It's a good thing that the gambling, opium-addicted, prostitute-loving husband of Elvira De Poulain died. She would otherwise be stripped of an adventure that is so engrossing it could compel the reader to skip meals and ignore chores in a mad dash to read the book's ending.

Spanish writer Matilde Asensi delivers frantic action in "Everything Under the Sky," a historical thriller that is sometimes a bit overbearing and heavy-handed. But that's part of the fun.

De Poulain is an uptight, middle-aged Spanish painter who travels to China in the early 1920s after learning that her husband has died there under mysterious circumstances. She arrives in Shanghai and is overwhelmed by loud noises, fetid smells and hordes of people. De Poulain is desperate to leave after arranging her husband's affairs, but finds herself unwillingly sucked into a quest for the remains and riches of China's first emperor.

Her sidekicks soon emerge: an unassuming but genius orphan, a jolly Irish journalist with an affinity with whiskey and his friend, a Chinese antiquarian capable of whacking bad guys with a steel fan. His talents are superseded only by those of friendly monks in China's interior who could kick their way out of a fight with 10 men while solving an ancient math puzzle.

They all join forces to uncover the grave of Shi Huang Ti, China's first Qing emperor.

The treasure-hunting group, which includes De Poulain's 17-year-old niece, is pursued by ruthless gang members as they rush to solve one riddle after another to reach the emperor's tomb first. The discovery would not only make them rich, it could also rewrite China's history and destabilize the current government.

The tomb promises to contain a life-size replica of one of the emperor's palaces, adorned with riches such as pearls that represent stars and mercury rivers filled with steel fish.

Asensi's descriptions are precise, colorful and extremely visual -- the reader often feels like another explorer. The riddles are creative and suspenseful, and tense moments are infused with the right dose of humor. But she has a tendency to rely on cliches, and her occasional summaries of previous events are annoying and detract from the action.

The book is rich with historical details, including nods to feng shui, the Five Elements and the Wudang mountains, where monks are trained in martial arts.

In real life, archaeologists have discovered the famous terra-cotta army of roughly 8,000 men and horses that protected Shi Huang Ti's tomb. But the tomb itself has not been excavated, which makes the book even more delicious to read.

Brian Wilson sings with boundless enthusiasm on "That Lucky Old Sun," his first full album of new songs since 2004. That was when he remade and completed "Smile," the attempted masterpiece he had abandoned amid drug use and mental illness in 1967. In "Oxygen to the Brain" on the new album, he sings, "I wasted a lot of years."

Lately Wilson, 66, has overcome his stage fright and toured extensively, performing the complete "Pet Sounds" and "Smile" along with other hits he wrote for the Beach Boys. "That Lucky Old Sun," which was commissioned for a performance last year at the Royal Festival Hall in London, is a latter-day sequel to those two albums. It applies their elaborate structures and sounds to a concept: a day in the life of Los Angeles, from one dawn to the next.

Los Angeles becomes the same sunny city Wilson defined with the Beach Boys in the mid-1960s, now tinged with regrets for lost time. "Goin' Home" declares, "At 25 I turned out the light/'Cause I couldn't handle the glare in my tired eyes/But now I'm back."

Produced by Wilson, the music is packed, even overstuffed, with echoes of his Beach Boys marvels: chugging rhythms, creamy vocal harmonies, oom-mow-mow nonsense syllables and favorite instruments like bass harmonica, temple blocks, chimes and French horn. "That Lucky Old Sun" is an uninterrupted suite of 17 tracks that lasts 38 minutes, barely longer than "Pet Sounds." Except for the title song, a pop standard by Haven Gillespie and Beasley Smith, Wilson wrote the album with his band's keyboardist, Scott Bennett, and with Van Dyke Parks, who provided wordplay-laden lyrics for "Heroes and Villains" and other "Smile" songs. (Parks also wrote songs for Wilson to sing on "Orange Crate Art," a 1995 album that portrayed California with a wider historical sweep.)

