|
The Big Quiz Night
Some questions were never meant to be answered
by Paul Ashford
#19216
In **The Big Quiz Night**, Paul Ashford delivers a brilliantly chaotic romp that intertwines the mundane with the extraordinary. When the Childhood Chums, an unsuspecting quiz team, enter a high-profile league, they are thrust into a whirlwind of absurdity involving radioactive slugs, international espionage, and an ancient conflict between two Central Asian deities. The stakes escalate dramatically when a gun battle erupts in the snug bar of the Three Wise Fishes, leaving the team scrambling for survival.
With their star player incapacitated by carnivorous molluscs, Rosie Dawn, the bookshop owner and team coach, reluctantly recruits a mysterious stranger whose loyalties remain shrouded in uncertainty. As the quiz spirals into chaos, the quizmaster is fatally interrupted mid-question, and the team finds themselves accused of murder, ensnared in a shadowy competition where the stakes far exceed mere bragging rights.
At the centre of this whirlwind is the enigmatic billionaire Sir Tristan Dashing, whose ambitions to restore an ancient city intertwine with a final question that promises to resolve all others. As enemies close in and the scoreboard ticks ominously upwards, Rosie and her motley crew must navigate hidden loyalties and age-old grudges, all while confronting the possibility of losing everything they hold dear.
Ashford’s novel is a wickedly clever, darkly humorous exploration of knowledge and loyalty, compelling readers to ponder what occurs when the world’s most pressing questions fall into the hands of the least qualified individuals to answer them.
More books from Paul Ashford
Paul Ashford has walked this earth for a good few decades although at the start he mostly crawled. He was brought up under idyllic conditions in the Surrey Hills and failed to undergo any of the suffering now obligatory for a modern novelist. He began producing fiction at an early age, mostly in the form of excuses for not doing his homework.
He received a degree in Philosophy from a university which kept Philip Larkin stashed in its library, and then changed his mind and got his doctorate in Psychology from another one.
All this learning was insufficient to prevent Paul from becoming employed in the media, and he was embroiled in innumerable titles including being a director of Channel 5 and the Express Group. Since making up fairy tales was incompatible with the rigorously factual approach of the British press, his first novel, Caryddwen’s Cauldron, appeared under the name of Paul Hilton.
Paul continues to work on new stories. When not doing this he plays a number of instruments, most of them badly, and has a small boat which he sails extensively and largely alone due to the fear of drowning that his past exploits elicit in passengers.
