Please Do Not Ask for Mercy as a Refusal Often Offends

A darkly comic dystopian crime novel Detective Kilroy is assigned to investigate a horrible murder. He's a fine cop, from the brim of his hat to the soles of his brogues, but his inquiries, far from solving the mystery, lead him into a deeper one - and to Cynthia, an enigmatic woman with a secret that could overturn Kilroy's entire world. But where is this world? It seems both familiar and uncanny, with electric cars, but no digital devices, and the audience for a public execution arriving by tram. Meanwhile, the seas are retreating, and the Church exerts an iron grip on society - and history. Power belongs to those who control the narrative. Kilroy is forced to take sides between the Kafkaesque state that pays his wages, and the truth-seekers striving to destroy it, all the while becoming increasingly besotted with a woman who may only love him for his mind - in an alarmingly literal way. Please Do Not Ask for Mercy as a Refusal Often Offends is a dystopian satire that manages to be funny and frightening in equal measure.

Paul Bassett Davies worked in experimental theatre before moving to television and radio, where he wrote for some of the biggest names in British comedy. He also wrote his own radio sitcom, and scripted several radio plays. He wrote the screenplay for the 2005 feature animation The Magic Roundabout and has written and produced music videos with Kate Bush and Ken Russell. He is a former creative director of the London Comedy Writers Festival. His first novel, Utter Folly, topped the Amazon humorous fiction chart in 2012, and his second, Dead Writers in Rehab, was published by Unbound in 2017.