Short, nasty and brutish. How else to describe the most recent of Charlie Higson's paperbacks, Getting Rid of Mr Kitchen? The concept is mad but strangely plausible: a man comes round to look at your car with a view to buying it, he pisses you off and because you're in a bad mood, you kill him. You then spend the rest of the book trying to get rid of the bloody corpse. And it's all the fault of the weather forecaster, of course.

From the opening paragraph I knew I had to read this book:

All weather forecasters are liars. What is the point? I mean, what is the point of a forecast which is only at best fifty percent accurate? That's not a forecast, it's a guess. It's a lie... Have you noticed how they've taken up telling you what the weather was like today?... I bloody know what the weather was like today. Christ on a bike, they even get that wrong sometimes.

In case you've been shying away from Higson's books on the grounds that "who does he think he is bloody renaissance man or what" (being as he is one of the presiding geniuses of the pop group The Higsons - catchphrase 'Who Stole My Bongos? - and of course The Fast Show - catchphrases too numerous to mention) then think again.

There is no Steven Fry-esque extreme cleverness for the sake of it. There isn't really anything that would remind you of The Fast Show, the world of his books is so dark and brutal. Vicious.

His other books are lengthier, and do not spring from such a simple concept. Looking back at them now... King of the Ants finds a jobbing builder caught up in a nightmarish underworld, Happy Now is a really really bad dream that will mess with your head and Full Whack... Full Whack must have made no impression on me at all, as even flicking through it I can't recall anything about it, even though I only read it last summer - which suggests to me that it's the one to avoid. The others are all gripping and might have you screaming out in the middle of the night "WHO STOLE MY BONGOS?"