Title: Framed
Author: Ronnie O’Sullivan
Type: Fiction
Page Count: 346
Rating: 3.25/5
When I first started reading this, I thought it was possible that Ronnie had actually written this himself because the writing wasn’t particularly good, but then I got sucked into the story and so I’m now pretty sure he had a ghostwriter, mostly just because this is an okay contemporary crime novel. If I didn’t know that Ronnie’s name was attached to it and I’d read it, I think it could have passed as any old mass market paperback.
Of course, with O’Sullivan being known as the greatest snooker player who’s ever lived, there are a couple of references to the game throughout. For example, the main character owns a struggling snooker club, and he keeps a cue under the bar in case there’s any trouble. There was even a reference to him putting on an event and getting some well-known players in, like The Rocket. So we can safely say it got a little bit meta.
For the most part, though, it just settles into the background, and the book itself mostly follows what happens when our protagonist’s brother Jack wakes up in his house with blood everywhere and no recollection of how he got there. Frankie decides he’s going to try to figure out what happened, even if it kills him – and with some of the nutters who are around, it might do just that.
The majority of this book hangs on the central mystery of what the hell actually happened, and indeed that was enough to keep me going from start to finish. After I got past the first fifty pages or so, I basically had to switch it out from being my bedtime book to being my main book because I was so curious about what had happened. Fortunately, the ending of it didn’t disappoint, and overall I was pretty impressed by the book. It wasn’t great and it’s definitely not high literature, but it set out to do a job and succeeded at it.
