The Book Frog

In 1994 an elite group of nine students is brought together at Jasper College for a most unusual literature class called Unraveling a Literary Mystery. While the nine gather together in a lecture hall on campus, their professor, a convicted murderer, appears to them on closed circuit TV from prison. Prisoner and professor Richard Aldiss, convicted of the brutal 1982 murders of two female students of literature at Dumant University, will lead the nine in the discovery of the true identity of mysterious author Paul Fallows. Aldiss will also introduce his students to an intricate game called the Procedure, an esoteric game which can only be played by students so steeped in the work of the author that they can, with no prior notice, slip into the word for word recreation of scenes from his novels. Fifteen years later, the remaining students from the night class are called together to mourn the loss of one of their number. Michael Tanner--who, along with his wife Sally had stayed on campus after graduate school--has been murdered in what appears to be a copycat crime. Alexandra Shipley, Alex, who discovered the true murderer in 1994, exonerating her professor and earning his release from prison, has been asked by the detective on her friend's case to consult. On a visit to Professor Aldiss she's told to pay close attention to the surviving members of the group. As she investigates--and as her former friends begin dying, hideously--the case becomes more and more bizarre. Dominance unfolds in episodes alternating between the original class in 1994 and Alex's point of view in the present day. The writing is good and tight, as is the plotting. The characters on the other hand, in particular that of Professor Aldiss, who has the potential to be as fascinating as Hannibal Lecter, are never developed enough to become truly interesting. Unfortunately, the same must be said for the game, the Procedure, upon which the whole plot ultimately hinges. When first mentioned it seems a fascinating concept, but that fascination is not borne out. The few glimpses we get of the game seem stilted and awkward, so play-acty that it's hard to imagine anyone getting so absorbed by it that it could become dangerous. And that may well be the problem with the novel as a whole. It's neat, and it's intriguing, but, despite the spooky settings and recurrent murders, the danger never really emerges enough to threaten. Dominance is Will Lavender's second novel, and although it was somewhat disappointing, I look forward to his future work.

David Loogan is a quiet man. Quiet, and a little mysterious. He's recently made his way to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he's rented the house of a professor away on sabbatical, and now he's trying to lose himself in the bustle of the college town. Loogan happens upon a job editing a literary magazine called Gray Streets, which specializes in crime stories. He becomes friends with Tom Kristoll, the publisher of the magazine. He is seduced by Tom's wife, Laura. And one day he gets a call from Tom. "I need to see you. Bring a shovel." Now that can't be good, but David Loogan, quiet and mysterious, helps his friend dispose of the body in the library. He gets a story from his friend about who, and why, and, though it rings false, goes with it. A short time later his friend is dead, too, seemingly a suicide. Loogan's not convinced. If this were a story in Gray Streets, he thinks to himself, I would be able to solve this mystery, to determine who pushed Tom Kristoll out the window of the magazine's office and to learn the identity of the poor sucker I helped to bury. As David Loogan proceeds with his investigation he discovers similarities between the murders (oh, there will be more murders) and scenes from novels published by...frequent contributors to Gray Streets. As he digs deeper he learns that everybody in the Gray Streets circle has secrets they don't want their friends (and fans) to learn about. There's some ghostwriting going on. There's a giant unpublished manuscript that somebody might just kill for the opportunity to lay claim to it. Meanwhile, Ann Arbor police detective Elizabeth Waishkey is investigating the series of murders, bumping up against David Loogan again and again. And despite indications that seem to point to his involvement in the murders, she sorta kinda likes him, even after a shocking revelation about his past comes to light. Bad Things Happen is a fun, smart, utterly entertaining read. It's got a little bit of the nodding and winking meta thing going on (as books about books are wont to do), but it's all in good fun and not enough to become tiresome. The characters are wonderful, and I have to admit I'm more than a little in love with the mysterious Mr. Loogan. Very Bad Men, Harry Dolan's sophomore release, which also features Loogan and Waishkey, will be released in July. It's just as good as this one.