The lyrics -- and nutty spoken-word passages written by Parks -- sketch a Los Angeles filled with lovers and dreamers, but they circle back to Wilson's own story. In "Midnight's Another Day," a spacious, swaying ballad about chronic depression, he sings, "Swept away in a brainstorm/Chapters missing, pages torn" and climbs toward a choral revelation, "All these people make me feel so alone."

Wilson and his collaborators strive mightily to make "That Lucky Old Sun" a new career landmark, and after the simplistic ditties that filled his previous solo albums, it's a breakthrough. But too often the songs are patchworks of Wilson's past glories, making references that are far too recognizable. For all its determined optimism "That Lucky Old Sun" ends up as more an affirmation of Wilson's legacy than an expansion of it.

-- JON PARELES

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- When a mysterious biblical philosopher wrote what would become Ecclesiastes 1:9, he may as well have been staring into the liquor cabinet: "What has been done will be done again," his thoughts roughly went. "There is nothing new under the sun."

Vodkas are flavored, tequilas super-aged, wines "made" by sports stars and celebrities -- but it's still just vodka, tequila and wine after all.

So it was easy to get worked up about the prospects of Veev, the self-styled first and only distilled spirit made with an exotic berry from the Amazon, complete with hyperbolic claims of environmental friendliness and antioxidant benefits.

It comes in a handsome, frosted bottle. The folks who make it offer a handful of intriguing cocktail recipes. And by golly, it tastes like nothing else.

Veev, supposedly made from the purple berry of the acai palm tree, has the clean mouthfeel of vodka, the slight citrus tang of fine tequila and a blueberryish overtone all its own that raises the question: "What kind of killer, last-gasp-of summer cocktail can I make with this stuff?"

To answer that, we go back to the source, deep in the Brazilian rainforest.

Acai juice, which used to be nothing more than a goopy staple of Amazon cuisine we'd never heard of, went from total obscurity to global superfood in little over a decade. You can't swing a smoothie menu these days without waving its claims of antioxidant potency, cholesterol fighting abilities and sexual, er, enhancements.

Enter Courtney Reum, a young and palpably ambitious Goldman Sachs investment banker who, sick of the vodka-Red Bulls that were fueling his nights out in New York City, recognized acai's fermentation potential while on a surfing trip in Brazil with his brother.

"My brother and I were surfing in Rio, and had an acai smoothie on the beach almost every day for a week," he said, "and didn't think much of it."

He thought more of it pretty quickly. In the throes of a brief career working inhumane hours on major corporate mergers and consumer products -- including during explosion of Vitamin Water -- Reum, already in search of an entrepreneurial opportunity, began to wonder how to turn the local slurry of dark berries into a health-conscious clubber's drink of choice.

"I was struck by lack of innovation in the alcohol space," he said, "and even had a couple of CEOs tell me they've never really tried to innovate. I was really taken by the fact that these bigger guys I was working with weren't going to introduce something new."

Taking cues from the biggest trends in food -- an endless parade of fresh, organic, and traceably sourced ingredients -- Reum and his brother turned their Wall Street haul into the launch of Veev a little over a year ago.

"My brother and I felt like, 'Why don't we get out in front of it?'" Reum said.

For now, the brothers are taking a low-key approach to marketing their new drink, sticking to hotspots around New York and Los Angeles.

"I'm not trying to be Dark Knight at the box office," Reum says. "More like trying to have the highest per-screen average."

Because it's a privately held company, sales figures weren't available -- but Reum says his is the best-selling independent brand in Southern California, "and we're doing in the thousands of cases a year."

Getting there wouldn't be so easy. Acai (pronounced ah-sah-YEE') is finicky stuff, prone to spoiling after its thin layer of juice and pulp is removed from the berry's hard center. Already in high demand in Belem (once the place where its juice was more popular than any other beverage) acai quickly became coveted the world over when producers figured out how to freeze the pulp. Soon it wound up in juices, energy drinks and beauty products in the U.S.

But Reum says acai is renewable in that it grows like a weed, and his company has taken pains to be an impeccably responsible exporter, including a $1 donation per bottle sold to rainforest preservation.

