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What is the miso soup we are all swimming in? I hope it is nothing like the bits and pieces of this gentle yet repellent modern-day Japanese slasher novel. I picked this up in the library, carelessly mistaking it for a book by an entirely different Murakami. For my mental carelessness I received a shock to the system.

The novel starts out gently enough, the narration is readable and the narrator is likeable. He's a tour guide for foreigners visiting Tokyo's tawdry sex club scene. His mother thinks he's in college. Soon enough he picks up an unusual customer, a gaijin named Frank who really gives him the creeps. He'll give you the creeps, too, and if you like suspense in a novel, maybe this is not such a bad choice. Pretty soon you worry something bad is going to happen. My own worry was assuaged by the hope that the horrifying events I knew must be right around the corner might turn out to be not completely real. Or they might be reversible. Sad to say, my false sense of security was lulled by the fact that I thought it was a completely different Murakami writing!

So imagine my disgust when, innocently walking down the street reading the book while walking the dog, (warning, I'm about to give things away here), I find that Frank has killed about five people in a really gross and repellent way. To make matters worse, one of the dog-walking ladies in the neighborhood came up to me at that point with her two dogs and said, "What are you reading? Is it any good?" At that point I felt like throwing up.

Murakami did raise an interesting point, though. When his character is confronted with this psychotic killer, something which of course almost never happens to anyone in the course of everyday life, he becomes helpless. He doesn't run screaming out the door, he doesn't call the cops, he is somehow able to keep conversing with Frank. He finds out more about Frank, and, out of overwhelming fear, takes him to hear the New Year's bells at a quiet bridge with his girlfriend (not Frank's girlfriend, to be sure).

Notwithstanding its insights into the fringes of contemporary Japanese life, except for all but the most strong-stomached among you, I cannot recommend In the Miso Soup [buy at amazon] , a graphic and suspenseful modern horror novel by Ryu Murakami.

Hoax [buy at amazon] by Robert K. Tanenbaum. Having read the previous 12 or 13 books in this series, I looked forward to the latest adventures of NYC DA Butch Karp, his vigilantism-inclined and troubled Catholic wife, the linguistic genius daughter Lucy, and their twin sons, one of them blinded by a pelletgun in a previous episode. Not to mention the gigantic and lovable slobbering mastiff dog.

And, except for the dog, I was rewarded, at least somewhat richly. By this point of course, there is a huge amount of back story in these novels, so it's kind of tough to fit any new characters into the first 90 pages, but Tanenbaum manages admirably, creating sympathetic new good guys and a cast of minor characters.

The bullet: Alejandro Garcia, a rap artist, is framed for the murder of L.A.- based ML Rex (Martin Luther Rex), in order to get files about a massive coverup of injustice out of the way of the hands of the new DA, who would in all probability do something about it. Also, be warned that there are many gruesome killings that in addition to subject matter make this novel inappropriate for the young. Scenes of sex, violence, and, as they say 'language' abound! What's not to like?

Something is a little unusual about the way the writing constructs the book this time around, though. It's as if Tanenbaum, who must have visited Taos New Mexico for research, so lyrical and realistic are the descriptions of the desert countryside, also got too near one of those vortexes (vortices?) of famed Taos New Age lore. Tanenbaum, afflicted with a touch of the supernatural of the old Southwest, writes around a lot of scenes, returning you to the present after a meandering visit to the past, and returning to a scene from another viewpoint to explain how the characters could possibly have been where they were, and then showed up at the right time with the right weapon. Is it fragmented as in cubist art? It's reminiscent of the wonderful movie Lone Star about a border sheriff, where a pan across a scene can take you, within the scene, to a time decades removed.

The effect is a little unsettling, and a couple of scenes don't really work plausibly but it doesn't really matter because from a plot standpoint it's pretty much a comic book anyway, with the bad guys stereotypically delineated, and the REALLY bad guy an evil villain right who maybe could have come right out of a Batman comic.

I'm a forgiving reader and I enjoyed Tanenbaum's humor, but I missed the big old dog.

Take your big old dog for a walk down to amazon.com and grab a copy of Hoax [buy at amazon] .by Robert K. Tanenbaum. Don't let the kids get their hands on this one, though.

About 22 years ago, crashing a Mensa party with some babes, I was sitting at this table and a little bald guy comes up to us and says "Hi, I'm Alan Lakein, I wrote a book called 'How to get control of your time and your life,' it sold over 2 million copies". It was quite an opening line, but the funny part was, I knew it was true, because his appearance pretty closely matched my copy of the book, which I had at home, and had read.

So imagine my surprise when upon opening "My Life" by Bill Clinton, he mentions Alan Lakein's book in the Preface. How to get control of your time and your life [buy at amazon] .by Alan Lakein

I'm still reading a collection of James Carroll's columns in the Globe. Carroll has studied the crusades and shows GW Bush as a modern day crusader. This is about the best-written book about the war I have come across. At last a book that's quite readable!

I recommend it highly, even though I haven't finished reading it. An important point from Carroll: it would have been possible to go after Bin Laden and the Al Quada terrorists in a police action, without waging war. War has its own imperatives and soon assumes a life of its own. Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust war [buy at amazon] . by James Carroll