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Never Have Your Dog Stuffed is not what one might expect of a celebrity memoir, not only because it is so very good but also because there is, you come to realize, so very little celebrity in it.

In addition to the principal stories mentioned above--Sidney's own story told twenty years hence, his short story, the novel within that story--other tales are slipped into the narrative--the reminiscences of various characters, stories told second-hand, Sidney's account of his courtship of his wife, delivered in footnotes.

Arrived at the victim's workplace, a secretive nuclear research facility in Switzerland, Langdon discovers that the Illuminati have more in store for the world than the assassination of a single scientist.

Rachel's involvement in the project, however, which requires observation of the find in situ, plunges her into a nightmarish race for survival after she and a small band of civilian scientists stumble upon certain irregularities in NASA's evidence.

In the brief interval between his deliberate self-imprisonment and his death, Sauniere constructs an elaborate cipher and, ingeniously, handpicks the individuals who will undertake its solution.

Thomas is directed to dig up the mouldering corpse and retrieve something from the dead woman's pocket.

This is a book that will fly by if you let it, its seductively short chapters flashing past in an adrenaline rush of reading.

Happily, that's just what's in store for the Pirate Captain and his shipful of variously monikered pirates--the scarf-wearing pirate, the pirate with an accordion, the ill-fated balding archeologist pirate--when they bump into Charles Darwin and his trained monkey Mr. Bobo in the South Pacific.

Li believes the crime is related to World War II-era germ warfare experimentation -- the Mengele-esque work of Japan's infamous Unit 731 -- conducted in part by Li's personal nemesis, Sato Matsushita.

But for the most part one is allowed to lose oneself in the reading, which very often means finding yourself alongside Wegener on the Greenlandic ice, behind a sledge in minus 30 or 40 or 50 degrees, the white underfoot difficult to distinguish from the white above the horizon.

And he learns too that though his family's house is ensconced behind the reassuring walls of a gated community -- his wife's idea -- he and his children are anything but safe.

Working with unprecedented fervor by day in order to fake his way in a position for which he is not qualified, Adam is forced to spend many of his nights prowling around the darkened headquarters of Trion, breaking into offices, scamming security guards, riffling through top secret files.

His expertise lands him a last-minute summons to the company's annual leadership retreat -- three days off the grid at a remote fishing lodge in British Columbia, team-building with a bunch of alpha male execs.

In the next 72 hours Toni will find that the situation is far worse than she initially supposed: the security system at Oxenford has been breached by the one person capable of defeating its safeguards, someone who now has access to a highly infectious, easily released disease with a survival rate of zero.

Readers will feel the threat too: there is something menacing about Jonah's behavior, despite that his actions are ostensibly innocent.

But what sets the book apart is the mood it sets--the languid air of a city in the tropics--and the philosophical, bibliophilic Espinosa, whose character emerges slowly, without fanfare, as the story progresses.

Their unconscious minds had sifted through enormous amounts of information--about the fire's behavior and sound, for example--and had spat out a conclusion -- the floor is about to collapse -- without their being aware of the thought process.

For myself, if I had highlighted the passages I most appreciated in the book my copy would be awash in vibrant yellow.

Gradually the pieces of Eric's life, related out of sequence, recombine to explain the mystery of his character: how a top student, a hero on the gridiron, a man whose innate goodness is plain to see -- despite the darker side that reveals itself when he drinks -- how such a man came only seven years after his high school triumphs to be squandering his life in a kind of hopeless holding pattern.

It's a place where nobody locks their doors (locking them would seem unneighborly), where people are defined not by their resumés but by their family ties.

He is confident enough in his planning that he uses his real name--rubbing his victims' noses in their impotence--and is unconcerned if they happen to have access to firearms.

It was instead a solemn event, and impossibly harsh strictures were laid on the spectators to guarantee their good behavior: anyone who rose from his seat during the fight was to be penalized by the loss of a hand; coughing was punishable by death.

In Keeping Watch, Allen's character and history are fully fleshed out, from the experiences in Vietnam that ineradicably imprinted themselves on him, to the mission he undertook after the War as a means of quelling his demons: Allen has spent more than 25 years applying his jungle survival skills to the task of rescuing abused children and wives from their abusers, usually by illicit means.

He eventually staggers up to a police car, covered himself in Rosie's blood and soaked in sweat, looking, he is uncomfortably aware, more like a man guilty of murder than a respectable citizen reporting a crime.

As Dr. Hill repeatedly insists, no two people committing sexually motivated homicides will derive satisfaction from the same complex of details--how their victims are bound, how they are tortured, how they are killed.

It is so well written, and the author's portrayal of Gabriel is so vivid, that readers will be hard-pressed to remember they're holding a piece of fiction in their hands.

Yet Pel might yet keep things under control at work--the requisite meetings with Chinese mafiosi, the disappeared colleagues, the nerve gas and would-be poltergeists--were his home life not so chaotic.

At the same time the diary records Lachlan's attempts to cope with normal life in the months following his wife's conviction -- the mothers at his daughter's day care center conspicuously friendly, an "elderly triumvirate" of relatives making a show of their support by coming to stay with him -- uninvited, unwelcome, and ultimately unhelpful.

We are made to understand early on in the story that some terrible event occurred--or rather, that the girls were responsible for something terrible happening--at the end of their senior year in high school, in 1988.

He establishes a set of ten rules for himself, "a simple skeleton of the well-ordered life for a feeble old man," by means of which he intends to live with some dignity until the end, and to approach death on something like his own terms.

Robson, indeed, has fleshed out her characters and explored their interlocking relationships--all of which are changed during the course of this story--more fully than most authors can in twice as many pages.

Roebuck, a man with the sexual appetite of a satyr, enjoys an amusing love-hate relationship with Sully, the product of a lifetime of acquaintance in a small town.

In the course of the book Hank is beset by the academic infighting that attends a university-wide budget crisis, by animal rights activists incensed by his on-air near strangling of a goose and his threat of further fowl play, and by his inability to produce satisfactory quantities of urine.

He describes the logistics of the operation--the uses to which the various rooms of the place were put--while trying to understand the nature of the Lifestyle: becoming emotionally attached to the people you have sex with is not the done thing, for example, yet people who are in it only for the sex are apparently frowned on as well.

One is transported in the reading to the verdant Maryland wilderness, loud with animal noises and buzzing insects, the overgrowth pressing in on the Washbrooks' modest home as if to reclaim it for the surrounding woods.

When his beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal died during childbirth in 1630, Shah Jahan, the emperor of Hindustan, ordered that a magnificent mausoleum be erected for her.

Eventually, the two threads of Smith's story meet, tragically, when the author is nine years old.

Scott Smith immerses his characters in this moral dilemma of a situation and lets us watch as the ostensibly reasonable plan they agree on leads inevitably, inexorably, to a string of tragic consequences.