The 80-proof liquor defies categorization. A clear elixir, it smells a little like very ripe grapefruit, is smoother than most tequilas and mixes beautifully with anything rum does, from odd fresh fruit juices -- including watermelon, mango and pomegranate, or any combination thereof -- to guarana soda, a favorite in Brazil.

But it also dances deftly on the rocks with a squeeze of lemon, something that can't be said for some of the best white spirits that have been on the market for generations.

If there's a catch -- and there has to be a catch, right? -- it's that Veev is not actually distilled from the berries it puts forth as its calling card. Instead, the frozen pulp is shipped to a distillery in eastern Idaho, where it's infused into a neutral, winter-wheat based grain alcohol.

And there's a reason for that.

"When you harvest them in the rainforest, within 24 hours you have to do something with it, or it starts to go bad," Reum said.

Unfortunately for those of us who don't take regular surfing trips to Rio, "you will never see an acai berry at the market."

Nor, after thousands of years of trial-and-error fermentation and subsequent market research, will you probably ever see any truly new liquor under the sun.

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RAINFOREST ON THE ROCKS

To make watermelon juice, puree about 1 cup of cut watermelon in a blender, then pour the puree through a mesh strainer. Use the back of a spoon to press the pulp to extract all the juice. This recipe was made with a yellow watermelon variety, producing a beautiful, sunny cocktail, but any color or variety would work.

Start to finish: 10 minutes

Servings: 1

Ice cubes

2 ounces Veev liqueur

1 1/2 ounces watermelon juice

4 sprigs fresh mint

Club soda

Fill a tall glass with ice cubes.

In a cocktail shaker, combine the liqueur, watermelon juice and mint. Shake, then strain into the glass. Top the glass with club soda. If desired, garnish the glass with additional mint sprigs.

(Recipe from http://www.veevlife.com)

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Sip columnist Josh L. Dickey can be e-mailed at jdickey(at)ap.org

AP-WS-08-29-08 1339EDT

Twenty-two years later, this 1986 teen comedy, scripted by John Hughes, stands up in most ways and falls down in others. James Spader is quite good as a sleaze.

Molly Ringwald is radiant and makes one wonder why a big film career as an adult never followed. Andrew McCarthy seems to be imitating Steve in "Sex and the City," except there was no "Sex and the City" in 1986.

The movie is about a poor girl and a rich boy who get together, but the social environment at their high school makes their romance difficult. The temptation might be to call the film unrealistic, but more than two decades later, precisely the same kind of romance could be found in the documentary "American Teen," with identical character types and issues.

The main problem with "Pretty in Pink" today is simply that the entire section involving Jon Cryer, as Ringwald's pompadour-wearing best friend, is excruciating to watch. It must have been equally excruciating to perform.

Basically, anytime Cryer is onscreen, the story ceases to advance. He is there as comic relief only -- or comic filler -- but there's nothing funny about either the role or the performance. Still, there's a really good, perceptive 50-minute teen-age story buried in this 96-minute movie. And a pretty good time capsule, besides.

-- Mick LaSalle

Great chilies are defined by the intensity of their flavor.

Usually, this is supplied by the seasonings and hot peppers that give chili its savory notes and sharp kick. But there is another, and frequently overlooked, source of upping the intensity -- the meat.

Of course, only meats that have an oomph all their own can take a chili to the next level. Sausage, for example, is a fine choice. As is richly smoky, wonderfully chewy beef jerky.

For the weeknight cook, jerky offers another benefit. Unlike virtually any other meat choice, jerky is already cooked. A short simmer is all it needs to tenderize and permeate the other ingredients with its flavor.

For a truly intense chili, this recipe pairs jerky with seasonings that are bloomed (heated) in oil before other ingredients are added. And don't confuse intensity with pure heat -- we're talking mouth-puckering flavor, of which heat is just one element.

The blooming produces flavors similar to those developed during a long simmer, but in a fraction of the time.

When selecting jerky for this recipe, find one that is tender, meaty and with a flavor you enjoy. Something smoky is nice. The jerky then is chopped in a food processor before being added to the chili.

If your jerky comes in large strips, you may need to cut it into smaller pieces before using the food processor.

