Preposterous, silly, crazy and still I liked it. Must be the pandemic. ( )

The book has a great title and is an homage to noir. It starts off auspiciously with plenty of wisecracks and some send-ups of the Nero Wolfe type of mystery, but I found it hard going after the first few casual deaths that apparently didn't bother anyone. It is theoretically set in the future, but there wasn't much futuristic about it except for a sort of formulaic cloning plot. The end is excruciatingly badly written with people holding guns on one another and explaining the whole situation, and it ends with a cliffhanger. Oh, well. ( )

Thank goes to Netgalley!

Perhaps I should say double-thanks? The novel more than lived up to all expectations and perhaps a great deal more. In fact, from the outset, I didn't really get the sense of a lot of promise. It seemed to be a pretty standard Private-Eye (sorry, Phenomenological Inquisitor) with a pretty heavy SF bent, full of light humor and quirky intent.

What it became, after a while, was anything but standard and anything but simple. In fact, even being a long-time reader of both genres, I thought I had things pretty well figured out by page 30, revise - page 80, revise - page 120, revise - oh hell... it did SEEM to lead me to the right, even cool conclusion! But no, I was reliably and enthusiastically proven wrong.

Can I tell you want a delight this is? It gets even better, too! The writing is crisp and it knows what it's about. Strong voice, clear plot developments, interesting characters, and tons of truly interesting twists that made great use of both mystery standards AND a couple of armloads of beautiful SF tropes while never feeling stale.

Indeed, I came out of this read feeling as if the one initial promise, that this was some sort of PKD successor, was entirely on the mark. It took a while to realize it, from a straight textual progression, but the entire novel, taken together, IS absolutely worthy.

I might even say that it's a better read than PKD, if I were to be so heretical. It's not quite as philosophical or religious, but it certainly has the bat-s*** crazy down. :)

The only thing that it took a bit to get used to was the humor. I just didn't think the banter was all that funny at first, but it did grow on me as the complexity of the tale grew.

Hell, I think the really funny jokes are all plot-driven, not limited to a line-by-line hit parade.

If you are looking for something with a lot of panache and crazy cool happenings in a great one-to-one genre mashup of Mystery/SF that leaves you feeling refreshed and elated, then by all means, GO GET THIS BOOK. :)

You cannot imagine how many spoilers I wanted to give away. There were SO many great scenes to discuss and laugh about, with tons of in-jokes I could be sharing with you... right this instant.

This is so aggravating. :) : ) :) ( )

A bit like a futuristic Dirk Gently with an irreverent detective and seemingly unconnected and ridiculous cases. ( )

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

To be clear, Robert Kroese's "phenomenological inquisitor" tale The Big Sheep is not much more than a well-written ripoff of Douglas Adams' "holistic detective" Dirk Gently novels, combined with the characterizations found in the cult movie The Zero Theorem and the alt-history universe-building of a typical "slow apocalypse" science-fiction book. But I happen to love the witty and smart Dirk Gently novels; and given that Adams died several years ago and won't be writing any more of them, I've got no problem at all with Kroese taking up the slack and putting out books nearly identical in both spirit and tone.

Set in a version of the 2030s that has already seen a cataclysmic event in America come and go, it has left behind a tougher and weirder Los Angeles that among other things now contains flying cars (since the old highways of pre-apocalypse LA are no longer navigable), as well as giant sections of the city that have essentially been walled off like Escape From New York and are their own anarchic demilitarized zones, the subject of the newest wave of popular gritty TV shows within an entertainment industry that has been permanently commingled with the journalism industry, so that there's virtually no difference any longer between the two. It's within such a setting that we follow the adventures of metaphysical private investigator Erasmus Keane, as well as his tough but perpetually bewildered assistant Blake Fowler, as they simultaneously take on cases of an intelligent sheep that's been kidnapped from a top-secret genetics facility, and a teenage TV star who's become convinced that someone is out to kill her, the two investigations slowly revealing their complicated connections as the story reaches its absurdist, violent conclusion.

To be fair, there are some problems with the novel, which is why it isn't getting a higher score than it is today; the characterizations are a bit inconsistent from one chapter to the next, there's way too much telling over showing, and the book simply isn't as funny as Kroese seems to think it is. But that said, I was thoroughly charmed by the ridiculous machinations that fuel this novel's day-after-tomorrow storyline, the premise getting more and more preposterous and convoluted with each passing chapter; and in general it was a fast and always entertaining page-turner that will immensely satisfy fans of bizarro literature, as well as those who like the wackier side of science-fiction (think Terry Pratchett). The first of what looks like is going to be an entire series of Keane/Fowler adventures, I certainly would not mind a franchise being made out of these two engaging and memorable characters; and while this first volume doesn't exactly come recommended to all, certainly those who enjoy the kind of novels I just described should pick it up with no delay.

Out of 10: 8.3 ( )