There are no chapters in Scott Smith's book, just section breaks, which is probably just as well: turning the page to start a new chapter would just slow down your reading.

I should confess that I am half in love with Mr. Snicket, and I would pledge myself to him eternally were it not for a previous commitment of my own and Lemony's apparent devotion to the deceased Beatrice, to whom he dedicates each of his books (for example, "To Beatrice--darling, dearest, dead").

Among the first things Troost found worthy of thus chronicling after his arrival in Kiribati was his first blissful swim in the Pacific--all palm trees and booming surf and brilliant sun--an idyllic atmosphere that was marred by what Troost found waiting for him in the shallows when he waded back to shore: there, directly between the author and dry land, was a large pair of defecating human buttocks, whose owner soon took to wiping himself with twigs and casting aloft these feces-laden utensils on the outgoing tide...outgoing, that is, in the direction of our in-wading author.

Harriet finds Anne, this "strange new mistress-person" she's become, wholly changed from the woman she knew in New York, smothering under the demands of an oppressive relationship with her Victor, a fastidious, subtly abusive, toeless Auschwitz survivor.

In August of 1985, with rent coming due and having no way to pay it, York settled on the implausible scheme of raising the money by writing his autobiography.

He seamlessly weaves a handful of stories around the quotes--the author being slapped as a four-year-old for off-color humor and upstaged by a quarterback a decade later; picket lines and cigarette ads and Bert Convy's heroics.

She hadn't married Philip for love, but rather because that's what you did in late 19th-century London when a titled bachelor asked for your hand and if, like Emily, you were eager to escape a nagging, pedestrian mother.

Given orders in clandestine meetings by his otherwise nameless master, Control, Charlie undertakes thrilling, James Bond-worthy missions--and in his off hours satisfies his Bond-sized appetites.

It's hardly surprising that in adulthood Auslander has complicated relationships with both his family and God, the latter an angry entity who, much like Auslander's father, specializes in inconsistent and disproportionate punishments.

He could shake his head and blink his left eye, and he was able to spell out complex thoughts by blinking when an interlocutor, running a finger cross an alphabet board, pointed to the correct letter.

Sitting on the hard bench in his cell with time on his hands, Eric begins to explain how things fell apart for him, a tale whose roots go back to the day he met Colleen.

The couple's happy, nearly thirty-year marriage has been punctuated by Catherine's hospitalizations for depression, but when the story starts she has been out of the hospital for a year--taking her medicine and seeing a psychiatrist regularly.

Meanwhile, an assassin is dogging Becker's steps in Spain, an NSA employee may be in cahoots with the author of the code, and a zealous security guard is pushed to his death in the bowels of the super computer's housing.

They have lived together since in this desolate place where the sun dips below the horizon in November and isn't seen again until January, where temperatures range from a balmy 80 degrees to 50 below.

What is it about Josh Groban that can make middle-aged women act like teenagers squealing over a David Cassidy album cover?

In addition to urine-soaked manuscripts, there are recycled gravestones to read about, and near poisonous glasses of cider, and lyrical vomiting, and scheming Lords, and, everywhere, a bibliophile's revelry in old books.

Add water to a box of five-inch-tall frozen monsters and--as Anthony and Sarah, the sibling protagonists of Bruce Coville's The Monsters of Morley Manor discover--surprising things can happen.

He encounters there the eccentric, 72-year-old Jasper Hudnut, formerly an academic physicist, who is intrigued by a jet-ski-looking machine he finds stashed in the museum's basement.

Jenny and Lester reveal themselves to Tom in stages, in their behavior and in the stories they tell about themselves, though how much of what they say is deliberate falsehood and how much the product of misguided interpretation is open to debate.

More than likely, his body's been replicated cell by cell, down to almost the last detail, as part of an attempt by extra-terrestrial pod creatures to take over the earth.

Hours north of these unfortunates' hellhole, forensic pathologist Dr. Maura Isles, passing a July evening among the refrigerated dead in the Boston morgue, has her own nightmare to contend with--a corpse stirring in a body bag.

Meeting with no help from the imposing Rawlins, Talbot compounds his earlier transgressions--what landed him in trouble in the first place--by dragging Aleister back with him to Manchester on the off chance that the boy can be of some service.

After hugging the dog for precisely four minutes, and after being accused of the animal's murder by its distraught, pajama'd owner, Christopher determines to investigate the mystery of the canicide.

The regimen of study he adopted makes for fascinating reading: notebooks filled with information to be absorbed (lists of presidents and Shakespearian plays and European rivers), innumerable cartoons, very often buttock-related, drawn as mnemonic aids; Harris's lifestyle and living room rearranged to facilitate his "state-dependent retrieval" of information once on stage.

The mystery of that event, how it came to have such an effect on Marguerite, is slowly revealed to the reader as Marguerite, emerging from her self-imposed exile in order to gather ingredients for dinner, allows herself to remember.

Santos hopped around Paris in his "Baladeuse," or "Wanderer," alighting to order an aperitif at some sidewalk café, or dropping anchor at a club where, upon disembarking, he would hand the reins of his machine to a valet.

Sumner, as it turns out, is not your average cleavage-baring predator.

There were also the regular abuses of Jamison's Mengele-esque older sister and, in the author's adolescence, the in-retrospect-inappropriate attention of "Scoutmaster Gary," the Mormon overseer of a series of Church-sponsored activities in which Jamison took part.

A look in DeSalvo's eyes as he asked her to come downstairs--something inexplicably threatening--prompted her to refuse to join him and to close and lock the basement door.

Fighting demons is all well and good when you're a lithe and childless twenty-year-old.

He writes about French fry production and celebrity diets (Robbie Coltrane, "Hagrid" in the Harry Potter films, will not appreciate his mentions here), about pain killers and plastic surgery.

Need to set up a home birthing center, but all you've got on hand are a stack of newspapers and a packet of sterile vulva pads?

In one scene that is a powerful argument for women not living alone in remote locations we watch the murderer, a bear of a man decked out in animal skins, slaughter his fifth victim.

Have you ever wondered, for example, what a professional Amazonian's take on the reviews of Harriet Klausner (Amazon's top-ranked reviewer) might be?

But even with so much on her plate there is time for Mma Ramotswe to sit and think and to drink bush tea, to reflect on the traditional ways of her country and on the traditional troubles afflicting man, to enjoy a drive in her tiny white van and the enormous pleasures afforded by other small things.

Nor are the Olympians themselves without their own petty squabbles, mostly arising from Zeus' habits of stealing credit from his siblings and begetting offspring with mortals.

There is also God, who is evidently shorter than one would suppose and who interrupts Tom's first-person narrative from time to time to expound upon His point that romance is illusory and love the stuff of chemical impulses.

