This addictive, whimsical follow-up to 2003's Foul Matter from MWA Grand Master Grimes dives into the cesspool that is the New York publishing world. L. Bass Hess, a despicable literary agent, likes to sue his former clients, claiming, after they fire him, that they owed him a commission. Some authors have settled rather than fought, but not Cindy Sella, a kind woman with an interest in tropical fish who's suffering from writer's block. Meanwhile, members of a group led by "mega-bestselling author" Paul Giverney and including two hit men with their own idea of who is worth killing, a publisher, an editor, and a mysterious Malaysian woman named Lena bint Musah, decide to take Hess down. This requires a seance, an alligator, a number of tropical fish, and other esoteric items. The coup de grace alone is worth the price of admission. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

They're back! Candy and Karl, who represent the gold standard for hit men in Manhattan (introduced in Foul Matter, 2003), return with their scruples they kill only persons they think deserve to die and their burgeoning interest in the publishing industry. But their contract on universally disliked literary agent L. Bass Hess hits a snag. Because Hess is suing a former client, author Cindy Sella, Candy and Karl fear that Sella would be the first person suspected if Hess were murdered. So the pair draws on their contacts from the earlier book, including best-selling author Paul Giverney and publisher Bobby Mackensie, to devise a means of obliterating Hess short of killing him. From the opening pages, when other hit men shoot up an aquarium in the downtown Clownfish Cafe, exotic tropical fish are the key to zany action proposed on the fly. This sequel to Foul Matter is a caper that casts an eye on publishing that is comic, caustic, and relentlessly readable. Yes, it's Grimes lite and probably as much fun for the author as it is for her readers.--Leber, Michele Copyright 2010 Booklist

Unlikely alliances form in a plot to neutralize an author's greedy former agent. After two armed thugs enter and shoot the fish aquarium in Manhattan's Clownfish Caf, writer Cindy Sella, a Manhattanite from a small town in Kansas, and hit man Karl leave with souvenir clownfish they helped rescue. While Karl and his colleague Candy consider a contract to off the literary agent L. Bass Hess, Candy leafs through Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews, and Karl sets up his clownfish in the converted warehouse he shares with Candy. Although Karl kills people for a living, he's happy to redecorate the apartment to provide a more appropriate environment for his fish--and to join Candy in helping Cindy extricate herself from a baseless lawsuit that Hess, her former agent, has brought against her. Mega-selling author Paul Giverney has his own reasons to rid Manhattan of Hess. To further his elaborate schemes, he calls on, among others, an abbot with a dubious religious vocation, an amiable stoner, the legendary Skunk Ape, Bass' uncle-turned-aunt, Candy, Karl and Karl's fish. As one caper follows another, from Manhattan to Sewickley, Pa., to the Everglades, Cindy loses her importance to the conspirators. Grimes (Fadeaway Girl, 2011, etc.) brings a crazy-quilt sensibility to a romp that ultimately sags a bit under the weight of its own cleverness. Despite its pallid heroine, however, this sendup of the book world, in which hit men apparently have more integrity than publishers, is great fun.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

