Death in Fine Condition

By: Andrew Cartmel

Narrated by: Olivia Dowd

Cordelia knows books. An addict-turned-dealer of classic paperbacks, when she's not spending her days combing the charity shops and jumble sales of suburban London for valuable collector's items, she's pining for the woman of her dreams and nimbly avoiding her landlord's demands for rent.

The most elusive prize of all, her white whale, has surfaced—a set of magnificent, vintage Sleuth Hound crime novels. Gorgeous, and as rare as they come. Just one problem. They're not for sale. Still, that won't stop a resourceful woman like Cordelia… One burglary later, the books are hers. Unfortunately, the man she's just robbed turns out be one of London's most dangerous gangsters, and now he's on her trail and out for blood.

Cordelia's best laid plans to pay the rent and woo the object of her affections start to fall apart, and she realises she may have placed herself in the crosshairs of a villain torn straight from the pages of her treasured novels.

©2022 Andrew Cartmel (P)2022 W. F. Howes Ltd

Great series - good characters, clever and quirky

I am enjoying this series tremendously. Highly recommend it for listening or reading old style. The characters are delightful, and lots of them, the stories are intriguing, good writing - and lots of fun. And a good mystery. Can't go wrong.

An entertaining antihero

Cordelia Stanmer is a thief. A thief of rare and expensive paperbacks. Paperbacks with gorgeous cover art. As a college student, she fell in love with the cover art of 1950's and 60's detective novels. The covers: it was like opening your front door and finding a tableaux of your neighbor's dream instead of your parlor. Cordelia was hooked. She may have actually purchased the first rare book but she's stolen all the rest since. She would steal from death himself to get a paperback; this time her sights are set on books owned by a deadly gangster. She will have this gangster's books at any risk, even though they used to belong to his dear departed mother.

I wrote this review because of the reviews that mentioned masturbation as figuring too much in the story. If you are upset by masturbation you might want to give this novel a miss. However, to my lights, It's not masturbation itself, as is found in porn; but, in fact, something not found in porn. There are mostly descriptions of unsuccessful masturbation; not very porn like. It could be that masturbation is a strand of subtext here. It's the flip side of the coin to voyeuristic appreciation of cover art in steamy detective novels. Perhaps the author is exploring the struggle for supremacy between fantasy gratification and real relationships when he tells Cordelia's story. A neat feature of the detective trope is that it aims to be both entertaining and insightful. This novel does a pretty good job covering both angles.

Interesting but could not accept the premise

The author, Andrew Cartmell, is very good. I especially love the "Vinyl Detective" series. And in this book, the performance by Olivia Dowd is excellent. But I cannot accept a protagonist who flagrantly steals from someone, not once, but twice, and then profits from those robberies. Sure, the person from whom she stole may not have been nice or good, but stealing is stealing, and she stole from him not knowing anything about him. The protagonist should be behind bars, plain and simple. I'll listen to The Vinyl Detective series again and again, but I can't get interested in glorifying a thief.