Tom Hurst is delighted to be offered a position as junior tutor (Transgression and Pathology) at the world’s premier college for fictional detection – some of the greatest, best-selling detectives claim Cuff College as their alma mater. His first task is to work out the mystery of the Body in the Library – universally abhorred Claire Morgan, head of Tom’s own department, has been found dead.
The only clue, an African spear (jutting out of her torso), sends Tom to Botswana, where he discovers the next clue (a prive tag for a duvet from IKEA) and enlists the assistance of Cuff College graduate Mma Delicious Ontoaste, fresh from solving her own mystery of the vanishing business man. Tracking down the duvet takes them to Sweden, and Inspector Burt Colander, who is hot on the heels of a missing copy of Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf for the stations’ Ingmar Bergman Film Club night. But there are no mysa måne duvets in Sweden. In fact the last one available at any IKEA anywhere is in Edinburgh, which is where the group adds Inspector Scott Rhombus to the party. Rhombus is at the heart of, and suspected of being embroiled in, a corruption scandal. He craftily outwits those who have plotted against him, garnering five bloodstained notebooks in the process. Tom Hurst, Mma Delicious Ontoaste, Insp. Burt Colander and Insp. Scott Rhombus determine that the lists of names all refer to places in Virginia, North America – home to famed pathologist Faye Carpaccia, who’s trying to determine who’s behind a string of particularly vicious murders. The victims are attacked in their own homes, hung upside down and exsanguinated, plucked bald, then their internal organs are removed, bagged, and returned to the empty abdominal cavity. Those poor chickens had their whole lives ahead of them.
I don’t know why I do this to myself – I like the idea of parodies, but the execution… not so much. I had read two of the genre (from Alexander McCall Smith and Patricia Cornwell), and seen the odd Ian Rankin Rebus episode on TV. Based on these the parodies are accurate, and the Cornwell section captured some of the things that I found so grating that I vowed to abandon the series, but the overarching plot was weak, and the small but persistent use of footnotes commenting on the symbolism of weather was irritating and went nowhere. - Alex
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