Synopsis:
An SPSFC 2021 Finalist and Indie Fantasy Fund 2022 Award Winner (somehow)!
Michael Duckett is fed up with his life. His job is a drag, and his roommate and best friend of fifteen years, Stephanie Dyer, is only making him more anxious with her lazy irresponsibility. Things continue to escalate when they face the threat of imminent eviction from their palatial 5th floor walk-up and find that someone has been plastering ads all over the city for their Detective Agency.
The only problem is: He and Stephanie don’t have one of those.
Despite their baffling levels of incompetence, Stephanie eagerly pursues this crazy scheme and drags Michael, kicking and screaming, into the fray only to find that they are way out of their depth. They stumble upon a web of missing people that are curiously linked to a sexually audacious theoretical physicist and his experiments with the fabric of space-time. And unless Michael and Stephanie can put their personal issues aside and fix the multi-verse, the concept of existence itself may, ironically, no longer exist.
Review:
Duckett & Dyer is a SPSFC Finalist for the 2021-22 batch! I read it as part of the judging process.
I’ll admit right off the bat that I don’t tend to pick up comedies, so I wasn’t sure how I would get on with this one. But, thanks to the SPSFC, I gave it a go and found that actually I quite enjoyed it! Nair knows how to write comedy and kept throwing unexpected surprises at me through every turn.
I think my favourite section is in the middle and without revealing spoilers I loved all the universes that Nair quite clearly had fun coming up with all these wierd and wacky places and ideas. I would have loved to have explored some of these more strange places, but I understand that Nair needed to keep going with the story and so our unlikely detectives couldn’t linger!
Duckett & Dyer are a comedy duo who you’ll learn to love, especially with Dyer. She starts as a somewhat frustrating character but by the end she reveals how dedicated of a friend she is, even if she’s still annoying Duckett by that point. Add in a whole host of supporting characters and you get a good mix of people to help, or hinder, our duo.
Nair takes the currently-popular trend of the multi-verse and makes it entirely ridiculous (but in a good way.) It’s overly-dramatic, filled with comedy explanations for things but still serious enough to have a story within it that you’ll want to keep reading.
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