A Mint Condition Corpse by Duncan MacMaster #BookReview @FuriousDShow @fahrenheitpress #Fahrenbruary

Batman schmatman, there’s a new hero in town and he’s kinda dorky…
Kirby Baxter went to Omnicon for the cosplay, the comics and the collectibles. 
No-one was supposed to get murdered.
Get ready for a whole new kind of crime novel. The Dork Knights are rising and Kirby Baxter and his friends are putting the nerd firmly into noir. 
It’s all fun and costume changes at OmniCon until schlock horror superstar Erica Glass turns up dead. Fresh from a mysterious adventure in Lichtenstein Kirby Baxter soon finds himself up to his geeky neck in a deadly murder mystery.
Kirby must deploy his unique skills of deduction and detection before the body count rises and ruins OmniCon for everyone. 

💜💜💜💜💜

This is the book that ticked all my boxes: it twitched my Miss Marple nose, it tickled my funny bone and it scratched all the geeky itches I didn’t even know I had.

Let’s start with the mystery angle. The mystery to be solved is right there in the title: there’s a corpse, there’s been a murder and we’re trying to find out whodunnit. If you insist that your bookish police investigations should be on the realistic side, you might want to skip this one, because there’s no way actual Canadian police would invite the Scooby gang to help them solve a murder. Enlisting a civilian consultant, maybe, but actually inviting said consultant and his friends to join the investigation, I think not! I, however, have no such hang-ups and I enjoyed this storyline tremendously! I did figure out the culprit long before those meddling kids did, but who even cares?! That is totally not the point!

What is the point then, you ask? Enjoying the ride! This book made me grin and giggle and laugh out loud. The interaction between the characters, their witty repartee is not just witty, it’s often laugh-out-loud-hilarious. The characters are almost caricatures of themselves: Kirby is a rich geeky Sherlock Holmes / mentalist with super-hearing and super-smell, there’s Molly with the big eyes and the big appetite but petite enough in stature to catch a ride on the shoulder of Gustav, who is literally larger than life and the strong silent type, and then there’s Mitch, the official mooch, Kirby’s best friend. Each and every one of them is an absolute delight to read to about!

This brings us to the geeky side of the story. Throughout the novel there are little winks, nods and nudges to the comic book culture, although I’m guessing I missed a few that probably went straight over my head (there does seem to be a limit to my geekiness ?). Though I’m not particularly fond of the superhero comic books, I do love this setting. Do you need to love comic books to enjoy this novel? Absolutely not, but I feel it does add an extra layer of enjoyment if you do.

This book is just a shitload of fun and both Kirby Baxter and Mr Duncan MacMaster have a new fan!

Get A Mind Condition Corpse here!