Wit's End: A Novel

US: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2009. Good. [A] delightful and eccentric new tale"(The Boston Globe) from the author o f the runaway bestseller The Jane Austen Book Club In Karen Joy Fowler's newest novel, the bestselling author of The Jane Aust en Book Club once again delivers top-notch storytelling, creating character s both oddball and endearing in a voice that is utterly and memorably her o wn. Wit's End is a clever, playful novel about finally allowing oneself to grow up-with a dash of mystery thrown in. At loose ends and weary from her recent losses-the deaths of an inventive i f at times irritating father and her beloved brother-Rima Lansill comes to Wit's End, the home of her legendary godmother, bestselling mystery writer Addison Early, to regroup...and in search of answers. For starters, why did Addison name one of her characters-a murderer-after Rima's father? But Add ison is secretive and feisty, so consumed with protecting her famous fictio nal detective, Maxwell Lane, from the vagaries of the Internet that-rumor h as it- she has writer's block. As one woman searches for truth, the other s truggles to control the reality of her fiction. Rima soon becomes enmeshed in Addison's household of eccentrics: a formerly alcoholic cook and her irksome son, two quirky dog-walkers, a mysterious s talker, the tiny characters that populate Addison's dollhouse crime-scene r eplicas, and even Maxwell Lane himself. But, wrapped up in a mystery that m ay or may not be of her own creation, Rima discovers to her surprise that t he ultimate solution to this puzzle is the new family she has found at the house called Wit's End. Playfully exploring the blurred boundaries between reali.