Sweet, Sweet Revenge Ltd by Jonas Jonasson

 

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 medicine man who adopts the son that falls out of the tree as a gift from God and then gets repeatedly arrested in Sweden, the Maasai son and art dealer daughter who meet and fall in love and happen to decide on revenge and then look up and see the newly opened revenge company (see what I mean? Should be an unbelievable coincidence but Jonas Jonasson's writing just engages you in the ride in a way that makes you totally accept that this not only could happen but absolutely definitely would).

Even the various individual revenge plots he (the author) comes up with to give Johan, the owner of the revenge company, some background - llamas as guard dogs/ murder weapons, anyone? - must be the product of a mind firing on way too many (absolutely brilliant) cylinders.

Jonas Jonasson is one of a handful of authors for whom I make a pointed effort to listen out for and read new novels. And this one fully cements that commitment!