Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès, Island of Point Nemo (2014)

This seemed like an incredibly fascinating book, just the sort of thing I'd like. Back-cover blurbs compare it to Murakami and Eco, and, you know, my Murakami fandom may be extremely ambivalent, but still, it's the sort of thing I want to like and, you know, that looks cool. It's about a stolen diamond. Kind of. And it leads into being a picaresque trip across Asia and Australia. The main characters are a drug-enthusiast detective, Canterel; a descendant (apparently) of Sherlock Holmes and his servant Grimod; and Canterel's one-time amour known as Lady MacRae. There are some others too, but that's the main lot. And there are a lot of, you know, enigmas. That could indeed lead one to think of Murakami. Secret codes. Mysterious killers. Lovecraftian...stuff. Also, a number of plotlines that connect tenuously at most with the main one: the Chinese owner of an ebook manufacturing plant who spies on his employees, a couple's persistent efforts to cure the husband's impotence, the owner of a shut-down cigar factor which morphs into a thing about a tradition of workers in cigar factories making the time go by with readings from novels and whatnot while they work. And like that.

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