Putting the Boot In

Wickedly funny, this is the third novel in the elusive Dan Kavanagh's London-based crime series featuring bisexual private detective Duffy. Things are hotting up in the Third Division and it seems someone's nobbling players. Following the loss of one of his best strikers, Jimmy Lister, former England player and now ineffectual club manager, calls on the expertise of the inimitable Duffy. Duffy must investigate the troubled world of lower-league football while also facing questions of his possible encounter with AIDS, whether he's cooked his frozen pizza for too long and whether he's too short to be a decent goalkeeper.

Dan Kavanagh was born in County Sligo in 1946. Having devoted his adolescence to truancy, venery and petty theft, he left home at 17 and signed on as a deckhand on a Liberian tanker. After jumping ship at Montevideo, he roamed across the Americas taking a variety of jobs: he was a steer-wrestler, a waiter-on-roller-skates at a drive-in eatery in Tucson, and a bouncer in a gay bar in San Francisco. He is currently working in London at jobs he declines to specify, and lives in north Islington.