Carl Hiaasen

I came back from my 2012 summer holidays determined to carry on good reading habits and largely succeeded. It was February 2013 before I fell away. This year I read well on holiday as ever but on return couldn't do it at all. I started a a book I had saved for my return but never got beyond about page twenty, even though it was the new Tom Wolfe. From July to October it was just newspapers and web-sites for me. I would be happy to hear your diagnoses but if there were any obvious answers such as needing new reading glasses I would have found them.

Last week we went away to the Lake District and I spent the first few days catching up on newspapers and magazines.

I realised that the books I had taken with me (the previously abandoned one and another more demanding tome) were not going to cut the mustard and I needed to break the log jam.

Do you have in-case-of-emergency authors? I do. Christopher Brookmyre, Ed McBain, Elmore Leonard, John Grisham and Carl Hiaasen (illustrated).

I had seen that his new one had come out recently but intended to wait for the paperback. Had to spend £17 on the hardback. Had to. See it as therapy money. I knew it would work.

Hiaasen writes comedy thrillers about grotesques in the deep south of Florida. Andrew Yancy is a detective demoted to food inspector for abusing a colleague's husband with a vacuum cleaner attachment. He becomes interested in a human arm (unattached) which finds itself on the end of a fishing line. The bad monkey is a sort of pet being rehabilitated from its former life as film extra by a variety of poorly educated Caribbean owners many of whom now have monkey bites on their anatomy in various unedifying places. Laughing yet? Yancy's girlfriend is a forensic pathologist. His ex-girlfriend is a fruitloop. The widow of the former owner of the arm is a bit over-anxious to get his money. The monkey's current owner is trying to stop a Bahaman building project. Yancy is trying to stop his neighbours.

Gripped? I was. Great fun. I commend all his books, especially the children's ones

About to start a Grisham.