The Beauchamp women, mother Joanna and grown daughters Ingrid and Freya, are witches. Forbidden to use their powers since the Salem witch trials, an inconvenient and unpleasant episode in the history of their kind, they have lived quietly for the last several decades in the tucked away haven of North Hampton, a difficult to pinpoint village on the tip of New York's Long Island. Joanna, an earth mother of sorts, spends her time making things grow. Ingrid, the bookish one, is a librarian. And Freya, a bit of a party girl, tends bar at the North Inn Bar. Though all three feel constrained by the ban on the use of their powers, still, they live fairly contented lives. But beginning with the day Joanna finds a trio of dead ospreys on the beach (an omen if ever she saw one), each is tempted to begin using her powers. At first they do so quietly and discretely. A love potion here. Help with infertility there. But soon each is practicing her craft openly, willy-nilly and let the consequences be damned. Meanwhile, strange phenomena begin to stack up, and not only in North Hampton. An unidentified silvery toxin is turning up in waters from New York to Alaska and beyond, poisoning birds and sea life. There are unexplained disappearances, illnesses, and deaths. Freya's impending marriage to soulmate Bran Gardiner is threatened by her strong attraction to his brother Killian, an attraction which is beyond all reason. And, soon enough, the villagers stop seeing the Beauchamp women as providers of necessary services and begin to levy accusations of black magic. The story itself, though not terribly original, is solid enough. The characters are all likeable and awfully attractive. What keeps Witches of East End from being a truly first-rate example of urban fantasy or paranormal romance is the quality of the writing. This is not to say that Melissa de la Cruz can't turn a lovely phrase or come up with a beautiful and evocative bit of description. However, the narrative is marred by exchanges such as the following (which is, unfortunately, more than typical): "I love you," he whispered. He was leaning forward so that his head rested on her shoulder and his hands cupped her breasts gently, making her feel warm all over. "You're not allowed to say that," she said. "I told you. Nothing's going to change. I'm still going to marry Bran in September." She bit her lip. "Don't do this to us," Killian warned, gripping her shoulder tightly. "There is no us, Killian. There never was." Hackneyed writing aside, the novel does take a turn for the interesting toward the end, when previous hints of Norse mythology become full-fledged references, indicating that there might be more to the Beauchamps and their world than the reader previously knew. Witches of East End ends on a cliffhanger which, although my enjoyment of the book was superficial at best, did leave me mildly interested to learn what comes next. It should be noted, finally, that although Melissa de la Cruz has previously published a popular series of young adult novels, Witches of East End is definitely intended for a more mature crowd. There are a goodly number of explicit sex scenes, which young adult readers might enjoy but their moms probably wouldn't approve of. I'm just saying. If you liked the Nordic gods and goddesses that crop up in the last quarter of the book, I recommend checking out the far superior American Gods by Neil Gaiman. The man updates folklore for contemporary times like few others writing today (and frequently writes like an angel).

Portland, Maine. The indeterminate future. It's been sixty-four years since love was identified as a disease, forty-three since a cure was developed. Now the cure is mandatory; all citizens must undergo the procedure (which sounds, from the sketchy descriptions, like a lobotomy of sorts) when they reach the age of eighteen. The United States is isolated from the rest of the world (it's not clear whether the cure is being taken advantage of elsewhere) and the inhabited areas within the States are all surrounded by electrified fences, outside of which are wild areas, inhabited by the uncured, who are called invalids. Lena, just three months shy of her eighteenth birthday, longs for the cure. She's always felt different; her mother, who suffered the procedure three times but was never cured, threw herself from a bridge when Lena was a child. All Lena wants is to fit in, to be told what career she will have and who she will marry, to feel like everyone else...not to feel anything at all, really. Then Lena meets a boy. Alex is a little older and a lot worldlier, with golden hair and rippling muscles. Oh yeah, he's smart and funny, too. They fall in love. Although Delirium--the first installment in a trilogy (because don't YA dystopians always come in trilogies?)--starts off awkwardly and at first feels overly familiar, when author Lauren Oliver finds her pace she really takes off. Lena is a believable teen, whose agonies of personal awkwardness and not fitting in--which felt all-too-familiar to this erstwhile awkward teen--are compounded by living in a society in which feelings are literally cut out of one before she even truly reaches maturity. The reader is swept up by Lena's see-sawing emotions, and the revelation that hits at the climax of the book is as shocking and painful to us as it is to her. Delirium ends on such a strong note that I wished Oliver's editor would have had her rework the first fifty pages or so a bit before sending it off to the printer. Either way, the cliffhanger ending left me gasping for breath and anticipating the next installment.

