One Dead Hen, Charlie Williams
One Dead Hen, Charlie Williams
1 Rating(s)
List: $14.99 | Sale: $10.50
Club: $7.49

One Dead Hen

Author: Charlie Williams

Series: Mangel #1

Narrator: James Clamp

Unabridged: 6 hr 30 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/30/2012

Synopsis

The town of Mangel has always been a rough place, but rough turns to nightmarish when headless corpses begin piling up. The police are desperate for a suspect, and Royston Blake, the former pub doorman-turned-recluse is prime for the taking. He’s hauled in for questioning, but to no avail: this is one crime Blake didn’t commit. Yet the interrogation is enough to shake up his paranoid world. He realizes that, instead of hiding from the ills of the world, he should be fighting them. So begins Blake’s quest to score the unlikeliest of jobs for a guy like him: becoming a copper in Mangel. Considering his violent past, everyone—cops, criminals, even his ex-girlfriend—tries to dissuade him. But Blake’s a tenacious bloke, and what better way to convince the naysayers of his crime-fighting skills than to catch the butcher plaguing his town? As per usual, nothing goes according to plan in Blake’s attempt to turn over a new leaf, leaving him to slog through plenty of blood and muck in the deliciously suspenseful fourth installment of Charlie Williams’s darkly comic series.

About Charlie Williams

Charlie Williams was born in Worcester, England, where he still lives with his wife and two children. His novels include Deadfolk, Booze and Burn, King of the Road, and Stairway to Hell, and have been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, and Russian.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Darren on November 20, 2011

A serial killer is stalking the shadowy streets of Mangel. Who can stop this killer they call the Reaper? Who is man enough to track him down? Who could possibly take on this beast? What manner of man can contend with this fiend? Step forward Royston Blake Mangel needs your swede on the case. Mangel......more

Goodreads review by Sean on January 08, 2013

Royston Blake is back and with him comes murder, mayhem and mystery. One Dead Hen (fourth in series) has a hint of supernatural and a whiff and the 'other' about the plot - which all adds to the fun as Royston gets caught up in a case of headless bodies. And it's not just headless corpses that turn......more

Goodreads review by Meran on October 16, 2013

Deadfolk #4 (or Mangel #4) Our bloke, Royston Blake, has finally learned a lesson, one bought in blood; Don't Trust Anybody. He's been staying hidden in his house, coming out only for scran (food). But he goes out to get some, even though he doesn't have a job currently, which means he can't afford e......more

Goodreads review by Sid on March 15, 2016

I enjoyed this book, the first of Charlie Williams's that I have read. As other reviewers have said, not everyone will agree, but if you share its sense of humour as I did then it is a very amusing read. The story is set in the grim fictional town of Mangel and narrated in a Midlands-ish dialect by t......more

Goodreads review by Darcia on June 23, 2011

I have not read the prior books in Charlie Williams' Royston Blake series and nothing in this book's blurb prepared me for the actual text. Had I read even the first page, I wouldn't have purchased this one. The narrative is written in the first person, from Royston Blake's point of view. The dialec......more

Quotes

“Royston Blake is a boastful, aggressive, foul-mouthed, psychopathic hard-man of the utmost political incorrectness, a failure at everything he does but an indomitable believer in his own cleverness and sex appeal…Why then is he so enjoyable to read about?” —The Times“A welcome return for a daft anti-hero…Engrossing…Royston’s ripe dialect and daft adventures are thoroughly entertaining. And while we laugh at the absurdity of the story, Williams does just enough to create the nagging worry that it isn’t so unreal after all; that Royston is only as much of a caricature as the sensitive intellectual in the Hampstead novel or Jonathan Franzen’s troubled Americans. The hideous town of Mangel, meanwhile, with its casual violence, unmanageable drinking and psychotic conservatism, offers up a vision of Britain that seems all too familiar…One of the most challenging social commentaries you are likely to read this year. AmazonEncore has rescued an excellent book.” —The Guardian

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