Robert Lewis (2)

A dark novel about a man, Robin Llewellyn, on a route of self-destruction with alcohol. We meet him at a very low point and every time you think things can't get any lower he finds a way to make it so. Robert Lewis had a deep understanding of the mind of an alcoholic, moving pubs, sitting drinking in the corner, making decisions that are irrational. Robin Llewellyn works as a private detective and is hired to create an entrapment of a husband. He starts work in a chaotic but occasionally brilliant manner and at the same time giving the reader some of the back story. The story gets more complex as it moves on to the entrapment and spirals down and down.… (mais)

bookshelves: hardback, one-penny-wonder, paper-read, britain-england, britain-wales, bristol, published-2005, amusing, autumn-2013, abandoned, teh-demon-booze, next
Read from September 27 to 28, 2013

Withdrawn from Peterborough City Council

my isbn: 978 1 84632 906 7
large print hardback

Opening: The White Hart was over the other side of Victoria Park, in Bedminster.

Mr Lou-Ellen smokes B&H and is a private dick prone to hangovers and losing on the gee-gees. I was still waiting for some semblance of a story to appear at the 100 page mark. NEXT!

Crossposted aNobii, BookLikes, LibraryThing
1 like… (mais)

Robin Llywelyn is a Private Detective, or at least that is what his card says. He has no memory, is handcuffed to the bed and in a hospice. When he is taken off his medication and told he has a short time to live, he is in shock.
Confused and wanting answers, he contacts his doctor, attorney and eventually someone he shouldn’t have! He finds out that he was charged with a crime, but the charges were dropped because of his medical condition. The problem is, he has no idea what the crime is and though several people allude to the fact that it involves money, no one tells him directly.
When he realizes there are people looking for him and he may have given them the way to track him, he takes off. He finds bodies, uses bartenders and even has a lady interested in him. Along the way, Robin meets a cast of interesting characters. It seems everyone knows more about him than he does and it irritates him to say the least.
He now has to get his memory back, evade the multiple players chasing him and discover exactly why everyone is after him, oh, and all of that before his cancer kills him. When he finally gets a decent lead on what he did, the race is on and he hopes to win!
An intriguing read that gives great insight into how the mind works. The mystery will keep you guessing throughout!

Reviewed by Ashley Wintters for Suspense Magazine… (mais)

Disturbing modern noir

Lewis has created a character (Robin Llewelyn) very much on the edge – all the Noir tropes are there, alcoholic PI, femme fatale, taking what seems to be a simple case but turns out to be much larger and more complicated than first thought etc. Everything though is given a much grittier more realistic slant – Llewelyn is a proper alcoholic in a very self destructive way which almost ruins everything he attempts to do. The femme fatale is a prostitute working in a massage parlour and the plot? It’s a request from a Mrs Dixon to entrap her husband in an infidelity with video evidence. Llewelyn being desperate for money accepts the job without asking too many questions and that’s where his real problems start. The book is occasionally uncomfortable reading and Llewelyn lives a life that has not only gone off the rails but is careening out of control which only gets worse as the plot progresses. Lewis is an accomplished writer and the book is the first in a trilogy and I’ve immediately put the other two books on my wishlist. Perhaps there was a bit extra for me in the book as it’s set on the mean streets of Bedminster and Redcliffe in Bristol with several trips to Old Market Street, which in the late 90’s when the book was set was a seedy district of massage parlours and dodgy pubs and where I happened to live at about the time the story was set. Llewelyn visits several pubs I’ve been in, stays for a night at a hotel I’ve been to and the entrapment is set up in a hotel that hosts a comic book convention I go to every year so I was easily able to envisage the locations where the story was set.

Overall – A very dark and potentially depressing but brilliantly written noir about drinking and despair… (mais)