A review by debs4jc
The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry

4.0

This inventive mystery takes the old fashioned private eye story and recreates it with elements of fantasy. At the center is Charles Unwin, a clerk for 'the agency' who suddenly finds himself promoted to a detective. The detective that he once clerked for has gone missing and as Unwin encounters a series of bizarre occurances he becomes determined to track down the missing detective--for he may be the only one who can explain what's going one and help solve the case. [return]I sometimes had a hard time following all the twists and turns of Unwin's journey through a bizarre landscape of sleepwalkers. The fact that so many completely unexpected things kept happening kept my interest though, and there was enough of a thread of coherency for me to follow the plot. The narrator of the audiobook captured the feel of the story well, transporting the reader back to the heyday of detective stories--the 1940's--with a masterful reading of slang and appropriate voices. Fans of noir and traditional private eye stories