📖 NetGalley Review

No Good Deed by John Niven
William Heinemann, 29th June 2017

Alan, an affluent journalist and restaurant reviewer, lives with his wife and three children in a palatial residence. He comes across Criaig, an old school friend and former rock star who is now homeless and begging. Alan offers Craig a home and money, which Craig accepts with alacrity. However, Craig is resentful and envious of Alan's success.

Although this is a well-written tale exploring the darker side of friendship that started off quite well, it quickly flagged and became rather dull. It didn't hold my interest, and I would not recommend it. However, it has lots of great reviews, so it clearly has its merits.

⭐️⭐️

Thanks to William Heinemann and John Niven for providing an eARC via NetGalley; this is my unbiased review.

I really enjoyed 'Kill Your Friends' and have 'The Sunshine Cruise Company' on my Kindle to ready right now, however, after finally reading this i'm not in a hurry to pick that one up. I found the characters to be shallow and trite, without the whipcrack dialogue and humor that made 'Kill Your Friends' such a fun read. I didn't like the characters and this one wasn't for me - i'll wait to read another John Niven book until i'm in a place for mean spirited characters and narcissistic writing.

John Niven has proven himself the master of dark comic satire and his new novel is no different. Sharp, biting and hugely entertaining, this is his best since Kill Your Friends.

This is the first of John Niven's books i've read and I really liked the premise of the story. However, I don't think he quite pulled it off with the characters being more caricatures than believable people. I also felt that some of the set pieces, particularly the toilet blockage, were probably hilarious in his head but for me they didn't work in the book.

An OK read; unfortunately not unforgettable.

Alan has, by any standards, an amazingly comfortable life. Married with three kids and with a successful career as a restaurant reviewer and columnist he has it made. Then one night his life takes a sharp left turn when he bumps into an old school friend called Craig. Their circumstances could not be more different, once the singer of hugely successful rock band The Rakes, a heroin addiction destroyed Craig's career and has left him living on the streets begging for change. Already feeling the twinges of upper middle class guilt, Alan takes his old schoolfriend for a drink and then offers to put him up for the weekend. A weekend turns into a week and then a month as with Alan's help, Craig cleans himself up and starts getting back on his feet. As Craig ingratiates himself into Alan's life and restarts his music career, Alan can't help wondering if Craig's getting a little bit too comfortable and could the string of bad luck Alan seems to be experiencing is related to Craig's sudden appearance?

Full disclosure, I love John Niven's books. He's fine tuned the art of writing about the spiky underbelly of human nature and this book is no exception. As teenagers, there was a fair bit of hero worship from Alan towards Craig and this plays in nicely to Alan's eagerness to help him. The story becomes comical at points, especially the chapter involving a blocked toilet in a stately home but never veers towards farce. There's also a lengthy golfing sequence, which will be a joy if you play golf as theres a lot of jargon but Alan's rage at losing is enough on its own to amuse the layman. The story is wrapped up quite neatly but the question hangs in the air of if circumstances were different, could the roles have been reversed? Alan's downward spiral seems to happen very quickly and without too much nudging from Craig. Most of the story is from Alan's point of view but I'd have liked to have read more of Craig's and how he felt watching someone he patronised and tolerated make such a successful life for himself. An excellent book nonetheless and well worth reading.

I received an ARC from Netgalley in exchange for a fair review.

Compelling, a page turner . Thought the concept was interesting but felt that the motive at the end was a bit weak

What if you bumped into an old friend, who through bad luck and hardships happened to be sleeping rough on the street? Would you invite him back to yours and offer to put him up for a while? For Alan, there is no question, he has to help out his "old mate" Craig and get him back on his feet. But as life gets better for Craig, everything seems to take a turn for the worse for Alan... They say no good deed goes unpunished...
A dark but funny read at the same time, this book will make you question who your friends really are and help you reflect on how life's highs and lows can impact friendships for the better or for worse.

Solid 3 stars. Would have given for if the ending was wrapped up better. As it is the ending felt rushed. We sit through all these tedious details and then this is the ending we get?

Wham bam thank you m'am.

Would have liked to have known more about why Craig did what he did.

The saving grace here for me was the overflowing toilet scene. I howled with laughter at the description of the "aftermath".

Niven writes well .

He presents you with characters who are at best ambiguous and at worse hateful

This is a spin on for example Trading Places with the title allowing the reader to get a good idea of what could happen.

The twist if we call it one is not a shock but is still well written and placed in the story. The plotting is good and in parts it reads like Chrostopher Brookmyre which i think is a compliment.

This is a book for the misanthrope in your life and they will love it

Yet again John Niven explores the darker side of human nature, what makes a "friend" and does it mean that we actually have to like them.
Some great contrasts between the two lead characters with a well described supporting cast.
Thoroughly enjoyable, although it seemed almost quite tame compared to earlier material - not that this is a bad thing, it makes it more accessible to a wider audience. A definite recommend.

