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The Office of Lost and Found
 
 

The Office of Lost and Found [Kindle Edition]

Vincent Holland-Keen
3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)

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Book Description

July 1, 2011
Thomas Locke can find anything. You know the hurricane that hit a while back? Word is he found the butterfly that started it. So, when a desperate Veronica Drysdale hires Locke to find her missing husband, it makes perfect sense.

Except the world of Thomas Locke doesn't make sense. It puts monsters under the bed, makes stars fall from the sky and leads little children to worship the marvels of road-works.

This world also hides from Veronica a past far darker and stranger than she could ever have imagined. To learn the truth, Veronica is going to have to lose everything.

And that's where Locke’s shadowy business partner Lafarge comes in…

FOCUS ON -
• DARK COMEDY
• TWISTED CRIME NOIR
• SUPERNATURAL HORROR
• ACTION AND SUSPENSE

If you like The Office of Lost and Found, try:
• Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams
• Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
• The Thief of Always by Clive Barker
• Aberystwyth Mon Amour by Malcolm Pryce

A teaser trailer can be viewed at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiaEqlvzTNI

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Vincent Holland-Keen is an author, artist and video director currently residing in the North of England. He works for a major metropolitan university as a business analyst/system designer.

PRAISE FOR VINCENT HOLLAND-KEEN
"The Office of Lost and Found is a novel unlike anything you are likely to read this year. Probably next year as well. It's staggeringly different to anything else I've read since picking up a copy of a Douglas Adams book when I was a teenager, really enjoying it and then never reading anything in the same vein since... this is a great story, written excellently and executed to almost perfection... Gloriously confusing, hilarious, emotional and unforgettable. Highly recommended to all."
-Guilty Conscience

"This isn’t your typical, by the numbers, urban fantasy, this is something completely different... Trust me when I say, if you are willing to take a chance on this debut novel you will enjoy it."
-The Eloquent Page

"I really enjoyed reading The Office of Lost and Found. It's fun, scary, surprising and bizarre. The book kept surprising me and just when I thought things could not get more weird they did. Vincent Holland-Keen writes like a cocktail of Douglas Adams and A Lee Martinez with a twist of James Herbert."
-I Will Read Books

"The feeling I got whilst reading this book took me back to reading Good Omens [Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman] all those years ago. I knew I was reading something different... It is a wild and thoroughly enjoyable read that I will be recommending to my friends, and certainly reading again at a later date.
-Tony’s Thoughts

"It has something in common with early Robert Rankin but is less self consciously clever, relaxing instead into excellent storytelling, compelling characters and unrelenting movement. Fans of Robert Rankin and Christopher Moore, or Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently series, should find a lot here to love... One of my all-time favourite books…"
-Un:Bound

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Product Details

  • File Size: 580 KB
  • Print Length: 534 pages
  • Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited
  • Publisher: Anarchy Books (July 1, 2011)
  • Sold by: Amazon Digital Services
  • Language: English
  • ASIN: B0059K1S34
  • Text-to-Speech: Enabled
  • Lending: Enabled
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #276,061 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase
I'm actually rather at a loss for how to review this book, or even how many stars to give it. It's definitely one that I would not recommend to everyone, although for some people, it would likely be a great read. Others will quit just pages into it, I'm sure.

The word "surreal" is often used casually and not very appropriately for anything that's a bit outré or unexpected. This novel is more than just a bit outré and I don't think there's very much that's "expected" in it -- certainly there's very little that the reader can easily anticipate -- and it is definitely surreal.

At first, the story looks a bit like it's nothing more than a strange hard-boiled murder mystery with an amnesiac detective who has some rather other-worldly skills. Then it feels a bit more like a horror novel. The story changes shape throughout the book, much as the "reality" depicted changes and shifts.

Characters come and go, and come back -- or sometimes seem to come back, but don't, or do come back, though they don't seem to at first glance.

Ambiguity thrives here -- in the characters, the plot, and morality -- and the bizarre, chaotic structure of the novel reflects this ambiguity. Incongruity and incoherence seem to be virtues of this book, but they make it difficult to read.

Despite my own ambiguous feelings about the book, I did keep reading, though it was a long, bumpy, and confusing ride. I was surprised that when I got to the end, we had an almost "normal," satisfying ending.

If you have a taste for the bizarre and patience for a story line that is extremely nonlinear, then give this book a go, particularly if you also like science fiction, fantasy, or horror. If you like a more straight-forward story, skip this one. If you're like me and are looking for something different, this might fill the bill, even if you don't want to make a steady diet of it.

The formatting could have used some work, but perhaps the formatting choices were deliberate. Otherwise, well-written.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Kindle Edition
To call Vincent Holland-Keen's debut novel The Office of Lost & Found merely "strange" is an understatement of epic proportions. Of course, in my world strange means creative, original, enchanting, challenging, and mind-blowing, which means the über strange of The Office of Lost & Found makes for an amazing read; one of my Top 5 of 2011 in fact.

It's kind of difficult to explain a book that damn near requires you to keep a scratch pad or dry erase board handy in order to keep people and plot points straight, but I'll give it a go.

Thomas Locke is not just a detective, he's a detective capable of finding anything, anywhere, no matter how long lost or how well hidden. He is the "found" half of The Office of Lost & Found, a place that has no fixed location, but rather metaphysically migrates - along with Locke and all the contents of the office - to wherever it happens to be needed.

Locke's partner is a... well, we'll call him a man, named Lafarge. Lafarge brings new meaning to the term shadowy, literally only appearing as a tall, dark figure cloaked deep in shadows. He is the "lost" half of The Office of Lost & Found, and you better be sure you really want something lost before seeking his help, because things Lafarge loses stay lost. Permanently.

When Veronica Drysdale's husband goes missing she hires Locke to find him. Little could she have imagined she'd learn that far more important things had been lost to her, things she didn't even know were missing and which she'll only be able to reclaim by making a deal - against Locke's advice - with the mysterious Lafarge.

And with that setup, boys and girls, we're off down the rabbit hole into a world in which people can be reincarnated as inanimate objects (like the toaster named Leonard who communicates by burning messages into the toast), monsters really do live under children's beds, a Ministry of Checks and Balances exists to keep order in the reality we know as Earth, a sort of reality-bending black hole known as the Conjunction blurs the lines between dimensions, and a pan-dimensional entity called the Umivatoré (which appears alternately as a machine, a horror movie worthy massive man-eating plant, swarm of locusts, etc. depending upon its plane of existence) seeks to become the God of all universes.

Fueled by a small cast of wonderfully quirky and endearing characters, The Office of Lost & Found unfolds as several parallel, if time-bending, plots which you need to take on faith will eventually each take a turn which puts them on a collision course to bring the overall story arc to resolution. Along the way you need to pay close attention, and even then you won't always understand what's going on, but that's part of what makes The Office of Lost & Found such a fresh and amazing read; it's as far from predictable, formulamatic, paint by numbers writing as one can possibly get.

Quite simply, The Office of Lost & Found is a deliciously demented, exquisitely written, massive dose of humor-infused creative madness which easily made my Top 5 Reads of 2011.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
really good January 5, 2012
Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase
Understand synchronicity? No? Neither does anyone else. This is a really well-written story based on synchronicity, not causality, and the author does a fine job weaving the multiple story lines together. Confusing; yes. Highly recommended; definitely.
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More About the Author

Vincent Holland-Keen resides in the North of England and as well as writing novels, he's also an artist and the director of book show Un:Bound Video Editions (UBVE). He works for a major metropolitan university as a business analyst/system designer.

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