Falling Glass, by Adrian McKinty (Serpent's Tail, £11.99) The latest novel from Ireland's more accessible answer to James Ellroy has as its central character an old associate of Michael Forsythe, antihero of McKinty's wonderful Dead trilogy.
Everything else is brilliant, beautiful, perfect, wonderful and/or dead right.
"I'd get phone calls saying, 'Mr. Wonderful is dead.' I'd say, 'I see him on TV every week.' " By 1985, Vince McMahon had devoured the sport, hiring the regional stars to populate his World Wrestling Federation.
As the wonderful long-dead Sunday Express columnist John Gordon used to say, it makes you sit up a bit, doesn't it?
It's a wonderful and dead-on send-up of a public radio show around current issues...except it's 100% improvised and the issues are - just like so many in the real world - patently ridiculous.
We cannot but cringe when we hear that the "propositional content" of her grief was "My wonderful mother is dead," or that the "real question" posed by the difference between her initial agony and her current calm is whether it is "a cognitive difference, or a noncognitive difference".
Ah, wonderful — skulls of dead animals used as interface devices for personal computers.
Also wonderful were a dead-on pâté with a jug of cornichons, pork cheeks in a gorgeous dark sauce with celery root cooked in stock (my mouth is watering at the thought of that); a few chunks of insanely good calf's liver and poularde de Bresse, with meat that was almost as good as the skin, served with Chinese cabbage.
In all of them, the climactic events defy plausibility with wonderful returns from the dead or the lost.
"Showing stuff shot years ago in these fantastic frames -- it's wonderful but a little dead.
