Find a missing book. That was the job the woman in the Doc Martens gave us.

Easy money, right?

Only now it seems she’s actually an ancient, powerful sorcerer, and the book is a Book of Power that doesn’t want to be found.

It wants to tear reality apart at the seams, and it’ll use anyone it can to do it.

So now we’ve got one spectacularly displeased sorcerer, a hungry, still-missing book, a dentist with bad hygiene, and a neighbourhood having some reality issues to deal with.

Plus about a day before the book turns our world – and us – inside out.

We’ve totally got this.

I hope.

‘Gobbelino London And A Scourge Of Pleasantries‘ is a light fast read about a talking cat, Gobbelino London, and his human partner who work as PIs in Leeds (although most of their customers don’t know Gobbleino is part of the team – not everyone can accept the idea of a talking cat, nevernind a mercenary, slightly snarky, smarter-than-his-human-partner talking cat).

The book opens the way all good gumshoe novels should, with a beautiful woman walking into the PI’s office with a deceptively simple request for which she’s offering a suspiciously large amount of money. Gobbelino knows there’s something off about her, though he can’t sniff out what because the woman is drenched in perfume. Gobbelino can’t resist the cash so they take the job and put themselves, their neighbours and perhaps the whole world at risk.

The plot moves like a cat scaling a wall, fast and with complete confidence while appearing to defy the laws of physics. The pace goes from fast to frenetic without a pause for breath. The world-building, which was more detailed than I’d expected, happens on the run and the reader is expected to keep up. There was ongoing mayhem, a little snark, lots of cat humour and a strong dash of supernatural soul-eating threat and that’s before we get to tentacles emerging from another dimension.

This story happens in the same universe as the DI Adams and the Beaufort Scales stories so part of the fun for me was getting Gobbelino’s slightly cynical, scarred by experience, quintessentially feline view on the world. I liked the changing political culture of The Watch and how scary the Inbetween and the things that live there were. They gave a stimulating sharp edge to the cosy feel of the story.

One of the things that made me smile was that the root cause of the world being driven to the edge of destruction was someone’s desire to be nice. I always knew that unbridled optimism and limitless goodwill were dangerous.

I thought the actions scenes, which mostly take place in an environment where time and space are distorted, were very well done. Most of all, of course, I liked the humour which pulses through the story.

I’ll be back for more of Gobbelino’s brushes with the bizarre (there are seven books in the series) starting with ‘Gobbelino London And A Contagion Of Zombies‘ – how could I resist a title like that?