Flipping Out
Marshall Karp
Publisher: Allison & Busby
ISBN: 978-0-7490-7978-9
June 29, 2009
Look, here’s a path. Let’s all follow this one through the garden. Oh, hang on, it’s completely wrong, darn it. Now we’ll never find the way to the Big Bad Wolf’s house. That’s what Marshall Karp manages to do to his readers throughout his third Lomax & Biggs novel, Flipping Out, and boy is it entertaining.
A group of women including Mike Lomax’s girlfriend and Mrs Terry Biggs, have partnered with a bestselling author for a lucrative gig in which the writer sets a crime scene in an actual Hollywood home. Once the interest of the ghoulish followers of the books is sufficiently piqued, the group then sell the house for a tidy profit. Nice work if you can get it ... until members of the group of wannabe realtors start dying that is.
Quite simply, this is going to be a book that’s hard to beat for its tight writing, quick witted humour and all around entertainment value. Lomax and Biggs, following on from their smash hit debut appearance in The Rabbit Factory came on leaps and bounds – no pun intended – in Blood Thirsty, and are now so well rounded they might have to be renamed to something like Hand and Glove.
Yet it is not just these two that make you want to turn the pages, but also the outstanding supporting players and the marvellous sense of place Karp puts across, persuading rather than dragging the reader into his world and its this more than anything else that make his novels the standout reads that they are.
This is a quite exquisite and filled with everything any fan of crime fiction could wish for.
Chris High
break the rules as I see fit.” - Chris High 2003.