I'm an Aberystwyth alumnus, so it should come as no surprise that I hold Malcolm Pryce's Louie Knight series in affection. This fifth entry in the sequence is as good as any except, perhaps, the second one. The trademark Pryce style of absurdities and maudlin philosophising is present, this time with the balance tipped somewhat in favour of the philosphising.

For those not familiar with the series, Pryce has written about Louie Knight, Aberystwyth's only Private Eye. He works the mean streets of Aber, where organised crime, violence, corruption and vice all live side by side with the ice-cream stands, tourists, University and Welsh National Library. And that's the joke; Aber isn't the epitome of Noir fiction's cities - it's a small, old, quiet town on the West coast of Wales, unremarkable for the most part and yet held in affection by all the Uni alumni.

Pryce needed to dump a whole collection of ideas and characters from the previous books because they were getting tired and, bravely, he actually did it. This is perhaps why this book is slightly less strong on the comic absurdity; how many more Noir fiction/Welsh cultural cliches can he think of to stuff into stuffy old Aber thereby making them new, lively and hilarious? There's got to be a limit and it looks as if Pryce is nearing it. Perhaps this should be Knight's last case.

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This 5th instalment of the noir pastiche series has private detective Louie Knight and his partner Calamity employed by Uncle Vanya to find out what happened to a girl that went missing 30 years ago from the neighbouring town of Abercuawg, now submerged by the lake formed after they built a dam. It seems as though the spirit of the missing girl inhabited Uncle Vanya's daughter over in Hughesovska (a replica town of Aberystwyth built in the Ukraine) so he's trying to understand what happened so he can come to terms with the events that followed. It might mean a trip to Hughesovska for Louie and Calamity so they enlist the services of Mooncalf & Sons for their travel arrangements and also to fence the sock they got from Uncle Vanya as payment for taking the case. Mooncalf can do them a good deal on the trip if they agree to make a delivery for him to a friendly count in Transylvania. He can even help with disguises. They'll travel as spinning wheel salesmen via the Orient Express but will have to watch out for honey trappers. As the investigation continues it may or may not involve trolls, bearded ladies, snuff philatelists and fish milt flavoured ice-cream.

This was another quite dark entry into the series but still contains enough humour to raise a smile every now and then. There's also a certain amount of emotional weight within these pages as Louie contemplates his relationship with Calamity and his own father. It's also been my least favourite of the 5 books I've read so far. I hope that the series isn't running out of steam as there is still one that I haven't gotten to as yet. It's not a bad book and is quite readable, it's just not quite on a par with the others as far as I'm concerned. A shame as I enjoyed the last one quite a lot. ( )

I enjoyed this in the end. I bought the book originally for a friend but decided to keep it for myself in the end, partly out of curiosity and partly because I wasn't sure she would like it. In retrospect, she may well have liked it as it is set in Aberystwyth for the most part, which was why I bought it, as we had both studied there. It is always fun to read about a place that you know, and see it from another perspective. The story is about Louie Knight, a private detective, one of many books by Malcolm Pryce based on this character in and around Aberystwyth. In this book, Louie Knight also takes a short trip by train to Hughsovka, "...the legendary replica of Aberystwyth built in the Ukraine..." via Transylvania. An interesting and funny detour. There is comedy, and drama, and mystery. It took me a while to get into as I had come to the book thinking it might be a bit like Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency - which I loved. It wasn't, although there was a bit of such humour when Louie Knights' assistant, Calamity, talks of "superseding the paradigm" as a method of solving their mystery. It took me a while to get into the book because I had to adjust my preconceptions to it, and also because I was always reading late at night when I was too tired to read. But it got more interesting towards the end as they solved their mystery painstakingly through their encounters with the colourful characters of Aberystwyth and on their trip to Hughsovka. I liked that the mystery was solved, but some matters were deliberately left unresolved. A bittersweet ending. Not bad at all. I might read the other books in the series. ( )

I had't read any of this series in a while, and it was a great pleasure to return to the altiverse of Aberystwyth Noir. Deftly daft, very funny, inventive, and revelling in its own quirks. Because of these very qualities I full appreciate why this series is a bit of a Marmite read and polarises opinion. ( )

This is a strange combination of styles (crime, pastiche, humour, occasional philosophical musings) that is readable (as I finished it), but for me ultimately unsatisfying. It felt contrived as if someone had decided to write offbeat crime novels, rather than developing the characters and finding where that took them. It also reminded me of Jasper Fforde, in that the humour and the similar, but surreal, alternative world came to feel laboured.
There are some nice characters, but I did not feel involved and they felt stereotyped.
I appreciate that it is fifth in a series and I undoubtedly lost something by not having read previous novels, but the author (or editor) was skilful in supplying the background history in an unobtrusive manner.
It feels as if it might all come together and work, but it is trying too hard to tick all the boxes that the author feels should be covered, without letting the main characters develop enough themselves. Readable, but disappointing. ( )