The No. 2 Global Detective

The bestselling author of The Asti Spumanti Code offers a globe-hopping spoof of contemporary fiction’s most famous detectives.   Cuff College of Transgression and Pathology, Oxford, is the Alma Mater of the world’s most famous fictional detectives. But when a body is discovered in the Cuff College library, the police are baffled. The only clues to the crime are the enormous spear sticking out of the victim’s chest, and the price tag from an IKEA duvet. It looks like a case for junior lecturer Tom Hurst. Though, from Tom’s perspective, it looks like a job for almost anyone else.   Breaking every rule of the whodunnit genre, Tom recruits four of the College's most celebrated graduates to find the killer: from Botswana, Mma Delicious Ontoaste; from Sweden, Inspector Burt Colander; from Scotland, Inspector Scott Rhombus; from America, Doctor Faye Carpaccia. Together, perhaps these international supersleuths can solve the case—if only they can stop arguing and get to IKEA before it shuts.   Revisiting—and rewriting—some of the most famous crime novels of recent times, Toby Clements offers four thrillers in one in this uproarious murder mystery that will seem oddly familiar to readers of Alexander McCall Smith, Henning Mankell, Ian Rankin and Patricia Cornwell.

Cuff College of Transgression and Pathology, Oxford.The quiet of the evening is shattered by the discovery of a Body In The Library.The police are Baffled. Tom Hurst, a junior lecturer at the College, breaking every rule of the whodunnit genre, follows a trail of arcane clues that leads him to Botswana and Mma Delicious Ontoast.His investigations then take him to Sweden and Burt Colander; to Edinburgh, where he is grudgingly helped by DI John "Just-Now" Rhombus; and to Richmond, Virginia, where he meets the brilliant, attractive-in-a-powerfulway, midnight-blue-pantsuited forensic pathologist Dr Su Carpaccio.Sometimes one supersleuth just isn't enough.The No.2 Global Detective revisits and rewrites some of the most famous crime novels of recent times, taking the genre and its heroes to an ultimately hilarious extreme.