Lynn Truss - A Shot In The Dark

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Rather disappointing

Lynn Truss is an excellent writer with a fine comic sense and I have enjoyed a lot of her work very much, but I'm afraid I was a little disappointed in A Shot In the Dark.

The Book is a "crime mystery" but also essentially a farce.  Set in Brighton in the late 50s, a hopelessly stupid and vain police Inspector turns a blind eye to all crime, completely convinced that he has eradicated it from Brighton.  A brilliant, socially inept new constable arrives and upsets the normal order of things, just as murderous events take place around the opening of a new play by an Angry Young Man, and a comic investigation/imbroglio develops. 

Truss has a lot of fun at the expense of conceited but idiotic policemen, pretentious and narcissistic theatre folk and so on, and I enjoyed the first half of the book a lot.  However, it did begin to pall a bit; the plot moves slowly and rather predictably and the comedy is so broad-brush that it lost its appeal rather.  Inspector Steine's colossal idiocy and vanity became just annoying and the rest of the developments weren't funny enough to maintain the book.  I know that it is intentionally absurdly pantomimic and a parody of old-fashioned police dramas, but even Lynn Truss couldn't keep it going for me.

So, a decent beginning but overall I can't recommend this and I shan't be bothering with any more in what seems to be being set up for a series.

(My thanks to Bloomsbury Press for an ARC via NetGalley.)