Some of her job had a cloak-and-dagger excitement to it--clandestine meetings and coded signals--but much of it was dull, from the reams of paperwork she was required to fill out to the necessity of listening to some low-level agent's marital complaints during a meeting.

Watch while the author reads the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, say, or spends a year cooking Julia Child recipes.

The result is that he sometimes disappears from the present, leaving nothing but a pile of clothes behind him, and materializes stark naked in some other time and place.

For example, when it's pitch dark in a strange house that you think may be haunted and/or inhabited by a killer, and when there's a room down the hall in which you suspect there just might be a dead body, you don't react to finding an old scrapbook with a cheery cry of, "This is terrific! Look! Photographs!"

The text of the book reads very quickly, but finishing the 50 puzzles that are included in Wordplay will be the work of weeks, if not months.

The cows annoy Annie by their mere presence in town, particularly after she is ordered to report on their doings for the paper.

The Olympians--a petty, vengeful, randy (some of them) lot--amused themselves by interfering with human affairs, despoiling mortal virgins, stirring up epic wars, championing their favorites....

I'd had no idea, for example, that it was standard as late as the 19th century for communities to determine their time locally, so that the time from town to town would vary by minutes depending on how the communities were situated from one another longitudinally.

The author worked for the Secret Service for almost thirty years prior to her retirement in 1996, and she was appointed director general of MI5 in 1992.

The book opens with the first of many colorful scenes, a roomful of plastic surgeons practicing their grotesque (at the best of times) trade on a bunch of severed heads.

With the police unwilling to credit his claim that a volatile patient of his is somehow behind the crime, Joe is forced to try to unravel the real killer's elaborate plot against him while on the run.

Morgan, who has worked with the police in past cases, becomes involved again when a serial killer begins murdering prostitutes and posing them, in death, in a series of religiously significant, grotesque tableaux.

After many thousands of pages, Rowling's prose continues very much the same--a kind of straightforward, unaffected writing that gets the story across without slowing things down, a style that has proved unusually accessible to a vast readership.

Born the 13th of 13 children to a 12-teated, alcoholic mother, Firmin was frequently compelled by virtue of his relatively diminutive size and strength to assuage his hunger by gnawing on books--a pathetic situation which, however, resulted in the singular fact and blessing of his life, his "lexical hypertrophy," heightened mental acuity coupled with an uncanny ability to read at super-human, let alone super-rodent speeds.

Winter's story is filled with sadism and incest, haunted lives in a decaying mansion--Angelfield Hall--the truth about its inhabitants hidden from the world.

The Amish, that is--and this is something I would never have dreamt I could say prior to reading this book--are, some of them, too wild for this reviewer.

Her previously overachieving daughter, who is too embarrassed by her mother's profession to mention it to her friends, has taken up with Great Neck's resident bad boy, a shaven-haired hoodlum who doesn't "do" parents.

Teen-aged girls mooning over matinee idols turn quickly into hardened farm wives with work-ravaged hands and too many children.

The book starts with a deliciously suspenseful chapter: the pilot of a Virgin Atlantic Airbus announces his suicidal intentions mid-flight, prompting scrambling on the ground as a criminal psychologist tries to talk the pilot out of it, and scrambling in the air as two F-18 Hornets prepare to shoot the aircraft down.

Cotten's brief encounter with the chief archaeologist of the dig, Dr. Gabriel Archer, sets in motion the dramatic series of events to follow--events foretold in the Book of Revelation that may culminate in nothing less than the Second Coming of Christ.

But beneath the attitude, the boys are surprisingly thoughtful and nobly loyal to one another, and Mark, at least, is intelligent, capable of using "dyad" in a sentence.

But more alarming than the tremors and the lava and the frequent cyclones, more alarming even than the shark-infested waters that put a damper on life in paradise, are the foot-long, poisonous, carnivorous, child-killing centipedes that live in Vanuatu.

What happened to the men in fact proves to be more interesting than anything that was reported to their families by telegram.

On the way back, a tub of soft-serve vanilla successfully secured from the local Fro-Z-Cone, Sara is killed in a car accident.

The braying Furies for the moment appeased, Joan Castleman and her husband are in mid-air, en route to Finland, where Joe is slated to receive the Helsinki Prize for literature.

Many of Hofmann's forgeries were intended to undermine the religion he had grown up to despise, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, by inserting into the historical record documents that were embarrassing to the Church.

They argue that in fact some degree of messiness is very often to be preferred to strict order--because the cost of maintaining order can be higher than the benefits accrued from it, for example, because disorder can be the mother of invention, because messy systems can be more efficient and robust than perfectly neat ones.

She supplements her income by trading in stolen antiquities, a dangerous business that involves handing wads of cash over to hoodlums in the middle of the night.

The phantom they have in mind is not your run-of-the-mill, graveyard-haunting variety, but rather a thought-form that the group members will hallucinate into being, after extensive research into the time period from which their ghost hails, and after creating for him an elaborate back-story.

He fidgets incessantly with the set of pentominoes he keeps with him at all times, fitting the Tetris-like shapes together to form rectangles of varying sizes.

Chris Baty, the author of No Plot? No Problem, is the founder of National Novel Writing Month, a bizarre, web-based movement, now in its sixth year, in which would-be novelists are invited to unleash their inner muses, register (for free) at the NaNoWriMo website (NaNoWriMo.org), and crank out the rough draft of a novel during the month of November.

What the book has to offer, in turn, is more on the characters' back stories, in particular those of the Tin Woodman and, of all creatures, the Flying Monkeys--much maligned, misunderstood beasts that they are.

In the same essay Ms. Berenbaum further informs us that the manifold varieties of human flatulence are codified in the apparently otherwise stolid, doorstop-sized Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy (which reports, we are told, that the "open sphincter" type is "said to be of higher temperature and more aromatic").

He is interested particularly in the relationship between the two, how Vlad the Wallachian prince--an ill-starred fellow who worked through his issues "by killing a whole mess of people"--became tied up with the blood-sucking fiend of creature features and cereal boxes.

Audience members are all potential contestants, and prior to every show Bilts talks to them all, in groups of about twelve, interviewing 340 people in ninety minutes.

But I keep coming back to the series for its homey ambiance: the happy, pun-filled relationship of Rosco and Belle themselves, and the clutch of Newcastle denizens who join the couple in holding down a table at Lawson's Coffee Shop every Saturday morning.

Eschewing his family's more traditionally tasteful lifestyle, Briephs lives alone on an island in a house that was built to his specifications, a labyrinthine, red-walled replica of an ancient Minoan palace.

Botha writes, for example, that "black baggers" are on the lowest rung of the dumpster diving hierarchy.

Boys are famous for having penises, of course, and they come in two basic styles.

We are given an insider's view of a prosecutor's response to a case--the evidence, its handling by the police, the testimony of witnesses, the effect on the case of the personalities involved.

