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Rocketing to the top of favorite reads of the year is Jo Walton's Farthing.

Walton has a knack for taking a specific story (such as the utterly splendid Tooth and Claw that uses Trollope's Framley Parsonage and crosses it with dragons, getting a sum greater than both parts) or a storyline (like Arthuriana) and crossing it orthogonally so that both are transformed into something altogether different. And yet one can see traces of each source. Being a visual being, I can only compare it to the color prism we used as kids, when we laid the yellow glass circle over the edge of the blue to make green--with the edges of the yellow and blue still showing. Better, perhaps, a palimpsest: one sees traces of old underlying the new, so you get a third effect.

Anyway, she takes the form of the English country house murder mystery, with all its emphasis on rank and manners, and crosses it with an Alternate History. So we open with all the implied tensions between the genteel manners of people of privilege--their emphasis on being civilized--with a body lying in a bedroom, one of their own done to death by violence. Meanwhile we discover that this England's WW II never really happened, because in 1941 the government, currently led by political conservatives nicknamed the Farthing Set, made peace with Hitler.

The chapters alternate between twoPOVs. There is the first person account of Lucy Kahn, daughter of the ultra-conservative Farthing Set (named after their country house) who dared to marry a Jew. So she's a born insider who chose to become an outsider, because one of the issues, of course, in making peace with Hitler is accepting what he's doing over on the continent. The alternate chapters are third person from the POV of Inspector Carmichael of Scotland Yard, sent down to investigate the murder. He's frustrated because he senses that not everyone is telling the truth, but he has to parse the body language and tones of people whose upbringing is so different from his--he's an outsider in various ways forced inside to complete his investigation. Meanwhile, Lucy, who knows the people, how they move and think, is looking at the mystery from another angle--because her husband is the chief suspect. The alternating storyline builds with inexorable (and inescapable) tension as the stakes grow exponentially. Does the mystery get solved? Oh yes, but I can guarantee you are not prepared for the double-echo sonic boom of the ending. I mean it left me gasping--and I had to go right back and start rereading the book again. I'm still stunned when I think about it a week later.

Way at the other end of the spectrum is Scott Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamorra.

This is a pungently Rabelaisian picaresque novel beginning with an orphan, Locke Lamorra, being sold by the Thieftaker to the "Priest of Thieves, Thief of Priests." This priest, Father Chains, brings Locke into his trained group of scammers called the Gentleman Bastards. The story unfolds moving back and forth from the present (Locke's latest and biggest scam) to the past (how he grew up and took over the Bastards)--until he comes up against a new and very dangerous opponent, the Gray King.

Rabelais used popular, earthy humor in his adventurous farces, and Lynch does the same. This story is not for the delicate of sensibilities; it is funny, scary at times, as the stakes rise. No one is who they seem, everyone wears at least two layers of identiry as they move about the complicated and layered ancient island city of Comorra. The glimpses of an alien past, the promises about real identity, are not neatly solved in this story, setting readers up for further adventures.

My third good read of August was Terry Pratchett's The Truth.

This one came out in 2001, so it's only new to me--I have been portioning out Pratchetts over time. (I doan't know why, as I love rereading them.) In this one, a hapless hero of the type Pratchett does so well, William de Worde, blunders into discovering the newspaper, with typically cock-eyed results in the city of Ankh-Morpork. In this one, the enigmatic and all-powerful Patrician is threatened by a plot, inbetween the progression of journalism. As always, Pratchett shafts his comic light down into deeper questions about our "true" assumptions, and even uncomfortable ones, like: whose truth is true? Is the pen mightier than the sword? What about when people choose to get their news from flagrantly unreliable sources because it's more interesting? There are sidetrips into a lot of contemporary questions, but Pratchett never steps over into ranting, or telling the reader what to think. You keep laughing right through the story . . . and when you put it down and the laughter dies away, the ideas are still there, waiting to be pondered. Excellent stuff.

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