Wit's End is many things: a quest novel—a young woman's search for the truth about her dead father's past; a mystery—the story of a long-ago murder in which that father might have been complicit; and a game—one that ensnares readers in cunning deceptions, challenging them to separate the true from the fictive.

Set in contemporary Santa Cruz, the novel centers on Rima Lanisell, a young woman at loose ends, having just lost her father to cancer. (Rima seems to lose people and things habitually— sunglasses and car keys, lovers and family members.) Now she has come to coastal California at the behest of her godmother, Addison Early, who once knew Rima's father well. Perhaps too well. Rima is on a mission to discover just what that relationship was really about.

Addison, a bestselling mystery writer, is secretive and feisty. Over the years, she has tried to protect her work and her privacy as her passionate fans have become ever more intrusive. In this age of the Internet, with its blogs, chat rooms, websites, its Wikipedia, false personas, and hidden identities, those fans have begun to take over the plot lines and the life of her famous fictional detective. For many, he is more real than Addison herself. So Wit's End is also a highly inventive take on the way dedicated readers appropriate their favorite books, perhaps the one act of theft applauded the world over—except by authors.

Above all, Wit's End is Karen Joy Fowler at her most subversive and witty,creating characters both oddball and endearing in a voice that is uniquely and memorably her own.

And the EW's PopWatch blog raves:

'Wit's End' and other jaunts across pop-culture boundaries

May 9, 2008, 06:00 AM | by Simon Vozick-Levinson

Categories: Books, Nightstand Inspection!, Sci-Fi, Web/Tech

 "No one in novels watches TV," a character declares early in Jane Austen Book Club author Karen Joy Fowler's Wit's End, by way of explaining why she no longer thinks printed literature is a truly living medium. There are several levels of irony included in that casual dismissal: This character happens to be a wildly successful novelist herself, for one. And Wit's End happens to be a novel in which lots of people watch a lot of TV. Fowler's characters chat casually about Lost, Prison Break, 24, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Battlestar Galactica, Bones, and more. She really does capture what it's like to be a post-millennial pop-culture junkie without beating the theme into readers' heads, and that alone makes me respectfully differ with the solid B that Wit's End received in EW recently. I wolfed it down over the course of two recent plane flights, and I can't recommend it highly enough.

Wit's End has also gotten much attention for the way its plot turns on characters' use of Wikipedia, LiveJournal, and fanfic sites. The websites themselves come to life practically as vividly as some of Fowler's secondary characters. As io9's Annalee Newitz has put it, this makes the novel a kind of "science fiction in the present": "While there are no aliens here, or artificial intelligences who come to life, Wit's End manages to skirt the edges of science fiction themes beautifully, hinting at the ways our lives have become the stuff of science fiction without us noticing." And these big, explicit nods to the world that Web 2.0 has wrought aren't so different from those incidental TV references, are they? In both, Fowler is playing with the communities created by a popular medium — the incredible collective experiences shared by people who watch a series or user-edit a website.

I think the reason I like Wit's End so much is because it fits into one of my favorite kinds of entertainment: pop culture about other kinds of pop culture. The Truman Show was a movie about TV; the fourth-season finale of Curb Your Enthusiasm was a TV episode about Broadway (Mel Brooks' The Producers).....

 I will be happy to combine shipping for the purchase of multiple items.

This is a brand new, never read hardcover with dust jacket.