What's hot, what's not in new fall fiction

The fall crop of novels is as varied and crisp as a bushel basket of ripe fall produce.

Some tackle mysteries, as when a human-resource manager must discover the identity of a mysterious corpse in "A Woman in Jerusalem." Some take a bizarre scenario and manage to make it feel real, as "Simpsons" contributor Harry Shearer — voice of Ned Flanders, among others — introduces readers to a town that's pretending it's an Indian tribe (well, hi-diddly-ho, neighbor).

Not all of this fall's crop are tasty. Jennifer Egan's "The Keep" seems to have a surefire Halloween-timed premise, as two cousins with a mysterious past reunite at a creepy castle. But the story don't quite meld. And other books could have used an editor with a heavier hand.

Our fall fiction roundup guides you through what's fresh and what's skippable.    —Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, Books Editor

The manager's mystery
"A Woman In Jerusalem" (Harcourt; $25), from prominent Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua, begins after the only character in it who will ever be named is already dead. Killed in a suicide bombing, she goes unidentified until the company whose pay stub she was carrying assigns its human-resource manager to figure out who she was. The manager, a former military man whose own personal life is tempestuous, initially resists the task, but becomes increasingly fascinated with the woman and her history.

Despite being nominally about a dead body, the book isn't morbid or even particularly grim, nor does it dwell on politics or the senselessness of the woman's death. Instead, it's the engrossing story of the manager, and his growing drive to see his mission through to its end. Similarly, the writing doesn't get in its own way: there are no enormous and blunt metaphors; there is no one final lesson; everything in the book does not represent something else.

The plotting of "A Woman In Jerusalem" feels effortless, as if the tale is simply revealing itself in stages. It's a book that's spare in its presentation but complex in its ideas, not so much about tragedy, but about what drives connections between strangers, even between the living and the dead.    —Linda Holmes

My little town
Harry Shearer's credits include "The Simpsons," "This Is Spinal Tap," and a famous "Saturday Night Live" sketch in which he and Martin Short played a synchronized swim team. He's a very influential satirist, so it isn't surprising that his first novel, "Not Enough Indians" (Justin, Charles & Co., $20), runs in the same vein.

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Shearer sets the story in a dying New York town where there's no money to fix the sidewalks, and the ineffectual town government has failed even at groveling to Wal-Mart. An idea, therefore, is hatched: have the residents fraudulently declared an Indian tribe, and open a casino.

The uncomfortable premise could easily have fallen into the trap of trying to say something important about the ethics of Indian gaming. But Shearer is more interested in a "Northern Exposure"-like examination of petty town politics, and the book succeeds most on that level, as a study of small towns as beehive-like power structures.

There are places where the pace slackens, and the ending, while clever, may be too cute by half. Nevertheless, the book benefits from a virtue much needed and rarely observed in satirical novels: it knows enough to be 200 pages instead of 300 pages.    —L.H.

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What's hot, what's not in new fall fiction

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