From the author of the runaway bestseller The Jane Austen Book Club comes a sly and clever novel of mystery, intrigue, and virtual reality.

Set in contemporary Santa Cruz, Wit's End opens as Rima Lanisell arrives at her godmother’s old Victorian mansion, weary from her recent losses — an inventive if at times irritating father, a beloved brother. (Indeed, Rima seems to lose people and things habitually — sunglasses and keys, lovers and family members.) At loose ends, she has come to coastal California to regroup and to meet that legendary godmother. She soon finds herself enmeshed in a household of eccentrics: a formerly alcoholic cook and her irksome son, two quirky dog-walkers, a mysterious stalker, and of course, godmother Addison Early, a secretive and feisty bestselling mystery writer who once knew Rima's father well. Perhaps too well. Rima is on a mission to discover just what their relationship was all about.

That won't be easy. Over the years, Addison has fought fiercely to protect her work and her privacy, even as her passionate fans have become ever more intrusive. In this age of the Internet, with its blogs, chat rooms, and websites, its Wikipedia, false personas, and hidden identities, those fans have begun to take over her plotlines and the life of her famous fictional detective. For many of those fans, Maxwell Lane is more real than Addison herself. So Wit's End is also a highly original take on they way dedicated readers appropriate their favorite books, perhaps the one act of theft applauded the world over — except by authors. Word has it that Addison is so beleaguered, so distracted by her fans' Web postings, that she has writers block.

Traveling back into the past, firmly rooted in the present, Wit's End is storytelling at its best. It is also Karen Joy Fowler at her most subversive and witty, creating characters both oddball and endearing in a voice that is utterly and memorably her own.

"At the start of this quietly funny, slightly mysterious novel of discovering one's roots from bestseller Fowler (The Jane Austen Book Club), 29-year-old Rima Lanisell visits her estranged godmother, Addison Early, in Addison's house by the sea, Wit's End, in storied Santa Cruz, Calif. Addison, the wildly successful but cautiously private author of the Maxwell Lane mysteries, was once the girlfriend of Rima's recently deceased father, Bim, for whom a character in the series is named. For each novel, Addison first constructs a dollhouse diorama that depicts what will be the principal murder scene, but her upcoming novel and its dollhouse are uncharacteristically delayed. By weeding through decades-old correspondence with eccentric fans and the contemporary channels of online forums, Rima slowly discovers the truth behind Addison's novels and that Rima herself is a topic of interest among Maxwell Lane devotees. As Fowler analyzes our modern-day relationship to novels and writers' relationship to their readers, the line between fiction and reality blurs — real people become characters in another's blog as fictional characters become real to the fans that fetishize them. Author tour. (Apr.)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"'The Jane Austen Book Club' could not have been better designed or timed. Karen Joy Fowler's fourth novel appeared in 2004 at the intersection of two massive forces in American publishing: women's book clubs and the Austen revival. With its sharp wit and clever allusions to 'Emma' et al., the story rotated through a year's worth of meetings involving six members of a book club in California. If the... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) plot was a little slow and tenuous, well, nobody minded because Fowler's portrayal of reading-group dynamics was pitch-perfect, and the sprinkling of Austenia made the whole thing sparkle.

Her new novel, 'Wit's End,' promises the same kind of bookish delight, and, again, it aims at an enormous segment of the reading market: mystery lovers, who will seize upon this novel like Hercule Poirot upon a bloody candlestick. It's packed with parodic references to the genre's classic conceits and cliches, and there's a nod to Austen's own satire of mysteries, 'Northanger Abbey.' But Fowler's real subject this time is the relationship between contemporary writers and their rabid fans.

Our heroine is a 29-year-old middle-school teacher in Ohio named Rima, who has a habit of losing things. Among the missing items, Fowler lists 'countless watches, rings, sunglasses, socks, and pens. The keys to the house, the post office box, the car. The car. A book report on Wilkie Collins' "The Moonstone" plus the library's copy of the book plus her library card. Her mother's dangly turquoise earrings, the phone number of a guy she met playing pool and really, really did want to see again. One passport, one winter coat, four cell phones. One long-term boyfriend. One basically functional family.'

