Life hasn't treated Sughrue kindly over the years. Introduced in The Last Good Kiss (1978), this now late-middle-aged, Texas-born redneck and Vietnam vet was left for dead at the end of the Hammett Award-winning The Mexican Tree Duck (1993), and he almost bit it on several more occasions in the revenge fantasy Bordersnakes (1996). As Madness opens, C.W.'s younger lawyer wife, Whitney, has taken new employment in Minneapolis, and he's in serious denial about the consequences of this separation on their marriage. Instead, Sughrue loses himself in MacKinderick's supposedly "easy job"--witnessing a series of gruesome deaths (including the botched hanging of a professor's spouse and an artist's fatal tumble), chasing across the highway-striped West in search of some missing forensic evidence, being physically violated by a "blond giantess from Ukraine," and endeavoring to protect his client's redheaded wife from a couple of licentious FBI agents and her own self-destructive habits. Along the way, MacKinderick's blood-soaked sports car is found on a Washington state Indian reservation, and the doctor is presumed dead. But that only drives Sughrue on harder, as he tries, with help from seductive Butte attorney Claudia Lucchesi, to determine how all the pieces of this puzzle fit together. He's barely more successful at that task than readers will be. But then, Crumley's detective stories have always been stronger on character development, high-caliber action, literary wit, and lyrical exposition than on meticulous plot construction. If you've ever wondered how Hunter S. Thompson might have rewritten Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye, The Right Madness provides more than a few clues. Watch out: bad craziness ahead. --J. Kingston Pierce

"A chase after money and revenge had brought me to Texas, and a woman had kept me here," Milo explains. But trying to salvage a love affair, keep his PI business going, and run a tavern (whose real business is laundering drug money) hasn't kept trouble from following Milo--or maybe it's the other way around. When a man kills a drug dealer right in front of him, Milo can't help but track the shooter down, if only to keep the Texas cops from railroading him into the death chamber. Soon one beautiful woman frames Milo for the murder of a well- connected Texan, and another one with ties to both killings disappears, setting up the intricately plotted action of this fast-paced thriller.

Crumley's narrative gifts and poetic talents set this crazy-funny mystery apart. Milo is a consistently interesting protagonist, especially here, as Crumley depicts him in the fullness of middle age, a hard-boiled, bruised, and battered dick who, despite all evidence to the contrary, still believes in the redemptive powers of love--not to mention liquor, cocaine, and sex. Texas may not be Milo's natural habitat, but it's a big enough backdrop for his unique talents, and for Crumley's, too. --Jane Adams

Slapped together by one author after another, the crazy plot is surprisingly consistent. Yet the contributors have made no effort to disguise their individual styles, which range from Barry's potty-mouthed slapstick to Richard Bausch's tonier stuff to James Crumley's pulp fiction. Indeed, this shift in tone is one of the book's great pleasures. So is the sex and satire, if not necessarily in that order. Still, the ultimate reason to read The Putt at the End of the World is for its strange-but-true evocation of the game itself. Here's Tim O'Brien's take on a ball with a mind of its own:

For the first thirty feet, the old Titlist did not touch the earth, heading for orbit, engines roaring, but then suddenly the rain and wind and fog forced a scrubbed mission. Gravity reasserted itself. By pure chance--a miracle, some would call it--the ball dropped heavily onto the green, not five feet from the cup.... It caught a sidehill slope. It wobbled off line for a second, then straightened out and continued its erratic pilgrimage toward destiny.

In college, Mike Thompson's microbiology studies lead him to befriend two Iranian students, Malik Aziz and Sadeq Nadim. The Ayatollah's rise to power unleashes a chain of events that pulls these men in different directions, eventually pitting them against each other in the most significant conflict the United States has ever witnessed

Semi-retired General Herndon has foreseen the coming events. He must now take charge of the military response, using only the scattered remnants of America's once powerful defenses.