After You with the Pistol

In "After You with the Pistol," readers are plunged back into the delightfully disreputable life of Charlie Mortdecai, a degenerate aristocrat whose penchant for art forgery, general debauchery, and sheer bad luck has repeatedly landed him in sticky situations. After miraculously surviving a recent brush with death, Charlie is informed by shadowy figures that his continued existence comes with a singular, rather alarming condition: he must marry the breathtakingly beautiful, fabulously wealthy, and utterly unhinged Johanna Krampf. Johanna, a woman whose immense fortune is rivaled only by her enthusiasm for extreme danger, wastes no time in dragging Charlie into her escalating series of global escapades. From covert monarch-assassination attempts and high-stakes heroin smuggling operations to the truly terrifying prospect of survival training at a college exclusively for militant feminist spies, Charlie finds himself a reluctant pawn in her life-threatening games. As he stumbles through these perilous scenarios, armed only with his dubious charm and an ingrained sense of self-preservation, Mortdecai desperately hopes to unearth the underlying motives behind his bizarre predicament – if, that is, he can manage to stay alive long enough to find out. This darkly humorous caper further cements Kyril Bonfiglioli's reputation for combining exquisite wit with imaginatively unpleasant thrills.