Nancy still loves a good mystery--maybe a little too much--and she is wont to incorporate a bit of excitement into her otherwise humdrum, post-teen-sleuthing life whenever she can.

Romand's story might be just bizarrely amusing--a French variation of the life of deceit adopted by Leonardo DiCaprio's character in Catch Me If You Can, albeit with a less clever protagonist--were it not for what happened next.

One comes away from Cheney's book impressed at the apparent extent to which this gruesome business is going on, and impressed also with how many people seem to be able to sleep comfortably at night when they've got a refrigerator full of heads in the next room.

There is in Griet's modeling for Vermeer the potential for tragedy, and in the painter's final brushstrokes a form of abuse.

Dry rot has forced a temporary evacuation of her home and office, a rented houseboat moored on the east shore of Washington's Lake Union, and from her interim quarters she is overseeing the final preparations for two end-of-year nuptials.

The logistics of the body's disposal, the fear that it will be discovered once buried, the protagonist's dread of being found out, and the mystery of how Peter Morton came to be in this situation in the first place, wrongfully dead, form the tense backbone of Rhian Ellis's debut novel.

Jackie Gleason's Ralph Kramden, struggling to afford the accoutrements of middle-class life in the post-War period, appealed to an audience that was striving for, or had only recently achieved, similar goals.

She decides to take up stalking herself as a therapeutic exercise, and soon selects, more or less at random, her own stalkee.

Jason finds himself able to satisfy her longing for a higher salary after a fortuitous encounter with a modern-day Renaissance man, ex-Special Forces soldier turned tow truck driver Kurt Semko.

He pocketed and profited from many more cards before graduating to a more sophisticated brand of fraud, one that allowed him access to other people's money without the dirty work of swiping wallets.

Writers leave their marks on manuscripts unconsciously, Foster explains, as surely as gloveless burglars leave their fingerprints, their identities betrayed in their phrasing and word choice, in the body of authors whose styles they unwittingly emulate, in their commas and ampersands.

The problem is, feverish and delirious as he's been, Kinky does not make the most convincing of witnesses, and neither the police he summons nor his gang of variously accented, frequently inebriated cronies--the so-called "Village Irregulars," the collective Grace Kelly to his laid up Jimmy Stewart--believes him.

In making his case against Neaira the prosecutor in the case, Apollodoros, dredges up all manner of dirt about Neaira's sordid past as one of ancient Greece's most infamous courtesans.

With adulthood came addictions to heroin and alcohol, numerous arrests for shoplifting and stints in prison, estrangement from his family, an AIDS diagnosis, and relationships that ended with him being attacked with a claw hammer and set on fire.

The stories in the Monk books are narrated in the first person by Natalie Teeger, Monk's personal assistant, who provides her boss with a steady stream of Wet Naps and caters, more or less patiently, to his eccentricities.

The quest for Sparky's killer leads Monk far outside his comfort zone--as far, in fact, as the city dump, where the germophobic detective dons a hazmat suit to dig for incriminating garbage.

The principal piece of advice one comes away from the book with, however, is a simple one, that if you want to be a writer, you have to sit down every day--or as close to every day as you can--and write something for some length of time.

The book's principal character, to the extent that it has one, is Chester Ludlow, the chief engineer of the Atlantic Cable Company and the genius behind the paying-out mechanism that will, it is hoped, prevent the cable from breaking while it is unspooling.

Without understanding why the clock has rewound for him, he lives the same quarter century again, making different mistakes against a familiar historical and cultural backdrop--Kennedy's assassination and Vietnam, the Beatles and Watergate, Patty Hearst and disco and Iran-Contra.

The small town's police force is not accustomed to murder investigations, and when a young woman turns up dead in the cemetery with what appears to be a crossword clue in her pocket, the police chief naturally turns to the town's resident cruciverbalist for expert opinion.

Before the puzzle ladies can solve the mystery, two corpses, their murders somehow connected to the crossword contest, join Emma's in the local cemetery.

A germophobic 39-year-old with a genius for the game, he is apparently incapable of speaking a decently-formed English or of consistently making smart decisions in the real world.

Most interesting, however, are the photographs of locations and buildings that remain recognizable today but survive in very changed form: Hamden Plaza in the 1950's; Whitney Avenue unpaved, and again bisected with trolley tracks; the town center, thronged with locals, during Hamden's sesquicentennial celebration in 1936.

Nor is it easy to fit crime-fighting into the life of the average mother: most superheroes, remember, are not encumbered with the twin burdens of childrearing and parent-teacher meetings.

In what alternate universe is blowing one's nose on the habiliments of one's paramour appropriate behavior?

Hellmann saddles Ellie with some unfortunate vices: she has a history of kleptomania, and it is hinted that she makes occasional use of drugs (not to mention alcohol and tobacco).

Refrigerators self-diagnose and summon repairmen when appropriate.

As a sysop Harper can cruise the hundreds of discussions within EROS, his presence in allegedly private chat rooms undetected by the participants, and he can take part in discussions himself under assumed identities.

Enticing as his secret life of letters is, Simon's forays into lower-brow literature are not his only secret: he also happens to be a vampire, a gay vampire, in a world in which, however, medical advances have taken away much of the unpleasantness associated with that condition.

Perhaps perversely, I'm hoping Simon will forget his medication one day: I'd like to see how the polite society of Snupperton Mumsley would react should Simon start showing his fangs.

It is less difficult than one might suppose for Simon to blend in with the locals, as medical advances have, in his world, taken the bite out of vampirism.

As Johnson explains, obituaries preserve information--personal anecdotes and gossip and small moments in a life--that you won't find elsewhere in a newspaper.

She is by no means miserable, but true happiness is precluded by her relationships with her mother and her spouse: she is smothered by the former's expectations, and virtually ignored by the extraordinarily egocentric Rodney.

Perry Mason's alter-ego may not have taken on the Albacco case, but Cece is struck by the convicted murderer's tone in his letter--humble rather than hostile.

Their tendency toward internecine feuding would have guaranteed the Delaneys' unhappiness anyway, but the family's future was further complicated when Sean, unwisely and ineffectively, attempted to avenge the wrongful death of his young wife.

When rescuers arrived on day four--on August 8, 1999--Raffi was still alive, if dehydrated, and he admitted to having stabbed David to death just that morning by way of ending his friend's suffering.

Klugman credits Randall with nothing short of making him a better human being.

Skulduggery is a skeleton who manages to look less conspicuous when the situation requires by wrapping himself up, Invisible Man-like, in a coat and scarf, a frizzy wig and wide-brimmed hat.

One could see the appeal of this trouble-free existence, it being a kind of extended childhood, if the price of not having to balance a checkbook and make mortgage payments and pick out one's own clothes were not deemed exorbitant.

