FIRST FICTION

In the Vienna of Klimt and Mahler, a young woman is found strangled in the Volksgarten. She is Dora, Freud’s famous case study, and although the father of psychoanalysis is never mentioned in Jody Shields’ atmospheric thriller--an Art Nouveau answer to “The Alienist”--his spirit always hovers nearby. Freud is the unstated link between the two radically divergent crime solving methods embodied by the stoic, rational Inspector, who runs a routine questioning with the monumental aloofness of an analyst, and his wife Erszebet, a Hungarian watercolor painter with an unquenchable fascination with the realm of superstition--of dreams, Gypsy legends and Tarot readings. While the Inspector and his staff adhere to the strict methodology laid out in the “Enzyclopadie Kriminalistic,” Erszebet--with the help of an eager English governess named Wally--begins a secret investigation of her own into Dora’s murder, breaking all of the Inspector’s rules along the way. She sends Wally into the field to befriend Dora’s distraught mother, search Vienna’s gardens for a fig tree (the remains of a fig were found in Dora’s stomach) and undergo humiliating treatments at the hands of Dora’s hysteria doctor. As these investigations uncover a bewildering array of suspects and motives, someone--or something--has dug up Dora’s body and has removed one of her thumbs: Is it a psycho or a werewolf, and what, exactly, is the difference? Shields’ Vienna is a wonderfully realized creation, full of modern unease assuaged with strong kaffe and sacher tortes. Like Freudian analysis, “The Fig Eater” has a lot of loose ends, and half the joy is working through them.

LOST GEOGRAPHY By Charlotte Bacon; Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 262 pp., $24

The four generations of unrooted characters in Charlotte Bacon’s impressive first novel tend not to stay in one place very long. Home for these people isn’t found in geographic continuity but rather in the stories they hand down, familiar tales (some tall, some not) that weave themselves into a makeshift portable tapestry. For Margaret Evans, a young Saskatchewan nurse in the ‘30s, the allure of the faraway arrives in the form of Davis Campbell, a bookish Pacific-bound Scotsman who washes up on the door of her clinic; when Davis’ 104-degree temperature and obscenity-laced ravings subside, the two settle into an intense marriage that spawns three kids and utterly derails Davis’ thoughts about continuing his journey to British Columbia. It is left to headstrong daughter Hilda to move on when Margaret and Davis die in a freak auto accident; she heads east to Toronto, getting work at a travel agency and becoming pregnant by her old family doctor. When her plucky daughter Danielle comes of age, Hilda sends her to Paris, where she promptly falls in love with the half-British, half-Turkish Osman (he’s weaned equally on stories of the Battle of Britain and of the mysterious East) and starts a family in the love-struck early ‘70s. While Osman’s rug business gets off the ground, the couple raise two bilingual ex-pat kids amid the quiet glories of Paris, until a terminal illness sends Danielle’s survivors to a challenging new beginning in New York City. Bacon brings the acute exquisite eye of a cartographer to this engrossing gazetteer about survival, heartache and the frayed edges of memory.

USE ME By Elissa Schappell; William Morrow: 322 pp., $23

Elissa Schappell writes the “Hot Type” column for Vanity Fair; as you might expect, her first novel--which unfolds as a series of 10 stories--is full of sass and polished to a high gloss. It’s also smart, honest, sexy and--as if this doesn’t already sound enough like the blind date of your dreams--an utter heartbreaker. It’s narrated, for the most part, by Evie Wakefield, a girl from the horsy suburbs of Delaware who gets dragged along on perfect, boring vacations by her travel-obsessed parents. (They obliviously quaff glasses of Pouilly-Fume at a French winery while Evie experiences her first dollop of sex.) If Evie is a spoiled smart-aleck, she meets her match in her college roommate, Mary Beth, whose family resembles “a subspecies of man: Upper East Side Preppus Erectus.” Mary Beth--who, in one unforgettable scene, is made to help her cruelly efficient mother remove a swallowed pair of boy’s underwear from the business end of a pug--could be Evie’s urbane, badass twin. Yet they inevitably diverge, and Evie acquires the mellowed tones of wisdom and loss as she marries an aimless yet soulful punk rocker, copes with her father’s repeated bouts of cancer, impulsively tastes his ashes from their urn when he finally dies and, in the aftermath, refuses to stop breast-feeding her toddler son. Through it all, we come to know Evie as a complex woman ever on the verge of taking nurture too far, even as she dangerously withholds basic comfort from herself.