United States Reviews - St. Louis Post-Dispatch TN2

This sequel to "The Eyre Affair" could be subtitled "The Continuing Adventures of Thursday Next," as Jasper Fforde returns to the alternate and exceedingly odd world he constructed for his best-selling first novel. The new book is easier to put down than the first, but it's still an enjoyable read, different from anything anyone else is writing.

"Lost in a Good Book" is part fantasy, part mystery and part suspense. Thursday works as an investigator of literary crimes for the Special Operations Network. In our world, literary investigators usually have a low profile; Next's exploits have brought her to the attention of the nation.

She seeks to save (A) the world and (B) her husband, who has been written out of history by the bad guys. These are powerful villians, obviously, but Thursday is fearless and has a few tricks of her own. One is the ability to leave the real world and enter a work of fiction merely by reading a scene out loud, thus the title.

She pops up in Charles Dickens' "Great Expectations," and Miss Havisham takes her on as an apprentice. Then it's off to a vast library presided over by the White Rabbit from "Alice in Wonderland." (The Red Queen shows up, too.) Fforde has fun with his characters' names, including a PR person named Flakk, two doomed operatives named Phodder and Kannon, and a pair of villains whose names shouldn't be printed in a family newspaper. He also has fun with the plot, which moves as almost as quickly as Thursday Next when she's fleeing the operatives of the Goliath Corp., the evil empire with designs on all the universe.

If you'd like to enter Fforde's world, you might want to start with the first book, which is now available in paperback. Chances are, you won't want to stop with the second, and you won't have to -- a third is in the works, promised for release in the spring of 2004.