Book 30 His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik

Book 29: Demon Theory by Stephen Graham Jones

Book 28: An Army at Dawn by Rick Atkinson

Book 27: The King of Lies by John Hart

Number of frogs: one, only as a thought, as the narrator repeats the old (false) claim about putting a frog in boiling water.

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Book 26: Songs of Innocence by Richard Aleas

Number of frogs: 0

"You want to know what it's like?" Leo had said to me, clearly hoping to scare me off if I was considering the job for the wrong reasons. He'd had one assistant before me and it hadn't worked out. "It's like this. Your work like a bastard for days and days and nothing makes any sense. You're lost, you're confused, you've got no answers and you're wasting your client's money. You're a fraud, you've always been a fraud, and no one in his right mind would hire you to find Times Square on a map or add two plus two. The one day, you think of something. Or you see something. Or someone tells you something. And suddenly, everything that didn't make sense does. Only here's the thing: nine times out of ten, you wish it didn't. You wish you were a fraud again. Because the things people hire us to figure out are the ugliest fucking things in the world."

Book 25: House of Meetings by Martin Amis

Number of frogs: 0

It was a rare fascist who lasted long in a strong brigade. In a strong brigade there was a unanimity of effort that had the weight of a union contract or a military oath: you met the norm and you ate the full ration. It was one way of getting through it -- the booming worksong, the bucketful of soup, the sleep of the dead. A peasant, carrying around with him his millennium of slave ethic -- a peasant could manage it without great inner cost. But an intelligent...This is what comes over you, in the slave system. It takes a couple of months. It builds, like a graduated panic attack. It is this: the absorption of the fact that despite your obvious innocence of any crime, the exaction of the penalty is not inadvertent. Now go with such a thought to a strong brigade. You try and you try, but the idea that you are excelling in the service of the state -- it weighs your hands down, and causes them to drop to your side. You can feel your hands as they drop to your side; your sides, your hips, feel them as they fall. Needless to say, a weak brigade, with its shiteater short commons, wasn't any good either. So what do you do? You do what all the fascists do. You skive and slack and fake and wheedle, and you subsist.

Book 24: The Tyrant by Michael Cisco

Number of frogs: 0

As she peers into the dark, a slightly flexed horizontal band of faint light spanning the sky overhead sweeps away from her to the horizon. Beneath it, rolling heath, dark bare hills, nearby a treeline, shadows of branches slide around the roots as the band goes by aloft, the leaves reflect brightly and the spaces in between the boughs are clots of black...Scattered cemeteries surrounded by low stone walls on the heath, a few obelisks and flat black stone...There a gibbet...The band winks out at the horizon -- then, it rolls back, nothing in the sky to obscure. Ella watches the band sweep toward her and away from her like a visible sonar ping, gradually becomes aware that there is a slow drift in the view toward the woods, the gaps between the trees like dark halls...
...a long white figure issues from them with weightless curving strides --
Ella shrieking pitches backwards and while Dr. Belhoria is admonishing her -- "El-la! You can't keep going off like this!" -- both of them are interrupted as the dead figure lying opposite them says--
*Stay away from those dead woods...from them, even ghosts never can come back.*

The Tyrant receives:

Book 23: Remainder by Tom McCarthy

number of frogs: 0

As I came up to street level, out onto the concourse in front of the station, rush hour was getting underway. Commuters were streaming past me, heading back down the steps into the tube. I stood there for several minutes trying to work out which way Younger and Younger's office was while hurrying men and women dressed in suits streamed past me. It felt strange. After a while I stopped wondering which way the office was and just stood there, feeling them hurrying, streaming. I remembered standing in the ex-siege zone between the perpendicular and parallel streets by my flat two days earlier. I closed my eyes and turned the palms of my hands outwards again and felt the same tingling, the same mixture of serene and intense. I opened my eyes again but kept my palms turned outwards. It struck me that my posture was like the posture of a beggar, holding his hands out, asking passers-by for change.
The feeling of intensity was growing. It felt very good. I stood there static with my hands out, palms turned upwards, while commuters streamed past me. After I while I decided that I would ask them for change. I started murmuring:
"Spare change...spare change...spare change..."
I continued this for several minutes. I didn't follow anyone or make eye contact with them -- just stood there gazing vaguely ahead murmuring spare change again and again and again. Nobody gave me any, which was fine. I didn't need or want their change: I had eight and a half million pounds. I just wanted to be in that particular space, right then, doing that particular action. It made me feel so serene and intense that I felt almost real.

For Remainder;

Book 22: Trauma by Patrick McGrath

Number of frogs: 0

I got up out of the chair and left the apartment. Descending the staircase I remembered a story about a man in an asylum. This man believes that his psychiatrist, whom he has met only once, is busy working on his case, finding the solution to his problem. It keeps him going. Then, after some months, he sees him again. The psychiatrist pats him on the back and asks what his name is, and what seems to be the problem. This was my mood. I felt as though I'd been putting my faith in some absent being who was working on my problem. When my mother died, I realized that nobody was working on my problem, in fact no one even knew what my problem was.

