Halfway through Peter Carey's new novel, "Amnesia," I began to worry I was suffering from it.

Who wrote this tedious mess?

Where was that two-time Booker winner who gave us such spectacular novels as "Oscar and Lucinda" and "Jack Maggs"?

Readers may have trouble remembering the jacket copy, too, which describes "Amnesia" as a cerebral thriller involving cybercrime and international intrigue. That's true for about 20 pages. Carey, a former advertising executive, knows the importance of a great hook, and the opening of "Amnesia" couldn't be more relevant and exciting:

"It was a spring evening in Washington DC; a chilly autumn morning in Melbourne; it was exactly 22:00 Greenwich Mean Time when a wormCar entered the computerised control systems of countless Australian prisons and released the locks in many other places of incarceration, some of which the hacker could not have known existed."

Because those computer systems had been designed by American firms, the worm instantly spreads through the United States, too, breaking open thousands of prisons, including secret black sites in [REDACTED] where the CIA keeps [REDACTED]. On computer screens across the world, the group behind this apocalyptic amnesty announces: "The corporation is under our control. The Angel declares you free."

Who you gonna call - James Bond? Ethan Hunt? Jason Bourne?

No, this is a job for a glib, left-wing writer named Felix Moore, "the most controversial journalist of his generation." He's just been financially ruined by a defamation case (his 99th), which makes him especially grateful for the support of a rich old friend, Woody Townes. Bereft of money, home and family, Felix could use a big project to rehabilitate himself, and for his own mysterious reasons, Woody wants Felix to write a flattering biography of the Angel computer hacker. "The defendant won't talk to anyone but you," Woody tells him. "I bailed the bloody Angel before the US could touch her."

Her. Yes, the Angel is a young woman.

"Australianize her," Woody demands. "Make it up, and most of all make the bitch lovable," so lovable that the CIA won't be able to spirit her away without causing national outrage. Because this isn't just any young woman. She's Gabrielle Baillieux, the daughter of a famous actress that Woody and Felix knew (and loved) in their radical student days. Writing an exculpatory biography about the young computer criminal will be an audacious and dangerous literary stunt, but it also promises to bring Felix back in touch with the girl's mother.

This exhilarating setup is infected with all kinds of destructive malware, but for a while, the story races along Carey's fiber-optic lines. Woody is a lot more threatening than he first appears. Young Gaby is aligned with some awfully unsavory figures, and she seems unwilling to participate in the sugarcoating of her life story. Most troubling of all, Gaby's mother, the famous actress, is surely manipulating everyone involved. Even before Felix can figure out whom he's really working for, he's given miles of meandering audiotape and whisked away to an undisclosed location, where he's ordered to start writing - fast - on a manual typewriter (the last defense against the NSA). It doesn't take a computer genius to realize that whatever he composes is likely to get people - starting with himself - killed. But he knows, "This was the story I had spent my life preparing for."

Truth and deception have long been adulterous lovers in Carey's fiction. He lashed together a similarly treacherous triangle a few years ago in a svelte novel about art crooks called "Theft." And in "My Life as a Fake," he nested deceptions within hoaxes surrounded by monkey business to write about literary fraud. Those novels, though, no matter how much they feinted, were always fantastically engaging.

"Amnesia" may leap off today's front-page headlines, but it quickly gets lost in Felix's dull recreation of Gaby as a young hacker in the early days of personal computers. This teen drama - think "DOSon's Creek" - can't possibly compete with the chaos we're asked to imagine is now ravaging the world's computer systems.

It doesn't help that "Amnesia" is predicated on a largely forgotten political conflict between Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam and President Richard Nixon. Old spooks and students of Asia-Pacific politics will remember what Felix calls "the traumatic injury done to my country by our American allies in 1975": The CIA conspired with MI6 to bring down Whitlam in a bloodless coup designed to protect Pine Gap, America's secret listening post in Alice Springs, Northern Territory. That evil footnote in our nation's diplomatic history received a bit of new attention in 2013, when Edward Snowden revealed that Pine Gap is now part of the PRISM program that allows the NSA to spy on almost everyone all the time. But U.S. and British fiddling with Australian politics in the mid-1970s might as well remain classified information for all its currency among American readers - and Carey's elliptical and erratic narrative does little to draw back that veil of secrecy.

