Book 21

"Only Forward" by Michael Marshall Smith

And here we have Marshall's first book. Not quite so gritty, overall, as "Spares" and an awful lot funnier. Kinda more like the Red Dwarf novels with the brakes off. There's a lot more humour in this novel than his second, but the magical realism continues. This time the hero of the novel - Stark - is called in when a 'special' problem turns up. Stark specialises in solving these 'special' problems, and many of them involve a psycho who goes into a dream world and kills people. Again we have the fantastic elements, the hard-core sci-fi and the humour. Stark lives in The City and this City is made up of special neighbourhoods, like Noise (where no one is allowed to make a noise) and a neighbourhood where only Cats live.

Marshall's imagination is running riot in this work, and it is clearly a first novel. An excellent first novel, yes, but there are still some issues with clunky exposition and a few places where the ideas are stronger than the writing, but it was still a fantastic read anf very enjoyable.

Four grumpy surveillance detectors.