The opening of Hall’s outstanding third mystery featuring PI Vish Puri (after 2010’s The Case of the Man Who Died Laughing) sets the tone nicely as Puri tinkers with the bathroom scale to prevent his wife, who refers to him as Chubby, from learning that he’s gained weight. Soon after, a representative of the Moustache Organization of Punjab (MOP) asks him to find the fiend who cut off half of the record-setting long whiskers of one of its members. This case fades as he looks into a more serious matter—the poisoning of a guest at a dinner following a high-stakes cricket match. A resourceful and dogged investigator, Puri follows a twisting trail that connects with corruption in the sport and illegal gambling. Well-drawn colorful characters bolster a whodunit sure to appeal to those who enjoy a dash of humor with their crime. Agent: Christy Fletcher, Fletcher & Co. (July)

Humanities editor Skinner, who is on the usage panel for the American Heritage Dictionary, offers a highly entertaining and intelligent re-creation of events surrounding the 1961 publication of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary by G. & C. Merriam. The dictionary, assembled at a cost of $3.5 million, included a press release from Merriam’s president Gordon J. Gallan, which said the work contained “an avalanche of bewildering new verbal concepts.” The new dictionary embraced informal English in 450,000 total entries, including 100,000 new words, including clunk (from Mickey Spillane), cool (from jazz), and snafu (from WWII). Editor Philip Gove’s break with tradition, the refusal to distinguish between good language and bad, outraged academics and editorial writers, setting in motion what Skinner calls “the single greatest language controversy in American history.” A Chicago Tribune headline announced “Saying Ain’t Ain’t Wrong.” Life labeled Webster’s Third “a non-word deluge,” and it was vilified as “literary anarchy.” To probe why it triggered such volcanic eruptions, Skinner shows how Gove sought to construct a modern, linguistically rigorous dictionary and details how Dwight Macdonald and other critics sought to destroy it. The result is a rich and absorbing exploration of the changing standards in American language and culture. Agent: Rafe Sagalyn Agency. (Oct.)

With King Arthur’s DNA swirling in his wiry little body, it’s only natural that six-year-old Henry Alfred Grummorson would want to go on a monster-battling quest. The thing is, every monster he encounters—be it a terrible dragon, a dreaded cyclops, or the “most to be feared” leviathan—seems to have the DNA of Ferdinand the Bull. Ordered to “unsheathe your claws and let us have ado!” an elaborately feathered griffin instead offers a game of chess. “I prefer black. Is that ok?” it asks eagerly. Although the wrap-up is too pat, considering what precedes it, debut author Kraegel proves he’s a talent to be reckoned with. He has a Monty Pythonesque sense of language, humor, pacing, and character—the text’s mixture of bombastic and deadpan deliveries makes for a stirring read-aloud. This fine sense of the epically absurd also animates Kraegel’s rococo watercolor and ink renderings: in his hands, a dragon’s scales coalesce into an intricate mosaic, a tree is a swirl of mazelike lines, and the sea becomes a tangled mass of blue ribbons. Ages 5–8. Agent: Ronnie Herman, the Herman Agency. (July)