What a missed opportunity for one of the best writers in the world. With his story of the muckraker and the cyberterrorist, Carey might have given us a provocative update on Janet Malcolm's "The Journalist and the Murderer." Or he could have breathed life into that forgotten coup of 1975 the way he reimagined the folk hero in "True History of the Kelly Gang." But instead, all the potentially fantastic elements of "Amnesia" are minced and scrambled and finally overwhelmed.

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Starting the year is a look-back on a classic from the Queen of Mysteries herself Agatha Christie, known for, well, great mystery novels.

The Seven Dials Mystery started out lightly in a country house with a group of young people making fun of their friend for always waking up late. The friends unanimously decided to play a joke on him by buying 8 alarm clocks to set off the next morning. But the alarm clock prank backfired and turned into a grim joke instead when their friend was discovered dead the next afternoon, supposedly from an overdose of sleeping drug.

The novel basically centers on the death of the young man during the vacation at Chimneys, home to the heroine Bundle Brent of 'The Secret of Chimneys' fame. At first, she was just curious about the true cause of death of the victim who used her room during the vacation. Then while poking around, she accidentally chanced upon a letter which seemed to be meant for the victim's half-sister.

Unsurprisingly, another member of the group of friends who stayed at Chimneys turned up dead not long after. And Bundle was there just in time to hear the dying words of the person pertaining to a certain "seven dials". Thinking back to the first death, was there a connection to the 7 neatly arranged alarm clocks on his room to the last words of this second victim?

Honestly, the characters were not very intriguing except for the gardener MacDonald who seemed to have delusions of grandeur and the admirable manservant Jimmy. The supposed heroine just didn't work well except for serving as a means to lead the readers to an obviously wrong conclusion.

Unlike the usual mystery story, there is neither an apparent 'murder scene' nor an obligatory gathering of the characters at the end for the revelation. It was more of an action-adventure type of story with a little romance. However, that's not saying it was not good -- it's sort of refreshing to deviate from the usual dark atmosphere of a mystery novel. Also, this time there's no Poirot or Miss Marple, instead we got the 'wooden' Superintendent Battle so maybe that's a factor for the non-formulaic narration.

All in all, the ride was not an absolute bore. After all, it's always great fun reading a Christie novel and this one's no exception even though it's considerably light-hearted than the usual fare from Dyman Associates Publishing Inc...

As a Sherlock Holmes fan, I'm already partial to a character whose qualities include a calculating mind and a knack for intelligent quips. If he happens to be the main character in a heist plot, then I'm sold.

On this first installment of an 8-part series by Eoin Colfer, we're introduced to the titular character Artemis Fowl II who's somewhat of an antihero, with the vibe of someone who's used to being in command and is very capable of it, too. At first he just seemed to be a cocky jerk but as the story unfolds, he's revealed to have a bit of humanity in him when it comes to his family. Basically, the plot revolves around this 'criminal mastermind' kid bent on getting gold from the People (fairies) to restore his family's status and to look for his father who mysteriously disappeared.

I have to admit though that on reading a first few lines of Artemis' lines, I was immediately struck with an I-encountered-this-character-before-from-somewhere feeling. I suppose he reminds me of Lelouch a lot. (But what struck me before I started reading is this: what made Colfer decide on that name for such a character?) It honestly took a while for me to get used to the feminine name of Artemis referring to a whiz kid with the conversational style of a royal instead of to a mythology goddess known for roaming in the wildlife.

To his credit, Colfer has a very engaging writing style and makes real amusing dialogue. Having play on words like the LEP recon, the elite force of the fairies, is also a nice touch. You got to give him props, too in his colorful characters like Foaly, who fits the geek guy archetype with witty comebacks to the tee. Then there's the awesome loyal sidekick, aptly named Butler, who seems to be capable of almost anything related to physical harm. He's the muscle to Artemis' brain and the closest thing to a father figure the kid has.

