Coincidence is a glorious thing. My Arizona book for the month is by Ethan Moe, who has been a part of local fandom here in state for a long time, including chairing LepreCon 35, a science fiction/fantasy con here in the valley. I also run a local science fiction convention, CoKoCon, an immensely rewarding event which I get to host with a lot of wonderful people, wonderful people like Michael Duckett and Stephanie Dyer, whom I should emphasise are not the stars of this novel. Or are they?

I knew Michael Duckett. He ran our game room at CoKoCon 2019, though he sadly passed before we got back to an in-person event after COVID. Our collection of games is called the Michael Duckett Sr. Game Library in his honour and it just debuted at CoKoCon 2022 earlier this month. I know Stephanie Dyer too. She's one of our treasurers, she runs hospitality and she handles hotel liaison with all of its associated tasks/jobs, like coordination of fan tables and room parties. Duckett and Dyer: Conrunners for Hire! Oh, and she also edits the Nameless Zine, for which I write my book reviews. Hola Stephanie! I bet you think this book is about you!

Needless to say, when it became apparent that some dude in New York City wrote a science fiction novel about Michael Duckett and Stephanie Dyer, two inept best friends who stumble into a parallel universe time travel tangle of hilarity, I had to immediately order a copy off Amazon and find out what exact sort of shenanigans my friends have been getting up to when not at our concom meetings. What does G. M. Nair know that I don't? How does he know it? And if our concom has the ability to travel in time, then we have a panelist three years ago that we need to remove from our programming before it happens. Hey, which of Stephanie's collection of sheds should we be looking in to find that time travel device?

I'm pretty sure that Nair doesn't have the ability to travel in time himself, or he'd surely go back to fix a particularly chaotic use of smart quotes. The book is actually pretty well laid-out, with decent fonts and margins and what have you, not to ignore the excellent comic-book inspired cover art; but the very first sentence in the very first chapter starts with straight quotes and ends with curly ones and, in doing so, sets a trend in motion that frustrated my proofreader's brain. Of course, that may well be appropriate, as it's the sort of thing that the fictional Duckett and Dyer would do, because they're utterly inept.

This Michael Duckett works for a living, at somewhere enticing called the Future Group, but that seems to be about all he's good at. When he's not at work, he's a bundle of nerves and doubts and that affects his ability to do pretty much anything. At least he's managed to strike up conversation with a beautiful neighbour in the apartment complex laundry room, Terri Bradshaw by name (even I got that reference) though it inevitably takes her to ask him out. At least he's with it enough to say yes.

This Stephanie Dyer is at once lazier, apparently content to coast through life and spend most of it on a couch, and more ambitious because, whenever she actually does get a wild hare to do something, she's able to throw herself into it with abandon. Nothing can hold her back except the will to actually do it in the first place. Her decisions aren't always good ones—let's face it, most of them aren't—but she does make decisions and, given the inability of her roommate and best friend of fifteen years to do that, she get to be the dynamic leader in the partnership.

Put together, they're a disaster on four legs just waiting to happen and Nair has an absolute blast with that because his sense of humour is joyous and that's obvious before we even start reading the book. I loved the quotes on the back, not just "Who are you? How did you get into my office" from Neil Gaiman but "A long written or printed literary composition" (Webster's Dictionary Definition of "Book"). What made me laugh the loudest, though, was the copyright page, hardly a typical place to find laughs. Nair lists the book's ISBN and then adds "SSN: 113-85-921—wait... no. Disregard that."

As you might imagine, his sense of humour is far more British than American, rooted in the absurdities of Monty Python and Douglas Adams. If the remaining Pythons ever make another movie, he should be hired to write the credits. It could be argued that, given that this book is a coherent novel with a story that wraps up comfortably within its pages, a good editor would have excised some of the silliest of the sheer lunacy, but I'm not complaining about how wild it gets. And, even when it's grounded, it's pretty crazy.

For instance, the title stems from the fact that Duckett & Dyer also appear to be private investigators, except that they aren't, regardless what the posters and commercials and whatnot might suggest, not to fail to mention the wannabe client who continually wants to hire them. It's all a mystery to Duckett, whose response is to pretend none of it's happening, and it's all a mystery to Dyer, whose response is a more enthusiastic embracing of something so cool, especially with a motto like "no case too tough, no case too crazy."

In fact, the fact that someone appears to be assiduously promoting a business that they don't run is as mysterious as the electrical storms of increasing frequency; which tend to result in the disappearance of someone whose name appears on a short list and the appearance of a clue in the form of a cryptic Post-it note (which is carefully not ever called a Post-it note, presumably for copyright reasons). It's through one of those storms that a real investigator gets involved. He's Det. Rex Calhoun and he's technically a cop looking into a drug peddling street gang, the Trick Ponies, but he gets caught up in the multiverse-threatening chaos that Duckett and Dyer may or may not have triggered, especially when the cool and insightful CSI chick disappears too.

What I realised partway through is that this plays out rather like 'Ghostbusters' without ghosts, with a light-hearted treatment of quintessentially fantastic tropes. Stephanie is Bill Murray's character, Peter Venkman, but Michael doesn't directly equate to one of the others. Given how inept this pair are—and there are glorious quotes to back that up; Terri Bradshaw's brother Jacob states that "they didn't look like they'd be able to tie a pair of shoes between them—it falls to other people to ground the story, like Calhoun, but it's our intrepid duo who stumble and pratfall their way through the story.

I had a lot of fun with this book, even discounting the names of the primary characters and any baggage that I might have brought in because of that, to either distract or enhance. Much of that is due to Nair's sense of humour, which is sharp and dry and absurd, but his story kept me on the hop too. The next step would be to continue reading the series, which currently includes the presumably Holmesian 'The One-Hundred Percent Solution' and the gloriously generic 'The Mystery of the Murdered Guy'. In fact, while they have far fewer ratings and reviews on Goodreads, those ratings are notably higher. ~~ Hal C F Astell