FICTION

GET SHORTY by Elmore Leonard (Dell: $5.99). Miami loan shark Chili Palmer’s former occupational skills come in handy when he makes a career change to tinsel- town deal-maker.

RUSH by Kim Wozencraft (Ivy: $5.95). Fictionalized account of the author, a former undercover narc agent, and her partner/boyfriend taking their work home with them.

HAMMERHEADS by Dale Brown (Berkley: $5.95). Government disbands usual drug-enforcement agencies and relies on the tactics of an elite Prohibition squad.

SECRETS OF THE MORNING by V. C. Andrews (Pocket: $5.95). Dawn imagines herself and her music teacher making beautiful music together; instead, her family’s troubled past sounds a sour note.

REACHING TIN RIVER by Thea Astley (Penguin: $8.95). Young Australian woman falls in love with a genteel man she dug up during her archival meanderings.

NONFICTION

THE POLITICS OF RICH AND POOR by Kevin Phillips (HarperPerennial: $9.95). Economic patterns of the Gilded Age, the Roaring Twenties and the ‘80s are shown to widen the chasm between rich and poor.

WITH MURDEROUS INTENT by Robert Hemming (Onyx: $4.99). Shannon Mohr Davis was only looking for someone to love her; her husband, David Richard Davis did--to death.

MAY YOU BE THE MOTHER OF A HUNDRED SONS: A Journey Among the Women of India by Elisabeth Bumiller (Fawcett Columbine: $12). Journalist agonizes over the wretched conditions of women in a country that once elected a woman as its head of state.

DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT HISTORY by Kenneth C. Davis (Avon: $10.95). Davis puts the personalities back into historical events--a more colorful, less sanitized version of History 101.