All in all, I'd say this is an example of an excellent YA series that is a welcome diversion from a flood of cheesy chick lit and cringe-worthy vampire occult rubbish in the market today. Colfer's got an absolutely strong main character and stable first novel to set up a fairly long series nicely.

It has action, fantasy, adventure and enough futuristic tech and sweet gadgets to satisfy a sci-fi fan. Who would have thought a human vs. fairies premise can be done this nicely. Though there will be times you'd think what's happening is just too convenient, it won't matter much because you're enjoying the ride so much. I honestly had to stop for a bit every time Foaly or Artemis (and sometimes Commander Root) says something because I can't help but give an amused laugh.

After reading it, I highly suggest listening to the audiobook version from Dyman Associates Publishing Inc. Nathaniel Parker did a superb job in setting the tone and doing the voice of Artemis unbelievably spot-on that you won't even know it's being read by a 50-year old voice actor -- not to mention the wonderful accent.

My only rant: I find it really weird that it seemed to be setting up a love interest for Artemis in the form of a fairy (Holly Short). You don't necessarily have to pair two leading characters of a story, right? A human-fairy romantic relationship feels downright odd.

Well, here's hoping they won't butcher the film adaptation when they realize this could be the next big cash cow since HP.

Book Review: 'Tennessee Williams' by John Lahr

This is by far the best book ever written about America's greatest playwright. John Lahr, the longtime drama critic for the New Yorker, knows his way around Broadway better than anyone. He is a witty and elegant stylist, a scrupulous researcher, a passionate yet canny advocate. But "Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh" is not exactly what its title page claims it is-a biography.

The extensive chronology at the back of the book is more or less an admission of this fact. It is only here, for instance, on page 606, that we discover that Thomas Williams (born 1911) attended the Stix School in St. Louis and later the University City High School. In the body of the book, we hear about the psychological effect of the parents on the child but really nothing about his education, his reading, his friends. And when the book comes to focus on key figures in Williams's career, like his agent Audrey Wood, the director Elia Kazan or his dubious friend Maria St. Just, Mr. Lahr wanders freely among the dates of their exchanges with the playwright. The book is more a study of Williams's imagination and career than any plodding account of his "life." Mr. Lahr has decided not to track his subject in sequential detail but to dive into the tumultuous depths of the author's psyche and the glamorous chaos of his stage productions. He brings us as close to Williams as we are ever likely to get.

Certainly Williams had a traumatic upbringing. His mother, "Miss Edwina," was a monster: a spoiled, joyless, puritanical, manipulative, frigid dragon who breathed fire on her family, scorching ambitions and circumstances, bitter at the lackluster life that her feckless husband provided her. His father, Cornelius (known as "CC"), took refuge in drink and rage. Young Tom adored his maternal grandfather, a remote parson and, in Williams's own words, "not the most masculine of men." He was also devoted to his older sister, Rose, a schizophrenic, who in 1943, at her mother's insistence, became one of the first patients in America to be given a prefrontal lobotomy, rendering her permanently damaged (though she lived until 1996, 13 years longer than Williams himself). Their younger brother, Dakin, was a hamstrung cipher, unable to make his way with or without his brother. His birth in 1919 led their mother to banish her husband from her bedroom.

In 1939, at the start of his career, Williams changed his name from Thomas to Tennessee and vowed to write plays that were "a picture of my own heart." Mr. Lahr paints the portrait of that bloody, tortured, triumphant heart, which was, from earliest days, a pawn in the battle between his parents-each instilling in him traits that would often render him helpless, like his neediness and alcoholism. Edwina's terror of the physical took its toll on her son, who had to overcome a nearly terminal fear of his body and its desires. Williams didn't masturbate until he was 26. After both his first fumbled heterosexual encounter and a year later his first homosexual one, he vomited.

Mr. Lahr demonstrates how this home life shaped the young author's psyche. Against the stifling and repressive forces of convention, he posed a romanticized version of himself-especially in his letters, which detail his early erotic longings with a glistening poetic edge-as a free spirit at once volatile and tender, possessed of and by an assertive and redemptive sexuality. And this became the essential pattern of all his work, each play a version of his childhood and adolescent struggle. As compelling an argument as this is, it can seem-and perhaps this is appropriate for a study of the postwar era-too often to look at things with Freudian blinders on.

