Malcolm Pryce was born in the UK and has spent much of his life working and travelling abroad. He has been, at various times, a BMW assembly-line worker, a hotel washer-up, a deck hand on a yacht sailing the South Seas, an advertising copywriter and the world's worst aluminium salesman. In 1998 he gave up his day job and booked a passage on a banana boat bound for South America in order to write Aberystwyth Mon Amour. He spent the next seven years living in Bangkok, where he wrote three more novels in the series, Last Tango in Aberystwyth, The Unbearable Lightness of Being in
Aberystwyth and Don't Cry for Me Aberystwyth. In 2007 he moved back to the UK and now lives in Oxford, where he wrote his most recent novel, From Aberystwyth with Love.
It's May in Aberystwyth and the mayoral election campaign is underway. Private detective Louie Knight has just received a visit from a mysterious stranger called Raspiwtin asking him to track down a dead man called Iestyn Probert. Originally hanged for his part in the infamous raid on the Coliseum cinema, Iestyn Probert was later seen alive and well and boarding a bus to Aberaeron. Did he escape the hangman's noose? Or could there be some truth to the rumours that he was resuscitated by aliens?
Now, as strange lights are spotted in the sky above Aberystwyth and a farmer claims to have had a close encounter with a lustful extraterrestrial, Iestyn Probert has been sighted once again. But what does Raspiwtin want with him? And why does Louie's investigation arouse unwelcome interest from a shadowy government body and a dark-suited man in a black 1947 Buick?
Surreal, absurd and very funny
Effortless and hilarious ... in a league of his own
The X-Files crossed with Raymond Chandler, set in West Wales ... irresistible
Pryce continues to put a uniquely surreal spin on the hoary old conventions of noir writing ... it's impossibly weird and, in parts, beautifully lyrical. Pryce's many fans certainly won't be disappointed
In the latest hilarious instalment of Malcolm Pryce's Aberystwyth
mysteries, Wales's answer to Philip Marlowe faces an axe-wielding
rabbit-hugger, a green-eyed beauty who answers to the name Miaow, and a case
that is out of this world