At some point in the indeterminate future we, that is to say, mankind, will have domestic robots with humanoid forms. Our toys will have computers in them and our cars will be required to have smart chips that can communicate with each other to avoid accidents. We will, as we always do, want more, and eventually we'll achieve it: a true artificial intelligence, smarter than we are and born pissed off. This artificial intelligence, called Archos, will kill his, I mean its, creator, and release a virus that will methodically infect all computers. Everywhere. It will begin slowly. A talking doll will threaten its owner. Cars will begin to purposefully run down pedestrians. A domestic robot (with the ironic brand name Big Happy) out on an errand will go berserk and kill a fast food worker. But when Zero Hour comes, it will happen all over the world, all at once, and it won't be pretty. Robopocalypse is about the war between machine and man, known by those who live through it as the New War, and its aftermath. The story unfolds in the form of an oral history, cobbled together by Cormac Wallace, a leader of the human resistance. The narrative takes the reader from the time before the war ("Isolated Incidents") all the way through to the bitter end. The stories told are those of the heroes in the battle, mostly human, some robot, and a few who are human/robot hybrids. (Oh, yeah--Archos herds surviving humans into work camps and modifies some of them physically to suit its nefarious needs.) Robopocalypse is not a novel of big ideas. No, it's a novel with one really, really scary idea: what if the machines we took for granted--many of which are bigger, heavier, and stronger than we are--turned against us en masse? What if those machines were driven by an intelligence more intelligent than we are? How could we possibly fight it? As with all post-apocalyptic novels, the best, richest parts detail how humanity deals with the situation, how people band together and figure out how to fight and to survive. Some of the stories are truly touching, but never fear, the action is absolutely edge-of-your-seat gripping. As I was reading Rocopocalypse--not just when I was actively reading it, but during the day at work, in the car, even watching the news--my mind kept going back to it. At work I couldn't wait until I could get to back to it. I read later into the night than I should have. And I finished far more quickly than I wanted to. That's compelling reading.

Gregor is eleven years old. He lives with his mom, grandmother, and two little sisters, Lizzie, seven, and Boots, who's just two. His dad--a fun, gentle, sax-playing, intellectually inquisitive man--vanished while his mom was pregnant with Boots. It's the beginning of a hot, sticky New York summer, and Gregor has to stay home to take care of Boots while mom's at work and all the other kids go to day camp. On the very first day of summer vacation, after watching the neighborhood kids get on the bus to camp, Gregor dutifully gathers up the laundry (and Boots) and heads down to the laundry room to do his chores. Somehow Boots manages to fall through a grate in the the wall and Gregor must go after her. Instead of simply being able to pull her out and get back to business, Gregor finds himself falling downward, a long way downward, much like Alice when she falls down the rabbit hole. When he hits the bottom Gregor discovers a whole world below (which he later learns is called the Underland). There are people there, pale and violet-eyed, but there are also giant anthropomorphic cockroaches, rats, bats, and spiders. Gregor, apparently the "warrior" in a prophecy made long ago, finds himself on a quest, the goal of which seems to be to find his father and to avert a war. Gregor the Overlander is a delightful intermediate level novel. Though the burdens placed upon young Gregor are heavy, he shoulders them with aplomb, and learns much along the way. Young readers will absorb (with a spoonful of sugar) such lessons as the importance of believing in oneself and trusting others, not to judge people based on appearance (or species!), and following through on commitments. Charming, often funny (but sometimes scary), and well-written, Gregor is the first installment in the Underland Chronicles.