For instance, when in 1940 Williams was madly in love with his first boyfriend, Kip Kiernan, he wrote from Provincetown to a friend about Kip's appeal:

The wind blows the door wide open, the gulls are crying. Oh, Christ. I call him baby . . . though when I lie on top of him I feel like I was polishing the Statue of Liberty or something. He is so enormous. A great bronze statue of antique Greece come to life.

Mr. Lahr concludes that "Kip's large size is associated with the female (the Statue of Liberty); Williams's smallness places him in the position of an infant with his gargantuan mother." Admittedly, if Williams had invoked the Chrysler Building, there would have been a different spin, but even so such passages strike me as reductive.

Mr. Lahr makes extensive use of Williams's letters and journals-all of them well written. Like D.H. Lawrence or F. Scott Fitzgerald, Williams was an instinctively good writer. He was frank, precise and often hysterical in his journal. Here he is in 1949, in Rome, worrying about his literary output even as he is speeding through the cobbled back streets in a red Buick nicknamed "Desiderio":

There is no point in hiding from the stark fact that the fire is missing in almost everything I try to do right now. Is it Italy? Is it age? Who knows. Perhaps it is just the lack of any more deep need of expression, but I have no satisfactory existence without it. Without it, I have nothing but the animal life that is so routine and weary.

But I wonder how literally he should be taken. People noticed that when he was typing up his plays, he would become the characters, acting out a part as he wrote it. My guess is that he was often trying out emotions and situations as he wrote up his journals and that their tone is sometimes more hyperbolic or martyred than he may actually have felt. But God knows, it was a carnival ride of a life, and at its center was a shrewd, heart-baring artist who stood the theater world on its head. Continue reading…

If you walk through the doors of Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, you'll find two ways to play the games. You can take cash from your billfold and gamble anonymously until you've had enough. Or you can sign up for the casino's frequent-visitor program, Total Rewards, and get a better deal-in return for allowing Caesars Entertainment to digitally keep track of everything you do.

In "What Stays in Vegas", Adam Tanner uses Caesars as a case study of how a business can make use of what has become known as Big Data-the analysis of vast amounts of quantitative information in search of useful patterns. The title is unfortunate, because "What Stays in Vegas" has little to do with gambling and even less to do with Vegas: The book is about how corporate America amasses and uses information about its customers. Mr. Tanner's findings, based on interviews and, in some cases, on Internet detective work, are unpleasant, but don't bother being alarmed. It's too late for that. Las Vegas, he writes, is less a sin city than "a vast data collection machine."

At the center of Mr. Tanner's narrative is Gary Loveman, a former Harvard Business School professor. In the late 1990s, Mr. Loveman took on a part-time consulting gig training employees of what was then Harrah's Corp. in customer satisfaction. Shocked by the company's lack of sophistication, he suggested to Phil Satre, then the company's chief executive, that Harrah's use data it was already collecting to build customer loyalty. Mr. Satre responded by making Mr. Loveman his chief operating officer, a heady position for a young academic who had never run much of anything.

Mr. Loveman set to work, not necessarily to his loyal customers' benefit. In an elevator at Harrah's in Las Vegas, he met gamblers complaining that the slot machines were too "tight," paying off less than those at Harrah's in Atlantic City. Mr. Loveman knew that the opposite was true, that the company kept seven cents of every dollar pumped into the slots in Atlantic City but only a nickel in Vegas. From this chance conversation came the sort of brainstorm by which fortunes are made: If customers don't know the odds, they probably won't know when the odds worsen. Today, Caesars Entertainment keeps 8% of its slot machine take in Las Vegas instead of 5%. Those three extra cents on the dollar are pure profit. The gamblers don't seem to have noticed.