Because beef jerky tends to be loaded with sodium, this recipe calls for low- or no-sodium canned tomatoes. Be sure to taste the finished chili before seasoning with any salt; you may find the jerky provides enough.

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JERKY CHILI

Start to finish: 30 minutes

Servings: 6

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 medium yellow onion, diced

1 teaspoon cumin

1 teaspoon dried oregano

1 teaspoon smoked paprika

1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper

1 tablespoon minced jarred jalapeno pepper slices (more or less to taste)

1 pound beef jerky (if large, cut into 1-inch chunks)

14-ounce can kidney beans, drained and rinsed

28-ounce can low-sodium crushed tomatoes

14-ounce can low-sodium tomato puree

In a large saucepan, heat the olive oil over medium-high. Add the onion, cumin, oregano, paprika, black pepper and jalapenos. Saute for 5 minutes, or until the onion is very tender.

Meanwhile, place the jerky in a food processor and pulse until well chopped. Add the jerky to the pan and saute for 3 minutes. Add the beans, diced tomatoes and tomato puree, then bring to a simmer.

Cover the pan, reduce heat to low and simmer for 15 minutes, or until the jerky is tender.

Nutrition information per serving (values are rounded to the nearest whole number): 466 calories; 223 calories from fat; 25 g fat (9 g saturated; 0 g trans fats); 36 mg cholesterol; 30 g carbohydrate; 31 g protein; 7 g fiber; 1,773 mg sodium.

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EDITOR'S NOTE: J.M. Hirsch can be e-mailed at jhirsch(at)ap.org.

AP-WS-08-29-08 1154EDT

There is no substitute when Nintendo pumps out a Mario-themed sports game, where average gamers and younger kids can all pick up a controller and have fun without all the sim-related minutiae that would be overwhelming and burdensome. There is no substitute, in this case, except for perhaps a better game.

This is not to say that "Super Mario Sluggers" is a total dunce, because it is not. But it certainly lacks the flair and pizzazz that previous "Super Mario" sports titles have had. The main reason might be from the Wii's overwhelming desire to be appealing to mass audiences. While this notion has been the driver of the Wii's overall success in gaming, the fear is that it will eventually drive all its games to be bland and working too hard to satisfy too many, which certainly is the case here.

The controls are easy to grasp. If you've played any of the numerous baseball games for the Wii, this won't take long to figure out. Some typical Marioesque tricks and style points have been added. Using weapons in the outfield a la "Mario Kart" and having teams built around characters with different strengths and weaknesses a la "Super Strikers" are present here, among others you will recognize quickly.

Yet beyond the staples you come to expect, there is very little new or exciting. The baseball is just OK. Hitting and fielding work just fine, but pitching can be a tad difficult, especially when you are playing alone and the camera is in a non-traditional location. Also, the graphics are shockingly poor. Maybe knowing how amazing "Mario" games can be causes you to end up getting the blahs when watching "Sluggers" play out.

You certainly would not be judged poorly by going out and buying "Super Mario Sluggers." You should just know going in that it won't be the full-fledged "Mario" experience you have come to enjoy.

"Tales of Vesperia"

Platform: Xbox 360

Genre: Role-Playing

Publisher: Bandai Namco Games

ESRB Rating: T, for Teen

Grade: 4 stars

It took all of nine months to arrive, but I can clearly say that "Tales of Vesperia" is the first RPG of the year that actually had me coming back for more -- and easily ranks as the best RPG on the Xbox 360 in 2008. Well, at least until the monster holiday season of games starts rolling out.

Visually the game is stunning, with vivid colors, engaging animations that have you constantly glued to the screen and a distinctive, odd assortment of characters and creatures. And it has an easy control system and equally understandable upgrade mechanic that should not be hard to learn.

The visuals are helped along by the story, which while not wholly original in nature (a basic good-vs.-evil tale with friendships and loyalty tested along the way) is still entertaining.

Another aspect that makes this game so enjoyable is how battles are handled. You really control only one character while (thankfully) the AI handles the other three in your group and does an admirable job of fighting off enemies. The controls amount to little more than button-mashing, which is disappointing over the long term, but it is not enough to drag down the overall experience.

