"Hazell and the Menacing Jester" by P.B.Yuill

Hazell the wise-cracking cockney private eye makes his third appearance after Hazell plays Solomon and Hazell and the Three-Card Trick. Can he work out who has been playing pranks on Mr Beevers, the businessman with the posh wife who lives in a swanky mansion flat and tips from a big roll of banknotes? Sex, violence and some cheeky cockney chatter.

There are some good lines as always:

• "They had that look you always see on hospital visitors, glad it's them coming out on the street again but a bit guilty about being glad." (p 15)
• "The darling sounded a bit forced, as if he had to remind her whose side she was on." (p 23)
• "He pecked at a cheek that didn't exactly offer itself." (p 24)
• "His tongue was busy making sure his beard hadn't fallen off." (p 24)
• "Your educated now, they're taught early on to shop everybody for thegood of society. I expect it makes sense if it's your society." (p 38)
• "I don't know what it is with me and women, when I'm feeling low I call it loneliness and when I'm flourishing I call it freedom." (p 50)
• "That's what it is about London, millions of us passing through and hardly leaving any mark at all. ... Your Londoner's got to make his own luck because if he lies down to die there's not a lot will stop to ask what's wrong." (p 58)
• "All the glamour of a honeymoon in a gravelpit." (p 58)
• "Driving was a duel to the death the way he went at it." (p 62)

April 2017; 189 pages