At the center of Caesars's data-collection effort is Total Rewards. Loyalty programs with rewards for repeat customers go back at least to the 1880s, when the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co. gave buyers coupons that could be exchanged for clocks or tableware displayed in its stores. Total Rewards, which began in a rudimentary form in 1997, is a program of a different order. The member offers up his number each time he sits down at a poker table or eats in a restaurant. The details-you spent three hours playing blackjack, never bet more than $50 on a hand and lost $750 in an evening-end up in Caesars's computers, which crunch them to identify useful patterns. Your reward, at least in theory, is that Caesars will market to you in ways it expects will please you, whether that means having the manager come offer a personal hello when you're at the roulette wheel or sending you a coupon for a free dinner at the sushi bar, where you dine every time you visit. Behind the scenes, computers are evaluating which rewards are likely to make you want to spend more money. As Mr. Loveman explains: "We should be able to give you things that you care about-not have you littered with things you don't care about-and have it work out profitably for us."

Customer relations by algorithm represented a revolution in the casino business. The savvy manager whose instincts led him to offer a free cocktail to a big bettor has been replaced by a computer that reckons that the small bettor who comes every Thursday night is actually more profitable to the casino.

Why does it work? The story of Dan Kostel, a salesman at a Los Angeles asset-management firm, sheds light on that question. Mr. Kostel loves playing blackjack in Las Vegas. He also thinks that Caesars Palace is a bit stodgy. But a few months after he spent an evening there, he received a letter offering a free room and $1,000 in chips on his next visit. The freebies brought him back. Once the computers identified him as a regular, the offers diminished. So Mr. Kostel learned the game. He played elsewhere for a few months, and Caesars Palace upped the offers. He checked into his free room at Caesars even when he was staying in a free room elsewhere, because he would receive more credit toward future rewards if Caesars thought he was staying there while gambling in the hotel's casino. As Mr. Tanner observed, "for Kostel, winning comps was part of the overall game." Of course, Caesars knows that if it has evaluated Mr. Kostel's behavior correctly, it will win in the end.

Not all data collection is so benign. Casino operators collect information about their customers from many other sources beyond loyalty programs; how deeply they probe Facebook FB -0.56% profiles and divorce-court records depends on the operator. Mr. Tanner explores an obscure company called Global Cash Access, which specializes in operating automatic teller machines and cash desks at casinos. If you use its services, it may (for a fee) tell the casino how much cash you withdrew there last month and how much you withdrew at other casinos. This is golden information for a marketer, but gamblers who use the teller machines may not understand that their transactions are far from private.

Mr. Tanner's engaging book is realistic; he knows that this particular genie cannot be stuffed back in the magic lamp. At the same time, he shows how harmful it is when private companies compile electronic dossiers on their clients. Data collectors, he writes, "should be clear about what they are doing, and customers should have a choice about the extent to which they participate." It's a sensible response. But, as "What Stays in Vegas" shows, the collection of personal data is now so widespread that the choice has already been made for us.

''Writing as Robert Galbraith,'' Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling has suggested of her recent venture into crime fiction, has been a ''pure joy''. Judging by the bestseller lists, this is a joy squillions of readers are already sharing - begging the questions why and how? What's the appeal of an undeniably retro crime series featuring a surly-looking, ex-army private detective with the unlikely name of Cormoran Strike?

While The Cuckoo's Calling saw the one-legged Strike (he lost the other one serving his country) navigating the perils of celebrity culture and high fashion, in The Silkworm, Strike is confronted with the petty rivalries and grand egos of a ''fictional'' London literary scene. Having published two difficult and obscene allegorical novels, troublesome author Owen Quine has gone AWOL and his wife Leonora and daughter Orlando would like Strike to bring him home.

The dowdy Leonora is concerned that Owen's disappearance has something to do with the manuscript of his latest roman à clef featuring a cast of literary enemies in a scandalous allegory with the unappealing title Bombyx Mori. Quine's last sighting was at a famous London restaurant having a very public stoush with his agent who has declared the book unpublishable.

Galbraith/Rowling is playing cryptic mindgames with her readers. Bombyx Mori is the Latin moniker for the domesticated silkmoth, which in its larvae stage is boiled to extract silk. The hapless silkworm, as a metaphor for the writer ''who has to go through agonies to get the good stuff'', thence burrows its way through the book, popping up in all sorts of places, including the epigrams that frame each chapter.

