Escaping Reality by GEOFF NELDER

Escaping Reality

by Geoff Nelder

A review by M. Kenyon Charboneaux

Escaping Reality : Nelder At His Best!

No one can suspend my disbelief as quickly and as cleanly as Geoff Nelder. Whether it's one of his gentle ghost stories with the faint scent of MR James' quaint and haunting perfume, a thriller with twists and turns and chases that culminate in the greatest end to a bad guy I've seen in Nelder's Hot Air, or the escape from reality he gives us in this crime thriller, Escaping Reality, Nelder is the best writer in the UK today at writing well-crafted, well-written and well-worth the purchase price novels, and short stories.

Nelder is versatile, imaginative and original, no matter what he's writing. Escaping Reality is another grand joyride of a read, a thriller with an innocently convicted murderer, wondrously funny sex scenes, great conversations full of patented Nelder quips, black secrets and black humor.

From the opening lines this tale of musician Gerry Ricketts is full of trademark Nelder scenes - including my favorites - the bad guys experiencing agony usually inflicted by our hero in panicked retreats designed to save his own skin.

Busted by a large policewoman for jewelry theft and manslaughter crimes that our hero is too "gormless" to have committed, the jury believes the prosecution's only-incriminating-because-no-one-else-is-on-it videotape from the jewelry store, so our Gerry finds himself in Stonelodge Prison almost before he can say "gormless". Of course the fact that several of the stolen pieces of jewelry were in his coat pocket didn't help his case, nor did his incompetent barrister his family hired, apparently by using the old pagan way of making important decisions - in this case, sticking a pin in the yellow pages under barristers.

Gerry's first priority is to survive prison. His second is to escape Stonelodge before he's transferred to another category of prison equivalent to our past Alcatraz or present Marion, Illinois penitentiary - where hard time and maximum security, are dread words to a man looking to make an opportunistic escape. Though he hopes for his appeal to free him, he's smart enough to know that escape is probably his better chance at proving his innocence. So with typical Nelder twisted humor, complex and intriguing plan and wonderful writing, Gerry does, but not before he has a marvelous roll in the bubble wrap with the prison's female librarian, Wendy, who continues to help him while he's on the run.

As a fugitive and trying to clear himself, Gerry goes through a series of adventures that include bicycles and beautiful women, (of course - this is Nelder!) clever comments and cleverer comebacks, using the assumed name of a real person, Preston Garnet, he actually goes to his own abandoned house to live (and gets the electricity hooked up), gets a job as a bartender, gets on the wrong side of some low-life gangsters, finds out that the someone who may be the real killer is too close for anything close to comfort yet may still have helped him escape, and in general through a flurry of incidents (including several attempts on his life and living on a houseboat - a dream of mine, but NOT in Gerry's circumstances I assure you! - verbal gymnastics and patented Nelder quips, gets caught after several months on the run. But all is not lost… you just have to read it.

So who was the actual killer, the killer who framed Gerry for the jewel theft and the dead jewelry store clerk?

I didn't know until the author choose to tell me and that's rare for me. It makes this book a 12 on a scale of 1-10 as far I'm concerned, because a mystery/thriller where I don't know who the killer is by the fourth chapter, at the latest, is a hell of twister of a mystery. Escaping Reality is more complicated than it looks at first glance. It'll keep you guessing, sometimes cringing for poor Gerry and always laughing from start to finish.