Black Bag - Luke Kennard

I will not be surprised if Black Bag wins the Booker Prize this year. This was the book on the longlist I was least excited to pick up, the sixth one I've read so far, but enough people had told me how much fun they were having with it that I made an effort to go in with an open mind. I didn't want my preconceptions to colour the whole experience before I'd even opened it. I wanted to be pleasantly surprised. And for the first hundred pages or so, that's exactly what happened. I put up a post the other day gushing about the opening paragraph, and I stand by it - it might be the strongest opening on the longlist so far. The prose is snappy and stylish, frequently funny in a way that never seems to be straining for the laugh, and the narrator is very likeable to begin with. The whole milieu of dinner party mysteries and shambolic amateur theatre he's tangled up in is a fun, strange little world to spend time in, and the scenario with the black bag itself is compellingly weird. I was…