Fair Warning - By Robert Olen Butler. 240 pages. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press

Amy Dickerson has a plateful. The successful auctioneer at one of the more prestigious New York houses is grieving her father's death, dealing with new ownership of the company where she works as an art dealer and trying to improve strained relationships with her mother in Texas and sister in Long Island. Amy has just turned 40 and is looking either for love or a fling, the other stuff keeps her from discovering which it is. Amy is close to a mid-life crisis.

Fair Warning, the latest novel from Robert Olen Butler, FSU's Pulitzer Prize-winning professor of English, explores how people define themselves. Amy laments that her fate was sealed perhaps by something she did when she was a seven-year-old. She's haunted by two failed love affairs and unresolved issues that exist between her and her family, living and dead.

While reconnecting with her mother and sister, Amy becomes an object of desire for the French millionaire who bought her company. He collects beautiful things. She's a former model.

Amy knows men, knows how to read them and manipulate them into overpaying for the desirable things she auctions. She knows the value of objects-it's her specialty. These two facts provide the suspense that propels the novel to Amy's moment of truth. Late at night in Paris, Amy finally gets a read on her new boss.

With the master of the house asleep, Amy awakens and lays the foundation for the next phase of her life with a wit and ruthlessness that will endear her to many readers. - J.C.

Inside Britain's India

My Indian Peregrinations: The Private Letters of Charles Stewart Hardinge 1844-1847. Edited by Bawa Satinder Singh. 232 pages. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, $34.95.

At 21, Charles Stewart Hardinge acted on an urge common among young adults, to travel and live for a spell far, far from home. His father, India's newly appointed governor general, offered him a secretary's position at a time when Britain was to expand and consolidate its rule of the subcontinent. Although his official duties were behind the front lines, the young Hardinge wrote first-person accounts of the Sikh war, the Kasmir insurrection and the personalities of colonial India in letters to reletives in England.

Edited by historian Bawa Satinder Singh, My Indian Peregrinations is the account of a young man at a frontier where western and eastern cultures clashed. On occasion, Hardinge frankly found his subjects unworthy of serious consideration: “There is nothing in the characters of either Hindus or Muhammadans that can make a European really feel an interest in them,” he wrote.

If nothing else, Hardinge had a talent for understatement. In a letter following the Battle of Mudki he described a situation where the British found themselves outnumbered and surrounded by the Sikh army. The enemy had moved field artillery pieces within 50 yards of their camp. He described the situation-the British waiting in the dark, listening to the Sikhs' drumming and intermittent cheers-as “helpless.”

When the Sikhs attacked, Hardinge witnessed three aides killed, leaving him the only survivor of a group of 11 when the campaign began. He saw one horse shot from under him and a second wounded. Of that night, he wrote that the experience “ . . . was certainly not pleasant.” Given the current turmoil in that part of the world, Hardinge's letters offer insight into the region's troubled past that seem eerily relevant to the present. -J.C.

Fair Warning - By Robert Olen Butler. 240 pages. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, $24.00.

My Indian Peregrinations: The Private Letters of Charles Stewart Hardinge 1844-1847. Edited by Bawa Satinder Singh. 232 pages. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, $34.95.