The English Student

You'll probably know Jonas Jonasson better as the author of The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared.

I haven't read The Hundred-Year-Old Man, but Caboodle Firsts was running a giveaway of 100 early copies of Hitman Anders, so I thought, why not. I knew that someone whose taste I respect had enjoyed The Hundred-Year-Old Man. And so it was that I came home one day and found a free book on the doormat, which is always nice.

It's a story of a hotel receptionist, an atheist priest and a hitman who all wind up in the same hotel in Sweden. The receptionist and the priest being considerably cannier than Hitman Anders, they set up an assault business, charging money to the criminal underworld to have Hitman Anders go and break someone's legs or arms or whatever and running a successful PR campaign in the form of scaremongering tabloid news articles. Of course, the business inevitably fails after a time, and the trio have to go on the run and find some other profitable scam.

It's a whimsical and ridiculous novel, reading something like Douglas Adams except not as clever. I did laugh out loud a couple of times, but I don't actually have very much else to say about it. It was OK. I didn't hate it and I didn't love it; it was enjoyable in the same way as a cooking programme with Mary Berry is enjoyable - you watch it cheerfully enough while recognising that it doesn't mean anything very much.