It's hard to write about this book without spoilers, everything that happens in it delighted me. The characters are interesting and funny, the criminal underworld element is brilliantly misplaced in the setting of suburban Ireland, and the whole thing comes together in a wonderfully clever ending. Highly recommended.

Set on the clean streets of Dublin ( there's a good joke right from the off , Sloot is a very funny and very clever almost but not quite , crime / detective novel ( in much the same way that Vince Hill is almost culture, not quite , but almost , as Del Trotter explained to June Snell at the opera ). The plot revolves around a suspicious death , 3 wonderful, slightly deranged aunts , a family of Dublin gangsters, a dog and an attempt to write a crime novel within the structure of a crime novel . Anyway, you should just read this magnificent book for yourself because my pitiful attempt to review it does it's sheer brilliance no justice at all.

The scene is set in Clontarf, a leafy suburb of Dublin where nothing has happened since the death of King Brian Boru in battle there in 1014. Then Uncle Eddie dies. That is the mainspring of the story. It is also an excuse for Ian MacPherson to let his imagination run riot through a plot where the only sane character is Rusty, who is Uncle Eddie’s dog. Let me introduce you to the cast list. There is Hayden McGlynn, a stand-up comedian and Uncle Eddie’s nephew. He decides that his elderly uncle has been murdered and makes it his job to uncover the culprit. Unfortunately, whilst he does not have the “little grey cells” of Hercule Poirot, he does have the imagination of Myles na Gopaleen. There are the three nonagenarian aunts who are so demented that they cannot even remember their own names, let alone the names of the other two, but who somehow manage to have a grasp of the situation. There is the Pope family, psychopathic rulers of Dublin’s criminal underworld, led by Frankie, who has a dark underside to his dark underside. There is Detective Lou Brannigan who is determined to get the Popes. There is Tracey who has a strange fascination for Hayden. And there is the mystery woman living in the house opposite Uncle Eddie’s Just to give this pot a good stir, the author is also present in the story just to keep an eye on things. And once the pot is stirred you have this delightfully insane Irish stew. There is an impeccable logic to the development of this tale. I have no intention of telling you how this develops as that would spoil your fun. It is a bit like asking someone “How do I get to so-and-so” and getting the reply “Well, if I were you, I wouldn’t start from here”. No, I tell an untruth. It is not a bit like that, it is exactly like that. I am willing to bet that you will not see the denouement coming, and, when it does, you will wonder why you didn’t. One thing, I am sure of. Clontarf has not seen this much excitement since 1014.

In Sloot We open with our protagonist trying (and essentially failing) to entertain a crowd. His comedy doesn’t appear to be going down well, and it becomes clear that this may be the case for his career in general. Our main character, Hayden, finds out that his Uncle Eddie has died. Uncle Eddie is not just a regular Uncle though, he is the man who raised Hayden after his parents abandoned him. Eddie is at least partly responsible for Hayden deciding to work in the arts. Given that he is a bit down anyway he rushes home for the funeral and decides to stay in his old room in Eddie’s house. He also decides that he is writing a book – a fact he tells all in sundry about, despite the fact he hasn’t written anything yet. When he gets home we get to meet the rest of the cast who make up this novel. His best friend, who is obsessed with writing crime novels and keeps giving Hayden ideas on how to write the book. We also have Hayden’s aunts, who live next door to Eddie. They are in their nineties and apparently suffer from dementia, so much so that they can’t remember their own names – but they also seem to have their wits about them. They speak in a strong accent and are one of the primary sources of humour throughout – by far the strongest characters in the book – they appear everywhere. We also have to throw in some gangland criminals and their boss, a police officer who is set out to get them, a would be stalker and a mysterious lady who lives across the road. Where things take a bit of a twist is when the author himself occasionally brings himself into the story. It is as if he is actually following Hayden around – and sometimes taking wild relatively unrelated tangents. With Hayden dealing with the death of his Uncle, living in his Uncle’s house, and trying to write a crime novel (apparently by reading books and starting at pieces of blank paper), it doesn’t take long for Hayden’s over active imagination to kick into gear. He convinces himself that Eddie didn’t die in an accident – he was obviously murdered! Given that the police have absolutely no interest in following this line of inquiry he takes it upon himself to catch the murderer, and in doing so gets caught up in the dealings of the previously mentioned gangland organisation. It is off the wall. It is mad. It is, at times, hilarious. It is incredibly intriguing. I couldn’t really tear myself away from it, and given the structure, I didn’t really know where our narrator was going to take us next. An exceptional read that is certainly one you should consider picking up if you are a fan of stories that a little bit “out there”. I highly recommend it.