The town of Mangel has always been a rough place, but rough turns to nightmarish when headless corpses begin piling up. The police are desperate for a suspect, and Royston Blake, the former pub doorman-turned-recluse is prime for the taking. He’s hauled in for questioning, but to no avail: this is one crime Blake didn’t commit. Yet the interrogation is enough to shake up his paranoid world. He realizes that, instead of hiding from the ills of the world, he should be fighting them. So begins Blake’s quest to score the unlikeliest of jobs for a guy like him: becoming a copper in Mangel. Considering his violent past, everyone—cops, criminals, even his ex-girlfriend—tries to dissuade him. But Blake’s a tenacious bloke, and what better way to convince the naysayers of his crime-fighting skills than to catch the butcher plaguing his town? As per usual, nothing goes according to plan in Blake’s attempt to turn over a new leaf, leaving him to slog through plenty of blood and muck in the deliciously suspenseful fourth installment of Charlie Williams’s darkly comic series.
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"Great thoroughly enjoyed it, the best of the series about Royston Blake, Mangel's premier doorman. I really lost myself in this one, something I haven't done with a book in a while." — Keith (5 out of 5 stars)
"Great thoroughly enjoyed it, the best of the series about Royston Blake, Mangel's premier doorman. I really lost myself in this one, something I haven't done with a book in a while."
“Royston Blake is a boastful, aggressive, foul-mouthed, psychopathic hard-man of the utmost political incorrectness, a failure at everything he does but an indomitable believer in his own cleverness and sex appeal…Why then is he so enjoyable to read about?
A welcome return for a daft anti-hero…Engrossing…Royston’s ripe dialect and daft adventures are thoroughly entertaining. And while we laugh at the absurdity of the story, Williams does just enough to create the nagging worry that it isn’t so unreal after all; that Royston is only as much of a caricature as the sensitive intellectual in the Hampstead novel or Jonathan Franzen’s troubled Americans. The hideous town of Mangel, meanwhile, with its casual violence, unmanageable drinking and psychotic conservatism, offers up a vision of Britain that seems all too familiar…One of the most challenging social commentaries you are likely to read this year. AmazonEncore has rescued an excellent book.
" The worst book I have ever read. Don't bother. "
Charlie Williams is the author of several novels, including Deadfolk, Booze and Bum, Stairway to Hell, and King of the Road, among many others. He and his family live in Worcester, England.
James Clamp is an award-winning voice actor, earning his first AudioFile Earphones Award in 2011. Originally from London, he currently lives in New York.
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