Terry Pratchett's Thud!

Terry Pratchett's new Discworld novel will be released in the second week of September. Thud! will chronicle the further mis-adventures of Commander Samuel Vimes and the City Watch of Ankh-Morpork. I'm looking forward to the novel, as there's always a dry spell between Pratchett books -- and he's an author that I am a little obsessive about. The man has wit and hilarity in his scribe. The teaser e-mail that brought the news of the forthcoming novel included the following descriptive:

  It started out as a perfect day -- the sun was shining, the birds were singing, and Commander Sam Vimes of the City Watch shaved himself without a single nick. And then he went to work.

  THUD!

  Suddenly, Vimes is in the thick of looming disaster -- he's got an unsolved murder to crack, an impending war born of age-old animosity to avert, a new recruit he'd really rather not hire, not to mention a pesky government inspector asking all the wrong questions.

So I looked the novel up at Amazon, and got an even better teaser:

It's a game of Trolls and Dwarfs where the player must take both sides to win ...

It's the noise a troll club makes when crushing in a dwarf skull, or when a dwarfish axe cleaves a trollish cranium ...

It's the unsettling sound of history about to repeat itself ... THUD!

It's the most extraordinary, outrageous, provocative, insightful, and keenly cutting flight of fancy yet from Discworld's incomparable supreme creator ... Terry Pratchett

  Commander Sam Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch admits he may not be the sharpest knife in the cutlery drawer -- he might not even be a spoon. But he's dogged and honest and he'll be damned if he lets anyone disturb his city's always-tentative peace -- and that includes a rabble-rousing dwarf from the sticks (or deep beneath them) who's been stirring up big trouble on the eve of the anniversary of one of Discworld's most infamous historical events.

  Centuries earlier, in a gods-forsaken hellhole called Koom Valley, a horde of trolls met a division of dwarfs in bloody combat. Though nobody's quite sure why they fought or who actually won, hundreds of years on each species still bears the cultural scars, and one views the other with simmering animosity and distrust. Lately, an influential dwarf, Grag Hamcrusher, has been fomenting unrest among Ankh-Morpork's more diminutive citizens with incendiary speeches. And it doesn't help matters when the pint-size provocateur is discovered beaten to death ... with a troll club lying conveniently nearby.

  Vimes knows the well-being of his smoldering city depends on his ability to solve the Hamcrusher homicide without delay. (Vimes's secondmost-pressing responsibility, in fact, next to being home every evening at six sharp to read Where's My Cow? to Young Sam.) Whatever it takes to unstick this very sticky situation, Vimes will do it -- even tolerate having a vampire in the Watch. But there's more than one corpse waiting for him in the eerie, summoning darkness of the vast, labyrinthine mine network the dwarfs have been excavating in secret beneath Ankh-Morpork's streets. A deadly puzzle is pulling Sam Vimes deep into the muck and mire of superstition, hatred, and fear -- and perhaps all the way to Koom Valley itself.

Oh, I'm quite looking forward to the book. And I may even have to pick up the the companion picture-book, Where's My Cow?, that will be released at the same time.