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

Test Drive by DJ Burnham

Test Drive is the first collection of short stories by science fiction writer DJ Burnham. For a first collection, there is a very high hit ratio of really good stories.
One of the first things I noticed about the stories is that they all seem to follow a similar pattern, the first two thirds are on establishing the world and the characters and then the main thrust of the story comes in to play in the final third. In the hands of a less talented writer, this technique would make for quite a dull read but Burnham is very good. He makes his characters and story the focus of his writing, letting the ideas be a tool for the telling, rather than focus the story on the scientific idea – which makes a nice change from many other short science fiction stories I’ve read.

There’s a comfortable familiarity in his writing, the stories, while new, feel familiar. Time to Leave is probably the best example of this. It’s a story I feel like I’ve read before, but not done like this or told in this way. It was this feeling like I knew the stories that made the writing so easy to read.

Bid, One True Path, The Lighthouse Keeper and Biker’s Dozen were my four favourite stories in the collection. Bid tells the story of an auction site entrepreneur and the expansion of his gardening business into and interstellar one. I have never been interested in gardening, but this story kept me interested and entertained throughout. One True Path tells of the arrival of a religious alien race at Earth and their attempts to discover if it is a spiritual world and without need of conversion. The deciding factor in their choice appealed to me on quite a few different levels. The Lighthouse Keeper is all about setting up a lighthouse on a rogue asteroid field that is causing danger to interstellar shipping. Finally Biker’s Dozen is essentially a travelogue around an alien world after a war. The writing in this story is wonderful and very descriptive.

I have only mentioned four above, but nearly all the stories in the collection will have me reading them again. Only Blink disappointed me, as we never find out who it is that sets the chain of events in motion and while that might be the point, it irritated me. Home in Time for Christmas was probably the most disposable of all the stories in there. Even then, both of these stories are written with the same skill and care as the others.

In all this a very good collection from someone I will be keeping my eye out for. While reading this collection, it made me want to improve my own writing so that I could be as good as he is. I can’t think of a better compliment than that.

The author is donating all of the profits from the sale of this book to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF)

Find it on Lulu here