BRIEFY NOTED.(Dog Days, State of War and Building Jerusalem )(Book Review)

Dog Days, by Ana Marie Cox (Riverhead; $23.95). This first novel, by a former writer of the political blog Wonkette, aims at being a satire of Washington mores but comes off as Beltway chick lit. Melanie Thorton, a campaign worker for a Democratic Presidential candidate, is bored with her job, her life, and her affair with a married journalist. She launches a fictitious Internet diary intended to expose the seamier side of Washington life. When the career of the fake blogger, Capitolette, takes off, the deception comes to light. The situation is rooted, slightly, in real life: as Wonkette, Cox created a scandal when she linked to the blog of a Senate staffer who dished about her sexual escapades. But there's something self-defeating about a roman a clef that deals with people who were pseudonymous in the first place. And the plot's many twists just add more bones to the skeleton rather than fleshing it out.

The Accidental, by Ali Smith (Pantheon; $22.95). Smith's book, which has just won Britain's Whitbread Novel Award, concerns an attractive stranger who shows up on the doorstep of an unhappy family and is unquestioningly taken in. The visitor, armed with a perfect combination of candor, free-spiritedness, and rough love, proceeds to manipulate each of her hosts. Just as abruptly, and, perhaps, predictably, she disappears. We never learn much about her--her only purpose, it seems, was to jolt the family members out of their respective messes--and her righteous self-assurance can get tiresome. But the novel is saved by its skillful and touching rendering of the mental state of each family member. Smith's well-honed, even obsessive prose gives a feeling of eavesdropping on her characters' innermost thoughts.

State of War, by James Risen (Free Press; $26). Last month, the author, a Times reporter, broke, with his colleague Eric Lichtblau, the story of ...