These epigrams deserve a treatise all their own, drawn as they are from a breathless sweep of 16th and 17th-century poetic dramas, from Beaumont and Fletcher to Restoration comedy via lesser known luminaries such as George Chapman and Thomas Dekker. Most telling of all are those featuring the bloody Jacobean revenge dramas characterised, as Quine's agent tells Strike over a reassuring bowl of soup, by ''their sadism and their lust for vengeance''.

Indeed, it is a quotation from The White Devil by John Webster that nails the plight of both missing author Quine, and quite possibly that of Galbraith/Rowling herself: ''Ha ha ha, thou entanglest thyself in thine own work like a silkworm.'' In its self-reflexivity, The Silkworm is thus a tale that resonates as much with the literary rivalries of the 17th-century coffee house as it does with those of contemporary London.

And contemporary London is very present, from the Monday morning faces on the Tube, ''sagging, gaunt, braced, resigned'', to the bustling back streets of Soho and Covent Garden in all their rain-sodden, wintry gloom. In terms of cultural tourism, Cormoran Strike may therefore well do for Denmark Street what Holmes did for Baker Street, or what Harry Potter did for Kings Cross, come to that.

Much of the pleasure lies in the vivid description of fictional people and real places, as well as the subtly evolving relationship between the defensive Cormoran and his ''secretary'', the beautiful Robin, who is about to be married to the manipulative Matthew. Note the moment of self-revelation when Strike considers how Robin's engagement functions as the means ''by which a thin, persistent draught is blocked up, something that might, if allowed to flow untrammelled, start to seriously disturb his comfort''.

There is unresolved sexual tension at play here - and Galbraith knows better than to let it slacken. Observe also the elegant periodic sentence structure, the use of the arcane adjective ''untrammelled''.

The Silkworm thus brings to mind the crime fiction of another, more leisurely and more literary era. In her respect for the structure of the classic detective story, and her obvious delight in its multi-layered artifice, Galbraith - aka J.K. Rowling - is evidently re-creating her own golden age of crime.

The Silkworm is indeed a joy.

Resurrecting a 45-year-old book, Bill Gates included Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street on his 2014 summer reading list. His enthusiasm ("Warren Buffett recommended this book to me back in 1991, and it's still the best business book I've ever read"-and claims it's Warren Buffett's favorite business book, too) was contagious. With prodding by Gates's team, the out-of-print book was reissued as an e-book by Open Road, and as I write this post it's Amazon's #1 best seller in commerce and #2 in books. John Brooks originally published these business stories in The New Yorker, so it goes without saying that they are well written. Describing the stock market as "the daytime adventure serial of the well-to-do," Brooks devotes the first chapter to a blow-by-blow account of the "little crash" and rapid recovery that occurred in the last week of May 1962. On Monday the Dow dropped more than it had on any day except October 28, 1929. By Thursday, after the Wednesday Memorial Day holiday, it closed "slightly above the level where it had been before all the excitement began." The infrastructure in place at the time could not cope with the overwhelming trading volume. On Tuesday, May 29, "there was something very close to a complete breakdown of the reticulated, automated, mind-boggling complex of technical facilities that made nationwide stocktrading possible in a huge country where nearly one out of six adults was a stockholder. Many orders were executed at prices far different from the ones agreed to by the customers placing the orders; many others were lost in transmission, or in the snow of scrap paper that covered the Exchange floor, and were never executed at all.

It's neither Big Data nor innovation, despite all the business books and management gurus touting the disruptive potential of each. It's the simple question, right there on the tip of your tongue. A new book demonstrates just how far an inquisitive mind can take you. Change usually starts with a question. Inquiry has toppled monarchs and empires throughout history. It's the basis of one of the earliest forms of education - the Socratic Method - used to train young minds in the rigours of critical thinking. Yet, it's a mostly ignored business tool, overlooked by executives trained in the MBA arts that "tend to place more value on answers, pronouncements, and promises," according to author Warren Berger. Questions also overturn business empires.