Paradise Postponed (Rapstone Chronicles, 1)

John Mortimer was the author of the Rumpole series, many of which formed the basis for the PBS-TV series Rumpole of the Bailey. The first book featuring his most famous character, Horace Rumpole, was published by Penguin in 1980. His work also includes many novels and plays and three acclaimed volumes of autobiography. A former barrister, Mortimer, who was knighted in 1998, lived in Oxfordshire, England. He died in January of 2009.

Class is also at the core of John Mortimer's Paradise Postponed: the ironies are naked and the comedy acid. The novel portrays the unedifying struggle between the upper-middle class and the lower-middle class, in the shape of Johnny Jump-ups, for hegemony in post-1960's Britain. It also takes on a few minor upper-class, middle-class, working-class and under-class skirmishes on the side. All this is couched as a pretty good mystery. However, the book's real beauty lies in its ironic taxonomy of the English social classes and their various manifestations. Paul Shelley's modest rendition of the varieties of speech is pleasantly unobtrusive, and the air of weariness his voice often carries seems right for the narrative. K.A.P. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine