New in February

Never underestimate the chutzpah of the novelist who goes beyond the awesome-enough challenge of telling a story that grabs the reader in a hammerlock, but does so by putting his characters in another time frame. (It’s 18th-Century England and your protagonist, late for an appointment, glances nervously at his wristwatch. Is there a prayer that some sharp-eyed reader won’t note the fact that wristwatches weren’t developed until early in the 19th Century?) The research that has to go into a historic novel is mind-boggling, and yet the genre dominates the current crop of popular fiction.

We owe a debt of gratitude to novelist Michael M. Thomas (he of “The Ropespinner Conspiracy,” “Green Money” and “Hard Money” among others) for not only daring to tackle an engrossing novel that covers the New York power structure from 1924 to sometime in the near future--with retrospects going back to 1814--but for undertaking the Herculean additional task of building it around the forbidding subject of Wall Street and the securities markets.

The fact that his latest, Hanover Place (Warner Books: $19.95; 479 pp.), succeeds brilliantly both as a novel and as an education on how Wall Street really works is due in no small measure to the fact that it’s a turf that Thomas knows like the palm of his hand. He’s a former curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a former investment banking partner of Lehman Bros. and Burnham & Co. This is the story of the S. L. Warrington & Son family which, since well before the Civil War, shaped--and was the model for--the securities business on Wall Street. And what a fascinating family it is--overachievers, underachievers and back-sliders alike! Holding it all together is the feisty Grande Dame of the clan, Lyda Warrington.

But the family’s personal triumphs, tragedies and conflicts aside, what really distinguishes “Hanover Place” is the penetrating insight it gives us into how Wall Street used to be and how it has subtly, and not so subtly, changed over the years. And “changed,” author Thomas convinces us chillingly, in a most unpleasant way. Since the novel extends into the early 1990s, the ghost-of-Wall-Street-future that Thomas foresees is downright scary. And the old, founding Warrington partners are spinning in their graves like dervishes.

But for a research job that really blows the mind, dip into Charles Palliser’s slice of early-1800 England, The Quincunx (Ballantine Books: $25; 788 pp.). A quincunx, incidentally, is a geometric pattern of five designs--one in each corner and one in the center, as on the No. 5 die in a set of dice--which runs throughout this first novel by English scholar and lecturer Palliser. While this is the story of young John Huffam and his efforts to unravel the mystery of his birth, the circumstances of murder involving his grandfather and the hanky-panky of his own disinheritance, the real protagonist in “The Quincunx” is London and the English countryside as they were at the birth of the 19th Century.

In mood, color, atmosphere and characters, this is Charles Dickens reincarnated--the grinding poverty of the homeless in London’s slums, the acrid pall of smoke from open fires, the stench of a city without sanitation. It’s a complex plot of dirty deals, land scandals and murder, and little John, time and again, is in danger of his life as he skirts the fringes of London’s underworld and toils 20 hours a day as the lowest-of-the-lowest in the household staff of a wealthy family--all the while in search of the elusive truth of his past. And what wonderful names--Digweed, Bellringer, Limpenney, Umphraville, Thackaberry, Vamplew. It is an immersing experience. You’re there . . . you feel the biting cold of the London winter with only a thin shirt on your back . . the terror of being caught in the tides of London’s underground sewers. The 12 years that Palliser spent researching the period pay off handsomely in a remartkable book.

What lovable, Jack Armstrong-type, real-life protagonist would you base a fictionalized biography on? Why, who else but the enterprising Hermann Goering, Adolf Hitler’s No. 2 man in the monstrous bloodbath known as World War II. Ella Leffland’s The Knight, Death and the Devil (William Morrow: $22.95; 720 pp.) explores the impact that this remarkable man had on world history. Despicable as his record was in the eyes of most of the world, Goering, in Leffland’s hands, emerges as probably the most charismatic, most popular and perhaps the brightest mind in that twisted inner circle of perverted talents surrounding Hitler.

The young Goering had a weird childhood, was absolutely incorrigible until he found his niche in military school and became Germany’s most celebrated fighter pilot of World War I when he inherited Baron von Richthofen’s famed squadron (typically, perhaps, he forged the papers transferring him into the Air Force in the first place but had become too popular to be reprimanded when it came to light). Would the bloody path that he chose when the Nazis came to power have taken a different twist if his first marriage to the gentle, but fragile Carin hadn’t ended so quickly? She, forever, remained his one and only true love after her death. Her gentle influence was lost, however.

This is a totally absorbing tale, from the inside, of Hitler’s rise to power, and of how abysmally France, England and, yes, the United States bungled their opportunities to chop the dictator off at the knees early in the game. This is the story of the brilliant mind that built the Luftwaffe into the world’s most awesome air force, reshaped all of Germany’s rearmament efforts and skillfully (as much as was possible) kept the increasingly erratic and psychopathic Hitler in rein.

Ultimately discredited with the dictator through the palace politics of Bormann, Goebbels and Speer, Goering, literally, was under house arrest when the Third Reich finally fell. Unrepentant, unremorseful and physically a broken man when his life played out, Goering, as depicted in “The Knight, Death and the Devil” was the most fascinating member of that notorious inner circle of evil. We are left to wonder: What turns would those massive talents have taken against a different historic background?

Turning author Dean R. Koontz’s imagination loose on an eerie premise is a little bit like dropping a ferret into a brood house. In his latest, The Bad Place (G. P. Putnam’s Sons: $19.95; 384 pp.), readers who thought Koontz’s “Midnight” was populated with weird characters and situations will look back on it as a humdrum excursion into conventionality.

For openers, take a man, Frank, suffering from amnesia who finds himself awakening covered with blood, possessing lots of cash, a couple of unfamiliar identifications and with strange, unidentifiable objects around him--red gems; black dirt or sand; a giant, dead, rare insect. The usual sort of thing. Frantic, he turns to a young husband and wife team, Bobby and Julie Dakota, who specialize in corporate security matters, computer thefts and the like. Obviously, Frank’s, amnesia problem isn’t exactly their bag, but who could resist the challenge?

The Dakotas should have. What the team gradually uncovers in the way of weirdos occupying some of the wild portions of Orange County should skyrocket the population of neighboring Riverside County-- the strange young man named Candy and his twin sisters, Violet and Verbina, and things that go bump, and worse, in the night.

The clutching knowledge that The Bad Place has spawned a Bad Thing that is quietly stalking them all-- and that they are powerless to either stop or elude it--grips both the reader and the Dakotas even as the beautiful and tough Julie Dakota, formerly with the Sheriff’s Department, tries to pooh-pooh the danger. This is white-knuckle, hair-curling-on-the-back-of-the-neck reading--as close to actual physical terror as the printed word can deliver. “The Bad Place” is a Literary Guild Main Selection.