Weekend in Weighton by Terry Murphy ***

Eddie G is a 26-year-old trying his hand as being a private investigator, as nothing else seemed to work. His first case involves murders, blackmail, corruption, organized crime, mistaken identities, and lost relatives ... all in a small town in England.

Weekend in Weighton by Terry Murphy has a little bit of everything in the style of hard-boiled detective novels with lots of dialogue like,

I hate to break this reverie Kate, but my bike needs me. And we have a timetable that makes NASA's shuttle launch look like an open mic night.

A major part of the story is a chase that starts on our hero's Santa Cruz Superlight mountain bike, to him jumping off an abandoned bright onto a passing boat, and so on. This goes on for chapters and reads like a script for a tongue-in-cheek super-hero movie ... each escape more fantastic and less credible then the previous one.

In the end I found the plot twist to be obvious and the steady stream of wise crack tedious. Alos concerning was the balance between jeopardy and humor. Eddie G was too much of a comic-book super-hero to ever be convincingly in danger, but too serious about his role as to PI to be really funny.

 I won a copy of this book in a Goodreads First Reads giveaway on June 30, 2013. I received the book on July 16, 2013.

A very short British Glossary

A & E - Accidents and Emergencies - The British National Health Service (NHS) for an emergency room.

Perspex - Plexiglas

WPC - Woman police constable