"Struldbruggs: The Life Everlasting" is the third and final volume of the Baloney U trilogy that began on a school trip with "Chaucer on the Nile," continued on campus in "Gloriana at Baloney U," and here concludes-shuffling on the edge of the abyss. In Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels," struldbruggs were humanlike creatures who live forever, but grow ever more vicious and grasping with each passing year. Recently retired emeritus professor George Badget, a widower, shares Swift's vision, seeing those around him living longer, but living increasingly dissolute, desperate lives-intent on...

When Detective Hinky Doanes parachutes in to become chief of the tired old Oakwood Mills police force, people expect heads will roll-but not down the streets of the town's tony residential neighborhood of mostly ethnic-Asian businessmen, professors, and researchers. Soon, the grisly decapitation has attracted investigators from the state police, and when the separated heads and bodies of Chinese-American businessmen and scientists continue to show up in nearby states, the FBI becomes involved. Despite having no claim to jurisdiction, Hinky and his friend Charlie Lee, an ethnic-Chinese officer...