Hugh Laurie, The Gun Seller

Thomas Lang may have the background for it—he's ex-military and peculiarly adept at hand-to-hand combat—but he's just too nice a guy to kill for money. Lang is in fact so good a citizen that, offered just such a job, he not only declines but endeavors to warn his would-be victim that there's a price on his head. This doesn't quite go according to plan. Unfortunately for Lang, nothing is as straightforward as it appears in this book. His initial job interview, as it were—an ostensibly simple offer of work delivered in an Amsterdam bar—winds up landing Lang in jail, in love, and in the thick of a terrorist group bent on, among other things, taking over an American consulate building in Casablanca.

The plot of Hugh Laurie's The Gun Seller is complex and can be hard to follow, in large part because Laurie leaves readers in the dark much of the time as to what Lang is up to. Having just finished it, with the book as fresh in my mind as it's going to get, I'd be hard-pressed to summarize the machinations of the various principals. But you won't really be reading Laurie's send-up of spy novels for the plot so much as for the author's drollery: the man wields the English language very deftly indeed. Not laugh-out-loud funny—particularly in the last third of the book, when the story becomes more serious (arms dealers are bad and people sometimes inconstant)—but witty and playful. There's something to appreciate in virtually every sentence of the book, starting with the first: "Imagine that you have to break someone's arm."

It's impossible not to imagine the author himself in the lead role should The Gun Seller ever be translated to screen, delivering Lang's lines with the same gruff sang-froid that characterizes his stubbled, sarcastic, oh-so-intelligent House (Bob Hoskins being my pick for Lang's "short and cheerful" friend David Solomon). Readers who enjoy Laurie's House-ian sarcasm, and anyone who likes a bit of verbal play in their diet, should give The Gun Seller a read.