HOW TO LOOK AFTER BERT REYNOLDS

Original and gripping thriller with cult appeal.

Anja DesMoine lives a quiet life and works at a crisis hotline in a small town in northeastern Kentucky. But when a man is found gruesomely murdered, a boy commits suicide under strange circumstances, and an Australian Bearded Dragon called Bert Reynolds goes missing from the scene of a crime, things start to get uncomfortable for Anja, who has a few secrets of her own. Anja goes on the lam, and the murder investigation, under the dubious leadership of Lieutenant Simon Kretzmar, takes on the quality of a comedy of errors. As the bodies pile up, Anja and Kretzmar must confront the things they most fear in life: family, failure and being alone. How to Look After Bert Reynolds is a rollercoaster of a novel, a gripping but oddball whodunit with a cast of offbeat characters, a dazzling array of pop culture references, and a very unlikely hero. It's a story about a series of murders, about life in a small town, but also about making peace with one's past, and finding friendship in unexpected places. Laurence Hamilton Cramer was born on 4 September 1970 in Kimberley and died tragically in a car accident on 15 November 2013. He and his fiancé, Tracy Rudling, ran a restaurant in the small Eastern Free State town of Rosendal. The Rosa restaurant is a hotspot where artists, actors and singers get together to explore books and the arts through gastronomic interpretation. Laurence wrote for a living for more than ten years, including commercial and television work. He died on the day Penguin was going to call him about publishing his book.