One character's name slips between Ernest and Lester. Sloppy! ( )

I plucked this book off the shelf at our local bookstore simply based on the cover. Probably my first mistake. Still the premise was interesting enough, and it looked like a quick and fun read. And for what it's worth, that it was. I won't detail the plot here, but I will say that Roberts is a pretty good writer of sentences. He strings them together nicely. And that's very important to me. I want to read a book by someone who knows how to write.

Sadly, he's not quite as good at putting together a plot or coming up with well rounded characters. Our main character here, Alma, is a private detective, and a bright and plucky hero she is, too. The broad strokes to this story are interesting enough, but what Roberts does with Alma is almost shameful. He constantly leads her into dire situations where her life is imperiled or (in one case) nearly and abruptly ended, only to have her saved by a deus ex machina well outside of her control. Which is odd because in other scenes she is completely capable of handling herself on her own. Plucky and bright, remember? That's the character he created, and yet he keeps leading her down pathways where she's out gunned (both literally and metaphorically, depending on which scene you're reading). Frustrating.

A better plotted novel written by a better plotting novelist would have allowed Alma to solve her way out of her own crises. He built her with enough gumption to do so, but then rarely trusted her in this regard. Shame.

Also, not to give anything away, but the ending of the novel was a bit of a bore. The so-called locked room mystery wasn't much of one after all. And the angle he was getting at, the villian behind the scenes, government conspiracy, isn't very original, even if his theory behind why these branches of government were at "war" (the real vs. the matrix) was kind of clever. ( )

Well, this didn’t go where I expected it to. Adam Roberts is an excellent person, and probably the best genre critic currently active in the UK, and while he writes enormously clever science fiction it is not always to my taste. But The Real-Town Murders has a heroine called Alma and is all about Hitchcock, and I’ve been a huge Hitchcock fan for many, many years, so this was a book I wanted to read. And yes, it starts out like a locked-room mystery, not that Hitchcock made many locked-room mysteries – maybe in Alfred Hitchcock Presents?- but The Real-Town Murders then goes off down a completely different path, which resulted in a very different novel to what I had been expecting to read. Alma is a private detective in a UK where most of the population live in a virtual world and rarely experience “the Real”. A bit like now, I expect. Except for the virtual world. She is called in to solve how a dead body appeared in the boot of a car at an automated factory even though there is complete footage of the car being made and at no time could a body have been placed in it. Alma is led to believe this may have been accomplished by teleportation. And if teleportation were real, then people might start returning to the Real because travel will have become as trivial there as it is in the virtual world. Except, it’s not teleportation (the solution is not hard to figure out, to be honest). And Alma finds herself being harassed by various arms of the government’s security services, which jeopardises the life of her partner, who had been infected with a hacked disease linked to Alma’s DNA and only Alma can prepare a a treatment when the disease threatens to kill her partner every four hours or so. So, not really a murder-mystery. And the plot makes so many swerves, despite being essentially a fugitive story, that at times it’s in danger of burying its ideas. Nonetheless, I liked it. There is apparently a sequel. ( )

It is sometime in the future and much of the populace spends their days in what today’s social media has evolved into: “The Shine,” a complete, full body immersive experience which is apparently far more interesting than “Real Life.” Their bodies are being exercised and maintained for them by the special suits they wear. Still, there are some who continue to operate in the Real-World and Alma, a young investigator, is one of these.

Alma been brought in to investigate the mysterious discovery of a (human!) body in the trunk of a car in a fully automated factory. The investigation quickly becomes something much more and Alma finds herself in the middle of a political coup. She’s hampered by the fact that her partner is gravely ill, and must be treated every four hours or she will die. Alma’s DNA has been maliciously configured into her partner’s treatment and therefore only she can apply the treatment.

While the cover suggests this crime novel is a mystery, it quickly moves away from the original mystery to become more a tongue-in-cheek thriller. My favorite part is the fight scene in the nose of Shakespeare, one of the many huge faces carved into the white cliffs of Dover (referred to as the “White Cliff Faces”) Adam Roberts, who by day is a professor of 19th Century English Literature, is a versatile writer who doesn’t take himself too seriously. He seems equally comfortable writing criticism, serious SF, even parodies, and I believe he once challenged himself to write an SF book in every sub-genre. Between my husband and I we have read most of his SF. This is a light, fun, fast-paced read, an amusing story with some interesting ideas thrown in (and we do eventually find out who killed the guy in the trunk of the car). ( )

http://speculiction.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/review-of-real-town-murders-by-adam.h... ( )