Some enterprising publishers seem to have gotten...

Some enterprising publishers seem to have gotten together and done a little research into my background. It’s finally happened: a list of books I wouldn’t resist no matter how badly they might be written. Proust may have had his tea cakes. Serve me up a newspaper war, a story set in a restaurant, or a sleek thoroughbred and I’m in memory heaven.

I grew up in Chicago at a time when there were not just two but three daily newspapers duking it out for readership. True, I was of an age where variety in comic strips meant more than three sets of international headlines, but the Trib, Daily News and Sun-Times--combined with the later effects of an inspirational high school journalism teacher--made me a print junkie. I am the target audience for Official Secrets (Warner Books: $4.95, paper; 352 pp.).

And, given the unsubstantiated off-the-record rumor--that author Lindsay Mitchell is, in fact, Los Angeles expatriate Wanda Urbanska (who worked at the Herald-Examiner) and her screenwriter husband Frank Levering--the rest of you might want to take a look at it too.

Mitchell has moved her/his/their story from Los Angeles to Washington, where Colette Daniels, voluptuous society columnist with the scrappy underdog Washington Tribune, grinds journalistic propriety to a powder under her stiletto heels and indulges her erotic interest in a presidential hopeful, Sen. Ben Fincastle. While the two of them endanger the Democratic Party’s future in a Mercedes on an almost-deserted strip of beach, Sylvia Loring, who is half Girl Scout, half Lois Lane, does some serious reporting about sexual indiscretion in high places (this is, after all, mainstream warfare). Along the way, she’s wooed, taken to the White House, and, finally, waylaid by the right guy.

The author(s) commits the usual actionable affronts. There’s a fair amount of detail-dropping (and, for the record, can you really get last year’s $10,000 Christian Lacroix pouf for a mere $1,000-plus?), and some rather simplistic hot-airing about the importance of the press and the dignity of the journalistic calling. Sylvia defends the Fourth Estate to President Bush in a short speech that makes her the belle of the evening; I read it twice over and still don’t see what was so stirring about it.

But I forgive these folks almost anything, I confess, because I agree with them. When Woodward and Bernstein broke the Watergate stories, journalists were heroes for about five minutes on the historical clock. Ever since, they’ve been portrayed as party poopers. It’s nice to see them treated with some respect.

But back to Chicago and the funny pages. There used to be a contest: Name the thoroughbred colt and you could win him. Year after year I entered, and lost, settling instead for a collection of tiny horse statues that I kept until the 1971 earthquake taught me never to put anything of value (and made of china) on a window ledge. I am one of the few people over age 10 who walk over to the Santa Monica mounted police to say hello to the horses.

So what do I care that the plot of William Kingsolving’s Bred to Win (Doubleday: $19.95; 612 pp.) is disturbingly similar to a best seller I vaguely recall reading two years ago? I mean, how much can you do with a dame and a racehorse? Annie Grebauer is crazy over horses (let Freud spin, I say; do any of you recall his answer to the question of what women want, or was he copping to his own inability to figure it out?). Sam Cumberland is crazy over horses, too, and equally enthusiastic about Annie, which allows for some romantic tension.

The rest of the story, though, could be played out in front of any backdrop. Annie starts out poor and abused and ends up--having met the requisite number of people who will come back to haunt her later--rich and happy. Her brothers seem to have inherited the nastiness chromosome she lacks, and the man who introduced her to horse racing plots a grisly revenge involving Annie’s beloved Base Blood. That’s where “Bred to Win” lost me. Let fictional characters do what they will to each other in the name of emotional stupidity, but I can’t stand to see a horse suffer for their foolishness.

The only mammals who suffer in Tables (Little, Brown: $18.95; 383 pp.), by John Lucas, are human beings--and perhaps the sheep and cows who meet their maker and become entrees at the chic Manhattan restaurant where Lucas launches his tale of ambition and blackmail. Lucas is a first-time novelist who wins some sort of award for most arresting opening line in a work of commercial fiction: “The man who had once been enormous sat up against the headboard of a bed that still was.” Said gentleman, unfortunately, is not a NutriSystem success story. He’s wasting away from cancer, but before he dies, he makes a special bequest--his secrets--that allows a blackmailer to terrorize a handful of the rich and famous.

There isn’t enough restaurant detail to satisfy me (I spent my early years eating in places that owed my restaurant-supply-salesman father money); I believe what Tom Wolfe says about researching fiction as though it were nonfiction, so you know where you are before you start to write. But there’s plenty of the vicious interpersonal intrigue that we all like to believe festers at the core of the Big Apple.

When you do write about what you know, as Robert Cullen does in Soviet Sources (Atlantic Monthly Press: $19.95; 260 pp.), you come up with more, and more credible, detail. Cullen was a Moscow correspondent for Newsweek, so his story about Colin Burke, Moscow correspondent for the Washington Tribune (everybody’s favorite fictional newspaper, it seems), rings energetically true. People seem to love to drop off-the-record tidbits into Burke’s rumpled lap, but there’s such a thing as too much news: When Burke starts hearing things he’s not supposed to know about an imminent KGB coup, the number of people he can trust starts to diminish at an alarming rate. The structure of the story is fairly standard, including the star-crossed romance, but Cullen’s resources are unique.