24-hour novel

Maggie Hamand's book The Resurrection of the Body (Maia Press, £8.99) would deserve a review, even if it weren't any good (which it is). It won the first World One-day Novel Cup - in other words, it was written in a day.

To be precise, Hamand wrote a novel of 23,000 words under exam conditions in 24 hours, and later expanded the text by a factor of two to make a longer version of the story.

This is a fantastically impressive achievement by any standards. And the book is, as the Bishop of London said, "a rattling good read".

There are a number of themes here: mystery, detective, religious, and social - all interwoven into a thoroughly well thought out story.

The story begins when a man staggers into a church in the middle of the Good Friday service, bleeding from knife wounds. Vicar Richard Page and his congregation are, not surprisingly, horrified; the man dies shortly thereafter. Strangely, no one knows who the man is: there was no identification, no one reports him missing, and, even more bizarrely, the corpse disappears from the morgue on Easter morning.

The vicar feels impelled to explore the mystery, especially as one of the women in his congregation, Mary, thinks she saw someone looking like the unknown man in the park. Things get even stranger when the vicar follows his own line of detection, and finds himself in a very uncomfortable situation, physical, mental, emotional and spiritual.

This is an excellent book, easy to read, fluent, as thought-provoking for the reader as it is for the bewildered vicar. And maybe with an explanation at the end, or maybe not. God only knows.