The King Was in His Counting House

Douglas Lindsay

Average Rating 9/10 (1 Review)

The door opened and a young woman walked in, carrying a tray of breakfast materials. She smiled, her teeth were extraordinarily white, and she was dressed in dark blue. Neatly cut trousers and a top with a high, Chinese buttoned neckline. The outfit was edged with very fine red and gold, and had a beautiful presence of its own, of uniformity and of lavish, unnecessary expense.

‘Nice to see you’re awake, Mr Thomson,’ she said, standing properly before him, after laying the tray on a large round table. ‘We weren’t sure what you would like to eat, so there’s a selection.’

He didn’t reply. She was partly blocking the sun so that it was hitting the back of her head and creating a halo effect around her bobbed blonde hair. She was beautiful. Pale. Almost celestial. And Barney Thomson suddenly wondered if he was dead.

Following his previous involvement with a branch of Murderer’s Anonymous, which ended with him dead at the foot of a cliff and his brain stored in a jar, Barney Thomson’s future seemed bleak.

However, for no reason that he can get to the bottom of, suddenly he is back, plucked from the grave to be the personal barber to the First Minister of the Scottish Executive.

Unexpectedly thrown into the world of political intrigue and scandal, Barney’s life is at least given some consistency when a serial killer begins to pick off members of the cabinet in a series of brutal, but popular murders.

Review by Nigel (250706) Rating (9/10)

Review by Nigel
Rating 9/10
When I heard the news that a new Barney Thomson novel had been released I assumed it would be set in-between one of the other stories as we had predicted in our review for Barney Thomson and the Face of Death… how wrong could we be? Douglas Lindsay, not one to have the death of his main character put him off, continues with the next instalment following on from the events told in A Prayer for Barney Thomson. And yes, if you have read this book, Barney did die.

Barney wakes to find he has been ‘employed’ as barber to Jesse Longfellow-Moses, the First Minister of the Scottish Executive. However, something isn’t quite right and Barney can’t place his finger on it… then normality resumes and people start to die, namely members of the Scottish Cabinet. As more and more are killed Barney tries to work out who is doing the killing, while supposedly collecting evidence for two very amusing policemen, DCI Solomon and DS Kent. All is finally revealed in a TV studio ending that is fantastic, gradually building up to a hysterical climax that should have a health warning.

Throughout the story the main question puzzling the reader, as well as Barney, is how he is back from the dead. I won’t give this away and in truth when you find out you won’t be too sure anyway and I think this is how the author intended it… Barney is back, does it matter how?

The story is basically about the power mad and those mad for power, told with a Barney twist. Barney is, however, much more world weary in this story (as dying will probably do to you) and seems to have lost some of the naivety that was part of the charm of the earlier books. That said, it is another great instalment in what is becoming a cult series. What it really deserves is main stream success… read this book, recommend it and we can all look forward to more of Barney.
Nigel (25th July 2006)