Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn is undoubtedly one of the best books I read this summmer. It's at once a hard-boiled detective novel and a loving sendup of the genre.

The lead character is a New York detective, who just happens to have Tourette's syndrome. Things snowball from there.

The novel is a tremendous amount of fun, especially if you're the sort of person who digs contortions of language. Don't wait, buy it.

Nitpicks? Of course I have one. It seems to me that more people would have known what Tourette's was independently of knowing Lionel. I counted one such person in 300 pages. But as my good friend Pclem would say: Shutupcanavan! Sackupcan'tavac! Vacuumsaginaw!