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At first dismissive of the find--she knows what she saw--she comes to doubt her senses and her memory, and finally questions whether the last twenty years of her life have been based on a lie.

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.

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.

But guides have to deal with paying guests as well as wild animals, and Allison does not shy from criticizing the spoiled and stupid among his tour groups.

This is not a story that scares with gore and firepower, yet it's one of the most frightening and suspenseful books I can remember reading.

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.

She puts on a sweet-old-lady act that's won the rest of the villagers over, but Macbeth sees through it at once to recognize the bitty within.

As for parents, they'll find that kids raised as pirates will have higher self-esteem and a more colorful vocabulary.

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.

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.

A secret message from a magician, presumed dead, leads them into peril--specifically, the evil, glove-wearing clutches of a pair of too-perfect-looking malefactors, the enigmatic Dr. L. And Ms. Mauvais.

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

When we first meet Emily she's bringing her garbage cans in from the road, a chore that's attracted the attention of an unusual number of crows--menacing in their quanity and their fearlessness and their single-minded interest in the contents of her trash can....

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.

Kate winds up marrying Michael before she notices anything disquieting about his personality or habits: his secrecy about his job, his occasional jumpiness, his over-familiarity with Liza, with whom he was allegedly only slightly acquainted before she fixed the newlyweds up.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

While Columbo hides his acumen behind feigned incompetence, Monk's genius for solving crimes is a byproduct of his nearly crippling obsessive compulsive disorder.

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.

But even without knowing a turnbuckle from an outrigger, I could understand the tenor of what was going on--grave peril and high drama at sea.

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.

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

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

Odysseus' visit to the Underworld is reenacted more in spirit than in fact.

And in most restaurants dishwashers have access to a steady stream of table scraps, which is likewise perfect for a guy who'd rather save his pennies than squander them on undefiled foodstuffs.

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.

When Mitch needs to buy ammunition for a gun he's gotten his hands on, for example, he doesn't know how to ask for it at at the counter of a gun shop without looking suspicious

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.

Pinkerton and his agents policed the nation's railroads, for example, and they infiltrated the Confederate forces during the Civil War to smuggle information to the Union.

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

I am of a cynical bent, and find it difficult to believe in the possibility of--or even the desirability of--unconditional love (with an exception granted for one's children).

In a passage that must have been difficult to write he describes the incident which led him to resolve, at roughly age nine, that thenceforth "only the most formal relationship would exist between my father and me...."

We're not given a sense of the man behind the moustache.

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

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.

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.

It's an unhappy chapter in Mma Ramotswe's life, but it packs meat onto her character: she is not all homespun goodness, that is, but was capable in her youth of great folly, and what wisdom she has was hard won.

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

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!"

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

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.

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!).

One admires, despite the nature of the task, his painstaking preparations for the kill.

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....

The club's members, who adopt the names of old film stars, meet in a public restaurant and tell funny stories about their recent slayings over dinner.

Price can also remember, with perfect clarity, the conversation she had with doctors about allowing them to harvest her husband's organs once he was taken off life support.

Sure, one has to suspend one's disbelief about the whole giant gecko thing.

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.

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.

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.

This is the sort of mess that a real person might make of matricide.

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

Many subjects were taboo in the home--the relationship of the meat on one's plate to its animal source, for example, his mother's mental health, human sexuality.

The North Koreans are being helped in their gruesome enterprise by Cotten Stone's nemesis, the Dark Lord himself, Lucifer: as regular readers of the series will be aware, Cotten isn't just a reporter; she's also the daughter of Furmiel, one of the Fallen Angels, who rebelled against God but later repented of it.

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

That is, he's not squeamish about committing murder, he's just unwilling to attract more police attention than is strictly necessary.

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 is, in short, the perfect place to raise children.

The climactic scene of the movie, wherein Banks's transformation is effected, is a small one: his children apologetically surrender to him the tuppence that had caused such a stir at the bank, where he works, leading to his being fired.

The book is a sort of extended love letter to Alice, to be sure, but a further point of the exercise is to be found on the book's dedication page.

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.

A humorless interlocutor in Switzerland identified clean public restrooms as a source of Swiss happiness, for example, while the Moldovans Weiner spoke with named as their sole source of joy their country's fresh fruits and vegetables.

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.

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.