Christine's stumbling across the man in the middle of the ocean is a bit of needle-in-a-haystack good luck that she comes to wish had never happened.

That is, with a great number of young women, newly uprooted from their families, renting rooms in the hotel he had constructed near the Fair grounds, it became a simple matter for Holmes to find women he could murder and either cremate in his home-made kiln or flay and have turned into articulated skeletons.

Thomas Lang may have the background for it--he's ex-military and peculiarly adept at hand-to-hand combat--but he's just too nice a guy to kill for money.

How Rachel escaped is a mystery, though the fact that she managed to break out of a locked room and get past several manned checkpoints and a gaggle of poker-playing orderlies suggests that she had a lot of help.

But the "locked boat" mystery in which Griffin is implicated--two men on a yacht in the middle of the ocean and one of them ends up dead--is only one of several puzzles to be solved in this book.

The Barksdale murder trial is a high profile case of Klaus von Bulow proportions: Charles and his trophy wife were members of the local aristocracy.

A plot by a bunch of animal rights activists to set free a pair of dolphins ends badly, specifically, in felony murder

Nikolai is besotted with this bleached-blonde Ukrainian some fifty years his junior--not least because she favors him with access to her superb bosom--and he is intent on becoming her savior by marrying her.

Her hunt for her identity takes Liz away from Gordon's grasp, finally, and into the thick of a dangerous game of international intrigue in which identifying the bad guys is hard, and outrunning them even harder.

Seldom's chapter on serial murders, in particular, seems to have inspired the recent killings: with each murder the killer leaves behind a symbol--the first, a circle, appears in a note addressed to Seldom himself -- as if he is challenging the mathematician to work out the logic of his series before he kills again.

Some of Daniel's peculiarities merely make his life difficult, such as his need for the aggregate wattage of lit lightbulbs in his apartment to equal precisely 1125 at all times.

The picture that emerges is part Somerset Maugham, part Austin Powers, the expatriate shedding his "snug black velvet bell bottoms" for the odd sexual romp.

Von Igelfeld's experiences abroad--with scheming dons and their lachrymose Master, with an inappropriate Porter, with the University's intolerable toilet situation--leave him more certain than ever of the German's superiority to the Anglo-Saxon.

We are given accounts, too, of the very moment when the idea of writing about Portuguese irregular verbs came to Igelfeld, and of his ill-fated near courtship of a certain lady dentist.

But he does provide a great many details about Adrienne that will send readers running to Google, most tantalizing among them that Amy's mother served as Undersecretary of State during the Reagan and Bush administrations.

There is a great secret lurking behind the facade of On ne peut pas vivre seul, the mansion in Akron, Ohio in which Fergus has served as midwife to the Lowell pieces, the childhood home of Merit, for whom Fergus acted as the only responsible "parent."

Tommy will do just about anything for Jody, short of eating bugs, and that includes tolerating--indeed bonding with--a dead guy in their freezer.

The book, too, loses charm as it moves from the farce of its early pages to the melodrama of Charles's post-Amaurot life.

In the middle chapters, however, the book slows, while Blake and Zola Khan, a historian Harry's persuaded to help him, discuss the secret purpose of Ogilvie's expedition and drop erudite references to intellectual and religious history.

You'll come away from the book thinking that Bob Newhart's a nice guy (but you thought that anyway, right?), with a nostalgic longing for his classic TV show and some curiosity about his early comedy albums.

He insinuates himself into the life of Cincinnati's most eligible bachelor, Robert Helton, the CEO of Helton International and a closeted homosexual so afraid of being outed that he's a perfect candidate for blackmail.

She is not, that is, one of those perky-breasted blondes whose clothes always fit right and who's engaged to a doctor, but rather the funny gal pal type, who's more often than not unwashed and underdressed, and more often than she should be under the table.

Her stomach is forever growling or otherwise demanding restaurant fare, so we're given a tour of New Haven's eating establishments while reading--from Sally's Pizza in Wooster Square to Louis' Lunch (home of the hamburger Nazis) to Clark's Dairy (where I used to work!).

The hierarchy of playground mothers, the less powerful personalities under the sway of a spandex-clad, fascistic, supermom, does not ring true.

As a benevolent near-god Ipolis looks after its residents, and the rest of the world to the extent that it can, keeping an eye in particular on its favorite son, Mozart.

She came, in fact, to claim to be Carolyn Keene herself--the pseudonymous author of the Nancy Drew books--giving no credit to Mildred Wirt, who wrote 23 of the first 30 books in the series (as well as many other books for the Syndicate).

It's amusing, for example, (when you get over the real-life scariness of the kidnapping) to imagine the Herdmans displaying a "tattooed" baby for profit (if you also forget that the kid would surely be unhappy and uncomfortable if this were really happening to him) -- but it's not the sort of thing that would happen outside of the Our Gang comedies or Ed, Edd n Eddy's cul-de-sac.

The story is awash in musical and gastronomic details--Justine is the daughter of chefs--and it explores, often movingly, incapacitating grief and its aftermath and the sometimes ugly "other" that each of us hides from the outside world.

While investigating a mystery connected with recent discoveries at an archaeological dig in Rome, Josh comes to understand that his life is inextricably bound with those of Julius and Percy, and that the past casts a long shadow over the present.

This isn't a book that will grab you by the throat, but one you'll come to appreciate instead intellectually.

His death was a particularly horrific one as the poison that was used, a massive dose of tartar emetic (a derivative of antimony), is a highly corrosive substance.

By day a senior investigative correspondent for the Satellite News Network, Cotten also happens to be the mortal daughter of Furmiel, the only one of the Fallen Angels to have sought forgiveness for following Lucifer over to the dark side.

The mysterious Mr. Snicket, as in previous volumes of his researches into the Baudelaires' misfortunes, amuses with his clever wordplay, educates with his tangential discussions of vocabulary, and, indeed, alarms us on his behalf with hints dropped into the narrative of his own harrowing life on the run.

And Storr's account in his last chapter of an alleged case of possession in Texas is horrifying--not because demons are on the loose but, alas, because humans are.

The alley he selected is bounded by a Chinese restaurant on one side and an Irish pub on the other, so that its greasy-slick cobblestones are awash nightly in edible garbage of both ethnic varieties, palatable to aficionados of either type.

The alley he selected is bounded by a Chinese restaurant on one side and an Irish pub on the other, so that its greasy-slick cobblestones are awash nightly in edible garbage of both ethnic varieties, palatable to aficionados of either type. The alley is, in short, the perfect place to raise children.

At thirty-five, Ezra Gordon's better days are behind him--or so his doctor informs him after having withdrawn from his rump.

Truss's plea for violent action in the face of mixed up itses may go unheeded, but her light-hearted, best-selling paean to punctuation, originally published in Great Britain (and retaining British punctuation practices), has clearly tapped into a vein of previously voiceless pedants who believe that the lives of punctuation marks are worth celebrating.

