PURE DEAD BATTY

Good prevails, malice gets a proper—often terminal—comeuppance and characters come back from the incompletely dead in this latest tale featuring the closely knit but harum-scarum Strega-Borgia clan and its assorted nonhuman hangers-on. The daily chaos continues amid a welter of spectacularly destructive mishaps and gross alimentary eruptions. Even as gentle paterfamilias Luciano is being carted off to prison as a mass murderer in the latest ploy from his crazed Mafioso half-brother, the twin pregnancies of Luciano’s ditzy wife Baci and Ffup the dragon, a scaly diva (“I. Don’t. Do. Carbs. Ever.”) with a tendency to blow flames from both ends, provide emotional roller coasters for the three (soon to be four) Strega-Borgia siblings. And with visits to Heaven, Hell and a few places in-between, beloved nanny/witch Flora McLachlan continues her efforts to keep the incredibly dangerous Chronostone out of the clutches of S’tan, First Minister of the Hadean Executive. Despite the author’s near-continual attempts to fill in the background, readers unfamiliar with the previous three episodes are likely to flounder amid this tangle of ongoing subplots, but anyone with a taste for wild farce anchored by a loving family will be enraptured. (Fantasy. 11-13)