Today we are promoting nearly a dozen titles that for some reason got overlooked . . . either we missed giving them the attention they deserved, or perhaps, you didn’t see the newsletter.  We thought we’d give them another chance, and we are cutting the price on each of them by five bucks.   All eleven titles are exciting and merit another look, but please give your special attention to three of them.

(Publisher’s Weekly, Dec. 6)

Set in an unnamed city, Berry‘s ambitious debut reverberates with echoes of Kafka and Paul Auster. Charles Unwin, a clerk who’s toiled for years for the Pinkerton-like Agency, has meticulously catalogued the legendary cases of sleuth Travis Sivart. When Sivart disappears, Unwin, who’s inexplicably promoted to the rank of detective, goes in search of him. While exploring the upper reaches of the Agency’s labyrinthine headquarters, the paper pusher stumbles on a corpse. Aided by a narcoleptic assistant, he enters a surreal landscape where all the alarm clocks have been stolen. In the course of his inquiries, Unwin is shattered to realize that some of Sivart’s greatest triumphs were empty ones, that his hero didn’t always come up with the correct solution. Even if the intriguing conceit doesn’t fully work, this cerebral novel, with its sly winks at traditional whodunits and inspired portrait of the bureaucratic and paranoid Agency, will appeal to mystery readers and nongenre fans alike.

Order your signed copy of The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry at www.vjbooks.com!