After Oz A novel

Readers confronting this novel--especially if they're unfamiliar with McAlpine's work--might wonder whether this is a tiresome retread of Frank Baum's masterpiece, wordplay, or a pseudo-scholarly bore. But no! Author McAlpine's last novel--sadly, he recently passed away--is a blast of enchanting writing, straight-ahead storytelling, and a murder mystery too. The setting is a little prairie town on a Kansas plain late in the nineteenth century. A tornado has wreaked havoc, and 11-year-old Dorothy is missing. She's found eventually, rattling on about a tin man and red slippers and murdering a wicked witch. Damningly, a town woman is murdered in distressingly similar circumstances, and townspeople conclude that Dorothy's a crazed killer. A young woman psychologist, having none of it, examines the evidence, and suddenly, we're in Sherlock Holmes territory, realizing the importance of previously unimportant details. Then a skip to the Golden Age of mystery as the psychologist-turned-detective explains what's happened to the stunned townspeople. Golden Age, golden prose--it's a smart, classy reading experience.

McAlpine's sluggish latest (after Holmes Entangled) reimagines The Wizard of Oz as a psychological thriller. Eleven-year-old Dorothy Gale and her dog, Toto, go missing during a terrible tornado in 1896. Both are found unharmed four days later in a pumpkin patch two miles from their home in Sunbonnet, Kans. Relief turns to wariness when Dorothy describes befriending a talking lion, scarecrow, tin man, and wizard during the storm; her neighbors attribute Dorothy's tales to the influence of evil and a lack of religious training from her unpopular uncle Henry and aunt Emily. When Dorothy also claims she accidentally killed a witch, under circumstances eerily similar to the death of an old woman in town, she's accused of murder and sentenced to seven years in the Topeka Insane Asylum. Her case piques the interest of 28-year-old alienist Evelyn Grace Wilford, who tries to determine if Dorothy could really be a killer and sends her findings to her cousin, writer Frank Baum. The pace is lethally slow, only picking up speed in the last 50 or so pages, and by then, even an intriguing 11th-hour twist isn't quite enough to save the day. This misses the mark. Agent: Lukas Ortiz, Philip G. Spitzer Literary. (Aug.)