EXPOSURE: POISONED WATER, CORPORATE GREED, and One Lawyer's Twenty-Year Battle against DuPont by Robert Bilott (Atria). Well, yes, yet another exposé of corporate evildoing, so soon after the last exposé of corporate, etc. In fact, there's often a compelling cause of such things coming to proliferate on publishers' lists. Not because humanity has changed its nature lately, but because public awareness is growing of this source of the rationally defined priorities—defined, and then honed and sharpened priorities—that produce these appalling results. It's all covered pretty well by the slogan “corporate greed”—understanding that corporations are supposed to be greedy (it's even a fiduciary responsibility, to produce not for the common weal but for their shareholders). It's no radical leap, then, to an understanding of how the economic philosophy that massively replaced, and came to despise, the “corporate citizen” ideal provided for by Keynes, Roosevelt's New Deal, and beyond—that this new wisdom generated theories of virtue that would motivate the creation of management teams with very hard eyes and thin smiles. That might be any of us, when our own and our families' wellbeing come to be at stake; I just don't remember when wellbeing came to include retiring with yachts the size of destroyers, furnished like glitzy high-tech palaces. (This sermonizing is mine, not so much the book's: the book is a rousing account of the lawyer Bilott—a complicated guy and not given to sermons at all—finally smacking down DuPont, for calculatedly, consciously, poisoning people and lying coldly and often about it. A movie, to be similarly rousing if we're all in luck, is well into production.)

THE GIVER OF STARS by Jojo Moyes (Pamela Dorman/Viking). One of two recent, very decent historical novels centered on a wonderful WPA project (hm-m—a Roosevelt thing) in the Great Depression, to establish and promote literacy in remote areas of Kentucky—“the Packhorse Librarians.” Moyes is a star romance novelist and this one is a very involving and satisfying example of that—a new bride at its center as well as strong atmosphere, richly detailed. (If you enjoy it as much as I did, you might want to look for the somewhat different THE BOOK WOMAN OF TROUBLESOME CREEK, by Kim Michele Richardson (Sourcebooks Landmark). Worth reading, too, if its reviews are to be believed—though the column missed it.)

FISHNET by Kirstin Innes (Scout Press). And a contemporary thriller as a nightcap. This is a first novel, fine as a suspense novel but almost as good as a smart, both sophisticated and sympathetic, in-depth portrait of sex work and sex workers. Set in Scotland, but in no sense exotic or difficult for us to identify with.