If you've heard the one about the woman who bought a fried rat from KFC, or the babysitter terrorized by threatening phone calls that turn out to originate from inside the house, you know about urban legends: plausible, allegedly true stories that float around as the experiences of friends of friends. As the foremost chronicler of contemporary folklore, no one knows urban legends better than Jan Harold Brunvand, who began popularizing the subject in the '80s with such books as The Vanishing Hitchhiker and The Mexican Pet. Too Good To Be True is something like a greatest-hits collection of urban legends, a mammoth assemblage of stories both venerable (the terrible consequences of mixing Pop Rocks and soda, or the one with the microwave, the confused senior citizen, and the wet cat) and recent, such as Internet-circulated stories concerning hapless travelers waking to find their organs harvested. What the compilation offers in breadth, however, it lacks in depth. Brunvand's collections have grown less analytical over the years, eschewing the commentary of early volumes for the sake of including more stories, and Too Good To Be True is the worst offender so far. Brunvand will presumably remedy this with the forthcoming (and oft-mentioned) The Truth Never Stands In The Way Of A Good Story, but for now, these tales could use a bit more elucidation than the author provides. That said, Too Good To Be True is a marvelous collection if you're simply looking to read urban legends. Most readers will find themselves to have been taken at one point, be it by the college rule giving an automatic 4.0 to those whose roommates die or the gang whose initiation involved stalking cars who warn them that they're not using headlights.