Bookends

TRUST

by George V. Higgins

Henry Holt; 230 pages; $18.95

Earl Beale, a salesman at a Boston used-car lot, is a former college basketball player who did time in Leavenworth for his role in a point-shaving scandal. The fact that he is an ex-con has somehow been erased from official records. For this dispensation, Earl knows that he owes someone a favor, and when the call comes, it looks simple. All he has to do is steal a car in Rhode Island.

A slight problem with Trust, George V. Higgins' 20th book, is that Earl's task is simple. He pulls off the theft easily; for fairly complicated reasons, the intended victim wants the car to disappear. Unfortunately, Earl ignores the instructions to have the hot auto crushed in a trash compactor. He sells it instead, a characteristic act of greed that promises to get him in trouble. But Higgins seems much more interested in atmosphere than in denouement. There are long, long passages of the author's by now patented low-life banter, characters being long-winded and tedious about the banalities of their lives. Readers who like this sort of thing will love Trust. Others will wish that Earl had got his comeuppance a lot earlier in the book.

THE SOUND OF WINGS

by Mary S. Lovell

St. Martin's Press

420 pages; $22.95

On July 2, 1937, an aviator took off from Papua New Guinea for Howland Island in the central Pacific. She was on a round-the-world trip when she and her twin-engine Lockheed Electra lost radio contact and vanished into legend. Since that time women have become commercial pilots, paratroopers and even astronauts. Yet the name of Amelia Earhart retains the power to intrigue. Did she assume a new identity? Was she on a secret reconnaissance mission? Did she get captured by the Japanese? Mary S. Lovell shrugs off these theories; her emphasis is on Earhart's life and accomplishments.

Early on, the shy, Kansas-born social worker made two key decisions: she fell in love with flying, and she married a publisher, G.P. Putnam. He manipulated the press to create an international celebrity. Earhart became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic and the first person to fly solo from Honolulu to Oakland. But if she was an eagle aloft, she remained a sparrow on the ground. Lovell, biographer of the British pilot Beryl Markham, can do little to romanticize her taciturn subject. It is only when Earhart climbs into the cockpit that The Sound of Wings truly takes off.