British novelist Mosley: Between depressing reality and seductive dream photo: Caroline Forbes Inventing God By Nicholas Mosley Dalkey Archive, 296 pp., $14.50 Buy this book more books most popular most commented A G.I.'s Strange War Tale by Sean Gardiner Horacio Castellanos Moya Does the Twisted by Jed Lipinski The 2008 New Yorker Cartoon Standings by BRIAN PARKS Sasa Stanisic Turns Gruesome History Beautiful by Sidra Durst Rivka Galchen's Twisty Mistaken Identities by zach baron Trash Talking With Harvey Weinstein by Tony Ortega Coming and Then Licking It Up. Is This a Gay Thing? Savage Love by Dan Savage At Home With Competitive Swallowers Crazy Legs and Eater X by Andy Kropa Gene Simmons and the Whores He Admires La Dolce Musto by Michael Musto Columbia's Knotty Noose Problem by Graham Rayman The 'W.' Stands for 'War Criminal' (17) Nat Hentoff Scientology's Crushing Defeat (15) Tony Ortega Runnin' Scared: From Brooklyn, a Rap Campaign Against Tight Clothes (9) Runnin' Scared: Arcynta Ali Childs Runnin' Scared: The City Pitted Kids Against Artists in the East Village (6) Runnin' Scared: Chloé A. Hilliard Savage Love: My Boyfriend Almost Fathered a Lesbian Couple's Baby?!? (5) Savage Love: Dan Savage

What smart reader could want for more? Erudition plus a tense religious/political backdrop—the Middle East, just pre-9-11—and a missing professor with a secret that may advance biological warfare to its hideous genocidal conclusion make Inventing God a learned, engrossing read. Mosley wields hypnotic syntax (after a line of dialogue, he inserts "thoughts"—as in "Andros thought—That girl has made the telephone call? Then—Maurice would have liked this story!") and walks the line between depressing reality and a seductive dream state in which every surface conceals a trap. A professor returning home from a class falls into a hole, landing beside a pile of bones that may or may not be the remains of a missing colleague; an Israeli girl explores a tunnel near the Temple Mount and becomes a sudden captive in the ruins. Aboveground, traps of a different sort are baited and set for the conscience and the intellect. Is there a gene for hatred? Can right and wrong best be determined by watching rather than intellectualizing? The ability to generate questions, Mosley suggests, is the only way to reinvent a god who has become an excuse to smite, rather than understand, the so-called enemy.