Life on Mars? A Catinel's Chance

Praise for Life on Mars? A Catinel’s Chance: ‘A rollicking, cheeky read...Detective thriller, comedy horror, call it what you will, it is by turns elegant, crude and hilarious, packed with witty one-liners and terrible puns.’ Western Daily Press ‘A thoroughly enjoyable read...rattles along at a great pace...surreal madness...weird and wonderful characters... murder and mirth ensue.’ Mensa Magazine ‘Very funny…beautiful use of the English language …a very cheeky, very naughty book.’ BBC Radio Cornwall ‘A wacky murder mystery... witty alliterations and great puns.’ Microlight Flyer Magazine ‘A fast–moving mystery–horror–comic spoof. Crude at times, elegant at others, Tanner successfully bridges the gap. So good, I read it three times!’ Amazon ‘Zany or what! A detective novel? Well, sort of, but not a Whodunit. The Young Ones meet Monty Python and the Goons...Amazingly inventive.’ Waterstone’s ‘A punchy black comedy…erudite daftness of the first order! Ben Elton meets Tom Sharpe, with a smidgen of Will Self into the bargain.’ Philomena Muinzer Spoof spiritualist Gideon Pee's blinding ineptitude at predicting the future is seriously impeding his stage career. Extrasensory powers remain maddeningly elusive - until one day he gets the vision he's always hankered after. And it's a biggy... An unannounced visit from an old college chum might just shake things up a bit for Felix Abercrombie, a canal-dwelling youth worker nudging forty. For Frankie (a ham-fisted conjuror struggling to assuage a hazardously imminent mid-life crisis)arrives bearing baggage of unspeakable horror. Conveniently, Felix's incomprehensible infatuation for flying widens the possibilities for disposing of his visitor's putrefying bundle. His tranquillity becomes further assaulted by the appearance of Frankie's oddball cohort, Salvatore and Giuseppe, and soon the fatuous four find themselves lumbered with a second grizzly cadaver they hadn't bargained for. If they didn't know better they might suspect events had been preordained, or at any rate coaxed along by someone with an oddly cynical axe to grind... Clues to what appears to be two motiveless gothic murders dribble in to the police at a snail's pace, but it's all too much for DI Toogood and his trivia-sponge minion, Sgt Chanter. Perhaps upwardly-mobile PC Dring can figure it all out?