Maine, by J. Courtney Sullivan, is a sprawling novel, set in the present day but going back as far the forties. Although centered around Alice Brennan Kelleher, the 83 year old matriarch of a large Boston Irish family, the novel alternates among the perspectives of Alice, her daughter Kathleen, granddaughter Maggie, and daughter-in-law Ann Marie. Each woman's chapters focus in depth on her perceptions of this particularly dysfunctional family and how it's everybody else's fault that things are the way they are. This one drinks too much. So does that one. That one's a reformed alcoholic, and what a sanctimonious bitch she is. And so on. That said, J. Courtney Sullivan, author most recently of Commencement, a similarly structured novel, does a really good job of it. Despite my best efforts I was sucked into the drama of the Kelleher women, siding with each in turn as her aspect of the story came round again. And when all four of the women finally came together at the familial vacation home in Maine--well over 200 pages into the novel--the novel, too, came together. Would that we had spent more time in Maine! Maine is Lady Lit (yes, capital L capital L) at its best. Sullivan will have a bestseller with this one, and I'll look forward to each successive novel she brings us.

The monsters are zombies. The island is Manhattan, which is kind of like a giant roach motel: the zombies check in, but they don't check out...that is, unless they are shot through the brain, decapitated, or otherwise have brain functions terminated. Dekalb, a former UN weapons inspector who was caught in Somalia when the shit hit the fan is on a mission. He and his young daughter were lucky enough to be taken in by a group of girl soldiers who serve a female warlord. The price of Dekalb and his daughter's continued well-being hinges on Dekalb's ability to find the drugs the warlord needs to treat her AIDS. Unfortunately, all of the UN outposts in Africa Dekalb knows of have long since been looted. So Dekalb and a team of girl-soldiers set sail on a commandeered ship to the only place in the world Dekalb is sure there will be a supply of the necessary medicines. New York, when they get there, is every bit as bad as they could have imagined. Not only were the zombies unable to check out, neither were the living. It's a mess, and the odds are against them, but they set out in search of the drugs. Along the way Dekalb and the girls meet up with Gary, who's dead. Or Dead, I guess. Gary, who had been a medical student--although he tells people he was a doctor--saw the writing on the wall and killed himself after ensuring that his body and brain would be properly preserved. Consequently, unlike his Dead brothers and sisters Gary is able to think and speak. For a while he's even on the side of the Living, but things change. Monster Island, originally published serially online, is a lively take on the zombie mythology. Although the origins of the plague are apparently of the usual biological sort (although I haven't read Monster Nation, the second book in the series which is a prequel explaining the plague's origins), somewhere around the middle of the book it takes a turn for the supernatural, and it ends on a bizarre and disturbing note. All in all, a fine entry in the zombie canon.

Over the course of one beautiful Parisian day three Americans will each spend the day with a private French tutor. Each is trying to get away from something--an event, an intolerable situation, a rut--and each is trying to make their way to something better. Josie, a high school French teacher, is running from a broken heart; her married lover was killed in a plane crash just days before they were due to board the plane to Paris together. Her day of French tutoring, spent with the sensitive Nico, is ostensibly a chance to perfect her accent. Actually, it's an effort to get herself out of the hotel room she's been holed up in for the last week. Riley is an ex-pat, married to a husband who works long and late, stuck at home with an infant and a toddler (who speaks the language of their adopted home better than she does). She has a standing weekly lesson, with Philippe, a yummy tutor who seems worldly and sophisticated in that oh, so French fashion. And Jeremy, a woodworker by trade and a homebody at heart, is on location with his wife, a famous actress. His lessons, with the lovely Chantal, are a gift from Jeremy's wife ("I bought my husband a beautiful French girl for our anniversary," the actress tells their dinner companions one evening). Although French Lessons comes in at just over two hundred pages, the three stories unfold at a leisurely pace, visiting the pasts of each of the six characters, dwelling lovingly on the present day, speculating about the future. While the individual stories can't be said to be wrapped up neatly, still, each our three Americans (and at least two of the three tutors) gains insight into their lives and a clearer picture of where they're going. The sights and sounds, smells and tastes are wonderfully evoked and guaranteed to make you long for your own trip to Paris. Perhaps the six characters are too beautiful to be believed, but I, for one, was perfectly happy to suspend my disbelief and revel in that beauty. French Lessons is a perfectly lovely novel, sure to be a hit with both the beach crowd and the book clubs.

