Anyone who thinks there's really nothing new in fiction hasn't been reading Fforde's wildly inventive, genre-bending Thursday Next series. Next is a detective who inhabits a fantasy-world Britain in which literature is very much alive--so alive, in fact, that it takes a dedicated machinery of justice to keep the plots in order and the characters in place. After rescuing a kidnapped Jane Eyre in The Eyre Affair (2002) and battling an evil multinational corporation seeking to exploit the world of fiction in Lost in a Good Book (2003), Next has beaten a strategic retreat into BookWorld, where as part of the Character Exchange Program, she hides out in an unpublished, by-the-numbers police procedural. She's pregnant, her husband has been killed before he really existed, and her memories of him are being eaten away by a mindworm. She can't rest for long, however; she's still a trainee agent in the BookWorld police force, JurisFiction, and soon fiction itself is under a greater threat than ever before. Fforde is a terrifically agile writer, and his central conceit--that books are not constructed by authors but by a busy parallel world of goofy but industrious creatures--allows him to deck this tasty cake of a book with seemingly endless layers. Amid the humor, wordplay, and fun with fiction's conventions, there's both a decent mystery and a book lover's plea to save the world's messiness from corporate streamlining. This will surely delight bookworms--and real people, too.

Third course in a feast of hyperliterary alternate-reality thrillers ( The Eyre Affair , 2002, etc.) may prove too rich for some stomachs. Fforde's story takes place in several parallel universes that manage, against all laws of logic and geometry, to intersect at many, many points. Our heroine, literary detective Thursday Next, is the nexus of this strangely wired cosmos. Thursday has just returned from the pages of Jane Eyre, in which she foiled archvillain Acheron Hades' attempt to steal the ending. Now pregnant (by a dead veteran of the Crimean War) and badly in need of rest, she requests an assignment in the Character Exchange Program and is sent to fill in for Mary Jones, detective in a dreadful unpublished thriller. Like all unpublished books, Caversham Heights exists in a kind of limbo in the Well of Lost Plots, a warren of sub-basements in the Great Library where all books are born, but few see the light of day. Thursday works her way through Mary's role in the hopeless plot, glad of a safe job for change, but she soon finds plenty of extratextual distractions that hint at trouble ahead. Within the ranks of Jurisfiction (a kind of FBI of the text world), a string of murders begins to claim the lives of various authorities connected with a new process of plot development. Thursday learns that her late husband is not dead at all but was in fact "eradicated" at the behest of rogue elements within Jurisfiction. Between teaching her "generic" houseboys Ibb and Obb how to cook, fending off hostile grammasites (literary parasites that infest a plot with gerunds), and facing Jurisfiction charges that she changed the ending of Jane Eyre , Thursday still has to find the time to solve the various crimes now springing up within and without the text. For instance, who stole the commas from Joyce's Ulysses ? Like anchovies, Wagner, and Helmut Newton: will greatly appeal to people with unusual tastes—and befuddle everyone else.

In this delicious sequel to <EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">The Eyre Affair and <EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">Lost in a Good Book, Fforde's redoubtable (and now throwing-up-pregnant) heroine Thursday Next once again does battle with philistine bibliophobes, taking a furlough from her duties as a SpecOps Literary Detective to vacation in the Well of Lost Plots, the 26 noisome sub-basements of the Great Library. Pursued by her memory-modifying nemesis Aornis Hades, Thursday joins Jurisfiction's Character Exchange Program, filling in for "Mary," sidekick to the world-weary detective hero of <EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">Caversham Heights, a hilariously awful police procedural. At the imminent launch of UltraWord, the vaunted "Last Word" in Story Operating Systems, Thursday's friend and mentor Miss Havisham is gruesomely killed, and Thursday gamely sets out to restore order to her underground world, where technophiles ruthlessly recycle unpublished books and sell plot devices and stock characters on the black market. Meanwhile, Aornis is doing her fiendish worst to make Thursday forget Landen, her missing husband and father of her child. If this all sounds a bit confusing, it is—until the reader gets the hang of Fforde's intricate mix of parody, social satire and sheer gut-busting fantasy. Marvelous creations like syntax-slaughtering grammasites and the murderous Minotaur roam this unusual novel's pages, and Fforde's fictional epigraphs, like his minihistory of "book operating systems," are worth the cover price in themselves. Fforde's sidesplitting sendup of an increasingly antibookish society is a sheer joy. <EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">(Feb.)

<EMPHASIS TYPE=""BOLD"">Forecast: <EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">Despite the rarefied nature of his spoofing, Fforde has attracted a substantial and loyal readership. Expect fans to turn out in droves on the 20-city author tour.

Adult/High School-Fforde's third novel featuring English sleuth Thursday Next is an interesting, enjoyable mix of detective story, fantasy, and literature. Thursday works on cases involving the protection of the stories and characters of famous books, which can be affected and changed by people in the real world. In this installment, she enters the Book World itself. Fforde has a nice touch, never pressing on any one aspect of the story, but managing to interweave all of the elements, with a good deal of humor. The use of various literary characters means that it helps to be familiar with the works in which they appear, but, despite knowing very little about Anna Karenina, it is still very funny to read its plot written as a gossipy telephone conversation between two Russian noblewomen. It also helps to have read the first two books in the series, The Eyre Affair (2002) and Lost in a Good Book (2003, both Viking), but teens will want to read The Well of Lost Plots anyway.-Ted Westervelt, Library of Congress, Washington, DC Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.