On a planet where a dog’s best friend is his man, the director of the Institute for Interstellar Exploration is taking Spot for a walk.

Tom Holt is truly a master at subverting the normal and with Blonde Bombshell he has unleashed yet another deliciously twisted comic incendiary on the science fiction loving population. On the canine dominated planet of Ostar the peace and quiet so enjoyed by the citizenry is being shattered by the appalling attempts at music being belched out by the primitive human inhabitants of the nearby planet affectionately known as Earth. As much as the citizens of Ostar love their own humans – they buy them shiny collars and little jackets and could almost swear that their lovable pets can read their minds – something most be done to quieten to dim, country cousin style humans that have been left to run wild on Earth.

Being a technologically advanced bunch, the Ostar canines created a smart bomb that could be fitted snugly into a missile and launched towards their noisy neighbours, the intention of course being to blow the Earth into billions upon billions of tiny, soundless particles. The bomb is perfect, as well as being immensely powerful it features the most highly developed artificial intelligence system ever created. As the missile is sent speeding off towards its apocalyptic destiny, it seems that the Earth doesn’t stand a chance. Two years pass.

Something is clearly amiss. Much to the chagrin of those on Ostar, on Earth everything is business as usual. It seems that absolutely zero damage has been caused by interstellar weaponry. The smart bomb was unfortunately [or fortunately, depending on which planet you are commenting from] not as smart as it first appeared. Rather than detonating upon impact with Earth, the bomb is in fact living among the humans and having a whale of a time whilst doing so. Using its comprehensive biological and cultural databases to create itself the ultimate humanoid form, the bomb has become Lucy Pavlov [did you spot the doggy reference there?] aka the archetypal Blonde Bombshell.

In the year 2017 Lucy Pavlov is the ultimate female icon. The CEO of PavSoft Industries, producer of a revolutionary operating system that every computer on the planet runs on, Pavlov has it all – immense wealth, unfathomable intelligence and an unequalled three year run as winner of the international ‘Most Beautiful Woman’ title. Having been so successful with its assimilation into human culture, the bomb [or Lucy if you would prefer] has almost forgotten its past life. Until, that is, the day that it decides to give up smoking.

Blonde Bombshell no doubt sounds rather strange, which is just as well since the plot is actually even more spectacularly twisting and convoluted than a mere summary can adequately convey. Tom Holt always manages to create zany and engaging characters but the true genius of his work is the crazy yet somehow still disturbingly plausible situations that these characters find themselves in. That and the jokes. Holt is as much a humorist as he is a novelist and the jokes and witticisms come thick and fast in Blonde Bombshell. Picking a page at random to quote from: “… the penalty for transgression would make the liveliest imaginings of Hieronymus Bosch look like Disneyland.” Holt is able to pick out the oddities and peculiarities of humanity and then manipulate them to their utmost hilarity potential. Comic fantasy at its finest, Blonde Bombshell is another inventively entertaining novel from Tom Holt that is sure to get your brain twitching and to induce a belly laugh at least every three pages or so.

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