Tom Friday is a slightly overweight struggling photographer battling middle age lethargy, or is he?  One day, just like any other day in his humdrum life, Tom wakes up in Joseph Miller’s car in West London.  The Beretta PX4 Storm in the glove box comes in handy when Tom decides to check out Joseph’s home and meets some bad guys.  Characters in Tom’s life start overlapping those in Joseph’s world.  Is Sarah Tom’s long-time platonic friend or Tilda, Joseph’s dead wife?  Accents start changing as well. Preston, a casual acquaintance of Tom’s, formerly a British up and coming artist, now has a pronounced Baltimore twang. Is it a cocaine-induced hallucination or is there something to this cloak and dagger stuff?  

I was surprised to find that what I believed to be a British spy novel actually was a Prepper conspiracy theory book in disguise. Somehow Amschel Rothschild was involved in Tom/Joseph’s identity crisis along with the incorrectly misattributed quote “Let me control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.”  That opened a whole new can of worms which included the CIA,  the Federal Reserve, and the fictional US President Harrington.  

Much to my delight, I learned some new vocabulary in the course of reading If the Bed Falls In by Paul Casselle.  Did you know that the term Limey is a slightly derogatory term used to refer to a British person?  It comes from the practice of British sailors sucking on limes to prevent scurvy and is North American in origin.  A mortise is a hole cut in a door frame designed to meet up with the lock section in the door once the key is turned. Scrumping is the act of stealing withered apples usually by scaling a wall or fence. Unfortunately, I’m still not quite clear what the adverb bolshily might be, possibly coming from the word boshy.

The desk clerk, Cyril, was my absolute favorite character in the book.  Remicient of Angus Bough, Johnny English’s assistant, he does whatever he can to aid his favorite hero.

Will you enjoy reading  If the Bed Falls In by Paul Casselle?  If you enjoy spy novels, then yes.  If you don’t, well, then no.

Read more about this book here.  Get your own copy here.  This book was an OnlineBookClub.org Book of the Day.