Which brings me to another pleasure to be had from the book, that of disagreeing with Truss when she gets it wrong.

Those oblivious, the-world-revolves-around-me types who leave their grocery carts in the middle of the aisle, chain mail forwarders, spammers and telemarketers and express line abusers -- they're not criminals, exactly, so you can't lock them away or kill them.

Verissimo's supremely clever little mystery will be appreciated by Borges and Poe aficionados -- familiarity with both authors would be a plus -- and to readers who like their fiction thoughtful and their expectations upended.

Two of Marconi's employees--Phillips and Bride--were aboard the Titanic, and Walker tells the story of the sinking from the perspective of these men, one of whom survived.

Ward goes on to juxtapose Peter's appreciation of his wife's beauty, even in death, with his concern about the state of the ash-effect laminate she's "carelessly bleeding all over."

But when the girls discover that their mother has had an affair, and when their father refuses to join them in condemning her, the sisters become as disgusted with their family's imperfection, with their parents' failure to live up to the family's moral standards, as they had been convinced of its superiority.

In the meantime she is enjoying the life rural Ireland has to offer in the off-season--solitude and an unprecedented closeness to and awareness of the elements, a barely electrified dwelling that's not "on the phone," stoic donkeys and an abundance of mostly nameless cats, the unspeakable beauty of her surroundings.

In Paris' case those disastrous results would include the siege and destruction of Troy, which he brought about single-handedly by stealing Helen from her jealous Greek husband--her face launching a thousand ships and all that.

Maisie was tutored by a friend of her employer's, a Yoda-like character who spouted Eastern wisdom and taught his protégée a sort of holistic approach to detection.

Charlie, at least, is convinced that one of their regular customers, a gorgeous woman whose photographs suggest she trots the globe at breakneck pace, is a spy.

During the course of the novel Wilma's ability to move through life seemingly unaffected is tested by a string of dramatic events: the unexpected attentions of a suitor, the murder of one of her Mayberry-sized town's policemen, and the unannounced appearance on her front porch of Wilma's troubled daughter and granddaughter.

It could be improved by being spiral bound, of course, and, perhaps, by including a section for simple lists of books and a ratings box on the pages of the first section.

This romantic personal history makes Aczel particularly suited to tell the story of the compass, which so improved navigation in the late 13th century that it sparked a commercial revolution and made possible the Age of Exploration that was to follow.

Archer writes in a commendably straightforward style that is easily digested: it is not surprising that, as the jacket copy of the book informs us, Archer has been hailed as "the natural successor to Maugham."

Given a lifetime, more or less, of his theatrical antisocial behavior, it is hardly surprising that Farleigh-Stubbs's death--he is murdered at the aforementioned birthday party--upsets virtually no one.

Add to this stew of copulating characters an unwittingly flatulent baron, a nyphomaniacal opera singer, borderline incestuous interest, and, of course, a murder, and you have a delightful romp of a book.

It is a simple enough assignment, but as it happens, blackmail is only the most obvious element of a more complex latticework of crimes.

Her uneasiness was triggered by the brusque behavior of a gang of Polaroid-snapping set designers who descended on Belle's native Newcastle before the filming.

Lily's persistent belief that Stevens was the shooter cost her her job and, ultimately, her husband, whom she left because of his failure to believe her.

He is filthy and destitute and quite possibly mad, employed as a bicycle mechanic on a cramped street in Kuala Lumpur.

A host of needless deaths and the better part of a year later, Carl emerged from the jungle a more mature figure, still the likeable, duty-bound character he had been when he went in, but a world removed from the boys his age who had remained stateside.

The book's tongue-in-cheekiness goes a bit too far at times, too, as when the girls' Aunt Reba responds with unrealistic insouciance to her son's ostensible coronary.

Twenty-five-year-old Nick Copeman's accomplishments were few and decidedly unimpressive before he became King.

He undergoes brain surgery and survives, but during his convalescence Steve begins hallucinating and finds that, among other things, he can sometimes read people's minds.

She hits a number of nails squarely on the head--in her descriptions of the constant demands made on breastfeeding mothers, for example, or the drama and tension inherent in bringing a baby out into the public, or one's cautious anticipation of freedom when it looks like the kid may finally sleep.

The authors were charged with writing about, well, writing, and they manage to do so, surprisingly enough, without ever stepping on one another's subject matter: each essayist approaches the topic in a manner peculiar to themselves.

How, that is, does the average bigamist--not your Mormon extremist type whose wives all know the hubby's sleeping around, but the regular-seeming guy with a wife and kids in Schenectady and another family in Detroit--how does that guy keep it all straight, all the personal stuff you have to remember when you're part of a familial unit?

Downing offers a fuller account of the 1966 U.S. legislation that regularized (more or less) DST, and he writes about the attempts of various Pacific island states to profit from the millennial celebrations by tinkering with their clocks.

Time travel in these stories is achieved almost effortlessly, when the "thousand invisible chains" that keep us in the present--modern coins and manufactured items, apartment buildings--are, for a moment, loosed.

Terry and his wife share a sometimes charming camaraderie, approaching the innumerable life-threatening situations into which they are thrown with a Nick-and-Nora insouciance.

When the book begins, Ned Maddstone, the seventeen-year-old son of a Tory MP, is bound for Oxford and, almost certainly, for a life marked by as much success as he has already enjoyed: a cricket-playing future Head Boy and member of a sailing club, Ned is polite and good looking and newly in love, and he has the easy grace that comes with aristocracy.

The meaning of life is out there, a Usenet rumor has it, hidden on the web at an unregistered IP address, on a protocol no one uses, waiting for some genius hacker to stumble on it.

The author has a winner, though, in the character of Horst Schneider, the charming young German whom Jack befriends over a night of drinking, and who, happily, pops up repeatedly in the story to spice up the dialogue.

You'll be happy to become acquainted with some of the words and etymologies in Garg's corpus--dasypygal means "having hairy buttocks"; "helpmeet" comes from an erroneous interpretation of a Biblical passage.

That the victims are left unevenly shod is particularly irksome to Adrian Monk, the obsessive compulsive detective who is called in to help the SFPD solve the crimes.

The stories Greenlaw includes in the book are a mixed bunch--rough seas and unlikely survivals, noisome deck hands and shiv-wielding mates, a refrigerated dead guy.

And Franny wound up offering a second home also to Mattie while her parents sailed and mingled and drank cocktails.

Portrayed in the first three books of the series as a chain-smoking lush, Cora doesn't pick up a cigarette or a bottle for the first 200 pages of this installment, and we never see her drunk.

How many professional cruciverbalists, one wonders, can one small town realistically boast of?

