Cherry Pye is a talentless hack but nevertheless a star, a tone-deaf nymphet who's only marketable quality is her slightly tawdry teeny-bop sexuality. She's also a horrendous liability - consuming booze and drugs with giddy abandon, she's likely to die at any minute from an overdose that has less to do with tortured artistry than idiocy. To keep the paparazzi guessing, her management employs a body double, a doppelgänger so convincing that when one obsessive photo-jock goes off the deep-end, he kidnaps the wrong lady. It gets wackier from there.
It's a crime caper, with a strong element of slapstick and an even stronger sense of irony. Thoroughly implausible but gleefully so, its reliance on celebrity culture as plot (and its subsequent reliance on technological zeitgeist as plot-device) may one day render it dated, but for now it's a fun, quirky and witty read.
I think the reason I found it so enjoyable was its distinctiveness. It's just not like any other crime novel I've read recently. It's the absolute antidote - almost the antithesis - to the Scandinavian thrillers so popular in the late Noughties and early Tens. One person dies (only ONE!), and even then he's an unremitting dweeb and probably had it coming, and his death is gruesomely ludicrous as opposed to plain gruesome. It's energising to read a crime book that doesn't rely on heinous crimes and buckets of gore to create tension (and my favourite crime novel is probably Dark Hollow, so I'm not saying I mind books about those things).
A good summer read, funny an interesting and written in a breezy but solid style. Grab it soon, before everyone forgets what a Blackberry is.
Read by Joshua
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