No Good Deed has the perfect elevator pitch: Alan, a successful, affluent journalist with a happy family life, stops to give some money to a homeless man one night on the way to his club in Soho. The man turns out to be his old school friend, Craig. Alan feels obliged to help him and takes him home. But Craig, far from being grateful, proceeds to take over Alan’s life…

Too often these high-concept stories are peopled by flat characters and hackneyed plots, but in this case the novel does live up to its promise. Alan’s milieu – a kind of Notting Hill set without the (overt) politics, peopled by columnists and aristos and minor celebs, fuelled by nepotism and booze and lots of lots of money, is richly and satirically drawn.

Alan is an interesting character, an outsider from a council house in Scotland who has somehow found himself married to the daughter of a duke. He is both insider and outsider on his world, comfortable in it but painfully aware of its privilege and absurdities, which are heightened when he sees it through Craig’s eyes.

There are some funny set pieces in this novel (and plenty on the protagonist’s complex relationship with his bowels, surely an under-explored area in contemporary fiction) but what marks it out for me is its study of friendship. Alan was the not-quite-cool kid in his crowd, while Craig was the leader. Craig went on to be a rock star while Alan was a struggling reporter until his wife’s connections got him a decent job.

No Good Deed explores the darker side of friendship, the way the dynamics of your teenage years, at that age when friends mean more than family or bands or even sex, can influence you as you go through life. The plot wraps up neatly, as you’d expect from such a deftly plotted novel, but it also leaves you room to think about why the characters behaved the way they did, which makes it a thought-provoking as well an entertaining read.

The Road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Our hero, Alan, certainly finds this out the hard way as he travels along that road in this modern morality tale.

Alan is basically a good guy, he loves his family and cares about his fellow man (as long as it doesn't put him out too much), but he has had a fortunate and comfortable life. When Alan discovers his old school-mate, ex-rock star Craig, penniless and living rough on the shadowy margins of his own perfect world what are his motives for doing the decent thing and taking his old friend home to help him get back on his feet? The past is definitely a dangerous country to travel back to, and, as Mr Niven points out several times in the book, nothing is more annoying than an old friend's success, no matter how well you happen to be doing yourself.

No Good Deed is an entertaining, amusing and memorable read. I found myself rooting for the weak, but basically likeable, Alan once the devious Craig effortlessly gets his claws into him and starts to systematically unravel his life and everything he holds dear. And the chapter when the two guys have a very competitive and symbolic game of golf was hilarious.

I'm very pleased to be a woman sometimes.

"What do you do when the homeless man on the street you’ve just given money to thanks you by name and turns out to be one of your ‘closest’ friends, one you haven’t seen for over twenty years? Take him for a hot meal and see him on his way? Give him a lot more money than you usually would? Or take him in and try to get him back on his feet?"

Mordantly funny, No Good Deed takes a good bite out of the upper middle classes and the upwardly mobile. It also digs at the (sometimes) painful truth that we never really leave our teenage selves behind. And what does 'success' really mean anyway, when so much of life's path is just dumb luck?

The characters are mostly awful humans, throwing schadenfreude at any opportunity, and resenting one another for their respective privilege and position. But when satire hits close to the bone, it isn't necessarily pretty.

This book didn't hit every mark - a bit of scatological humour (involving a catastrophic plumbing failure) felt out of place, and the ending fell kind of flat for my liking. That said, this is a fun, quick read, if you're in the mood for cynicism and snark.

This book certainly kept me gripped. It's funny and, at times, makes for fantastically uncomfortable reading. The main character, Alan, is not a likable man. He is a bit of a snob and seems to try as hard as he can to forget the young man he once was, until Craig returns to his life. The ideas of 'good' and 'bad' become very difficult to work out and all characters are very well portrayed as 'real people', not just stock good or bad characters.

The only thing that I disliked about No Good Deed is the worry that it will age very badly. John Niven's need to name real famous people and places means that when Zoella, Bear Grylls and Gordon Ramsay are no longer in the direct public eye, the book will make almost no sense.

All in all, I enjoyed this read. It's not perfect but it's definitely worth picking up.

Have you ever felt jealous of an old friend who's done better in life than you did after you had dismissed that someone as a nobody in the beginning? This is the book for you. There's no loveable characters in there. You want to pummel all of them on their privileged heads but it is a page turner.

Whilst reading the book I was awarding it four stars - it is an easy read, humorous and has some comic insights into British society. When I got to the end I felt maybe I had missed something; I do sometimes read a little quickly and wondered if I passed over the point of the tale. But no, it just seems that there are some good, kind people in this world, and some meanies, and it is the meanies who star in this book. With this sense of deflation, and a general feeling of 'What?' my rating fell to three stars.

On the whole I did enjoy the book, however there were a couple of scenes that jarred. The flooding toilet moment for one; having left primary school a few years back I don't find poo and overflowing drains as hysterical as I once did. The book raised a smile but left me feeling there could have been a little bit more.

Great book really funny, an easy enough read that I could have had more of! The characters are all believable despite a kind of wacky premise and I really liked them all despite their all too human failings

When Alan finds his old friend Craig homeless in the street he helps him to get somewhere to live. But is Craig the friend Alan thought he was? A thought provoking book that is definitely worth reading. It might leave you re-evaluating your own friendships and some of the reasons you do things in life.