Well of Lost Plots

At the end of Lost in a Good Book, heroine and literary detective Thursday Next was planning a quiet retreat to a little-read novel. Her husband Landen has been eradicated by the evil Goliath corporation in a time-travel operation that engineered his death aged two in an accident, and Thursday, pregnant with his child, is the only person who remembers him. She's determined to rescue him, but before starting out on that dangerous mission she decides to rest safely in an unpublished manuscript until the baby is born. Or at least that's her intention. On her arrival in Caversham Heights, a fourth-rate crime novel set in Reading, she discovers that all is not well in the book world. The loner maverick detective with a drink problem is traumatised by his uninteresting role, the pathologist has only been trained as a mother figure in domestic potboilers, and worst of all Caversham Heights itself is under threat of being recycled into plain text. As Thursday travels into the cavernous Well of Lost Plots in an attempt to salvage the situation, she encounters terrifying grammasites, a rampaging mispeling vyrus and a suspicious plan to replace the book with a new technology. Worst of all, her foe Aornis, sister of Acheron Hades, is entering her memory by night and eliminating all trace of Landen. Fforde's imagination is as fertile as ever; from the training academy for fictional characters to the anger-management classes in Wuthering Heights the reader is swept along on a tide of baffling and hilarious invention, with literary references every other line and a nice line in affectionate mockery (just why are breakfasts, minor illnesses and underwear so rare in fiction?). Occasionally the plot becomes too complex for its own good, and, set entirely in the underworld of novels, it sometimes feels like a fill-in between the excitements and terrors of Lost in a Good Book and the thrills that we're certain to encounter in the next instalment. But Fforde's incapable of writing a dull line, and anything featuring Thursday, Pickwick the dodo and Miss Havisham (here seen trying to beat Toad for the land speed record) can't fail to entertain the reader throughout. Lie back and enjoy. (Kirkus UK)