Thirty-six-year-old Victor Van Allen is being cuckolded, quite blatantly. For a number of years his wife Melinda has paraded a succession of lovers around their small town of Little Wesley, Massachusetts, dragging the men along to the Van Allens' dinner engagements with friends, dancing with them provocatively, entertaining them in night-long debauches in the Van Allens' home.

His plans for Alice's upcoming childbirth--to be endured without benefit of anesthesia, of course--approach the barbaric.

Each is prefaced by lists of the books the author read and purchased in the month preceding the column's appearance: Hornby, who reads a lot of books and buys even more, is admirably comfortable with populating his shelves with books he is unlikely ever to get to.

Still, there is an undercurrent of menace in the book, which may explain why it continues to engage the reader despite that little of significance seems to be happening.

Penn soon finds himself investigating the thirty-year-old murder he had mouthed off about, but many people--among them the director of the FBI and Natchez's most fearsome resident, the corrupt Judge Leo Marston--would prefer that the 1968 car bombing of black factory worker Del Payton remain unsolved.

Though I would that modern-day medical advances hadn't defanged our hero--pills taken twice daily render him nearly human in his appetites--I very much like the idea of a genteel vampire taking a bite out of crime somewhere in the English countryside.

As it happens, I am among those whom Katz contacted: she writes in chapter eight about my habit of blogging the New York Times Sunday crossword every week at the-deblog.com.

Three A.M. finds him squishing wetly through Times Square on his quest, his sodden Rockport Walkers irretrievably soiled by spillage from a patient's burst peritoneum.

Aurcracker intends, with the assistance of a minion or two, to release a devastating computer virus, frame Max for the crime, and rake in piles of cash by selling the only software capable of defeating it.

Readers with less serious goals in mind probably won't find that particular idea--which is, after all, one of the main points of the book--pertinent to their own situation.

This time around, alas, we are made to look on as she splays her legs for an intimate waxing.

Thomson was involved in the particulars of William's life and early career to a degree that must have been maddening to the young man.

The two friends mean to follow the Ansazi to the summit once again, leaving their demons behind them -- or so they think -- but their climb is plagued by bad luck, bad weather, and worse portents.

Beginning with the unusual circumstances in which she entered the profession, Marks writes about difficult passengers and ditsy fellow workers, her brushes with law enforcement and the secret service, cellulite and on-board fires--in short, the perks and problems of flying for a living.

He is both oblivious to the perceptions of those around him and imperturbably convinced of his own self worth.

Granted, the position has its perquisites--immortality and the potential for world domination and so on--but on the other hand there is the difficult issue of the anthropophagous beast's appetite.

The author set herself the task of reading a book a week in 2002 and recording her responses to what she read, "matching up the reading experience with the personal one and watching where they intersect--or don't."

The average American falls asleep within seven minutes of going to bed and eats three pounds of peanut butter annually.

It's true that her relationship with her mother is strained, and her job as a reporter necessarily distances her from would-be newsmakers who don't want their peccadilloes showing up in the paper.

Orlean's modus operandi is to observe her subject for a length of time--spending a week or two, say, walking the aisles of an independently owned grocery store in Jackson Heights, New York, interviewing its managers and employees, watching the parade of hair-netted housewives and pierced teenagers and hand truck-pushing delivery men who flow in and out of the store ("All Mixed Up").

Iverson's interest in canine linguistics leads him to become involved--briefly, and somewhat against his will--with a group of extremists who will stop at nothing in their pursuit of canine speech.

At the same time, Ruiz is haunted by his own version of a locked-room mystery, the disappearance three years earlier of seven-year-old Mickey Carlyle from her apartment building.

He left his girls to roam the Mansion grounds alone, at the ages of six and four, while he played with Hef and the bunnies poolside.

Unfortunately Dahlman's brand of management involves posting naked pictures of Isabel on the web and pushing her to advertise "vaginal rejuvenation" surgery.

Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe, in the last month before his fatal stabbing (in May of 1593), uncovers a smuggling operation and ruffles some highly placed feathers.

The problem is that Tucker's search for a killer may lead her to the door of old friend Cissy Brice, the victim's widow, who had ample reason to want to see the last of her unfaithful, drug-addicted spouse.

Fiction isn't real life, after all; it's life polished into something finite and graspable, with, usually, the boring parts removed.

Regular readers of the series will not be surprised that hope of a happier future is wrested cruelly from the orphans' grasp in the course of the story, so that the book ends in woe.

At the same time he details for readers the minutiae of his life: his argument with a fast food place over the availability of Diet Coke in bottles in the restaurant; evidence that his roommate George may be having sex with chickens on the sly; his vague efforts to determine the identity of the "phantom pant scrubber," someone who spends an inordinate amount of time in the men's bathroom at work apparently scrubbing his underwear with steel wool.

The farmer's plot is complicated, however, by his estranged brother's will and by the appearance in town, under unusual circumstances, of a multilingual stranger.

The man with a plan, naturally enough, is wily Odysseus--star of Homer's Odyssey--here presented as a Machiavellian manipulator of words and men.

Did you know, for example, that Edwin Booth, John Wilkes Booth's brother, once saved the life of Robert Todd Lincoln?

The behavior of Archer's characters sometimes passes belief, as when Anna--who was in the North Tower when American Airlines Flight 11 hit the building but managed to escape to a friend's house--watched only a few minute of television coverage of the attacks before switching off the news for good.

We are to believe, in particular, that Ottavia--who confesses to never exercising--was able to run for some ten straight hours in order to reenact Pheidippides' famous run from Marathon to Athens.

There is, too, for those interested in flayed humans, a catalogue of anthropodermically-bound books, and also a story about a certain Bea Miles--"smelly, dumpy but charismatic,"-- that is worthy of Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair: she "roamed Sydney, wearing a hand-lettered cardboard sign offering to recite Shakespeare for a shilling a time."

He writes, for example, about the logistics of disposing of soiled diapers on an airplane, about the longevity of playground rhymes, about playing miniature golf in arctic conditions--apparently a family tradition.

This time around, two people are dead and a dog's gone missing, and someone is harassing Belle with threatening, home-made crosswords.

Holly, a "lopsided romantic" in the author's words, is a charming but self-involved, irresponsible, and sometimes mean-spirited young woman with a murkily unpleasant past.

While I found May and Florence and their respective beaux likeable enough, and I enjoyed the foray into Florida's community of relatively well-to-do codgers, I found the book plodding and its dialogue often boring.

Isabel's was something out of a gothic novel (so even the author tells us), with a distant father who communicated almost exclusively through New York Times clippings, an undemonstrative, mentally ill mother, and a by-the-book nanny.

And it is neither a "guidebook" nor a particularly inspiring piece of prose, however much the blurbists may rave.

The too-long chase scenes wind up lacking suspense both because we don't know what the protagonists are attempting to achieve and because we don't quite like them enough to care whether they achieve it.

