#BookReview-‘This Body’s Not Big Enough For Both Of Us’ by @Punkahoy

My thanks to the always amazing Titan Books for letting me pose some heart searching and head scratching questions to one of my favourite authors, Edgar Cantero!
Eagle eyed readers may remember that his last book, ‘Meddling Kids’ was in my Top 10 of 2018, it is a brilliant and evocative take on the child detective gang stories popularised in Enid Blyton or Scooby Doo.

This time around, Edgar introduces us to his latest creations, hardboiled private eyes, A.Z Kimrean.

Their USP? A is Adrian, Z is Zooey and they both inhabit the same body…A.Z is a chimera, a mosaic, and a brilliant yet unorthodox detective.

Here is a tantalising glimpse at this  third novel, my Q & A will be coming along shortly….

About the book…

An office door bears the names of A. Kimrean and Z. Kimrean, Private Eyes. Behind the door there is just one desk, one chair and one scrawny, androgynous detective. A.Z., as they are collectively known, are twin brother and sister. He’s pure misanthropic logic, she’s wild hedonistic creativity. The Kimreans have been locked in mortal battle since they were in utero… which is tricky because they literally share one single body. That’s right. One body, two pilots.

Someone is murdering the sons of a drug cartel boss in the biggest baddest town in California – San Carnal. A.Z. Kimrean must go to the sin-soaked streets, infiltrate the boss’s inner circle, and find out who is targeting his heirs. Plus rescue an undercover cop in too deep, deal with a plucky young stowaway, and face every plot device and break every rule Elmore Leonard wrote before they can crack the case.

This Body’s Not Big Enough for Both of Us is a brilliantly subversive and comic thriller celebrating noir detectives, Die Hard, Fast & Furious, and the worst case of sibling rivalry, that can only come from the mind of Edgar Cantero.

Warning-this book will make coffee come out of your nose and people look at you very very strangely on the train…it is laugh out loud hilarious!

However, it does not mock the genre that it so shamelessly plunders for tropes to subvert,it takes someone who has put in an awful lot of work, reading and care to make a book zing as much as this one does.

‘The chief fell silent.It was only eleven a.m and already he was regretting not being hit by a trolley on the way to work.’

How do you explain to your boss, the police chief, that the expert which you want to bring in as a freelance consultant , is a chimera with a whip smart tongue, filthy attitude, lewd , crude and as observant as a hawk? The very last person you would choose is A.Z Kimran which is exactly why Lieutenant Greggs wants to them to go undercover into a drug cartel to retrieve an undercover police officer.

”In other words,you guys managed to plant a narc in the home of the evil lord who runs San Carnal.The Ciudad Juarez this side of the border.The city where Sudanese war refugees refused to stay because it didn’t feel safe. ”

This is going to be downright dirty, off the books and done Kimrean’s way or not at all. The setup is brilliant, I really hope that Kimrean gets more adventures, the speed at which they talk takes a little getting used to, but once you settle into the cadence you are on board with wherever they are going.

More than just solving a mystery, this is a sibling rivarly taken to the next level. In a world where a gumshoe stakes a reputation on being a lone wolf, how does this one cope being 2 for the price of 1? How do you distract Zooey long enough to have a conversation with Adrian, and vice versa? Also is it possible for them to fall in love, keep secrets from each other or even just collaborate on the smallest of things?

This is a cracking read from an exciting writer, I bsolutely loved it. Published originally in hardback by Doubleday, it has been given a new life in paperback by Titan Books. Available now at all good bookshops, A.Z Kimrean is a character you won’t forget in a hurry…

About the author…

Edgar is a writer and cartoonist from Barcelona. Once a promising author in the local scene with his awarded 2007 debut Dormir amb Winona Ryder, the highbrow Catalan literary tradition soon lost influence on him in favor of Hollywood blockbusters, videogames, and mass-market paperbacks. The punk dystopian thriller Vallvi (2011) was his last book in Catalan before switching to English with a paranormal thriller, The Supernatural Enhancements (2014). Later, the Enid Blyton-meets-Lovecraft horror-comedy mashup Meddling Kids (2017) became a New York Times bestseller. It was followed by the noir spoof This Body’s Not Big Enough for Both of Us (2018), starring the chimeric investigator(s) A.Z. Kimrean.

Twitter @Punkahoy

@TitanBooks