The Butcher's Ball Book

"On the table by the door, you'll find the hood and the earplugs. Once you're completely naked, you put in the earplugs and put on the hood. Make sure you can't see or hear a thing. Don't even think about cheating, because I'll know. If you cheat, you're out. If you leave any clothes on, you're out. If you do anything wrong, you're out. Understood?""Yes," he said weakly. "But what ... what then?"There came the throaty laugh again. "Then, you leave it all to me," she said. "And we have ourselves some fun." Mark B Cohen's outrageous, audacious first offering, Brass Monkeys, ripped into the world of Whitehall with the kind of rampaging irreverence most of us wish we had the guts and the imagination to carry off. Here, in The Butchers' Ball, Cohen is off again, this time turning his attention to the City and the people who inhabit the hallowed halls of the high-rolling banking fraternity, knocking them for six and never once letting the frantic pace of his wickedly brazen second novel slip into the slow lane.It all kicks off with a bizarre string of S & M style suicides at Butchers, a top notch bank and fodder-filled dream for tabloid hacks. As the City boys roll up their sleeves to track down the rogue trader they believe has brought the bank to its proverbial knees and police investigations into all the dodgy dealings draw a blank, old boy Toby Slaker--a man whose own dull little neck is soon to be firmly on the line--decides to liven up his life a little with a series of blind (literally!) dates with the Minx, internet lover extraordinaire.But as the truth of the whole sordid affair gradually begins to dawn and Slaker, with the help of a seemingly deeply dippy, dope-smoking private detective, discovers that his own saucy sexual shenanigans may have something to do with the plot to raze Butchers to the ground, all hell breaks loose and the truth begins to out.The Butchers Ball is an exhilarating, sleazy and downright rude novel which proffers a merciless take on an age old institution by pitting the modern day fetishes of money, sex and take- over bids against the backdrop of a revered and crumbling establishment.If you are of a nervous disposition and like your sex and scandal a little more sanitised, then leave this on the shelf. But if you are a sucker for the barefaced, the brassy and the Tom Sharpe-esque then Cohen's latest is a must-have. --Susan HarrisonRead More