The Office of Lost and Found by Vincent Holland-Keen

Thomas Locke can find anything and works for someone who communicates with him via messages written on slips of paper.
Veronica wants him to find her husband and she willing to pay him the generous price of not shooting him to do it.
This is how we meet our two main protagonists.

As Thomas delves into Veronica’s life and her husband, he discovers a company that sell items that only cost certain parts of your psyche.
Just as you start to think, “This is getting interesting”, Thomas has solved the case and Veronica is free. For a given value of free.

That was the first shock, for me. The first half of this book is taken up by a number of smaller cases, almost short stories, that progress Thomas and Veronica’s relationship and delve into the weird world of The Office of Lost and Found.

It’s only as all the threads from the first half come together after the pair save a child and banish/kill Thomas’ employer (a place most stories would end) in the second half that the story really got going for me. I found that restarting with a new case every so often left the start of this novel very stop-start. It took me a good while to get into it.
It didn’t help that Veronica is almost defiantly unsympathetic in many ways. But it’s her caring heart that keeps you just interested enough in her to keep going.

Once we’ve set up all of the major players and underpinned that this reality is maybe just a little bit off from our own, then TOOLAF really kicks itself into a high gear and gets running.
Gods, children worshipping roadworks, the fate of everything, friendly monsters under the bed and just maybe the end of the world all come flying in with great speed to make the second every bit as engrossing as the first half was frustrating.

Thomas Locke is a fine entrant into the “weird detective” class. His methods are strange, and yet, if you’ve read Dirk Gently, quite familiar. Yes, this book is massively influenced by Douglas Adams’ quirky detective and it doesn’t really try to hide it. Instead Vincent Holland-Keen wears these influences on his sleeve and it’s all the better for it. He seems to have decided that there is room in the world for more than just Gently and his demented detective methods, and I’d have to agree.

The secondary characters are well drawn, Billy – the boy with monsters under his bed – gets the best deal of them all. But each character gets their moment to shine.

I enjoyed this book once the pieces were in place, it’s well worth the slight struggle past the necessary first half.
Definitely worth checking out.


The Office of Lost and Found can be purchased here

Serial Killers Incorporated by Andy Remic

We begin with our protagonist naked on a balcony, quite literally freezing his nuts off, while his lover performs her wifely duties with her husband. A husband who is also a gun runner and killer of at least 34 men.
It’s very quickly apparent that we are not supposed to like or admire most of the people who are going to populate this novel. And that’s fine, you don’t need to like a protagonist to want to see what happens to them. In fact a good chunk of the enjoyment of this novel is following Callaghan and his miserable efforts to work out just who is doing what to him and why.

A photographer by trade, Callaghan and his friend Jim get some of the best scoops in the journalism business by bribing, sneaking and occasionally making stuff up. So when they are led to a murder scene by an anonymous phone call, they don’t hesitate too long before checking it out.
The discovery of a brutal murder starts the ball rolling that sees Callaghan dragged further and further into a mess that he can see no way out of. By the time it’s all over a good number of people will be dead, there have been betrayals and a liberal use of expletives.

Remic writes books that don’t hang about. His prose is solid and easy to read, it’s unlikely to win any literary awards but it’s perfectly suited to this kind of story. Violence, blood and sex are his forte and he uses them well.
Remic also creates whole characters, making sure none are left as a cipher unless that’s the point of the character.
Callaghan is an utter bastard, something he takes pride in to begin with and has that self-knowledge slowly chipped at as the novel progresses. Callaghan is the type of character that is never going to be a hero in the traditional sense, in fact, in most stories about a serial killer he would die horribly and messily fairly quickly. However he is someone that you are almost fascinated to follow. He survives not by much real planning on his part, but almost feral reflexes and luck.
Surrounding him are a wide cast of some of the more twisted members of society and we get to know the motivations of each of them.

While it’s not going to be regarded as a classic of the genre, Serial Killers Incorporated does have a decent story. The final revelations may take people by surprise and if you can’t go with them then the novel is liable to lose you. I’m not going to spoil things too much here, but suffice to say, they remind me of Michael Marshall Smith’s novels.

Did I enjoy it? Yes I did, the humour works, the violence is quite lovingly and inventively described and even the sex scenes are done well.
If you like bastards doing bastardly things to each other with a smattering of sex and much use of profanity, then I think you’ll dig this.
If you don’t, then you probably won’t.


The eBook is to be accompanied by an album. Only 2 tracks were sent with my review copy. I don’t really review music because I’m not really versed in it in that way. I will say I quite enjoyed the two tracks by th3 m1ss1ng and the closest I could find in my iTunes folder to accompany them while reading were some Cooper Temple Clause tracks.



The book is available in eBook form from Anarchy Books here

In The Skin - Gary McMahon

In The Skin is a short novella that is absolutely jam-packed with some of the bleakest writing you will ever find.
And I mean that in a good way.

Our protagonist, Dan, is feeling a little dislocated from his life. At first I thought I had spotted the reason for this, but it turned out I was way off.
When Dan goes to New York for a business trip, ostensibly just to get away from his wife, things start to get weird for him.
A lingering smell of fish at the airport along with an horrific vision sets the tone.
As Dan's sense of dislocation continues he has a thoroughly unerotic encounter with a prostitute and meandering visit to New York.
But it is when he gets home that the dread and wrongness fill his life.

McMahon has written a dark and disturbing fiction here, the word that most sums it up for me is Bleak.
There are no chinks of light, no snatches of hoope to be found. And yet the writing is compelling, his prose full of the delightfully uncomfortable metaphors that he excels at.
In short, this is not and easy or uplifting read - but it is a straight shot of disturbing horror.

And at 70p/99 cents for the eBook - you can't really go wrong.
A solid recommendation.

Buy it from amazon uk here and amazon.com here