As for the flat itself, whatever had gone on here, it was highly unlikely that the weapon used was a cat, as there was nowhere near enough room to swing one.

Caimh McDonnell’s series of comic mysteries featuring bibulous police detective Bunny McGarry can well be called ground-breaking, if only for its extension of the category “trilogy” to include a series that’s up to six books now (not to mention the “Bunny in America” side-series). The latest is Firewater Blues, and it’s as inventive and hilarious as all the others.

Nevertheless, I’m done with them. Reasons at the end of this review.

Firewater Blues is a sort of prequel, occurring before A Man With One of Those Faces, the first in the series. Bunny is still with the police force at this point, though on a “sabbatical.” He’s grown disillusioned with the force, and is considering a change.

Then he encounters Rosie Flint, a young woman he once helped out. Rosie is a computer genius and very obviously somewhere on the Autistic scale. Which means she absolutely refuses to have anything to do with the regular police, due to the way they treated her the last time around. But she trusts Bunny… sort of. She has a boyfriend now, and he’s disappeared. On top of that, she’s convinced somebody has been following her. Already agoraphic, she’s terrified of a world of dangers.

Bunny agrees to help, and begins uncovering disturbing clues. Something very big is going on, and poor Rosie is in the middle of it. Bunny will approach the case with his usual blunt object methodology, and many heads will get knocked together before – with the help of a pack of renegade nuns and a twelve-year-old truant – he finds the answers. Not all of them comforting.

Author McDonnell is a genius, and Firewater Blues combines slapstick, crude jokes, and clever wordsmithing with moments of genuine poignancy. This is an excellent, funny book, if you can handle the language.

However (at least for this reader) this is where the author finally came out so plainly with his politics that that element overcame the entertainment. There’s never been any question where Caimh McDonnell stood on the political spectrum, but (it seemed to me) he came out swinging this time. He even went so far as to trot out the old chestnut that “political correctness is just another name for politeness.” (Yeah, pull the other one. What could be more polite than calling everybody you disagree with Hitler?) I’m sure author McDonnell doesn’t want my conservative, fascist money anyway.

In any case, it’s stopped being fun and I’m done with it. But you may be more tolerant than I am. I can recommend it as a really funny, well-written book.