City of Tiny Lights by Patrick Neate; Hidden Camera by Zoran Zivkovic

A Ugandan-Indian Englishman private eye investigating a case for a hooker. It's a decent enough book. Tommy Akhtar does nothing but drink, smoke, and ruminate about his past and the way of post-colonial Britain and in between that he looks into the case he was hired to solve. Then he gets involved in a case he wasn't hired to solve. That sort of thing happens a lot in these sort of books, along with the obligatory run-in with stereotypical obnoxious and stupid authority, and I have to wonder how these PIs finance their escapades. The plot is almost buried in reminiscences about Tommy's life and "how the world works" tangents and the British slang and cricket references leave me in the dark more often than not but it's not bad over all. There's more of a problem with the staccato nature of the prose and the "serious" tacked on to every fifth sentence. Also, for a book with a message running through it about how even "Paki's" (as he puts it) can be real people and something other than their stereotype and which makes fun of those people who judge others based on ethnicity/nationality, the fat-necked/overly tanned/macho "Yank" with bad fashion sense and an inability to "get" English humor comes over as hilarious. And kind of jarring actually.

Tommy has sent some dumb "thug-lite" kid with a chip on his shoulder to go undercover in an organization that brainwashes just that sort of idiot. I'm sure this will end well. Tommy is an interesting character but after he solves the case he was initially paid for he really does very little.

It's a good read, but I wonder how many of my recommendations would still be nice if I was buying books rather than getting them at the library.

This next book I did buy but cheap. Amazon Marketplace is my go-to for all books not in the library. That's where I got Hidden Camera by Zoran Zivkovic. A Czech author, this book is about a middle-aged undertaker who finds himself being led a merry chase in what he believes is a hidden camera show. He gets an invitation to a film, only when he arrives there is only one other person in the audience, a woman who's face stays hidden, and the film shows him eating his lunch. In the dark after the show ends he receives another invitation, this time to a bookstore. He decides to outwit his unseen antagonists by not being freaked out or making a fool of himself for their show. He fails if only because he's trying too hard and he's so caught up with being well-mannered that he's too rigid to easily adapt to new situations. The unnamed protagonist ends up moving from one strange situation to the next in the hopes of getting the better of the plot's organizers and of seeing the face of the mysterious woman. The ending was odd. I think I need to consider it a bit more because the whole thing seems to have something to do with life before birth/after death and nothing is ever explained. There's no dialogue either, basically. Only a short conversation with an obstetrician and a few lines exchanged with the extras in the "show".