Alex the Book Reviewer

  I learnt something when I googled to find out when this book was written; "The Key to Midnight is a suspense-horror novel by American writer Dean Koontz, released in 1979 under the pseudonym Leigh Nichols. It is considered Koontz's first success." I never even knew he wrote under a pseudonym! I'm also not sure how it was such a success. We were a different lot back in the 70s. I listened to this as an audiobook - this will become more relevant later. The 1979 date on this explains a lot in the book. In particular, the lack of mobile phones, which I didn't register until embarrassingly late in. I was at least a third of the way into the book before I realised everyone was calling landlines and using paper files to research things and it occurred to me that we probably weren't in the current century. Dean Koontz used to be one of my favourite authors. Like I said above, we were a different lot in the 70s (though I doubt I read any until the 80s, as I was on...

  Absolutely love Jonas Jonasson books. They're so good. SO funny. The characters are always a little bit bonkers, and the situations are always utterly bizarre. Any this one is no different, no different at all. Victor, dodgy racist, plans to become a rich political influencer in order to keep Sweden appropriately Swedish. Gets in with a rich art dealer, marries his daughter, tricks her into signing over all the inheritance, accidently has a black son with one of his "foot masseurs", tries to get him (the son) killed, but accidentally causes him to become a Maasai warrior instead. Everyone plots revenge. By rights, the plot of his books should be totally unbelievable but, somehow, they're not. I can't even begin to work out how the plots unfold in his brain, but he must have the most manic mind in the world. The characters in Sweet, Sweet Revenge are all appropriately odd. The brilliant advertiser who decides to set up a revenge company, the Maasai medi...