In Praise of Lies.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara

In Praise of Lies [Elogio da mentira], by Patricia Melo. Trans., Clifford E. Landers. New York: Bloomsbuw, 1999.

If you're going on vacation this winter, take In Praise of Lies with you. Patricia Melo's ingenious new crime novel is the perfect companion for lounging on the beach or curling up by the fire. A side-splitting spoof on writing and publishing that first came out in Brazil last year, In Praise of Lies plays on every cliche in the crime genre and keeps you turning pages.

In search of an unusual murder weapon for his next mystery, crime writer Jose Guber surfs the Internet for information on African snakes and comes up with the home page of a beautiful, sexy serologist named Melissa. The two meet and become lovers. Soon Melissa is suggesting clever plots to him, some of which involve bites by venomous snakes. Jose is enthralled, but when Melissa asks him to carry out one of her schemes and actually kill her husband, Jose balks. Concocting fictitious crimes is one thing, but actually killing a person is quite another.

In reality, Jose doesn't do much concocting. A hack who publishes his books under English pseudonyms, Jose steals most of his stow lines from the classics of Poe, Chesterton, and others. In order to find the peace and quiet to plagiarize, he has to drug his crazy mother, a religious fanatic who uses a megaphone to preach from her window. And now, on top of everything, his publisher is pressuring him to produce a book within a week and Melissa is anxious to move ahead with her plan.

A meticulous researcher, Melissa sets things in motion by ascertaining which hospitals are without snake-bite serum. She intends to lure her husband to a remote area, where a snake will bite him, then run from one unstocked hospital to the next, pretending to look for an antidote. Jose's role will be to appear on the scene and interfere, causing her to delay the search. In the interim, Melissa's husband will die. In preparation for the adventure, Melissa brings a rattlesnake to Jose's apartment for safekeeping, but his mother catches it swallowing a chicken and accuses the two of practicing witchcraft. Worse yet, after that initial meal, the snake refuses to attack, and Melissa and Jose are forced to search for a new reptilian weapon. Eventually, they acquire a deadly jararaca.

It's a perfect scheme, except it goes haywire. Instead of dying when the animal bites him...