Not On Your Wife! is a poor excuse for a stage comedy, all dropped trousers and double entendres. But then Charles Paris (Sicken and So Die, 1997) is a poor excuse for an actor‘and husband, father and lover. Yet he's proved to be an enduring amateur sleuth, whose cases take place during his sporadic moments of gainful employment. This latest dire dramatic vehicle is debuting in Bath, and Charles, between boozing bouts with his beloved Bells whiskey and romantic bouts with Cookie Stone, an aging actress unaccountably smitten with him, has landed a nice gig on the side reading books on tape. Mark Lear is in charge of the recording facility. He's a former BBC man and a bigger and more bitter drunk than Charles. His lover, Lisa Wilson, is concerned. Charles fancies Lisa more than poor Cookie and gets a rare chance to act chivalrous when Mark dies and all the signs (especially a locked sound room as the likely place of death) point to foul play. Brett is no stranger to the dramatic arts; his A Shock to the System was a Michael Caine movie, and he scripted a popular sitcom on British television. His characters are all priceless‘haughty ham actors, melodramatic drunks, driven company hacks. The play itself is trite and bawdy and rendered by the author with leering panache. Charles is once again in for bloody awful reviews, but he does find the killer after discovering that Mark once supplemented his wages with the manufacture of gay audiotapes that starred a few names familiar to Charles. Brett, who remains better known on his own side of the pond, is a master of breezy, boozy buffoonery. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Rolling-stone actor/detective Charles Paris has fallen away from the relative good fortune he enjoyed in Sicken and So Die (1997): Separated again from his eternally undivorced wife, he's reduced to touring in a frisky sex farce whose thoroughly professional author is in no hurry to get the lines right. The star, Bernard Walton, is a frigid egoist who gives his supporting cast no help and precious little eye contact; he's joined by bluff sponger Ransome George, Pippa Trewin, an ingénue over her head, and sexy stooge Cookie Stone. Not a warm heart among the lot, unless you count Cookie's dispatch in taking Charles to bedŽand even that little exercise, in the peerlessly inexpert manner of Charles's amours, turns out to be more trouble than it's worth. One fine day the company travels to a studio, on the outskirts of Bath, to record a radio ad for the play for ex-BBC producer Mark Lear, and soon after they leave, Lisa Wilson, who's more than just a partner to Mark, finds his dead body locked in an airless recording room. Accident, suicide, or murder? Mark's unlovely ex, smacking her lips over an insurance payoff for her children, wants Charles to prove that Mark couldn't have killed himself, but the gentle reader is most likely to remain indifferent. Much civilized mirth over Charles's equally incontinent drinking, wenching, and acting, though the mystery itself produces scarcely a peep. Strictly for fans who wouldn't miss a single one of Charles's hapless performances.

In this 17th Charles Paris mystery, the chronically unemployed actor finds himself in a very unusual position: he's working. Paris, who during his acting career has spent more time resting than performing, is engaged in a three-month run of Not on Your Wife! and is also moonlighting as an audiobook performer. But when the producer is found dead, the sleuth in Paris takes center stage. Brett's (A Comedian Dies) years with the BBC have given him keen insight into the working life of performers. This insider knowledge, coupled with his superb sense of the absurd, makes Dead Room Farce a sure hit. Frederick Davidson does a fine job of narrating. Recommended for all libraries with an interest in British literary mystery.--Theresa Connors, Arkansas Tech Univ., Russellville (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

The punny title pretty much says it all: light, funny fare not meant to be taken too seriously. This time around, journeyman actor Charles Paris is on the road, rehearsing a new bedroom farce, when an old friend, a former BBC radio producer, is murdered. Suspicion naturally falls on Charles' colleagues: the incompetent director, the self-centered star, even the victim's beautiful partner (of whom Charles becomes a little too fond--no surprise there for fans of the series). Charles is a likable fellow--he drinks too much and falls into bed with the most inappropriate people, but he means well--and it's fun to watch him stumble his way through this very amateur investigation, not so much solving the crime as accidentally arriving at the surprising solution. Readers will be as confused as Charles and as taken aback by the right-angle twist that leads to the unmasking of the killer. Perfect for Paris' fans and for anyone who likes a comic but challenging mystery. --David Pitt