Brighton 1966, and the pirate radio station Radio Seabreeze is entertaining the masses – well, the young part of the masses, anyway. Colin Crampton, crime report of the Evening Chronicle, is in the meantime looking into the murder of Claude Winterbottom, a fraudster who has finally got what was coming to him.

But Colin has annoyed his boss once too often and finds himself demoted to the entertainment section of the paper. He can’t seem to stay away from the paper as a second murder occurs and all roads – well, boats – lead to the Seabreeze…

This is book five of the Deadline Murder subseries of the Colin Crampton books, and I’m reviewing it as part of the blog tour for the book. Many thanks to Peter Bartram for putting me forward for it.

The Colin Crampton series is an entertaining set of light-hearted mysteries with a strong, witty narrator in the person of Colin and plots that go all over the place before dovetailing into an exciting finale.

This one is a little out there – while the events do reflect real-life events in the Sixties, the plot of one of the villains of this tale do seem a little more extreme than anything that actually happened in the day. It all builds nicely to the climax though, and due to the tongue in cheek nature of the tale, the author certainly gets away with it.

What is a slight disappointment is that the whodunit element of the tale does get sidelined for a lot of the book, due to the other thing that is going on in the plot – the two aspects did feel a little disconnected to me.

Regardless, this is a fun read, just like the others in the series and I do recommend you give them a go.