There's plenty of humour to be found and a great deal of potential for further development (and even a rumoured TV series) in Bateman's creation of the Mystery Man. A small independent bookseller, the "hero" is the owner of Belfast's premiere crime specialist bookstore No Alibis ('Murder is our Business'), who gets mixed up in a series of misadventures when customers start turning up to the shop looking for him to solve small cases now that the Private Detective next door seems to have closed-up business. Stolen leather trousers and a missing person he can deal with - just about - but when he gets involved in the Case of the Dancing Jew, not to mention mixed up with the girl from the jewellery shop across the road, it takes more than a few Twix and Starbucks coffees to shake him out of his closeted existence.
A genuine bookshop in Belfast on Botanic Avenue, No Alibis, its owner and its customers don't get perhaps receive the most flattering of depictions, but this is Bateman's particularly self-deprecatory Belfast type of humour and it's very funny, so it is. A few old jokes/stories/urban legends that have done the rounds for years are dug up and dusted down, the neurotic lead character perhaps owes something to Ignatius J. Reilly from John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces (or they've at least shared a ward together at some point), but it's all just a means for Bateman to poke fun at local types - booksellers, publishers, ex-paramilitary taxi drivers, street thugs (Botanic Avenue Irregulars indeed) and local small businessmen - not in a mean spirited way, but in a lightly humorous and sometimes just downright hilarious manner.
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