The Hotel Avocado, by Bob Mortimer

The Hotel Avocado is the sequel to Bob Mortimer’s The Satsuma Complex, and is just as enjoyable with the same caveat — if you don’t know/don’t like Mortimer’s style of humour, this novel might not work for you — but if you do, it almost certainly will. The novel picks up soon after the events of the previous book — Gary and his girlfriend Emily are still together romantically, but separated geographically as she has moved to Brighton to operate the hotel her father left her, while Gary remains in South London doing legal work and unable to commit to making the move to Brighton to be with Emily. The plot seesaws between Emily’s attempts to successfully open the hotel (complete with giant decorative outside avocado, which requires city planning permission), and Gary dealing with the aftermath of the last book’s plot, in which some rather unsavory characters are very anxious to make sure he doesn’t testify in the resulting court trial. As a thriller, this is probably a little loose and uneven, but I’m not reading it for the taut suspense — I’m reading it for the wacky humour, as well as the fact that several of the chapters are narrated by a pigeon.