One woman has been mutilated and another murdered on the bleak moors of Derbyshire. Detective Constable Ben Cooper and Detective Sergeant Diane Fry in­ves­ti­gate.

The novel is at least as much about the tense re­la­tion­ship between Cooper and Fry as it is about the mystery itself. This is the second in a series of Cooper-Fry books. Cooper is a local boy, deeply rooted in the rural community, pleasant and trusting. Fry is a bitter loner, who trans­ferred in from a distant city. Quickly promoted over Cooper, she can't understand his easygoing nature.

The …continue.

Another urban fantasy featuring the witch, Rachel Morgan, who runs an in­ves­ti­ga­tion agency with a vampire, in a world where ordinary humans were decimated by a virus and vampires, Weres, witches, pixies, and more live openly.

Morgan is reckless and addicted to living on the edge, and her friends will pay a heavy price before the end of the book. You'd want Rachel on your side in a fight, but you'd probably be ex­as­per­at­ed with her the rest of the time. She battles demons, both metaphor­i­cal …continue.

This book contains 40 usability guidelines for websites, ranging from Eliminate the Reset button and disable the Submit button after it's clicked to Give an error message that's noticeable at a glance to Be upfront about item un­avail­abi­ity. The topics include error messages, clear in­struc­tions, friendly forms, overcoming missing pages, helpful help, obstacles to conversion, and search.

When I state them that baldly, they sound obvious. But they're not. The 37 Signals guys have amply il­lus­trat­ed each guideline with examples of sites that violated the guideline, and …continue.

Iron Council is Miéville's third novel set in the world of Bas-Lag, where thau­matur­gy (magic) works along with steampunk technology and humans live alongside other sentient species.

Two decades ago, the city-state of New Crobuzon started building a railroad across an enormous desert. The workers are humans, cactacae (cactus people), and Remade (criminals grotesque­ly modified by thau­matur­gy, with animal or mechanical parts grafted on). Eventually, they rebel against the heavy-handed overseers, and flee far into the badlands. Known as the Iron Council, their legend lives on in New …continue.

Today's odds and ends.

• George MacDonald Fraser died the other day. He was the author of the marvelous Flashman novels. I reviewed the last Flashman novel a year ago.

• Kiva seems like a really good idea, connecting people in the emerging world who need microloans with people who can afford to lend them $25.

  Last summer, we attended a house party for Marc Gold of the 100 Friends project. He's a sort of one-man Santa Claus, personally handing out money to needy people and or­ga­ni­za­tions.

• Zane, whose superpower is knowing a Web 2.0 ap­pli­ca­tion for every problem, reminded me on Friday of Mint. I just signed up. Mint keeps track of your money …continue.

In 1845, Sir John Franklin led an expedition to find the fabled Northwest Passage, connecting the Atlantic to the Pacific via the Canadian Arctic. HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were never heard from again. Later rescuers found some notes in a cairn, indicating that the ships had been trapped for a year and a half in the ice, and the crews had finally abandoned ship, making for the south.

Dan Simmons builds a tale of horror from all the known historical facts: the frigid dangers of …continue.

Gideon Oliver, the forensic an­thro­pol­o­gist saddled with the un­for­tu­nate nickname of the "Skeleton Detective" by the press, is on vacation in the Scilly Isles, with his wife Julie. She's par­tic­i­pat­ing in a small biennial colloquium organized by an eccentric Russian mil­lion­aire.

Naturally, he happens upon a bone fragment, which leads him to a dis­mem­bered corpse, who turns out to be an attendee of the previous colloquium.

The main characters are likeable and, despite the somewhat gruesome de­scrip­tions of skeletons and post­mortems, it's an enjoyable, well-plotted whodunnit.

Days before Christmas 1321, a glovemaker is murdered in the cathedral town of Exeter. Sir Baldwin and his friend, Simon Puttock, are asked to in­ves­ti­gate by the Dean of the Cathedral.

Jecks juggles a complex plot with a large cast of characters, and manages to keep them distinct and in­ter­est­ing, while describing the in­ter­sec­tion of cathedral and town life and Christmas rituals in medieval England.

DCI Jack Spratt runs the Nursery Crimes Division of the Reading, Berks police. In­ves­tiga­tive reporter Goldilocks is found dead, after last being seen at the three bears' house. The Gin­ger­bread­man, a 7-foot psy­cho­path­ic cake, is rampaging around, randomly killing people. Punch and Judy have moved in next door: when they're not beating each other up, they're very good marriage coun­sel­lors. And enormous cucumbers are exploding under mysterious cir­cum­stances.

An extremely bizarre story, replete with puns, nursery rhymes, literary allusions, and shaggy dog stories.

En­ter­tain­ing, if silly.

Female sex slaves, Ukrainian oligarchs, an obsessive silver thief, white-collar criminals facing jail time, virus writers, self-de­struc­tive surgeons, and the Madrid bombers, are just some of the stories in this collection of non-fiction writing on crime and criminals, published in various magazines in 2005.

The book is bracketed by two pieces by James Ellroy. In the foreword, he argues that "true-crime writing offers a less ki­neti­cized and more sobering set of thrills [than crime fic­tion]—chiefly couched in human revelation". In the concluding …continue.