INSIDE JOB, by Connie Willis

In the novella *Inside Job,* Connie Willis effervesces with wit and humor. The tale of a professional skeptic, Rob, his beautiful researcher, Kildy, and the medium they hope to debunk illuminates the whole credulous Hollywood landscape which surges after each new psychic offering. Willis shines a light over the addictions of those false hopes, from aura cleansing to psychic liposuction to prior-life chiropractic (the present back pains are due to trauma suffered working at the Pyramids or Stonehenge, don't you know).

Rob spends his professional life battling these swindlers, and he offers amazing insights in the history of various forms of spiritualistic fraudulence. For example, Uri Geller, the 1970's psychic who could supposedly bend spoons with his mental powers, was exposed as a fraud--by Johnny Carson, on the Tonight Show. Carson had been a stage magician in his early career, which was something Geller forgot.

Then a funny thing happens on the way to debunk the medium--and it's a wry, intelligent twist negotiated with expertise and poignancy. The writing is as clear here as a stream in a Japanese garden, with each curve and stone placed so perfectly the effort is invisible. *Inside Job* has become an instant favorite of mine.

I wish the same could be said of Willis' *D.A.*, which seems to be a short story published alone in novella form, with the same dust jacket artist as *Inside Job.* *D.A.* is a mildly amusing little work which might elicit a smile in a short story collection while you thumbed over it for something better. The illustrations, which appear to all be drawings of Willis herself, are so cutesy they gag. I'm hoping she only wanted to take a little breather from her normally thoughtful, more serious output. This is the writer, after all, who took five years writing the dark novel *Doomsday Book,* about the Black Plague. But no one who ever met Willis through *D.A* would be compelled to seek any more of her writing. Back to the grindstone for you, Connie, and please create something special again, like *Inside Job.*