Kindle Edition, 320 pages
Published November 25th, 2014 by Metacircular Limited

Holy shit, this was one hell of a ride again!

~Goodreads synopsis~

“A naked magician vanishes, a severed hand appears

… and Frank Friendship is about to wet his pants.

This darkly sparkling thriller puts the fun back into murder.

Marek the naked magician—Frank’s arrogant work colleague—has gone missing and Frank is desperate to hide what happened the day the man disappeared. But the police have found a severed hand and night after night a witness daubs a message on the cafe window in blood-red letters. Fingers have started to point to Frank. Dead fingers.

Frank is slow to realise the stakes. His every move to hold onto his crummy job only digs a deeper, darker hole. And Frank’s new “best friend” Annie is helping him dig. She has the hots for him and her actions only implicate him further.

All Frank ever wanted was to win back his estranged wife. With his world collapsing around him, he has to re-examine who and what matters most in his life. But is he twenty years too late?”

---

Pursue Friendship can be read as a standalone book BUT, if you haven’t yet, I strongly recommend reading Screw Friendship first because it will bring so much more colour to this one if you do (you can find my review on it here).

Frank’s a special kind of guy. Not spesjul special, but awesome special. A gentle soul with a foul mouth and a fascinating brain. And with a body women tend to drool over. Two Frank-quotes I highlighted to give a general idea of this fantastic character:

“I’m not depressed. Look at my mo. With a mo like this, what have I got to be depressed about?”

************

“Man. Two kisses already. The woman was a nymphomaniac.” 

I would love to tell you aaaaaaall about Frank but I won’t because it would spoiler the shit out of the first book.

Because Screw Friendship thrived on its amazing plot twists and turns, I thought I was prepared for Pursue Friendship. I mean, now that I knew things were never what they seemed to be, it would be fairly easy to guess the plot outcomes eh? Just translate everything into the complete opposite and there wouldn’t be any more surprises? Yeah, I thought I really figured it out…

Nope! I was still as shocked and surprised as before and couldn’t have guessed the ending at all. Someone died, right? Probably means the person is still alive then, right? Wait, what?? If you can pull that off without turning the storyline into a complete mess *cough, M. Night Shyamalan, cough*, I consider that great writing.

We get to see a bit more of Edinburgh this time and especially a bit more of some of its dysfunctional fictional characters, of which my favourite was probably Catman, a homeless old man who wears a coat made out of cat fur, yet also has kittens who are very much alive, living in the inside pockets of this same coat.

Old characters make room for new characters, none of the new ones inferior to the old. My favourite disgusting character, Findlay Dickson, is still plenty around, which makes for an utterly delightful nose cringing experience.

There’s a lot more sex and bloody violence in this book than in the first one. It can still in NO way be marked as Erotica or, well, any type of genre really. The mystery aspect will glue you to the edge of your seat, the humorous aspect will make you fall off that same seat with the seat still attached to your arse as you do. The sex scenes are pretty explicit yet actually serve a purpose for the greater good. It’s just…wow. I’m making this my first 5-brownie-rated book of the year. Go R.G. Manse!

A fair warning again here, if you have a delicate soul, get easily offended by cursing and/or explicit sexual content, this book isn’t for you.

Links to the book:

Amazon US
Amazon UK
Goodreads