This book has really knocked this series over the edge from relatively realistic seeming detective novel into wild flights of fantasy type of story telling. In many ways it’s totally silly, but Hill keeps an edge of realism about it, and I love it.

Throughout Hill’s books there have been many cases of appropriately named characters and nicknames that tie in with the plots but none more so than here. This is a long book and at times it felt like the plot was a bit too obvious and really it was all an excuse for five hundred odd pages of fun with words and riddles. But what’s ace is that while there might be a hundred clues that you see through and you perhaps find a bit transparent and you wonder what the detectives are up to not seeing them all, what you see as the reader (or as this reader anyway) is only the tip of the iceberg of the clues and convolutions that are actually in the book. The ending a pleasure to read as you groan about all the things you managed to miss along the way.

A summary of the story is pretty short: a serial killer is knocking off victims with no apparent logic and writing ‘dialogues’ about the killings, these turn up at the local reference library. This simple idea makes for a really fascinating story, sometimes a bit comic book like but overall it works really very well.

I’m making myself wait to read the next installment of this series because I don’t want to overdose on it. This was great and I hope the next book is just as good.