Arms & Legs, byy Chloe Lane

 Chloe Lane's narrator, Georgie, tells a dark and frequently funny story that progresses in a spiral rather than a straight line. Her language, in Lane's novel Arms & Legs, gathers together a corpse in the Florida forest, exploding eggs, cops and creepy neighbors, controlled burns, and love and desire (not. necessarily at the same time), difficult relationships, and most of all the voice of Georgie, brutally honest with herself and yet open to hose strange creatures, other people.  Georgie is an instructor in a north-central Florida university that sounds a lot like the University of Florida, but this is not a college novel, and though sometimes satirical it is not cerebral: Georgie's language is very physical as well as metaphorical: her own body and its relation to her husband and. her lover is specific and concrete. Lane's novel is dark enokugh to be thought of as "noir," and includes a disturbing, grisly (to use Georgie's word) corpse, a police investigation (th0okugh conducted in the shadows of the narrative. So not a conventional crime novel, but a lyrical, honest portrayal of Georgie's mental, physical, and emotional struggles: as well as being highly entertaining, since Georgie's voice is always elliptical as well as entertaining.