PUT DOWN THAT PROUST

No one ever said summer was the season for gravitas. So it is not surprising that publishers reserve their books of substance--tomes with titles like Hitler's Willing Executioners--for distribution during the months of the year when one is less apt to read in the company of a wine cooler. If Dostoyevsky had had a marketing consultant, she would have positioned Crime and Punishment for a November release.

Summer is the time for books that don't tax or disturb or get debated about in the pages of Lingua Franca. It is the season for Tom Clancy and, although the best-selling author isn't offering up one of his 800-page tales of intrigue before Labor Day, there are plenty of big thrillers in stores and arriving shortly. Three of the most talked about, Brad Meltzer's The Tenth Justice (William Morrow; 389 pages; $23), Steve Alten's Meg (Doubleday; 275 pages; $22.95) and Don Winslow's The Death and Life of Bobby Z (Knopf; 259 pages; $22), have already been optioned for the movies (see box).

Jacket copy for The Tenth Justice promises "dialogue as true as it is sharp-witted." But sure enough, by page four, a superior is telling our hero Ben Addison, "You are the hottest property on the board. You're Boardwalk and Park Place."

Hokeyness, though, is a prime ingredient for a successful beach book, and it rears its head in another Grishamesque page turner: Likely to Die (Scribner; 393 pages; $24), a novel about a murdered neurosurgeon written by Manhattan sex-crimes prosecutor Linda Fairstein. Where else will you find the line "In your dreams, Blondie. In your dreams"?