Customer Reviews

Driving Big Davie

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While on a recent Caribbean cruise, I had the pleasure of meeting the wife of Colin Bateman and she gave me the book, "Driving Big Davie" as a gift. Now, I'd never heard of Colin Bateman but a free book is a free book nonetheless so I read it.

The twists and turns in this book are wonderful: the humor keeps you alive and kicking. I guffawed loudly over some of his descriptions, and being a Southwest Floridian, I noticed some geographical inaccuracies. One doesn't go up from Naples to Everglades City, you go down. But this aside, Dan Starkey and Davie Kincaid are two of the most fascinating characters I have run into a long while.

I have no idea what genre this would fall into except maybe "humorous murder", but without a doubt I enjoyed it so much that I've now purchased two additional books by Colin Bateman featuring his hero, Dan Starkey.

Not having one drop of Irish blood...north, south, east or west...in my family tree, and no national pride to defend, I found the description of the Irish amusing and not at all distasteful. I'm always amused how the intellectuals damn good old-fashioned raunch humor.

I was switched on to Colin Bateman in the late 90s when he was recommended to me as one of Ireland's best new authors. I loved Wee Sweetie, a book that, incidentally, turned my son into a reader. It had plenty of humour, a plot that made sense, mostly, characters with some depth and occasional violence. Since then, it seems like it's all been downhill for Colin. Driving Big Davie reaches new depths and all I can say is the over-characterisation of the Irish as pathetic drunks and his now-complete obsession with gratuitous violence has left me cold. In a first for me, I actually persevered for nearly 300 pages and then put it down, not remotely interested in the ending. In fact, who would care what happens to those Irish tossers?