Twenty’s book reviews

Posted in Old blogger by Twenty Major on June 28th, 2006

Got some bargain bin books the other week. Have read two of them so far. Want to know what they’re like? Ok then.

1 - Brandenburg - Glenn Meade

The book starts in Paraguay with an old guy being told by his doctor he’s got 48 hours to live so he goes home, burns all his papers and then shoots himself in the end. As you do.

The police investigate and so does a journalist. He’s friends with the police bloke. At the dead guy’s house the policeman goes downstairs to get two beers from the dead guy’s fridge for him and the journalist. While he’s out of the room the phone rings and the journalist picks up. It’s a top class hotel telling him his suite will be ready for that Friday at 7pm.

So journalist decides this could be a story and borrows recording equipment. On the Friday he pulls the old fake room service trick and delivers a complimentary bottle of champagne and some delicious canapes to the room. He records a load of Germans talking about ‘Brandenburg’ and other hard to decipher things. Luckily the Paraguyan journalist is fluent in German for some reason I don’t remember.

Anyway, he gets rumbled when the fake room service is questioned and they track him down and kill him but not before he’s left his tape in a train station luggage locker. As you do.

Forward to Germany where the journalist’s cousin knows something bad has happened to him after she hears he’s been killed. She is beautiful in every way. In fact, every woman in the book is beautiful and soft and sensuous and desirable.

She teams up with some kind of Interpol bloke called Volkmann who is British and hates all Germans because Nazis killed and raped his father’s sisters in the war. Eventually his distrust of the girl is lessened by her amazing breasts which he puts in his mouth and then they travel to Paraguay to try and track down the killers who are all old Germans who fled to South America. They want to find out why some bloke got paid $5,000 every 6 months from 1931 to 1945 by the German central bank.

They get close and find a villa in which everything has been cleaned and wiped. There isn’t even a bit of furniture. It’s as if nobody ever lived there. They find a picture though of a pretty woman arm in arm with a Nazi but you can’t see the nazi as half the picture is burnt away.

They go back to Germany, the Paraguayan police guy follows the escaping Germans to Mexico City where 13 people die in a shoot-out in some posh barrio.

Volkmann and the girl encounter terrorists (who went to college with the girl), historians, hash smoking nazi memorabilia sellers in Amsterdam and countless other half-wits as they try and track down someone who can indentify the girl. Meanwhile shipments from Montivideo are hidden in containers and some Italian called Franco delivers them to some tall blond bloke.

Eventually the discover the girl is Hitler’s niece and that Hitler was having an affair with his niece and he got his niece pregnant. She did the old fashioned Irish thing of disappearing for a while and then returning not half as fat as she used to be. Sadly she committed suicide two months later.

Then they discover that the German who was receiving the money and his wife and child aren’t who they seem. The German didn’t have a wife and the child was, in fact, HITLER’S son!!! OH.MY.GOD.

Then it turns out Hitler’s son has returned to Germany to take part in a coup and Franco the Italian has been smuggling uranium and plutonium to the new Nazis so they can make a bomb and take over Germany. They’re going to kill the Chancellor and his cabinet and then blame it on immigrants so good old fashioned Germans will support them.

Meanwhile the girl has been kidnapped and Volkmann tracks her down to a house where she’s being held by Hitler’s son. He gets shot in the hand and the elbow and then Hitler’s son shoots him in the end but somehow he manages to overpower Adolf Jr and kills him in the face as revenge for what the Nazis did to his dad.

The plotters do kill the chancellor and the entire German cabinet but somehow the coup fails and they capture the nuclear weapon. At least I assume they do because it doesn’t say much about it.

Volkmann wakes up in hospital after being shot in the head and puts the girl’s breasts in his mouth.

The End.

2 - Billie Morgan by Joolz Denby

Firstly I was greatly concerned at reading something by somebody called ‘Joolz’ but thankfully my instincts were correct. People with stupid names write stupid stuff.

This is the story of a woman called Billie Morgan whose Dad runs away when she’s a little girl and whose mother absolutely hates her for some reason. She’s a troubled teenager in that she’s a bit different, a bit gothy and the mother much prefers her older sister who likes lace curtains and other pretty things.

Soon she falls in love with a biker and gets into the whole biker world. She marries her biker boyfriend and they go around the place like Bradford Hells Angels. Then something happens. A man dies. Her husband leaves and she opens up a gift shop with some woman called Leckie.

The man who dies, who everyone else thinks just disappeared, has a wife who’s a bit of a junkie simpleton and Billie is the Godmother to her son called Natty. Around 15 years later on though her past comes back to haunt her. A rookie journalist for a Sunday newspaper wants to do a story on how the family of missing persons cope with the absence of their loved one.

The wife thinks he’s still alive somewhere and the son just wants to see his dad. The wife’s mother-in-law is a proper cunt and comes back into her life after a two year absence just in time for the interview. For some improbable reason the journo wants to talk to Billie as she’s a friend of the family. That Sunday the story appears and it’s a total stich-up. The wife is portrayed as a junkie simpleton, which is what she is, and the son as a coke fiend arsehole, which despite the author’s attempts to portray him as a misunderstood youth is exactly what he is.

Then they disover the wife has TB and nearly dies after coughing blood over everyone and young Natty goes on a bender. He’s got a little half-wit hunchback of a friend called Monkey, no really, who comes to stay with Billie while they search for him. Then Billie’s ex-husband comes back and tells her he’ll kill her if she tells what happened that night when the man disappears.

What actually happened all those years ago was they went to one of the other biker’s houses to get some hash or something and yer man was off his face and he fell and hit his head and died. For reasons best left known to themselves they took the body, dug a hole then broke his legs and neck so he’d fit in the hole. They could have just left the house. Fucking fools.

During her search she calls into her mother’s house who is going to live with her other daughter in Canada and the mother leaves a bundle of letters from her father which she never gave her. And yes, they were wrapped in a ribbon. He says how much he loves her and how many Christmas presents he bought her but the mother never gave her. Thank God she avoided all the major clichés.

Anyway, when Billie comes home she finds Natty asleep in her bed. They eat dinner and talk and then retire to the same bed which is quite natural. Most 40 plus women sleep platonically with their 18 year old Godsons. They go to sleep.

Later that night she awakes to feel a strange sensation. The Godson is licking her gee.

“You can’t do that!”, she says.

“But that’s what me and me mam do”, he says. “She says it’s our secret.”

Good god. He runs away. They go looking again.

The next day she comes back home to find him hanging to death in her house so she does what any woman in that situation. She runs off to Greece like Shirley Valentine and falls in love with a Greek bloke and she lives in a nice villa with a view of the sea.

This book was nominated for the Orange fiction prize in 2005. The Orange fiction prize must be worth approximately fuck all if bollocks like this can get shortlisted.

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So in conclusion do not read either of these books unless someone actually pays you to do so. They are shit.