Mitford, Monks and Mujahideen

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The Christian market sorely needs more quality suspense novels, and Dickson's excellent offering makes a solid contribution to the genre.

Rabbi Ruth Gold and lapsed Protestant Kate Flint share a hideous legacy from their childhood: together they stumbled upon a murder scene, then helped incarcerate the man they saw holding a knife by the victim. Now he's been released after 25 years in prison, and a bizarre string of events mimicking stories from the biblical book of Genesis unfolds in present-day New Orleans. Gold's boyfriend is poisoned with cyanide after eating an apple in her living room, a brother is tricked into killing his brother and wild animals are released from the zoo to roam the city. Meanwhile, tension escalates between Gold's Jewish congregation and a group of Christian fanatics who picket the temple and badger the Jewish people to turn to Jesus.

The multiple points of view give the novel a disjointed feel, and the book's intended CBA audience might have benefited from a glossary of the Jewish terms sprinkled showily throughout (Instead of rounding up a minyan to say kaddish, I was wondering if you'd come to Mama's grave and light a yahrzeit candle with me and say shehecheyanu?). However, the writing is original, with unexpected touches of humor, and contains enough plot twists to keep the reader guessing until the final pages. Although this is a highly entertaining nail-biter, one of the novel's significant accomplishments is its potential to promote greater understanding between people of both faiths.

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A contributing editor at Newsweek and author of W: Revenge of the Bush Dynasty, Mitchell was drawn into the sport of horse racing by chance. In 1999, Mitchell and her boyfriend, Chuck, then undergoing treatment for leukemia, made a spontaneous trip to the Kentucky Derby. Basing her wager on a portentous dream, Mitchell picked the winning horse, Charismatic, a 20-1 long shot, and thus began her research into Charismatic's story.

Almost given up on by his owners and trainers, Charismatic wasn't the only surprise victor that year; his jockey and trainer were also amazing comeback stories. A shy and quiet kid who set several racing records while still a teenager, jockey Chris Antley didn't handle success well. Drugs and depression seemed to have taken their final toll when Antley, who had grown over an inch in a bizarre, late growth spurt, was saddled with an extra 15 pounds (jockeys must maintain strict, low weight to ride). Charismatic's trainer, D. Wayne Lukas, was a champion trainer whose reputation was losing ground to younger trainers.

Mitchell weaves these struggles (as well as that of her stricken boyfriend) into a story that raises the question of the importance of luck, fate, work and genetics in the lives of man and beast. Mitchell's easy tone is backed by meticulous research, including original author interviews. Though the stories are often exceedingly poignant, Mitchell is never cloying; this beautiful book makes a distinct contribution to a singularly American sport and culture.

Collins, a former mujahid and Phoenix-based FBI informant, has recently been in the news for allegedly having warned the FBI to no avail about one of the Sept. 11 hijackers. Here he focuses mostly on his experiences fighting along with an associate of Bin Laden's in Chechnya, as well as his bitter misadventures with the FBI. (Subtitle notwithstanding, he worked primarily for the FBI but did some joint missions with the CIA.)

Collins, 28, converted to Islam while serving time as a teenager in a California prison for attempted robbery. After his release, he decided to make jihad in Bosnia in the early 1990s, and thus began an odyssey with the mujahideen that took him to training camps in Kashmir and Afghanistan and to the front lines in Chechnya. He became disillusioned, however, when some extremist factions began terrorizing civilians, and decided he could best preserve the sanctity of jihad by helping Americans rout the true terrorists.

But his FBI gig wasn't much more fulfilling; Collins scathingly critiques what he casts as the Bureau's willful ignorance (they didn't understand, for instance, that mosques were the wrong places to look for extremists), their self-defeating rules (he was not allowed to go undercover to a camp actually run by Bin Laden himself) and their general bureaucratic bumbling. The book doesn't offer much historical or political background, but Collins is a vivid raconteur and his accounts of illegal border-crossings in lawless Afghanistan and Dagestan are as gripping as the descriptions of actual battles. His firsthand view of the FBI, though clearly one-sided, should interest readers as well.

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