Something Rotten
Traduction: [ Google | Babelfish ]
Catégories : [ Livres/Thursday Next ]
© Amazon.fr
After two years spent in the BookWorld as Jurisfiction's Bellman, Thursday returns to the real world, accompanied with her son Friday and Shakespeare's Hamlet. She discovers that the Whig party leader Yorrick Kayne (who has already caused some trouble earlier) is campaigning to become dictator of England (a fact confirmed by Thursday's time-travelling father who warns her that if the Swindon croquet team does not win the finals, Kayne will eventually cause a nuclear holocaust; the 13th century St Zvlkx, who has made remarkably accurate predictions in the past however predicts that Swindon will win the game). Kayne is very successfully misdirecting the population's attention to hating the Danes, who are accused to be the source of all of England's problems, ordering all Danish books to be destroyed. Equally surprising is the fact that the Goliath Corporation is transforming from a company into a faith organisation where customers would become followers; as part of the process they offer to repair all the damages they have caused in the past, allowing Thursday to ask Goliath to un-eradicate her husband Landen (which eventually happens, after a few cycles of him appearing and disappearing). In parallel, Thursday gets her job back at SpecOps (despite having been AWOL for two years) and promises she would find a way to hide several truckloads of books in Wales. The solution arises when she discovers that in order for Swindon to win the croquet game after Goliath, supporting Kayne, has scared off its best players, she needs the help of the genetically re-engineered neanderthals (who play croquet very well but are not at all interested in competition). The neanderthals, who cannot make children, accept on the condition that she helps them find their species' blueprints from the lab at the Welsh border where they had been created decades ago. The trip to Wales allows her to hide the books and secure the cooperation of the neanderthals for the croquet game. Thursday then confronts Kayne, and while she has failed to recover the self-published novel by a Danish author from which Kayne has escaped, the latter is transformed into a human during a duel with the Cheshire Cat and loses his inhuman ability of persuasion (which was amplified by the ovinator, an invention by Thursday's uncle Mycroft). The ovinator is destroyed by Hamlet just before the croquet game, which Swindon wins by a hair. Just at the end, Thursday is mortally wounded by the Minotaur who had escaped from the BookWorld two years ago under the action of an accomplice of Kayne's, but as she enters the Underworld, the assassin who had been paid by Kayne to kill her and had been mortally wounded in an accident decides to take her place. When she wakes up from her coma a few weeks later, she learns that St Zvlkx was a time traveller who had been placing bets on future events with England's oldest betting shop before reappearing in the present and dying in a road accident. The betting shop now must pay several billions of pounds in gains; being indirectly owned by Goliath, it forces the corporation to sell half of its shares to Zvlkx's sponsor.
[ Posté le 12 octobre 2020 à 16:36 | 1 commentaire | lien permanent ]
© Amazon.fr
Fourteen years after Something Rotten Thursday is working for ACME carpets, which is a front for the now-defunct SpecOps 13 and 27; most of the members of the service are still working, funded by Thursday's operations on the cheese ...