The fifth adventure of alternate-reality literary detective Thursday Next takes place some 14 years after the events of Something Rotten. In the years since the 1988 SuperHoop (the croquet final that decided the fate of the world), a lot has changed in Swindon. Spec-Ops, including Thursday's literary division, have been disbanded. As far as her stay-at-home husband Landen knows, Thursday has settled down to a quiet life as a partner in a carpet-laying firm.

But actually, the carpet business is only a front for her continuing, off-the-books detective work. In this parallel version of 2002 England, time travelers, genetically-engineered monsters, the undead, and large-as-life literary characters mix with regular folks - folks like Thursday's stalker, who moonlights as her partner in a cheese-smuggling ring; like her writer husband, who has been trying to sell a book titled Fatal Parachuting Mistakes and How to Avoid Making Them Again; like her son Friday, who was supposed to join the ChronoGuard at age 13, invent time travel, and save the world numerous times over, but who at age 16 lies in bed until noon, speaks in monosyllabic grunts, plays in a garage band, and smells nasty; and like her elderly mother and aunt, who spice up their spare time by detaining market researchers in their parlor with feigned dementia and uncomfortable small-talk.

So even slaying demons, chasing rampaging dinosaurs, talking with ghosts, and smuggling illegal cheese isn't a big stretch for Thursday's weird world - a world where the government's biggest worry is the Stupidity Surplus, and where the worst criminals are imprisoned in a time-loop in the checkout line at T. J. Maxx. But actually, Thursday's spec-ops work is itself a front for her really secret job: policing the border between reality and literature as an agent of Jurisfiction.

In Book World, Thursday is a very important person. She is the only "real" person who regularly and legally drops in, and as such she serves as the "Last Bastion of Common Sense" on the high-and-mighty Council of Genres. But trouble is brewing. Forced to babysit two hopeless agents-in-training - both of whom look just like her, because they are her fictional counterparts from the Thursday Next books - she must also get to the bottom of a Goliath Corporation attempt to drive busloads of tourists into fiction, the reappearance of an assassin who was last seen gunning for Thursday years and years ago, a government scheme to turn Sense and Sensibility into a reality show, and most seriously of all, the steadily falling number of people reading books. This is a lot to battle when your ability to jump into fiction is slipping, when a mind-bending baddie has planted false memories in your mind, when a badly-written lookalike is trying to steal your life, and when the end of time may be at hand - and the fate of everything depends on a spotty teenager who hasn't washed his hair in weeks!

My reviews of the Thursday Next books are, necessarily, full of run-on sentences. How else am I supposed to give you even the daintiest sip of the full-flavored fun Fforde has in store for you? It is wild. It is wacky. It is sexy, scary, and drop-dead smart. And above all, it is side-splittingly funny. At times the characters seem to be reading their lines off cue cards - they're just too perfect to come out of the mouths of real people! Nevertheless, the weirdness and originality of Fforde's fantasy continues to fascinate. His gags (such as a clandestine cheese sale, and an encounter with a demon) leave you gasping and crying with laughter. And his complex, kaleidoscopic narrative remind you, page after page, that no form of entertainment can touch a good book.

You'll probably finish this one with a good-sized list of other books to read, from Conan Doyle to Austen and beyond. If you belong to practically any fandom (including Harry Potter), you will spot a reference to your first love while you fall in love with this book. And if you notice, as I did, that not all the loose ends get tied up (for example, the minotaur), you will be warmed by the hope that this First Among Sequels will not be the last.

Robbie Fischer
USA

Recommended Age: 17+

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