In a flashback from years earlier, Yamada shows up and wheedles Mallon into hiring her to work in his Santa Barbara bookstore. In short order, she seduces him (''Short men fall in love too easily") and informs him that he is going to publish her book of poems. ''How difficult can it be?" she asks, undeterred by the fact that he's not a publisher and she's never written a poem. A week later, she presents Mallon with ''And Vice Versa." By the time he publishes it, Yamada has moved on to her next amorous conquest and publisher.
Somewhere in the middle of the book, during a private party at an American Booksellers Association convention in Las Vegas, Mallon discovers Yamada dead of a drug overdose in the bedroom of the Elvis Presley Memorial Mansion, where else but in a ''king-sized, King-sized bed."
Never mind that, at times, this plot seems to unfold like a game of Clue -- was it author Maxwell Black in the bedroom, or book review editor Taylor Bingham in the ballroom? And so what if the story sometimes seems to skitter forward like a needle on a scratched record? This is a very readable novel with a sendup of the publishing industry, told fast and loose by an appealing narrator. Dead poets never had so much fun.
Stephen Spignesi takes another nontraditional approach in ''Dialogues," an impressive debut novel. In a prologue, it's ''euthanasia day" at a New Haven animal shelter. Tory Troy works with robotic efficiency. She tethers the abandoned pets, turns on the gas, waits the requisite amount of time, vents the chamber, and opens the door.
From that moment on, the novel reads like a case file. Unadorned transcripts of interviews between Troy and a court-appointed psychologist make it clear that Troy has been charged with murdering six co-workers by injecting them with a paralyzing toxin and then gassing them in the chamber used to euthanize pets.
