The No. 2 Global Detective

Book excerpt: All is tranquil at Cuff College, Oxford, the world's leading academic centre for Transgression and Pathology. But without warning 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 whodunit 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-powerful-way, midnight-blue-pantsuited forensic pathologist Dr Sue Carpaccio. Sometimes one super sleuth 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.