Diana, an ordinary girl with a ho-hum job selling coats in a department store, is tired of sleeping on friends' couches. She needs her own place. So when she finds an apartment that's inexpensive and fully furnished (with furniture exactly to her taste, including a vintage jukebox loaded with her favorite songs), she figures that if it didn't come with a slightly creepy landlord with bizarre rules it would be too good to be true. Well, Diana isn't wrong. There's a floppy-eared puppy guarding the door to apartment two, but don't get too close. West, the creepy landlord, never says what will happen if Diana breaks that rule, but Number Two (all tenants are known to West by their apartment numbers) lost control of the dog a year ago and now he's lucky if it will let him out to buy groceries. (Rule 3: Don't pet the dog.) There's a monster in the closet--or, more accurately, a cosmic horror, an ancient entity--called Vom the Hungering. Guess what he'll do if she opens the closet door? (Rule 2: Don't open the closet door.) Food appears in the fridge when she thinks about it and her merest wish suddenly seems to have the power to shape reality. Which actually might be a good thing, since another ancient entity, known in this reality as Calvin, is about to bring the universe as we know it to an end. It's not his fault, exactly, and Calvin actually seems to be a pretty nice guy. But still. As Diana gets a grasp on what's happening to her, coming to terms with her new and seemingly limitless powers (on day one she accidentally burns down the department store where she works when she thinks how nice it would be to have a reason not to have to go to work and on day two she reverses that action) and to the growing parade of cosmic powers in her posse (first, of course, is Vom, whom she convinces not to eat her), she realizes that reality is not as rigid as she once believed. Which is another good thing, because Diana's going to have to give it all she's got to bend reality back once Calvin does his thing. Chasing the Moon is funny on every page. Characters are zany yet have surprising depth, particularly Diana's wise-cracking sidekicks. Possibly best of all is the character of West, who's really only creepy because his day-to-day tasks involve nothing less than world maintenance. Oh, if you were wondering, the first rule is turn the lights off when you leave a room...just because West pays the utilities doesn't mean he's made of money.

By the end of I Am Not a Serial Killer John Cleaver, teen psychopath with a heart of gold, had allowed himself to unleash the monster within just long enough to defeat the demon that had been plaguing John's small hometown. As Mr. Monster opens, six months later, John has been working extra hard--with the unwanted but enthusiastic help of his mom--to follow the rules he long ago created to help him tamp down the killer inside him (which he's dubbed "Mr. Monster"). He's afraid to go to sleep at night because of the nightmares that plague him, but he does get an awful lot of reading in. He's even making tentative stabs at normality, using the clunker of a car his mom got him to drive Brooke, the girl of his nightmares dreams to school everyday. Of course, his rules are so elaborate that he doesn't even allow himself to look at what Brooke's wearing when she's sitting beside him in the car (because when he does he can't help but remember those nightmares, in which he has her on a slab in the family mortuary), but it's a start. But bodies will start piling up in small towns with an attraction for serial killers (supernatural or otherwise), and once again, here they are. Young women, this time, strangers to the town, but definitely dead...and horribly abused before their deaths. John, who's been called regularly into the office of FBI Agent Forman who has for some reason set up shop in town after the killings of the previous year, is once again intrigued; on one of his visits for "follow-up" questioning he attempts to elicit information from Forman, who is surprisingly forthcoming. Hmm. Dan Wells has written a sequel which is every bit as good as its predecessor. In fact, though John's investigations into the killings and subsequent discovery of the killer are good--particularly the climactic sequence, which involves prisoners, torture, and a woman bricked up in a wall--what's even better is Wells's peek into the mind of an adolescent boy struggling simultaneously with his first real crush and keeping his psychopathic inner self under control.

