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Why I picked it up: Because it was 50% off during a bookshop bankruptcy sale.

This is a book for our times.  I mean that this book wouldn’t have made any sense at all 7 years ago. It’s not just the references to Bones and Battlestar Galatica.  This book was written to be read on a Kindle or some sort of e-reader so you could go to the web sites, click through the hyperlinks, see the picasa photo gallery. And Wit’s End is brilliant at showing how an author’s creation gets away from her in the hands of the engaged readers — especially in today’s Internet age (hello there, Harry Potter).  Throw in some meta-fictional winks and nods along with a sly dry wit and what’s not to love.

Plus, Karen Joy Fowler totally nails the cliches of mystery writing.  How perfect is her description of her godmother’s fictional detective, Maxwell Lane?

Like most fictional detectives, Maxwell Lane has both a problem with alcohol and a problem with facing the world sober.

If you’ve read or watched any generic mystery, you’ll know it’s pretty damn perfect.

But then it’s as if Wit’s End gives you all this windup and fails to deliver the strike.  Because even if I had read this book on Kindle, I couldn’t have gone to the Wikipedia article on Maxwell Lane because there isn’t one.  If you are going to publish a book that couldn’t have been written without Web 2.0, then why not put it out in the Web 2.0 world.  Where are the Myspace and LiveJournal entries sourced in the novel?  Where is this virtual Ice City?  Why can’t I read Scorch’s blog?  Why can’t I make Maxwell Lane my avatar (or at least Martin — but only if I could get rid of the soul patch).

So the book ends up being distant; kind of like some stranger’s blog that you had really enjoyed reading but then they made it private and you don’t really miss it all that much anymore.

Don’t read this if:

• you are looking for a mystery.  Because it’s not.
• you don’t know what Wikipedia is. Because that chapter is really going to confuse you.
• think slash fiction is a subgenre of horror. Because it isn’t.
• have never fallen in love with a fictional character.  Really, you haven’t?  Not one?

Basic plot in marketing copy prose: Rima — reeling from the accumulated loss of her immediate family — temporarily moves in with writer A.B. Early, her godmother and author of a hugely successful mystery series.  Once there, she must deal with stalkers, Wikipedia edit wars, the loss of habeas corpus, territorial dachshunds and estranged sons while avoiding careful dollhouse reconstructions of fictionalized murders as she tries to figure out what exactly was the relationship between Early and Rima’s father.

But here’s what it’s really about: it’s about loss and family; about how we are remembered; about who owns a character — real or fictional — or maybe actually, about who owns the memory of the character; if a character truly lives most completely in the hands (mind?) of the author or of the readers; starting over or at least starting again; creating community — physical or virtual — with strangers around a shared love; not knowing the people we love; loving the people we don’t know; and finally how a story still means something to us even in this strange, perplexing, complicated and hyperlinked digital world we live in.

Random yet representative quote: “But she thought she’d probably do okay.  Like all first children, when she played games, she planned to win.”