Lost in a Good Book

If resourceful, fearless literary detective Thursday Next thought she could avoid the spotlight after her heroic escapades in the pages of Jane Eyre, she was sorely mistaken

Her adventures as a renowned Special Operative in literary detection have left Thursday Next yearning for a rest. But when the love of her life is eradicated by the corrupt multinational Goliath Corporation, Thursday must bite the bullet and moonlight as a Prose Resource Operative in the secret world of Jurisfiction, the police force inside books. There she is apprenticed to Miss Havisham, the famous man-hater from Dickens's Great Expectations, who teaches If her to book-jump like a pro. If she retrieves a supposedly vanquished enemy from the pages of Poe's "The Raven," she thinks Goliath might return her lost love, Landen.

But her latest mission is endlessly complicated. Not only are there side trips into the works of Kafka and Austen, and even Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Flopsy Bunnies, Thursday finds herself the target of a series of potentially lethal coincidences, the authenticator of a newly discovered play by the Bard himself, and the only one who can prevent an unidentifiable pink sludge from engulfing all life on Earth.