Reviews Tom Mayer: Vulnerability and deception wrap up a trio of books for December: 'The Ghost' by Rick DeStefanis, 'Terra Nova' by Henriette Lazaridis and 'Nine Liars' by Maureen Johnson

Dec. 27—Books are the gifts that keep giving, and if this trio of new releases for December wasn't already on your Christmas list it's not too late: Consider a novel reading experience for the New Year.

'The Ghost' by Rick DeStefanis

Rick DeStefanis writes his own brands of fiction — Southern, Western and military — from his home in North Mississippi, but slide into any one of his much-praised series, and you're anywhere but in the Magnolia State.

The most recent of those is "The Ghost," the sixth book in DeStefanis' Vietnam War canon. Based on true events from during that war, the series has been compared favorably with the likes of early Vietnam writers such as Tim O'Brien ("The Things They Carried") and James Webb ("Field of Fire"), and it's likely the author's early 1970's experience as a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division that so accurately flavors his humanizing stories.

"The Ghost," though, isn't quite like any of those earlier offerings. Easily the best of the six — all but the first two, 'The Gomorrah Principle' (2013) and 'Melody Hill' (2015) are standalone novels — DeStefanis textures this military fiction with Native American spirituality, conceptualizing a harrowing descent into the war's, and country's, inner bowels.

Prompted by his father, second lieutenant Martin Shadows visits his Lakota Sioux grandfather just before he departs for Vietnam. Shadows will be in-country as a military intelligence officer, and so foresees little of the danger new officers typically combat. His grandfather — a man he had met only once before, and then as a child — foretells a different future, four visions that cast Shadows in the fiery light of enemy conflict.

The rational soldier discounts the visit with his elder, but being immediately called into a secret mission upon arriving in Vietnam sets his grandfather's foreshadows alive: Exploits with a North Vietnamese spy, isolation in a North Vietnamese prison and other increasingly horrific events prove the truth of his grandfather's foresight.

"There are many ways to find a man's deepest fears," Shadows is told by a commandant in Vietnam.

If only he had listened to his grandfather, Shadows will come to realize, he might not have had to discover this on his own.

Set during the Vietnam era, "The Ghost" is a novel for today — both a mixture of superstition and mysticism, and a heralding addition to the reality of American war fiction.

'Terra Nova' by Henriette Lazaridis

Henriette Lazaridis grew up in the Boston area learning Greek as her first language, but the language of her recent novel, "Terra Nova" (Pegasus Books) is far from those upbringings.

Set in 1910 as two polar explorers, Americans Watts and Heywoud, are in a race to the South Pole, the book contrasts that desolate journey — "There is only cold. Cold like a presence they breathe and like a force to hold them down, hold them in place even as they inch over endless swales of white and gray, gray-white, blue-white," the novel opens — with that of Viola's, a complex character whose current passion is photographing hunger strikers of a suffrage movement that she comes to realize is a hypocritical metaphor for her own life. As the novel ascends, that complexity magnifies as the stories roll, pitch and yaw: of the two explorers, one is her husband, the other her lover.

With such scenarios, deceptions will abound, but it is the duplicities Viola discovers in her dark room that are most roiling and morally compromising. Learning that the adventurers have altered and doctored their photos to fake a successful trek to the Pole, Viola must decide between betraying the two men — one a spouse, the other a friend — or attach herself to their success for her own artistic aggrandizement.

"You told us you would photograph these injustices to serve the cause," Viola is told. "Instead, you used these women to create some sort of perverse art."

But is that true, or true only from a singular perspective? With storylines diverse and intertwined, readers will find Lazaridis's union of art and exploration not only a public offering, but a personalized descent into the telling of their own choosing.

'Nine Liars' by Maureen Johnson

Layering her latest Truly Devious offering with the series' distinctive humor and mystery — expected from an author whose gigs pre-best seller included faking the appearance of an employee to bolster a business' roster — "Nine Liars" (Katherine Tegen Books) explores not only a double-murder cold case, but the warmth of friendship with all of its emotional vulnerabilities up for grabs.

In a trio of previous novels, Stevie Bell solved the Truly Devious mystery ("Truly Devious," "The Vanishing Stair" and "The Hand on the Wall"), concluding the "case of the century." Now, a senior at the familiar Ellingham Academy, she pines for something more. Her friends are centering their lives on the next big step — college applications — and her boyfriend, David, is in London, studying abroad. Cue a new case — one of ennui.

Things change rapidly, though, when study arrangements are made for Stevie and friends to join David. Through Izzy, a friend of David's — there are always a lot of friends in a Maureen Johnson story — Stevie soon learns about a 1995 double murder involving nine friends from Cambridge University who, in a drunken game of hide-and-seek, discover two of their gang in a woodshed, hacked to death with an axe.

Izzy's aunt is the sole remaining member of the Nine, and she lets it "slip" that perhaps the police had it miscued from the beginning: a burglary gone wrong might just perhaps be the cover for something much more sinister.

Competently weaving feelings of teen inadequacies and apprehensions — which Stevie manages with "emergency anxiety medication" — Johnson adds depth and deep emotional dimensions to this contemporarily diverse Agatha Christie-esque whodunit.