“[A] delightful and eccentric new tale”(The Boston
Globe) from the author of the runaway bestseller The
Jane Austen Book Club
In Karen Joy Fowler’s
newest novel, the bestselling author of The Jane Austen
Book Club once again delivers top-notch storytelling,
creating characters both oddball and endearing in a voice
that is utterly and memorably her own. Wit’s End is a
clever, playful novel about finally allowing oneself to grow
up—with a dash of mystery thrown in.
At loose ends
and weary from her recent losses—the deaths of an inventive
if at times irritating father and her beloved brother—Rima
Lansill comes to Wit’s End, the home of her legendary
godmother, bestselling mystery writer Addison Early, to
regroup…and in search of answers. For starters, why did
Addison name one of her characters—a murderer—after Rima’s
father? But Addison is secretive and feisty, so consumed
with protecting her famous fictional detective, Maxwell
Lane, from the vagaries of the Internet that—rumor has it—
she has writer’s block. As one woman searches for truth, the
other struggles to control the reality of her
fiction.
Rima soon becomes enmeshed in Addison’s
household of eccentrics: a formerly alcoholic cook and her
irksome son, two quirky dog-walkers, a mysterious stalker,
the tiny characters that populate Addison’s dollhouse
crime-scene replicas, and even Maxwell Lane himself. But,
wrapped up in a mystery that may or may not be of her own
creation, Rima discovers to her surprise that the ultimate
solution to this puzzle is the new family she has found at
the house called Wit’s End.
Playfully exploring the
blurred boundaries between reality and virtual reality,
fiction and fact, Karen Joy Fowler subverts the whodunit and
gives us a thoroughly modern meta-mystery with wit, warmth,
and heart.