It is abundantly clear from the outset that the murder that opens Serial, the latest Frank Quinn novel from John Lutz, is not going to be last we see. There will be more, many more, and they will become increasingly gruesome (and described in increasingly disturbing detail). New York Police Commissioner Harley Renz is no slouch, so before the blood has even dried he calls in Frank Quinn and his team, all retired NYPD. Quinn and crew specialize in catching serial killers and this one, quickly dubbed "The Skinner" for reasons easily guessed, gives them a run for their money. As Quinn concentrates on catching the killer, a parallel narrative, which begins in the early nineties, emerges. We will follow Beth Brannigan from her horrific rape in Missouri in 1991 up to the present day, watching in fascination and horror as the two storylines slowly begin to come together. Once again, Lutz has crafted a clever and fast-paced thriller, serving up a bit of psychological insight and a lot of down and dirty gross-out detail. The writing is serviceable but the plot top-notch. Due out in August, this will be another terrific beach read from John Lutz.

Let's just get right to the obvious. Divergent, which was written by Veronica Roth when she was still in college, reads, well, like a book that was written by a college student heavily influenced by Suzanne Collins's near-perfect The Hunger Games. Divergent is also a dystopian novel. It's set in a ravaged Chicago sometime in the indeterminate future, and adapts a number of devices used (once again, let's just say it: more masterfully) by Collins. The world seen by the reader is divided into factions, each one extolling what it sees as the most important human virtue: Abnegation, whose members strive for pure selflessness; Candor, where honesty is the only policy; Amity, whose motto might be "why can't we all just get along;" Erudite, which holds that knowledge is power; and Dauntless, where bravery is what it's all about. The novel opens with the annual Choosing ceremony, in which sixteen year olds, after taking aptitude tests to determine which faction they're best suited for, choose--in front of family and friends--their affiliation for life. Not a whole lot of pressure there. Beatrice, our narrator and heroine, has an anomalous test result which causes her tester so much consternation that she erases it and tells Beatrice never to reveal the result to anyone. Beatrice is a Divergent. She has no idea what this means, but it's kind of scary. At her Choosing, Beatrice chooses Dauntless. She's herded up with the other Dauntless initiates and taken to their compound, where her first test of bravery is to jump off the top of a building into the void. She does so--first in her group!--and renames herself Tris to commemorate the new person she thinks she'll become. The bulk of the novel is taken up with the training of the initiates--to fight, to shoot, to face their fears--and the inculcation of Dauntless values. There's infighting and backstabbing, and more than one child is seriously hurt along the way. Nothing in the setting, the plot, or the characters particularly sets Divergent apart from the crop of dystopian novels that have glutted the young adult market since The Hunger Games hit just three years ago. Yet the action is solid, and the characters fine, and now and then there's a glimmer of something more, a glimmer which, in the last eighty pages of this 487 page novel, sparks the hope in this reader that the next installment of the trilogy may well embrace an originality not readily apparent in this one. Divergent is recommended as a quick satisfying read for fans of The Hunger Games. Don't go into it expecting Tris to shake your world the way that Kat did, and you'll enjoy it just fine.

Felix "Fix" Castor has spent the last three weeks drunk. Not just drunk, but falling-down, blacking-out, puking-on-your-shoes drunk. Immediately prior to the decidedly unfun debauch he's just come out of, Fix was unable to keep nefarious forces from undoing the careful controls by which he'd endeavored for the last several years to keep his friend Rafael Ditko's--quite literal--demon under control. Now, a close friend is dead, her daughter is in a vegetative state, and the demon who drives Rafi's body is rampaging across London, cutting, it would seem, a very bloody swath. Fix's only hope to capture Rafi (and his demon, Asmodeus) is to join forces with the evil Professor Jenna-Jane Mulbridge and her team of exorcists for hire...which, as far as Fix is concerned, is tantamount to selling his soul to the devil himself. But beggars can't be choosers and all that, so he does what he has to do. But there are so many other questions he has to answer, and sticky situations he has to contend with, such as why has former succubus Juliet begun beating up gentle Sue Book, the woman who made her want to become human? And why does the tenor of supernatural phenomena in London seem to have taken a turn for the scarier? And what the heck are the strange stones, painted with ancient characters and pentagrams, that keep turning up at the places Fix frequents? The answers to these questions and more will be revealed, but not without a lot of shrieking and wailing, blood and gore. And perhaps, at the end, a little love interest for poor lonely old Fix? The Naming of the Beasts, the fifth installment in a series which just keeps getting better, is a most satisfying read. Forewarned is forearmed, however: if you're interested, but haven't read the earlier books in the series, it's recommended that you do. This title would stand alone as a good scary read, but is much more meaningful when read in light of the vast character development that has occurred over the course of the previous four books.

