My first novel from William Boyd (an author who came highly recommended) was not a disappointment.

Interesting characters, complicated plot, and a well developed sense of place come together into a well paced thriller. I think it's a good thing when I say that I felt I was reading an HBO drama.

The original premise is a bit crazy (mistaken identity) and it might all come together a bit too neatly in the end, but the week of reading between point A and point B was worth those minor flaws.

I will certainly read Boyd again. ( )

Adam Kindred es un experto climatólogo, pero es incapaz de prever la feroz tormenta que está a punto de descargar sobre sí mismo el día que acude a Londres a una entrevista de trabajo. Por hacerle un favor de lo más simple a un extraño su vida pasa en pocas horas de contener un futuro prometedor a ser un presente de pesadilla.
Despojado de todas sus pertenencias y sospechoso de haber cometido un asesinato, Kindred se verá acosado por la policía, al tiempo que el auténtico responsable lo buscará con ahínco para liquidarlo. Su existencia se convierte en un thriller con un falso culpable y en una darwinista lucha por la supervivencia.

Adam stumbles upon a dying man, and flees, fearing he will be accused of murder…. And so, William Boyd delves into the underbelly of down-and-outs, the wretchedly poor, and, in contrast, the machinations of a money-grabbing pharmaceutical company.
Interesting story but, unlike the usual classic literature, there was no neatly tied-up ending. ( )

Pretty ordinary conspiracy thriller. However the descriptions of a character from a white collar background adapting to living a life off-the-grid is pretty interesting and where I started to really enjoy the book. ( )

[Ordinary Thunderstorms] - William Boyd
The most famous acropachydermic was the poet W H Auden. Acropachyderma is a clubbing of the fingers, deformation of the long bones, and thickening of the skin of the scalp, face and extremeties. W H Auden died in 1973, but in the late 1960's he seemed to be almost a permanent fixture on late night intellectual programmes on the BBC. I often wondered about his incredibly wrinkled facial features: the wrinkles looked incredibly deep; I imagined they might have been caused by cigarette smoke, he always seemed to have a lighted cigarette on the go, or perhaps he had spent an ordinate amount of time on fishing boats, but no William Boyd tells us in Ordinary Thunderstorms it was acropachyderma, which was by far the most interesting thing in his 2009 novel Ordinary Thunderstorms.

Adam Kindred returns to England from America after a messy divorce. After a job interview he casually meets a man in a restaurant and they chat. The man leaves without his plastic folder and Adam decides to return it to him as he lives nearby. Adam arrives at his house to find the door open and the man lying in bed with a knife in his chest. Adam rushes over to help and the man tells him to pull out the knife. Meanwhile an intruder hiding on the balcony slips out through the front door. The man dies and Adam is left with the knife in his hands and covered in blood, he panics and rushes out of the apartment. From this moment on Adam's life is in turmoil, the dead man was a scientist, working for a pharmaceutical company, which is about to reveal a new wonder drug. Adam does not report the murder to the police, but has left enough evidence in the apartment to make him a murder suspect. A hit man is also trying to track him down. Adam takes to the streets living amongst the down and outs and then plays cat and mouse with the police and the hit man while trying to prove his innocence. Adam lurches from one adventure to another while a series of improbable coincidences keeps the story moving along.

Boyd is a good story teller and writes well enough, he can do humour and adventure and can lead his characters into tense situations. Of course its all baloney, and if two of the three female characters are whores (the other is a police woman) and expendable and the rich white male characters are cheating each other over in the big Pharma company and the man with acropachyderma gets murdered; well its all to be expected in such a novel. It mostly works itself out in the end, but although it is entertaining I did not put the book down with any feeling of satisfaction at the conclusion. Not quite storytelling by numbers, but close enough. This was one of the unread books on my shelves, it is now in the charity book box. 3 stars. ( )