Book 21: Moment of Truth in Iraq by Michael Yon

Number of frogs: 0

Iraqis love and greatly value their children. This makes children especially vulnerable as targets for terrorists. That is a brutal fact. The official had gone on to say that on a couple of occasions in Baqubah, al Qaeda invited to lunch families they wanted to convert to their way of thinking. In each instance the family had a boy about eleven years old. When the families sat down to eat, their boy was brought in with his mouth stuffed. The boy had been baked. Al Qaeda served the boy to his family. My repeated attempts to verify the story failed to produce concrete proof, although many had heard similar stories. But the rumors showed how terrible al Qaeda's repuration for atrocities had become among the local people.
Ali told me people had been afraid in their own homes because of al Qaeda. And so Abu Ali and the local 1920s were the latest al Qaeda paradox. Al Qaeda, which nearly ripped Iraq apart, was driving former enemies into what I believe could be long-term alliances with U.S. forces. The 1920s knew that our people had moral fiber and were completely unafraid to close with al Qaeda in combat at any chance. The 1920s had come to respect U.S. forces for the punishment and losses U.S. soldiers could take, yet still keep clobbering 1920s, al Qaeda, and JAM, all at the same time. That respect helped create common ground. We all knew that we had to destroy al Qaeda.
Al Qaeda had made the 1920s in Baqubah our ally.

Book 20: House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

Number of frogs: zero living, but one shadow-puppet frog, a couple of Feng Shui bullfrogs, and a crystal bullfrog thrown across the room and shattered by Hunter S. Thompson.

In once continuous shot, Navidson, whom we never actually see, momentarily focuses on a doorway on the north wall of his living room before climbing outside of the house through a window to the east of that door, where he trips slightly in the flower bed, redirects the camera from the ground to the exterior white clapboard, then moves right, crawling back inside the house through a second window, this time to the west of that door, where we hear him grunt slightly as he knocks his head on the sill, eliciting light laughter from those in the room, presumably Karen, his brother Tom, and his friend Billy Reston - though like Navidson, they too never appear on camera - before finally returning us to his starting point, thus completely circling the doorway and so proving, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that insulation or siding is the only possible thing this doorway could lead to, which is when all the laughter stops, as Navidson's hand appears in frame and pulls open the door, revealing a narrow black hallway at least ten feet long, prompting Navidson to re-investigate, once again leading us on another circumambulation of this strange passageway, climbing in and out of the windows, pointing the camera to where the hallway should extend but finding nothing more than his own backyard - no ten foot protuberance, just rose bushes, a muddy dart gun, and the translucent summer air - in essence an exercise in disbelief which despite his best intentions still takes Navidson back inside to that impossible hallway, until as the camera begins to move closer, threatening this time to actually enter it, Karen snaps, "Don't you dare go in there again, Navy," to which Tom adds, "Yeah, not such a hot idea," thus arresting Navidson at the threshold, though he still puts his hand inside, finally retracting and inspecting it, as if by seeing alone there might be something more to feel, Reston wanting to know if in fact his friend does sense something different, and Navidson providing the matter-of-fact answer which also serves as the conclusion, however abrupt, to this bizarre short: "It's freezing in there."

Book 19: The Face That Must Die by Ramsey Campbell

Number of frogs: 0

He shoved open the inner door. It cost him a few moments to realize that the door to the passage opened inward, and to grab the handle. Behind him the inner door halted half-open. It was being held.
He wrenched at the handle. Between the doors, the vestibule was claustrophobic as an airlock. His nervousness hindered the door. As he dragged it open, a large hand reached over his shoulder and laid itself flat on the wood.
He saw its hairs, black as an ape's. He saw the penumbra of moisture which outlined it on the door. It was inches from his face. He limped into the dim passage, clenching his eyes to see, and heard the man padding after him. He wouldn't be intimidated; the man had none of his friends with him now. He turned and stared straight into the man's eyes.
The face looked absurd on the large head: a small patch crowded with all the features, surrounded by luxuriant flesh. It gazed at Horridge for a moment, then it frowned. But it knew well enough why he was staring. It was the face he'd seen outside the house on Aigburth Drive, and spying from the window.

I give the Millipede Press edition of The Face That Must Die (which includes the "fractured photographic montages" of JK Potter):

Book 18: Garnethill by Denise Mina

Number of frogs: 0

They could hear him ringing off. Maureen darted back to the settee. Liam came back into the living room and slammed the phone down on the side table. He looked furious. "She's gutted," he said. "She told her mother she'd smoked hash once and now she thinks Maggie's a drug-soaked gangster's moll."
Benny was puzzled. "Why did she tell her mother that?"
"Because she asked," said Liam with a superior air. "And Maggie's family don't lie to each other all the time."
"My God," said Benny. "They must hate each other."

A good book, with an original voice. But the author is a bit of a wanker - an interview in the back of the book, she refers to Patricia Cornwell's crime novels as "crap, really right-wing fiction." ?!?!?
Despite that, Garnethill earns: