Tim Dorsey - The Pope Of Palm Beach

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Great stuff

I loved The Pope Of Palm Beach. 

Although there are 20 previous books in this series, this is my first Tim Dorsey and it worked fine as a stand-alone novel.  Set in Florida, it's a very amusing farce featuring the manically curious and furious Serge Storms and his drug-addled sidekick, Coleman.  They are a brilliant pairing, with Serge venting his righteous rage on various scumbags who do things like dump polluting materials in nature reserves or price vital medicines out of the reach of those who need them out of personal greed.  They all meet dreadful but appropriate ends, a bit like a modern-day, secular version of Dante's Inferno.  There is also an historical story intercut with this, whose relevance we don't discover until the last quarter or so of the book, but which works very well and leads to a thrilling (and amusing) climax which kept me reading well after I should have stopped for the night.

It's excellently done.  You really do have to get the tone right if you're going to make gruesome killing funny, and Dorsey gets it perfectly.  He writes brilliantly, creating an excellent sense of place, and the balance of excitement and humour in the narrative seemed perfect to me.  He also skewers many of the idiocies of modern life and especially in the character of Darby Pope, makes some quite profound human statements below the witty surface.

I'm delighted to have been introduced to Tim Dorsey and I'll definitely be looking into more Serge and Coleman books.

(My thanks to Farrago Books for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Asia Mackay - Killing It

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Well written but flawed

I tried Killing It expecting it to be either fantastically good fun or absolutely terrible.  It was neither; there were plenty of good things about it, but it wasn't great.

Lex Tyler is a new mum who returns to work as an undercover assassin for the British Secret Service, and the book is a comic riff on both action-packed spy adventures and the tribulations of motherhood, with their juxtaposition at the heart of both the comedy and the feminist message.  Asia Mackay writes well in Lex's very readable narrative voice and she creates a good setting for the action.  The spy plot is OK, if a little silly and is reasonably well done, as is the nightmare of Lex having a cover-story which means that, as well as some exciting action, she has to socialise with over-privileged, pretentious and competitive West-London mothers.

I did have some quite serious reservations, though.  The book could have done with a firm editorial hand; at 400 pages it is far too long.  The riffs on the Competitive-Mother setting and Lex's own sense of blundering along messing it up (common to most normal parents, I suspect) are often good but they are too numerous and too protracted so they really get in the way of the story.  Even though I'm wholly in sympathy with the feminist message, it is terribly crudely done at times – especially with the introduction of a caricature sexist pillock of a fellow assassin whom Lex has to confound, which felt so unreal as to weaken the point Mackay is, quite rightly, making.  I also felt uneasy in places about the overall issue of taste.  It is possible to make assassination a subject of some humour if it's done right, but there is a flippancy about torture here which seems to me to be beyond humour in any context.  Mackay oversteps the boundary of acceptability more than once, I think, and I didn't like it

I ended up skimming quite extensively, to be honest, and didn't feel I'd missed all that much.  There are some nice comic moments, like realising that forgetting her maternity bra pads might lead to her leaving DNA at the scene of a covert operation, for example, but overall, I can only give Killing It a very qualified recommendation.

(My thanks to Zaffre the publishers for an ARC via NetGalley.) 

Terry Pratchett - The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Classic Pratchett

Terry Pratchett wrote this for young adults, but this…er…mature adult also enjoyed it very much indeed.

The Amazing Maurice is a cat who suddenly found that he could think and to talk.  He now travels with a group of rats who have been given the same abilities and, with a young boy playing the pipe, travel from town to town doing a sort of Pied Piper act to con the townspeople.  However, they begin to develop a conscience about this and then arrive in a town where something sinister is plainly going on…

It's classic Pratchett: gripping, funny, ingenious and quietly full of some important human and moral considerations.  The portrait of Maurice's behaviour as a cat is very amusing, there are some great side-swipes at the conventions of fairy tales and so on.  And anyway, anyone who doesn't like a story featuring a thoughtful, moral rat called Dangerous Beans is, quite frankly, a wrong 'un.

I've managed somehow to miss out on The Amazing Maurice up to now.  I'm very glad to have put that right and can recommend this warmly to readers of all ages.

Domenic Stansberry - The White Devil

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Disappointing

I'm afraid I was disappointed with The White Devil.  It has won an award and some enthusiastic reviews, but it wasn't for me.

This is a modern re-telling of the 1612 play The White Devil by John Webster, set in 2005, largely in Rome.  The narrator, "Vittoria", is a married American woman with a very dubious past in which she and her amoral brother may have been involved in murder and all sorts of other things.  She begins an affair with a rich, powerful and corrupt Italian senator, from which gossip, intrigue and death follow; if you are familiar with Webster's play, you'll have an idea of how things play out.

I have to say that for me, the story isn't strong enough to bear this reworking.  It's a format which can work very well; some of the current series of Hogarth Shakespeare reworkings – like Shylock Is My Name and Dunbar, for example – have been brilliant, but they have been in the hands of outstanding authors who are working with plays of depth and insight into what it means to be human.  With The White Devil, it seems to me that neither the author nor the play fits those descriptions.  The writing is decent enough and Stansberry develops an oppressive atmosphere, but there's a curious emotional flatness to the whole thing which may fit the narrator's character but makes for a rather tedious, disjointed and unengaging narrative.  Also, something made me a little uneasy about this woman's voice written by a male author.  In principle there's nothing wrong with that, but although this is not particularly sexually explicit, the whole thing is steeped in sexuality and for me it's not quite well enough written to be convincing and therefore to avoid being slightly creepy.

Others seem to have found this very good, judging by some of the quoted reviews, but I'm afraid I really can't recommend it.

(My thanks to the publisher, Orion, for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Colin Watson - Broomsticks Over Flaxborough

Rating: 4/5

Review:
More Flaxborough fun

This is another very enjoyable instalment in Colin Watson's Flaxborough chronicles.  It's perhaps not one of the very best, but it has Watson's characteristically brilliant dry wit, excellent writing and comic but rather penetrating characterisation.

This time, some of Flaxborough's most respectable citizens are indulging in paganism and licentious "rites," when one of their number disappears and a mystery develops involving various of the town's worthies.  Watson uses this as always to puncture pomposity and to poke fun at the self-deluding grandiosity of many of his characters, while taking well aimed sideswipes at advertisers and their nonsensical jargon, the behaviour of the press and, of course, "devil-worship" and its associated pretensions.

It's a lot of fun, but the absurdity of the subject matter, oddly, makes this a little less amusing for me than some of its predecessors.  Also some of Watson's rather dodgy attitudes to women are rather more to the fore here, which I found a little uncomfortable in places, and Miss Lucy Teatime makes only a brief appearance, which is a slight disappointment.  Nonetheless, Watson's style is always a joy and the redoubtable Purbright and Love remain a unmitigated pleasure as characters.

If you're not familiar with Watson, this may give you a flavour of his style, as the slow-witted Chief Constable Chubb is informed of the identity of a suspect. " 'But he's…' Mr Chubb was about to say 'vice-chairman of the Conservative Club' when he remembered his inspector's perverse inclination to disregard the relevance of social lustre to a presumption of innocence.  'But he's married,' he said instead."  If you like that, you'll like Colin Watson's books.

Broomsticks Over Flaxborough isn't an absolute favourite Flaxborough Mystery, but it's still a very enjoyable read and warmly recommended.

(My thanks to Farrago for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Matt Haig - The Dead Fathers Club

Rating: 5/5 

Review:
Another excellent book from Matt Haig

I thought The Dead Fathers Club was excellent.  It's a very well-done reworking of Hamlet through the eyes of Philip, an 11-year-old boy whose father has been killed in a road accident, leaving his mother to run their pub in Newark, Nottinghamshire.  Uncle Alan, his father's brother has designs on both his mother and the pub and Philip's father appears as a ghost, telling him that Alan arranged the crash and demanding that Philip exact revenge.

I found the whole thing gripping, insightful and touching.  Philip's narrative voice is completely believable, as is the story with events and characters recognisable from Hamlet but very cleverly adapted to Philip's modern-day school and home life.  Haig doesn't follow the play slavishly (so we are spared the corpse-strewn finale, for example) but its themes and insights are there, including the question of whether Philip really is seeing the things he describes or whether they are the product of a disturbed mind.

In short, this is another excellently written, engrossing and very humane book from Matt Haig.  Very warmly recommended.

(My thanks to Canongate Books for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Seth Kaufman - Metaphysical Graffiti

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Good in parts

I enjoyed quite a lot of Metaphysical Graffiti, but I do have some reservations.  It's a collection of essays about aspects of rock music which are fairly random, quirky and personal – something I liked the sound of a lot.  They are of rather mixed quality, though; at their best they are perceptive and entertaining, but I found some to be tedious and almost toe-curlingly unfunny.

Kaufman knows his stuff.  He's plainly a fan, he has listened widely and deeply and has thought about what he has heard.  This shows in the essay Beatles Or Stones? in which Kaufman discusses with considerable insight what factors dictate our answer to this sort of question, or his fine little appreciation of drummers, or a very nicely done piece on influences – and I'm always ready to applaud anyone who will acknowledge in public that, great though some of their music may have been, a lot of the Grateful Dead's output (especially live) is plain bloody boring.

On the other hand, there are some pretty frightful acts of whimsy which aren't nearly as funny as they think they are: What Kind Of Air Guitar Do You Play is not only pretty vacuous and unfunny, it's a load of absurd, pseudo-psychological tosh, too, and as for Kaufmann's rap rendering of Waiting For Godot…don't get me started.  He even feels the need to ruin already weak jokes further by explaining afterward why they are (allegedly) funny.  It's pretty grim stuff in places.

I've given this four stars, perhaps slightly generously, because Kaufman can write easy, readable prose and the good parts are genuinely enjoyable and insightful, but I did have to grit my teeth quite hard to get through other parts of it.

(My thanks to OR books for an ARC via NetGalley.)