The KD Shindig

The novel opens with the wedding of Kristin Nicol and Darren Maundeville in a small, historic cathedral in Northern Ireland.

The guests returning to England, the author follows this toxic soup of friends and relatives for a year, opening a window onto the peaks and troughs of their lives: Maggie and Richard Dearlove, a reasonably happily married couple; Joanna Centofani, a self-adoring actress; the green-eyed Rosemary Icthus; the steely Mr. Cameron Scattergood and his antithetic wife, Ruth; the love-loathe duo Johnny Nicol and Charity B. as well as various other interrelated characters. The reader will sympathise, agonise and be antagonised!

The dark humour is evident throughout the novel - and although there are some characters who have only one scene within the book, sometimes these are drawn with more verve and wit than many of the others.

The timescale is not linear either, sometimes jumping back and dealing with different characters to keep the reader's interest.

Plus the underlying story of spying, double-dealing and outright underhandedness definitely makes this story worth a second read.

Philip Musson has captured a totally different world from the one that most of us know; from the glamorous couple the reader is introduced to at the beginning of the book, to the self-centred actress whose masterly comeuppance during a talk show is well worth a second read.

The other vignettes that form part of the book are equally compelling especially the girl who lobs a snowball into the face of the publisher who has just rejected her script without even reading it.

The KD Shindig is just that, a selection of scenes from the main characters lives, some of which the reader returns to, others that only appear once throughout the course of the novel and yet all these individual stories make up the whole flavour of the book which intertwines many stories to make a surprisingly cohesive whole.