Pick up this game and play it. It's just too good to avoid.

(E-mail Chris Campbell at game -- on -- games(at)mac.com.)

SHNS

AP-NY-09-02-08 1756EDT

Wildflowers are among Nature's greatest gifts, and yet they can be the most difficult plants to grow in gardens. The problem is that we aren't observing nature. We try to impose our own ideas of when and how to plant them.

In the wild, the life cycle of wildflowers shows us what to do. When the flowers go to seed at the end of the season, the dry winds of fall scatter their seeds far and wide.

The seeds become lodged in nooks and crannies in the soil where they winter over until spring conditions are perfect for germination. These seeds may form roots very early, long before we'd ever think of going out to sow them into cold ground. By the time tiny green shoots appear, they are already burrowing down deep into the soil to find moisture that will feed the growing plant all summer long.

We make the mistake of sowing our wildflower seeds in the early days of spring as soon as the gardening urge strikes us. But, in many cases, this is too late, and the seeds will take weeks before roots are well-established. By that time, wild fall-sown relatives of the same species are already forming buds. It's easy to see why Nature's seed blooms earlier, and if we follow her example our wildflower gardens will be equally as early and prodigious as hers.

There are other benefits to fall sowing as well.

First off, you aren't as busy in the fall garden so there's more time to spend with the wildflower soil preparation. The weather is more stable at this time, too, and the soil not so muddy. Your new seedlings will be timed to take full advantage of the spring rains.

The task of sowing fall wildflowers can be piggybacked onto fall bulb-planting efforts. In fact, wildflowers make a fine cover crop for spring bulb beds. The combination of certain wildflowers with carefully chosen bulbs can produce a unique look.

To get started with wildflowers at your homesite, select a seed mix designated for your region. This is important because you want the most locally adapted seed you can get.

American Meadows offers specially blended wildflower seed mixes online at www.americanmeadows.com. The site offers a wealth of knowledge, with step-by-step instructions for proper wildflower planting. The company sells seed mixes for the Northeast, Southeast, Midwest, Southwest, Far West and the Pacific Northwest.

The Northeast mixture, for example, features 26 different wildflowers adapted to that region, which takes the guesswork out of selection. However, these are not all native wildflowers of the Northeastern states, but a collection of those from North America and Europe that grow well there.

For a more regional approach, check out American Meadows' all-native mixes. These are for the purist who would like to grow only those plants indigenous to his or her local region. These wildflowers are more likely to persist and hopefully naturalize, because they are naturally pest- and disease-resistant.

Keep in mind that not all the seeds germinate. Some are gobbled by birds, drowned in puddles or fall on hard ground. Therefore, it's important to sow at the recommended rate, or even more densely than indicated on the American Meadows Web site for that mix.

For example, 1/4 pound of all-native seeds will cover 500 to 100 square feet, so order accordingly.

Wildflower gardening is a perfect way to make your yard a green haven for wildlife and outdoor living. That is, if you follow Mother Nature's example and, like her, sow your seed in the fall.

(Maureen Gilmer is a horticulturist and former host of "Weekend Gardening" on DIY Network. Her blog, the MoZone, offers a groundbreaking series of great ideas for cash-strapped families to live more richly on less. Read the blog at www.MoPlants.com/blog. E-mail her at mogilmer(at)yahoo.com.)

SHNS

AP-NY-09-01-08 1647EDT

"TRUE BLOOD"

Sunday, HBO

-- "True Blood" (HBO, Sept. 7). Brooding, brawling, campy and hot-blooded, this horror-romance imagines a live-and-let-live breakthrough in a small Louisiana town. Now vampires can buy synthetic blood to quench their thirst, therefore keeping their fangs out of humans. Does that mean ordinary folks will accept vampires as their equals? Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin) is ready to, especially when the first vampire she has ever met (handsome Stephen Moyer) moves into town. Of course, Sookie isn't so ordinary: She is cursed with the ability to overhear what people are thinking. But not this vampire, she finds to her relief. Looks like she and her fellow oddball are an item. Then things get weird.