Darkly hilarious, clever and self-referential detective story with a difference

My first Colin Bateman, and definitely not my last. A bookshop owner finds himself taking on the cases from the private detective next door, who has gone missing.

Our 'hero' turns out, through time and exposure, to be more of an anti-hero. He's no white knight in shining armour, no prince. He has every health condition going, he's not always whiter-than-white honest, he's socially a little awkward.

We never find out his name, but he talks to us as a confidante and friend, we know his every secret... and those of his 'clients'. Some cases he takes on are a challenge, and he's often able to use his contacts in the book world as well as his own knowledge gleaned from literature to solve them.

There's some good arcs in the book, as our bookshop owner falls in love, and cases come back through the book to the forefront.

I found this hard to stop listening to (the audiobook is beautifully captured by an Irish voice that does bring out the narrator's darker side and black humour). Loved the irony and literary references, and the excellent ending.

Can't wait to read some more.

Not only is this book a great mystery, it's one of the few I've read that is clever, laugh out loud funny, and very well written!

This book aged me a century. Writing style of a 13 yr old and the most insufferable main character ever. Took everything in me to actually finish it. Think my eyes are crossed now from how much I rolled them.

Very funny, dark and entertaining. 4,5 stars

Fairly interesting but mostly disappointing. The main protagonist, "Mystery Man", was offbeat and strange and at times humorous, but the humour became repetitive and fairly silly after a while. I did enjoy Mystery Man's in depth knowledge of books, specifically those of the mystery and whodunnit genre, and the quirky mysteries towards the beginning of the book were fun. The main mystery was interesting too, but overall, I felt that the author was trying way too hard to be funny.

A cliffhanger!

3.5 stars.

A hilarious and maddening book! (Don't base on how long it took me to read fr start to end cos I was juggling to many books at one go). At times, I got really embarrassed by the main character being naive/ dense.

And what's up with the last line of the book? Now I'm curious, maybe will pick up book 2 soon.