Fitzroy Maclean Angel Books
Streetwise hero Roy Angel, faced with parenthood and a move to the country, has to do the unthinkable - and get a job. To make sure he does, his partner, fashion diva Amy May, buys him a share in Rudgard & Blugden Confidential Investigations, a previously all-female private detective agency. In at the deep end (as usual), Angel’s first client is a millionaire chemist trying to plug a leak of stolen Botox – the ‘pretty poison’ used in cosmetic surgery – from his supposedly secure laboratory, where everything and everyone is constantly monitored by close-circuit television cameras. Whilst trying to solve an impossible crime, Angel is distracted by a vivacious redhead with a passion for Salsa dancing; a jovial Russian sailor with a passion for old East German cars fit only for the junkyard; an estate agent with a passion for Audrey Hepburn; some very strange goings-on in country houses; and a redundant KGB officer trying to retrain as a gangster! And Angel gets little support from his wonderfully dysfunctional family. His estranged father is (selfishly) admitted to the hospital after a stroke and needs looking after, but that’s not the main problem. Which brave soul is going to tell Angel’s fearsome hippy mother she’s soon to be a grandmother?
Roy Angel is slowly adjusting to the pressures of working at Rudgard & Blugden Confidential Investigations, although his Raymond Chandler ‘training manuals’ still haven’t reconciled him to going to work every day. It would seem that Angel could take it easy with his latest case however; finding the retired Mr. Ellrington’s long-lost love shouldn’t be too demanding, should it? Handling his partner Amy May, fashionista turned fearsome nesting mother-to-be, as well as his ailing father and his Page 3 girlfriend, might be another matter though. From meeting Huddersfield’s very own Double-O-Seven, to getting entangled in a shootout where the OAPs are acting like kids, Angel’s latest caper boasts a cast of unforgettable characters and the indefatigable humor that rightly makes Mike Ripley the King of Comedy Crime.
Private detective Fitzroy Maclean Angel is not your ordinary private detective. The world he inhabits is strange and it is about to get stranger. A new born baby means no more cases, no more fingerprinting and no more espionage and, with the arrival of his aging, hippy mother, he has swapped bloodstains for paint stains. Domesticity, or the lack of it, has replaced his high-paced, crime-solving lifestyle. That is, of course, apart from the AWOL screenwriter whose mother’s funeral he must attend.