Daniel Handler has a fine sense of timing. As a writer for adults, he has produced two popular novels which have had an eerie prescience to them: his 1999 The Basic Eight deals, partly in a tongue-in-cheek manner, with a teenage murder, and hit the shelves just a month before the tragic events at Colorado's Columbine High School focused the nation's attention on teen violence; his second novel, a "mock-operatic incest comedy" as Amy Benfer of Salon described Watch Your Mouth, came out in time to benefit from a similar theme broached at the Oscar awards ceremony of 2000.

However, it is his juvenile writings, penned under the pseudonym of Lemony Snicket, that have most benefitted from chronological serendipity: "A Series of Unfortunate Events" has ridden the tsunami created by J. K. Rowling's "Harry Potter" books, tapping into a youthful readership eager to deal with irony, intelligent silliness, and Goth-like...