Putting the boot in - Dan Kavanagh

Wickedly funny, this is the third novel in the elusive Dan Kavanagh's London-based crime series featuring bisexual private detective Duffy.

Things are hotting up in the Third Division and it seems someone's nobbling players. Following the loss of one of his best strikers, Jimmy Lister, former England player and now ineffectual club manager, calls on the expertise of Duffy.

Enter London's most unusual investigator. An ex-policeman with razor-sharp wit and an interminable sexual appetite, Duffy must investigate the murky world of lower-league football. He soon finds himself grappling with neo-Nazism and vicious sabotage - not to mention the niggling question of whether or not he really is too short to be a decent goalie.

As deceit and violence abound, Duffy's set for a difficult game. Warm up's over; it's kick-off time.

Dan Kavanagh was born in County Sligo in 1946. Having devoted his adolescence to truancy, venery and petty theft, he left home at seventeen and signed on as a deckhand on a Liberian tanker. After jumping ship at Montevideo, he roamed across the Americas taking a variety of jobs: he was a steer-wrestler, a waiter-on-roller-skates at a drive-in eatery in Tucson, and a bouncer in a gay bar in San Francisco. He is currently working in London at jobs he declines to specify, and lives in north Islington.