I enjoyed John Vaillant's new THE TIGER: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival (Knopf, $26.95) so much so that I spent an hour after I finished reading it going on Googlemaps to see satellite views of this wooded region in northeast Russia where man and tigers coexist on an edgy basis. Vaillant successfully manages to create a suspenseful tale of the hunted and the hunter - filled with the tension of love and revenge between man and beast. Like the best of mystery authors, he spices his tale with a lot of miscellaneous but fascinating information about not only tigers, but also the many colorful woodsmen who co-inhabit the region, anthropology, archeology, and the scrapping together of a life in post-Perestroika Russia. This is one of those special books that pull you in and keep you turning the pages reading about something you never thought you would possibly be interested in. - Barbara Meade