#38 Divorced and Deadly, by Josephine Cox (Harper Collins)

Where to start with Divorced and Deadly, the book I accepted as part of a blind challenge by my local library? How about the fact that I wish I hadn't walked into the library that day. Indeed, I would rather it had turned out to be a Mills and Boon.

The point of this year-long challenge isn't to badmouth books and authors - not least because I'm no Charlie Brooker, who would be much better able to give this novel the thorough kicking it deserves - but it's difficult to ignore something as unremittingly awful as Divorced and Deadly.

The blurb says the book is 'packed with hair-raising escapades and laugh-out loud moments'. I'm sorry, but it's really not. There is also the information that Cox started writing Divorced and Deadly on her website, as a series of 'hilarious' (her words, definitely not mine) real-life incidents which happened to real people, in real situations and so on. The publishers 'in their wisdom' (again, her words) then decided it should be lengthened into a book...

On a list of bad decisions, that one's up there with Cheryl Tweedy deciding Ashley Cole was suitable husband material. Indeed, like the latter's autobiography, this is an affront to literature, and it got to the stage where I seriously considered prying my eyes out rather than continuing to read such rubbish.

If a character named Dickie Manse brains-in-his-pants (and that's how he's referred to throughout) raises the slightest giggle, you may find something to briefly like within this book. If you find it childish, as I did, you'll want to move on as quickly as possible.

For a supposed comedic tale, the characters are so unlikeable it's painful. The 'escapades' mentioned earlier are incredibly infantile and any glimmer of a mildly amusing situation is magnified and extended to such a degree that renders it pointless and insulting to the reader. It's like making an hour-long documentary analysing a knob joke (which actually sounds like a whole lot more fun now I've written it down).

I completed it because I had to, rather than because I wanted to. And although I'll give any author some credit for actually managing to get a book published, after two 9/10 books in succession, this was a crashing, dismal and abject failure.

So, rating time:

#38 Divorced and Deadly, by Josephine Cox (Harper Collins) - 2/10

Next up: A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini (Bloomsbury)

Click here for the full list of books so far, and their rating