“Declan Burke is his own genre. The Lammisters dazzles, beguiles and transcends. Virtuoso from start to finish.” – Eoin McNamee “This bourbon-smooth riot of jazz-age excess, high satire and Wodehouse flamboyance is a pitch-perfect bullseye of comic brilliance.” – Irish Independent Books of the Year 2019 “This rapid-fire novel deserves a place on any bookshelf that grants asylum to PG Wodehouse, Flann O’Brien or Kyril Bonfiglioli.” – Eoin Colfer, Guardian Best Books of the Year 2019 “The funniest book of the year.” – Sunday Independent “Declan Burke is one funny bastard. The Lammisters ... conducts a forensic analysis on the anatomy of a story.” – Liz Nugent “Burke’s exuberant prose takes centre stage … He plays with language like a jazz soloist stretching the boundaries of musical theory.” – Totally Dublin “A mega-meta smorgasbord of inventive language ... linguistic verve not just on every page but every line.Irish Times “Above all, The Lammisters gives the impression of a writer enjoying himself. And so, dear reader, should you.” – Sunday Times “A triumph of absurdity, which burlesques the literary canon from Shakespeare, Pope and Austen to Flann O’Brien … The Lammisters is very clever indeed.” – The Guardian

Thursday, February 21, 2013

Read It And Weep

I’m currently reading Mark O’Sullivan’s CROCODILE TEARS (Transworld Ireland) and hugely enjoying the company of Detective Inspector Leo Woods, who is, to put it mildly, no great respecter of reputations. To wit:
Bloody psychiatrists, Leo thought, useless bastards with their talk of drives and complexes dreamed up by that coke-head fiend Freud. Everything was about sex with those clowns. Except sex. Which was about death.
  Leo Woods is a bleakly, blackly funny character, and has good reason to be, but Mark O’Sullivan has a tasty way with a turn of phrase too:
She felt as though she’d stepped into some ancient mythological world where gods ripped living things to pieces, feasted on them, tossed the bloodied bones aside and returned to their sky, staining it red with dawn. She looked at the distant horizon, barbaric in its roseate beauty.
  CROCODILE TEARS will be published in April. If there’s a better Irish crime fiction debut published this year, I’ll be very pleasantly surprised.

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