referring to: those stentorian rhythms, the biblical cadences, the characters who function more as archetypes than flesh-and-blood.

VASHON ISLAND, Wash. - It would be hard to imagine a place further removed from the brash intensity of Occupy Wall Street. This secluded island of fir forests and rolling lavender fields - home to 23 organic farms, a tofu factory and a monastery that markets its own gourmet coffee - has always been a counterculture retreat for those who bike to the sound of different drummers. Yet a continent away - a whole world away, really - from New York, this small island of 11,000 residents has become one of the darlings of the Move your Money campaign, an Occupy effort to hit corporate banking where it hurts: the ledgers.

Never Fall Down A Novel Patricia McCormick Balzer + Bray: 224 pp., $17.99, ages 14 and up When it comes to genocide, Hitler is obviously well covered. There are countless titles for young readers about the atrocities he inspired. The Khmer Rouge, which seized control of Cambodia in 1975 and, in its attempts to create an agrarian form of communism, killed millions of its own people, is less familiar territory, especially for young readers. "Never Fall Down" offers a detailed look at what it was like to live under such a cruel government from the perspective of one of its best-known survivors, Arn Chorn Pond.

In a UCLA classroom one day not long ago, Alain Mabanckou was teaching a course in post-colonial African fiction, which he instructs in his French mother tongue, one of several languages he speaks. With his easygoing yet focused manner, soccer player's graceful body language and a way funkier fashion sense than the average college don, the 46-year-old Mabanckou kept his students' attention, framing moral quandaries for them to consider and regaling them with technical explanations of an African army's " technique de la terre brulee" (scorched earth policy)

The most remarkable achievement within Charlotte Rogan's debut novel, "The Lifeboat," is how neatly it exceeds, and defies, expectations. The plot seems basic: Some people clamber aboard a lifeboat as a ship sinks, and we think we're all set for a tale in which someone inevitably will be eaten for dinner. But Rogan delivers something entirely different (rest easy, no one gets eaten) by using a familiar setting to explore moral ambiguity, human nature and the psychology of manipulation.

Judith Merkle Riley, a longtime associate professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and the author of internationally bestselling historical novels, has died. She was 68. Riley died of ovarian cancer Sept. 12 at her home in Claremont, said her daughter, Elizabeth Riley. Riley, who taught under her maiden name, joined the government department faculty at Claremont McKenna College and the faculty of Claremont Graduate School in 1982. She taught organization and management, public and comparative administration, political ideologies, and healthcare and public policy.

Ralph McInerny, a longtime professor of philosophy and medieval studies at the University of Notre Dame who also was a popular mystery writer best known for his Father Dowling series of novels, has died. He was 80. McInerny died Jan. 29 at Our Lady of Peace Hospital in Mishawaka, Ind., after a long illness, according to the university. A member of the Notre Dame faculty from 1955 until his retirement in 2009, McInerny gained international renown as a scholar, author and lecturer who specialized in the works of St. Thomas Aquinas, the 13th century theologian and philosopher.

The plural in"Headhunters"is not accidental. Though it starts with one man and his conventional-seeming job as a corporate headhunter, before this twisty Norwegian thriller is over two individuals are involved in nonstop pursuit of each other for the highest possible stakes. Like life and death. Taken from the fiendishly plotted novel by Jo Nesbo, one of Scandinavia's top mystery writers, "Headhunters" is a dark adult entertainment, a wild and bloody adrenaline rush of a movie that deals in gleeful grotesqueness and over-the-top implausibilities.

"Headhunters,"the new Norwegian thriller based on the novel of the same name by Jo Nesbo, tells the story of a wealthy but insecure executive recruiter who moonlights as an art thief to support his posh lifestyle. Years before "Headhunters" was an international box office success or a bestselling book, Nesbo was living his own double life as a stockbroker at the Oslo Stock Exchange and rock musician with the band Di Derre (translation: "those guys"). "I was seen as this sort of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," said Nesbo, 52, on the phone from his native Oslo.