Book club: Beastly Behaviour

Welcome to my book club. Please sit down and help yourself to a piece of cake. As long-time readers will know our club doesn't bother with dull Booker prize shortlist novels, the sort of thing that thrills worthy lit chicks. We're about fiction that comes with the smack of firm discipline.

Which is why this month's club choice is 'Beastly Behaviour' by Aishling Morgan.

I adore the flair and wit of Aishling Morgan at her (or his?) best. Her writing is funny and clever - and arousing all at the same time. In fact, they deserve to be up there with a classic like 'Frank and I'.

And 'Beastly Behaviour' is among the best of them, although it gets a run for its money from one or two of the others. How can you not love a novel with a notes section that begins with the statement: "The late Victorian era must surely be regarded by all right-thinking persons as the golden age of female underwear." This right-thinker definitely agrees and is just as keen to celebrate the wonder of corsets, drawers and the rest. 

You don't have to have read Conan Doyle's 'The Hound of the Baskervilles' to cotton on to the fact that Ms Morgan borrows heavily from the Sherlock Holmes yarn for 'Beastly Behaviour'. There's the 'bleakness and melancholy' of Dartmoor, a big black hound, a convict on the loose and a detective by the name of Harland Wolff (who is accompanied by his old friend Dr Manston).

Their lady in distress is, however, not the typical Conan Doyle creation - she makes her first dancing in a Wild West whorehouse, where she's being offered for sale by the unscrupulous Nanna Bloss.

And, unlike a Holmes story, 'Beastly Behaviour' is bristling with sex and spanking. Along the way Genevieve, and her bottom, suffer plenty of indignities in a story that has lots of fiendishly inter-woven plot lines.It all moves along at a spanking pace (what else) to the sort of satisfying conclusion that a good AM always provides. In short, I'd say its a spanko treat.