August Picks Are Sturdy Bunch

American publishers, like the French bourgeoisie, tend to take les vacances in August. They leave their offices as early on Fridays as their position in the corporate hierarchy will allow and head to the shore for the weekend, or they disappear entirely, returning only after the humidity has broken at home. This month’s potential best sellers reflect the industry’s wanderlust. The big August book must be sturdy enough to stand on its own two feet (which accounts for a plethora of goldie oldie plots), and it must take place anywhere but home.

Marrying the wrong member of a family, or a member of the wrong family, is always a trustworthy device, and Monique Raphel High ups the ante in Thy Father’s House (Delacorte: $17.95) by sprinkling the incestuous De Rochefleurs all over Europe. In a geneticist’s nightmare of a plot, Charlie Levy de Rochefleur marries his first cousin Anne to get his hands on the family homestead outside Paris, when of course he should have married his other first cousin, the Viennese pastry, Amelia. As if inbreeding, a hereditary predisposition to suicide and plenty of illicit sex weren’t enough to keep the pot boiling, much of the story is set against the backdrop of World War II--so every time Charlie’s about to set his life straight, a Nazi walks in the door and ruins everything.

High clearly considers herself part of the Russian literary family, obsessed, as she is, with patrimony and familial intrigue; she even begins her book with a neo-Nabokovian riff on chess, strategy and personality. But this is no King, Queen, Knave, nor are the cousins De Rochefleur the new brothers Karamazov. “Thy Father’s House” goes down as smoothly as a Stoli. Delacorte Press, which has published High’s four previous novels, starts out with a 25,000-print run, $25,000 ad-promo budget, and, given the subject matter, target mailings to Jewish publications and organizations.

The heroine of Mary Emblad’s All Manner of Riches (Viking: $18.95) may not travel as far afield, but psychologically, her story is some trip. Cassie Taylor, possibly the only member of her family with an IQ that exceeds normal body temperature, marries the wrong brother in the right--that is, rich--family in an attempt to escape her Depressi1869488228her father-in-law into buying her silence about her husband’s unspeakable behavior and moves to Dallas--which seems to have replaced Manhattan and Beverly Hills as the location of choice for bootstrap (as in pull-yourself-up-by-your) fiction.

Before you can say Tony Lama, Cassie becomes a lawyer, buys a house, endows a fitting room at Neiman-Marcus, dumps the bad brother and, you guessed it, lives happily ever after with the good brother. Viking will back up a 50,000-print run with $50,000 “initially” in advertising and promotion, on this Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club alternate.

Robert Stuart Nathan journeys all the way to the People’s Republic of China for The White Tiger (Simon & Schuster: $18.95), to dress up a fairly familiar story: A high-ranking investigator who’s too smart for his own good starts looking into the mysterious death of a close friend and powerful political figure, only to find that even more powerful political figures loom rather ominously in his path, insisting that there has been no foul play. Nathan tosses in a spy subplot to remind us that first impressions can be misleading, as well as standard fare about the cynical cop’s disaffected wife and adoring, if naive, mistress.

The notion that power corrupts is hardly a new one--if you missed it in “Animal Farm” you can catch it at the contra hearings--but the backdrop is lovingly researched down to the tiniest detail, the result of Nathan’s monthlong fact-finding mission to China. Simon & Schuster will start out with a 40,000 first printing of this Book of the Month Club alternate selection, which will also be published in 15 foreign languages.

The protagonist of Thomas Fleming’s Time and Tide (Simon & Schuster: $19.95) is a historian too, but of the military variety, a man who can fill 640 pages with the message that war is hell. Fleming, author of several books about military history, has created in Frank Flanagan a fictional alter-ego to investigate the strange story of the USS Jefferson City, which seems to have fled the Battle of Savo Island under the command of Capt. Kemble; Kemble’s Annapolis roommate, Capt. Art McKay, is given command of the ship and told to figure out what really happened.

Fleming uses the story to float his analysis of naval strategies, but that will be lost on all but the most militarily sophisticated readers. To the civilian mentality, “Time and Tide” is standard World War II fiction: An ethnic casserole of a crew sets out in a spooked ship with a captain whose emotional sails are about to come unstarched, and the ones who don’t die along the way end up older, wiser, and no longer virgins. “Time and Tide” is a Military Book Club Main Selection and a Literary Guild Featured Alternate, and will debut with a 65,000 printing.

Prolific British mystery writer Winston Graham has no interest in upstanding members of any society: He takes a perverse pleasure in making a hero out of a bad seed in The Green Flash (Random House: $18.95). Eleven-year-old David Abden gets away with murder (patricide, no less), and grows up to work in the perfume business, where he doesn’t behave much better. David dallies--with his female boss, a gay partner in crime, a convenient wife, the widow of his cousin. But he is a thinking man’s rogue who, for all of his bad behavior, makes the absolutely right decision in the end.

Still, “The Green Flash” is a dark horse candidate for the best-seller lists; while most of these books sprawl over time and geography, Graham’s novel examines a very specific and strange place. Random House will do a 10,000 initial print run and then hope that reviews will make this a “breakthrough” book.

Hot Ice, a Bantam paperback original, ($3.95) fairly screams “Soon to be a major motion picture,” or at least a minor miniseries. Author Nora Roberts, author of more than 40 Silhouette Romances, fed the scripts from “To Catch a Thief” and “Romancing the Stone” into a literary Cuisinart, hit pulverize , and came up with the story of Whitney McAllister, free-spirited rich girl, and Doug Lord, rascal thief. A treasure map leads the pair to the requisite tropical locale, here Madagascar: Toss in one fresh villain on the same trail, dress with sexy clothes, steamy bathtubs, and exotic settings, and serve immediately; it wilts rather quickly.

Roberts ends “Hot Ice” with an eye toward a sequel. In case we still don’t get the message that she wants to be a movie when she grows up, Bantam includes a sneak preview of her next novel in the bound galleys of this book. Review copies will likely come with a free box of popcorn.