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: