FOR YOUR DESK

The Associates: How Four Capitalists Created California By Richard Rayner (W.W. Norton, $23.95)

In the history of American business, few men have exercised the power that Collis Huntington, Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker and Mark Hopkins did in the 19th century. Once middle-class store owners in Sacramento, Calif., they reached national prominence by constructing the western portion of the first transcontinental railroad. That transportation link ended the pioneer era and left the Bear State with a genial arrogance regarding its place in history ("California Annexes the United States," read placards in San Francisco after the last spike was driven in 1869) that persists to this day. It also provoked the Big Four to extremes and deceit in order to sustain their influence. L.A. novelist Rayner (The Devil's Wind) recounts the lives and legacies of these robber barons in often droll detail.

FOR YOUR NIGHTSTAND

Come to Think of It: Notes on the Turn of the Millennium By Daniel Schorr (Viking, $24.95)

Recruited to CBS News in the 1950s by Edward R. Murrow, named on Richard Nixon's "enemies list," and threatened with imprisonment after he released to the public a damaging report on CIA corruption, Daniel Schorr -' now 91 years old and the senior news analyst at National Public Radio -' is legendary in U.S. journalism circles. He brings his extraordinary knowledge of history and history makers (he's covered 12 presidents so far) to this collection of piercing commentaries about everything from international affairs and national health care to executive privilege battles and the Supreme Court decision that installed George W. Bush in the Oval Office in 2000. A fascinating primer on American politics of the last quarter-century.

Gods Behaving Badly By Marie Phillips (Little, Brown, $23.99)

In the world of "what ifs," British blogger Phillips' debut novel is the iffiest. It imagines the 12 Greek gods of Olympus having survived into our time and sharing a dilapidated London townhouse, their powers waning and their immortality in question. Aphrodite has a day job as a phone-sex operator, Artemis is a dog walker, Dionysus is a DJ, and ... well, you understand why they're bored enough to make mischief. The trouble begins when Eros shoots Apollo (now a TV psychic) with an arrow of love, and he tumbles for a mortal cleaning woman, Alice, who's already enamored of the humble Neil. As the gods' squabble turns ugly, it falls to Alice and Neil to save mankind. A charmingly satirical bit of escapism.

Red Mandarin Dress By Qiu Xiaolong (St. Martin's Minotaur, $24.95)

Chinese-born St. Louis resident Qiu, who attracted the public's attention with his award-winning debut novel, Death of a Red Heroine (2000), returns to the world of Shanghai Inspector Chen Cao as that poet-policeman strives to curtail the homicidal handiwork of his city's first serial killer. As seems true of nearly every pursuit of wrongdoers in 1990s Communist China, this case is a political minefield; even the red mandarin dresses in which the killer attires his victims appear connected to a boiling corruption scandal around which Chen had once hoped to steer clear. Qiu's prose is evocative, and his portrait of a Maoist society uneasily accommodating capitalist practices is engrossing.