Skulddugery Pleasent

Skulddugery Pleasent, by Derek Landy, is, quite frankly, the funniest book I have read since, well, forever. 
    Stephanie Edgely's uncle has just died.  People speculate that he dropped dead of a heart attack, though why he did so is beyond them because he seemed to be a perfectly heathly middle-aged novelist.  But died he has, and he has left behind quite a legacy for his favorite niece:  Not only has Stephanie inherited his fortune and his grand old manor, but she has also inherited his lifestyle -- a life of danger and magic and a war that has spanned ages.  Along with Skluddery Pleasent, a back-talking, flame-throwing, wise-cracking, Bently-driving, walking, talking, skeleton/dective with a grudge, she races against the evilest of villians to figure out why her uncle was murdered and to find an artifact that could mean the destruction of the world as we know it. 
     But nothing is ever that simple, as Ms. Edgely is soon to figure out, and things get complicated as magic and trechery permiate everything.  Stephanie must find out who she really is, what life she really wants, and who her friends really are before Serpine burns down the world, taking Skulduggery with him. 

I love this book.  I have read it three times in the past two years.  All the way through, all three times.  And I don't even own it.  Really, the sarcasm and wit is something else, and I must confess that I have gotten most of my good come-backs from that volume. 
     One of the other things that I like about the book, other than the refreshingly cynical sarcasm, is the plot.  It basically boils down to a good guy vs. evil villian plot.  Oh, sure, Stephanie has her doubts about people's motives, and some people's motives really need to be questioned, but at it's heart it's the good guy battling it out against the good guy.  You just don't get plots that simple any more in young adult liturature, and it's sort of refreshing.  You don't have to stress your brain out thinking 'oh, wait, he's the bad guy, right?' or 'wait, he was in love with her but now he's dating her but he's secretly working for the bad guy and he's trying to gleam information from her, and he's trying to spare the girl he loves.  Is that it?' 
     Another thing:  This book glides along smoothly without any romance.  In most books there's a boy/girl tension to the plot, to help create tension.  In a lot of books that is very nesscessary because there would be next to none dramatic tension otherwise (It's why I don't read much of Jenna Black's stuff.  Or Stephanie Meyer's.).  But this one is exciting enough without a guy element.  It's very nice.  All fighting and action, and very little romantic talk.  Just the way I like it.
      And, of course, there are the characters. More motley of a crew never have I met.  A skeleton who walks and talks and posses 'razor sharp wit', a girl who knows that she's something more than suburbia, a tailor who's so ugly he decided that he shouldn't join boxing and ruin his face more, a warrior-lady who has layers like an onion (on the top, she's tough, but peel her and she's just as girly as the next lady who's wearing pink high-heels), a china (ha ha, punny) doll of a woman who's spell is just as alluring as her lies, and a villian who has no motive whatsoever, as far as I can tell.  But you just love them all to bits.  Except for China and Serpine, but that could've done without saying.  The characters are real life people who spring to life off the page.  You can see them marching through wax-musames, hear them as they laugh over their jokes, run with them as they avoid vampires.  And, amazingly, you remember their names after you're done reading and you don't have to go back and reference the book just to make sure. 
       It doesn't seem like it should go together, a fantasy mystery about death and destruction and the satirical conversations about silly things like packages and cars, but it does.  It fits together like a jigsaw puzzel, and one is hard-pressed to find a piece that is missing. 
     Yet another book trying to re-define the definition of magic, this one suceeds in a way that's more than half-decent.  But even if the plot line were awful, the reasoning holey, and it required you to stretch your imagination a bit more than nesscesary you would forget to notice, so caught up would you be in the clever-word play and the lightness of the text.
     I'm afraid that this piece of barely-coherent writing doesn't do the book one bit of justice, but it's late and I'm really rather tired.  Let me just say that Stephanie and Skulddugery's adventures will be read many more times by me, and that I might have to go bean Derek Landy over the head with his own novel because I don't think he's put out a sequal.