Amberville (Tim Davys)

Referred on other pages as a part of the “Nursery Crime” sub-genre… Which was a new one for me to run across…

Crime/detective novel, man#1 is going to die, and he decides that the best way to live is to force man#2 to save him. Should he fail to do so, man#1 will have his thugs kill man#2′s wife.

Easy enough decision for a man to make, provided he does not utterly despise his wife, he should see what he can do about saving man#1.. Right?

Well, that is the core plot of Amberville, but it has a twist… Man#1 and man#2 are not men.. Sure, they are MALE, but they are not MEN.

Amberville and all of its surrounding burgs are wholly populated by stuffed animals.

Eric Bear grew up in a decent family, in a decent part of town.. his father, Boxer Bloom, is head of the local schools. His mother, Rhino Edda, is head of the environmental government branch. despite upbrining, Eric always found himself in a bit of trouble. As a young cub, he found himself working side jobs at the Casino Monokowki. His twin brother ‘Teddy” (go figure) was a whole other mess.

20 years later, he is a successfully reformed bear, living with his wife, Emma Rabbit, working as an advertising guru at a local firm.

it should be noted that in Amberville, young stuffed animals are not born. they are brought to families who are on the “cub list”. the factory sends out green pick up trucks driven by uniformed deliverymen, to drop the youngsters at their new homes.

Amberville also has a dark side. The cub list has a rumored counterpart , the death list. For hundreds of years stuffed animals have whispered about it, likewise about the chauffeurs, driving red pickup trucks through darkened night streets to take the dead off to their end.

On waking with a particularly bad hangover one morning, Eric is accosted by his old boss, Nicholas Dove, gangster and proprietor of the Casino he used to be employed at. Dove has found that the death list is real and that he is on it. Dove wants off the list and will have Emma Rabbit tortured and destroyed if his name is not scratched from the list.

Older, more threadbare, and no longer the delinquent he used to be, Eric goes off to locate said mythical object in order to save his wife.
He is unwillingly helped by his old gang: a self serving snake, an drug addicted sexually ambiguous antelope with a broken horn, and a mentally screwed up Crow named Tom-Tom with a history of extreme violence and memory loss during times of stress.

• Pages: 368
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (2010)
• ISBN-10: 0061625132
• ISBN-13: 978-0061625138

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All in all, this was a great book. i enjoyed it a lot and will gladly point people in its direction. as book one in a series pertaining to each of the 4 burgs in the Mollisan Town area.

Only one concern when it came to reading this book. fore-warning to those who follow: Some sections of the book have some bizarre verbiage in use which is confusing. this mainly pertains to descriptions of the twins Eric and Teddy. unlike myself who reread certain sections 2-3 times, dont waste the effort. you will glean no extra insight. your questions will be answered later.

i read this book in a free ebook format on the Harper Collins website. if you read ebooks, i suggest getting it while the gettin’s good. available here –>http://files.harpercollins.com/Mktg/Perennial/HTML/amberville_offer/

paperback is also available, feel free to use my amazon search on the left to give me a few pennies of your purchase price.. help me get more books and make me smile in the process :)

regardless of how you read it, come back and tell me your thoughts. would love to get involved in some discussion on this.

About the Author:

Tim Davys is not a real name. the photo you see here is that which harper collins carries under his author page.

instead of spouting off nonsense of my own regarding the awesomeness of pseudonyms, go check out The Man Your Husband Is Worried About‘s review on this book.http://hardcorelit.blogspot.com/2009/07/amberville-by-tim-davys.html