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The Better Mousetrap

by Tom Holt

     

Frank Carpenter is the son of Paul Carpenter and Sophie Pettingell, last seen going off into the sunset together with millions of New Zealand dollars.  Frank has inherited one thing only from them after they left their money to charity—the portable door.  Now he saves an insurance company millions by going back in time and ensuring that accidents did not happen.  But one day he has to rescue a young woman, who has fallen out of a tree while rescuing a cat.  It looks as though however many times he tries to rescue her, she still stays dead.  This is partly because the tree disappears when she is thirty feet up, being actually a Better Mousetrap.  Of course he does manage to save her, but that is just the start of things.

If you are wondering what happened to the surviving staff from J W Wells and the Carpenters then the wait is over.  This is another installment in the continuing saga of magical companies in modern cities, first Wells and now Carringtons.  True to form, Holt has another rudderless loser meeting an uptight, prickly young woman and falling in love.  Maybe it might be nice if, just once, this formula might be changed but perhaps I am missing the point.  The thing that hooks this reader into these books is not the characters but the extraordinarily intricate background and plots, which seamlessly create scenarios for the impossible that seem dizzyingly scientific.  At this point in the series much of this is old ground, but there always seems to be something new to impress and a reason to keep reading.

The Book

Orbit (Little, Brown)
7 May 2009
Paperback
1841495042 / 9781841495040
Fantasy / Contemporary - London and New Zealand
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Excerpt
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The Reviewer

Rachel A Hyde
Reviewed 2009
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