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This month, cross-eyed Cupid takes aim in APRIL STEVENS'S quirky first novel, Angel Angel (Viking). It's a dysfunctional-family valentine in which Mom gives philandering Dad the boot, then checks out and crawls into bed for the rest of the summer, much to the dismay of her two sons, Mathew, a health-food-obsessed Harvard student, and Henry, a teenage stoner.

New York Times book reviewer CHRISTOPHER LEHMANNHAUPT steps into the cross fire with his political thriller, A Crooked Man (Simon & Schuster) (which, incidentally, this would-be novelist loved). Bankers, traders, and Mafia drug lords infest LINDA DAVIES'S financial page-turner, Nest of Vipers (Doubleday). JEFF NOON'S Vurt (Crown) is the tale of a feather and a drug and the path to a virtual wonderland. The mysterious bridge between the mind and disease is the theme of ROBERTSON DAVIES'S new novel and 35th book, The Cunning Man (Viking). Folks used up by desire roam the rural Wisconsin landscape, against which DEBRA MONROE'S bittersweet short stories are played out in A Wild, Cold State (Simon & Schuster). The Life of Graham Greene, Volume II: 1939-1955 (Viking) picks up brothel-frequenting, opium-smoking, manic-depressive Greene at his literary peak and the zenith of his career as a spy in NORMAN SHERRY'S authorized biography of the enigmatic author. A freak bom to a celebrated actress goes in search of his missing father and his destiny in PETER CAREY'S tragicomedy The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (Knopf). JAMES CAMPBELL'S Exiled in Paris (Scribner) illuminates the lives of postwar Paris literati. A storybook town is shattered when a young girl hurls herself from the top of a waterfall in GEOFFREY WOLFF'S The Age of Consent (Knopf). The Point (Little, Brown) is the extraordinary debut collection of

short stories by CHARLES D'AMBROSIO.

P. D. JAMES, the grande dame of whodunits, graces us with her 14th gem, Original Sin (Knopf). Jimmy Hoffa, Howard

Hughes, and other underworldly American icons prowl JAMES ELLROY'S.

American Tabloid (Knopf). JOHN

TYTELL explores America's most rev-

olutionary theater company's days of yore in The Living Theatre (Grove).

And The Penguin Book of Infidelities (Viking), edited by STEPHEN BROOK, is a sinfully delectable anthology of extramarital dirty laundry through the ages written by literary masters from Chaucer to Updike. Will you be my valentine?

ELISSA SCHAPPELL