Trigger Warning: A killingly funny SAS comedy

by Rich Nash

You are the world’s worst life coach, but the fate of a disgraced SAS hero lies in your hands. Stuffed with survivalist advice, grit, guts, and bloodcurdling silliness, this edge-of-the-pants adventure takes the bestselling SAS thrillers of Andy McNab and Chris Ryan and plonks a hopeless pillock at the centre of the action. When death is in your DNA, always give more than a four-figure percentage and never forget that the enemy of your enemy’s enemy is also your enemy.Unemployed life coach Cuthbert Huntsman wakes up in an empty strip club, naked, tied to a dancing pole, and with no idea how he got there. He has been abducted in order to solve a military mystery. Cuthbert must identify the killer of Sergeant Bill Tell, a tiny but lethal Special Forces Operative, and avenge his death.Sergeant Tell could nightmarch naked across glaciers, swim the Euphrates under hostile fire and lug his own bodyweight up Mount Kilimanjaro without breaking sweat. As a triple agent, he once convinced the IRA and UDA to kneecap each other’s Quartermasters, he foiled thousands of suicide bombers by putting them in touch with the Samaritans, and he won a guerrilla war single-handed in the Irish jungle.Now, Sergeant Tell has returned from a disastrous tour of duty in The Walloon Republic of Outer Ggaga - a covert, East African country riven by brutal Belgian horticulturalists, homicidal nuns, and the ruthless semi-pygmy insurgency - and moved back in with his mum in the London Borough of Wandsworth. Tell must go undercover in Belladonna’s Floral Deliveries, a firm of ruthless assassins masquerading as florists, and unravel a conflict diamond conspiracy involving The National Stealth Service, The Royal Deniables, and Agnostic Jihad.After tense encounters with a trainee spy from The National Stealth Service’s Remedial Unit, a bashful dominatrix, and an obese cop who always goes with his gut and prefers paperwork to policing, the adrenalin pumping action climaxes in a nine-sided shoot-out at The Chelsea Flower Show.As he navigates the mind-boggling military mystery, Cuthbert Huntsman employs unpopular life coaching techniques including semitasking, mindlessness, self-indifference, recluttering, bin fire therapy, going for a pint in your head, pre-dawn drinking, and reverse yoga ( “agoy”, an excruciatingly painful exercise that misaligns your spine and disrupts your breathing).I’d tell you more, but I’d have to kill us all first!Interview with the – What’s so special about the Cuthbert Huntsman series?A – They are all comedy books full of dark humour, frantic action, shameless sex, staggering stupidity, and misguided wisdom. At a time when everyone is pretending to be perfect and “living their best lives” on Instagram, I think it’s refreshing to have a deeply flawed anti-hero stumbling about from one mistake to another. It feels closer to my own life, anyway.Q – What order should I read the Cuthbert Huntsman Trilogy in?A – It’s more of a loosely conjoined threesome than a trilogy, but I’d 1. How Not To Live Your Life 2. Cop Lives Probably Matter 3. Trigger Warning Cuthbert narrates and wreaks havoc in all three. How Not To Live Your Life is a twisted take on self improvement books, and crammed with heightened comedy characters. Cop Lives Matter is a comedy crime tale, a parody of the police drama “Line of Duty”. Trigger Warning is an SAS comedy, a satire of the bestselling military thriller perfected by Andy McNab and Chris Ryan.Q – Why are you parodying such popular genres?A – Because I love them. I am a big fan of crime books, thriller books and Jordan Peterson’s self development books for men.

362 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 5, 2023