JOHN REBUS is the kind of cop who isn't afraid to think, and what he's thinking in Ian Rankin's terrific new procedural, SAINTS OF THE SHADOW BIBLE (Little, Brown, $26), is that he and his ilk aren't long for this brave new world. Having decided that retirement wasn't such a hot idea after all, the Edinburgh homicide detective is back on the job, but feeling increasingly out of step with his younger, more tech-savvy and ethics-bound colleagues. "My town, my rules" was the mantra adopted by Rebus and those old cronies (the self-anointed "saints" of the title) who held themselves above the regulations governing the behavior of lesser cops. But that boast rings hollow when Internal Affairs opens an investigation into a 30-year-old case of dubious probity. Complications arise, as they always do in Rankin's painstakingly constructed plots, linking the old case with a suspicious auto accident involving the offspring of a high-profile politician and a crooked businessman. (The mothers don't count for much here, as women rarely do in this series.) In one surprisingly bold move, Rankin has shifted Malcolm Fox, Rebus's perennial nemesis and current Internal Affairs shadow, into a closer relationship - something dangerously akin to friendship - with his old enemy. "The whole system's changed, hasn't it?" Fox says, in one of their more intimate exchanges about the capricious nature of police work and those slippery definitions of right and wrong. Rebus doesn't really need the reminders. His apartment décor of cigarette butts, beer bottles, print newspapers and LPs of Miles Davis ("from the period before he got weird") might tag him as a candidate for the tar pits where dinosaurs from the 1980s go to die. But confronting the man he used to be has left him with a comforting insight - young dinosaurs are being born every day. MARTHA GRIMES HAS a dangerous sense of humor. She cracked it like a whip in "Foul Matter," her 2003 takedown of the publishing industry. The satire is even more barbed in this sequel, THE WAY OF ALL FISH (Scribner, $26.99), which brings back the best (that is to say, the worst) of those ruthless publishers, unprincipled agents, devious lawyers and difficult authors who make the book business so ripe for parody. The novel's imperiled heroine is Cindy Sella, a respected but naive novelist embroiled in a costly lawsuit with her unscrupulous former agent, L. Bass Hess, and his evil henchmen in the law firm of Snelling, Snelling, Borax and Snelling. Cindy sets the amusingly absurd plot in motion by leading the rescue of a tank of exotic fish in the Clownfish Cafe, thereby endearing herself to fellow diners Candy (who admires all creatures aquatic) and Karl (who feels the same way about books). These lovable contract killers, first met in "Foul Matter," plan to save Cindy from her dastardly ex-agent through an elaborate scheme of byzantine design, hilariously executed by a huge cast of Dickensian characters. The tone may be light - "How noir is this?" Karl complains of one gentrified setting. "Where's your fog? Your foghorns? Your miasma?" - but Grimes's notion of farce is positively lethal. THERE'S TOO MUCH sentimental gush and not enough guts and gore in THE DEVIL'S BREATH (Kensington, paper, $15), the latest entry in Tessa Harris's uneven but fascinating series featuring Dr. Thomas Silkstone, an American anatomist struggling to pursue his mystifying profession of forensic science in the imperfectly enlightened society of 18th-century England. Harris is at her vivid best describing in precise, fearsome detail the "Great Fogg," the clouds of noxious poison gas that swept across Europe in 1783, darkening the sky, destroying crops and snatching the breath of men, women and children. Dashing between his London laboratory and his ladylove's country estate, Thomas works feverishly to determine the cause of this airborne plague and find a cure. The ignorance and superstition of the age hamper his work, but so does the robotic behavior of the stock characters around him. As if to compensate, Harris offers revoltingly graphic glimpses of London, where erudite men think deep thoughts but have yet to discover the benefits of sanitation. THE DANISH AUTHOR Jussi Adler-Olsen revisits his favorite topics of captivity and torture in THE PURITY OF VENGEANCE (Dutton, $26.95), a sordid tale of "unwanted pregnancy, abortion, rape, unjust confinement to mental asylums and compulsory sterilization" inspired by actual events during a dark period of Danish history. Ah, but there's more, so much more in this frenzied thriller: homicide by poison, scalpel and hammer, multiple nail-gun murders, a sulfuric acid attack, displays of putrefying body parts and the splendid Grand Guignol spectacle of a dinner party (complete with place cards) for five (or is it six?) corpses. Carl Morck, the homicide cop charged with making sense of all this gaudy material, is a bit of a joker himself. More a bad-tempered grouch than a brooding hero in the classic Scandinavian mode, he presides over Department Q, an eccentric cold case unit staffed with personnel rejects and relegated to the basement of Copenhagen's police headquarters. It's a strange world down below and not to be taken too seriously; but still, there's never a dull moment in the cellar.