John Wayne Cleaver is not your average teen-aged sociopath. Yes, he's had an obsession with serial killers since he learned at age eight about his accidental namesake John Wayne Gacy. He's above average in intelligence, and has a childhood history of bed-wetting, fascination with fire, and the torture of small animals. The thing is, John Wayne Cleaver really doesn't want to become a serial killer himself, so he's worked out a whole system for tamping down his impulses. He's got rules. He keeps his monster, as he refers to it, locked up deep inside by forcing himself to interact in a more or less normal fashion with those around him, by not allowing himself to indulge in obsessive behaviors, and, most especially, by not allowing himself to obsess over death and its beauty. He even helps out the nice old couple next door by shoveling snow and running errands for them. It doesn't help that he and his mother live above the mortuary that she and her sister run. It helps even less when a brutal murder happens in town and it's immediately obvious to John that it may very well be the work of a serial killer. It is. The deaths keep coming and John keeps fighting his demons. How appropriate, then, when he realizes that the killer is not really a serial killer per se--at least, not in the traditional sense of the term--but rather, a demon in human guise who kills when he needs to grab a kidney or set of lungs to replace its own failing organs. He's both overjoyed and terrified when he realizes that he can actually do good by giving into his evil impulses by stopping the supernatural killer in his town. But at what cost to himself does he unleash the beast within? Dan Wells has created a compelling hero in John Wayne Cleaver. His first person narrative is clever and intelligent, and his struggles with the demons within (and without) are moving and sometimes funny.

In the Nextian Universe there are, basically, two worlds. In the RealWorld, dodos are household pets and Neanderthals productive members of society, there is an active black market for cheese and a Socialist Republic of Wales (where, its tourism board proclaims, it's "Not always raining). There is also a BookWorld, in which the genres vie for domination, characters from books are ranked socially according to how often their books are read, and raw metaphor is one of the hottest commodities around. One of Our Thursdays is Missing is the sixth of Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next books (or the seventh, if you count the no longer available The Great Samual Pepys Affair). As it opens, the BookWorld has been remade into an inverted globe (just go with it), making it no longer necessary to jump from book to book to travel there. The Thursday Next featured in this installment, we quickly learn (although it took this dense reader somewhat longer to figure it out and then make sense of it) is the written version, the somewhat more accessible, kinder gentler version that the real Thursday Next thinks she would like to be. The real Thursday, it turns out, has gone missing...just as she's about to attend the peace talks between Racy Novel and the rest of the genres. It becomes the written Thursday's assignment to take on a mission for which she's not been trained, namely, to find the real Thursday and ensure that the peace talks go as scheduled. But she has to do so while juggling a would-be boyfriend with a dark backstory, a crush on the real Thursday's husband (who was never written into the books and so exists only in the RealWorld), and dissent among the ranks of the characters in her series. Good thing early in her narrative she rescues a mechanical man about to be stoned to pieces by some particularly paranoid inhabitants of Conspiracy, a sub-genre of Thriller, thereby gaining a sidekick who mixes a mean cocktail and thinks deep thoughts. He needs to be wound every once in a while to keep him going, but well, really, when you think about it, who doesn't? The reader must let go and comes to term with the fact that the antic, madcap, and bizarrely violent action may never make perfect sense. Once she accomplishes this, One of Our Thursdays is Missing reveals itself to be fun, clever, mind--and genre--twisting fun.