Amazon.com (ISBN 0684803143, Hardcover)

Leave it to Andrei Codrescu to introduce a soupçon of sex into an already bizarre death scene featuring a televangelist named Jeremy "Elvis" Mullin, a lost lottery ticket, and Felicity herself, a New Orleans private detective whose "spiky short hair, baggy clothes, pierced nostril, and eight-hole black work boots were the manifestations of the 'be more manly every day' discipline she'd practiced for years. The goal of the regimen was to achieve maximum teenage boyishness by the time she turned thirty, and to maintain it indefinitely." It is the turn of the century, after all--December 1999, to be exact--and anything goes. Her grandmother's death has left Felicity alone in the world and with only one aim in mind: to take down the weaselly Mullin who had convinced Grandmère to hand over her two-million-dollar lottery ticket to his United Ministries.

Meanwhile, halfway around the world, Andrea Isbik, late of Sarajevo, has found refuge from the Serbian prison camps in Jerusalem. But Israel is just a stop along the road to the Big Easy for Andrea, and before long the two women have met and joined forces as Armageddon threatens. Codrescu has his tongue firmly in cheek as he piles on the millennial fears and cranks up the volume of nutty rhetoric in the final, pitched battle between Felicity's tribe of pierced and tattooed followers and the fanatical legions of the fundamentalist Reverend Mullin. Readers who prefer their apocalyptic panic leavened with a good dose of humor will find Messiah right up their alley. --Alix Wilber