Book Review: Road Kill: The Duchess of Frisian Tun, DaDa Detective Agency Book 1, Pete Adams
Mystery: Road Kill: The Duchess of Frisian Tun, DaDa Detective Agency Book 1, Pete Adams
BLOG TOUR AUGUST 31, 2020
I read a lot of books. Usually at the end of the book I am left with a variety of possible emotions. I might be moved by the plot or the characters. I might be motivated by the power of the writing. I might be amused by the humor of the writer.
It’s very seldom that I am left asking myself, “What in the world did I just read?”
Road Kill: The Duchess of Frisian Tun strikes me as a very British book. I am not sure it could have been written by an American. We may be separated by a common language but there are certain types of absurdity that seem particular to the Isles. This book may be the result of Benny Hill and Monty Python having a paper love child. Are You Being Served might have wandered in forming a literary menage a trois. It is surreal, naughty, campy, self-aware, bizarre, and probably a whole lot of other things. My head is still spinning after reading it. It may be the strangest book I have read in a long, long time. And despite its euphemistic references to “lady parts” and “man bits,” it would get a solid “R” rating in the U.S. if adapted faithfully for the silver screen.
The skeleton of the plot is relatively straightforward. A street battle in a quiet residential neighborhood results in the destruction of a woman’s home. Lord Everard Pimple, a local reporter, is asked to get the story. He arrives at the apartment of a local geographer, where various people from the neighborhood gather to give their perspectives on what happened. Along the way, Everard experiences a sexual awakening with the help of the lovely Georgiana.
And that description prepares you for this book about as well as an hourglass prepares an Inuit to be dropped in the Sahara.
Taking some inspiration from The Canterbury Tales, Adams introduces a cast that takes turns sharing their own stories and perspectives on the events at hand. There is the tall geographer with a propensity for swinging a long stick to point at places on the maps that festoon his walls. The fact that a human body part may be in the path of his stick is unfortunate but does not deter him. There is the naive and sexually inexperienced upper-crust twit Everard. The far-from-naive and far-from-sexually-inexperienced Georgiana. The flamboyantly gay professor. Everard’s mother, who resembles a moose. The buxom and beautiful Cecilia, another reporter with Everard’s newspaper. Mike, the priest who knows everyone. Jack Jane Austin, who prefers to go by the name “Dick,” and his wife Amanda, whom he likes to insist should be called “Duck.” They are the DaDa detectives, recently retired from the police, somehow connected with MI5, participants in the street battle that started the whole imbroglio.
And the narrator, who introduces himself as writing under a female pseudonym which gives him/her the ability to comment on the events and characters from the perspective of either gender. Or both. It gets confusing sometimes.
Interrupted by frequent chaotic scenes of domestic destruction (the shattered remnants of a sideboard table figure prominently and painfully in several of these interruptions), characters stepping away from the conversation to have sex or tea, and new characters wandering into the apartment, the story unfolds in a unique and hardly organic way. At the end, we do learn why the street battle occurred, who the Duchess of Frisian Tun truly is, and how to survive the sock-em and clip-em game. Actually, we don’t learn that last thing, since the rules are never written down. Read the book and you’ll know what I mean.
If you are looking for an absurd, surreal, bizarre, unique book to take your mind off a world full of trouble, Road Kill gives you all of that and more. Pete Adams’ take on the detective mystery is very strange. It may not be the choice of every reader, but those who choose it will be rewarded with a funny and ridiculous story with an explosive finale.
Pete Adams is an architect with a practice in Portsmouth, UK, and from there he has, over forty years, designed and built buildings across England and Wales. Pete lives in Southsea with his partner, and Charlie the star-struck Border terrier, the children having flown the coop, and has 3 beautiful granddaughters who will play with him so long as he promises not to be silly.
Our thanks to Emma Welton of Damp Pebbles Blog Tours for inviting us to participate and providing us with our copy of this novel in exchange for our review. The opinions are solely those of Scintilla. Check out the other bloggers on this tour for different perspectives on Road Kill.
Book Review: Road Kill: The Duchess of Frisian Tun, DaDa Detective Agency Book 1, Pete Adams
Thanks so much 🙂