That was true until the last installment, when he inadvertently covered himself in glory and is now basking in the limelight, some of it literal as he is invited to speak on television or receive yet another award for his cleverness and courage. He joins a small force that consists of Chief Inspector Steine, who has, until recently, been more interested in boosting tourism by pretending that Brighton has no crime, than in breaking up the formidable organized crime gang that runs amok, than in solving any of the crimes that have been committed. Our protagonist, Constable Twitten, is brilliant but irritating. Surprise! This time, Truss had me laughing right out of the gate.įor the uninitiated, this satirical series is set in Brighton, a coastal resort town in England, in the 1950s. It will be funny, I am sure, but probably not just yet. So as I open Psycho by the Sea, I have fortified myself to give Truss a minute or two to warm up. She had proven to have a distinctive, rather odd fiction writing style, which began in a sort of corny, groaning, oh-my-God-is-this-the-best-you-can-do style, but then sneakily grew better and funnier until by the second half, I’d be laughing my butt off. I tell you all this so you’ll see why I thought I had this author figured out. I somehow missed the review copy for the third, Murder by Milk Bottle, which I discovered when I received the review copy for this fourth in the series after sulking for a bit, I took myself to Seattle Bibliocommons and checked it out so that I’d be up to date when I began reading this one. A decade later I began reviewing, and one of my first reviews was for Cat Out of Hell, and later, the first in the Constable Twitten series, A Shot in the Dark, followed by the second, The Man That Got Away.

Truss first came on my radar with her monstrously successful nonfiction grammar primer, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.

Lynne truss books