That sly wit, slipping easily between silly and tragic, is Fowler's best quality. Rima's mother died almost 15 years ago, her brother was killed in a car accident, and recently her father passed away. Now alone, lonely and grief-stricken, Rima accepts an invitation to stay with her wealthy godmother in Santa Cruz, Calif. She doesn't know the woman well, but she knows of her. Everyone does. Addison Early is 'The Grande Dame of Murder,' one of the world's most successful mystery writers. In her 60s and suffering from a long bout of writer's block, she lives in a gorgeous Victorian beach house called 'Wit's End' that was once owned by a survivor of the Donner Party. The rooms are filled with Addison's famous dollhouses, each a replica of a murder scene that she constructed to plan a different novel, e.g., "The Box-Top Murders," poison in the breakfast cereal; "One of Us," rattler in the medicine chest; and "The Widow Reed," weed whacker in the hedges.'

Her famous detective character, Maxwell Lane, lives in the popular imagination with the likes of Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolfe. He's the subject of Addison's numerous novels, eight movies and three TV series. But Fowler is most interested in Maxwell's active, independent existence in the minds of fanatical readers, the kind of aggressive adoration that's grown exponentially since the advent of the Internet. Addison wages a never-ending battle against intrusions on her privacy, including a series of Wiki-wars conducted on the popular Web encyclopedia, with deletions and additions cycling on ad infinitum. Every possible aspect of Maxwell's life is analyzed on Web sites devoted to the novels, and he's the leading man (sometimes gay, sometimes straight) in an ever-growing collection of stories written by fans for other fans — a relatively new, legally questionable online genre called fan fiction.

Everything about this mystery-soaked set-up promises high entertainment (and high sales), but the biggest riddle of all is why 'Wit's End' is ultimately so unengaging. Some of the problem stems from the fact that the novel has such a muted plot. Soon after Rima arrives to stay with her godmother, a belligerent Maxwell fan barges into the kitchen and darts off with the tiny corpse from one of the dollhouses. Rima determines to solve this miniature crime, but no one else in the book is very interested and, frankly, no one outside of it is likely to be either. Even Rima acknowledges that there's little mystery here. 'Solving the case would give her something to do,' she thinks, but then wonders, 'What case?'

Soon, she moves on to discovering the nature of her late father's relationship with Addison. This investigation leads her to a defunct cult in which something dastardly may or may not have taken place 50 years ago. Although there's plenty of sensational material here — charismatic sex-fiend! suicide! murder! — these events remain distant, not so much mysterious as merely vague, and despite the accumulation of little clues, we're never given much reason to care. Late in the book, Rima seems to acknowledge as much when she admits again, 'There was no case.'

Of course, 'The Jane Austen Book Club' didn't have much plot momentum either, but it overcame that deficiency by sinking deep into the lives of its book club members. In 'Wit's End,' however, except for Rima, the characters are coated with some kind of impenetrable membrane. Addison is obsessive about her privacy. She tells stories that, 'no matter how intimate the content, kept Addison behind glass.' Tilda 'was Addison's housekeeper unless she was something more,' a possibility never seriously explored in the novel. And that only leaves the dog-walker, Scorch, who is less interesting than Addison's miniature dachshunds.

This comedy of manners isn't without charm; Fowler's subtle humor glides across these pages and enlivens them no matter how dilatory the plot. And her exploration of the creepy relationship between popular authors and their fans in the Internet Age feels up-to-the-minute fresh. But nevertheless a crime has been committed: Long before the end, the novel's life is snuffed out.

Ron Charles is a senior editor of The Washington Post Book World. Send e-mail to charlesr(at symbol)washpost.com."

Reviewed by Ron Charles, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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"[A] mystery that's barely a mystery but is every bit an absorbing and funny novel....[I]nsightful and engaging." Library Journal

"Fowler's clever insights eventually sink in as more profound than they initially seemed." Kirkus Reviews

The author of The Jane Austen Book Club presents another highly inventive novel — one that ensnares readers in cunning deceptions, challenging them to separate the truth from fiction.

Karen Joy Fowler, A PEN/Faulkner and Dublin IMPAC nominee, is the author of Sarah Canary, The Sweetheart Season, Black Glass: Short Fictions, and Sister Noon.