There are corpses everywhere--vacationing in Canada, publishing articles in peer-reviewed journals, meeting with friends at coffee shops--and if you're not careful you may get the life sucked out of you as well.

The more Paul investigates the obsessively private Pühapäev's life, the more unusual his subject appears to have been: Pühapäev was wont, for example, to carry a loaded gun to campus, and the University responded with unexpected leniency on the two occasions when he fired it from his office window.

The series is set in an alternate universe in the mid-1980's, a world in which dodo birds and Neanderthals have been reengineered, where ChronoGuard detectives regularly surf through time, and where literature is taken very seriously indeed.

Her decision to open a bookshop in the building, while approved by a certain Edmund Brundish, the town's most respected scion, is opposed by an unfortunately more influential resident of Hardborough, Violet Gamart, who has the vague plan of turning the Old House into an art center.

It would be impossible to overemphasize the shelf appeal of an accessible, diagramming-related book to the likes of me.

It's far easier for the publisher to hire a pair of hit men to take Isaly out--thugs who turn out to be more discerning than your average performers of "wet work."

In the weeks before his move to England, Edward becomes engrossed in both these activities, the game and his search for the codex, to the point that he questions whether he will in fact return to the work that had until recently meant everything to him.

He was a strict disciplinarian who hooked his sons up to a lie detector he'd procured and sweated the truth of their peccadilloes out of them.

AidSat is a kind of über-OnStar system, a company that monitors its subscribers' vital signs constantly via miked tiepins and bracelets, whose employees are always available to offer assistance of any kind--from product reviews to relationship advice to the dispatch of a police cruiser or ambulance.

The obsession started with a simple question, posed after dinner in 1977, when the subject of conversation had turned to geography.

Also annoying is that somewhere along the line the book turns into little more than an extended liberal rant, wherein the author sounds off on the evils of George Bush and Walmart and the consumer culture, and she laments not being able to enjoy the "soul-cleansing polemics of Michael Moore" in Fahrenheit 9/11.

There's nothing unusual about Rex's flight or his performance as Frederick, but the next morning Rex finds a picture of himself in the obituaries.

There is also canine unhappiness, the imagined wretchedness of an imagined dog, whose loyalty and service is repaid with beatings and abandonment.

Presumably the author is going for light-hearted romp rather than yuck, get a room.

Years after Manning lost the White House, Wes is still fetching the former President his coffee.

Festivus was celebrated annually (but irregularly, with no set date) with depressing music and the recitation of poetry and the ingestion of meat.

When he encounters some thousands of snails slime-trailing their way around the wet terraces of his vacation bungalow, Pepin doesn't just register their appearance as a curiosity and move on, as we might.

When an old college friend, choreographer Ruth Renswick, asks for Juliet's advice on the staging of a ballet of Great Expectations, the former professor of English literature finds herself a regular observer of the Jansch Repertory Ballet Troupe's rehearsals--and an observer as well of the rivalries and romances that animate the dancers.

At twenty degrees below zero, Nestor didn't manage to live until morning, when a Häagen Dazs-seeking employee finally opened the door, but he did have time to come to an imperfect understanding of the circumstances of his death.

Once arrived, however, he finds the library shuttered and his job description much altered: rather than manning a civilized circulation desk, Israel is to run a mobile library, spreading literature around, quite literally, out of the back of a broken-down bus.

Certainly they reflect their times, young widows and widowers apparently being thick on the ground in the 19th century, and the contracting of relationships hinging very often on the quantifiable resources one could muster--whether a yearly stipend or a tractor.

We can view with sympathy Liana's desire to free herself from her mother's stifling, sweaty, noisome affection, if not the dramatic means by which she eventually makes good her escape.

His Visitors from Above is a hit among conspiracy theorists, all UFOs and alien abductions and the enigmatic disinformation specialists of Scott Spencer's title--those fellows who, "sallow of complexion" and inappropriately dressed, can convince alien spotters, Tommy Lee Jones-like, that they haven't seen anything whatever out of the ordinary.

Joyboy courts Aimee by manipulating into smiles the faces of the corpses he works on that are headed for her cubicle.

Their investigation is a dangerous one: Hamar has been targeted already by a shadowy assassin, and Jesuit priests have a way of turning up dead after meeting with her.

But Smith's stay in the King's Bench Prison is itself anticlimactic, because while Winchester alludes to its "horrors" earlier on, he finally describes debtors' prison as a sort of country club, where the indebted middle-class pass their time playing cards or bowling and drinking beer.

We are to believe that a freshman arrived in Princeton preoccupied already with an obscure Renaissance text to the extent that he was able to recite in chronological order the publications of a Renaissance historian who had worked on that text.

In the process we learn a little about Lawrence--he paid his bills on time, he is unlikely to have been comfortable naked, he tended to be angry much of the time, he was handy around the house.

As it turns out, a number of her colleagues would probably jump at the chance to kill their department chairman, but none of them has an obvious motive for wanting the victim dead.

With Rowland's marriage suffering as a result of his obsession with Chris and with Chris himself showing signs of instability, with several of the book's characters announcing that the situation is ripe for murder, the end of the school year holds the promise of high drama.

Cheated of this glowing future, Marion's ghost, as it turns out, wants to pursue her career in 1970's Hollywood, and she inhabits Jan's body, eventually with the latter's permission, with a view to making her come-back.

A camera that can film the Spartans at Thermopylae I accept, but no one would agree to upend their life as readily as Lucy does here.

In his very brief (95 pages in my edition, with photographs) biography, author Jean Nohain tells the bizarre story of Le Petomane, an evidently kindly baker, and a father of ten, who was determined to use his talent for flatulence for good.

The author's foolishness in this instance is one among a number of reasons that he--or the persona he adopts for the book--is an unappealing figure.

She occasionally refers to the links between her own life and the world of Harry Potter, telling readers, for example, that Stanley and Ernie from the Knight Bus were named after her grandparents, and that the Weasley's turquoise Ford Anglia was modeled after a high school friend's car.

Its authors, in interviewing so many subjects from throughout the publishing world, show readers a cross-section of the industry with its various strata, from author to bookseller, laid bare.

Toward the book's end her protagonist dreams of a man Borges might have concocted, whose memory runs in the wrong direction: he "remembers" the future, but once his memories are lived they are lost to him.

While students can, that is--some of them, at least--express themselves adequately, they are not proficient at explicating the literal meanings of grammatically complex texts.

In fact it is a greater achievement to make a character engaging if he is not someone the average person can identify with: Patricia Highsmith's sociopath Tom Ripley is a great example of the type.

In his essay Ancient Democracy and Modern Ideology P.J. Rhodes considers both modern and ancient attitudes toward democracy, particularly the radical Athenian democracy of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. Rhodes discusses the various approaches classical scholars have adopted in their study of democracy.