The Hotel Avocado is a sequel to Mortimer’s 2023 novel The Satsuma Complex, also published as The Clementine Complex in the U.S. In that novel, 30-year-old Gary Thorn, a legal assistant and perpetual screw-up, gets involved in a police investigation of his co-worker’s death while also trying to track down an intriguing woman who ghosted him around the same time. It was a charming novel chock-full of Mortimer’s trademark brand of absurdist, off-handed humor. (For the uninitiated, Mortimer is a British comedy legend, and a regular on the panel show circuit. Please search for his Would I Lie to You? appearances on YouTube the next time you need to laugh for a few hours straight.)
At the end of The Satsuma Complex (spoilers ahead), Gary has embarked on a relationship with a woman named Emily, become very close to his elderly neighbor Grace, and exposed a bunch of corrupt police officers. The Hotel Avocado follows fairly closely in the aftermath of the first novel’s timeline. Gary is still navigating his new relationship in the wake of Emily moving to Brighton and taking over her father’s run down hotel. He is also awaiting the trial of the corrupt police officers when, one day, he is approached by a mysterious man named Mr. Sequence who wants to persuade him not to testify at the trial. Gary is uninterested in the money, but when certain threats are made, he knows he has to take Sequence seriously.
That’s an intriguing enough set-up, but the novel really doesn’t go anywhere from there. Gary tries to keep Emily and Grace safe while dealing with Sequence’s increasing threats, but that story is dragged out far too long for too little payoff. The novel is padded out with even less relevant storylines involving Emily’s renovations to the titular hotel and Grace’s attempts to reestablish ties with her estranged daughter and granddaughter. There are also chapters from the point-of-view of a mystery character whose eventual revelation has to be one of the most pointless, absurd things I’ve ever read in a novel, even after making allowances for Mortimer’s day job.
I listened to this as an audiobook because I heard that Mortimer read the book himself. In reality, he’s only doing the chapters from Gary’s perspective, while fellow comedian Sally Phillips handles Emily’s chapters and Paul Whitehouse narrates for the unknown character. Mortimer and Phillips are delightful people, but their narrations leave much to be desired.
Between the lackluster narration and the glacial pace of the plot, The Hotel Avocado was a real slog to listen to. The humor was surprisingly irritating in comparison to the original novel, and the ending was honestly kind of infuriating. There is an indication that there might be a third novel in the series, but if anything happens in that book it will only serve to emphasize how uneventful this book is.