Something nasty in the woodshed (Penguin Books)

Something Nasty in the Woodshed - the third Charlie Mortdecai novel. "Splendidly enjoyable. The jokes are excellent, but the most horrible things keep happening". (Sunday Telegraph). 'Spring was infesting the air in no uncertain fashion and I awoke, for once, with a feeling of well-being and an urge to go for long country walks.' Charlie Mortdecai - minor aristocrat and art-dealer banished from London for crimes against, well, art - has decamped to the tiny island of Jersey with his wife Johanna and manservant Jock.

There, amidst tax dodgers and inbred natives, he had hoped to lie low, and sink lower. But when a friend's wife is attacked, Charlie is forced to turn sleuth to discover the perpetrator. As further attacks occur, of an increasingly Satanic nature, Charlie finds he is desperate to solve the crimes before things turn truly Hellish..."You couldn't snuggle under the duvet with anything more disreputable and delightful".

(Stephen Fry). "A comic masterpiece...the Bonfiglioli revival will surly gather apace, for he is by far the best thing to have happened again in years". (Spectator).Kyril Bonfiglioli was born on the south coast of England in 1928 of an English mother and Italo-Slovene father.

After studying at Oxford and five years in the army, he took up a career as an art dealer, like his eccentric creation Charlie Mortdecai. He lived in Oxford, Lancashire, Ireland and Jersey, where he died in 1985.

He wrote four Charlie Mortdecai novels, and a fifth historical Mortdecai novel (about a distinguished ancestor).