Starting a week before release, Baskerville advertised for the book in public spaces in Edinburgh, Glasgow and London. This was not a crime story, it was a way for Frankie to spill all his guff onto the page and bore us all to tears. But to keep ourselves on our toes, we have a rule that author gender is alternated, girl-boy-girl-boy, and the continents always rotated (with occasional glitches).

Kind of bonkers, often funny, sometimes expectedly poignant, this is a murder mystery investigation the like of which I have definitely not read before.

Taking readers from the world of drugs, to artificial intelligence, to conspiracy theory through to politics (Like AI without the I part . You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. I think there's a crime story in this book - ok so there definitely is, but it's not really all that front and centre, there's so much more going on around and about it that it does, on occasion, get lost in the noise.

With the novel’s protagonist Felix, Frankie has definitely injected him with much of his own sense of humor as well as his often fatalistic view of society. Meantime is a tremendous book: a detective story full of twists and turns that is as beautifully written as it is darkly comic. well that was beyond a mind trip, the 'philosophical discussions' and tangents that the characters go off on often making me wonder if I hadn't actually consumed a few hallucinogens too. It's as rambly as a story about a drug-addicted guy out of his mind trying to solve the murder of his friend as you expect it to be, but I was never bored. There is a large cast of characters, each one having their own idiosyncrasies and each one of them is memorable for some reason or other.But to break through his drug-induced fog and get closer to the truth Felix enlists the help of a dying crime novelist, Jane Pickford and his crisis-ridden friend Scott.

Sometimes the novels chosen are new, often they are from the backlist and occasionally re-issued from way back. The main twist was learning about Felix's history, and I wish we'd heard a bit more about this story, perhaps in conversation with Jane?Donnie drives Felix to meet Healing Hands charity workers that Marina volunteered with, but the pair aggravate Mary and Matt to the extent that a fight breaks out.