Will Heron's Review of Cremains
A uniquely comic and fast-paced crime caper with more twists and turns than an Escher staircase.
How could I resist Rob Johnson’s crime caper novel Cremains? There are so few books that fall under the crime comedy category that I try to read them all, but a crime caper is an even rarer beast, so in I dived.
Max Dempsey (aka Simon Golightly) a once upstanding member of society and local bank manager has got himself into a spot of bother. To try and keep pace with his wife’s spending habits and stop her constant complaining he has been “borrowing” money from customer's accounts. But as the amounts get larger, he is rumbled and loses his job. Joined by his two criminally inept helpers, Scratch and Alan, he tries his hand at bank robbery. Sadly, this doesn’t go to plan either and just results in him getting more into debt with his old school friend, local Cocaine distributor and undertaker Danny when it fails.
He agrees to help Danny out and clear his debt by trying to sell some of his product to the fat sweating and murderous psychotic Greek, Nikos. So far so bad, but it wouldn’t be a caper if things didn’t go from bad to worse. After a switched urn and a pissed-off bunch of Greeks who are not too happy with him trying to sell them ashes. He and his partners in crime chase the grieving Tess and her grandfather Bernard across the country on their way to scatter what they believe are her dead grandmother's ashes on a Scottish hill.
But Bernard has a bit of an incident with the ashes at a campsite and mixes up the contents with some washing powder and a Tupperware box of sugar – sadly none of the criminal geniuses seem to know what cocaine looks or tastes like. Luckily (kind of) Max has Toby his nephew along for the ride, (instead of doing work experience at the bank that he is still pretending to his wife to be working at) and he’s tried it once, so they finally have a tester at least.
Less luckily, Max is then kidnapped by the Greeks and held to ransom for the coke, which they think Max is buying from Tess and Bernard. The storylines intertwine faster than a granny knitting on speed. The final showdown takes place on the Scottish hilltop - with the Greek still wanting his cocaine, Max still wanting a way out and Jess still having no clue who all these people are that want her grandmother’s ashes.