Sucked In...to Shane Maloney's wit

Rather than wax lyrical about the witty delivery and irreverent humour with which Shane Maloney writes, I thought I would take a few choice quotes from his latest Murray Whelan mystery, Sucked In.

On a woman he's had his eye on in the Greek class he's been taking:

Lanie's may not have been the face that launched a thousand ships, but it definitely floated my little rubber duckie.

Murray on his party's present predicament:

They outnumbered us two to one in the lower house, five to one in the upper house. We weren't just a minority. We were an endangered species, a puny splinter with little option but to keep our heads down and our powder dry. Not that we had any powder. We lost the formula two elections ago.

Some of the double-entendres while Murray was engaging in a quickie in the chamber of the Legislative Council:

She was likewise engaged, negotiating a break in my strides. As I found the passage I sought, she seized upon the pressing issue.

and

'You want spill,' I muttered through clenched teeth. 'Keep glad-handing me like that, I'll give you spill.'

and finally...

Kelly abruptly jack-knifed upright, bucking me off at the exact moment my honourable member reached the climax of his oration.

Wonderful to see that romance is alive and well in the Victorian parliament.

Shane Maloney has plonked Murray Whelan into the middle of a political stoush with a federal Labor MP dropping dead and any number of wanna-be replacements stepping up to elbow their way into his seat. But the discovery of a body that was found in the drained Lake Nillahcootie could be that of a union leader, disappeared feared drowned 20 years ago.

Murray gets himself involved in the inquiry into the origins of the body and uncovers a dirty little cover-up that he could find very useful.

Sucked-In is typical Shane Maloney which is to say, endlessly entertaining, wryly amusing and totally original.

Now I just need to extract the digit and finish my review of the book.